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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14571 ***
+
+LIFE AND
+GABRIELLA
+
+THE STORY OF A WOMAN'S COURAGE
+
+BY
+ELLEN GLASGOW
+
+
+
+FRONTISPIECE
+BY
+C. ALLAN GILBERT
+
+GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
+
+DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
+1916
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+BOOK FIRST--THE AGE OF FAITH
+
+CHAPTER                              PAGE
+     I. Presents a Shameless Heroine    3
+    II. Poor Jane                      30
+   III. A Start in Life                61
+    IV. Mirage                         90
+     V. The New World                 122
+    VI. The Old Serpent               148
+   VII. Motherhood                    176
+
+BOOK SECOND--THE AGE OF KNOWLEDGE
+
+     I. Disenchantment.               211
+    II. A Second Start in Life        241
+   III. Work                          274
+    IV. The Dream and the Years       300
+     V. Success                       331
+    VI. Discoveries                   368
+   VII. Readjustments                 406
+  VIII. The Test                      444
+    IX. The Past                      476
+     X. Dream and the Reality         501
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST
+
+THE AGE OF FAITH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+PRESENTS A SHAMELESS HEROINE
+
+
+After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw
+a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour. On the
+window-sill, midway between the white curtains, a pot of blue hyacinths
+stood in a cracked china plate, and as the sunlight shone into the room,
+the scent of the blossoms floated to the corner where Gabriella was
+patiently pulling basting threads out of the hem of a skirt. For a
+minute her capable hands stopped at their work, and raising her smooth
+dark head she looked compassionately at her sister Jane, who was
+sitting, like a frozen image of martyrdom, in the middle of the long
+horsehair sofa. Three times within the last twelve months Jane had fled
+from her husband's roof to the protection of her widowed mother, a weak
+person of excellent ancestry, who could hardly have protected a sparrow
+had one taken refuge beneath her skirt. Twice before Mrs. Carr had wept
+over her daughter's woes and returned her, a sullen saint, to the arms
+of the discreetly repentant Charley; but to-day, while the four older
+children were bribed to good behaviour with bread and damson preserves
+in the pantry, and the baby was contentedly playing with his rubber ring
+in his mother's arms, Gabriella had passionately declared that "Jane
+must never, never go back!" Nothing so dreadful as this had ever
+happened before, for the repentant Charley had been discovered making
+love to his wife's dressmaker, a pretty French girl whom Jane had
+engaged for her spring sewing because she had more "style" than had
+fallen to the austerely virtuous lot of the Carr's regular seamstress,
+Miss Folly Hatch. "I might have known she was too pretty to be good,"
+moaned Jane, while Mrs. Carr, in her willow rocking-chair by the window,
+wiped her reddened eyelids on the strip of cambric ruffling she was
+hemming.
+
+Unmoved among them the baby beat methodically on his mother's breast
+with his rubber ring, as indifferent to her sobs as to the intermittent
+tearful "coos" of his grandmother. He had a smooth bald head, fringed,
+like the head of a very old man, with pale silken hair that was almost
+white in the sunshine, and his eyes, as expressionless as marbles,
+stared over the pot of hyacinths at a sparrow perched against the deep
+blue sky on the red brick wall of the opposite house. From beneath his
+starched little skirt his feet, in pink crocheted shoes, protruded with
+a forlorn and helpless air as if they hardly belonged to him.
+
+"Oh, my poor child, what are we going to do?" asked Mrs. Carr in a
+resigned voice as she returned to her hemming.
+
+"There's nothing to do, mother," answered Jane, without lifting her eyes
+from the baby's head, without moving an inch out of the position she had
+dropped into when she entered the room. Then, after a sobbing pause, she
+defined in a classic formula her whole philosophy of life: "It wasn't my
+fault," she said.
+
+"But one can always do something if it's only to scream," rejoined
+Gabriella with spirit.
+
+"I wouldn't scream," replied Jane, while the pale cast of resolution
+hardened her small flat features, "not--not if he killed me. My one
+comfort," she added pathetically, "is that only you and mother know how
+he treats me."
+
+Her pretty vacant face with its faded bloom resembled a pastel portrait
+in which the artist had forgotten to paint an expression. "Poor Jane
+Gracey," as she was generally called, had wasted the last ten years in a
+futile effort to hide the fact of an unfortunate marriage beneath an
+excessively cheerful manner. She talked continually because talking
+seemed to her the most successful way of "keeping up an appearance."
+Though everybody who knew her knew also that Charley Gracey neglected
+her shamefully, she spent twelve hours of the twenty-four pretending
+that she was perfectly happy. At nineteen she had been a belle and
+beauty of the willowy sort; but at thirty she had relapsed into one of
+the women whom men admire in theory and despise in reality. She had
+started with a natural tendency to clinging sweetness; as the years went
+on the sweetness, instead of growing fainter, had become almost cloying,
+while the clinging had hysterically tightened into a clutch. Charley
+Gracey, who had married her under the mistaken impression that her type
+was restful for a reforming rake, (not realizing that there is nothing
+so mentally disturbing as a fool) had been changed by marriage from a
+gay bird of the barnyard into a veritable hawk of the air. His behaviour
+was the scandal of the town, yet the greater his sins, the intenser grew
+Jane's sweetness, the more twining her hold. "Nobody will ever think of
+blaming you, darling," said Mrs. Carr consolingly. "You have behaved
+beautifully from the beginning. We all know what a perfect wife you have
+been."
+
+"I've tried to do my duty even if Charley failed in his," replied the
+perfect wife, unfastening the hooks of her small heliotrope wrap trimmed
+with tarnished silver passementerie. Above her short flaxen "bang" she
+wore a crumpled purple hat ornamented with bunches of velvet pansies;
+and though it was two years old, and out of fashion at a period when
+fashions changed less rapidly, it lent an air of indecent festivity to
+her tearful face. Her youth was already gone, for her beauty had been of
+the fragile kind that breaks early, and her wan, aristocratic features
+had settled into the downward droop which comes to the faces of people
+who habitually "expect the worst."
+
+"I know, Jane, I know," murmured Mrs. Carr, dropping her thimble as she
+nervously tried to hasten her sewing. "But don't you think it would be a
+comfort, dear, to have the advice of a man about Charley? Won't you let
+me send Marthy for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"
+
+"Oh, mother, I couldn't. It would kill me to have everybody know I'm
+unhappy!" wailed Jane, breaking down.
+
+"But everybody knows anyway, Jane," said Gabriella, sticking the point
+of her scissors into a strip of buckram, for she was stiffening the
+bottom of the skirt after the fashion of the middle 'nineties.
+
+"Of course I'm foolishly sensitive," returned Jane, while she lifted the
+baby from her lap and placed him in a pile of cushions by the deep arm
+of the sofa, where he sat imperturbably gazing at the blue sky and the
+red wall from which the sparrow had flown. "You can never understand my
+feelings because you are so different."
+
+"Gabriella is not married," observed Mrs. Carr, with sentimental
+finality. "But I'm sure, Jane--I'm just as sure as I can be of anything
+that it wouldn't do a bit of harm to speak to Cousin Jimmy Wrenn. Men
+know so much more than women about such matters."
+
+In her effort to recover her thimble she dropped her spool of thread,
+which rolled under the sofa on which Jane was sitting, and while she
+waited for Gabriella to find it, she gazed pensively into the almost
+deserted street where the slender shadows of poplar trees slanted over
+the wet cobblestones. Though Mrs. Carr worked every instant of her time,
+except the few hours when she lay in bed trying to sleep, and the few
+minutes when she sat at the table trying to eat, nothing that she began
+was ever finished until Gabriella took it out of her hands. She did her
+best, for she was as conscientious in her way as poor Jane, yet through
+some tragic perversity of fate her best seemed always to fall short of
+the simplest requirements of life. Her face, like Jane's, was long and
+thin, with a pathetic droop at the corners of the mouth, a small bony
+nose, always slightly reddened at the tip, and faded blue eyes beneath
+an even row of little flat round curls which looked as if they were
+plastered on her forehead.
+
+Thirty-three years before, in the romantic and fiery 'sixties, she had
+married dashing young Gabriel Carr for no better reason apparently than
+that she was falling vaguely in love with love; and the marriage, which
+had been one of reckless passion on his side, had been for her scarcely
+more than the dreamer's hesitating compromise with reality. Passion,
+which she had been taught to regard as an unholy attribute implanted by
+the Creator, with inscrutable wisdom, in the nature of man, and left out
+of the nature of woman, had never troubled her gentle and affectionate
+soul; and not until the sudden death of her husband did she begin even
+remotely to fall in love with the man. But when he was once safely dead
+she worshipped his memory with an ardour which would have seemed to her
+indelicate had he been still alive. For sixteen years she had worn a
+crape veil on her bonnet, and she still went occasionally, after the
+morning service was over on Sunday, to place fresh flowers on his grave.
+Now that his "earthly nature," against which she had struggled so
+earnestly while he was living, was no longer in need of the pious
+exorcisms with which she had treated its frequent manifestations, she
+remembered only the dark beauty of his face, his robust and vigorous
+youth, the tenderness and gallantry of his passion. For her daughters
+she had drawn an imaginary portrait of him which combined the pagan
+beauty of Antinous with the militant purity of Saint Paul; and this
+romantic blending of the heathen and the Presbyterian virtues had passed
+through her young imagination into the awakening soul of Gabriella.
+
+By the town at large Mrs. Carr's sorrow was alluded to as "a beautiful
+grief," yet so deeply rooted in her being was the instinct to twine,
+that for the first few years of her bereavement she had simply sat in
+her widow's weeds, with her rent paid by Cousin Jimmy Wrenn and her
+market bills settled monthly by Uncle Beverly Blair, and waited
+patiently for some man to come and support her.
+
+When no man came, and Uncle Beverly died of a stroke of apoplexy with
+his will unsigned, she had turned, with the wasted energy of the unfit
+and the incompetent, to solve the inexplicable problem of indigent
+ladyhood. And it was at this crucial instant that Becky Bollingbroke had
+put her awful question: "Have you made up your mind, Fanny, what you are
+going to do?" That was twelve years ago, but deep down in some secret
+cave of Fanny's being the ghastly echo of the words still reverberated
+through the emptiness and the silence.
+
+"Don't you think, darling," she pleaded now, as she had pleaded to Becky
+on that other dreadful occasion, "that we had better send immediately
+for Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"
+
+"I--I can't think," gasped Jane, "but you may if you want to, mother."
+
+"Send, Gabriella," said Mrs. Carr quickly, and she added tenderly, while
+Gabriella dropped her work and ran to the outside kitchen for Marthy,
+the coloured drudge, "you will feel so much better, Jane, after you have
+had his advice."
+
+Then at the sight of Jane's stricken face, which had turned blue as if
+from a sudden chill, she hurriedly opened the drawer of her sewing
+machine, and taking out a bottle of camphor she kept there, began
+tremulously rubbing her daughter's forehead. As she did so, she
+remembered, with the startling irrelevance of the intellectually
+untrained, the way Jane had looked in her veil and orange blossoms on
+the day of her wedding.
+
+"I wonder what on earth we have done to deserve our troubles?" she found
+herself thinking while she put the stopper back into the bottle and
+returned to her sewing.
+
+"Marthy has gone, mother," said Gabriella, with her cheerful air as she
+came back into the room, "and I shut the children in the laundry with
+Dolly who is doing the washing."
+
+"I hope they won't make themselves sick with preserves," remarked Jane,
+with the first dart of energy she had shown. "Perhaps I'd better go and
+see. If Fanny eats too much we'll be up all night with her."
+
+"I told Dolly not to let them stuff," answered Gabriella, as she sat
+down by the window and threaded her needle. She was a tall, dark girl,
+slender and straight as a young poplar, with a face that was frank and
+pleasant rather than pretty, and sparkling brown eyes which turned
+golden and grew bright as swords when she was angry. Seen by the strong
+light of the window, her face showed sallow in tone, with a certain
+nobility about the bony structure beneath the soft girlish flesh, and a
+look of almost stern decision in the square chin and in the full rich
+curve of the mouth. Her hair, which was too fine and soft to show its
+thickness, drooped from its parting at the side in a dark wing over her
+forehead, where it shadowed her arched black eyebrows and the clear
+sweet gravity of her eyes. As she bent over her sewing the thin pure
+lines of her body had a look of arrested energy, of relaxed but
+exuberant vitality.
+
+"You won't go to the dance to-night, will you, Gabriella?" inquired Mrs.
+Carr nervously.
+
+"No, I'm not going," answered the girl regretfully, for she loved
+dancing, and her white organdie dress, trimmed with quillings of blue
+ribbon, lay upstairs on the bed. "I'll never dance again if only Jane
+won't go back to Charley. I'll work my fingers to the bone to help her
+take care of the children."
+
+"I'll never, never go back," chanted Jane with feverish passion.
+
+"But I thought Arthur Peyton was coming for you," said Mrs. Carr. "He
+will be so disappointed."
+
+"Oh, he'll understand--he'll have to," replied Gabriella carelessly.
+
+The sunshine faded slowly from the hyacinths on the window-sill, and
+drawing her crocheted cape of purple wool closer about her, Mrs. Carr
+moved a little nearer the fireplace. Outside the March wind was blowing
+with a melancholy sound up the long straight street, and rocking the
+glossy boughs of an old magnolia tree in the yard From the shining
+leaves of the tree a few drops of water fell on the brick pavement,
+where several joyous sparrows were drinking, and farther off, as bright
+as silver in the clear wind, a solitary church spire rose above the
+huddled roofs of the town. When the wind lulled, as it did now and then,
+a warm breath seemed to stir in the sunshine, which grew suddenly
+brighter, while a promise of spring floated like a faint provocative
+scent on the air. And this scent, so vague, so roving, that it was like
+the ghostly perfume of flowers, stole at last into the memory, and made
+the old dream of youth and the young grow restless at the call of Life,
+which sang to the music of flutes in the brain. But the wind, rising
+afresh, drove the spirit of spring from the street, and swept the broken
+leaves of the magnolia tree over the drenched grass to the green-painted
+iron urns on either side of the steps.
+
+The house, a small brick dwelling, set midway of an expressionless row
+and wearing on its front a look of desiccated gentility, stood in one
+of those forgotten streets where needy gentlewomen do "light
+housekeeping" in an obscure hinterland of respectability. Hill Street,
+which had once known fashion, and that only yesterday, as old ladies
+count, had sunk at last into a humble state of decay. Here and there the
+edges of porches had crumbled; grass was beginning to sprout by the
+curbstone; and the once comfortable homes had opened their doors to
+boarders or let their large, high-ceiled rooms to the impoverished
+relicts of Confederate soldiers. Only a few blocks away the stream of
+modern progress, sweeping along Broad Street, was rapidly changing the
+old Southern city into one of those bustling centres of activity which
+the press of the community agreed to describe as "a metropolis"; but
+this river of industrialism was spanned by no social bridge connecting
+Hill Street and its wistful relicts with the statelier dignities and the
+more ephemeral gaieties of the opposite side. To be really "in society"
+one must cross over, either for good and all, or in the dilapidated
+"hack" which carried Gabriella to the parties of her schoolmates in West
+Franklin Street.
+
+For in the middle 'nineties, before social life in Richmond had become
+both complicated and expensive, it was still possible for a girl in
+Gabriella's position--provided, of course, she came of a "good
+family"--to sew all day over the plain sewing of her relatives, and in
+the evening to reign as the acknowledged belle of a ball. "Society," it
+is true, did not reach any longer, except in the historic sense, to Hill
+Street; but the inhabitants of Hill Street, if they were young and
+energetic, not infrequently made triumphant excursions into "society."
+Though Gabriella was poor and sewed for her living, she had been, from
+the moment she left school, one of the most popular girls in town. To be
+sure, she was neither so pretty as Florrie Spencer nor so clever as
+Julia Caperton, but in the words of Julia's brother Algernon, she was
+"the sort you could count on." Even in her childhood it had become the
+habit of those about her to count on Gabriella. Without Gabriella, her
+mother was fond of saying, it would have been impossible to keep a roof
+over their heads.
+
+Twelve years before, when they had moved into the house in Hill Street,
+Mrs. Carr had accepted from Jimmy Wrenn the rent of the first floor and
+the outside kitchen, which was connected with the back porch by a
+winding brick walk, overgrown with wild violets, while the upper story
+was let to two elderly spinsters, bearing the lordly, though fallen,
+name of Peterborough. These spinsters, like Mrs. Carr, spent their lives
+in a beautiful and futile pretence--the pretence of keeping up an
+appearance. They also took in the plain sewing of their richer
+relatives, who lived in Franklin Street, and sent them little trays of
+sweet things as soon as the midday dinner was over on Sunday. Sometimes
+they would drop in to see Mrs. Carr just before supper was ready, and
+then they would pretend that they lived on tea and toast because they
+were naturally "light eaters," and that they sewed all day, not for the
+money, but because they liked to have "something to do with their hands"
+They were tall thin women in organdie caps and black alpaca dresses made
+with long basques which showed a greenish cast in the daylight. The
+walls of their rooms were covered with family portraits of the colonial
+period, and Mrs. Carr, who had parted with most of her treasures, often
+wondered how they had preserved so many proofs of a distinguished
+descent. Even her silver had gone--first the quaint old service with the
+Bolton crest, which had belonged to her mother; then, one by one, the
+forks and spoons; and, last of all, Gabriella's silver mug, which was
+carried, wrapped in a shawl, to the shop of old Mr. Camberwell. She was
+a woman who loved inanimate things with the passion which other women
+give only to children, and a thousand delicate fibres of sentiment knit
+her soul to the portraits on the wall, to the furniture with which she
+lived, to the silver and glass that had once belonged to her mother.
+When one after one these things went from her, she felt as if the very
+roots of her being were torn up from the warm familiar earth in which
+they had grown. "There's nothing left in the parlour that I shouldn't be
+ashamed to have your grandmother look at," she had once confessed to her
+daughters.
+
+Seen by the light of history, this parlour, in which so much of
+Gabriella's childhood was spent, was not without interest as an archaic
+survival of the fundamental errors of the mid-Victorian mind. The walls
+were covered with bottle-green paper on which endless processions of
+dwarfed blue peacocks marched relentlessly toward an embossed
+border--the result of an artistic frenzy of the early 'eighties. Neither
+Mrs. Carr nor Jimmy Wrenn, who paid the rent, had chosen this paper, but
+having been left on the dealer's hands, it had come under the eye of the
+landlord, who, since he did not have to live with it had secured it at a
+bargain. Too unused to remonstrance to make it effective, Mrs. Carr had
+suffered the offending decoration in meekness, while Jimmy, having a
+taste for embossment, honestly regarded the peacocks as "handsome."
+From the centre of the ceiling a massive gilt chandelier, elaborately
+festooned with damaged garlands, shed, when it was lighted, a dim and
+troubled gloom down on the threadbare Axminster carpet. Above the white
+marble mantelpiece, the old French mirror, one of the few good things
+left over from a public sale of Mrs. Carr's possessions, reflected a
+pair of bronze candelabra with crystal pendants, and a mahogany clock,
+which had kept excellent time for half a century and then had stopped
+suddenly one day while Marthy was cleaning. In the corner, between the
+door and the window, there was a rosewood bookcase, with the bare
+shelves hidden behind plaited magenta silk, and directly above it hung
+an engraving of a group of amiable children feeding fish in a pond.
+Across the room, over the walnut whatnot, a companion picture
+represented the same group of children scattering crumbs before a polite
+brood of chickens in a barnyard. Between the windows a third engraving
+immortalized the "Burial of Latané" in the presence of several sad and
+resigned ladies in crinolines, while the sofa on which Jane sat was
+presided over by a Sully portrait of the beautiful Angelica Carr,
+wearing a white scarf on her head and holding a single rose in her hand.
+This portrait and a Saint Memin drawing of Mrs. Carr's grandfather, the
+Reverend Bartholomew Berkeley as a young man in a high stock, were the
+solitary existing relics of that consecrated past when Fanny Berkeley
+was "not brought up to do anything."
+
+To Mrs. Carr, whose mind was so constituted that any change in her
+surroundings produced a sensation of shock, the room was hallowed by the
+simple fact that she had lived in it for a number of years. That an
+object or a custom had existed in the past appeared to her to be an
+incontestible reason why it should continue to exist in the present. It
+was distressing to her to be obliged to move a picture or to alter the
+position of a piece of furniture, and she had worn one shape of bonnet
+and one style of hairdressing, slightly modified to suit the changing
+fashions, for almost twenty years. Her long pale face, her pensive blue
+eyes, and her look of anxious sweetness, made a touching picture of
+feminine incompetence; and yet it was from this pallid warmth, this
+gentle inefficiency of soul, that the buoyant spirit of Gabriella had
+sprung.
+
+For Gabriella was the incarnation of energy. From the moment of her
+birth when, in the words of her negro "mammy" she had looked "as peart
+as life," she had begun her battle against the enveloping twin powers of
+decay and inertia. To the intense secret mortification of her mother,
+who had prayed for a second waxlike infant after the fashion of poor
+Jane, she had been a notoriously ugly baby (almost as ugly as her Aunt
+Becky Bollingbroke who had never married), and as she grew up, this
+ugliness was barely redeemed by what Jane, in her vague way, described
+as "the something else in her face." According to Cousin Jimmy, who
+never recognized charm unless its manifestations were soft and purring,
+this "something else" was merely "a sunny temper"; and one of the
+constant afflictions of Gabriella's childhood was overhearing her mother
+remark to visitors: "No, she isn't so pretty as poor Jane, but, as
+Cousin Jimmy tells us, she is blessed with a sunny temper."
+
+"Give me that ruffle, mother, and I'll whip the lace on while we're
+waiting," she said now, laying aside the skirt of her Easter dress, and
+stretching out her hand for the strip of cambric in her mother's lap.
+But Mrs. Carr did not hear, for she was gazing, with the concentrated
+stare of Jane's baby, at a beautiful old lady who was walking slowly
+through the faint sunshine on the opposite pavement.
+
+"I wonder where Mrs. Peyton can be coming from in her best dress?" she
+remarked, forgetting Jane for an instant while her sense of tragedy
+yielded to the keener impulse of curiosity.
+
+"She never goes anywhere but to church or to the Old Ladies' home,"
+replied Gabriella. "Arthur says she hasn't paid a call since her
+husband's death."
+
+"Well, I haven't made one, except of course to my relatives, for fifteen
+years," rejoined Mrs. Carr a trifle tartly. Then her manner lost its
+unusual asperity, and she added excitedly, "They're coming now, Jane.
+There's Cousin Jimmy and he's bringing Cousin Pussy and Uncle
+Meriweather!"
+
+"Oh, mother, I can't possibly see them! I feel as if it would kill me!"
+cried Jane in desperation.
+
+"Give her the camphor, mother," said Gabriella with grim humour as she
+went to open the door.
+
+"Brace yourself, my darling. They are coming," pleaded Mrs. Carr, as she
+slipped her arm under Jane's head. At the first hint of any excitement
+she invariably lost her presence of mind and became distracted; and
+Jane's hysterical outbursts never failed to convince her, though they
+usually left the more skeptical Gabriella unmoved. "Don't you think you
+would feel better if you lay back on the pillows?" she urged.
+
+Then the bell rang, and before Jane could swallow her sobs, her sister
+ushered in Jimmy and Pussy Wrenn, who were closely followed by the
+ponderous figure of Uncle Meriweather, a gouty but benign old gentleman,
+whose jet-black eyebrows and white imperial gave him a misleading
+military air.
+
+"Well, well, my dear, what's this I hear about Charley?" demanded Cousin
+Jimmy, whose sprightly manner was never sprightlier than in the hour of
+tragedy or the house of mourning. "What does he mean by letting you run
+away from him?"
+
+"I've done my duty by Charley. I've never, never failed in my duty!"
+wept Jane, breaking down on Pussy's tender bosom, and waking the
+sleeping baby.
+
+"We know, darling, we know," said Pussy, patting Jane's shoulder, while
+Jimmy drew a white silk handkerchief from his pocket, and hid his face
+under the pretence of blowing his nose.
+
+To see a woman cry never failed to wring a sympathetic tear from Jimmy.
+Though he was a man of hard common sense, possessed of an inflexible
+determination to make money, there was a soft spot inside of him which
+was reached only by the distress of one of the opposite sex. The
+suffering--particularly the financial suffering--of men left him
+unmoved. He could foreclose a mortgage or press a debt (as long as the
+debtor's wife or daughter did not appeal to him) as well as another; but
+the instant a skirt fluttered on the horizon that soft something inside
+of him appeared, as he expressed it, "to give way." Apart from their
+afflictions, he had an eye, he used to boast, for but one woman in the
+world, and she, thank God, was his wife. Handsome, portly, full-blooded,
+and slightly overfed, he had let Pussy twine him about her little finger
+ever since the afternoon when he had first seen her, small, trim, and
+with "a way with her," at the age of six.
+
+"Poor, poor child," said Pussy, cuddling Jane and the baby together
+against her sympathetic bosom. "Something must be done, Cousin Fanny.
+Something must be done, as Mr. Wrenn said on the way down, if it's only
+for the satisfaction of letting Charley know what we think of him."
+
+"We've got to put down our pride and take some step," declared Jimmy,
+wondering vaguely how he could have forgotten the spirited utterance his
+wife attributed to him. "I'm all for the authority of the husband, of
+course, and the sanctity of the home, and everything according to the
+Bible and all that--but, bless my soul, there's got to be a limit to
+what a woman is expected to stand. There're some things, and I know
+Uncle Meriweather will agree with me, that it isn't in human nature to
+put up with."
+
+"If I were forty years younger I'd call him out and give him a whipping
+he wouldn't forget in a jiffy," blustered Uncle Meriweather, feebly
+violent. "There's no way of defending a lady in these Godforsaken days.
+Why, I remember when I was a boy, my poor father--God bless him!--you
+recollect him, don't you Fanny?--never used a walking stick in his life
+and could read print without glasses at ninety--"
+
+"Making love to the dressmaker," pursued Jimmy, whose righteous anger
+refused to be turned aside from its end.
+
+"Don't you think, Cousin Fanny," whispered Pussy, "that Gabriella had
+better leave the room?"
+
+"Gabriella? Why, how on earth can we spare her?" Mrs. Carr whispered
+back rather nervously. Then, beneath Pussy's compelling glance, she
+added timidly: "Hadn't you better go, darling, and see what the children
+are doing?"
+
+"They are playing in the laundry," replied Gabriella reassuringly. "I
+told Dolly not to let them go out of her sight."
+
+"She knows so much already for her age," murmured Mrs. Carr
+apologetically to Pussy.
+
+"I don't know what Mr. Wrenn will think of your staying, dear," said
+Pussy, smiling archly at the girl. "Mr. Wrenn, I was just saying that I
+didn't know what you would think of Gabriella's staying in the room."
+
+Jimmy's large handsome face, with its look of perpetual innocence--the
+incorruptible innocence of a man who has never imagined anything--turned
+helplessly in the direction of his wife. All things relating to
+propriety came, he felt instinctively, within the natural sphere of
+woman, and to be forced, on the spur of the moment, to decide a delicate
+question of manners, awoke in him the dismay of one who sees his
+accustomed prop of authority beginning to crumble. Surely Pussy knew
+best about things like that! He would as soon have thought of
+interfering with her housekeeping as of instructing her in the details
+of ladylike conduct. And, indeed, he had not observed that Gabriella was
+in the room until his wife, for her own purpose, had adroitly presented
+the fact to his notice.
+
+"Gabriella in the room?" he repeated in perplexity. "Why, you'd better
+go, hadn't you, Gabriella? Oughtn't she to go, Pussy?"
+
+"Just as you think best, dear, but it seems to me--"
+
+"Certainly she ought to go," said Uncle Meriweather decisively. "The
+less women and girls know about such matters, the better. I don't
+understand, Fanny, how you could possibly have consented to Gabriella's
+being present."
+
+"I didn't consent, Uncle Meriweather," protested poor Mrs. Carr, who
+could not bear the mildest rebuke without tears; "I only said to Pussy
+that Gabriella knew a great deal more already than she ought to, and I'm
+sure I'm not to blame for it. If I'd had my way she would have been just
+as sheltered as other girls."
+
+"Don't cry, mother, it isn't your fault," said Gabriella. "Uncle
+Meriweather, if you make mother cry I'll never forgive you. How can she
+help all these dreadful things going on?"
+
+She was sensible, she was composed, she was perfectly sweet about it;
+but, and this fact made Pussy gasp with dismay, she did not budge an
+inch from her position. With her clear grave eyes, which lost their
+sparkle when she grew serious, and her manner of eager sympathy, she
+appeared, indeed, to be the only one in the room who was capable of
+facing the situation with frankness. That she meant to face it to the
+end, Pussy could not doubt while she looked at her.
+
+"Oh, it doesn't matter about Gabriella. She knows everything," said
+Jane, with the prickly sweetness of suffering virtue.
+
+"But she's a young girl--young girls oughtn't to hear such things,"
+argued Uncle Meriweather, feeling helplessly that something was wrong
+with the universe, and that, since it was different from anything he had
+ever known in the past, he was unable to cope with it. Into his eyes,
+gentle and bloodshot above his fierce white moustache--the eyes of one
+who has never suffered the painful process of thinking things out, but
+has accepted his opinions as unquestioningly as he has accepted his
+religion or the cut of his clothes--there came the troubled look of one
+who is struggling against forces that he does not understand. For
+Gabriella was serious. There was not the slightest hope in the disturbed
+mind of Uncle Meriweather that she was anything but perfectly serious.
+Caprice, being a womanly quality, was not without a certain charm for
+him. He was quite used to it; he knew how to take it; he had been taught
+to recognize it from his childhood up. It was pretty, it was playful;
+and his mind, if so ponderous a vehicle could indulge in such activity,
+was fond of play. But after the first perplexed minute or two he had
+relinquished forever the hope that Gabriella was merely capricious.
+Clearly the girl knew what she was talking about; and this knowledge, so
+surprising in one of her age and sex, gave him a strange dreamy sense of
+having just awakened from sleep.
+
+"I must say I like girls to be girls, Fanny," he pursued testily; "I
+reckon I'm only an old fogy, but I like girls to be girls. When a woman
+loses her innocence, she loses her greatest charm in the eyes of a
+man--of the right sort of a man. Pluck the peach with the bloom on it,
+my poor father used to say. He didn't believe in all this new-fangled
+nonsense about the higher education of women--none of his daughters
+could do more I than read and write and spell after a fashion, and yet
+look what wives and mothers they made! Pokey married three times, and
+was the mother of fourteen children, nine of them sons. And are we any
+better off now than then, I ask? Whoever heard of a woman running away
+from her husband before the war, and now here is poor Jane--"
+
+"But it isn't my fault, Uncle Meriweather!" cried Jane, in desperation
+at his obtuseness. "I've tried to be the best wife I could--ask Charley
+if I haven't. He neglected me long before I let any one know--even
+mother. I forgave him again and again, and I'd go on forgiving him
+forever if he would let me. I've told him over and over that I was going
+to be a faithful wife to him if he killed me."
+
+"Of course, my dear, I'm not meaning to reproach you," said Uncle
+Meriweather, overcome by the effect of his words. "We all know that
+you've stood as much as any woman could and keep her self-respect. It
+isn't possible, I suppose, for you to go on living with Charley?"
+
+"Oh, I couldn't bear a separation, not a legal one at any rate," groaned
+Mrs. Carr. "Of course she must come away for a time, but nobody must
+hear of it or it would kill me. They are one in the sight of God, and my
+dear old father had such a horror of separations."
+
+"Well, I'd kick him out--I'd kick him out so quickly he wouldn't know
+it," declared Jimmy. "If a daughter of mine were married to that scamp,
+she'd never lay eyes on him except over my dead body. I reckon God would
+enjoy the sight of his getting his deserts."
+
+Deep down in Cousin Jimmy, deeper than sentiment, deeper than tradition,
+deeper even than the solid bedrock of common sense, there was the
+romantic essence of his soul, which hated baseness with a fiery hatred.
+His ruddy face, still boyish in spite of his fifty years, blanched
+slowly, and there came into his soft dark eyes the look he had worn at
+Malvern Hill under the fire of the enemy.
+
+At the sight Gabriella thrilled as she did when drums were beating and
+armies were marching. "Oh, Cousin Jimmy, don't let her go back!" she
+cried.
+
+"I can't go back to him now! I can never, never go back to him again!"
+intoned Jane with passionate energy.
+
+"No, God bless her, she shan't go back," declared Jimmy, as profoundly
+stirred as Gabriella.
+
+"But the children? What will become of the children?" demanded Mrs.
+Carr, not of Jimmy, but of the universe. Her helpless gaze, roving
+wildly from face to face, and resting nowhere, was like the gaze of a
+small animal caught in a trap. "If Jane separates the children from
+their father what will people think of her?" she asked, still vainly
+addressing Heaven.
+
+"As long as she is right it doesn't matter what people think," retorted
+Gabriella; but her protest, unlike her mother's, was directed to the
+visible rather than to the invisible powers. The thought of Jane's
+children--of the innocent souls so unaware of the awful predicament in
+which they were placed that their bodies could be devouring bread and
+damson preserves in the laundry. The poignant thought of these children
+moved her more deeply than she had ever been moved before in her twenty
+years. A passion for self-sacrifice rushed through her with the piercing
+sweetness of religious ecstasy. Nothing like this had ever happened to
+her before--not when she was confirmed, not when she had stood at the
+head of her class, not when she had engaged herself to Arthur Peyton two
+years before. It was the pure flame of experience at its highest point
+that burned in her.
+
+"I will take care of the children," she said breathlessly. "I will give
+up my whole life to them. I will get a place in a store and work my
+fingers to the bone, if only Jane will never go back."
+
+For a moment there was silence; but while Gabriella waited for somebody
+to answer, she felt that it was a silence which had become vocal with
+inexpressible things. The traditions of Uncle Meriweather, the
+conventions of Mrs. Carr, the prejudices of Jimmy, and the weak impulses
+of Jane, all these filled the dusk through which the blank faces of her
+family stared back at her. Then, while she stood white and trembling
+with her resolve--with the passionate desire to give herself, body and
+soul, to Jane and to Jane's children--the voice of Experience spoke
+pleasantly, but firmly, through Cousin Pussy's lips, and it dealt with
+Gabriella's outburst as Experience usually deals with Youth.
+
+"You are a dear child, Gabriella," it said; "but how in the world could
+you help Jane by going into a store?"
+
+In the midst of the emotional scene, Cousin Pussy alone remained sweetly
+matter-of-fact. Though she was not without orderly sentiments, her
+character had long ago been swept of heroics, and from her arched gray
+hair, worn à la Pompadour, to her pretty foot in its small neat boot,
+she was a practical soul who had as little use for religious ecstasy as
+she had for downright infidelity. There seemed to her something
+positively unnatural in Gabriella's manner--a hint of that "sudden
+conversion" she associated with the lower classes or with the negroes.
+
+"You are a dear child," she repeated, biting her fresh lips; "but how
+will you help Jane by going into a store?"
+
+"I can trim hats," returned Gabriella stubbornly. "Mr. Brandywine will
+take me into his new millinery department, I know, for I said something
+to him about it the other day."
+
+"Oh, Gabriella, not in a store! It would kill mother!" cried Jane, with
+the prophetic wail of Cassandra.
+
+"Not in a store!" echoed Mrs. Carr; "you couldn't work in a store. If
+you want to work," she concluded feebly, "why can't you work just as
+well in your home?"
+
+"But it isn't the same thing, mother," explained Gabriella, with angelic
+patience. "Nobody will get me to make hats at home, and, besides, I've
+got to learn how to do it. I've got to learn business methods."
+
+"But not in a shop, my dear," protested Uncle Meriweather in the precise
+English of his youth.
+
+"Bless my heart!" chuckled Cousin Jimmy. "Business methods! You're as
+good as a show, Gabriella, and, by George! you've plenty of pluck. I
+like pluck in man or woman."
+
+"I shouldn't encourage her if I were you, Mr. Wrenn," said Cousin Pussy,
+almost forgetting to be indirect.
+
+"Well, of course, I don't approve of that store business," replied
+Jimmy, deprecatingly, "but I can't help liking pluck when I see it. Look
+here, Gabriella, if you're bent on working, why don't you turn in and
+teach?"
+
+"Yes, let her teach by all means," agreed Uncle Meriweather, with
+genuine enthusiasm for the idea. "I've always regarded teaching as an
+occupation that ought to be restricted by law to needy ladies."
+
+"But I can't teach, I don't know enough, and, besides, I'd hate it,"
+protested Gabriella.
+
+"I'm sure you might start a school for very little children," said Mrs.
+Carr. "You don't have to know much, to teach them, and you write a very
+good hand."
+
+"What about plain sewing?" asked Pussy in her ready way. "Couldn't you
+learn to make those new waists all the girls are wearing?"
+
+"I haven't the patience to sew well. Look how hard mother works, making
+buttonholes with stitches so fine you can hardly see them, and yet she
+doesn't get enough to put bread into her mouth, and but for her
+relatives she'd have been in the poorhouse long ago. I'm tired of being
+on charity just because we are women. Now that Jane has come home for
+good I am simply obliged to find something to do."
+
+"I don't mind your wanting to work, dear, I think it's splendid of you,"
+returned Pussy, "but I do feel that you ought to work in a ladylike
+way--a way that wouldn't interfere with your social position and your
+going to germans and having attention from young men and all that."
+
+"Why don't you make lampshades, Gabriella?" demanded Jane in an emphatic
+burst of inspiration. "Sophy Madison earns enough from lampshades to
+send her sister and herself to the White Sulphur Springs every summer."
+
+"Sophy makes all the lampshades that anybody wants, and, besides, she
+gets orders from the North--she told me so yesterday."
+
+"Gabriella crochets beautifully," remarked Mrs. Carr a little nervously
+because of the failure of her first suggestion. "The last time I went to
+see Miss Matoaca Chambers in the Old Ladies' Home, she told me she made
+quite a nice little sum for her church by crocheting mats."
+
+"And Gabriella can cook, too," rejoined Pussy, with exaggerated
+sprightliness, for she felt that Mrs. Carr's solution of the problem had
+not been entirely felicitous. "Why doesn't she try sending some of her
+angel food to the Woman's Exchange?"
+
+Jimmy, who had listened to this advice with the expression of tolerant
+amusement he always wore when women began to talk about the more serious
+affairs of life in his presence, made an honest, if vulgar, attempt to
+lighten the solemnity of the situation with a joke.
+
+"Gabriella isn't trying to earn church money. You're out gunning for a
+living, aren't you, Ella?" he inquired.
+
+"I'm sick of being dependent," repeated Gabriella, while her face grew
+stern. "Do you think if Jane had had enough money to live on that she
+would ever have stood Charley so long?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I should, Gabriella. Marriage is sacred to me!" exclaimed
+Jane, whose perfect wifeliness atoned, even in the opinion of Jimmy, for
+any discrepancies in logic. "Nothing on earth could have induced me to
+leave him until--until this happened."
+
+The conviction that she had never at any moment since her marriage
+"failed in her duty to Charley" lent a touching sanctity to her
+expression, while the bitter lines around her mouth faded in the wan
+glow that flooded her face. Whatever her affliction, however intense her
+humiliation, Jane was supported always by the most comforting of
+beliefs--the belief that she had been absolutely right and Charley
+absolutely wrong through the ten disillusioning years of their married
+life. Never for an instant--never even in a nightmare--had she been
+visited by the disquieting suspicion that she was not entirely
+blameless.
+
+"Well, you've left him now anyway," said Gabriella, with the disarming
+candour which delighted Jimmy and perplexed Uncle Meriweather, "so
+somebody has got to help you take care of the children."
+
+"She shall never come to want as long as Pussy and I have a cent left,"
+declared Cousin Jimmy, and his voice expressed what Mrs. Carr described
+afterward as "proper feeling."
+
+"And we'd really rather that you'd earn less and keep in your own
+station of life," said Pussy decisively.
+
+"If you mean that you'd rather I'd work buttonholes or crochet mats than
+go into a store and earn a salary, then I can't do it," answered
+Gabriella, as resolute, though not so right-minded, as poor Jane. "I'd
+rather die than be dependent all my life, and I'm going to earn my
+living if I have to break rocks to do it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+POOR JANE
+
+
+Supper was over, and Gabriella, still in the dress she had worn all day,
+was picking up the children's clothes from the floor of her room.
+According to Mrs. Carr's hereditary habit in sorrow or sickness, Jane
+had been served in bed with tea and toast, while several small hard cots
+had been brought down from the attic and arranged in the available space
+in the two bedrooms. As Gabriella looked at the sleeping children, who
+had kicked the covering away, and lay with round rosy limbs gleaming in
+the lamplight, she remembered that Arthur Peyton was coming at nine
+o'clock to take her to Florrie's party, and she told herself with grim
+determination that she would never go to a party again. The Berkeley
+conscience, that vein of iron which lay beneath the outward softness and
+incompetence of her mother and sister, held her, in spite of her
+tempting youth, to the resolution she had made. She had told Jimmy that
+she meant to earn her living if she had to break rocks to do it, and
+Gabriella, like Pussy, came of a race that "did not easily change its
+mind."
+
+Turning to the bureau, she smoothed out the children's hair ribbons and
+pinned them, in two tight little blue and pink rolls, to the pincushion.
+Then taking up a broken comb, she ran it through the soft lock of hair
+that fell like a brown wing over her forehead. Her bright dark eyes,
+fringed in short thick lashes and set wide apart under arched eyebrows,
+gazed questioningly back at her from a row of german favours with which
+she had decorated the glass; and it was as if the face of youth,
+flickering with a flamelike glow and intensity, swam there for an
+instant in the dim greenish pool of the mirror. Beneath the charm of the
+face there was the character which one associates, not with youth, but
+with age and experience. Beneath the fine, clear lines of her head and
+limbs, the tall slenderness of her figure, the look of swiftness and of
+energy, which was almost birdlike in its grace and poise, there was a
+strength and vigour which suggested a gallant boy rather than the
+slighter and softer frame of a girl.
+
+While she stood there, Gabriella thought regretfully of all that it
+would mean to give up her half-dependent and wholly ladylike existence
+and go to work in a shop. Necessity not choice was driving her; and in
+spirit she looked back almost wistfully to the securely circumscribed
+lot of her grandmother. For there was little of the rebel in her
+temperament; and had she been free to choose, she would have
+instinctively selected, guided by generations of gregarious ancestors,
+the festive girlhood which Cousin Pussy had so ardently described. She
+wanted passionately all the things that other girls had, and her only
+quarrel, indeed, with the sheltered life was that she couldn't afford
+it. In the expressive phrase of Cousin Jimmy, the sheltered life "cost
+money," and to cost money was to be beyond the eager grasp of Gabriella.
+
+The door opened as if yielding under protest, and Marthy entered, still
+hurriedly tying the strings of the clean apron she had slipped on over
+her soiled one before answering the door-bell.
+
+"Yo' beau done come, Miss Ella. Ain't you gwine?"
+
+"No, I'm not going to the party, Marthy, but ask him to wait just a
+minute."
+
+"He's settin' over yonder in de parlour wid his overcoat on."
+
+"Well, ask him to take it off; I'll be there in a moment." She spoke as
+gravely as Marthy had done, yet in her face there was a light play of
+humour.
+
+Two years ago she would have thrilled with joy at the thought that
+Arthur was waiting for her; but in those two years since her engagement
+she had grown to look upon her first love as the gossamer, fairylike
+romance of a child. For months she had known that the engagement must be
+broken sooner or later; and she knew now, while she listened to Marthy's
+shuffling feet hastening to deliver her message, that she must break it
+to-night. In the dim pool of her mirror a face looked back at her that
+was not the face of Arthur Peyton; she saw it take form there as one
+sees a face grow gradually into life from the dimness of dreams. It was,
+she told herself to-night, the very face of her dream that she saw.
+
+"Well, I must get it over," she said with a sternness which gave her a
+passing resemblance to the Saint Memin portrait of the Reverend
+Bartholomew Berkeley; "I've got to get it over to-night, and whatever
+happens I've got to be honest." Then, with a last glance at the sleeping
+children, she lowered the gas, and went across the darkened hail, which
+smelt of pickles and bacon because one end of it was used as a
+storeroom.
+
+The parlour had been swept since the family council had deliberated
+there over Jane's destiny. The scraps of cambric had been gathered up
+from the threadbare arabesques in the carpet; the chairs had been placed
+at respectable distances apart; the gas-jets in the chandelier were
+flaming extravagantly under the damaged garlands; and the sewing machine
+had been wheeled into the obscurity of the hail, for it would have
+humiliated Gabriella's mother to think that her daughter received young
+men in a room which looked as if somebody had worked there.
+
+When Gabriella entered, Arthur Peyton was standing in front of the
+fireplace, gazing abstractedly at his reflection in the French mirror.
+Though his chestnut hair was carefully brushed, he had instinctively
+lifted his hand to smooth down an imaginary lock, and while he did this,
+he frowned slightly as if at a recollection that had ruffled his temper.
+His features were straight and very narrow, with the look of
+sensitiveness one associates with the thoroughbred, and the delicate
+texture of his skin emphasized this quality of high-breeding, which was
+the only thing that one remembered about him. In his light-gray eyes
+there was a sympathetic expression which invariably won the hearts of
+old ladies, and these old ladies were certain to say of him afterward,
+"such a gentleman, my dear--almost of the old school, you know, and we
+haven't many of them left in this hurrying age."
+
+He had done well, though not brilliantly, at college, for his mind, if
+unoriginal, had never given anybody, not even his mother, the least bit
+of trouble. For three years he had worked with admirable regularity in
+the office of his uncle, Carter Peyton, one of the most distinguished
+lawyers in the Virginia of his period, and it was generally felt that
+young Arthur Peyton would have "a brilliant future." For the present,
+however, he lived an uneventful life with his widowed mother in a
+charming old house, surrounded by a walled garden, in Franklin Street.
+Like the house, he was always in perfect order; and everything about
+him, from his loosely fitting clothes and his immaculate linen to his
+inherited conceptions of life, was arranged with such exquisite
+precision that it was impossible to improve it in any way. He knew
+exactly what he thought, and he knew also his reason, which was usually
+a precedent in law or custom, for thinking as he did. His opinions,
+which were both active and abundant, were all perfectly legitimate
+descendants of tradition, and the phrase "nobody ever heard of such a
+thing," was quite as convincing to him as to Mrs. Carr or to Cousin
+Jimmy Wrenn.
+
+"Gabriella, aren't you going?" he asked reproachfully as the girl
+entered.
+
+"Oh, Arthur, we've had such a dreadful day! Poor Jane has left Charley
+for good and has come home, with all the children. We've been busy
+dividing them among us, and we're going to turn the dining-room into a
+nursery.
+
+"Left Charley? That's bad, isn't it?" asked Arthur doubtfully.
+
+"I feel so sorry for her, Arthur. It must be terrible to have love end
+like that."
+
+"But she isn't to blame. Everybody knows that she has forgiven him again
+and again."
+
+"Yes, everybody knows it," repeated Gabriella, as if she drew bitter
+comfort from the knowledge, "and she says now that she will never, never
+go back to him."
+
+For the first time a shadow appeared in Arthur's clear eyes.
+
+"Do you think she ought to make up her mind, darling, until she sees
+whether or not he will reform? After all, she is his wife."
+
+"That's what mother says, and yet I believe Charley is the only person
+on earth mother really hates. Now Cousin Jimmy and I will do everything
+we can to keep her away from him."
+
+"I think I shouldn't meddle if I were you, dearest. She'll probably go
+back to him in the end because of the children.
+
+"But I am going to help her take care of the children," replied
+Gabriella stanchly. "Of course, my life will be entirely different now,
+Arthur," she added gently. "Everything is altered for me, too, since
+yesterday. I have thought it all over for hours, and I am going to try
+to get a place in Brandywine's store."
+
+"In a store?" repeated Arthur slowly, and she saw the muscles of his
+mouth tighten and grow rigid.
+
+"Mother doesn't like the idea any more than you do, but what are we to
+come to if we go on in the old aimless way? One can't make a living out
+of plain sewing, and though, of course, Charley will be supposed to
+provide for his children, he isn't exactly the sort one can count on.
+Brandywine's, you see, is only a beginning. What I mean is that I am
+obliged to learn how to support myself."
+
+"But couldn't you work just as well in your home, darling?
+
+"People don't pay anything for home work. You must see what I mean,
+Arthur."
+
+"Yes, I see," he replied tenderly; but after a moment's thought, he
+went on again with the gentle obstinacy of a man whose thinking had all
+been done for him before he was born. "I wish, though, that you would
+try to hold out a little longer, working at home with your mother. In a
+year or two we shall be able to marry."
+
+"I couldn't," said Gabriella, shaking her head. "Don't urge me, Arthur."
+
+"If you would only consent to live with mother, we might marry now," he
+pursued, after a minute, as if he had not heard her.
+
+"But it wouldn't be fair to her, and how could I ask her to take mother
+and Jane and the children? No, I've thought it all out, dear, and I must
+go to work."
+
+"But I'll work for them, Gabriella. I'll do anything on earth rather
+than see you ordered about by old Brandywine."
+
+"He won't order me about," answered Gabriella cheerfully; "but mother
+feels just as you do. She says I am going out of my class because I
+won't stay at home and work buttonholes."
+
+"You couldn't go out of your class," replied Arthur, with an instinctive
+gallantry which even his distress could not overcome; "but I can't get
+used to the thought of it, darling--I simply can't. You're so sacred to
+me. There's something about the woman a man loves that's different from
+every other woman, and the bare idea of your working in a shop sickens
+me. I always think of you as apart from the workaday world. I always
+think of you as a star shining serenely above the sordid struggle--"
+Overwhelmed by the glowing train of his rhetoric, he broke down suddenly
+and caught passionately at the cool hand of Gabriella.
+
+As he looked at her slender finger, on which he had placed her
+engagement ring two years before, it seemed to him that the situation
+was becoming intolerable--that it was an affront not only to his ideal
+of Gabriella, as something essentially starlike and remote, but to that
+peculiar veneration for women which he always spoke and thought of as
+"Southern." His ideal woman was gentle, clinging, so perfectly a "lady"
+that she would have perished had she been put into a shop; and, though
+he was aware that Gabriella was a girl of much character and
+determination, his mind was so constructed that he was able, without
+difficulty, to think of her as corresponding to this exalted type of her
+sex. By the simple act of falling in love with her he had endowed her
+with every virtue except the ones that she actually possessed.
+
+"I know, I know," said Gabriella tenderly, for she saw that he suffered.
+Her training had been a hard one, though she had got it at home, and in
+a violent reaction from the sentimentality of her mother and Jane she
+had become suspicious of any language that sounded "flowery" to her
+sensitive ears. With her clear-sighted judgment, she knew perfectly well
+that by no stretch of mind or metaphor could she be supposed to resemble
+a star--that she was not shining, not remote, not even "ideal" in
+Arthur's delicate sense of the word. She had known the horrors of
+poverty, of that bitter genteel poverty which must keep up an appearance
+at any cost; and she could never forget the grim days, after the death
+of Uncle Beverly Blair, when they had shivered in fireless rooms and
+gone for weeks without butter on their bread. For the one strong quality
+in Mrs. Carr's character was the feeling she spoke of complacently,
+though modestly, as "proper pride"; and this proper pride, which was
+now resisting Gabriella's struggle for independence, had in the past
+resisted quite as stubbornly the thought of an appeal to the ready
+charity of her masculine relatives. To seek a man's advice had been from
+her girlhood the primal impulse of Mrs. Carr's nature; but, until Fate
+had starved her into sincerity, she had kept alive the ladylike fiction
+that she was in need of moral, not material, assistance.
+
+"Of course, if there were any other way, Arthur," said Gabriella,
+remembering the earlier battles with her mother, and eager to compromise
+when she could do so with dignity; "but how can I go on being dependent
+on Cousin Jimmy and Uncle Meriweather. Neither of them is rich, and
+Cousin Jimmy has a large family."
+
+Of course she was reasonable. The most disagreeable thing about
+Gabriella, Jane had once said, was her inveterate habit of being
+reasonable. But then Jane, who was of an exquisite sensibility, felt
+that Gabriella's reasonableness belonged to a distinctly lower order of
+intelligence. When all was said, Gabriella saw clearly because she had a
+practical mind, and a practical mind is usually engrossed with material
+matters.
+
+"I understand exactly how you feel, dear, but if only you could go on
+just as you are for a few years longer," said Arthur, sticking to his
+original idea with a tenacity which made it possible for him to argue
+for hours and yet remain exactly where he had started. Though they
+talked all night, though she convinced him according to all the laws and
+principles of logic, she knew that he would still think precisely what
+he had thought in the beginning, for his conviction was rooted, deeper
+than reason, in the unconquerable prejudices which had passed from the
+brain into the very blood of his race. He would probably say at the end:
+"I admit all that you tell me, Gabriella, but my sentiment is against
+it;" and this sentiment, overruling sense, would insist, with sublime
+obstinacy, that Gabriella must not work in a shop. It would ignore,
+after the exalted habit of sentiment, such merely sordid facts as
+poverty and starvation (who ever heard of a woman of good family
+starving in Virginia?), and, at last, if Gabriella were really in love
+with Arthur, it would triumph over her finer judgment and reduce her to
+submission. But while she watched him, in the very minute when, failing
+for words, he caught her in his arms, she said to herself, suddenly
+chilled and determined: "I must get it over to-night, and I've got to be
+honest." The scent of the hyacinths floated to her again, but it seemed
+to bring a cold wind, as if a draught had blown in through the closed
+slats of the shutters.
+
+"Everything has changed, Arthur," she said, "and I don't think I ought
+to go on being engaged." Then because her words sounded insincere, she
+added sternly: "Even if we could be married--and of course we can't
+be--I--I don't feel that I should want to marry. I am not sure that I
+love you enough to marry you."
+
+It was all so unromantic, so unemotional, so utterly different from the
+scene she had pictured when she imagined what "breaking her engagement"
+would be like. Then she had always thought of herself as dissolving in
+tears on the horsehair sofa, which had become sacred to the tragedy of
+poor Jane; but, to her surprise, she did not feel now the faintest
+inclination to cry. It ought to have been theatrical, but it wasn't--not
+even when she took off her engagement ring, as she had read in novels
+that girls did at the decisive instant, and laid it down on the table.
+When she remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but
+Arthur seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the
+fire in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray's Elegy
+and brought it back to Gabriella.
+
+"I'll never give you up," said Arthur stubbornly, and knowing his
+character, she felt that he had spoken the truth. He could not give her
+up even had he wished it, for, like a belief, she had passed from his
+brain into the fibre of his being. She had become a habit to him, and
+not love, but the inability to change, to cease thinking what he had
+always thought, to break a fixed manner of life, would keep him faithful
+to her in his heart.
+
+"I'm sorry--oh, I'm sorry," she murmured, longing to have it over and to
+return to Jane and the children. It occurred to her almost resentfully
+that love was not always an unmixed delight.
+
+"Is there any one else, Gabriella?" he asked with a sudden choking sound
+in his voice. "I have sometimes thought--in the last four or five
+months--that there might be--that you had changed--that--" He stopped
+abruptly, and she answered him with a beautiful frankness which would
+have horrified the imperishable, if desiccated, coquetry of her mother.
+
+"There is some one else and there isn't," she replied simply. "I mean I
+think of some one else very often--of some one who isn't in my life at
+all--from whom I never hear--"
+
+"Is it George Fowler?"
+
+She bowed her head, and, though she did not blush, her eyes grew
+radiant.
+
+"And you have known him less than a year?"
+
+Again she bowed her head without speaking. What was there, after all,
+that she could say in justification of her behaviour?
+
+A groan escaped him, smothered into a gentle murmur of protest. "And I
+thought women were more constant than men!" he exclaimed with something
+of the baffled and helpless feeling which had overtaken Uncle
+Meriweather while he regarded Gabriella.
+
+The generalization was not without interest for Gabriella.
+
+"I thought so, too," she observed dispassionately. "I thought so, too,
+and that is why it was such a dreadful surprise to me when it happened.
+You yourself aren't more shocked and surprised than I was in the
+beginning," she added.
+
+"But you've got used to the thought, I suppose?"
+
+"Well, one has to, you see. What else is there to do? I always
+understood from mother"--she went on with the same eager interest, as if
+she were stumbling upon new and important intellectual discoveries--"I
+always understood that women never fell in love with men first--I mean
+until they had had positive proof that their love would be returned. But
+in this case that didn't seem to matter at all. Nothing mattered, and
+the more I fought against it and tried to be true to my engagement, the
+more I found myself being false. It's all very strange," she concluded,
+"but that is just how it happened."
+
+"And he knows nothing about it?"
+
+"Oh, no. I told him I was engaged to you, and then he went away."
+
+For an instant he was silent, and watching his face, so carefully
+guarded and controlled by habit that it had the curious blank look of a
+statue's, Gabriella could form no idea of the suppressed inarticulate
+suffering in his heart.
+
+"And if he came back would you marry him?" he asked.
+
+Before replying she sat for a minute gazing down on her folded hands and
+weighing each separate word of her answer.
+
+"I should try not to, Arthur," she said at last, "but--but I am not sure
+that I should be able to help it."
+
+When at last he had said "good-bye" rather grimly, and gone out of the
+door without looking back, she was conscious of an immense relief, of a
+feeling that she could breathe freely again after an age of oppression.
+There was a curious sense of unreality about the hour she had just
+passed through, as if it belonged not to actual life, but to a play she
+had been rehearsing. She had felt nothing. The breaking of her
+engagement had failed utterly to move her.
+
+After bolting the front door, she turned out the gas in the parlour,
+pushed back the lump of coal in the grate in the hope of saving it for
+the morrow, and went cautiously down the hall to her room. As she passed
+her mother's door, a glimmer of light along the threshold made her pause
+for a minute, and while she hesitated, an anxious voice floated out to
+her:
+
+"Gabriella, is that you?"
+
+"Yes, Mother, do you want anything?"
+
+"Jane has one of her heart attacks. I put her to bed in my room because
+it is more comfortable than the dining-room. Don't you think you had
+better go back and wake Marthy?"
+
+"Is she ill? Let me come in," answered Gabriella, pushing open the door
+and brushing by Mrs. Carr, who stood, shrunken and shivering, in a gray
+flannel wrapper and felt slippers.
+
+Though Jane's attacks were familiar occurrences, they never failed to
+produce an immediate panic in the household. As a child of nine,
+Gabriella remembered being aroused in the middle of a bitter night,
+hastily wrapped in her mother's shawl and a blanket, and hurried up the
+staircase to Jane, who had broken her engagement to Charley the evening
+before. Jane, pale, angelic, palpitating, appeared to draw her last
+breath as they entered, while the old doctor supported her in his arms,
+and Marthy, in a frenzy of service, rattled the dead embers in the
+grate. It had all been horribly vivid, and when Jane had murmured
+Charley's name in a dying voice, they had stood, trembling and blue with
+cold, around her bed, waiting for the end. But the end had not come, and
+three months later Jane was married to Charley Gracey.
+
+After that scene, Gabriella had associated Jane's attacks with a
+freezing January night and a fireless grate (though the last but one had
+occurred in mid-August), and she was relieved now to find a fire burning
+in her mother's room and a kettle singing merrily on the fender. The
+elder children, with their flannel petticoats pinned over their thin
+little shoulders, were sitting straight and stiff on a box couch which
+had been turned into a bed, and their strange little faces looked wan
+and peaked in the firelight.
+
+Jane was really ill, Gabriella decided, after a glance at her sister.
+Nothing except acute suffering could have given her that ghastly pallor
+or made her eyes sink so far back in her head. She lay quite motionless
+on the far side of the big tester bed, staring straight up at the
+ceiling with an expression which terrified Gabriella, though she had
+seen it on her sister's face at least a dozen times before to-night.
+
+"Has Arthur gone?" asked Mrs. Carr in a voice that sounded as if she
+were running.
+
+"Yes. Did you want him, mother?"
+
+"I thought we might send him for the doctor and for Charley. Don't you
+think Charley ought to be told of her condition? She has asked for the
+children."
+
+"Have you given her the digitalis?"
+
+"I can't make her swallow it. There are the drops on the table by the
+bed. My hands tremble so I had to measure them three times."
+
+Taking the glass from the table, Gabriella bent over her sister and
+implored her to swallow the drops, but, without appearing to hear her
+voice, Jane still stared blankly upward, with the rigid, convulsed look
+of a woman who has been stricken with dumbness. Her flaxen hair, damp
+with camphor, which Mrs. Carr had wildly splashed on her forehead, clung
+flat and close to her head, while the only pulse in her body seemed to
+beat in irregular, spasmodic throbs in her throat.
+
+"Don't go, mother. I'll wake Marthy," cried Gabriella, for Mrs. Carr,
+inspired by the spirit of panic, was darting out of the door in her felt
+slippers. Then, while the children, crying distractedly, rushed to
+Jane's bedside, the girl ran out of the house and along the brick walk
+to the kitchen and the room above it where Marthy lived the little life
+she had apart from her work. In answer to Gabriella's call she emerged
+entirely dressed from the darkness; and at the news of Jane's illness
+she was seized with the spurious energy which visits her race in the
+moment of tragedy. She offered at once to run for the doctor, and
+suggested, without a hint from Gabriella, that she had better leave
+word, on her way home, for Marse Charley.
+
+"I knowed 'twuz comin' jez ez soon ez I lay eyes on 'er," she muttered,
+for she was an old family servant. "Dar ain' no use 'n tryin' ter come
+betweenst dem de good Lawd is done jine tergedder fur worse. A baid
+husban'! Hi! Dar ain't un 'oman erlive, I reckon, dat 'ouldn't ruther
+own a baid husban' den no husban' at all. You all is got to teck 'em de
+way dey's made, en dar's moughty few un um dat is made right."
+
+Still muttering, she stumbled down the walk and out of the gate, while
+Gabriella returned to her mother's room and hurried the weeping children
+into their shoes and stockings. Mrs. Carr, still in her flannel wrapper,
+with her little flat gray curls screwed up on pins for the night, and
+her thin ankles showing pathetically above her felt slippers, ran
+nervously to and fro with mustard plasters and bottles of hot water
+which she continually refilled from the kettle on the fender.
+Occasionally she paused long enough to hold the camphor to Jane's nose
+or to lift the quilt from the bottom of the bed and then put it
+carefully back in the very spot where it had lain before she had touched
+it. And because she was born to take two steps to every one that was
+necessary, because she could not accomplish the simplest act without a
+prodigious waste of energy and emotion, because she died twenty deaths
+over the slightest anxiety, and, most of all, because she was the last
+person on earth who ought to have been burdened with poverty and hard
+work and an unhappily married daughter--because of all these things Mrs.
+Carr wore herself to a shadow in the quarter of an hour they spent
+waiting for the doctor and Charley Gracey.
+
+Though she had brought Jane through at least a dozen "attacks," she
+still lost her presence of mind as completely as on that January night
+when, utterly distraught, she had hurried Gabriella to the first
+death-bed scene of her sister; she still grew as forgetful of herself
+and her own feelings, and, in obedience to some profound law of her
+nature, she still as confidently "expected the worst." For Mrs. Carr's
+philosophy, like Jane's, was of that active but dreary sort that thrives
+best upon misery. Just as Jane, who had lost every illusion about
+Charley, went on loving him in spite of it, so Mrs. Carr, having lost
+her illusions about life, retained a kind of wistful fondness for the
+thing that had wounded her.
+
+The door-bell rang sharply, and Gabriella went to let in the doctor, a
+brisk, authoritative young man of the new school, who had learned
+everything there was to be known about medicine except the way to behave
+in a sickroom, and who abhorred a bedside manner as heartily as if it
+were calomel or castor oil. His name was Darrow, and he was the
+assistant of old Dr. Walker, Mrs. Carr's family physician, who never
+went out at night since he had passed his seventieth birthday.
+Gabriella, who liked him because he was not anecdotal and gave small
+doses of medicine, hastily led the way to her mother's room before she
+ran back to meet Charley Gracey at the door of the dark parlour.
+
+"You can't see her now. The doctor is with her," she whispered. "I'll
+make a light in here and you can wait."
+
+"Let me," said Charley, quite as pleasantly as if he were not a bad
+husband, while he found a match and struck it on the sole of his foot.
+Then, as the gas flared up, he exclaimed, with a low whistle, "By Jove,
+you're a sight, Gabriella!"
+
+"Well, it's your fault," replied Gabriella sharply, letting him see, as
+she told herself, exactly what she thought of him. "You've made Jane so
+ill we thought she was dying."
+
+"I'm sorry for that," he said, suddenly smitten with gravity. "Is she
+really so bad?"
+
+His charming freckled face, with its irrepressible humour, grew almost
+grotesquely solemn, while the habitual merriment faded slowly from his
+light-gray eyes, leaving them empty of expression. He was a short,
+rather thick-set man, not particularly good-looking, not particularly
+clever, but possessing a singular, if unaccountable, charm. Everybody
+liked Charley, though nobody respected him. He was a scamp, but a
+lovable scamp, while Jane, with the best intentions in the world, had
+managed to make every virtue unattractive. When people condemned him,
+they said that he was "utterly unprincipled"; when they softened in
+their judgment, they admitted that he had "the best heart in the world."
+
+"I suppose it isn't any worse than other attacks," answered Gabriella,
+"but you know what they are like."
+
+"Yes, I know," replied Charley. "Oh, Lord, don't I?"
+
+"She asked mother to send for you," continued Gabriella. "She wants you
+to know that she has forgiven you."
+
+"Has she?" said Charley, without elation. Turning away, he stared for a
+minute or two at the engraving of the children feeding fish in a pond;
+then, with his eyes still glued to the picture, he burst out
+passionately: "Gabriella, I'd hoped she wouldn't this time!"
+
+"If I were she," retorted Gabriella crushingly, "I would never speak to
+you again until the day of my death."
+
+"If she were you," rejoined Charley, with barefaced audacity, "I'd have
+been a good husband. Why, I was simply starving to be a good husband
+when I married Jane. It's my ideal in life. I'm all for the domestic
+thing by nature. I was tired--positively dog-tired of the other kind. I
+wanted a wife. I adored--I've always adored babies--"
+
+"If that is true," returned Gabriella sternly, for she was not disposed
+to soften to Charley, and in her heart she deeply resented what she
+called Jane's "weakness," "if that is true why do you behave so
+outrageously to Jane and the children? Why can't you be decent?"
+
+"I could," answered Charley, with engaging lucidity, "if she were less
+so. It's her infernal virtue I can't stand, Gabriella. No man could
+stand it without taking to drink."
+
+"But you knew she was that way. She was always trying to make people
+better. It is her mission. Why, I remember one winter night before you
+were married mother got me out of bed in the cold to come and hear Jane
+forgive you beautifully about something."
+
+"That was the first time, and it was very touching. I suppose the first
+time always is touching. Of course, I didn't know she meant to keep it
+up. No man could possibly have kept it up," said Charley, with
+bitterness, "but she married me to reform me, and it is the only thing
+she has really enjoyed about her marriage. She's a born reformer. I
+haven't eaten a thing I cared about, nor drank a drop I wanted, nor used
+a bad word I was fond of, since I married, without being nagged at about
+it. She loved me for my vices, and yet she hasn't let me keep a single
+one--not even the smallest--not even cigarettes. Nag! Good God! She's
+nagged me to perfection ever since the day of our wedding when she made
+me sign the pledge before she let me kiss her!"
+
+"Well, that doesn't make it any easier for us or for the children,"
+replied Gabriella, without sympathy; "and if you don't think of Jane,
+you might at least think of your children."
+
+"Of course it's hard on the kids," admitted Charley ruefully. "But as
+for Jane--now, will you tell me what would become of Jane after she had
+reformed me? Why, she'd be bored to death. She'd be a martyr without any
+martyrdom. When she made me give up tobacco, she lost interest in
+everything for a week. She was like your Uncle Meriweather after the
+surrender. There wasn't anything left to fight about, and fighting was
+all he could do--"
+
+"I believe--I really believe you have been drinking," interrupted
+Gabriella with cold disgust. "Suppose Jane were to die?"
+
+"She won't die. She'll be all right as soon as she has forgiven me."
+
+He was not only bad, she told herself, he was perfectly shameless. He
+appeared to have been born without the faintest sense of responsibility.
+And yet, while Gabriella listened to him, she realized that, in some
+ways, he might be a less trying companion than poor Jane. His candour
+was as simple, as unaffected, as the serene artlessness of a child. It
+was impossible not to believe in his sincerity. Though she "despised
+him," as she told herself, still she was obliged to admit that there was
+something to be said on his side. The harsh judgment of youth--of youth
+that never tries to understand, that never makes allowances--softened
+under the influence of Charley's reprehensible charm. Even badness,
+Gabriella conceded grudgingly, might be easier to live with in some
+circumstances than a too exalted self-righteousness.
+
+"If you'll bring Jane to that way of thinking," retorted Charley, with
+vulgar frankness, "I'll give you five hundred dollars down. If you'll
+thoroughly corrupt her mind and persuade her to neglect her duty to me,
+I'll make it a thousand."
+
+He was jesting! It was monstrous, with Jane lying ill in her mother's
+room; it was indecent; it was grossly immoral; but he was actually
+jesting! Not even scandal, not even the doctor's presence in the house,
+could suppress his incorrigible spirit of levity. "If I were Jane, I'd
+never speak to him," thought Gabriella, and the question flashed through
+her mind, "how in the world could she ever have loved him?" It was
+impossible for her to conceive of any situation when Charley could have
+made a girl fall in love with him. Though she had heard stories of his
+early conquests, she had never believed them. There were times when she
+almost liked him, but it was the kind of liking one gave to an inferior,
+not to an equal. She admitted his charm, but it was the charm of an
+irresponsible creature--the capricious attraction of a child or an
+animal. Her common sense, she told herself, would keep her from making
+a mistake such as Jane had made with her life; and, besides, she was
+utterly devoid of the missionary instinct which had lured Jane to
+destruction. "If I ever marry, it will be different from that," she
+thought passionately. "It will be utterly different!"
+
+The door of Mrs. Carr's room opened suddenly, Marthy's name was called
+in a high voice, and the doctor was heard saying reassuringly: "She is
+over the worst. There is no need to worry."
+
+"Don't send me in there alone, Gabriella," begged Charley piteously.
+"I'd rather face bullets than Jane in an attack." His bravado had
+deserted him, and he appeared positively craven. The stiffness seemed to
+have gone not only out of his character, but out of his clothes also.
+Even his collar had become limp with emotion.
+
+"Well, I don't care," answered Gabriella, "you've got to stand it.
+There's no use squirming when you've only yourself to blame." With a
+malicious pleasure, she watched the consternation in Charley's face,
+while the doctor's footsteps came rapidly down the hall and stopped at
+the threshold of the parlour.
+
+"You may go in, Mr. Gracey--your wife is asking for you; but be very
+careful not to say anything that might disturb her. Just keep her as
+quiet as you can for a few hours."
+
+Then the door in the distance opened again, and Mrs. Carr, in the hollow
+tones of destiny, called: "Gabriella, Jane is waiting to speak to her
+husband."
+
+"Come, Charley," ordered Gabriella, grimly, and a moment later she
+pushed him across her mother's threshold and turned back into the hall.
+"I hope she'll make him squirm," she said to herself, with relish.
+Nothing, she felt, except the certainty of Charley's squirming, could
+make up to her for the half-hour she had just spent with him.
+
+She was still standing there when Jane's medicine came from the druggist
+at the corner, and for a while she waited outside the door, fearing to
+lighten Charley's punishment by her entrance. The medicine had to be
+measured in drops, and she went into the dining-room, where the children
+were huddled together in an improvised bed, and diluted the mixture with
+water before she could persuade herself to go into her mother's room.
+Even then she hesitated until she remembered that the doctor had said
+Jane must take the first dose immediately. Not by her, if she could help
+it, should the divine wrath of the furies be appeased.
+
+But with the first touch of her hand on the knob, Charley's flippant
+voice greeted her with, "Won't you come in, Gabriella?" and swallowing
+her angry retort, she entered stiffly, with the glass held out straight
+before her. Charley, on his knees beside the bed, with his arm under his
+wife's pillow, stared up at his sister-in-law with the guilty look of a
+whipped terrier, while Jane, pallid, suffering, saintly, rested one thin
+blue-veined hand on his shoulder. Her face was the colour of the sheet,
+her eyes were unnaturally large and surrounded by violet circles; and
+her hair, drenched with camphor, spread over the pillow like the hair of
+a drowned woman. Never had she appeared so broken, so resigned, so
+ineffably spiritual; and Gabriella's solitary comfort was the thought
+that Jane's attack had conquered Charley as completely as it had
+conquered the rest of them.
+
+"Gabriella, I've forgiven him," said Jane, with fainting sweetness,
+"and he wants you and mother to do so. He has promised to be good in the
+future."
+
+"Well, I shan't forgive him for keeping me up all night," answered
+Gabriella resentfully, and she felt that even if it killed Jane, she
+could not keep back her reply. "I can't answer for mother, but I haven't
+forgiven him and I never shall." She felt her anger hardened to a rock
+inside of her, and it hurt her so that she put the glass hurriedly down
+on the table and ran out of the room. As she closed the door behind her
+she heard Jane saying gently: "Yes, I forgive you, Charley, but I can't
+help feeling that you don't love me as you ought to."
+
+An old cape of her mother's was lying on a chair in the hall, and,
+throwing it over her shoulders, Gabriella went out on the porch and
+stood breathing quickly in the cold air, with her hand pressed on her
+bosom, which rose and fell as if she had been running. She was not only
+furious, she was grossly affronted, though she had known from the
+beginning, she said to herself, exactly how it would end. She had never
+trusted Jane--no, not a minute; she had never really trusted her mother.
+Something had told her that Jane had never meant in her heart to leave
+Charley, that she was only making a scene, after the immemorial habit of
+women, before going back to him. And yet, though she had suspected this
+all along, she was as indignant as if she had been deceived by a
+conspiracy of the three of them. Her sense of decency was outraged. She
+despised Jane because she had no strength of character; but even while
+this thought was still in her mind, she admitted that Jane had had
+sufficient strength of character to upset the household, bring Charley
+to repentance, and emerge, faint but victorious, from the wreck of
+their peace. Yes, she despised Jane, though it was impossible to deny
+that Jane's methods were successful, since she had got what she wanted.
+
+The street was very quiet, for it was in the small gray hours between
+midnight and dawn, and a solitary policeman, strolling by on his beat,
+appeared as wan and spectral as the bare boughs of the poplar trees
+beneath which he moved. The wind was still blowing over the brow of the
+hill, and now and then it tossed a wisp of straw or a handful of dust on
+the porch where Gabriella was standing. As it swept onward it drove a
+flock of shadows, like black birds, up the open street into the clear
+space under the old-fashioned gas lamp at the corner. All the lights
+were out in the neighbouring houses, but from a boarding-house down the
+block there floated suddenly the gay snatch of a waltz played on a banjo
+with a broken string. Then the music stopped, the policeman passed, and
+Gabriella and the wind were alone in the street. Overhead the stars
+shone dimly through a web of mist; and it seemed to her that the sadness
+of the sky and the sadness of the earth had mingled there in the long
+straight street where the wind blew with a melancholy sound between rows
+of silent and darkened houses.
+
+A noise in the hall made her turn, and, looking up, she saw the gaunt
+figure of Miss Amelia Peterborough standing in the bend of the
+staircase. In her hand the old maid held a twisted candlestick of
+greenish brass, and the yellow flame of the candle cast a trembling,
+fantastic shadow on the wall at her back. Her head, shorn of the false
+"front" she wore in the day, appeared to have become all forehead and
+beaked nose; her eyes had dwindled to mere points of blackness; her
+mouth, sunken and drawn over toothless gums, was like the mouth of a
+witch. The wind, blowing in gusts through the open door, inflated her
+gray shawl and the skirt of her dressing-gown, while, with each flutter
+of her garments, the grotesque shadow on the white wall danced and
+gibbered behind her. And, as she gazed down on the girl, it was as if
+the end of life, with its pathos, its cruelties, its bitterness and its
+disillusionment, had stopped for a fleeting instant to look back at life
+in the pride and ignorance of its beginning.
+
+"There was so much moving about, I thought something might have
+happened," said Miss Amelia apologetically, while Gabriella, closing the
+door, shut the draught from the staircase.
+
+"Jane had one of her heart attacks," answered the girl. "I'm so sorry we
+waked you."
+
+But she was thinking while she spoke, "So that is old age--so that is
+what it means to be old?" There is a vague compassion in the thought,
+but it held no terror, for the decay of Miss Amelia seemed as utterly
+remote and detached from her own life as one of the past ages in
+history. The youth in her brain created a radiant illusion of
+immortality. By no stretch of imagination could she picture herself like
+the infirm and loveless creature before her. Yet she knew, without
+realizing it, that Miss Amelia had once been young, that she had once
+even been beautiful. There was a legend, fading now into tradition, that
+her lover had been killed in a duel, fought for her while she was still
+a girl, and that she had worn only white or black since that day--she
+who was now well over eighty. She had known love; a man had died for
+her; it was said that she had been a famous coquette in the 'thirties;
+and now she stood there, grotesque and sexless, with her eyes empty of
+dreams and of memories, and her face as gray and sinister as the face of
+her shadow.
+
+"I hope she is better, poor child," she said, for, like the rest of
+Richmond, she believed Jane to be all saint and Charley all sinner. "If
+I can be of any help, be sure to let me know."
+
+"Yes, I'll let you know, thank you. I hope we didn't disturb Miss
+Jemima."
+
+The younger Miss Peterborough--called "the happy one" by Gabriella and
+Mrs. Carr because she was always cheerful, though, as far as any one
+could tell, she had nothing and had never had anything to be cheerful
+about--was named Jemima. A chronic invalid, from some obscure trouble
+which had not left her for twenty years, she was seldom free from pain,
+and yet Gabriella had never seen her (except at funerals, for which she
+entertained a perfectly healthy fondness as diversions free to the poor)
+without a smile on her face.
+
+"Sister Jemima doesn't wake easily. She is a sound sleeper and she's
+getting a little hard of hearing"; and lifting the candlestick to light
+her way, Miss Amelia turned back up the stairs, while the flame flitted
+like a golden moth into the dimness.
+
+"Poor old thing," thought Gabriella, imagining in her ignorance that she
+could understand the tragedy of Miss Amelia's life; "poor old thing, she
+must have had a terrible time."
+
+As she approached her mother's door, Charley came out, glanced at her
+sheepishly, and hurried to where his hat hung on the walnut hatrack in
+the front hall. Then, as if overcoming his first impulse to avoid her,
+he beckoned to her furtively, and said in a sepulchral whisper:
+"Gabriella, be very careful what you say to her."
+
+The audacity of it! This from Charley, the abandoned, the depraved, the
+unutterably abhorrent in her sight. Without replying, she turned
+indignantly away and opened her mother's door.
+
+Lying in the middle of the bed now, and slightly propped with pillows,
+Jane was sipping a second dose of medicine from a glass Mrs. Carr held
+to her lips.
+
+"I know you don't understand my forgiving him, Gabriella," she said very
+gently, "but some day, after you are married, you will realize that I do
+it from a sacred duty--from a sacred duty," she repeated firmly, while
+the shining light of martyrdom illumined her features.
+
+"Well, it's none of my business," answered Gabriella crossly, "but the
+sooner you do it, I suppose the sooner you will have to do it again." If
+only for once Jane would be direct, if only she would be natural, if
+only she would speak the truth and not fiction.
+
+"Oh, no, dear, you don't understand him any better than you do me," said
+Jane as sweetly as ever in spite of Gabriella's deplorable loss of
+temper. "He is really dreadfully penitent, and he sees that he hasn't
+always treated me as he ought to have done. But you'll know what I mean
+when you marry, Gabriella. She'll understand me then, won't she,
+mother?"
+
+"I'm sometimes tempted to hope that Gabriella will never marry," replied
+Mrs. Carr with the uncompromising bitterness of abject despair; "the
+Carrs all seem to marry so badly."
+
+In her normal mood she would never have uttered this heresy, for she
+belonged to a generation that regarded even a bad marriage as better for
+a woman than no marriage at all; but the night had worn her out, and one
+of her spells of neuralgia, which followed fatigue, was already
+beginning in her face. The purple crocheted "fascinator" she had caught
+up at the doctor's entrance was still on her head, and her long pale
+face, beneath the airy scallops, appeared frozen in an expression of
+incurable melancholy. For the rest she had been too frightened, too
+forgetful of herself and her own comfort even to put on her stockings,
+though Gabriella had begged her to do so. "Don't think about me. Attend
+to poor Jane," she had repeated over and over.
+
+"Mother, go into my room and get into bed," commanded Gabriella, whose
+patience, never abundant, was ebbing low. "If you don't get some sleep
+your neuralgia won't be any better."
+
+"It isn't any better. I don't expect it to be any better."
+
+"Well, you must go to bed or it will get worse. I'll heat you a cup of
+milk and wrap you up in warm blankets."
+
+"Don't worry about me, dear. Think of poor Jane."
+
+"We've been thinking of Jane all night, and you need it now more than
+she does. I can tell by your eyes how you are suffering."
+
+In the first streak of dawn, which was beginning to glimmer faintly on
+the window-panes, Mrs. Carr looked as if she had withered overnight.
+
+"It's only my left temple," she said dully, "otherwise I am quite well.
+No, dear, I must rub Jane's forehead until she falls asleep. The doctor
+said it was important that we should keep her soothed."
+
+But it was a law of Gabriella's nature that she never knew when she was
+beaten. Failure aroused the sleeping forces within her, and when these
+forces were once liberated, the spasmodic efforts of Mrs. Carr and the
+indirect methods of Jane were alike powerless to oppose them. At such
+times a faint flush rose to her pale cheeks, her eyes shone with a
+burning darkness, while her mouth lost its fresh young red and grew hard
+in outline.
+
+"You must go to bed, mother," she repeated in a voice which Mrs. Carr
+would have obeyed had it issued from the wall or a piece of furniture.
+
+Fifteen minutes later Gabriella stood authoritatively beside the bed,
+while her mother, with a mustard plaster at the back of her neck,
+obediently sipped hot milk from a teacup. Mrs. Carr had surrendered to
+the conquering spirit of her daughter, but her surrender, which was
+unwilling and weakly defiant, gave out presently a last feeble flicker
+of resistance.
+
+"Don't you think, Gabriella, we might arrange to live with Jane?" she
+asked. "It would be a saving of expense for us both, and we might be so
+helpful about the children."
+
+"And about Charley, too, I suppose," suggested Gabriella maliciously.
+
+Mrs. Carr, having been born without a sense of humour, never understood
+the broadest joke unless it was illustrated; but even to her it became
+evident, after a moment's anxious thought, that Gabriella was teasing
+her.
+
+"You seem to forget that he is her husband," she replied, with a
+pathetic clutch at her dignity, which, owing perhaps to the purple
+"fascinator" and the mustard plaster, she failed completely to
+recapture. Then, as she finished the milk and handed back the empty cup
+to her daughter, she added wearily, for life, as she often said to
+herself of late, was becoming almost too much for her, and she was
+feeling worn out and old:
+
+"My one comfort, Gabriella, is the thought that Arthur Peyton loves you.
+There couldn't be anybody more unlike Charley."
+
+"There couldn't be," agreed Gabriella mildly, for she felt that another
+blow would prostrate her mother.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A START IN LIFE
+
+
+In the late 'seventies and early 'eighties the most important shop in
+the town of Gabriella's birth was known to its patrons (chiefly ladies
+in long basques, tightly tied back skirts, and small eccentric bonnets)
+as Brandywine & Plummer's drygoods store. At that period, when old Mrs.
+Carr, just completing her ninetieth year with a mind fixed upon heaven,
+would have dropped dead at the idea that her granddaughter should ever
+step out of her class, Gabriella's mother bought her dresses (grosgrain
+of the very best quality) from Major Brandywine. To be sure, even in
+those days, there were other shops in the city--for was not Broad Street
+already alluded to in the newspapers as "the shopping thoroughfare of
+the South?"--but, though they were as numerous as dandelions in June,
+these places were by no means patronized so widely by "the best people."
+Small shops, of course, carrying a single line of goods and supplying
+their particular products to an exacting and discriminating class, held
+their own even against the established reputation of Brandywine &
+Plummer's. O'Connell's linen store, Twitlow's china store, Mrs. Tonk's
+doll store, and Green & Brady's store for notions--all these were
+situated in Broad Street hardly a stone's throw from the Second Market.
+But none of these, excellent as they were, could bear comparison with
+the refined atmosphere, so different from the vulgar bustle of a modern
+department store, which enveloped one in the quiet gloom of Brandywine &
+Plummer's. In the first place, one could be perfectly sure that one
+would be waited on by a lady--for Brandywine & Plummer's, with a
+distinguished Confederate soldier at its head and front, provided an
+almost conventual shelter for distressed feminine gentility. There was,
+for instance, Miss Marye of the black silk counter, whose father had
+belonged to Stuart's cavalry and had fallen at Yellow Tavern; there was
+Miss Meason of the glove counter, and there was Mrs. Burwell Smith of
+the ribbon counter--for, though she had married beneath her, it was
+impossible to forget that she was a direct descendant of Colonel Micajah
+Burwell, of Crow's Nest Plantation.
+
+Then, if one happened to be in search of cotton goods, one would be
+almost certain to remark on the way home: "Miss Peters, who waited on me
+in Brandywine's this morning, has unmistakably the manner of a lady," or
+"that Mrs. Jones in Brandywine's must be related to the real Joneses,
+she has such a refined appearance." And, at last, in the middle
+'nineties, after the opening of the new millinery department, which was
+reached by a short flight of steps, decorated at discreet intervals with
+baskets of pink paper roses, customers were beginning to ask: "May I
+speak to Miss Gabriella for a minute? I wish to speak to Miss Gabriella
+about the hat she is having trimmed for me."
+
+For here, also, because of what poor Jane called her "practical mind,"
+the patrons of Brandywine & Plummer's were learning that Gabriella was
+"the sort you could count on." As far as the actual work went, she
+could not, of course, hold a candle (this was Mr. Plummer's way of
+putting it) to Miss Kemp or Miss Treadway, who had a decided talent for
+trimming; but no customer in balloon sleeves and bell-shaped skirt was
+ever heard to remark of these young women as they remarked of Gabriella,
+"No, I don't want anybody else, please. She takes such an interest." To
+take an interest in other people might become quite as marketable an
+asset, Mr. Plummer was discovering, after fifty years of adherence to
+strictly business methods, as a gift for the needle; and, added to her
+engaging interest, Gabriella appeared to know by instinct exactly what a
+customer wanted.
+
+"I declare Miss Kemp had almost persuaded me to take that brown straw
+with the green velvet bandeau before I thought of asking Gabriella's
+advice," Mrs. Spencer was overheard saying to her daughter, as she
+paused, panting and breathless, at the head of the short flight of
+steps.
+
+"Oh, Gabriella always had taste; I'll ask her about mine," Florrie
+tossed back gaily in the high fluting notes which expressed so perfectly
+the brilliant, if slightly metallic, quality of her personality.
+
+Beside her mother, a plump, bouncing person, with a noisy though
+imperfectly articulate habit of speech, and the prominent hips and bust
+which composed the "fine figure" of the period, Florrie seemed to float
+with all the elusive, magic loveliness of a sunbeam. From the shining
+nimbus of her hair to her small tripping feet she was the incarnation of
+girlhood--of that white and gold girlhood which has intoxicated the
+imagination of man. She shed the allurement of sex as unconsciously as a
+flower sheds its perfume. Though her eyes were softly veiled by her
+lashes, every male clerk in Brandywine & Plummer's was dazzled by the
+deep blue light of her glances. In her red mouth, with its parted lips,
+in the pure rose and white of her flesh, in the rich curve of her bosom,
+which promised already the "fine figure" of her mother, youth and summer
+were calling as they called in the velvet softness of the June breeze.
+Innocent though she was, the powers of Life had selected her as a
+vehicle for their inscrutable ends.
+
+"Where is Miss Carr? I must speak to Miss Carr, please," she said to one
+of the shop girls who came up, eager to serve her. "Will you tell her
+that Miss Spencer is waiting to speak to her?"
+
+Responding to the girl's artless stare of admiration, she threw a
+friendly glance at her before she turned away to try on a monstrous
+white Leghorn hat decorated around the crown with a trellis of pink
+roses. Unless she happened to be in a particularly bad humour--and this
+was not often the case--Florrie was imperturbably amiable. She enjoyed
+flattery as a cat enjoys the firelight on its back, and while she purred
+happily in the pleasant warmth, she had something of the sleek and
+glossy look of a pretty kitten.
+
+"How does this look on me, mother?" she asked over her shoulder of Mrs.
+Spencer, who was babbling cheerfully in her loud tones to Miss
+Lancaster, the forewoman.
+
+Though some of the best blood in Virginia, profusely diluted with some
+of the worst, flowed comfortably in Mrs. Spencer's veins, it was
+impossible even for her relatives to deny that she could be at times
+decidedly vulgar. Having been a conspicuous belle and beauty of a bold
+and dashing type in her youth, she now devoted her middle-age to the
+enjoyment of those pleasures which she had formerly sacrificed to the
+preservation of her figure and her complexion. Though she still dyed her
+somewhat damaged hair, and strenuously pinched in her widening waist,
+she had ceased, since her fiftieth birthday, to forego the lesser
+comforts of the body. As she was a person of small imagination, and of
+no sentiment, it is probable that she was happier now than she had been
+in the days when she suffered the deprivations and enjoyed the triumphs
+of beauty.
+
+"What's that, Florrie?" she inquired shrilly. "No, I shouldn't get that
+if I were you. It doesn't flare enough. I'm crazy about a flare."
+
+"But I want a pink bandeau, mother," replied Florrie a little pettishly,
+as she patted her golden-red fringe. "I wonder where Gabriella is? Isn't
+she ever coming, Miss Lancaster?"
+
+"I thought I saw her when I came in," observed Mrs. Spencer, craning her
+handsome neck, which was running to fat, in the direction of the
+trimming room. "Florrie, just turn your head after a minute and look at
+the hat Patty Carrington is buying--pea green, and it makes her face
+look like a walnut. She hasn't the faintest idea how to dress. Do you
+think I ought to speak to her about it?"
+
+
+"No, let her alone," replied Florrie impatiently. "Is this any better
+than the Leghorn?"
+
+"Well, I must say I don't think there is much style about it, though, of
+course, with your hair, you can carry off anything. Isn't it odd how
+exactly she inherited my hair, Miss Lancaster? I remember her father
+used to say that he would have fallen in love with a gatepost if it had
+had golden-red hair."
+
+Miss Lancaster, a thin, erect woman of fifty, with impassive features,
+and iron-gray hair that looked as if it were rolled over wood, glanced
+resignedly from Mrs. Spencer's orange-coloured crimps to the imprisoned
+sunlight in Florrie's hair.
+
+"I'd know you were mother and daughter anywhere," she remarked in the
+noncommittal manner she had acquired in thirty years of independence;
+"and she is going to have your beautiful figure, too, Mrs. Spencer."
+
+"Well, I reckon I'll lose my figure now that I've stopped dieting,"
+remarked the lively lady, casting an appreciative glance in the mirror.
+"Florrie tells me I wear my sleeves too large, but I think they make me
+look smaller."
+
+"They are wearing them very large in Paris," replied Miss Lancaster, as
+if she were reciting a verse out of a catalogue. She had, as she
+sometimes found occasion to remark, been "born tired," and this
+temperamental weariness showed now in her handsome face, so wrinkled and
+dark around her bravely smiling eyes. Where she came from, or how she
+spent her time between the hour she left the shop and the hour she
+returned to it, the two women knew as little as they knew the intimate
+personal history of the Leghorn hat on the peg by the mirror. Beyond the
+fact that she played the part of a sympathetic chorus, they were without
+curiosity about her life. Their own personalities absorbed them, and for
+the time at least appeared to absorb Miss Lancaster.
+
+"I like the Leghorn hat," said Florrie decisively, as she tried it on
+for the third time, "but I'll wait till I ask Gabriella's opinion."
+
+"I hope she's getting on well here," said Mrs. Spencer, who found it
+impossible to concentrate on Florrie's hat. "Don't you think it was very
+brave of her to go to work, Miss Lancaster?"
+
+"I understood that she was obliged to," rejoined Miss Lancaster, with
+the weary amiability of her professional manner.
+
+"She might have married, I happen to know that," returned Mrs. Spencer.
+"Arthur Peyton has been in love with her ever since she was a child, and
+there was a young man from New York last winter who seemed crazy about
+her. Florrie, don't you think George Fowler was just crazy about
+Gabriella?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know, mother. He paid her a great deal of attention,
+but you never can tell about men."
+
+"Julia Caperton told me, and, of course, she's very intimate with
+George's sister, that he went back to New York because he heard that
+Gabriella was engaged to Arthur. Florrie, do you suppose she is really
+engaged to Arthur?"
+
+Thus appealed to, Florrie removed the Leghorn hat from her head, and
+answered abstractedly: "Jane thought so, but if she is engaged, I don't
+see why she should have started to work. I know Arthur would hate it."
+
+"But isn't he too poor to marry?" inquired Mrs. Spencer, whose curiosity
+was as robust as her constitution. "Haven't you always understood that
+the Peytons were poor, Miss Lancaster, in spite of the lovely house they
+live in?"
+
+Her large, good-humoured face, which had once been as delicate as a
+flower, but was now growing puffed and mottled under a plentiful layer
+of rice powder, became almost violently animated, while she adjusted her
+belt with a single effective jerk of her waist. Though Bessie Spencer
+was admitted to have one of the kindest hearts in the world, she was
+chiefly remarkable for her unhappy faculty of saying the wrong thing at
+the wrong time. An inveterate, though benevolent, gossip, she would
+babble on for hours, reciting the private affairs of her relatives, her
+friends, and her neighbours. Everybody feared her, and yet everybody was
+assured that "she never meant any harm." The secrets of the town flowed
+through her mind as grist flows through a mill, and though she was
+entirely without malice, she contrived, in the most innocent manner, to
+do an incalculable amount of injury. Possessing a singularly active
+intelligence, and having reached middle-age without acquiring sufficient
+concentration to enjoy books, she directed a vigorous, if casual,
+understanding toward the human beings among whom she lived. She knew
+everything that it was possible to know about the people who lived in
+Franklin Street, and yet her mind was so constituted that she never by
+any chance knew it correctly. Though she was not old, she had already
+passed into a proverb. To receive any statement with the remark, "You
+have heard that from Bessie Spencer," was to cast doubt upon it.
+
+"You don't think I'm getting any stouter, do you, Miss Lancaster?" she
+inquired dubiously, with her hands on her hips and her eyes measuring
+the dimensions of her waist. "I'm making up my mind to try one of those
+B. and T. corsets that Mrs. Murray is wearing. She told me it reduced
+her waist at least three inches."
+
+"Oh, you aren't like Mrs. Murray--she didn't measure a fraction under
+thirty inches," replied Miss Lancaster, with her patient politeness.
+Then, after a pause, which Mrs. Spencer's nimble wit filled with a story
+about the amazing number of mint juleps Mrs. Murray was seen to drink at
+the White Sulphur Springs last summer, Florrie exclaimed eagerly:
+
+"Why, there is Gabriella! Won't you get her for us, Miss Lancaster?"
+
+Near one of the long windows, beyond which large greenish flies were
+buzzing around the branch of a mulberry tree in the alley, Gabriella was
+trying a purple hat on a prim-looking lady who regarded herself in the
+mirror with a furtive and deprecating air as if she were afraid of being
+unjustly blamed for her appearance. "I'm not sure--but I don't think it
+suits me exactly," she appeared to murmur in a strangled whisper, while
+she twisted her mouth, which held a jet-headed hatpin, into a quivering
+grimace.
+
+"She's waiting on Matty French," said Mrs. Spencer, and she added
+impulsively, "I wonder what it is that men see in Gabriella. You
+wouldn't call her really pretty, would you, Miss Lancaster?"
+
+"Well, not exactly pretty, but she has an interesting face. It is so
+full of life."
+
+"Can't you get her, mother?" asked Florrie; and Mrs. Spencer, always
+eager to oblige, rustled across the room and pounced vivaciously upon
+the prim lady and Gabriella.
+
+"We've been looking for you everywhere, Gabriella," she began, nodding
+agreeably to Miss French. "Florrie has tried on all the hats in the
+room, and she wants you to tell her if that white Leghorn is becoming.
+Good morning, Matty! That blue wing is so stylish. I think you are very
+sensible to wear colours and not to stick to black as Susie Chamberlain
+does. It makes her look as old as the hills, and I believe she does it
+just to depress people. Life is too short, as I said when I left off
+mourning, to be an ink blot wherever you go. And it doesn't mean that
+she grieves a bit more for her husband than anybody else does. Everybody
+knows they led a cat and dog's life together, and I've even heard,
+though I can't remember who told me, that she was on the point of
+getting a divorce when he died. Are you going? Well, I'm glad you
+decided on that blue hat. I don't believe you'll ever regret it.
+Good-bye. Be sure and come to see me soon. Gabriella, will you help
+Florrie about her hat now? I declare, I thought Matty would never get
+through with you. And, of course, we didn't want anybody but you to wait
+on us. We were just saying that you had the most beautiful taste, and it
+is so wise of you to go out to work and not sit down and sew at home in
+order to support your position. A position that can't support itself
+isn't much of a prop, my husband used to say. But I don't believe you'll
+stay here long, you sly piece. You'll be married before the year is up,
+mark my word. The men are all crazy about you, everybody knows that.
+Why, Florrie met George Fowler in the street this morning, and when he
+asked after you, his face turned as hot as fire, she said--"
+
+Gabriella's face, above her starched collar with its neat red tie, was
+slowly flooded with colour. Her brown eyes shone golden under her dark
+lashes, and Mrs. Spencer told herself that the girl looked almost pretty
+for a minute. "If she wasn't so sallow, she'd be really good looking."
+
+Happily unaware that her face had betrayed her, Gabriella slid back a
+glass door, took a hat out of the case, and answered indifferently,
+while she adjusted the ribbon bow on one side of the crown:
+
+"I didn't know Mr. Fowler had come back. I haven't seen him for ages."
+
+From her small, smooth head to her slender feet she had acquired in
+three months the composed efficiency of Miss Lancaster; and one might
+have imagined, as Mrs. Spencer remarked to Florrie afterwards, that "she
+had been born in a hat shop."
+
+But instead of the weary patience of Miss Lancaster, she brought to her
+work the brimming energy and the joyous self-confidence of youth. It was
+impossible to watch her and not realize that she had given both ability
+and the finer gift of personality to the selling of hats. Had she
+started life as a funeral director instead of a milliner, it is probable
+that she would have infused into the dreary business something of the
+living quality of genius.
+
+"Oh, Florrie hadn't seen him for ages either," chirped Mrs. Spencer,
+with her restless eyes on the hat in Gabriella's hand. "I don't know
+whether I ought to tell you or not, but you and Florrie are so intimate
+I suppose I might as well--Julia Caperton told Florrie that George came
+back because he heard in some way that you had broken your engagement to
+Arthur. Of course, as I told Julia afterwards, you hadn't mentioned a
+word of it to me, but I've got eyes and I can't help using them. I was
+obliged to see that George was simply out of his mind about you. It
+would be a splendid match, too, for they say his father has made quite a
+large fortune since he went to New York--"
+
+"Mother!" interrupted Florrie sternly, over her shoulder, "you know
+Julia told you not to breathe a single word as coming from her. She is
+the bosom friend of George's sister."
+
+"But, Florrie, I haven't told a soul except Gabriella, and I know she
+wouldn't repeat a thing that I said to her."
+
+"Now, isn't that exactly like mother?" observed Florrie, with the casual
+disapprobation of youth. "She was on the point of telling Miss Lancaster
+all about it when I stopped her."
+
+"Why, Florrie, I didn't say a word except that men were crazy about
+Gabriella--you know I didn't. Of course, I talk a great deal," she
+pursued in an aggrieved, explanatory tone to Gabriella, "but I never
+repeat a word--not a single word that is told me in confidence. If Julia
+had asked me not to tell Gabriella what she said, I shouldn't have
+dreamed of doing so."
+
+"Oh, it doesn't matter in the least, Mrs. Spencer," said Gabriella
+hastily, "only there isn't a word of truth in it."
+
+The becoming flush was still in her cheeks, and she poised a hat over
+Florrie's head with a swift, flying grace which Mrs. Spencer had never
+noticed in her before. "I wonder if Gabriella can really care about
+George?" she thought quickly. "But if it is George she is in love with,
+why on earth did she start to work in a shop?" Then suddenly, following
+a flash of light, she reasoned it out to her complete satisfaction. "It
+must have been that she didn't know that George cared--that is why she
+is blushing so at this minute."
+
+An hour or so later, when Florrie and her mother had fluttered volubly
+downstairs, and the exhausted assistants were putting the hats away
+before closing the cases, Gabriella went into the dressing-room, where
+Miss Nash, a stout, pleasant-looking girl, was sitting in a broken
+chair, with her shoes off, her blue serge skirt rolled back from her
+knees, and her head bowed, over her crossed arms, on the window-sill.
+
+At Gabriella's entrance she glanced up, and remarked cheerfully: "My
+feet were killing me. I just had to take off my shoes."
+
+"They do get dreadfully tired," assented Gabriella in the tone of
+sympathetic intimacy she had caught from the other girls.
+
+Her naturally friendly spirit had refused to "hold aloof" from her
+companions, as her mother had begged her to do, and at the end of three
+months she had learned things about most of them which interested her
+profoundly. One supported an invalid father, another had a family of six
+little brothers and sisters to care for, and still another had lost her
+lover through a railroad accident only two days before her marriage.
+Several of them were extravagantly loud, one or two were inclined to be
+vulgar; but the others were quite as refined and gentle as the girls
+with whom she had grown up, and what impressed her about them all was
+their courageous and yet essentially light-hearted Southern spirit. To
+her surprise, she found an utter absence of jealousy among them. The
+elder women were invariably kind and helpful, and though she liked the
+girls, she soon discovered in herself a growing feeling of respect for
+these older women. They represented a different type, for the hardness
+she noticed in some of the younger girls was entirely lacking in the
+women of Miss Lancaster's generation. Many of them even her mother
+would have called well born, and one and all, they were almost painfully
+ladylike. With their thin, erect figures, their wan, colourless faces,
+their graying hair, and their sweet Southern voices, they imparted a
+delicate social air to the shop.
+
+Usually Gabriella stopped to talk to the girls who crowded in from the
+workroom, brushing shreds of silk or ribbon from their skirts, but
+to-day her mind wandered while she answered Miss Nash, and when, a
+minute later, Miss Lancaster spoke to her on her way out, and asked her
+to match the flowers for Florrie's hat, she was obliged to make an
+effort before she could recall her roving attention. She was thinking
+not of Florrie's hat, but of Mrs. Spencer's words, "He has come back
+because he heard that your engagement was broken." And at the first
+insurgent rise of emotion, she ceased to be the business woman and
+became merely an imaginative girl, dreaming of love.
+
+"They aren't quite the right shade, are they?" she asked with an
+uncertainty which was tactful rather than sincere, "or, perhaps, the
+ribbon might be darker?"
+
+Her eyes questioned Miss Lancaster, who moved a step nearer the window
+as she held the bolt of ribbon toward the daylight.
+
+"Well, we'd better look at it again in the morning. You are in a hurry,
+Miss Carr?"
+
+"Oh, no, I've all the time in the world," answered Gabriella, though she
+longed to be out with the June scents and her dreams, "but I am sure the
+ribbon ought to be a deeper blue to tone with the ragged robins."
+
+"You've a wonderful eye for colour, that's why I ask your advice," said
+the other, and a sudden friendliness shone in her tired eyes, for she
+had liked Gabriella from the beginning. That the girl possessed a
+genuine gift of taste, the elder woman had already discovered. For
+herself, Miss Lancaster had always hated the sight of hats, and had
+taken up the work merely because a place in Brandywine & Plummer's had
+been offered her shortly after her father, a gallant fighter but a poor
+worker, had gone to end his kindly anecdotal days in the Home for
+Confederate Soldiers. She was a repressed, conscientious woman, who had
+never been younger than she was now at fifty, and who regarded youth,
+not with envy, but with admiring awe. For she, also, patient and
+uncomplaining creature, belonged to that world of decay and inertia from
+which Gabriella had revolted. It was a world where things happened
+to-day just as they happened yesterday, where no miracles had occurred
+since the miracles of Scripture, where people hated change, not because
+they were satisfied, but because they were incapable of imagination.
+Miss Lancaster, who had never wanted anything with passion, except to be
+a perfect lady, was proud of the fact that she had been twenty years in
+business without losing her "shrinking manner."
+
+"Yes, you have an eye for colour," she repeated gently; "if you could
+only learn to sew, you might command a most desirable position."
+
+"I despise sewing," replied Gabriella, with serene good-humour, "and I
+could never learn, even at school, anything that I despised. But I
+suppose I can always tell somebody else how it ought to be done."
+
+Then, because her work always interested her, she forgot the disturbing
+words Mrs. Spencer had spoken--she forgot even her impatience to feel
+the June air in her face. Her best gift, the power of mental control,
+enabled her to bring the needed discipline to her emotion; and when the
+moment of her release came, she found that the brief restlessness had
+passed from her mind. "There's no use letting myself get impatient," she
+thought; "I've got to stick to it, so it won't do a bit of good to begin
+wriggling."
+
+All the other girls had gone home before her, and on the sidewalk Miss
+Meason, of the glove counter, stood talking about the spring sales to
+Mr. Brandywine. As Gabriella passed them, in her white shirtwaist and
+dark belted skirt, they looked thoughtfully after her until her sailor
+hat, with the scarlet band, crossed Broad Street and disappeared on the
+opposite side.
+
+"She's a remarkable girl," observed Mr. Brandywine, with his paternal
+manner. "I hope she is beginning to feel at home with us."
+
+"I believe she'd feel at home anywhere," replied Miss Meason, "and she's
+obliged to get on. There's no doubt of it."
+
+"A pleasant face, too. Not exactly pretty, I suppose, but you would call
+it a pleasant face."
+
+"Oh, well, I'd call her pretty in her way," answered Miss Meason. "Her
+eyes are lovely, and she has a singularly bright expression. I always
+say that a bright expression makes up for anything."
+
+"Her mother was a beauty in her day," said Mr. Brandywine reminiscently;
+"she was the snow and roses sort, and her eldest daughter took after
+her, though she is a wreck now, poor lady."
+
+"That's Charley Gracey," remarked Miss Meason tartly, for she had the
+self-supporting woman's contempt for the rake. "Yes, she was lovely as a
+girl. I remember as well as if it were yesterday how happy she looked
+when I sold her her wedding gloves. She is a beautiful character, too,
+they say, but somehow Gabriella, even as a child, appealed to me more.
+She has three times the sense of her sister."
+
+Then they shook hands and parted, while Gabriella, tripping through the
+Second Market, was saying to herself: "There's not the least bit of
+sense in your thinking about him, Gabriella."
+
+In Hill Street, maple and poplar trees were in full leaf, and little
+flakes of sunshine, as soft as flowers, were scattered over the brick
+pavement. Beyond the housetops the sky was golden, and at the corner the
+rusty ironwork of an old balcony had turned to the colour of bronze. The
+burning light of the sunset blinded her eyes, while an intense sweetness
+came to her from the honeysuckle clambering over a low white porch; and
+this light and this sweetness possessed an ineffable quality. Life,
+which had been merely placid a few hours before, had become suddenly
+poignant--every instant was pregnant with happiness, every detail was
+piercingly vivid. Her whole being was flooded with a sensation of
+richness and wonder, as if she had awakened with surprise to a different
+world from the one she had closed her eyes on a minute before.
+
+As she crossed the street she saw her mother's head above a box of clove
+pinks in the window; and a little later the front door opened and Miss
+Polly Hatch, a small, indomitable spinster who sewed out by the day,
+walked rapidly between the iron urns and stopped under the creamy
+blossoms of the old magnolia tree in the yard.
+
+"It's too late for your ma to be workin', Gabriella. You'd better stop
+her."
+
+Pausing in the middle of the walk, she comfortably tucked under her arm
+an unwieldy bundle she carried, and added, with the shrewdness which was
+the result of a long and painful experience with human nature: "It's
+funny--ain't it?--how downright mulish your ma can be when she wants
+to?"
+
+"I can't do a thing on earth with her," answered Gabriella in distress.
+"You have more influence over her than I have, Miss Polly."
+
+Miss Polly, who had the composed and efficient bearing of a machine,
+shook her head discouragingly as she opened the gate and passed out.
+
+"I reckon she's set for good and all," she remarked emphatically, and
+went on her way.
+
+"Mother, it's time to stop sewing and think about supper," called
+Gabriella gaily, as she ran into the room and bent to kiss her mother,
+who turned a flat, soft cheek in her direction, and remarked gloomily:
+"Gabriella, you've had a visitor."
+
+Not for worlds would Mrs. Carr have surrendered to the disarming
+cheerfulness of her daughter's manner; for since Gabriella had gone to
+work in a shop, her mother's countenance implied that she was piously
+resigned to disgrace as well as to poverty. It was inconceivable to her
+that any girl with Berkeley blood in her veins could be so utterly
+devoid of proper pride as Gabriella had proved herself to be; and the
+shock of this discovery had left a hurt look in her face. There were
+days when she hardly spoke to the girl, when refusing food, she opened
+her lips only to moisten her thread, when the slow tears seemed forever
+welling between her reddened eyelids. As they had just passed through
+one of these painful periods, Gabriella was surprised to find that, for
+the moment at least, her mother appeared to have forgotten her righteous
+resentment. Though it could hardly be said that Mrs. Carr spoke
+cheerfully--since cheerfulness was foreign to her nature--at least she
+had spoken. Of her own accord, unquestioned and unurged, she had
+volunteered a remark to her daughter; and Gabriella felt that, for a
+brief respite, the universe had ceased to be menacing.
+
+"Gabriella, you have had a visitor," repeated Mrs. Carr, and it was
+clear that her sorrow (she never yielded to passion) had been overcome
+by a natural human eagerness to tell her news.
+
+"Not Cousin Jimmy?" asked the girl lightly.
+
+"No, you could never guess, if you guessed all night."
+
+"Not Charley Gracey surely? I wouldn't speak to him for the world."
+
+Though Jane had returned to Charley, and even Mrs. Carr, feeling in her
+heart that her younger daughter had dealt her the hardest blow, had been
+heard to say that she "pitied her son-in-law more than she censured
+him," Gabriella had not softened in her implacable judgment.
+
+"Of course it wasn't Charley. I shouldn't have mentioned it if it had
+been, because you are so bitter against him. But it was somebody you
+haven't seen for months. Do you remember Evelyn Randolph's son who paid
+you so much attention last winter?"
+
+"George Fowler! Has he been here?" asked Gabriella, and her voice
+quivered like a harp.
+
+"I told Marthy to say you were out. Of course I wasn't fit to see
+company, but he caught sight of me on his way to the gate and came back
+on the porch to speak to me. He remembered all about my having gone to
+school with his mother, and it seems she had told him about the time she
+was Queen of May and I maid of honour. I asked him how Evelyn stood
+living in New York, but he said she likes it better than his father
+does. Archie Fowler insists that he is coming back to Virginia to end
+his days. They seem to have plenty of money. I expect Archie has made a
+fortune up there or he wouldn't be satisfied to live out of Virginia."
+
+"Did George ask when I'd be at home?" inquired Gabriella.
+
+Though she knew that it was unwise to divert her mother's attention from
+the main narrative, her whole body ached with the longing to hear what
+George had said of her, and she felt that it was impossible to resist
+the temptation to question.
+
+"He said something about you as he was going away, but I can't remember
+whether he asked when you would be in or not." In spite of the fact that
+Mrs. Carr had the most tenacious memory for useless detail, she was
+never able to recall the significant points of an interview.
+
+"He didn't ask where I was?"
+
+The question was indiscreet, for it jerked Mrs. Carr's mind back with
+violence from its innocent ramble into the past, while it reminded her
+of Gabriella's present unladylike occupation. She shut her lips with
+soft but obstinate determination, and Gabriella, watching her closely,
+told herself that "wild horses couldn't drag another word out of her
+mother to-night." The girl longed to talk it over; but she might have
+tried as successfully to gossip with the angel on a marble tombstone.
+She wanted to hear what George had said, to ask how he was looking, and
+to wonder aloud why he had come back. She wanted to throw herself into
+her mother's arms and listen to all the little important things that
+filled the world for her. If only the aloof virtue in Mrs. Carr's face
+would relax into a human expression!
+
+Taking off her hat, Gabriella went into the bedroom, and then, coming
+back again after a short absence, remarked with forced gaiety: "I
+suppose he didn't have anything interesting to tell you, did he?"
+
+"No." Though the light had almost waned, Mrs. Carr broke off a fresh
+piece of thread and leaned nearer the window, while she tried to find
+the eye of the needle.
+
+"Let me thread your needle, mother. It is too late to work, anyway. You
+will ruin your eyesight."
+
+"I have never considered my eyesight, Gabriella."
+
+"I know you haven't, and that's why you ought to begin."
+
+As it was really growing too dark to see, Mrs. Carr rolled the thread
+back on the spool, stuck the needle into the last buttonhole, and
+folding the infant's dress on which she was working, laid it away in her
+straw work-basket.
+
+"Will you light the gas, Gabriella?"
+
+"Don't work any more to-night, mother. It is almost supper time."
+
+Without replying, Mrs. Carr moved with her basket to a chair under the
+chandelier. Once seated there, she unfolded the dress, took the needle
+from the unfinished buttonhole, and tried again unsuccessfully to run
+the thread through the eye. Then, while Gabriella rushed to her aid, she
+removed her glasses and patiently polished them on a bit of chamois skin
+she kept in her basket.
+
+"Don't you feel as if you could eat a chop to-night, mother?"
+
+"I haven't been able to swallow a morsel all day, Gabriella."
+
+"I've saved you a little cream. Shall I make you a toddy?"
+
+"I don't want it. Drink it yourself, dear."
+
+After this there followed one of those pauses which fill not only the
+room, but the universe with a fury of sound. There were times when
+Gabriella felt that she could stand anything if only her mother would
+fly into a rage--when she positively envied Florrie Spencer because her
+plebeian parent scolded her at the top of her voice instead of
+maintaining a calm and ladylike reticence. But Mrs. Carr was one of
+those women who never, even in the most trying circumstances, cease to
+be patient, who never lose for an instant so much as the palest or the
+thinnest of the Christian virtues.
+
+Going into the bedroom, Gabriella changed from her shirtwaist into a
+gown of flowered muslin, with sleeves that looked small beside the
+balloon ones of the season, and a skirt which was shrunken and pale from
+many washings the summer before. She had worn the frock when she met
+George, and though it was old, she knew it was becoming, and she told
+herself joyfully that if she put it on to-night, "something must come of
+it." As she smoothed her hair by the dim gas-jet over the mirror, she
+saw again the face of George as it had first smiled down on her beneath
+the boughs of a mimosa tree in Mrs. Spencer's front garden. At the
+time, a year ago, she was engaged to Arthur--she had even called the
+placid preference she felt for him "being in love"--but while she talked
+to George she had found herself thinking, "I wonder how it would feel to
+be engaged to a man like this instead of to Arthur?" Then, since all
+Southern engagements of the period were secret, she had seen a good deal
+of George during the summer; and in the autumn, while she was still
+trying to make believe that it was merely a friendship, he had gone back
+to New York without saying good-bye. She had tried her best to stop
+thinking of him, and until this evening, she had never really let
+herself confess that she cared. But if she didn't care why was she so
+happy to-night? If she didn't care why was there such intoxicating
+sweetness in the thought of his return? If she didn't care why had she
+dressed herself so carefully in the flowered muslin he had once said
+that he liked? Her face, smiling back at her from the mirror, was
+suffused with a delicate glow--not pink, not white, but softly luminous
+as if a lamp, shining behind it, enkindled its expression. She had never
+seen herself so nearly pretty, and with this thought in her mind, she
+went back to her mother, who was still working buttonholes under the
+chandelier.
+
+"Marthy has brought the lamp, mother. Why don't you move over to the
+table?"
+
+"I can see perfectly, thank you, Gabriella."
+
+"I hate to see you working. Let me finish those buttonholes."
+
+"I'd rather get through them myself, dear."
+
+"Have you seen Jane to-day?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Has Cousin Pussy been here?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Did you get out for a walk?"
+
+"No."
+
+The appalling silence again filled the room like a fog, and Gabriella,
+moving cautiously about in it, began straightening chairs and picking up
+shreds of cambric from the carpet. She felt suddenly that she could not
+endure the strain for another minute, and glancing at Mrs. Carr's bent
+head, where the thin hair was wound into a tight knot and held in place
+by a tortoise-shell comb with a carved top, she wondered how her mother
+could possibly keep it up day after day as she did? But, if she had only
+known it, this silence, which tried her nerves to the breaking point,
+was positively soothing to her mother. Mrs. Carr could keep it up not
+only for days and weeks, but, had it been necessary, she could have kept
+it up with equal success for half a lifetime. While she sat there,
+working buttonholes in a bad light, she thought quite as passionately as
+Gabriella, though her mental processes were different. She thought
+sadly, but firmly, with a pensive melancholy not untinged with pleasure,
+that "life was becoming almost too much for her." It seemed incredible
+to her that after all her struggles to keep up an appearance things
+should have turned out as they had; it seemed incredible that after all
+her sacrifices her children should not consider her more. "They have no
+consideration for me," she reflected, while she took the finest stitch
+possible to the needle she held. "If Jane had considered me she would
+never have married Charley. If Gabriella had considered me, or anybody
+but herself, she would not have gone to work in a store." No, they had
+never considered her, they had never asked her advice before acting,
+though she had brought them into the world and had worked like a slave
+in order to keep them in that respected station of life in which they
+had been born. Then, her sorrow getting the better of her resolution,
+she turned her head and spoke:
+
+"I know you never tell me anything on purpose, Gabriella, but I think I
+have a right to know whether or not you have discarded Arthur for good."
+
+"I told you all about it, mother. I told you I found I was mistaken."
+
+"I suppose you never thought for a moment how much it would distress me?
+Though Lydia Peyton is so much older than I am, she was always my best
+friend--we often stayed in the room together when we were girls. I had
+set my heart on your marrying her son."
+
+"I know that, mother, and I am very sorry, but when it came to the point
+I couldn't marry him. You can't make yourself care--"
+
+"I should have thought that my wishes might influence you. I should
+never wish you to do anything that wasn't for your good, Gabriella."
+
+"Of course, mother, you've given up your life to us. I know that, and
+Jane knows it as well as I do. That's why I want to earn money enough to
+let you rest. I want you to stop work for good and be happy."
+
+"There are worse things than work," replied Mrs. Carr in a tone which
+implied that Gabriella had brought them upon her.
+
+After a pause, in which her needle flew mournfully, she added: "I hope
+for your own sake that you will marry some good man before you lose
+your attractions. Poor Becky Bollingbroke proved to me how unfortunate
+it is for a woman to remain unmarried."
+
+For an instant Gabriella looked at her mother without replying. She felt
+tempted--strongly tempted, she told herself--to say something cross.
+Then the sight of the bent gray head, of the bowed shoulders, of the
+knotted needle-pricked fingers, pierced her heart. Though she could not
+always agree with her mother, she loved her devotedly, and the thought
+that she must lose her some day had been the most terrible nightmare of
+her childhood.
+
+"Don't worry about me, mother, dear," she answered tenderly. "I can
+always take care of myself. I can manage my life, you know that, don't
+you?" Then she stopped quickly while her heart gave a single bound and
+lay quiet. She had heard the click of the gate, and a minute later, as
+Mrs. Carr gathered up her sewing, there was a ring at the bell.
+
+"It can't be a visitor before supper, can it, Gabriella?"
+
+"I think not, mother, but I shouldn't run away if I were you."
+
+"I'd better go. I don't feel dressed. Wait a minute, Marthy, and let me
+get out of the room before you open the door." She fled, clutching her
+work-basket, while Gabriella, turning to lower the flaming wick of the
+lamp, heard George's voice at the door and his footsteps crossing the
+hall.
+
+"I knew something would happen," she thought wildly, as she went forward
+to meet him.
+
+"I saw you pull down the shade as I was going by," he began rather
+lamely; and she hardly heard his words because of the divine tumult in
+her brain. Her heart sang; her pulses throbbed; every drop of her blood
+seemed to become suddenly alive with ecstasy. Under the tarnished
+garlands of the chandelier his face looked younger, gayer, more
+intensely vivid than it had looked in her dreams. It was the face of her
+dreams made real; but with what a difference! She saw his crisp brown
+hair brushed smoothly back from its parting, his blue eyes, with their
+gay and conquering look, the firm red brown of his cheek, and even the
+bluish shadow encircling his shaven mouth. In his eyes, which said
+enchanting things, she could not read the trivial and commonplace
+quality of his soul--for he was not only a man, he was romance, he was
+adventure, he was the radiant miracle of youth!
+
+"Florrie told me this morning that you had come back," she answered
+coldly, as she held out her hand.
+
+Her words seemed to come to her from a distance--from the next room,
+from the street outside, from the farthest star--but while she uttered
+them, she knew that her words meant nothing. She shed her joy as if it
+were fragrance; and her softness was like the magnolia-scented softness
+of the June night. Even her mother would not have known her, so greatly
+had she changed in a minute. Of the businesslike figure in the sailor
+hat and trim shirtwaist--of the Gabriella who had said, "I can manage my
+life"--there remained only an outline. The very feet of the capable
+woman had changed into the shrinking and timid feet of a lovesick girl.
+She was afraid to go forward, afraid to move, afraid to breathe lest she
+break the wonderful spell of the magic. Not only her basic common sense,
+but the very soul that shaped her body had become as light, as sweet,
+as formless as liquid honey.
+
+But of course, she knew nothing of this. She was innocent of deception;
+she was innocent even of any definite purpose to allure. The thought in
+her mind, if there were any thought, which is doubtful, was that she
+must be composed, she must be indifferent if it killed her.
+
+"I know I've come at an awkward hour, but I simply couldn't go by after
+I saw you."
+
+"Won't you stay?" she asked, trying in vain to shut out the ominous
+sound of Marthy bringing their scant supper. She remembered, with
+horror, that she had ordered only two chops, and a wave of rebellion
+swept over her because life always spoiled its divine instants.
+
+"No, I can't stay. I've an engagement for supper. I merely wanted to see
+you. You've no idea how I've wanted to see you."
+
+"Have you?" said Gabriella in so low a voice that he hardly heard her.
+Then, lifting her glowing eyes, she added softly, "I am glad that you
+wanted to."
+
+"There were times when I simply couldn't get you out of my mind," he
+responded, and went on almost joyously, with the romantic look which had
+first enchanted her imagination. "You see I believed that you were going
+to marry Arthur Peyton. Julia told me that your engagement was broken.
+That was why I came back. Didn't you guess it?"
+
+"Yes, I guessed it," she answered simply, and all the softness, the
+sweetness, the beauty of her feeling passed into her voice.
+
+Then, in the very midst of her happiness, there occurred one of those
+sordid facts which appear to spring, like vultures, upon the ineffable
+moments. She heard the bell--the awful supper bell which her mother
+insisted upon having rung because her parents had had it rung for
+generations before her. As the horrible sound reverberated through the
+house, Gabriella felt that the noise passed through her ears, not into
+her brain, but into the very depths of her suffering soul.
+
+"There, I must go," said George, without embarrassment, for which she
+blessed him. From his manner, the supper bell might have made a
+delightful harmony instead of a hideous discord. "I'll see you
+to-morrow, if I may. May I, Gabriella?"
+
+He smiled charmingly as he went, and looking after him, a minute later,
+over the clove pinks in the window-box, she saw him turn and gaze back
+at her from the opposite pavement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+MIRAGE
+
+
+On a bright Sunday in October Mrs. Carr stopped on her way from church
+to tell Mrs. Peyton of Gabriella's engagement. A crape veil, slightly
+scented with camphor, hung from her bonnet, and in her gloved hands she
+carried a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums, for she intended to go on to
+Hollywood, where her husband was buried. The sermon had been unusually
+inspiring, and there was a pensive exaltation in her look as she laid
+her hand on the gate of the walled garden.
+
+"If it couldn't be Arthur--and of course my heart was set on her
+marrying Arthur--I suppose George is the one I should have chosen," she
+said to Mrs. Peyton with tender melancholy as she turned her soft,
+clammy cheek, which was never warm even in summer, to be kissed.
+
+There was nothing against George that she could advance even to
+Gabriella. He was well born, for his mother had been a Randolph; he was
+comfortably rich (at least his father was); he was good-looking; he was
+almost arrogantly healthy--yet because she was obliged to regret
+something, she found herself clinging fondly to the memory of Arthur.
+"If it could only have been Arthur," she repeated sadly, gazing through
+the French window of the drawing-room to the garden where beds of
+scarlet sage flaunted brilliantly in the sunshine.
+
+"I hope and pray that dear Gabriella will be happy," replied Mrs.
+Peyton, a beautiful old lady, with wonderful white hair under the
+widow's ruching in her bonnet. The exquisite simplicity of her soul was
+reflected in the rose-leaf delicacy of her skin, in her benignant and
+innocent smile, in the serene and joyous glance of her eyes. Never in
+her life had she thought evil of any one, and she did not mean to begin
+on the verge of the grave, with the hope of a peaceful eternity before
+her. If dear Gabriella had "discarded" dear Arthur, then she could only
+hope and pray that dear Gabriella would not live to regret it.
+
+"She will be married at once, I suppose?" she said, and beamed as
+happily as if Gabriella had not disappointed the dearest hope of her
+heart. "There is no need to wait, is there?"
+
+"They have decided on the 17th of November. I wanted you to know it
+first of all, Lydia, so I haven't mentioned it to a soul except to
+Cousin Jimmy Wrenn."
+
+"You will live with dear Jane, will you not? Poor child, what a blessing
+you will be to her."
+
+"No, I shall be with Jane only for a month or two until Gabriella and
+George have taken a house in New York. She wouldn't consent to be
+married so soon until I promised to live with them. But how on earth
+shall I ever manage to go so far away, Lydia? To think of being so far
+from Hollywood almost breaks my heart, and yet what can I do?"
+
+Mrs. Peyton's loving gaze enfolded not only her visitor, but the house
+and the dreamy garden where frost was already blighting the flowers.
+
+"I understand your feeling, of course, Fanny," she said, "but you must
+think of Gabriella. How different it will be for her if her mother is
+with her. I shall miss you every minute, but for the sake of that
+splendid child of yours, I must not allow myself to be sorry."
+
+If Mrs. Carr's features could have lost the fixed impression of a
+lifetime, they would have appeared almost cheerful while her old friend
+held her hand and gazed benignly upon her; but so relaxed had the
+muscles of her face become that, even when her spirits rose, her
+countenance did not alter, and the flicker of light in her smile only
+served to illumine its profound melancholy.
+
+"I try to think of Gabriella," she answered, "but I oughtn't to forget
+poor Jane. Whenever I remember her, I begin to reproach myself."
+
+"Don't reproach yourself, Fanny. There is nothing on earth for which you
+can justly be blamed. I am sure you have never considered your own
+wishes for a minute in your life. If ever a mother gave up everything
+for her children, you have done so, Fanny, and you needn't deny it. But
+tell me about Gabriella. How thankful you ought to be that she has given
+up that work in a store!"
+
+"If it had been God's will, I suppose I must have borne it, Lydia, but I
+felt as if it was killing me."
+
+"The dear child has a strong character," observed Mrs. Peyton, and it
+seemed to her, while she thought of Gabriella, that a strong character
+was a beautiful and wonderful thing.
+
+"You would hardly know Gabriella, she is so changed," replied Mrs. Carr.
+"I declare I sometimes think that I never saw a girl so wildly in love
+as she is. She positively worships George, and when I look at her, I
+remember Becky Bollingbroke's saying that a smart woman in love is
+worse than a silly one. She has that much more to get foolish with, poor
+Becky used to say.
+
+"How happy it must make you," murmured the other. "There is nothing in
+life I'd rather see than my Arthur happily married."
+
+"I always thought that he and Gabriella were made for each other, but
+one never can tell--"
+
+"That must be Gabriella now," said Mrs. Peyton as the bell rang. "Is she
+coming for you?"
+
+"Yes, Cousin Jimmy was to bring her, and then drive me out to Hollywood.
+Isn't that Arthur's voice talking to her?"
+
+"Poor boy," whispered Mrs. Peyton, and then she rustled forward and
+enveloped Gabriella in a warm embrace. "My darling girl, your mother has
+just told me," she said.
+
+"And Gabriella has just told me," added Arthur at her elbow. Though
+there was a hurt look in his eyes, his manner was perfect. Years
+afterwards, whenever Gabriella thought of him, she remembered how
+perfect his manner was on that morning.
+
+"I wanted you to know first of all," said Gabriella.
+
+As the old lady looked at her with loving eyes, it seemed to her that
+the girl was softly glowing with happiness. She accepted joy as she
+accepted sorrow, with quietness, but there was a look in her face which
+made her appear, for the moment, transfigured. A radiance like that of a
+veiled flame shone in her eyes; the cool tones of her voice had grown
+richer and gentler; and at last, as Mrs. Peyton said to herself,
+Gabriella, the sensible and practical Gabriella, was sweet with the
+honeysuckle sweetness of Jane.
+
+"She must be over head and ears in love," she thought; and the next
+minute, "I wonder how it will end?"
+
+The question brought a pang to her kind old heart, which longed to make
+everybody, and particularly her boy Arthur, happy. Then, because her
+eyes were filling, she stroked the girl's arm gently, and said:
+
+"That's a pretty dress, my dear. I never saw you look better."
+
+"She's really getting pretty," remarked Mrs. Carr. "Cousin Jimmy was
+saying only yesterday that if Gabriella keeps it up, she'll be a better
+looking old lady than Jane."
+
+"Well, I think her a very pretty young one," replied Mrs. Peyton. "She
+hasn't such small features as Jane has, but there is more in her face.
+Now, I'm willing to wager that George thinks her a beauty."
+
+Gabriella laughed happily. "He hasn't the faintest idea what I look
+like, but he declares he won't be a bit disappointed if he finds out
+some day that I am ugly."
+
+The glow of youth, of hope, of love, gave to her expressive face an
+almost unearthly brightness. She seemed to draw to her all that was
+vital and alive in the dim old house, so filled with memories, and in
+the October pageantry of the garden. It was the day of her miracle, and
+against the splendour of the scarlet sage, she shone with an
+unforgettable radiance.
+
+When, a little later, Mrs. Carr, in Cousin Jimmy's buggy, with her bunch
+of chrysanthemums held rigidly in her lap, drove off at an amble to
+Hollywood, and Gabriella, turning to wave her hand, had vanished behind
+the corner of the gray wall, Mrs. Peyton said gently:
+
+"She looked very happy, dear boy. You and I must pray for her
+happiness."
+
+The beauty which all her life she had created through faith awoke in
+Arthur's suffering heart while she spoke to him. She demanded nobility
+of being, and it existed; she exacted generosity of nature, and it was
+there. By her mere presence, by the overflowing love in her heart, she
+not only banished jealousy and envy, but made the very idea of them
+unthinkable.
+
+"She is obliged to be happy. It is her nature," answered Arthur, for his
+disposition was hardly less perfect than his manner.
+
+Crossing Broad Street, which wore its look of Sabbath sleepiness,
+Gabriella hurried on to Hill Street, and saw George waiting for her
+between the two green-painted urns filled with the summer's fading bloom
+of portulaca.
+
+He was staring straight upward at one of the poplar trees, where a gray
+squirrel was playing among the branches, and for several minutes before
+he was aware of her presence, she watched him with her impassioned, yet
+not wholly uncritical, gaze. The sunlight sparkled in his eyes, which
+shone brightly blue against the red brown of his flesh; and between his
+smiling lips, which were thick and somewhat loosely moulded, she saw the
+gleaming whiteness of his teeth. She could not explain--she had never
+even tried to understand--why this face, which was not in the least a
+remarkable one, should so profoundly appeal to her. When George was
+absent, his look haunted her with the intensity of an hallucination;
+when at last she saw it again, she felt that nothing else in the world
+mattered to her, so supreme was the contentment that swept over her.
+Though she was more intelligent than Jane, not even Jane herself had
+surrendered so unconditionally to the primal force. At least Jane had
+made exactions, but so complete was the subjugation of Gabriella that
+she exacted nothing, not even a return of her love. To give was all she
+asked, and in the giving she bloomed into a beauty and fullness of
+nature which Jane's small, closed soul could never attain.
+
+"George!" she called, and went swiftly toward him.
+
+He turned, threw away the cigar in his hand, and held open the gate
+while she entered.
+
+"There's a jolly little beggar up in the poplar," he said; "I've been
+watching him for ten minutes."
+
+Then, as she passed before him into the parlour, he shut the door, and
+catching her in his arms, kissed the back of her neck.
+
+"Oh, George!" she murmured, and her voice was like music. Even to his
+short-sighted vision there was pathos at the heart of her happiness--the
+pathos of ignorance, Of innocence, of the reckless generosity of soul
+that spends its best for the pure joy of spending. With the instinctive
+miserliness of the man who realizes that passion to last must be
+hoarded, not scattered, he had drawn back almost unconsciously from the
+simple abandonment of her love. He wanted her because the deep
+discomfort of his nature could not be satisfied without her; but in
+possessing her he did not mean to give up anything else. Never for an
+instant had he deluded himself with the mystic ecstasies of Gabriella.
+The passion which had changed her whole being as if by a miracle, had
+altered neither his fundamental egoism nor his superficial philosophy.
+He loved her, he knew, as much as it was possible for him to love any
+woman; but he was still able to take a profound and healthy interest in
+his physical comfort. In one thing, however, they were passionately
+agreed, and that was that the aim and end of their marriage was to make
+George perfectly happy.
+
+"You are sweet enough to eat this morning," he said as he kissed her.
+
+"I told Mrs. Peyton that you didn't know whether I was pretty or ugly,"
+she answered merrily.
+
+"It isn't beauty that takes a man, though women think so," he rejoined
+lightly, and yet as if he were imparting one of the basic facts of
+experience. "I don't know what it is--but it's something else, and
+you've got it, Gabriella."
+
+She looked at him with luminous eyes.
+
+"I've got you," she answered in a whisper; "that's all--nothing else on
+earth matters. I want nothing but love."
+
+"But you let me go away for six months. I could never understand that."
+
+"I had to, George. I couldn't be mean even for you, could I?"
+
+"Well, I don't know." His gaze dwelt on her moodily. "Sometimes I wonder
+if you haven't too much conscience in your body?"
+
+Careless as were his words, they brought stinging tears to her eyes. Her
+throat ached with the longing to pour out her love; but it seemed to her
+suddenly that a wall of personality had risen between them, and that she
+could only beat blindly against the impenetrable mass that divided them.
+She knew now that he could never understand, and yet the knowledge of
+this intensified rather than diminished her love. The mere physical
+attraction, which she had glorified into passion, was invested with the
+beauty and the mystery of an unattainable ideal.
+
+"I believe you are going to cry, darling. Don't be so serious," he said,
+laughing.
+
+"But you know--tell me you know that I love you."
+
+"Of course I know it. Am I blind or a fool?"
+
+Then before the glowing worship in her face, he caught her in his arms,
+while he said over and over, "I love you! I love you!"
+
+He held her close, thrilling at her touch, seeking her warm lips with an
+eagerness which comforted her because she was too inexperienced to
+understand how ephemeral was its nature and its sweetness.
+
+"Promise to love me always, George, as you do now," she said,
+passionately trying to make the fugitive joy immortal.
+
+"If you'll tell me how to help it, I shall be grateful," he retorted as
+gaily as if her eyes had not filled with tears.
+
+"Swear it!"
+
+"I swear it. Now, are you satisfied?"
+
+"I don't believe it. I'll never believe that you love me as much as I
+love you. Nobody could."
+
+In his heart he agreed with her. That Gabriella loved him more than he
+loved her was a fact to which he was easily reconciled. He loved her
+quite as much as he could love anybody except himself and be
+comfortable, and if she demanded more, she merely proved herself to be
+an unreasonable person. Women did love more than men, he supposed, but
+what else were they here for? During the six months when he had thought
+that she belonged to another, she had, he told himself, almost driven
+him out of his mind; but possession once assured, he had speedily
+recovered his health and his sanity. Her worship flattered him, and in
+this flattery she had, perhaps, her strongest hold on his heart. Nothing
+in his engagement had pleased him more than the readiness with which she
+had given up her work at his request. He abhorred independence in a
+wife; and Gabriella's immediate and unresisting acquiescence in his
+desire appeared to him to establish the fact of her essential and
+inherent femininity. Had not all laws, as well as all religions,
+proclaimed that woman should be content to lay down not only her life
+but her very identity for love; and that Gabriella was womanly to the
+core of her nature, in spite of her work in Brandywine's millinery
+department, it was impossible to doubt while he kissed her. There were
+times, indeed, when the exaltation of Gabriella's womanliness seemed to
+have left her without a will of her own; when, in a divine submission to
+love, she appeared to exist only for the laudable purpose of making her
+lover happy.
+
+"I'd do anything on earth for you, Gabriella," said George suddenly. "I
+wonder if you would make a sacrifice for me if I asked it?" From his
+face as he looked down on her it was evident that he was not speaking
+from impulse, but that he had seized an opportune moment.
+
+"You know I would, George. I'd give up the whole world for you. I'd beg
+my bread with you by the roadside."
+
+"Well, it isn't so bad as that, darling--it's only about your mother
+coming to us so soon. I've had a letter from home, and it seems that
+father has had losses and can't help me out as he intended to do. He's
+always either losing or making piles of money, so don't bother your
+precious head about that. In six months he'll probably be making piles
+again, but, in the meantime, mother suggests that we should postpone
+taking a house, and come and live with her for a few months."
+
+"I'd rather live on your income, George, no matter how small it is. I'm
+an awfully good manager, and you'd be surprised to see how far I can
+make a little money go. Why can't we take an apartment somewhere in an
+inexpensive neighbourhood--one just big enough for mother and you and
+me?"
+
+"We couldn't live half so well in the first place, and, besides, I'd
+hate like the devil to see you working yourself to death and losing your
+looks. That's just exactly what Patty is doing. She was the family's
+greatest investment, you know. Everything we had for years was spent on
+her because she was such a ripping beauty, and mother set her heart on
+her marrying nothing less than a duke. So we sent her abroad to be
+educated and squandered a fortune on her clothes, and then, just as
+mother was gloating over her triumphs, the very day after the Duke of
+Toxbridge proposed to her, Patty walked out one morning and married
+Billy King at the Little Church Around the Corner. Billy, of course,
+hasn't a cent to his name except what he makes painting blue pictures,
+and that's precious little. They're up on the West Side now, living in
+four rooms with neighbours who fry onions at nine o'clock in the morning
+next door to them, and half the time Patty hasn't even a maid, I
+believe, and has to do her work with the help of a charwoman."
+
+"And is she happy?" There was eagerness in Gabriella's voice, for she
+was sure that she should love Patty.
+
+"Oh, yes, Patty is happy, but mother isn't. It's rough on mother."
+
+"I think she ought to have told your mother before she married."
+
+"Well, Patty thought she could stand the fuss better after she'd done it
+than she could before. She said she needed the support of knowing they
+couldn't stop it. Cheeky, wasn't it?"
+
+"And is she really so beautiful?"
+
+"Ripping," said George; "simply ripping."
+
+"I know I shall love her. Is she dark or fair?"
+
+"I never thought about it, but she's a towering beauty--something
+between dark and fair, I suppose. She has golden hair, you know."
+
+His arm was around her, and lifting her earnest face to his, Gabriella
+began in her softest voice: "I shouldn't mind a bit living like that,
+George--honestly I shouldn't."
+
+"Yes, you would. It would be rotten."
+
+"I wish you would tell me just how much we shall have to live on, dear.
+Even if it is very, very little, it would be so much better not to
+expect anything from your father. If the worst comes to the worst, I can
+always go back to work, you know, and I feel as if I ought to help
+because you are so generous about wanting mother to live with us."
+
+He frowned slightly, while a dark flush rose to his forehead. Already
+Gabriella was learning how dangerously easy it was to irritate George.
+Serious discussions always appeared to disturb him, and at the first
+allusion to the responsibilities he had assumed, she could see the look
+of bored restlessness creep into his face. It was evidently abhorrent to
+him to hear her talk about business; but with her practical nature and
+her fundamental common sense it was impossible that she should be
+content to remain in a fool's paradise of financial mysteries. She had
+only the vaguest idea how he earned a living, and a still vaguer one of
+what that living represented. There was an impression in her mind that
+he worked in his father's office somewhere in Wall Street--he had once
+given her the number--and that he went "downtown" every morning after
+breakfast and did not get home to luncheon. Cousin Jimmy had once told
+her that George's father was a stockbroker, but this information
+conveyed little to her mind. The men she knew in Richmond were lawyers,
+doctors, clergymen, or engaged, like Cousin Jimmy, in the "tobacco
+business," and she supposed that "a stockbroker" must necessarily belong
+to a profession which was restricted to New York. The whole matter was
+hazy in her thoughts, but she hoped in time, by intelligent and tactful
+application, to overcome her ignorance as well as George's deeply rooted
+objection to her enlightenment.
+
+"Well, you see, my income is uncertain, Gabriella. It depends a good
+deal upon the stock market and the sort of stuff we've been buying. Look
+here, darling, don't, for heaven sake, get the business bee in your
+bonnet. A mannish woman is worse than poison, and the less you know
+about stocks the more attractive you will be. Mother has lived for
+thirty years with father, and she doesn't know any more how he makes his
+money than you do at this minute."
+
+This was as lucid, she suspected, as George was ever likely to be on
+the subject, and, since he was becoming visibly annoyed, she abandoned
+her fruitless search for information. After she was married there would
+be time and opportunity to find out all that she wanted to know; and
+even if he never told her anything more--well, she was quite accustomed
+to the masculine habit of never telling women anything more. Her mother
+and Jane were as ignorant of finance as they had been in their cradles;
+Cousin Pussy spoke of the "tobacco business" as if it were a sacred
+mystery superior to the delicate feminine faculties; and while Gabriella
+was engaged to Arthur, he had fallen into the habit of gently reminding
+her that she "knew nothing of law."
+
+"Very well, dearest, I shan't bother you," she said cheerfully, "only,
+of course, I couldn't possibly leave mother with Jane and Charley. She
+doesn't realize it, but she would be perfectly miserable."
+
+"She told me that leaving Richmond was like death to her."
+
+"That's only because she knows she's going," answered Gabriella, but her
+endeavour to explain her mother's habit of mind appeared to her to be so
+hopeless that she added unconvincingly: "You can't imagine how dependent
+she is on me. Jane doesn't know how to manage her at all, though they
+are so much alike."
+
+"Well, of course, if we live at home--"
+
+"But you promised me we'd be to ourselves, George; you can't have
+forgotten it. We talked it over, every bit of it, and I told you in the
+beginning I couldn't leave mother."
+
+"If you loved me enough to marry me, I should think you'd be willing to
+give up your family for me." He spoke doggedly; it was his way to speak
+doggedly when he was driving a point.
+
+"It isn't that, dear, you know it isn't that."
+
+Taking a letter from his pocket, he drew a sheet of blue note paper,
+closely interlined, from the envelope, and handed it to her.
+
+"You can see for yourself how it is," he said in an aggrieved voice. By
+his tone he had managed to put her in the wrong as utterly as if she,
+not he, were trying to break her word. Yet she had told him in the very
+beginning that she could not leave her mother; she had refused to engage
+herself to him until he had offered Mrs. Carr a home with them. It had
+all been carefully arranged at the start, and now, within a month of
+their marriage, he had apparently forgotten that the matter was settled.
+
+Leaning forward until the light fell on the paper, she read with
+trembling lips:
+
+     My Dear Son:
+
+     Your letter was a blow to me because you had said nothing of
+     Gabriella's plan to bring her mother to New York to live with her,
+     and, of course, this makes it out of the question that you should
+     come straight to us. Now that Patty has gone--poor child, I am
+     afraid she will live to repent her rashness--your father and I had
+     quite looked forward to having you young people in the house; but
+     we haven't room, even if I could bring myself to face the prospect
+     of a rival mother-in-law under the same roof with me--and frankly I
+     can't. And your father has simply put his foot down on the idea. As
+     you know he hasn't been very well of late--the doctor says he is
+     threatened with diabetes--so my one thought is to spare him every
+     useless anxiety. He sleeps very badly and doesn't seem able, even
+     at night, to detach his mind from his business worries. If he
+     hadn't had such a bad summer, he might have been able to help you
+     start housekeeping, but there have been a great many failures in
+     the last few months, and he says he is obliged to cut down all his
+     expenses in order to tide over the depression in the market. We are
+     trying to retrench in every possible way, and, for this reason, I
+     fear we shall hardly be able to go down to your wedding. This is a
+     terrible disappointment to us both, and your father is particularly
+     distressed because he will not be able to add to your income this
+     year. Of course, if you should change your mind and decide to come
+     to us, we can get Patty's old room ready for you at once, and turn
+     yours into a sitting-room. Think this over and let me know as soon
+     as you possibly can.
+
+     I see Patty occasionally. She is in high spirits, but looking a
+     little thinner, I think. Billy has painted a portrait of Mrs.
+     Pletheridge, but it isn't a bit flattering, and he wouldn't let her
+     wear her pearls, so I'm afraid she won't buy it. I don't believe he
+     will ever make anything of himself. What a waste when Patty might
+     have been Duchess of Toxbridge. Though I am not a bit worldly, I
+     can't help regretting all that she has lost.
+
+     Your loving mother,
+
+     EVELYN FOWLER.
+
+When she had folded the letter and given it back to him, Gabriella
+dropped her hands in her lap and sat gazing thoughtfully at the square
+of sunlight by the window.
+
+"If you cared as much as I do, you'd be willing to give up your family,"
+he said suddenly, encouraged not only by her manner, which appeared
+yielding, but by his secret ineradicable conviction that her love was
+greater than his. Across the romantic screen of his features there
+flashed a swift change of expression, like the flicker of light on a
+coloured mask. If she could only have looked through the charming
+vacancy of his face, she would have been surprised to discover the
+directness and simplicity of his mental processes. He wanted his way,
+and he meant, provided it was humanly possible, to have whatever he
+wanted.
+
+"It isn't that, George. Love has nothing to do with it. It is a question
+of right."
+
+For a minute he surveyed her moodily; then, rising from her side on the
+sofa, he took two steps to the window and looked up at the boughs of the
+poplar tree. The gray squirrel was still there, and he watched it
+attentively while he pondered his answer. Yes, the whole trouble with
+Gabriella was too much conscience. This conscience of hers had got in
+his way before now, and he had suddenly an uneasy feeling, as if he had
+struck against the vein of iron which lay beneath the rich bloom of her
+passion. The thought of her opposition, of her secret hardness, bitterly
+angered him. He wanted her--no other woman could satisfy him--but he
+wanted her utterly different from what she was. He was seized with an
+indomitable desire to make her over, to change her entirely from that
+Gabriella with whom he had fallen in love. Of course, she was right as
+far as the mere facts of the case were concerned. He had promised that
+her mother should live with them; but he felt indignantly that it was an
+act of disloyalty for her to be right at his expense. She ought to have
+given in, and she ought to have given in gracefully, there was no
+question of that. When a woman loved a man as much as she loved him, it
+was unreasonable of her to let these innumerable little points of fact
+come between them; it was ungenerous of her to cling so stubbornly to
+her advantage. Her very quietness--that look of gentle obstinacy which
+refused either to fight back or to surrender--irritated him almost to
+desperation. His temper, always inflammable, suddenly burst out, and he
+felt that he wanted to shake her. He wanted, indeed, to do anything in
+the world except the sensible thing of walking out of the house and
+leaving her to reflection.
+
+"I should think your first duty would be to your husband," he said,
+while the streak of cruelty which was at the heart of his love showed
+like a livid mark on the surface of his nature. His mind was conscious
+of but a single thought while he stood there in the wind which fluttered
+the curtains and filled the room with the roving scents of October, and
+this was the bitter longing to make Gabriella over into the girl that he
+wanted her to become. Though it cost him her love, he felt that he must
+punish her for being herself.
+
+"Do you mean always to put your mother before me?" he asked
+passionately, after a minute.
+
+Still she did not answer, and in the deep, earnest eyes that she turned
+on him he saw not anger, not sorrow even, but wonder. As he stretched
+out his hand, it fell on Mrs. Carr's window box, where a rose geranium
+remained bright green in the midst of the withered stems of the clove
+pinks, and the scent of the leaves, as he crushed them between his
+fingers, evoked a swift memory of Gabriella in one of her soft moods,
+saying over and over, "I love you! Oh, I do love you!" At the image his
+temper changed as if by magic, and crossing the room, he bent down and
+kissed her with a fierceness that bruised her lips.
+
+"I adore you, Gabriella," he said.
+
+Though she had seen these sudden changes in him before, she had never
+grown wholly used to them. Her deeper nature, with its tranquil
+brightness, untroubled by passing storms, was unprepared for the shallow
+violence which swept over him, leaving no visible trace of its passage.
+No, she could not understand him--she could only hope that after they
+were married the blindness would pass from her love, and she would
+attain that completer knowledge for which she was striving so patiently.
+The transforming miracle of marriage, she trusted, would reveal this
+mystery, with so many others.
+
+"How can you hurt me so, George?" she asked with reproachful tenderness.
+
+"It's because you are so stubborn, darling. If you weren't so stubborn I
+shouldn't do it. Do you know you get almost mulish at times," he added,
+laughing, while she moved nearer and rubbed her cheek softly against his
+sleeve.
+
+"You frighten me," she whispered. "I was just beginning to believe that
+you really meant it."
+
+"Oh, lovers always quarrel. There's nothing in that."
+
+"But I hate to see you angry. It would almost kill me if it lasted
+longer than a minute. Never let it last, will you, George?"
+
+"Of course not, Goosey. It never has lasted, has it?"
+
+"Goosey" was one of his favourite names for her. He liked it because it
+gave him a merry feeling of superiority when he said it, and Gabriella
+liked it for perhaps the same reason. In the first ardour of her
+self-surrender she caught eagerly at any straw that she might cast on
+the flame of her passion.
+
+"And I'm not really stubborn, dear. Tell me that I'm not really
+stubborn."
+
+"You darling! I was only teasing you."
+
+"I'll do anything on earth for you that I can, George."
+
+"I know you will, dearest, and you don't honestly care more for your
+family, do you?"
+
+"I love you better than all the rest of the world put together. There
+are times when I think it must be wrong to love any man as much as I
+love you. My grandmother used to say that when you loved like that you
+'tempted Providence.' Isn't it dreadful to believe that you could tempt
+Providence by loving?"
+
+He kissed her throat where a loosened strand of dark hair had fallen
+against the whiteness.
+
+"Will you do what I ask, Gabriella?"
+
+So it was all to begin over again! He had not really given in, he had
+not really yielded even while he was kissing her. She closed her eyes,
+leaning her head on his shoulder. For a moment she felt as if a physical
+pain were pressing into her forehead.
+
+"Will you do it, Gabriella?" It was as if he put his soul into his
+voice, wooing her tenderly away from her better judgment. He was testing
+his power to dominate her; and never had she felt it so vividly, never
+had her will been so incapable of resisting him as at that instant.
+Moving slightly in his arms she looked at the clear red brown of his
+throat, at his sensitive mouth, with the faint dent in the lower lip, at
+his bright blue eyes, which had grown soft while he pleaded. His
+physical power over her was complete, and he knew it. Her flesh had
+become as soft as flowers in his arms, while her eyes, like dark flames,
+trembled and fell away from his look.
+
+"It isn't only the thing itself, darling, but I don't like you to refuse
+me. It hurts me that you won't do what I ask of you."
+
+"If it were anything else, George."
+
+"But it isn't anything else. It is just that I want you to myself--all
+to myself, after we are married."
+
+"Don't ask me, dearest. If you only knew how it makes me suffer."
+
+Her voice was a caress when she answered, but, as he told himself
+passionately, she had not yielded an inch. Once again he had run against
+the iron hidden under the bloom.
+
+"Then you refuse absolutely?" he asked, and though his voice quivered
+still, it was no longer from tenderness. He hated stubbornness, and,
+most of all, he hated it in the woman who was going to be his wife. A
+life of continual contradiction, he felt, would be intolerable. A strong
+will, which he had always admired in himself, became a positive failing
+in Gabriella. A woman's strength lay, after all, not in force of
+character, but in sweetness of nature. And yet how lovely she was! How
+soft, how sweet she looked as she gazed up at him with her radiant eyes.
+There was a fascination for him in her tall slenderness, in the graceful
+curve of her head, which drooped slightly like a dark flower on its
+stem. Everything about her charmed him, and yet he had never called her
+beautiful in his thoughts.
+
+"I told you how it was, dear, when you first asked me to marry you," she
+said, with infinite patience. "I told you that it wasn't fair to ask you
+to take mother, but that I couldn't possibly leave her alone in her old
+age. Jane's home is wretchedly unhappy--she can never tell when Charley
+is to be counted on--and it would kill mother to be dependent on Charley
+even if he were willing. I see your side, George, indeed, indeed, I do,
+but I can't--I simply can't act differently. I have always known it was
+my duty to look after mother--nothing can change that, not even love.
+She worked for us while we were little, and it is trouble that has made
+her what she is to-day. You must see that I am right, George; you can't
+possibly help it."
+
+But he couldn't see it. If the truth had been twice as evident, if
+Gabriella had been twice as reasonable, he could still have seen only
+his wishes.
+
+"I am only asking you to do what is best for us both, Gabriella."
+
+"But how can it be best for me to become an ungrateful child, George?"
+
+Neither of them wanted to quarrel, yet in a minute the barbed words were
+flying between them; in a minute they faced each other as coldly as if
+they had been strangers instead of adoring lovers. At the last, he
+looked at her an instant in silence while she sat perfectly motionless
+with her deep eyes changing to gold in the sunlight; then, turning on
+his heel, without a word, he left the house, and walked rapidly over the
+coloured leaves on the pavement. As he passed under the poplar tree the
+gray squirrel darted gaily along a bough over his head, but he did not
+look up, and a minute later Gabriella saw him cross the street and
+vanish beyond the pointed yew tree in the yard at the corner.
+
+"I wonder if this is the end?" she thought bitterly, and she knew that
+even if it were the end, that even if she died of it, she could never
+give way. Something stronger than herself--that vein of iron in her
+soul--would not bend, would not break though every fibre of her being
+struggled against it. All the happiness of her life vanished with George
+as he passed beyond the yew tree at the corner, yet she sat there with
+her hands still folded, her lips still firm, watching the tree long
+after its pointed dusk had hidden her lover's figure. Had she followed
+her desire as lightly as George followed his, she would have run after
+him as he disappeared, and bringing him back to the room he had left,
+dissolved in tears on his breast. She longed to do this, but the vein of
+iron held her firm in spite of herself. She could not move toward him,
+she could not even have put out her hand had he entered.
+
+The bell rang, and her blood drummed in her ears; but it was only Cousin
+Jimmy bringing Mrs. Carr back from the cemetery. Hearty, deep-chested,
+meticulously brushed and groomed, he wore his Sunday frock with an
+unnatural stiffness, as if he were still hearing Pussy's parting warning
+to be "careful about his clothes." His dark hair, trained for twenty
+years from a side parting, shone with the lustre of satin, and his
+shining eyes, so like the eyes of adventurous youth, wore their
+accustomed Sabbath look of veiled and ashamed sleepiness.
+
+"So you're going to take the old lady to New York with you, Gabriella?"
+
+"I can't bear to think of it, Cousin Jimmy," remarked Mrs. Carr, while
+she adjusted her crape veil over the back of her chair. "I don't see how
+I can stand living in the North."
+
+"Well, what about our friend Charley? Do you think you could get on any
+better with Charley for a son-in-law?"
+
+"You oughtn't to joke about it, Cousin Jimmy. It is too serious for
+joking."
+
+"I beg your pardon, Cousin Fanny--but where is George, Gabriella? I
+thought he was to meet you here."
+
+"He had to go just before you came. Don't you think mother is looking
+well?"
+
+"As well as I ever saw her. I was telling her so as we drove back from
+Hollywood. All she needs is to leave off moping for a while and she'd
+lose ten years of her age. Why, I tell you if it were I, I'd jump at the
+chance to go to New York for a few years. If there wasn't a single thing
+there except the theatres, I'd jump at it. You can go to a different
+show every night of your life, Cousin Fanny."
+
+"I have never been inside of a theatre in my life. You ought to know me
+better than to think it," replied Mrs. Carr, while the corners of her
+mouth drooped. She had laid her bag of grosgrain silk on the table at
+her elbow, and untying the strings of her bonnet, she neatly rolled them
+into two tight little wads which she fastened with jet-headed pins.
+
+"You make her go, honey, when you get hold of her," said Jimmy to
+Gabriella in a sympathetic aside "What she needs is bracing up--I was
+saying so to Pussy only this morning. 'If you could just brace up Cousin
+Fanny, she'd be as well as you or I,' was what I said to her Now I don't
+believe there's a better place on earth to brace a body up than old New
+York. I remember I took my poor old father there just a month or two
+before his last illness, when he was getting over a spell of lumbago,
+and it worked on him like magic. We stayed at the Fifth Avenue
+Hotel--you must be sure to get a dinner at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,
+Cousin Fanny--and went to a show every blessed night for a week. It made
+the old man young again, upon my word it did, and he was still talking
+about it when he came down with his last illness. Well, I must be going
+home to Pussy now. The boys and I went out squirrel hunting yesterday,
+and Pussy promised me Brunswick stew for dinner. Now, don't you forget
+to brace up, Cousin Fanny. That's all on earth you need. The world ain't
+such a bad place, after all, when you sit down and think right hard
+about it."
+
+He went out gaily, followed by Mrs. Carr's accusing eyes to the hatrack,
+where he stopped to take his glossy silk hat from a peg. Turning in the
+buggy as he drove off, he waved merrily back at them with the whip
+before he touched the fat flanks of his gray.
+
+"Cousin Jimmy means well, but he has a most unfortunate manner at
+times," observed Mrs. Carr.
+
+"What is the matter, Gabriella? Have you a headache?"
+
+"Oh, no, but the sunshine is so strong."
+
+"Then you'd better lower the shade. Why, what in the world has happened
+to my rose geranium? I was just going to pot it for the winter."
+
+"I'm sure it isn't hurt, mother. George broke the leaves when he was
+looking out of the window."
+
+"I thought he was going to stay for dinner. Did you make the jelly and
+syllabub?"
+
+"I made it, but he wouldn't stay."
+
+"Well, we'll send some upstairs to Miss Jemima. Do you know she had to
+have the doctor this morning? I met him as I was going out, and he said
+he was sorry to hear I was going to leave Richmond. I can't imagine
+where on earth he could have heard it, for I haven't mentioned it to a
+soul except Lydia Peyton. Yes, I believe I did speak of it to Bessie
+Spencer at the meeting of the Ladies' Aid Society the other day. Where
+are you going, Gabriella? Would you mind putting my bonnet in the
+bandbox?"
+
+No, Gabriella wouldn't mind, and taking the folds of crape in her arms,
+she went to get the green paper bandbox out of the closet. Though she
+had sacrificed her happiness for her mother, she felt that it would be
+impossible for her to listen with a smiling face to her innocent
+prattle.
+
+In the afternoon, when Mrs. Carr, with a small and inconspicuous basket
+in her hand, had set out on her Sunday visit to the Old Ladies' Home,
+and Marthy, attired in an apron with an embroidered bib, had taken the
+jelly and syllabub upstairs to Miss Jemima, Gabriella sat down in her
+mother's rocking-chair by the window, and tried desperately to be
+philosophical. The sound of the old maids from the floor above
+descending on their way to a funeral disturbed her for a minute, and she
+thought with an extraordinary clearness, "That is what my life will be
+if George never comes back. That is what it means to be old." And there
+was a morbid pleasure in pressing this thought, like a pointed weapon,
+into her heart. "That is all there will be for me--that will be my
+life," she went on after an instant of throbbing anguish. "I had no
+right to think of marriage with mother dependent on me, and the best
+thing for me to do is to start again with Mr. Brandywine. George was
+right in a way. Yes, it is hard on him, and I was wrong ever to think of
+it--ever to let him fall in love with me." The mere thought that George
+was right in a way gave her singular comfort, and while she dwelt on it,
+the discovery seemed to throw a vivid light on the cause of the quarrel.
+Of course, she had expected too much of him. It was natural that he
+should not want to be burdened with her family. What she had looked upon
+as selfishness was only the natural instinct of a man in love with a
+woman. He had said that he wanted her to himself, and to want her to
+himself appeared now to be the most reasonable desire in the world.
+
+Yes, she had acquitted George; but, in acquitting him, it was
+characteristic of her that she should not have yielded an inch of her
+ground. She drew comfort from declaring him innocent, but it was the
+tragic comfort of one who blesses while she renounces. George's
+blamelessness did not alter in the least her determination to cling to
+her mother.
+
+The afternoon wore on; the soft golden light on the pavement was dappled
+with shadows; and the wind, blowing over the iron urns in the yard,
+scattered the withered leaves of portulaca over the grass. Though the
+summer still lingered, and flowers were blooming behind the fences along
+the street, the faint violet haze of autumn was creeping slowly over the
+sunshine. Now and then an acquaintance, returning from afternoon
+service, looked up to bow to her, and while the daylight was still
+strong, Marthy, resplendent in Sunday raiment, came out of the little
+green gate at the side of the yard and passed, mincing, in the direction
+of the negro church. Then the door opened slowly, and the two old maids
+came in and stopped for a minute at the parlour door to see if Gabriella
+"had company."
+
+"Such a lovely evening, my dear"--they never used the word
+afternoon--"we went all the way to the cemetery. She was buried in her
+grandfather's lot, you know, in the old part up on the hill. It was a
+beautiful drive, but Amelia and I couldn't help thinking of the poor
+young thing all the time."
+
+It was Miss Jemima who had spoken, and her kind, plain face, all puffs
+and pleasant wrinkles, had not yet relaxed from the unnatural solemnity
+it had worn at the funeral. She was seldom grave, and never despondent,
+though to Gabriella she appeared to lead an unendurable life. Unlike
+Miss Amelia, she had not even a happy youth and a lover to look back
+upon; she had nothing, indeed, except her unfailing goodness and
+patience to support her.
+
+"I don't like to see you alone, honey," she said, untying the strings of
+her black silk bonnet, which fitted her cheerful features like a frame.
+"If the doctor hadn't told me to go to bed as soon as I came in, we'd
+sit a while with you for company."
+
+She felt that it was morbid and unnatural in Gabriella to sit alone in a
+dim room when there were so many young people out in the streets. "You
+mark my words, there's some reason back of Gabriella's moping all by
+herself," she remarked to Miss Amelia as she took off her "things" a few
+minutes later. "It wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear that she'd had a
+fuss with her sweetheart."
+
+"I declare, sister Jemima, you are too sentimental to live," observed
+Miss Amelia as she filled the tea kettle on the fender "Anybody would
+think to hear you talk that there was nothing in life except making
+love."
+
+"Well, there isn't anything else so interesting when you're young. You
+used to think so yourself, sister Amelia."
+
+Standing gaunt and black, with the tea kettle held out stiffly before
+her, Miss Amelia turned her tragic face on her sister.
+
+"Well, I reckon you don't know much about it," she responded with the
+unconscious cruelty of age. Having been once the victim of a great
+passion, she had developed at last into an uncompromising realist,
+wholly devoid of sentimentality, while Miss Jemima, lacking experience,
+had enveloped the unknown in a rosy veil of illusion.
+
+"You don't have to know a thing to think about it, sister Amelia,"
+replied the invalid timidly as she put on her flannel wrapper and
+fastened it with a safety pin at the throat.
+
+"Well, I reckon it's all right for a girl like Gabriella," said Miss
+Amelia crushingly, "but when you look back on it from my age, you'll
+know it isn't worth a row of pins in a life."
+
+And beside the window downstairs Gabriella was thinking passionately:
+"Shall I ever grow old? Is it possible that I shall ever grow old like
+that?"
+
+With the bare question, terror seized her--the terror of growing old
+without George, the terror of dying before she had known the full beauty
+of life. Looking ahead of her at the years empty of love, she saw them
+like a gray road, leaf strewn, wind swept, deserted, and herself
+creeping through them, as bent, as wrinkled, as disillusioned, as Miss
+Amelia. The very image of a life without love was intolerable to her
+since she had known George--for love meant George, and only George, in
+her thoughts. That she could ever be happy again, ever take a natural
+pleasure in life if she lost him, was unimaginable to her at the
+instant. She loved him, she had loved him from the first moment she saw
+him, she would never, though she lived a million years, love any one
+else. It was as absurd to think that she could love again as that a
+flower could bloom afresh when its petals were withered. No, without
+George there was only loveless old age--there was only the future of
+Miss Amelia before her. And she clung to this idea with a horror which
+Miss Amelia, who seldom reflected that she was loveless and by no means
+considered herself an object of pity, would have despised.
+
+"I have no right to marry George, and yet if I don't marry him I shall
+be miserable all my life," she told herself with a sensation of panic.
+It would be so long, the rest of her life, and without George it was as
+desolate as the gray road of her vision. All the beauties of the
+universe, all the miracles of hope, of youth, of spring; her health, her
+intellect, her capacity for work and for taking pleasure in little
+things--all these were as nothing to her if she lost George out of her
+life. "I oughtn't to marry him," she repeated, "but if I don't marry him
+I shall be miserable every minute until I die."
+
+Then a terror more awful than any she had yet suffered clutched at her
+heart. Suppose he should never come back! Suppose he had really meant to
+leave her for good! Suppose he had ceased to love her since he went out
+of the house! The possibility was so agonizing that she rose blindly
+from her chair and turned from the window as if the quiet street, filled
+with the dreamy sunshine of October, had offered an appalling, an
+unbelievable sight to her eyes. If he had ceased to love her, she was
+helpless; and this sense of helplessness awoke a feeling of rage in her
+heart. If he did not come back, she could never go after him. She could
+only sit and wait until she grew as old and as ugly as Miss Amelia.
+While the minutes, which seemed hours, dragged away, she wept the
+bitterest tears of her life--tears not of wounded love, but of anger
+because she could do nothing but wait.
+
+While she wept the bell rang. When she did not answer it, it rang again,
+and after an interminable pause the footsteps of Miss Amelia were heard
+descending the stairs. Then the door opened and shut, the footsteps
+began their slow ascent of the stairs, and after an eternity of silence,
+she knew that George had entered the room.
+
+Wiping her eyes on the ruffle of the sofa pillow, she sat up and faced
+him, while her pride hardened again.
+
+"Gabriella, I have come back."
+
+"I see you have," she answered coldly, and choked over a sob.
+
+"What are you crying about, Gabriella?"
+
+"I--I have a headache."
+
+"Have you thought about me at all to-day?"
+
+"A little."
+
+He laughed softly, the laugh of a conqueror.
+
+"I'm glad at least that I didn't give you the headache."
+
+"You didn't. I had it anyway."
+
+He was radiant, he was as fresh as the wind. Never in his life had he
+looked so gay, so handsome, so kind. His blue eyes were brimming with
+light. The mere fact of being alive appeared to fill him with ecstasy.
+And she loved him for his gaiety, for his lightness, for the ease with
+which he took for granted her unchangeable love. She longed with all her
+soul and body to prove this love by a surrender more complete than any
+she had made in the past. She longed to say: "I am yours to do with as
+you please, and nothing in the universe matters but you and my love for
+you." The very core of her nature longed to say this to him; but her
+indomitable pride, which even passion could not overcome, kept her
+sitting there in silence while she felt that her heart was bursting with
+happiness.
+
+"Have you thought it over, Gabriella?"
+
+She nodded. To save her life, she felt, she could not utter a word
+without sobbing.
+
+"And you have absolutely and finally decided to have your way?"
+
+This time she shook her head, but the tears fell on her cheeks and she
+did not brush them away. From his voice she knew that she had triumphed,
+but there was no delight in the knowledge. She did not want to triumph;
+she wanted only to yield to him and to make him happy by yielding.
+
+"O George!" she cried suddenly, and held out her arms to him.
+
+As he looked down at her his expression changed suddenly to one of
+intense sadness. From his face, which had grown pale, he might have been
+contemplating the Eternal Verities, though, in reality, he was
+considering nothing more exalted than the dreary prospect of a lifetime
+spent in the society of Mrs. Carr.
+
+Then, as Gabriella enfolded him, he laughed softly. He had given in, but
+he knew in the very instant of his defeat that he should some day turn
+it to victory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE NEW WORLD
+
+
+Gabriella stood in front of the station, ecstatically watching George
+while he struggled for a cab. In the pale beams of the early sunshine
+her face looked young, flushed, and expectant, as if she had just
+awakened from sleep, and her eyes, following her husband, were the happy
+eyes of a bride. She wore a new dress of blue broadcloth, passionately
+overtrimmed by Miss Polly Hatch; on her head a blue velvet toque from
+Brandywine's millinery department rested as lightly as a benediction;
+and her hands clasped Arthur's wedding present, a bag of alligator skin
+bearing her initials in gold. One blissful month ago she and George had
+been married, and now, on the reluctant return from a camp in the
+Adirondacks, they were confronting the disillusioning actuality of the
+New York streets at eight o'clock in the morning. While Gabriella
+waited, shivering a a little, for the air was sharp and her broadcloth
+dress was not warm, she amused herself planning a future which appeared
+to consist of inexhaustible happiness. And mingling with her dreams
+there were divine memories of the last month and of her marriage. After
+that one quarrel George, she told herself, had been "simply perfect."
+His manner to her mother had been beautiful; he had been as eager as
+Gabriella to obliterate all memory of the difference between them,
+though, of course, after his yielding that supreme point she had felt
+that she must give up everything else--and the giving up had been
+rapture. He had shown not the faintest disposition to crow over her when
+at last, after consulting Mrs. Carr, she had told him that her mother
+really preferred to stay with Jane until summer, though he had remarked
+with evident relief: "Then we'll put off looking for an apartment. It's
+easier to find one in the summer anyway, and in the meantime you can
+talk it over with mother."
+
+After this everything had gone so smoothly, so exquisitely, that it was
+more like a dream than like actual life when she looked back on it. She
+saw herself in the floating lace veil of her grandmother, holding white
+roses in her hand, and she saw George's face--the face of her dreams
+come true--looking at her out of a starry mist, while in the shining
+wilderness that surrounded them she heard an organ playing softly "The
+Voice That Breathed O'er Eden." Then the going away! The good-byes at
+the station in Richmond; her mother's face, pathetic and drawn against
+the folds of her crape veil; Cousin Jimmy, crimson and jovial; Florrie's
+violent waving as the train moved away; Miss Jemima, with her smiling,
+pain-tortured eyes, flinging a handful of rice; the last glimpse of
+them; the slowly vanishing streets, where the few pedestrians stopped to
+look after the cars; the park where she had played as a child; the
+brilliant flower-beds filled with an autumnal bloom of scarlet cannas;
+the white-aproned negro nurses and the gaily decorated perambulators;
+the clustering church spires against a sky of pure azure; the negro
+hovels, with frost-blighted sunflowers dropping brown seeds over the
+paling fences; the rosy haze of it all; and her heart saying over and
+over, "There is nothing but love in the world! There is nothing but love
+in the world!"
+
+"I've got a cab--the last one," said George, pushing his way through the
+crowd, and laying his hand on her arm with a possessive and
+authoritative touch. "Let me put you in, and then I'll speak to the
+driver."
+
+As he gave the address she watched him, still fascinated with the
+delicious strangeness of it all. It was like an adventure to have George
+whisk her so peremptorily into a cab, and then stand with his foot on
+the step while he curtly directed the driver. Nothing could surpass the
+romance--the supreme exciting romance of life. Every minute was an
+event; every act of George's was as thrilling as a moment in melodrama.
+And as they drove through the streets, over the pale bands of sunshine,
+she had a sense of lightness and wonder, as if she were driving in a
+world of magic toward ineffable happiness.
+
+"Isn't it strange to be here together, George?" she said. "I can hardly
+believe it." But in her heart she was thinking: "I shall never want
+anything but love in my life. If I have George I shall never want
+anything else." The bedraggled, slatternly figures of the women sweeping
+the pavements in the cross-street through which they were driving filled
+her with a fugitive sadness, so faint, so pale that it hardly dimmed the
+serene brightness of her mood. "I wish they were all as happy as I am,"
+she thought; "and they might be if they only knew the secret of
+happiness. If they only knew that nothing in the world matters when one
+has love in one's heart."
+
+"You'll believe it soon enough when we turn into Fifth Avenue," replied
+George, glancing with disgust out of the window. A month of intimacy had
+increased the power of his smile over her senses, and when he turned to
+her again after a minute, she felt something of the faint delicious
+tremor of their first meeting. Already she was beginning to discover
+that beyond his expressive eyes he had really very little of importance
+to express, that his prolonged silences covered poverty of ideas rather
+than abundance of feeling, that his limited vocabulary was due less to
+reticence than to the simple inarticulateness of the primitive mind.
+Through the golden glamour of her honeymoon there had loomed suddenly
+the discovery that George was not clever--but cleverness mattered so
+little, she told herself, as long as he loved her.
+
+"I hope your mother will like me," she said nervously after a minute.
+
+"I'll be sorry for her if she doesn't."
+
+"Do I look nice?"
+
+"Of course you do. I never saw you when you didn't."
+
+"I feel so dreadfully untidy. I never tried to dress in a sleeping-car
+before."
+
+"It did rock, didn't it?"
+
+"I'll never travel again at night if I can help it. There's a cinder in
+your eye; let me get it out for you." It thrilled her pleasantly to
+remove the cinder with the corner of her handkerchief, and to order him
+to sit still whenever the cab jolted. It was incredibly young,
+incredibly foolish, but it was all a part of the wonderful enchantment
+in which she moved. The cinder had made an agreeable episode, but when
+it had been removed there was nothing more for them to talk about. In
+four weeks of daily and hourly companionship they had said very easily,
+Gabriella had found, everything they had longed so passionately to say
+to each other. It was strange--it was positively astounding how soon
+they had talked themselves empty of ideas and fallen back upon
+repetition and ejaculation. Before her marriage she had thought that a
+lifetime would be too short to hold the full richness of their
+confidences; and yet now, after a month, though they still made love,
+they had ceased, almost with relief, to make conversation.
+
+After turning into Fifth Avenue they drove for ages between depressing
+examples in brownstone of an architecture which, like George, was trying
+rather vaguely to express nothing; and then rolling heavily into
+Fifty-seventh Street stopped presently before one of the solemn houses
+which stood, in the dignity of utter ugliness, midway of a long block.
+"They are all so alike I don't see how I shall ever know where I live,"
+thought Gabriella. Then, as George helped her out of the cab, the door
+opened as if by magic, and beyond the solemn manservant she saw the
+short, stout figure of a lady in a tightly fitting morning gown of black
+silk. Hurrying up the steps, she was pressed against a large smooth
+bosom which yielded as little as if it had been upholstered in leather.
+
+"My dear daughter! my dear Gabriella!" exclaimed the lady in a charming
+voice; and looking down after the first kiss, Gabriella saw a handsome,
+slightly florid face, with the vivacious smile of a girl and a beautiful
+forehead under a stiffly crimped arch of gray hair which looked as hard
+and bright as silver.
+
+"I've been up since seven o'clock waiting for you. You must be
+famished. Come straight in to breakfast. Your father is already at the
+table, George. Poor man, he has to start downtown so dreadfully early."
+
+Bright, effusive, vivacious, and as emphatically Southern as if she had
+never left Franklin Street, Mrs. Fowler took off Gabriella's hat and
+coat, kissed her several times while she was doing so, and at last,
+still talking animatedly, led them into the dining-room.
+
+"Archibald, here they are," she said in a tone of unaffected delight,
+while a thin, serious-looking man, with anxious eyes, pale, aristocratic
+features, and skin that had a curious parchment-like texture, put down
+the _Times_, and came forward to meet them. Though he did not speak as
+he kissed her, Gabriella felt that there was sincere, if detached,
+friendliness in his little pat on her shoulder. He led her almost
+tenderly to her chair; and as soon as she was comfortably seated and
+supplied with rolls and bacon, resigned her contentedly to his wife and
+the butler. His manner of gentle abstraction, which Gabriella attributed
+first to something he had just read in the newspaper, she presently
+discovered to be his habitual attitude toward all the world except Wall
+Street. He ate his breakfast as if his attention were somewhere else; he
+spoke to his son and his daughter-in-law kindly, but as if he were not
+thinking about them; he treated his wife, whom he adored, as if he had
+not clearly perceived her. In the profound abstraction in which he lived
+every impression appeared to have become blurred except the tremendous
+impression of whirling forces; every detail seemed to have been obscured
+except the gigantic details of "Business." His manner was perfectly
+well-bred, but it was the manner of a man who moves through life
+rehearsing a part of which he barely remembers the words. From the
+first minute it was evident to Gabriella that her father-in-law adored
+his wife as an ideal, though he seemed scarcely aware of her as a
+person. He had given her his love, but his interests, his energies, his
+attention were elsewhere.
+
+"Is that the way George will treat me--as if I were only a dream woman?"
+thought Gabriella while she watched her father-in-law over the open
+sheet of the _Times_. Then, with her eyes on her husband, she realized
+that he was of his mother's blood, not his father's. Business could
+never absorb him. His restlessness, his instability, his love of
+pleasure, would prevent the sapping of his nature by one supreme
+interest.
+
+The table, like everything else in the room, was solid, heavy, and
+expensive. On the floor a heavy and expensive carpet, with a pattern in
+squares, stretched to the heavy and expensive moulding which bordered a
+heavy and expensive paper. Mrs. Fowler's taste, like Jimmy's (he was her
+third cousin), leaned apparently toward embossment, for behind a massive
+repoussé silver service she sat, as handsome and substantial as the
+room, with her face flushing in splotches from the heat of her coffee.
+
+Some twenty-odd years before the house had been furnished at great cost,
+according to the opulent taste of the early 'seventies, and, unchanged
+by severer and more frugal fashions, it remained a solid monument to the
+first great financial deal of Archibald Fowler. It was at the golden
+age, when, still young and energetic, luck had come to him in a day,
+that he had bought the brownstone house in Fifty-seventh Street, and his
+wife, also young and energetic, had gone out "to get whatever she
+liked." Trained in a simple school during the war, and brought up in the
+formal purity of high-ceiled rooms furnished in Chippendale and
+Sheraton, her natural tastes were, nevertheless, as ornate as the
+interiors of the New York shops. Though the blood of colonial heroes ran
+in her veins, she was still the child of her age, and her age prided
+itself upon being entirely modern in all things from religion to
+furniture.
+
+As she sat there behind the mammoth coffee urn, from which a spiral of
+steam floated, her handsome face irradiated the spirit of kindness.
+Because of her rather short figure, she appeared at her best when she
+was sitting, and now, with her large, tightly laced hips hidden beneath
+the table and her firm, jet-plastered bosom appearing above it, she
+presented a picture of calm and matronly beauty. Not once did she seem
+to think of herself or her own breakfast. Even while she buttered her
+toast and drank her steaming coffee, her bright blue eyes travelled
+unceasingly over the table, first to her husband's plate, then to
+Gabriella's, then to her son's. It was easy to see that she was the
+dominant and vital force in the household. She ruled Archibald, less
+indirectly perhaps, but quite as consistently as Cousin Pussy ruled
+Cousin Jimmy.
+
+"My dear, you must eat your breakfast," she said urgently to her
+daughter-in-law. "Archibald, let me give you your second cup of coffee.
+Remember what a trying day you have before you, and make a good
+breakfast. It is so hard to get him to eat," she explained to Gabriella;
+"I have to coax him to drink his two cups of coffee, for if he doesn't
+he is sure to come home with a headache."
+
+"Well, give me a cup, Evelyn," replied Mr. Fowler, in his gentle voice,
+yielding apparently to please her. In his youth he must have been very
+handsome, Gabriella thought; but now, though he still retained a certain
+distinction, he had the look of a man who has been drained of his
+vitality. What surprised her--for she had heard him described as "a hard
+man in business"--was the suggestion of the scholar in his appearance.
+With his narrow, carefully brushed head, his dreamy and rather wistful
+blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses, his stooping, slender shoulders,
+and his long, delicate hands covered with prominent veins, he ought to
+have been either a poet or a philosopher.
+
+"You must be happy with us, my dear," he had said to Gabriella, showing
+a minute later such gentle eagerness to return to a part of the
+newspaper which Gabriella had never read and did not understand, that
+his wife remarked pityingly: "Read your paper, Archibald, and don't let
+our chatter disturb you. There are a thousand things I want to say to
+the children."
+
+"Well, it's time for me to be going, Evelyn," Mr. Fowler responded,
+reluctantly folding the pages; "I'll look into this on the way down."
+
+"Remember, dear, that Judge Crowborough is coming to dinner."
+
+"I'll remember. Is there any one else?"
+
+"Mrs. Crowborough, of course, and Colonel Buffington, and one or two
+others. Nobody that you will care for except the judge and Patty and
+Billy."
+
+"I shan't forget, but I may be a little late getting home. Good-bye, my
+dear, until evening."
+
+Bending over her chair, he kissed her flushed cheek, while George
+remarked carelessly: "I'll see you later, father, when I've had a bath
+and a shave."
+
+After the gentle tones of Mr. Fowler, the vitality of George's voice
+sounded almost brutal, and he added just as carelessly when the front
+door had shut softly: "The old man looks seedy, doesn't he, mother?"
+
+A worried look brought out three startling lines in Mrs. Fowler's
+forehead, and Gabriella observed suddenly that there were tiny crow's
+feet around her blue eyes where the whites were flecked ever so faintly
+with yellow. Though she was well into the mid-fifties, her carefully
+preserved skin had kept the firmness and the texture of youth, and she
+still flushed easily and unbecomingly as she had done as a girl.
+
+"He hasn't been a bit well, George. I am very anxious about him. You
+know when he worries over his business, he doesn't eat his meals, and as
+soon as he stops eating he begins to have nervous dyspepsia. He has just
+had a bad attack; that's why he looks so run down and haggard."
+
+"Can't the doctor do anything for him?"
+
+"He gave him some drops, but it is so hard to get your father to take
+medicine. Rest is what he needs, and, of course, that is out of the
+question while things are so unsettled. You must help him all you can,
+my boy, and Gabriella and I will manage with each other's company."
+
+Her bright smile was still on her lips, but Gabriella noticed that she
+pushed her buttered roll away as if she were choking.
+
+In the early afternoon, when George had gone to join his father in the
+office, and Gabriella, seated at a little white and gold desk in the
+room which had been Patty's, was just finishing a letter to her mother,
+Mrs. Fowler came in, and pushing a chintz-covered chair close to the
+desk, sank into it and laid her small nervous hand on the arm of her
+daughter-in-law. She was wearing a velvet bonnet, with strings, and a
+street gown of black broadcloth, which fitted her like a glove and
+accentuated, after the fashion of the 'nineties, her small, compact
+waist and the deep substantial curves of her bosom and hips. Her eyes,
+behind the little veil of spotted tulle which reached to the tip of her
+nose, were bright and wistful, and though her colour was too high, a
+smile of troubled sweetness lent it a peculiar charm of expression.
+
+"How nice you look, my dear," she said, with her pleasant manner, which
+no anxiety, hardly any grief, could dispel. "Are you very busy, or may I
+talk to you a little while?"
+
+Drawing closer to her, Gabriella raised the plump little hand to her
+lips. Beneath the surface pleasantness of Mrs. Fowler's life--that
+pleasantness which wrapped her like a religion--she was beginning to
+discern a deep disquietude.
+
+"I want to talk to you, mamma," she said, and her manner was a caress.
+
+"You love George very much, dear?" asked Mrs. Fowler so suddenly that
+Gabriella looked at her startled.
+
+For a minute the girl could not speak. "Oh, yes; oh, yes," she answered
+presently, and choked over the words.
+
+"We wanted so much to go to your wedding--we were afraid you would think
+it strange that we stayed away, but Archibald had his attack just then,
+and on top of it he was terribly worried about his affairs. We have had
+a very hard year, and we feel so sorry, both of us, that we can't do
+more for your pleasure. As it is, we are cutting down our expenses in
+every way, and I have even decided to give up my carriage the first of
+next year.
+
+"I know, I know," said Gabriella, who had never had a carriage, and to
+whom the giving up of one seemed the smallest imaginable sacrifice. "We
+mustn't add to your cares," she went on after a minute. "Wouldn't it be
+better, really better, if we were to take an apartment at once instead
+of waiting until June?"
+
+"Until June?" repeated Mrs. Fowler vaguely, and she added quickly: "It
+is the greatest pleasure to have you here. Since Patty went I get so
+terribly lonely, and I don't think it would be at all wise for you to go
+to yourselves. George has hardly anything except what his father is able
+to give him, you know. The poor boy hasn't the least head for business."
+
+"But we shouldn't need much. I am sure I could manage just with what
+George makes--no matter how little it is."
+
+For an instant Mrs. Fowler looked at her thoughtfully.
+
+"You could, but George couldn't," she answered.
+
+"You mean he is extravagant?"
+
+"He has never had the slightest idea of the value of money--that is one
+of the things you must teach him. He is a dear boy, but he has never
+made a success of anything he has undertaken, and his father thinks he
+is too unpractical ever to do so. But you must try to get him to live
+within your means, my dear, or you will both be miserable. Try to keep
+him from borrowing."
+
+"But he refuses to talk to me about his work. It bores him," said
+Gabriella; and her simple soul, trained to regard debt as a deeper
+disgrace than poverty, grew suddenly troubled. In her childhood they had
+gone without food rather than borrow, she remembered.
+
+"The matter with dear George," pursued Mrs. Fowler--and from the
+sweetness of her manner she might have been paying him a compliment--"is
+that he has never been steady. He doesn't stick at anything long enough
+to make it a success. If he were left to himself he would speculate
+wildly, and this is why his father is obliged to overlook all that he
+does in the office. It is just here that you can be of such wonderful
+help to him, Gabriella, by your influence. This is why I am telling
+you."
+
+But had she any influence over him? In spite of his passion for her had
+she ever turned him by so much as a hair's breadth from the direction of
+his impetuous desires? Once only she had withstood him--once only she
+had triumphed, and for that triumph she had paid by a complete
+surrender! She had been too glad to yield, too fearful of bringing a
+cloud over the sunny blue of his eyes.
+
+"I want to help him--I want you to tell me how I can help him," she said
+earnestly. "While we are with you this winter, you must teach me how to
+do it. Before we begin housekeeping in the summer, I want to learn all I
+possibly can about George's affairs. He won't talk to me about practical
+matters, so you must do it."
+
+"But where are you going, Gabriella? I thought you had decided to live
+with us?"
+
+"But didn't George tell you? Surely he must have told you. We are to
+take an apartment in June so my mother can come to us. I felt, of
+course, that I couldn't leave mother, and George understands. He was
+perfectly lovely about it."
+
+"I see, I see," murmured Mrs. Fowler, as if she were thinking of
+something else. "Well, that will all come right, dear, I hope."
+
+Rising abruptly, she began to draw on her gloves. "If you only knew how
+I long to make you happy," she said softly; "as happy as I have been
+with George's father."
+
+"They are so unlike," answered Gabriella, and the next day when she
+remembered the admission, she wondered how it had slipped from her.
+
+"Yes, they are unlike," agreed Mrs. Fowler. "George takes after me, and
+I am a frivolous person. But there doesn't live a better man than my
+husband," she added, glowing. "I've been his wife for thirty years, and
+in all that time I don't believe he has ever thought first of himself.
+Yes, it was thirty years ago that I drove through the streets with my
+bridal veil on, and felt so sorry for all the girls I saw who were not
+going to be married. To-day I feel exactly the same way--sorry for all
+the women who couldn't have Archibald for a husband. I've lived with him
+thirty years, I've borne him children, and I'm still sorry for all the
+other women--even for you, Gabriella."
+
+"He seems so kind," said Gabriella; "I felt that about him, and it's the
+best thing, after all, isn't it?" It was the best thing, and yet she
+knew that George was not kind--that he was not even good-tempered.
+
+"Yes, it's the best thing, after all, in marriage," answered the older
+woman; "it's the thing that wears."
+
+"I have always wanted the best of life," rejoined Gabriella
+thoughtfully; and she went on gravely after a moment: "I couldn't love
+George any more than I do, but I wish that in some ways he would grow
+like his father."
+
+"The boy has a very sweet nature," replied George's mother, "and I hope
+marriage will steady him." It was a warning, Gabriella knew, and she
+wondered afterwards if her silent acquiescence in Mrs. Fowler's judgment
+had not been furtive disloyalty to George.
+
+"A great deal will depend on you, dear, for he is very much in love,"
+resumed Mrs. Fowler when Gabriella did not speak, and she repeated very
+solemnly, "I hope marriage will steady him."
+
+In her heart Gabriella was hoping so, too, but all she said was, "I
+promise you that I will do all I can." She had given her word, and,
+looking into her eyes, Mrs. Fowler understood that her daughter-in-law
+was not one to give her word lightly. Gabriella would keep her promise.
+She would do her best, whatever happened.
+
+The older woman, with her life's history behind her, watched the girl
+for a minute in silence. There was so much that she longed to say, so
+much that could never be spoken even between women. She herself was an
+optimist, but her optimism had been wrung from the bitter core of
+experience. Her faith was firm, though it held few illusions, for, if
+she was an optimist, she was also a realist. She believed in life, not
+because it had satisfied her, but because she had had the wisdom to
+understand that the supreme failure had been, not life's, but her own.
+If she could only have lived it again and lived it differently from the
+beginning! If she could only have used her deeper wisdom not to regret
+the past, but to create the future! Much as she had loved her husband,
+she knew now that she had sacrificed him to the world. Much as she had
+loved her children, she would have sacrificed them, also, had it been
+possible. To the tin gods she had offered her soul--to the things that
+did not matter she had yielded up the only things that mattered at all.
+And she knew now that, in spite of her clearness of vision, the
+worldliness which had ruined her life was still bound up in all that was
+essential and endurable in her nature. She still wanted the illusions as
+passionately as if she believed in their reality; she still winced as
+sharply at the thought of Patty's marriage and of all that Patty had
+given up. In the case of George, she admitted that it was her
+fault--that she had spoiled him--but how could she have helped it? She
+remembered how he had looked as a child, with his round flushed face,
+his chestnut curls, and his eager, questioning eyes. He had been a
+beautiful child, more beautiful even than Patty, and because of his
+beauty she had been able to refuse him nothing. Then she thought of his
+boyhood, of his reckless extravagance at college; of the tales of his
+wildness to which she had shut her ears; of his debts, and still of his
+debts, which she had paid out of the housekeeping money because she was
+afraid to let his father know of them. Yes, George, in spite of his
+sweet nature, had given them a great deal of trouble, so much trouble
+that she had been quite reconciled to his marriage with any respectable
+girl. The memory of a chorus girl with whom he had once entangled
+himself still gave her a shiver at the heart when she recalled it.
+Money, always more money, had gone into that; and at last, just as she
+had grown hopeless of saving him, he had met this fine, sensible
+Gabriella, who looked so strong, so competent, and there had come an end
+to the disturbing stories which reached her at intervals. Surely it was
+proof of her son's inborn fineness that from the pink perfection of
+girlhood he should have chosen the capable Gabriella! At first she had
+regretted his choice, hoping, as the worldly and the unworldly alike
+hope for their sons, that the object of George's disinterested affection
+would prove to be wealthy. Then at the sight of Gabriella she had
+surrendered completely. The girl was fine all through, this she could
+see as soon as she looked at her. She liked her noble though not
+beautiful face, with the broad clear forehead from which the soft dark
+hair was brushed back so simply, and, most of all, she liked the charm
+and sympathy in her voice. George had chosen well, and if she could
+trust his choice, why could she not trust him to be true to it?
+
+"I wonder if you would like to put on your hat and come with me?" she
+asked, obeying an impulse. "I'm going to drive up to Patty's with some
+curtains for her bedroom."
+
+"Oh, I'd love to," replied Gabriella with eagerness, for she hated
+inaction, and it was impossible to spend a whole afternoon merely
+thinking about one's happiness. "It won't take me a minute to get
+ready."
+
+While she put on her hat and coat, Mrs. Fowler watched her thoughtfully,
+saying once: "It is quite cool, you'd better bring your furs, dear."
+
+When Gabriella answered frankly, "I haven't any, I never had any furs in
+my life," a tender expression crept into the rather hard blue eyes of
+her mother-in-law, and she said quickly: "Well, I've a set of white fox
+that I am too old to wear, and you shall have it."
+
+"But what of Patty?" asked Gabriella, for she had grown up thinking of
+other people and she couldn't break the habit of twenty years in a
+minute.
+
+"Oh, Patty has all the furs she'll need for years. We spent every penny
+we had on Patty before she married," answered Mrs. Fowler, but she was
+saying to herself: "Yes, the girl is the right wife for him. I am sure
+she is the right wife for him."
+
+The Park was brilliant with falling leaves, and as they drove beneath a
+perfect sky beside a lake which sparkled like sapphire, Gabriella,
+lifting her chin above the white furs, said rapturously, "Oh, I am so
+happy! Life is so beautiful!"
+
+A shadow stole into the eyes with which Mrs. Fowler was watching the
+passing carriages, and the fixed sweetness about her mouth melted into
+an expression of yearning. Tears veiled the faces of the women who spoke
+to her in passing, for she was thinking of her first drive in the Park
+with her husband, and though her marriage had been a happy one, she felt
+a strange longing as if she wanted to weep.
+
+"I never saw such wonderful horses," said Gabriella. "Cousin Jimmy would
+be wild about them;" and she added impetuously, "But the hats aren't in
+the least like the one I am wearing." A misgiving seized her as she
+realized that her dresses, copied by Miss Polly with ardent fidelity
+from a Paris fashion book, were all hopelessly wrong. She wondered if
+her green silk gown with the black velvet sleeves was different in style
+from the gowns the other women were wearing under their furs? Had
+sleeves of a different colour from the bodice, which Miss Polly
+considered the last touch of elegance, really gone out of fashion?
+
+The carriage passed out of the Park, and turning into one of the streets
+on the upper West Side stopped presently before a small dingy apartment
+house, where a dozen ragged children were playing leapfrog on the
+pavement.
+
+"Patty has the top floor--there's a studio." Drawing her skirts away
+from the children, for her generation feared contact with the lower
+classes, Mrs. Fowler walked briskly to the low brown steps, on which an
+ash can stood waiting for removal. Inside, where the hall smelled
+uninvitingly of stale cooking, they rang for the elevator under a dim
+yellow light which revealed a hundred secret lines in their faces.
+
+"I can't imagine how Patty puts up with the place," remarked Patty's
+mother dejectedly. "You wouldn't believe the trouble we went to to start
+her well. She was the acknowledged beauty of her winter--everybody was
+crazy about her looks--and the very week before she ran off with Billy
+she had a proposal from the Duke of Toxbridge. Of course, if I'd ever
+dreamed she had a fancy for Billy, I'd have kept him out of her sight
+instead of allowing him to paint her portrait whenever she had any time
+she could spare. But who on earth would have suspected it? Billy King,
+whom she had known all her life, as poor as a church mouse, and the kind
+of painter whose work will never 'take' if he lives to be a thousand!
+His portraits may be good art--I don't pretend to know anything about
+that--but I do know pictures of pretty women when I see them, and his
+women are frights, every last one of them. If you're thin, he paints
+your skeleton, and if you're fat, he makes you as square as a house,
+and, thin or fat, he always gives you a blue and yellow complexion. He
+wouldn't even make Patty white, though I implored him to do it--and he
+made her look exactly ten years older than her age."
+
+"I've never seen any portraits of living people--only of ancestors,"
+said Gabriella, "and I am so much interested."
+
+"Well, you mustn't judge them by Billy's, my dear, even if he did get
+all those prizes in Paris. But I always said the French were queer, and
+if they hadn't been, they would never have raved so over the things
+Billy painted. Now, Augustus Featherfield's are really charming. One can
+tell to look at his portraits that he paints only ladies, and he gives
+them all the most perfectly lovely hair, whether they have it or not.
+Some day I'll take you to his studio and let you see for yourself."
+
+The elevator descended, creaking beneath the weight of a negro youth who
+seemed half asleep, and a little later, creaking more loudly, it bore
+them slowly upward to the top of the house.
+
+"I feel as if I were taking my life in my hands whenever I come here,"
+observed Mrs. Fowler, in the tone of dispassionate resignation with
+which she always discussed Patty and the surroundings amid which Patty
+lived. Marching resolutely, though disapprovingly, down a long hall, she
+pressed a small bell at the side of a door, and stood, holding tightly
+to the bundle of curtains, while her expression of unnatural
+pleasantness grew almost painful in its determination. Here, also, they
+waited some time, and when at last the door was opened by an agitated
+maid, without an apron, and they were led into a long, queerly furnished
+studio, with a balcony from which they had a distant cloudless view of
+the river, Gabriella felt for a minute that she must have fallen into a
+dream. Long afterwards she learned that Billy's studio was charming,
+with its blurred Italian tapestries, which had faded to an exquisite
+tone, with its broken torsos of old marble, warming to deep ivory in the
+sunlight, with its ecstatic haloed saints praying against dim Tuscan
+landscapes, with its odd and unexpected seats of carved stone on which
+the cushions made strange splotches and pools of colour. At the time,
+seen through provincial eyes, it seemed merely "queer" to her; and
+queerer still appeared the undraped figures of women, all lean lines and
+violet shadows, which, unframed and unhung, filled the dusty corners.
+
+"The river is lovely, but it is so far away," she said, turning her
+abashed eyes from the nude figures, and thinking how terribly they would
+have shocked the innocence of Cousin Jimmy.
+
+"I always look at the river when I come here," responded Mrs. Fowler,
+and her tone implied that the river at least was perfectly proper. "A
+month ago the colours were wonderful."
+
+In the drive, which they could see from a corner view, a few old men,
+forgotten by time, warmed themselves in the sunlight. Far below, the
+river reflected the changeable blue of the sky, while the autumnal
+pageantry on the horizon was fading slowly, like a burned-out fire, to
+the colour of ashes.
+
+"Mother, dear, I'm so glad," said a gay voice in the doorway, and
+turning quickly, Gabriella stared with wide eyes at the vision of
+Patty--of Patty in some soft tea-gown, which borrowed its tone from the
+old tapestries on the wall, with her honey-coloured hair hanging over
+her shoulders, and her eyes as fresh as blue flowers in the ivory pallor
+of her face.
+
+"And this is Gabriella," she added, holding out her arms. "What a
+darling you are to come so soon, Gabriella."
+
+She was a tall girl, so tall that she stooped to kiss Gabriella, whose
+height measured exactly five feet and seven inches, and she was
+beautiful with the faultless beauty which is seen only once or twice in
+a generation, but which, seen once, is never forgotten. For Patty's
+beauty, as a poet once wrote of a dead woman, was the beauty of destiny,
+the beauty that changes history and turns men into angels or into
+beasts. Though Gabriella had seen lovely skins on Southern
+women--rose-leaf skins, magnolia skins, peach-blossom skins--she had
+seen nothing that resembled the exquisite colour and texture of Patty's
+face.
+
+"The curtains were finished, so I brought them," said Mrs. Fowler,
+pointing to the bundle. "I wanted Gabriella to see the Park. You are
+coming to-night without fail, aren't you, Patty?"
+
+"Without fail, even if we have to walk," answered Patty. "You can't
+imagine how much it costs to get about when one lives so far uptown.
+That's one reason we are anxious to move. Billy has been looking for a
+studio for weeks, and, do you know, he has really found one at last.
+Harry Allen is moving out of the Rubens Building, and we are going to
+take his studio on the top floor. We're awfully lucky, too, to get it,
+for it is the first vacancy there for years."
+
+"But it's over a stable, isn't it?" asked Mrs. Fowler. "How could you
+possibly live there? And the East Side way down there is just as bad as
+up here"
+
+"I believe there is a stable, but it won't bother us--we're too high,"
+replied Patty.
+
+"Well, we can't stop; Gabriella hasn't unpacked her trunks," returned
+Mrs. Fowler; "but be sure to come early, Patty. I want your father to
+see you."
+
+"I wish there wasn't going to be anybody else. I want to talk to my
+sister. Isn't it lovely to have a sister, and mamma was too selfish to
+give me one. Do you call her 'mamma,' too, Gabriella?"
+
+"Of course she calls me 'mamma,'" answered Mrs. Fowler before Gabriella
+could speak, "and she is a much better daughter already than you ever
+were."
+
+"And a much better son, too, than George ever was?" asked Patty slyly.
+
+"We aren't talking about George. George has settled down," said Mrs.
+Fowler quickly, too quickly it occurred to Gabriella, who was eager to
+hear all that the daring Patty would say. "Don't you think those white
+furs look well on Gabriella?"
+
+"She looks like the snow queen in them. Does it matter what I wear
+to-night? Who is coming?"
+
+"Nobody you will care about--only Judge and Mrs. Crowborough and Colonel
+Buffington."
+
+"That old bore of a colonel! And why do you have to ask the judge again
+so soon? He looks like a turkey gobbler, Gabriella, and he has so much
+money that it is impossible to judge him by the standards of other
+people, everybody says that--even Billy."
+
+"Hush, Patty. You mustn't corrupt Gabriella."
+
+"If the judge doesn't, I shan't, mamma."
+
+"Well, your father has the greatest respect for him, and as for asking
+him often to dinner, it isn't by any means so easy to get him as you
+think. I don't suppose there's another man in New York who is invited
+out so often and goes out so little."
+
+"Papa is a sweet innocent," observed Patty maliciously, "but if you can
+stand the judge, mamma, dear, I am sure I can, especially as I shan't
+have to sit by him. That honour will be reserved for poor Gabriella. I
+wish you didn't have to go, but you really must, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes, we must go. Come, Gabriella, or you won't have time to get into
+your trunks before dinner."
+
+On the drive home Mrs. Fowler was grimly silent, while the sweetness
+about her mouth ebbed slowly away, leaving the faintest quiver of the
+muscles. For the first time Gabriella saw George's mother look as she
+must look in her sleep, when the artificial cheerfulness of her
+expression faded into the profound unconsciousness which drowns not only
+happiness, but the very pretence of happiness. So here, also, was
+insincerity, here, also, was the striving, not for realities, but for
+appearances! In a different form she saw her mother's struggle
+again--that struggle, without beginning and without end, which moved
+always in a circle and led nowhere. Was there no sincerity, no reality
+even in love? Was George, too, only a shadow? And the visible sadness of
+the November afternoon, with its faint haze like the haze of a dream
+landscape, seemed a part of this invisible sadness which had sprung from
+nothing and which would change and pass away in a breath. "If things
+would only last," she thought, looking with wistful eyes on the gold and
+purple around her. "If things would only last, how wonderful life would
+be!"
+
+"To think that all Patty's beauty should have been thrown away," said
+Mrs. Fowler suddenly.
+
+Though Gabriella had never seen Billy, she was inclined at the moment,
+in her mood of dissatisfaction with the universe, to sympathize with
+Mrs. Fowler's view of the matter. To her frugal mind, trained to economy
+of material, it seemed that Patty was altogether too much for a poor
+man--even though he could paint her in lean lines and violet shadows.
+
+Upstairs she found her trunks in her bedroom, and after she had unpacked
+her wedding-gown of white satin, removed the tissue paper stuffing from
+the sleeves, and shaken out the creases with gentle hands, she sat down
+and pondered deeply the problem of dressing for dinner. By removing the
+lace yoke, she might make the gown sufficiently indecorous for the
+fashion of the period, and her only evening dress, the white muslin she
+had worn to dances in Richmond, she reflected gloomily, would appear
+absurd in New York.
+
+"I wish I didn't look such a fright," she said aloud, as she ripped and
+sewed. Then, in a flash, her mind wandered from herself, and she
+thought: "I wonder why George didn't tell his mother that we are going
+to take an apartment? I wonder why he didn't tell her that mother is
+coming in June? When he comes I must ask him."
+
+Looking at the clock, she saw that it was after seven, and hurriedly
+taking the last few stitches, she laid the gown on the bed, bathed her
+face in cold water, and then, sitting down before her dressing-table,
+drew the pins from her hair. In some obscure way she felt herself a
+different person from the bride who had watched George so ecstatically
+at the station that morning. She could not tell how she had altered, and
+yet she felt perfectly conscious that an alteration had taken place in
+her soul--that she was not the same Gabriella--that life could never be
+again exactly as it had been before. Nothing and yet everything seemed
+to have happened to her in a day. Her face, gazing gravely back at her
+from the mirror, looked young and wistful, the face of one who, like a
+bird flying suddenly out of darkness against a lamp, is bewildered by
+the first shock of the light.
+
+When her hair was arranged in the simple way she had always worn it, she
+slipped her dress over her bare shoulders, and fastened it slowly--for
+Miss Polly had no patience with "back fastenings"--while she told
+herself again that George would not be satisfied. She knew that her gown
+was provincial, knew that she lacked the "dash" he admired in women; and
+from the first she had been mystified by a love which could, while still
+passionately desiring her, wish her different in so many ways. "I'd like
+him to be proud of me, but I suppose he never will be," she thought
+dejectedly, "and yet he fell in love with me just as I was, and he did
+not fall in love with any of the dashing women he knows," she added
+quickly, consoled by the reflection. "And of course in a few things I
+wish him different, too. I wish he wasn't so careless. He is so careless
+that I shall have to be twice as careful, I shall have to look after him
+all the time. Even to-night he has forgotten about the dinner, and he'll
+be obliged to dress in a hurry, which he hates."
+
+Glancing at the clock again, she saw that it was a quarter of eight, and
+still George had not come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE OLD SERPENT
+
+
+At five minutes of eight o'clock he came in, with a lighted cigar in his
+mouth. For the first few days after her marriage there had been a
+pleasant excitement in the scent of George's cigars in her bedroom. Now,
+however, habit had dulled the excitement, and the smell of tobacco gave
+her a headache.
+
+"Oh, George, you are late!" she exclaimed, sinking the lesser into the
+greater offence after the habit of wives. As if he had all night instead
+of five minutes before him in which to dress, he stood in the centre of
+the room, blandly looking her over.
+
+"You're all right," he said after a pause. "I met a fellow at the club I
+hadn't seen for a year. He had been hunting big game in Africa, and he
+was telling me about it. By Jove, that is life!"
+
+They had been married but a month; it was their first day at home, and
+he could linger at the club to talk of big game while she waited for
+him. Flushed, excited, he stood there on the white bearskin rug midway
+between the bed and the wood-fire, while she felt his charm stealing
+like a drug over her senses. Though she had begun to realize the
+thinness of his mental qualities, she was still as completely in the
+power of his physical charm as she had been on the day of her wedding.
+In the flickering light of the fire he appeared to diffuse the glamour
+of romance, of adventure; and she felt that this single day in New York
+had left a vital impression upon him. It was as if he had become
+suddenly more alive, more inexplicable in his simplicity; and, though
+she had grasped vaguely the fact that his personality was composed of
+innumerable reactions, she had never really understood before how
+entirely he was the creature of his environment. It was as if the very
+essence of his soul floated there, a variable and fluid quantity,
+forever changing form and colour beneath the shallow ripples of his
+personality. She had seen him in many moods, but never in this one. Did
+he possess a deeper subtlety than she had imagined or was it the
+sincerity of his nature that defied analysis?
+
+"Did you enjoy yourself?" she asked cheerfully. Tell me about it."
+
+"Oh, it was rather jolly," he replied, and she knew that this was as
+much as she should ever get out of him. Beyond a few stock phrases,
+words hardly existed for him at all, or existed only in foreign
+languages, for, having been educated abroad, he spoke French and German
+fluently, if without felicity. Already his inarticulateness was like an
+encumbering veil between them--a veil in which she struggled as
+helplessly as a moth in a net. And only a month ago she had believed
+that the very immensity of his nature rendered him dumb.
+
+"Then you had better hurry, dear. Dinner is at eight, and you have only
+a minute."
+
+"You go down and tell them not to wait. I was detained downtown, but it
+won't take me a second to dress."
+
+As he passed under the electric light by the mirror, she saw his face
+with exaggerated distinctness, as if it were held under a microscope,
+and a heaviness, which she had never noticed before, marred the edge of
+his profile. If he hadn't been George, would she have said that he
+looked stupid at the moment? For a flashing instant of illumination she
+saw him with a vision that was not her own, but a stranger's, with a
+pitiless clearness unsoftened by any passion. Then the clearness faded
+rapidly before an impulse of tenderness, and she told herself that he
+was merely handsome, gay, and careless, as he had been on their
+honeymoon. If he would only talk to her, she felt that he would be
+perfect.
+
+"Yes, I'm going. Come as soon as you can," she said; and catching up her
+satin train, she descended the oak staircase to the drawing-room, where
+a fire was burning and the lights were shaded in crimson.
+
+Twenty minutes later, seated at the round table, which was bright with
+chrysanthemums in tall silver vases, she looked with a feeling of
+resentment at George's empty place. Why was he so careless? Time had for
+him, she realized, as little meaning as words had. Then, in the midst of
+her disquietude, she caught the serene blue eyes of George's mother
+fixed upon her. With her young face, her red lips, and her superb
+shoulders rising out of the rich black lace of her gown, Mrs. Fowler
+looked almost beautiful. Had Patty not been present, with her loveliness
+like a summer's day, her mother would have seemed hardly more than a
+girl; but who could shine while Patty, beside that long, lean man with
+the gray imperial, smiled with lips that were like a scarlet flower in
+her face?
+
+There were only four guests, but these four, as Mrs. Fowler had said,
+"counted for something." The long, lean man beside Patty was one Colonel
+Buffington, a Virginia lawyer, who had wandered North in search of food
+in the barren years after the war. As his mind was active in a patient
+accumulative fashion, he had become in time a musty storehouse of war
+anecdotes, and achieving but moderate success in his law practice, his
+chief distinction, perhaps, was as a professional Southerner. Combining
+a genial charm of manner with as sterile an intellect as it is possible
+to attain, he was generally regarded as a perfect example of "the old
+school," and this picturesque reputation made him desirable as a guest
+at club dinners as well as at the larger gatherings of the various
+Southern societies. His conversation, which was entirely anecdotal,
+consisted of an elaborate endless chain of more or less historical
+"stories." Social movements and the development of civilization
+interested him as little as did art or science--for which he entertained
+a chronic suspicion due to the indiscretions of Darwin. Change of any
+kind was repugnant to his deeper instincts, and of all changes the ones
+relating to the habits of women appeared to him to interfere most
+unwarrantably with the Creator's original plan. For the rest he had the
+heart of a child, would strip the clothes from his back to give to a
+friend, or even to an enemy, and possessed an infallible gift for making
+a dinner successful.
+
+On Colonel Buffington's right sat Mrs. Hamilton, a very pretty, very
+sprightly widow, with her hair coiled into the fashionable Psyche knot,
+and the short puffs of her sleeves emphasizing the hour-glass perfection
+of her figure. Next to Mrs. Hamilton there was Billy King, who wore a
+white flower in his buttonhole and looked like a soldier out of
+uniform, and beyond Billy sat Mrs. Crowborough, whom he was trying
+despairingly to entertain. She, renowned and estimable woman, was
+planning in her mind what she should say at a board meeting of one of
+her pet charities on the morrow, a charity which, like all of her
+favourite ones, concerned itself with the management and spiritual
+elevation of girl orphans. Tall, raw-boned, strung with jet, Mrs.
+Crowborough, who had been married for her money, looked as sympathetic
+as a moral principle or an organized charity. Unfortunately, for she was
+rather heavy in company, Judge Crowborough was obliged by custom to
+bring her to dinner; and she came willingly, inspired less by
+sociability than by the virtuous instinct which animated her being. Mr.
+Fowler had taken her in to dinner, and while she lent an inert attention
+to Billy's jests, he talked across Gabriella to Judge Crowborough, who
+was eating his soup with the complete absorption of a man to whom the
+smallest of his appetities is sacred. It was a grievance of Mrs.
+Fowler's that her husband would never, as she said, "pay any attention
+to women," and in order to feel assured of even so much as a cheerful
+noise at his end of the table, she was obliged to place within hearing
+distance of him somebody who could talk fluently, if not eloquently, of
+the stock market.
+
+To Gabriella's surprise, her father-in-law, who had appeared inert and
+listless at breakfast, became, in the stimulating presence of the judge,
+not only awake, but mildly animated. She had felt before the charm in
+his scholarly face, with its look of detached spirituality so strangely
+out of keeping with the calling he pursued; and she recognized now the
+quality of controlled force which had enabled him to hold his own in
+the financial whirlpool of his country. Had the girl known more of life,
+she would have understood that in the American business world there were
+hundreds of such men winning their way and leaving their mark at that
+moment of history--men whose natures were redeemed from grossness by the
+peculiar idealism they infused into their material battles. Of
+Scotch-Irish inheritance, the direct descendant of one Gregory
+Truesdale, who had died a martyr for Presbyterianism, Archibald Fowler
+was inspired by something of the austere devotion which had fortified
+his religious ancestor. Since his college days his private life had been
+irreproachable. Though he was a stronger character than his wife, he
+regarded her with almost superstitious reverence, and made no decision
+above Wall Street without consulting her. His heart, and as much of his
+time as he could spare from business, were hers, and she made the most
+of them. Women, as women, did not attract him, and he avoided them
+except at his own table, where custom constrained him to be polite.
+After a few courteous words to Mrs. Crowborough, he had turned with
+relief to her husband.
+
+"You've got a bright chap in your office, Stanley," he said; "that
+fellow Latham. I was talking to him this morning. He's from Colorado,
+isn't he?"
+
+"Oh, yes, they're all from the West now," responded the judge--he had
+sat on the bench in his youth. "Ten years ago the bright ones were from
+the South, but you Southerners are outstripped to-day, and it's the men
+from the West who are doing it. There's a fundamental reason there, I
+suppose, if you go deep enough," he added, fingering the ends of his
+short gray moustache while he kept an eye on his champagne glass.
+"We've done with mere classifying and imitation, and we're waiting for a
+fresh explosion of raw energy. Now for pure constructive imagination the
+North and South don't hold a candle--they simply don't hold a candle--to
+the West. Mark my words, in twenty-five years there'll hardly be a big
+railroad man in the country who wasn't born in sight of the Rockies."
+Unlike Mr. Fowler, whose mind ran in a groove leading directly to
+business, the judge had a natural bent toward generalization, and when
+dining, preferred to discuss impersonal topics. He was a tall, florid
+man with an immense paunch flattened by artificial devices, and a
+vitality so excessive that it overflowed in numberless directions--in
+his hearty animal appetites, in his love of sports, in his delight in
+the theatre and literature, particularly in novels of the sentimental
+and romantic school, in his fondness for the lighter operas, and in his
+irrepressible admiration for pretty women. His face, large, ruddy, with
+a hooked nose, where the red was thickly veined with purple, and
+protruding lips over square yellow teeth that gripped like the teeth of
+a bulldog, aroused in Gabriella a quick repulsion which only the genial
+humour of his smile overcame. That he should have married his wife for
+her money was less amazing to the girl than that his wife should have
+married him for any reason whatsoever. Only a moral principle or a
+charitable institution, she felt, could have endured him and survived.
+But in spite of his repulsiveness he had evidently experienced the
+natural activities of humanity. He had taken a wife; he had begotten
+children; he had judged other men; he had dug into the bowels of the
+earth for mines, and had built railroads on its surface; he had made
+grass grow in deserts and had turned waste places into populous cities;
+he had read romances and heard music; he had attained a social position
+securely founded upon millions of dollars--and all these things he had
+achieved through his unconquerable colossal vitality. "I wonder why they
+put him by me," thought Gabriella. "I shall never get on with him."
+
+Then he turned to her and said bluntly, between two mouthfuls of
+lobster: "So you're George's wife! Handsome chap George, but he hasn't
+much head for business. He lacks the grip of the old man. Where's he
+to-night?"
+
+"He got home so late that he wasn't ready for dinner. He'll be down in a
+minute."
+
+"It's a bad habit. He oughtn't to be late. Now, I haven't been late for
+dinner for twenty years."
+
+"I'm afraid he doesn't pay much attention to time. I'll try to change
+him."
+
+"You won't. No woman alive ever changed a man's habits. All you can do
+is to hide them."
+
+That his blunt manner was an affectation, she was quick to discern.
+While he talked to her, he looked at her knowingly with his light fishy
+eyes, and by his look and his tone he seemed to establish an immediate
+intimacy between them--as if he and she were speaking a language which
+was foreign to the rest of the table. He appeared to be kind, she
+thought, and on his side he was thinking that she was a nice girl, with
+an attractive face and remarkable eyes. On the whole, he preferred brown
+eyes, though his wife's were the colour of slate. "Why the deuce did she
+marry that fool?" he questioned impatiently.
+
+Across the table Billy King was working hopelessly but valiantly to
+engage Mrs. Crowborough's attention. What a splendid figure he had, and
+how clean and fine was the modelling of his features! He was just the
+man a girl like Patty would fall in love with, and Gabriella no longer
+felt that. Patty's beauty was wasted. Once or twice she caught fleeting
+glances passing between them, and these glances, so winged with
+happiness, spoke unutterable and ecstatic things.
+
+A hush dropped suddenly on the table, and in this hush she heard the
+voice of Colonel Buffington telling a story in dialect. It was an
+immemorial anecdote of Cousin Jimmy's--she had heard him tell it a dozen
+times--and while she listened, it made her feel comfortably at home.
+
+"'Uncle Amos,' I said to him, 'we've been together thirty years, but
+we've got to part. You're a drunkard and a thief and a worthless darky
+all round, and you've lived on my place ever since the war without doing
+a lick of work for your keep. I've stood it as long as I can, but
+there's an end to human endurance. Yes, Amos, the time has come for us
+to part.'
+
+"Hi! Marse Beverly,' said the old rascal, 'whar you gwine?"
+
+"Capital!" ejaculated the judge softly. "Capital!" And he added for
+Gabriella's ear: "Buffington tells the best negro stories of any man I
+know. Ought to have heard him at the club the other night."
+
+Gabriella did not answer; Cousin Jimmy's story had made her think of
+Cousin Jimmy, with his soft heart and his dark shining eyes like the
+eyes of a good and gentle dog. Then she thought of her mother, and
+reminded herself that she must ask George when they were to begin the
+hunt for an apartment. He had said they were very hard to find when you
+wanted them.
+
+Another hush fell, and Colonel Buffington was just beginning a second
+story--one of Uncle Meriweather's this time--when George came in from
+the drawing-room, and after a murmured apology, took his seat between
+Patty and Mrs. Hamilton.
+
+"That's a handsome boy," said the judge in a husky whisper to Gabriella,
+"but he hasn't much to say for himself, has he?"
+
+His manner of playful intimacy conveyed the impression that the secret
+understanding between them did not include Gabriella's husband. George
+was an outsider, but this hideous old man, with his curious repelling
+suggestion of over-ripeness, as of fruit that is beginning to rot at the
+core, was the dominant personality in her mind at the moment. She
+wondered if he knew how repulsive he was, and while she wondered, the
+judge, unaware of his tragic plight, went on eating lobster with
+unimpaired relish. His importance, founded upon a more substantial basis
+than mere personal attraction, had risen superior not only to morality,
+but to the outward failings of the flesh. Had he been twice as
+repulsive, she realized that his millions would have commanded a respect
+denied to both beauty and virtue.
+
+"I wonder how any woman can stand him," mused Gabriella. Then, glancing
+across the table at Mrs. Crowborough, she realized something of the
+amazing insensibility of the more ethereal sex. No man, not even in the
+last extremity, could have loved a woman as ugly as Judge Crowborough
+was. The roughest man would have had sufficient esthetic sense to have
+been shocked into revolt; yet a woman, a refined and intelligent woman,
+had married the judge and survived it. She appeared now, not only
+expressionless and unrevolted, but filled with a healthy zest for social
+reforms and the spiritual welfare of girl orphans.
+
+"Well, I've learned something of life to-night," thought Gabriella while
+she watched her.
+
+Later in the evening, when she passed into the drawing-room, with Mrs.
+Crowborough, bleak, unbending, and trailing her chains of jet, she
+comforted herself again with the reflection that what she was "seeing"
+might not be particularly exciting, "but it was life."
+
+On a short, hard sofa near the fire, beside Fatty, who bloomed like a
+white rose under the red-shaded light, she listened to Mrs. Fowler's
+unflagging efforts to "get on" with the judge's wife. Never had the
+dauntless little woman revealed more surprising resourcefulness, never
+had she talked so vivaciously, never had she appeared so relentlessly
+pleasant. It was as if she said in the face of Mrs. Crowborough's
+insensibility, which was the insensibility not of mind, but of inanimate
+matter, "Whatever you do, you can't keep me from being sweet." And in
+this strained sweetness there was something touching, something wistful,
+a hint of inner weariness which showed now and then beneath the restless
+vivacity.
+
+"Isn't it funny," said Patty suddenly, "how much mamma cares about
+things that don't matter at all? You wouldn't believe it to look at her,
+but she is in her heart the most worldly one of the family. Father
+wouldn't give a tallow candle for anything that isn't real."
+
+A log broke in the centre, and fell, scattering a shower of golden
+embers over the hearth. Rising quickly, with one of her sprightly
+movements, Mrs. Fowler reached for a pair of small brass tongs and
+pushed the broken log back on the andirons. Then she threw some fresh
+wood on the flames, and resumed her seat with an animated gesture as if
+the incident had enlivened her.
+
+"Now they are talking about the everlasting Pletheridges," whispered
+Patty. "I never understand how mother can take so much interest in those
+people just because they are rich."
+
+But to Gabriella it was more inconceivable still that her mother-in-law,
+with the bluest blood of Virginia in her veins, should regard with such
+artless reverence the social activities of the granddaughter of a
+tavern-keeper. In her native State an impoverished branch of Mrs.
+Fowler's family still lived on land which, tradition said, had been
+granted one of her ancestors by Charles the Second in recognition of
+distinguished services to that dubious monarch; yet she could long
+enviously for a closer acquaintance with the plutocratic descendant of
+an Irish tavern-keeper--an honest man, doubtless, who had laid the
+foundations of his fortune in a string of halfway houses stretching from
+New York to Chicago.
+
+"Yes, I dined with Mrs. Pletheridge once," she was saying in the tone in
+which her royalist ancestor might have acknowledged a command from his
+King.
+
+"It always makes me angry, I can't help it," pursued Patty. "If dear
+mamma had only some other weakness--cards or wine or clothes or anything
+else. It's queer, with all her pride, how little social backbone she
+has. Now to hear her talk, you would imagine that that vulgar snob,
+whose father kept hotels and married one of his chambermaids, had
+conferred an honour by inviting her to dinner. And the funniest part is
+that, for all her good breeding, and her family portraits, and her
+titled ancestors, mother hasn't half so much respect for the genuine New
+Yorkers--I mean the New Yorkers whose names really mean something--as
+she has for these mushroom plutocrats. She had set her heart on George
+marrying one of them, you know, but it's a jolly good thing he didn't."
+
+"That's the girl he told me about," said Gabriella. "Was he ever
+interested in her?"
+
+"Not for a minute. We're awfully contrary about our love affairs. We
+will marry for love--even mother did though she may have forgotten it.
+We never marry the people--" She clipped off the sentence, but Gabriella
+caught it up with a laugh:
+
+"I know," she said gaily, "you never marry the people your family pick
+out for you."
+
+"Well, of course, Billy went dreadfully hard with them--at least with
+mother. She wanted the Duke of Somewhere so very badly. But it was Billy
+or nobody for me. I'd have married Billy," she added while her beautiful
+face grew stern, "if I'd had to walk all the way across the world to
+him."
+
+"He looks as if he were worth it," admitted Gabriella.
+
+"He is, but that probably wasn't my reason for marrying him. One never
+knows why one marries, I suppose, unless one marries for money and then
+it is so beautifully simple. Now, you and George don't seem a bit alike,
+but it all happened on the spur of the moment, didn't it?"
+
+"It always seems that way when one looks back, doesn't it?" asked
+Gabriella. "But what I can't understand"--she brought it out with a
+frown--"is why marriage doesn't change one. I used to think I'd be
+different, but I'm not. And even love seems to leave people wanting
+everything else just as badly. Your mother has had a perfect love--she
+told me so--and yet it hasn't kept her from wanting all the other things
+in life, has it? I wish I could work it out," she finished, a little
+sadly, for she was thinking of her mother's cry on the night of Jane's
+attack: "I am tempted to hope Gabriella will never marry. The Carrs all
+marry so badly!" Why had those words come back to her to-night? She had
+not remembered them for months, she had even forgotten that she had
+heard them, and now they floated to her as clearly as if they had been
+spoken aloud.
+
+In a little while Billy came in, and when, after a few moments of
+spasmodic affability, Mrs. Crowborough rose and pleaded an early board
+meeting on the morrow, Gabriella watched Patty wrap her honey-coloured
+head in a white scarf and then stand, waiting for a cab, in the doorway.
+Happiness, with so many people an invisible attribute, encircled Patty
+like a garment of light. It crowned her white brow under the glory of
+her hair; it shone in her eyes; it rippled in her smile; it lingered in
+a beam of sunshine on her lips. With her arm in Billy's she looked back
+laughing from the steps, and it seemed to Gabriella that all the
+brightness of life was going with them into the darkness. Beside the
+curbstone an old cab horse, dazzled by the light from the door, turned
+his head slowly toward them; and the look in his eyes, wistful,
+questioning, expectant, seemed to say, "This is not life, but a
+miracle." And from his box the red-cheeked, wheezy Irish driver gazed
+down on Patty with the same wistfulness, the same questioning, the same
+expectancy.
+
+"I never see Patty go off in a cab that I don't feel she has thrown
+herself away," observed Mrs. Fowler, yawning, while she turned to the
+staircase. "Archibald, I hope you had a really good time with the judge.
+I must say it is like ploughing to talk to his wife."
+
+Upstairs in her room a little later Gabriella said to George: "Patty was
+telling me about the girl your mother wanted you to marry."
+
+He was pouring out a glass of water, and, absorbed in the act, he merely
+grunted for answer. It was his disagreeable habit to grunt when grunting
+saved effort.
+
+"I wish you'd talk to me, George. It is so annoying to be grunted at."
+
+"Well, what do you want?" he replied amiably enough. "Patty is a regular
+sieve, you know. Never tell her a secret."
+
+"Did you ever like that girl--really?"
+
+"The girl mother had in mind?" Having emptied the glass, he returned it
+to the tray and came over to her. "Yes, but if you want the truth, I
+preferred the girl in the chorus--the one the old lady got in a blue
+funk about, you know. She's still there, the last but one from the end,
+in the Golden Slipper. I'll take you to see it some night."
+
+"Men are strange," observed Gabriella, with philosophic detachment. "Now
+I couldn't feel the slightest interest in a man in comic opera. Did she
+really attract you?"
+
+"Um--humph," he was grunting again.
+
+"Wasn't she terribly common?"
+
+"Um--humph."
+
+"Wasn't she vulgar?"
+
+"Rather. They all are."
+
+"And fast?"
+
+"Regular streak of lightning."
+
+Then it was that Gabriella arrived at an understanding of masculine
+nature. "You never can tell what men will like," she concluded.
+
+While she spoke he winked at her from the mirror into which he was
+looking--mirrors always fascinated George and he could never keep away
+from them--and there was in his face the whimsical and appealing
+naughtiness of a child. Suddenly Gabriella felt that as far as character
+and experience counted, she was immeasurably older than George. Her
+superior common sense made her feel almost middle-aged when he was in
+one of his boyish moods. At the age of nine she had not been so utterly
+irresponsible as George was at twenty-six; as an infant in arms she had
+probably regarded the universe with a profounder philosophy. Though of
+course George was charming, he was without any sense of the deeper
+purpose of life. Like a child he must have what he wanted, and like a
+child he sulked when he was thwarted and grew angelic when his wishes
+were gratified. A single day had taught her that his father could not
+depend on him in business, that his mother could not trust him even to
+remember a dinner engagement. Gabriella loved him, she had chosen him,
+she told herself now, and she meant to abide by her choice; but she was
+not blind, she was not a fool, and she was deficient in the kind of
+loyalty which obliges one to lie even in the sanctity of one's own mind.
+She would be true to him, but she would be true with her eyes open, not
+shut.
+
+"George," she said presently, while she loosened her hair, "your father
+told me you didn't stay more than an hour in the office." The question,
+"What were you doing?" rose to her lips, but she strangled the words
+before they escaped her. Her mind was quick to grasp facts, and she had
+learned already something of a man's instinctive dislike to being made
+to give an account of himself.
+
+"You've been hearing too much gossip to-night," he rejoined gaily. "Take
+care what you listen to."
+
+"Don't joke, dear. I wish you would tell me things."
+
+"There isn't anything to tell, is there?"
+
+"Is your father very rich?"
+
+"Not very. Did you think you were marrying a millionaire?"
+
+"I never thought about it, but everybody at home thinks he has a great
+deal of money, and yet your mother talks as if she were poor."
+
+"Well, he made a pile of money in a big deal about ten years ago, and
+the papers had a lot about it. After that he lost it, or most of it, and
+the papers didn't tell. The fact is, he's always either making or
+losing, and now he's losing. That's why they wanted me to put off our
+marriage."
+
+"They wanted you to put it off?"
+
+"Mother did--the old man never interferes. She had got into her head,
+you see, that the only way for me to make a living was to marry one, so
+it was a little while before she could get used to the idea that I was
+going to marry because I wanted to, not because my family wanted me to.
+She was a brick though when she found out I was in earnest. Mother is
+true blue when you know how to take her."
+
+"But you never told me."
+
+"You bet I didn't. If I had, as likely as not, you would be Gabriella
+Mary Carr at this minute."
+
+Drawing gently out of his grasp, which had grown possessive, she stood
+looking at him with a smile in which tenderness and irony mingled; and
+the tenderness was her own, while the irony seemed to belong to the
+vision of an impersonal spectator of life. The smile fascinated him. He
+could not withdraw his gaze from it, and yet it had the disturbing
+effect of placing her at an emotional distance.
+
+"Your mother is very good to me," she said, "but I feel somehow as if I
+had taken an unfair advantage of her. And you hadn't even told her," she
+added, "that we are going to take an apartment in June."
+
+"Oh, that's all right--there's plenty of time," he responded irritably.
+"Only you mustn't make mountains out of molehills."
+
+Then, because she dreaded his anger, she gave up her point as she had
+given up many before. He was irresponsible, but he was hers and she
+loved him.
+
+"I am so sleepy," she said, stifling a yawn, "that I feel as if I could
+cry."
+
+Marriage, at the end of a month, had already disciplined the fearless
+directness of Gabriella. She had learned not to answer back when she
+knew she was right; she had learned to appear sweet when her inner
+spirit demanded a severe exterior; she had learned to hold her tongue
+when a veritable torrent of words rose to her lips. And these lessons,
+which George's temper and her own reason had taught her, remained with
+her in the future, long after she had forgotten George and the severity
+of her schooling.
+
+There were many things for her to learn, and the lessons of that first
+day and night stretched through the winter and well into the beginning
+of spring. Accompanying Mrs. Fowler on her busy rounds, she discovered
+that here also, as in the house in Hill Street, the chief end of life
+was to keep up an appearance; here also the supreme effort, the best
+energies, were devoted to a sham--to a thing which had no actual
+existence. Though Mrs. Fowler was rich beside Mrs. Carr, Gabriella soon
+found out that she was not nearly so rich as her neighbours were, not
+nearly so rich as her position in society exacted that she should be.
+She was still not rich enough to be spared the sordid, nerve-racking
+effort to make two ends meet without a visible break. Her small
+economies, to Gabriella's surprise, were as rigid as Mrs. Carr's; and
+though she lived in surroundings which appeared luxurious to the girl,
+there was almost as little ready money to spend as there had been in
+Mrs. Carr's household. Bills were made recklessly, and dinner parties
+were given at regular intervals; for Mrs. Fowler, who denied herself a
+hundred small comforts of living, who gave up cream in her coffee and
+bought her butter from a grocer below Washington Square, took quite as a
+matter of course the fact that she must, as she put it, "pay off social
+scores." Though they ate the simplest food in the market for six days of
+the week, on the seventh, hothouse flowers bloomed profusely in the
+lower rooms and champagne flowed abundantly into the delicate Venetian
+glasses on the round table. To be sure, Mrs. Fowler's gown may have been
+two seasons old, but it was covered with rare laces, which she had
+picked up during her summers abroad; and her pearls--the string was
+short, but really good, for she had matched it in Paris--shone, rich
+and costly, around her still beautiful neck. After one of these dinners
+the family lived on scraps and looked at fading flowers for days, while
+Mrs. Fowler, with the air of one who has done her duty, sat upstairs
+before the little French writing-desk in her room, and patiently added
+accounts from morning till night. A strained look would come into her
+plump, firm face, three little wrinkles would appear between her
+eyebrows, and her blue eyes, circled by faint shadows, would grow dark
+and anxious. Then, when at last the accounts were finished and the
+unpaid bills laid away in a pigeonhole, she would remark with animation:
+
+"I don't see how on earth I am ever to pay all these bills," and, after
+changing her dress, set out to bring her butcher or her grocer to
+reason. On one of these days she took Gabriella (they went in the stage
+because she had given up her carriage) on a hunt for bargains in
+underwear, and, to the girl's astonishment, her mother-in-law, who
+presented so opulent an appearance on the surface, purchased for herself
+a supply of cheap and badly made chemises and nightgowns. As she grew to
+know Mrs. Fowler better, she found that the expenditures of that
+redoubtable woman, in spite of her naturally delicate tastes, were
+governed by one of the most elementary principles of economy. Through
+long habit she had acquired a perception as unerring as instinct, and
+this perception enabled her to tell exactly where extravagance was
+useful and where it failed in its effect. She had learned to perfection
+never to spend money on things that did not show a result. An appearance
+was what she strove for, and one's chemises and nightgowns, however
+exquisite in themselves, could not very well contribute to one's
+external appearance. "Of course I like good underclothes," she remarked
+cheerfully to her daughter-in-law, "but, after all, nobody sees them."
+
+This was so different from the poverty-stricken point of view of
+Gabriella's childhood, that the girl puzzled over it afterwards when she
+sat in her corner of the stage. Mrs. Carr had kept up an appearance,
+too, she reflected, but, like the old maids on the floor above, she had
+kept it up even to herself. Perhaps the difference lay in the immense
+gulf which divided the appearance of Hill Street from the appearance of
+the East Fifties. Mrs. Fowler was obliged by the public opinion she
+obeyed to appear affluent, while Mrs. Carr was merely constrained not to
+appear destitute. On the whole Gabriella felt that she preferred the
+safe middle distance between the two exacting standards of living.
+
+But, though she might disapprove of her mother-in-law's philosophy,
+there was no question about her fervent admiration for her disposition.
+It was Mrs. Fowler's habit to appear "sweet," and never once did
+Gabriella see her lose her temper, never once, no matter how hard the
+day or how exasperating the accounts, did she show so much as a passing
+hint of irritability. Her temper was so angelic that it was the more
+surprising George should not have inherited a trace of it.
+
+If George had not inherited his mother's nature, he revealed, as time
+went on, even less resemblance to the perfect reasonableness of his
+father's temperament. Ever since her first day in the house, Gabriella
+had been drawn to her father-in-law with an affection which his wife,
+for all her preoccupied kindness, had not inspired. She respected him
+for his calm strength, against which the boisterous moods of George
+reacted as harmlessly as the whims of a child, and she liked him for his
+unfailing courtesy, for his patience, for his gentleness, which made her
+feel that he was, in spite of the material nature of his occupation, the
+only member of the household who possessed even a glimmer of
+spirituality. All day long, and the greater part of the night, he
+thought about money, and yet he had escaped the spiritual corruption
+which the ceaseless pursuit of wealth had produced in the other rich men
+whom Gabriella met in his house. It was as if some subtle alchemy in his
+soul had transmuted the baser qualities into the pure gold of character;
+and sometimes the girl wondered if the fact that he worked not for
+himself but for others had preserved him from the grosser contamination
+of money. For he seemed to think of himself so little, that after three
+months in his house, Gabriella was still ignorant of his interests apart
+from his work, except, of course, his absorbing interest in the morning
+papers. From the time he got up at seven o'clock until he went to bed
+punctually on the stroke of ten, he appeared to order his life with the
+single purpose of giving as little trouble as was compatible with living
+at all. His tastes were the simplest; he drank only boiled water; he ate
+two eggs and a roll with his coffee at breakfast; he spent hardly a
+third as much on his clothes as George spent; and beyond an occasional
+visit to his club in the evening, he seemed to have absolutely no
+recreation. His life was in the stock market, and it was a life of
+almost monastic simplicity and self-sacrifice. If he had any pleasure,
+except the pleasure of providing his wife with the money for her dinner
+parties, which bored him excruciatingly, Gabriella had never discovered
+it. "He asks so little for himself that it is pathetic," she remarked
+to George one night, when Mr. Fowler had gone upstairs, carrying the
+evening papers to bed with him.
+
+"Oh, well, he gets what he asks for," retorted George indifferently,
+"and that's more than the rest of us can say."
+
+George was in a bad humour; he had been in a bad humour for weeks; and
+for this reason Gabriella had put off from day to day telling him that
+she expected a child in the autumn. All her efforts to soothe had merely
+exasperated him; and there were days when her presence worked him into a
+fit of nervous irritability. After four months of marriage prolonged
+boredom had replaced the passionate tenderness of their honeymoon. Why
+this should be so she was too well-balanced emotionally to understand.
+She saw only the outward evidences of change, of gradual
+disillusionment; and though at first she wept a little while she
+wondered, she ended by drying her tears and attributing his casual
+indifference and his explosive violence alike to some obscure disturbing
+condition of health. Every evening, except when there were guests, he
+spent at his club; he came to bed late, and his waking hour was filled
+with complaint about the number and the size of his bills. He treated
+these bills as if they had been gratuitous insults, as if they had
+leaped, without reason for being, out of a malign world to assail him.
+As yet Gabriella had bought nothing; and she dreaded the time when her
+clothes would wear out beyond the hope of repairing, and she should be
+obliged to add another bill to the growing pile under the silver paper
+weight on the little white and gold desk.
+
+But in the last few weeks even this anxiety had faded from her mind,
+for the miracle of life which stirred in her body had diffused its
+golden halo around every trivial incident of her existence. After days
+of physical wretchedness, which she had hidden from George, she sat one
+evening, utterly at peace, in front of the fire in the room which had
+been Patty's before her marriage. It was past midnight, and she was
+waiting for George to come home because she felt that she could not
+sleep until she had told him. In the morning he had been unusually
+gentle, and as he left the house, she had said to herself a little
+sternly that he must know about the child before the day was over. A
+secret consultation with her mother-in-law had strengthened her
+resolution. "Don't keep it from him another day, Gabriella," Mrs. Fowler
+had urged. "It will make such a difference. I shall never forget
+Archibald's joy when I told him George was coming. Men are like that
+about children, you know."
+
+"Yes, I'll tell him to-night," Gabriella had answered; and sitting now
+in the rocking-chair by the fire, she began to wonder if George would be
+exactly like other men about children.
+
+The house was very still, but even in its stillness it exhaled the
+nervous apprehension which she felt to be its living character--as if
+George's parents, sleeping two doors away, had dropped their guard for
+the night, and allowed their anxious thoughts the freedom of the halls
+until daybreak. And these thoughts, which had become like invisible
+presences to the girl, wandered up and down the dim staircase, where the
+lowered lights awaited George's return, invaded the drawing-room, filled
+with stuffy red velvet chairs, so like crouching human beings in the
+darkness, and even thronged about her threshold, ready to spring inside
+at the instant when George should open the door. While her fire burned
+brightly on the andirons, and rosy shadows danced on the white rug
+beside her bed, on the lace coverlet turned back for the night, on the
+deep pillows with their azure lining showing through the delicate linen
+of the slips, on her simple nightdress, in which the buttonholes were so
+beautifully worked by her mother,--while she looked at these things it
+was easy for her to shut out the apprehensions of yesterday. But these
+apprehensions would come with George and they would not go until George
+left her again. The house with its heavy late-Victorian furniture, its
+velvet carpets which muffled footsteps, its thick curtains which hid
+doorways, its red walls, its bevelled mirrors, its substantial and
+costly ornaments, its solid paintings in solid frames--the house and all
+that it contained diffused for Gabriella an inescapable atmosphere, and
+this atmosphere was like the one in which she had waited expectantly in
+her childhood for the roof to be sold over her head. Now, as then, she
+waited for something to happen, and this something was a fact of dread,
+a shape of terror, which must be ignored as long as its impending
+presence was not directly before one's eyes. But with the look she was
+familiar, for she had seen it in her mother's face as far back as she
+could remember. It was associated in her mind with the need of money,
+with scant food, with scant fires, with a brooding and sinister hush in
+the house. With the knowledge of these things in her mind how could she
+hope that George would be glad of the child that was coming to them in
+the autumn?
+
+And yet to Mrs. Fowler the news had appeared to bring no additional
+anxiety. She had seemed pleased rather than otherwise, mildly
+interested, animatedly sympathetic.
+
+"I am afraid it will be very expensive," Gabriella had reminded her a
+little timidly, feeling frankly apologetic when she thought of all the
+trouble she must bring to the harassed and over-burdened little woman.
+
+But into Mrs. Fowler's face there had come the look with which she was
+accustomed to receive the suggestion that her dinner parties were an
+extravagance. That economy which she practised so rigidly, which was so
+elastic to cover little pleasures and the minor comforts of life, broke
+like a cobweb when she tried to stretch it over larger needs and
+desires. The severity of her self-denial was directed entirely against
+the trivial and the unessential. With regard to the indispensable
+materials for happiness, she seemed to feel that she possessed an
+unquestionable right to enjoy them at any cost; and she had reassured
+Gabriella with an optimism which appeared perfectly genuine. After
+talking to her the girl had felt that she might allow herself to be
+happy if only George would change back into his old way.
+
+Four months ago, at the beginning of her marriage, she had told herself
+that she needed only the daily intimacy of life to make her understand
+him. Now, after living with him, she felt that she was growing to
+understand him less every hour--that the relation which ought to have
+brought them spiritually closer, had ended by thrusting them to an
+incalculable distance from each other. Of the nervous reactions which he
+had suffered she knew nothing. All she saw clearly was that the widening
+breach between them would soon become impassable unless it could be
+filled by their new love for the child. The power to hold him must slip
+from her hands to the child's, and she was more than ready, she was even
+eager, to relinquish it. In the last few months her feeling for George
+had altered, and, though she was hardly conscious of the change in
+herself, her love for him had become less passionate and more maternal.
+The tenderness was there, but the yearning, the delight in his mere
+physical presence was gone. Like every other emotion that she had felt
+in the past, her love for her husband had become absorbed in the
+passion, the longing, the delight with which she enfolded the thought of
+her child.
+
+"I wonder if mother felt like this about me," she would say to herself,
+and the wonder was like a cord drawing her back to her mother and to her
+own babyhood. Then George would become strangely vague, strangely remote
+in her thoughts; and her mother would seem nearer to her than everything
+except the child under her heart.
+
+But since her talk with Mrs. Fowler, who had shown her photographs of
+George as a baby, some in long clothes, some in his first short frock,
+with a woolly lamb in his hands, some in a velvet suit, with his
+lustrous curls falling over a lace collar, Gabriella had felt that she
+possessed a new understanding of her husband and of the imperative needs
+of his nature. The child quality in him, the eternal boy that he
+betrayed sometimes by accident, appeared to her now to be the salient
+attribute of his character. After all, because of this quality, which
+was at once his charm and his weakness, she could not judge him as
+harshly as she might judge another man, she could not demand of him the
+gravity and the restraint of his father, who had never been young.
+
+"I ought not to have kept it from him. His mother is right. She
+understands him better than I do," she thought, as she looked at the
+clock. "If I had told him sooner he might be with me now."
+
+Through the muffled stillness of the house the sound of the opening
+front door stole up to her, and she heard George come in and stop for a
+minute to take off his hat and coat in the lower hail. Then she heard
+his footsteps move to the staircase; and while she listened she had a
+curious intuitive sense that it was not George at all, but a stranger
+who was coming to her, and that this stranger walked like a very old
+man. She heard him reach the bend in the stairs, and without stopping to
+put out the light, pass on to her door, which was the first on the
+landing. As he reached the top of the stairs, he stumbled once; then she
+heard his hand on the knob and a fumbling sound as if the knob would not
+turn. The door seemed to take an eternity to open, and while she sprang
+up with the clutch of terror at her heart, she felt again the sharp,
+agonizing premonition that a stranger was approaching her.
+
+"George!" she called in a strangled voice, and waited, standing, for him
+to enter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MOTHERHOOD
+
+
+At noon the next day Mrs. Fowler came into Gabriella's room and found
+her sewing beside the window which looked on a gray expanse of sky and
+street, where a few snowflakes were falling.
+
+"Did you tell him, dear?" she asked, arranging a handful of red roses in
+a little alabaster vase on the desk.
+
+No, Gabriella had not told him. She felt now that she should never be
+able to tell him, but all she said was:
+
+"I didn't get a chance. How lovely those roses are."
+
+Mrs. Fowler set the vase where the gray light fell on it, and then
+turning with empty hands from the desk, asked gently:
+
+"Aren't you making a mistake, dear?" Her movements were like those of a
+character in a play who is made to fill in an awkward pause with some
+mechanical action.
+
+"I couldn't tell him last night," replied Gabriella; "he was sick all
+night."
+
+She was very pale, even her lips had lost their rich colour, and her
+eyes had a drawn and heavy look as if she had not slept. Without looking
+at her mother-in-law, she went on with her sewing, working buttonholes
+of exquisite fineness in a small white garment. In her lap there was a
+little wicker basket filled with spools of thread and odd bits of lace
+and cambric; and every now and then she stopped her work and gazed
+thoughtfully down on it as if she were trying to decide how she might
+use the jumble of scraps that it contained.
+
+"Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler suddenly, after she had watched her a
+moment, "did anything happen last night?"
+
+"Happen? No, what could have happened?"
+
+"At what time did George come in?"
+
+"About one o'clock. I sat up for him."
+
+"Was--was anything the matter with him? Was he in any way different?"
+
+"He was sick. He was sick all night." A look of disgust crossed her face
+while she stopped to wipe away a drop of blood from her finger. "I don't
+remember pricking my finger since I was a child," she remarked.
+
+"You are keeping something from me," said Mrs. Fowler; and sitting down
+in the small chair by the desk, she leaned her elbow, in her full sleeve
+of violet cashmere, on the edge of the blotting-pad. She was wearing a
+morning gown made, as all her house gowns were made, after the princess
+style, and Gabriella could see the tight expanse of her bosom rising and
+falling under a garniture of purple and silver passementerie. Her hair,
+fresh from the crimping pins, rose in stiff ridges from her forehead,
+and her bright red lips were so badly chapped from cold that they
+cracked a little when she smiled. She looked as hard as granite though
+in reality her heart was breaking with pity.
+
+"I want to help you," she said, "and I can't if you keep things back."
+
+"I told you George was sick. I was up all night with him." Again a look
+of disgust, which she could not control, flickered and died in her face.
+
+"But you oughtn't to have let him keep you awake. You need all the sleep
+you can get. When he comes in late he must sleep in the spare room
+across the hall."
+
+"His things are all in here and he would come in to get them; that would
+wake me."
+
+For a moment Mrs. Fowler hesitated while the struggling breath grew more
+irregular under the passementerie on her bosom. The ripe colour faded
+from her cheeks and her lips looked blue in the harsh light from the
+window.
+
+"I think I'd better speak to George," she said. "He is spoiled and he
+always thinks first of his own comfort. I suppose it's the way we
+brought him up--but when he understands, he will be more considerate."
+
+For the first time Gabriella laid down her sewing and, leaning forward
+in her chair, fixed her eyes, with their look of deep stillness, of
+wistful expectancy, on the face of her mother-in-law.
+
+"Would you mind telling me if George was ever--ever wild about women?"
+she asked, and though her voice was very low and quiet, her words seemed
+to echo loudly through the hushed suspense in her brain. It was as if
+every piece of furniture, every vacant wall, every picture, and every
+pane of glass, repeated the sound.
+
+The pleasant smile on Mrs. Fowler's lips became suddenly painful. As if
+she were suffering a physical hurt, she put her handkerchief to her
+mouth while she answered:
+
+"He was once--but that was before he fell in love with you. We hoped
+that you would be able to steady him--that marriage would make him
+settle down."
+
+"Did he drink then?"
+
+"A little--not enough to make him show it. I never saw him really show
+it but once, and then he was dreadfully sick. Was--was he like that last
+night?"
+
+For a long minute, while she looked out of the window at the falling
+snowflakes, Gabriella did not reply. Then she spoke in a voice that was
+sternly accusing.
+
+"You ought to have told me. I ought to have known." Her own wild passion
+for George was forgotten. She felt only a sense of outrage, of wounded
+and stunned resentment, They had treated her as if she were a child or a
+fool. That she had been a fool she was not prepared to admit at the
+instant--and yet it was less than a year ago, that June night when she
+had watched George over the clove pinks while her heart melted with
+happiness. She had had her way, and she was already regretting her
+madness. "Is this what love comes to?" she asked herself bitterly as she
+watched the white flakes whirling out of the gray sky. "Is this what it
+all comes to in the end, or am I different from other women?"
+
+Moistening her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, Mrs. Fowler smiled
+bravely, though there were tears in her eyes. "Archibald wanted to, but
+I wouldn't let him," she replied; "I hoped that you would make
+everything different. He was so much in love with you. I thought you
+could do anything with him."
+
+Though her reasoning failed to convince Gabriella, it was sufficiently
+forcible to justify her in her own judgment, and with an easier
+conscience, she settled comfortably behind the impregnable defences of
+the maternal instinct. After all, she had only done what she believed
+to be best for her boy. She had not been selfish, she had not even been
+thoughtless, she had been merely a mother.
+
+"I wish you would tell me what really happened last night, Gabriella,"
+she said, and her tone showed that she had recovered her shaken
+confidence in the righteousness of her cause.
+
+"I can't tell you," answered Gabriella. "What good would it do? George
+was disgusting, that was all." She spoke sternly, for no lingering
+tenderness softened the judgment of her youth and her injured pride. How
+could she possibly have tenderness for a man who had tired of her in
+four months, who had become so lost to common decency that he could let
+her see him revoltingly drunk? And she had held her head so high, she
+had so despised Jane for her weakness and folly! At the moment she knew
+that she was helpless, but deep down within her she felt that this
+helplessness would not last--that the wings of her soul were still
+strong, still free, still untouched by the shame her body had suffered.
+With a single effort she could break the net of passion, and escape into
+the wonderful world which surrounded her. Like Jane, she had been a
+fool, but, unlike Jane, she would not stay a fool always.
+
+"You seem so hard, Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler. "Is it because you are
+young? Young people never make allowances."
+
+The taste of bitterness rose to Gabriella's lips.
+
+"I suppose I am hard," she answered, "and I am going to stay so. There
+is safety in hardness."
+
+Remembering Jane, remembering the hereditary weakness of the Carrs, who
+had all married badly, she told herself that in hardness lay her
+solitary refuge from despair. After all, it was better to be hard than
+to break.
+
+"You can't judge George quite as you would other men," began George's
+mother, and she was aware after a minute that the maternal instinct had
+in this instance led her to defeat.
+
+"I am not judging other men," replied George's wife coldly; "I am
+judging George." Against men as men she had never even thought of
+cherishing a grievance. All her life she had looked to some man as to
+the saviour of the family fortunes, and her vision was still true enough
+to perceive that, as a human being, Archibald Fowler was finer and
+bigger than his wife, that Billy was finer and bigger than Patty. She
+had found men less the servants of mere instinct than she had found
+women, less the passive and unresisting vehicles of the elemental
+impulses. Then, too, they were so seldom the victims of life, and there
+was in her nature a fierce contempt for a victim. She despised people
+who submitted to circumstances, who resigned themselves to necessity, as
+if resignation were a virtue instead of a vice.
+
+"Well, you must try not to worry, dear; worry is so bad for you. I am so
+sorry it happened. You won't mind my speaking to George, will you?"
+
+Gabriella shook her head. "I don't care what you say to him."
+
+"Do you feel able to come down to lunch?"
+
+"Oh, yes, perfectly. I am simply dying for a cup of tea, and afterwards
+I think I'll go out for a walk. One gets so stuffy and dull when one
+stays in the house."
+
+Her manner had changed as if by magic. In putting the thought of George
+out of her mind she seemed to have put aside her resentment and
+despondency.
+
+In the evening George came home, looking a little yellow, with a box of
+gardenias in his hand; but the scent of the flowers sickened Gabriella,
+and she put them out of the room while she dressed for dinner. The
+attention, instead of pleasing her, brought an ironic twist to her lips,
+though she thanked George quite as courteously as if he had been a
+stranger to her. At dinner when Mr. Fowler abruptly asked his son why he
+had not been to the office, she kept her eyes fixed on her plate, in
+which she seemed to see palely reflected the anxious pleasantness of her
+mother-in-law's smile. It hardly occurred to her to wonder where George
+had spent his day, though, when she met Mr. Fowler's kind and tired
+look, a pang shot through her heart. She was sorrier for George's father
+than she was for herself. He looked so lonely, yet so patient. He so
+obviously needed help, and no one appeared to notice it, not even his
+wife, who began planning a dinner party in the futile effort to come to
+George's assistance. It was by coming to George's assistance in every
+difficulty, Gabriella surmised, that his mother had made George what he
+was; and the girl saw in imagination an endless line of subterfuges, of
+pitiful excuses and feeble justifications, all hidden in the tortuous
+labyrinthine windings of the maternal instinct. She saw, with the
+relentless vision of a Hebrew prophet, the inevitable ruin of the love
+that does not submit to wisdom as its law.
+
+More than seven months afterwards, when she lay in her room with her
+child in the crook of her arm, she prayed passionately that some supreme
+Power would grant her the strength not of emotion, but of reason. All
+her life she had suffered from an unrestrained indulgence of the
+virtues--from love running to waste through excess, from the
+self-sacrifice that is capable of everything but self-discipline, from
+the intemperate devotion to duty that is as morbid as sin. Balance,
+moderation, restraint--these seemed to her, lying there with her child
+on her arm, to be the things most worth striving for. She saw her
+mother, worn to a shadow by the unnecessary deaths she had died, by the
+useless crucifixions she had endured; she saw Jane, haggard, wan, with
+her sweetness turning to bitterness because it was wasted; and again she
+found herself asking for balance, moderation, restraint. The child, a
+little girl, with George's eyes and hair like gauze, had liberated
+Gabriella from the last illusions of her girlhood.
+
+And yet, though Gabriella prayed for moderation, she found after a few
+months that motherhood was absorbing the full strength of her nature.
+George hardly existed for her; he came and went like the passing of a
+shadow, and she began gradually to sink her life into the life of her
+child. Not until the winter was she brought back to a sharp realization
+of her neglected duty to her mother; and this came with a letter from
+Mrs. Carr during the last week in January. Mrs. Carr was still living
+with Jane, and though she had accepted mildly Gabriella's reasons for
+postponing her coming to New York, she was beginning somewhat
+plaintively to question. She had made little effort to hide her
+disappointment at not being with her daughter when her grandchild was
+born, for, in spite of the fact that she had tragically assisted at the
+entrance of Jane's six children into the world, she still possessed an
+insatiable appetite for the perpetually recurring scenes of birth and
+death. Then only did her natural bent of mind appear to be justified by
+universal phenomena.
+
+And now on this morning in January, when Frances Evelyn, the baby, lay
+good and quiet in her crib, Gabriella read over again the disturbing
+letter she had just received from her mother.
+
+     MY DEAR DAUGHTER:
+
+     Jane wrote you that I had had a slight attack of pneumonia, so you
+     understood why I was obliged to let so long a time go by without
+     sending you a letter. Though I have been out of bed now for more
+     than a fortnight, I still feel so weak and good for nothing that I
+     am hardly equal to the exertion of writing. Then, too, I have had
+     some trouble with my wrist--the right one--and this has made it
+     really painful for me to hold a pen or even a fork. The doctor
+     thinks it is a nervous affection and that it will pass away as soon
+     as I get back my strength, and I am sure I hope and pray that it
+     will. But sometimes I feel as if I should never get any stronger,
+     and of course while my wrist is crippled I am unable to do any
+     sewing. This has depressed me very much, for poor Jane has so many
+     worries of her own that I dread being dependent on her, and Charley
+     has not been at all well this winter, though kinder and more
+     considerate than I have ever known him to be. He has his faults,
+     but I have always felt that he was not entirely responsible and
+     that we ought to pity rather than blame him. Women can never be too
+     thankful that they are spared by a merciful Providence the
+     temptations which seem to beset men. When we consider how much more
+     sheltered our lives are, we ought to be lenient in our judgment,
+     and I cannot help feeling that God meant us to be so when he gave
+     us more spiritual natures than those of men. Dr. Preston gave a
+     very instructive and impressive talk on that subject before the
+     Ladies' Aid Society of our church the week before I was taken sick.
+     Indeed, I am afraid I caught the cold that led to pneumonia sitting
+     in Charley's pew, which gets a bad draught from the door of the
+     Sunday-school room.
+
+     I must apologize for this dull letter, as I haven't been able to
+     get out even to market. Before I was taken ill I used to do all of
+     Jane's marketing, and you know what a place the market is for
+     meeting people and hearing all the latest news. There are, however,
+     two things to tell you, and you'll never be able to guess them.
+     First, poor Miss Amelia Peterborough is dead. She was stricken with
+     paralysis a week ago when she was all alone in the house--Miss
+     Jemima was at a funeral--and she never regained consciousness until
+     the end, which came at three o'clock Sunday night. Poor Miss
+     Jemima, I feel so sorry for her. She keeps up beautifully and is
+     very pious and resigned. They say she will go into the Old Ladies'
+     Home as soon as the arrangements can be made.
+
+     The other piece of news is more cheerful, though, for my part, life
+     seems so short and so uncertain that I can't see much cheerfulness
+     anywhere. So many people are dying that you can't help wondering
+     who will be next, and as Dr. Preston said when he called on me
+     during my illness, our only substantial hope is in a blessed
+     hereafter. My one regret will be leaving my children and
+     grandchildren, and especially my precious little Frances Evelyn,
+     whom I have never seen. I have no doubt that Mrs. Fowler was far
+     more useful than I could have been at the time of your trial, but
+     it was a great disappointment to me not to be able to receive the
+     little darling into the world.
+
+     But I had entirely forgotten that I started to tell you about
+     Florrie Spencer's marriage to Algernon Caperton. Of course I
+     couldn't go, but Jane says the wedding was lovely and that Florrie
+     looked really beautiful. Bessie had on rose-coloured brocade. Did
+     you ever hear of such a thing at her age? She was just as gay and
+     flirtatious as a girl, Charley said, and she sent me some of the
+     cake and a bottle of champagne, which, of course, I didn't touch.
+     It is a pity she is so loud, for there isn't a kinder heart in the
+     world. Florrie and Algernon are going to New York on their wedding
+     trip. Isn't it exactly like Florrie to want to go to all the
+     theatres? They send you word, by the way, that they are certainly
+     coming to see you and the baby.
+
+     And now that I have told all my news, I must write a little about
+     myself, though I am afraid you will be upset by what I am obliged
+     to tell you. I put it off as long as I could--for I do hate to
+     worry you--but the doctor has just been to see me and he says I
+     must go to Florida immediately to stay until the bad weather is
+     over. I told him I couldn't possibly afford it--the trip would take
+     a great deal of money--but he insisted that I should write and tell
+     you exactly what he said. He said my lungs were very weak and that
+     he ordered the change--you know they never seem to consider
+     expense--and when he was leaving, he stopped in the hall to speak
+     to Jane about it. Poor Jane, she is so worried that she has almost
+     gone deranged over my health, but as far as I am concerned I feel
+     that I would rather pass away than cause so much trouble and upset
+     everybody. Jane, as you know, hasn't a cent to her name, and it is
+     out of the question her asking Charley, because he has had a very
+     bad winter financially. Even Cousin Jimmy stopped sending me the
+     rent of the house since I moved to Jane's, and as for Uncle
+     Meriweather, he has been obliged to give up his business and go to
+     live with his niece in the country. So, much as I hate to ask you,
+     my dear child, I feel that you would rather I did so--and that I
+     ought to be perfectly frank about the situation, particularly since
+     poor Jane feels so deeply her inability to help me. I am afraid I
+     should need about four hundred dollars, as I have bought nothing to
+     wear for years. Bessie Spencer has told me of a very reasonable
+     place where I could board, and it is just possible that she will be
+     going herself by the time I am ready. If for any reason you are
+     unable to let me have the money, just destroy this letter and don't
+     think about it again. I wouldn't cause you a moment's worry for
+     anything in the world.
+
+     With love to George and a dozen kisses for my precious little
+     grandchild,
+
+     Your devoted mother,
+     FANNY CARR.
+
+     Did I remember to tell you that Miss Polly Hatch has gone to New
+     York to look after her nephew's children? He lost his wife a few
+     months ago, and was left with four little children, the youngest
+     only a year old.
+
+So her punishment had come! As Gabriella dropped the letter into her
+lap, and looked at little Frances, so good and happy in her crib, she
+felt that she was punished not only for her reckless marriage, but for
+all the subterfuge, all the deceit which had followed it. She had not
+told her mother the truth, for she, also, had been chiefly concerned
+with "keeping up an appearance." For the purpose of shielding George,
+who was blandly indifferent to her shielding, she had lied to her
+mother, if not in words, yet in an evasion of the truth, and the result
+was that her lies and her evasions had recoiled not on George's head,
+but on her own. For George wouldn't care. So little value did he place
+upon Mrs. Carr's good opinion, that he would not care even if Gabriella
+were to tell her the truth. And if she had only been honest! If she had
+only refused to lie because custom exacted that a wife should be willing
+to lie in defense of her husband. Some obscure strain of dogmatic piety
+struggled in the convulsed depths of her being, as if she had been
+suddenly brought up against the vein of iron in her soul--against the
+moral law, stripped bare of clustering delusions, which her ancestors
+had known and fought for as "the Berkeley conscience." The Berkeley
+conscience, bred for centuries on a militant faith, told her now that
+she was punished because she had lied to her mother.
+
+Then, as if this reversion to primitive theology had been merely an
+automatic reaction of certain nerve cells, she saw and condemned the
+childlike superstition. No, she was not punished so quickly; but she had
+been a fool, and she was paying the price of her incredible folly. How
+little, how pitifully little she knew of the world, after all! A year
+ago, on that horrible night, she had thought that her lesson was
+finished, but it was only beginning. Her immense, confiding ignorance
+would lead her into other abysses. And again, as on the morning after
+that night of revelation, she resolved passionately that she would not
+stay a fool always--that she would not become a victim of life.
+
+The empty bottle had slipped to one side of the crib, and little Frances
+lay smiling at the friendly universe, with her wet mouth wide open and
+her blue eyes, so like George's, sparkling with laughter. The down on
+her head, as fine and soft as spun silk, made tiny rings over her pink
+skull, which was as clear and delicate as an eggshell; and these golden
+rings filled Gabriella with a tenderness so poignant that it brought
+tears to her eyes. Whatever her mother may have thought about the world,
+it was perfectly obvious that Frances Evelyn considered her part in it
+remarkably jolly. To be a well baby in an amiable universe was her ideal
+of felicity.
+
+When George came up to luncheon, which he did sometimes now, he went
+straight to the nursery for a glimpse of his daughter. Ever since
+little Frances had lost her first hair and gained her golden down, he
+had taken an interest in the rapid stages of her development; and,
+though he never "wasted time," as he said, in the nursery, he liked to
+look in once a day and see whether or not she had changed in the night.
+On her side the baby treated her father as if he were an inexhaustible
+family joke, to be enjoyed not too seriously, but with a polite
+recognition of its humorous points. If she were sucking her bottle when
+he entered, she immediately stopped and laughed at him while the rubber
+nipple dropped from her toothless gums; if she awoke and discovered him
+at the side of her crib, she greeted him with subdued but inappeasable
+merriment; if he lifted her in his arms, her crocheted shoes could
+barely contain the kicks of her ecstatic feet. And because she was a
+jolly little beggar, George grew, after a time, to cherish a certain
+fondness for her. There was some use in a laughing baby, but he hated
+anything, child, woman, or animal, that cried.
+
+On this particular day the baby happened to be asleep when he entered,
+so, without stopping, he went into Gabriella's bedroom, where the
+perfume of roses mingled with the scent of the burning logs on the
+andirons.
+
+"That's a good fire," he observed, stopping on the hearth-rug. "I don't
+wonder you hate to go out."
+
+"Yes, the room was a little chilly, so I lit the fire for the baby's
+bath. I don't usually have one," replied Gabriella, explaining her
+apparent extravagance.
+
+"Has she been well?"
+
+"She is always well. I haven't had a day's anxiety about her since she
+was born."
+
+"But she isn't very old yet." Already little Frances was supplying
+conversational material to her parents.
+
+"I wish you would sit down, George," said Gabriella, with a change of
+tone. "I want to read you a part of a letter from mother."
+
+"Can't you tell me instead?"
+
+"If you'd rather. You know I never told mother why we couldn't have her
+to live with us. I never told her anything. I simply made excuses."
+
+"That was all right, wasn't it?" He was plainly nervous.
+
+"At the time I thought I couldn't do differently, but now--"
+
+She gave him the letter, and while he unfolded it awkwardly, she watched
+him anxiously and yet without interrupting his reading. Beyond the
+simple facts, she had told him nothing, and it was characteristic of her
+that she did not embellish these facts with picturesque phrases. She
+herself was so insensible to the appeal of rhetoric that she hardly
+thought of it as likely to influence anybody. Then, too, in moments of
+intense feeling she had always a sensation of dumbness.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry about her illness," he said, "but when you think of
+it, the best thing that could have happened to her was not to come to
+New York. This climate would have been the end of her."
+
+"Will you let me have the money, George? I will try to save in every way
+that I can. I've made all the baby's clothes, as it is, and I can easily
+make the few things I need, also. Since the baby came I have stopped
+calling with your mother."
+
+A flush rose to his face. "I know you've been a regular brick about
+money, Gabriella. I never saw a woman buy as little as you do, and you
+always manage to look well dressed."
+
+She smiled with faint irony. Her clothes were dowdy, for she had turned
+the broadcloth dress she had had at her marriage and was wearing it in
+the street; but if he thought her well dressed, it seemed hardly fair to
+undeceive him. Had she been any other woman, she reflected, he would
+probably have looked at her long enough to discover that she had grown
+decidedly shabby.
+
+Since the baby's birth, as she told him, she had stopped calling with
+her mother-in-law, and a black net dress, given her by Mrs. Fowler
+because it had grown too small in the waist, was still presentable
+enough for the family dinners. But she never worried about her
+appearance, and it was a relief to find that George was quite as
+indifferent on the subject as she was. In the days of their honeymoon he
+had been so particular that she had spent hours each day before the
+mirror.
+
+"Will you let me have the money, George?" she asked again. The form of
+the request had not changed, but there was a deeper note in her voice:
+the irony, which had been at first only a glancing edge to her smile, a
+subdued flash in her eyes, had passed now into her speech. George,
+looking sideways at the slightly austere charm of her profile, thought
+suddenly, "Gabriella is growing hard." He noticed, too, for the first
+time, that she looked older since the birth of the baby, that her bosom
+was fuller and that her figure, which had always been good, was now
+lovely in its long flowing lines. She was handsomer than she had been
+before her marriage, for her complexion had become clearer since she
+had lived in the North, and though she was still pale, her skin was
+losing its sallow tone.
+
+Yet, though he thought her more attractive than she had been as a girl,
+she had ceased to make the faintest appeal to his senses. There were
+times even when he wondered how she had ever appealed to him, for she
+had not been beautiful, and beauty had always seemed to him to be
+essential in the women with whom one fell in love. But, however it had
+happened, still it had happened, and she was now his wife and the mother
+of the adorable Frances Evelyn.
+
+"I'm awfully cut up about it, Gabriella," he said, "but honestly I am
+out of the money. I couldn't lay my hands on it just now to save my
+life."
+
+His excuses convinced him while he uttered them, but he had barely
+paused before Gabriella demolished them with a single blow of her
+merciless logic.
+
+"You were talking last night about buying a horse," she replied.
+
+He frowned resentfully, and she immediately regretted her words. By
+speaking the truth she had defeated her purpose.
+
+"It isn't as if I were buying a horse for pleasure," he answered
+doggedly; "I am dependent on exercise--you can see for yourself how I've
+gone off in the last two or three months. Of course if the horse were
+simply for enjoyment, like a carriage, it would be different. But mother
+has given up her carriage," he concluded triumphantly.
+
+He was a spendthrift, she realized, but he was a spendthrift with a
+streak of stinginess in his nature. Though he enjoyed gratifying his own
+desires, which were many, it pained him inexpressibly to witness
+extravagance on the part of others, and by a curious twist of the
+imagination, all money spent by Gabriella appeared to him to be an
+extravagance. To be sure, he had just told her that she was a brick
+about money, but that had been intended as a warning to virtue rather
+than as an encouragement to weakness. There was, to be sure, a vague
+understanding that she might make bills when they were unavoidable; but
+so in want of spending money had she been since her marriage, that
+several times she had been obliged to borrow car fare from her
+mother-in-law. When she had asked George for an allowance, however
+small, he had put her off with the permission to charge whatever she
+bought in the shops. As the bills apparently never lessened, and her
+conscience revolted from debt, she had gone without things she needed
+rather than accept the barren generosity of his promises. At Christmas
+her father-in-law had given her fifty dollars in gold, and with this she
+had bought presents for her mother and Jane and the servants.
+
+In the old days in Hill Street she had had little enough, but at least
+that little had really belonged to her; and since her marriage she had
+learned that when one is poor, it is better to live surrounded by want.
+To be poor in the midst of wealth--to be obliged to support a fictitious
+affluence on one's secret poverty--this was after all to know the
+supreme mortification of spirit. There were days when she almost prayed
+that the brooding suspense would assume a definite shape, that the blow
+would fall, the crash come, and ruin envelop them all. Any visible fact
+would be better than this impending horror of the imagination--this
+silent dread so much worse than any reality of failure--which
+encompassed them with the impalpable thickness and darkness of a cloud.
+
+"Then I can't help my mother even if it's a matter of life and death?"
+she asked.
+
+"I don't believe it's as bad as that, Gabriella. Ten chances to one the
+rest of the winter will be mild, and she would find Florida too
+depressing. You never can tell about doctors, you know. It's their
+business to make trouble. Now you mustn't let yourself worry--there's
+anxiety enough without that, heaven knows. Why, just look at father! He
+has lost almost all he ever had--he is simply staving off failure for I
+don't know how long, and yet from mother's manner who on earth would
+suspect that there is anything wrong? Now that's what I call pluck. By
+Jove--"
+
+Again her impetuous spirit--dangerous gift!--flashed out recklessly in
+defence of the truth.
+
+"Then why don't you try to help your father, George?" she asked. "He
+tells me that you rarely go down to the office." Her voice vibrated, but
+the stern lines of her mouth, which had lost its rich softness under the
+stress of her anger, hardly quivered.
+
+His frown darkened to a scowl. The calm disdain in her manner made him
+feel that he hated her, and he told himself stubbornly that if she had
+been gentler, if she had been more womanly, he would have done what she
+asked of him, forgetting in his rage that, if she had been these things,
+he would have found even less difficulty in refusing her.
+
+"You know as well as I do that I can't stand office work when I'm not
+fit," he returned sullenly. "It plays the devil with my nerves."
+
+Her case was hopeless. If it had not been so in the beginning, she had
+ruined it by her irrefutable arguments, and while he rambled on moodily,
+making excuses for his neglect of business, she sat silently planning
+ways by which she might get the money for her mother. To ask her
+father-in-law was, of course, out of the question; and Mrs. Fowler,
+beyond a miraculously extended credit, due probably to the shining
+bubble of her husband's financial security, was as penniless as
+Gabriella. Unless she could find something to sell there seemed little
+likelihood of securing four hundred dollars in a day. It was imperative,
+then, that she should find something to sell; and remembering her
+mother's tragic visits to old Mr. Camberwell, she ran hastily over her
+few personal possessions. As her wedding gifts had been entirely in the
+form of clothes--the donors doubtless surmising that the wife of a rich
+man's son would have other gifts in abundance--there remained only the
+trinkets George and George's parents had given her. All through
+luncheon, while Mrs. Fowler, with an assumed frivolity which Gabriella
+found more than usually depressing, rippled on over the warmed-over
+salmon, the girl mentally arranged and sorted in their cases a diamond
+brooch, an amethyst necklace, a bracelet set with pearls, and a topaz
+heart she occasionally wore on a gold chain, which she valued because it
+had belonged to her grandmother. Once she stopped, and lifting her hand,
+looked appraisingly at her engagement ring for an instant, while Mrs.
+Fowler, observing her long gaze, remarked caressingly:
+
+"I always thought it an unusually pretty stone, my dear. George knows a
+good deal about stones." Then, as if inspired by an impulse, she added
+quickly:
+
+"Wasn't George upstairs before lunch? I thought I heard his voice."
+
+"Yes, but he said he had an engagement at the club."
+
+"I wonder if he knows I have asked the Capertons to dinner to-night? You
+know I got Florrie's card the other day. She is here on her wedding
+journey, but even then she doesn't like to be quiet, for she is her
+mother all over again. I used to know Bessie very well. Kind hearted,
+but a little vulgar."
+
+"I didn't tell George. Perhaps you had better telephone him."
+
+"Oh, well, he usually comes up to dinner because of the baby. I've asked
+one or two people to meet Florrie, for I remember that Bessie's one idea
+of enjoyment was to be in a crowd. The Crowboroughs are coming and the
+Thorntons and the Blantons."
+
+"I'll be dressed in time," responded Gabriella, but she was thinking
+rapidly, "I can sell the diamond brooch and the bracelet and, if it is
+necessary, the amethyst necklace. The brooch must have cost at least
+three hundred dollars."
+
+The meal was finished in silence, for even Mrs. Fowler's cheerfulness
+would flag now and then without a spur; and Gabriella made no effort to
+keep up the strained conversation. As soon as they had risen from the
+table, she ran upstairs to dress for the street, and then, before going
+out, she sat down at her desk, and wrapped up the brooch and the
+bracelet in tissue paper. For a minute she gazed, undecided, at the
+amethyst necklace. Mr. Fowler had given it to her, and she hated to part
+with it. George's gifts meant nothing to her now, but she felt a
+singular fondness for the amethyst necklace.
+
+"I'd better take it with me," she thought; and wrapping it with the
+others, she put the package into her little bag, and went out of the
+room. It was her habit to stop for a last look at little Frances before
+she left the house, but to-day she hurried past the nursery, and ran
+downstairs and out of doors, where Mrs. Fowler was getting into a hansom
+with the assistance of Burrows, the English butler.
+
+"May I drop you somewhere, Gabriella?" inquired Mrs. Fowler, while
+Burrows arranged the parcels on the seat of the hansom. In the strong
+sunshine all the little lines which were imperceptible in the shadow of
+the house--lines of sleeplessness, of anxiety, of prolonged aching
+suspense--appeared to start out as if by magic in her face. And over
+this underlying network of anxious thoughts there dropped suddenly, like
+a veil, that look of artificial pleasantness. She would have died sooner
+than lift it before one of the servants.
+
+"No, thank you. I need the walk," answered Gabriella, stopping beside
+the hansom. "You will be tired if you do all those errands. May I help
+you?"
+
+"No, no, dear, take your walk. I am so glad the storm is over. It will
+be a lovely afternoon."
+
+Then the hansom drove off; Burrows, after a longing glance at the blue
+sky, slowly ascended the brownstone steps; and Gabriella, closing her
+furs at the throat, for the wind was high, hurried in the direction of
+Fifth Avenue.
+
+The streets were still white after the storm; piles of new-fallen snow
+lay in the gutters; and when Gabriella crossed Madison Avenue, the wind
+was so strong that it almost lifted her from the ground. Above the
+shining whiteness of the streets there was a sky of spring; and spring
+was blossoming in the little cart of a flower vendor, which had stopped
+to let the traffic pass at the corner. There were few people out of
+doors, and these few appeared remote and strangely unreal between the
+wintry earth and the April sky. Beside the gutters, where the street
+cleaners were already at work, wagons drawn by large, heavy horses moved
+slowly from crossing to crossing. At Forty-second Street the traffic was
+blocked by one of these wagons; and from the windows of the stage, which
+had stopped by the sidewalk, the eyes of the passengers stared with
+moody resignation at the hurrying pedestrians. And it seemed to
+Gabriella that these faces wore, one and all, the look of secret
+anxiety, the faint network of lines which she had seen in the face of
+her mother-in-law. "I wonder if I have it, too," she thought, pausing
+before a shop window. But her reflection flashed back at her from the
+glass, smooth, stern, unsmiling, as if her features had been sculptured
+in marble.
+
+Below Fortieth Street there was the shop of a jeweller she sometimes
+went to with Mrs. Fowler in that lady's despairing quest for suitable
+wedding presents at moderate prices; and something in the kindly,
+sympathetic face of the clerk who waited on them made Gabriella decide
+suddenly to trust him. As she unwrapped the tissue paper rather
+nervously, and keeping back the necklace, laid the brooch and the
+bracelet on the square of purple velvet he spread out on the counter,
+she raised her eyes to his with a look that was childlike in its appeal.
+Again she thought of the morning on which they had surreptitiously taken
+her silver mug, hidden in Mrs. Carr's gray and black shawl, to the shop
+of old Mr. Camberwell.
+
+"How much might I get for these? I have worn them only a few times. They
+do not suit me," she said.
+
+For a minute the clerk looked at her reflectively, but without
+curiosity; then lifting the trinkets from the square of velvet, he
+passed behind a green curtain into an adjoining room. After a short
+absence, in which she nervously examined an assortment of travelling
+clocks, he came back and told her that they would give her four hundred
+and fifty dollars for the two pieces.
+
+"The stones alone are worth that," he added, "and, of course, they will
+have to be reset before we can sell them."
+
+"May I have the check now?"
+
+"Shall we send it to you by mail?"
+
+"No, I must have it now. I want it this afternoon--immediately."
+
+He yielded, still with his reflective but incurious manner; and when she
+left the shop a quarter of an hour later the check was in her little bag
+beside the amethyst necklace. "I am glad I didn't have to sell the
+necklace," she thought. "Now I'll find a hotel and write to mother, and
+it will all be settled. It will all be settled," she repeated in a
+joyous tone; and this joyousness, overflowing her breast, showed in her
+eyes, in the little quivering smile on her lips, and in her light and
+buoyant step over the snow. A weight had been lifted from her heart, and
+she felt at peace with the world, at peace with the shivering
+passers-by, at peace even with George. The wind, hastening her walk,
+stung her face till it flushed through its pallor, and sent the warm
+blood bounding with happiness through her veins. Under the stainless
+blue of the sky, it seemed to her that the winter's earth was suddenly
+quickening with the seeds of the spring.
+
+In the Waldorf she found a corner which was deserted, except for an
+elderly man with a dried face and a girl in a green hat, who appeared to
+be writing to her lover; and sitting down at a little desk behind a
+lamp, she wrote to her mother without mentioning George, without
+explaining anything, without even making excuses for her failure to keep
+her promise. She knew now that George had never meant that her mother
+should live with them, that he had never meant that they should take an
+apartment, that he had lied to her, without compunction, from the
+beginning. She knew this as surely as she knew that he was faithless and
+selfish, as surely as she knew that he had ceased to love her and would
+never love her again. And this knowledge, which had once caused her such
+poignant agony, seemed now as detached and remote as any tragedy in
+ancient history. She was barely twenty-two, and her love story had
+already dwindled to an impersonal biographical interest in her mind.
+
+When she had finished her letter, she placed the check inside of it, and
+then sat for a minute pensively watching the girl in the green hat,
+whose face paled and reddened while she wrote to her lover.
+
+"It seems a hundred years ago since I felt like that," she thought, "and
+now it is all over." Then because melancholy had no part in her nature,
+and she was too practical to waste time in useless regrets, she rose
+quickly from the desk, and went out, while the exhilaration of her mood
+was still proof against the dangerous weakness of self-pity. "It's life
+I'm living, not a fairy tale," she told herself sternly as she posted
+the letter and left the hotel. "It's life I'm living, and life is hard,
+however you take it." For a few blocks she walked on briskly, thinking
+of the shop windows and of the brightness and gaiety of the crowd in
+Fifth Avenue; but in spite of her efforts, her thoughts fluttered back
+presently to herself and her own problems. "After all, you can't become
+a victim unless you give in," she said grimly; "and I'll die rather than
+become a victim."
+
+Her walk kept her out until five o'clock, and when she entered the house
+at that hour she found her mother-in-law in the front hall giving
+directions to Burrows. At sight of Gabriella she paused breathlessly,
+and said with undisguised nervousness:
+
+"A very queer-looking person who says she was sent by your mother has
+just come to see you, dear--a seamstress of some kind, I fancy. As she
+looked quite clean, I let her go upstairs to the nursery to wait for
+you. I hope you don't mind. She was so eager to see the baby."
+
+"Oh, it's Miss Polly!" cried Gabriella; and without stopping to explain,
+she ran upstairs and into the nursery, where little Frances was cooing
+with delight in Miss Polly's arms.
+
+The seamstress' small birdlike face, framed by the silk quilling of her
+old lady's bonnet, broke into a hundred cheerful wrinkles at the sight
+of Gabriella. Even the grotesqueness of her appearance--of her fantastic
+mantle trimmed with bugles, made from her best wrap in the 'seventies,
+of her full alpaca skirt, with its wide hem stiffened by buckram, of her
+black cotton gloves, and her enormous black broadcloth bag--even these
+things could not extinguish the pleasure Gabriella felt in the meeting.
+If Miss Polly was ridiculous at home, she was twice as ridiculous in New
+York, but somehow it did not seem to matter. The sight of her brought
+happy tears to the girl's eyes, and in the attempt to hide them, she
+buried her face in the warm, flower-scented neck of little Frances.
+
+"She's the peartest baby I ever saw," remarked Miss Polly with pride.
+"Wouldn't yo' ma dote on her?"
+
+"Wouldn't she? But how did you leave mother and Jane and the children?
+The baby must be a big boy now."
+
+"He's runnin' around all the time, and never out of mischief. I never
+saw such a child for mischief. I was tellin' yo' ma so last week.
+There's another baby on the way with Jane, you know."
+
+"How in the world will she take care of it? I suppose Charley is just
+the same?"
+
+"Well, if you ask me, Gabriella, I never was so dead set against Mr.
+Charley as the rest of you. I helped raise Jane from the time she was no
+higher than that--and I ain't sayin' nothin' against her except that Mr.
+Charley ain't half as bad to my mind as she makes him out. Some men
+respond to naggin' and some don't--that's what I said to her one day
+when she broke down and cried on my shoulder--and you've got to be
+mighty particular when you begin to nag that you're naggin' the right
+sort. But she won't listen, not she. 'If I don't tell Charley of his
+faults, who's goin' to?' she asks. You know Jane always did talk pretty
+free to me ever since she was a little girl. Well, there are some people
+that simply can't stand bein' told of their faults, and Mr. Charley is
+one of 'em. It ain't the kind of treatment that agrees with him, and if
+I'd been in Jane's place, I reckon I'd have found it out long ago. But
+it ain't her way to learn anything--you know that as well as I do. She's
+obliged to make the world over even if it drops to pieces in her hands."
+
+"She doesn't seem to have done much with Charley."
+
+"Well, you mark my words, Mr. Charley ain't bad, but he's full of
+natur', and Jane, is the kind of woman that's never happy unless she's
+gettin' the better of natur'. Whatever's natural is plum wrong, that's
+the way she looks at it; but mind you, I ain't sayin' she's all in the
+right. Naggin' ain't a virtue to my mind any mo' than drink is, but
+Jane, she can't see it that way, and there ain't a bit of use tryin' to
+make her. She's soft, but she's mulish, and the hardest thing on earth
+to push is a mule that looks soft."
+
+"It's such a pity, but I suppose nothing will change her. Tell me about
+mother."
+
+"Yo' ma looks downright po'ly. What with her sickness and her bother
+about Jane and the bad weather, she ain't managin' to keep as spry as
+I'd like to see her. From the stitch in her back she has most of the
+time it wouldn't surprise me any day to hear that she'd come down with
+kidney trouble, and she breathes so short that consumption has crossed
+my mind mo' than once when I was talkin' to her."
+
+Miss Polly, having, as she expressed it, "an eye for symptoms,"
+possessed an artistic rather than a scientific interest in disease; and
+the vivid realism of her descriptions had often, on her "sewing days" at
+home, reduced Gabriella to faintness, though Mrs. Carr, with her more
+delicate sensibilities, was able to listen with apparent enjoyment to
+the ghastly recitals. Not only had Miss Polly achieved in her youth a
+local fame as a "sick nurse," but, in the days when nursing was neither
+sanitary nor professional, she was often summoned hastily from her
+sewing machine to assist at a birth or a burial in one of the families
+for whom she worked. And happy always, as befits one whose life,
+stripped bare of ephemeral blessings, is centred upon the basic
+realities, she was never happier than when she put down her sewing, took
+off her spectacles, exchanged her apron for a mantle, and after
+carefully tying her bonnet strings, departed for a triumphant encounter
+with the Eternal Issues.
+
+"I am so anxious about mother," said Gabriella. "Did she tell you she
+was going to Florida?"
+
+"She cert'ny did. She was real full of it, and she talked a lot about
+you all up here--the baby and you and Mr. George. You know I ain't laid
+my eyes on Mr. George mo' than three times in my life. Well, I reckon
+I'd better be gettin' along back, or the children will miss me. I've got
+four children to do for now, and one of 'em ain't any bigger than
+Frances. It does seem funny--don't it, for an old maid to have her hands
+full of children? But, you know, I always did dote on children. There
+wouldn't be half so much fun in this world if it wan't for children and
+men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under their
+skins. Yes, I can find my way back real easy. I always was good at
+finding my way about, and all I've got to do is to set out and walk in
+that direction till I come to a car over yonder by that high building,
+and as soon as I get on I'll ask the conductor to put me off right at my
+do'."
+
+When she had gone, Gabriella went back into the nursery, and stood
+looking down at little Frances, who had fallen asleep, with the smile of
+an angel on her face. "I wonder if I can be the least bit like Jane?"
+she said aloud while she watched the sleeping child.
+
+George did not come home to dinner; and the wonder was still in
+Gabriella's mind when she dressed herself in her black net gown, and
+went downstairs to meet Florrie, who looked younger and more brilliant
+than ever in a dress of white and silver brocade. Florrie's husband, a
+dreamy, quiet man,--the safe kind of man, Gabriella reflected, who
+inevitably marries a dangerous woman--regarded his noisy wife with a
+guileless admiration which was triumphantly surviving a complete
+submergence in the sparkling shallows of Florrie's personality. He was a
+man of sense and of breeding. He possessed the ordinary culture of a
+gentleman as well as the trained mind of a lawyer, yet he appeared
+impervious alike to the cheapness of Florrie's wit and the vulgarity of
+her taste. Her beauty had not only blinded him to her mental
+deficiencies; it had actually deluded him into a belief in her
+intelligence. He treated her slangy sallies as if they were an original
+species of humour; he accepted the sweeping comment of her ignorance as
+if it had been an inspired criticism of life. While she chattered,
+parrotlike, to the judge, who was obviously impressed by her appearance,
+Algernon listened to her ejaculatory conversation with a mixture of
+admiration and awe.
+
+"How do you think Florrie is looking?" he asked in a low tone of
+Gabriella, while his wife's laugh, high, shrill, penetrating in its dry
+soprano quality, fluted loudly on the opposite side of the table. Beside
+Patty's patrician loveliness, as serene and flawless as that of a
+marble goddess, Florrie appeared cheap, common, and merely pretty to
+Gabriella. The hard brilliancy of her surface was like a shining polish
+which would wear off with sleep and have to be replenished each morning;
+and while she watched her, Gabriella saw, in imagination, a vaguely
+ominous outline surrounding her which might have been the uncertain edge
+of her mother's shadow. In twenty-five years Florrie would be the image
+of her mother--protuberant hips, pinched waist, mottled complexion, and
+hopelessly tarnished hair; yet, with this awful prospect before him,
+Algernon could appear not only tolerant, but positively adoring. He had
+seen Bessie--he had known her for years--and he could marry her
+daughter!
+
+"I never saw her look handsomer," said Gabriella, "that white and silver
+gown is very becoming."
+
+"That's what I told her, but she wouldn't believe me. She thought it was
+too plain for her style. Your sister-in-law is something of Florrie's
+type, isn't she? Not quite so striking a figure, perhaps, but the same
+sort of colouring."
+
+Was it possible that for the first time in his life the simple Algernon
+was speaking in irony? Turning in her chair, she looked questioningly
+into his kind, grave face, so empty of humour, into his serious gray
+eyes, which followed each movement of his wife's with admiring
+attention. No, he was not ironic; he was perfectly solemn. It was a
+miracle--a miracle not of piety, but of passion--that she was
+witnessing.
+
+"Yes, Patty is lovely," she answered, thinking, as she reflected upon
+the eccentricities of love, how much too good he was for his wife.
+
+Across the table Florrie's voice was heard exclaiming: "Now, you don't
+mean it! Well, I'm just as flattered as I can be!" and Gabriella
+surmised that she was completing her conquest of the judge.
+
+"It's wonderful how well she gets on with everybody," observed Algernon.
+"She's never at a loss for a word, and I tell her if I had her ready
+wit, I'd be the greatest lawyer in Virginia to-day. Have you noticed the
+way she is managing Judge Crowborough?"
+
+"She always gets on well with men," acquiesced Gabriella, though without
+the enthusiasm of Algernon. "Do you remember what a belle she always was
+at the germans?" Though she was willing to admit that love was the
+ruling principle of life, it occurred to her that Algernon would be more
+amusing if he were less abundantly supplied with that virtue.
+
+They talked of nothing but Florrie until the women went into the
+drawing-room; and there, from the safe haven of a window, Gabriella
+listened to Florrie's ceaseless prattle about herself. She was as
+egotistical, as effervescent, as she had been as a schoolgirl; and it
+seemed to Gabriella that she was hardly a day older. Her eyes, of a
+grayish blue, like pale periwinkles, were as bold, as careless, as
+conquering in their glances; her hair was still as dazzling; her face,
+with its curious resemblance in shape to the face of a pretty cat, was
+still as frank, as naïve, as confiding in its innocence. If she had
+changed at all, it was that, since her marriage to the silent Algernon,
+she had become even more talkative than she had been in her girlhood.
+Her vivacity was as disturbing as the incessant buzzing of a June
+beetle.
+
+"Well, you need never tell me again that you wouldn't rather live in New
+York, Gabriella," she fluted at parting, "because I shan't believe a
+single word of it. Why, we've been to the theatre every night for a
+fortnight, and we haven't seen half the good plays that are going on.
+Algy wanted to stay at Niagara Falls--you know we went to Niagara Falls
+first--but it was so deadly quiet I couldn't stand it. 'I don't care if
+I am married,' I said to Algy, 'what I want is the theatre.'"
+
+After she had gone, adoringly wrapped up by Algernon, Patty turned to
+her mother with a little malicious grimace:
+
+"I know it's horrid to say she's dreadful, mamma, but she really is."
+
+"Don't, Patty, it isn't kind, and, besides, she's a friend of
+Gabriella's. What I can't understand," she added, "is how Bessie ever
+came out of Virginia, yet there were always a few like her. You don't
+remember Pussy Prime, do you? Of course you don't, she died long before
+your day, but she was just that loud, boisterous kind, and all the men
+were in love with her."
+
+"Well, if I'm ever born again," remarked Gabriella, as she kissed Patty
+good-night, "I hope I'll be born a fat blonde. They always get taken
+care of."
+
+She ascended the stairs wearily to her room. Yes, she was barely
+twenty-two and love was over forever. "I couldn't hold a man six
+months," she thought dejectedly, "and yet Florrie, who is a fool and
+vulgar, will be adored all her life."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND
+
+THE AGE OF KNOWLEDGE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DISENCHANTMENT
+
+
+In July Gabriella joined her mother in the mountains of Virginia, and
+when she returned in the autumn, she found that the character of her
+home had changed perceptibly during her absence. Brightness had followed
+gloom; the fog of suspense had dissolved, and the hazy sunshine of an
+ambiguous optimism flooded the house. What the change implied she could
+not immediately discover; but before the first day was over she surmised
+that the financial prospects of her father-in-law had improved since the
+spring. If she had had any doubt of his rising fortunes, the sight of
+the diminished pile of bills on Mrs. Fowler's desk would have quickly
+dispelled it.
+
+And even George had apparently altered for the better. His improved
+finances had sweetened his temper and cast the shining gloss of
+prosperity over his appearance; and, in a measure at least, time had
+revived in him the ardent, if fluctuating, emotions of the lover. For
+three months after her return, he evinced a fervent sentiment for
+Gabriella, which she, who was staunchly paying the price of her folly,
+received with an inner shrinking but an outward complaisance. Her
+feeling for George was quite dead--so dead that it was impossible for
+any artificial stimulus to revive it--but she had learned that marriage
+is founded upon a more substantial basis than the romantic emotions of
+either a wife or a husband. Though she had ceased to love George, she
+could still be amiable to him; and it occurred to her at times that if
+one had to choose between the two not necessarily inseparable qualities
+of love and amiability, George was not losing greatly by the exchange.
+When, however, at the end of three months, George's capricious symptoms
+disappeared as suddenly as they had come, and his attentions lapsed into
+casual expressions of a nonchalant kindness, she drew a breath of
+relief, and devoted her happiest days to the nursery. There at least she
+had found a stable refuge amid the turmoil of selfish human desires.
+
+In the house, which like George, began presently to show the gloss of
+prosperity, the winter brought a continuous flashing stream of gaiety,
+in which Mrs. Fowler darted joyously about like some bright hungry
+minnow beneath the iridescent ripples of a brook. There were new rugs,
+new curtains, new gowns, new bonnets; and Gabriella was led compliantly
+from dressmaker to milliner, until she lost in the process her look of
+shabbiness and developed into the fashionable curving figure of the
+period. She had always liked clothes; her taste was naturally good; and
+as she followed eagerly from shop to shop, she recalled the three months
+she had spent in Brandywine's millinery department, and the rudiments of
+a trade she had learned there. "I'd rather design my next gown myself,"
+she said one day to Mrs. Fowler, while they were looking at French
+models in the establishment of Madame Dinard, who had been born an
+O'Grady. "I know I can do better than these, and besides I shan't meet
+duplicates of myself every time I go out." That night she dreamed of
+hats and gowns, and the next morning she drew pictures of them in
+coloured chalk. "It's the only talent I ever had," she remarked gaily to
+her mother-in-law, "and it is running to waste."
+
+Madame, who regarded the sketches with uncompromising disdain, showed
+great interest in the practical application of Gabriella's ideas to the
+dressing of Mrs. Fowler.
+
+"Yes, you have undoubtedly ideas," she said, discarding in her
+enthusiasm the accent she had spent twenty years in acquiring, "and
+there is nothing so rare in any department--in any walk of life--as
+ideas. You have style, too," she pursued admiringly, turning her eyes on
+Gabriella's figure in one of her Parisian models. "It is very rare--such
+chic. You wear your clothes with a grace."
+
+"That, also, is a marketable asset in a dressmaker," laughed Gabriella.
+"Do you know I ought to have been a dressmaker, Madame. Only I hate the
+very sight of a needle."
+
+"But I never sew! I haven't had a needle in my hand for twenty
+years--no, not for thirty," protested Madame.
+
+"Then I mustn't give up hope. If I ever have to earn my living, I'll
+come to you, Madame."
+
+Then Madame bowed and smiled and shrugged as if at a gracious jest, and
+Mrs. Fowler observed in her crisp, matter-of-fact manner: "Yes, my
+daughter has a genuine instinct for dress, and, as you say, that is very
+rare. She carries her clothes well, doesn't she? It's such a blessing to
+be tall--though my husband insists that the women who have ruled the
+world have always been small ones. But I do love a fine figure, and she
+looks so distinguished in that cherry-coloured cloth, doesn't she?"
+
+To all of which Madame agreed, as she bowed them out, with her
+ingratiating professional manner.
+
+"It's so lovely to have clothes," said Gabriella, sinking back in the
+victoria, "money is one of the best gifts of the gods, isn't it?"
+
+"It's hard to do without it," replied Mrs. Fowler, brisk and perfectly
+businesslike even in her generalizations. "I expect the worst suffering
+in the world comes from poverty."
+
+Then, after a thoughtful pause, she added with the practical air of one
+who scorns to be abstract: "But do you know I sometimes think Archibald
+and I'd both be happier if we had never made any money at all--I mean,
+of course, except just enough to live simply somewhere in the South.
+When once you begin, you can't stop, and I wish sometimes we had never
+begun." Above the narrow black velvet strings of her bonnet, her round
+florid face, from which the fine tracery of lines had vanished, assumed
+the intent and preoccupied expression which Gabriella associated with
+the pile of unpaid bills on the little French desk. "I believe Archibald
+feels that way, too," she concluded after a minute, while her firm and
+unemotional lips closed together over the words.
+
+"But you enjoy it so much when you have it."
+
+"That's just the trouble. You have to enjoy it as quickly as you can
+because you never know when you are going to lose every bit of it
+without warning. It's been that way ever since I married--rich one year,
+poor the next, or poor for two years and then rich for three. Life has
+been a seesaw with prosperity at one end of the plank and poverty at
+the other. Of course I know," she pursued, with characteristic lucidity,
+"that you think me dreadfully extravagant, but we'd just as well spend
+it as lose it, and it's sure to be one thing or the other."
+
+"But couldn't you save something? Couldn't you put by something for the
+future?" Saving for the future was one of the habits of Gabriella's
+frugal past which still clung to her.
+
+"That would go, too. If we ever come to ruin--and heaven knows we've
+been on the brink of it before this--Archibald would not keep back a
+penny. That's his way, and that's one of the reasons I spend all we
+have--up to the very margin of his income."
+
+The logic of this was so confusing that Gabriella was obliged to stop
+and puzzle it out. At the end she could only admit that Mrs. Fowler's
+reasoning processes, which were by nature singularly lucid and exact,
+showed at times a remarkable subtlety--as if some extraneous hybrid
+faculty had been grafted on the simple parent stock of her mind.
+
+"I can't help feeling, though," resumed the practical little lady before
+Gabriella had reached the end of her analysis, "that I'd be a great deal
+happier at this minute if we'd been poor all our lives."
+
+"It wouldn't have suited George," observed George's wife with an
+inflection of irony.
+
+"He mightn't have liked it, but I believe it would have been a great
+deal better for him," replied Mrs. Fowler, while she bowed gravely to a
+woman in a passing victoria. "There are many things George can't be
+blamed for, and the way he was brought up is one of them. Of course,
+he's no good whatever as a business man--his father hardly ever sees
+him in the office--but it's useless to scold him about it, for it only
+exasperates him. But he might have been a sensible, steady boy, if he
+had been brought up in some small place in the South where there was
+nothing to tempt him."
+
+That there was any place in the South small enough not to afford
+temptation to George seemed improbable to Gabriella; but she felt that
+Mrs. Fowler's earnest belief, supported as it was by the unshakable prop
+of maternal feeling, hardly justified the effort she must make to dispel
+it; and she had still no answer ready when the carriage turned into
+Fifty-seventh Street, and stopped beside the pavement where little
+Frances--they had already begun to call her Fanny--sat in a
+perambulator. Flushed and smiling, with her red mouth gurgling
+delightedly, and a white wool lamb clasped in her arms, the adorable
+child was certainly worth any seesaw of destiny, any disillusioning
+experience of marriage.
+
+Before the beginning of the next winter Gabriella's second child was
+born--a brown, sturdy boy, who came into the world with a frowning
+forehead and crying lustily from rage (so the nurse said) not from
+fright. He was named Archibald after his grandfather, who developed
+immediately a passionate fondness for him. His eyes were brown like the
+eyes of the Carrs, though by the time he was two years old, he was
+discovered to be painfully near-sighted, a weakness which Mrs. Carr,
+when she heard of it, insisted he must have inherited from his father's
+side of the family. He was not nearly so beautiful a baby as little
+Fanny had been; but he was from the very beginning a child of much
+character, strong, mutinous, utterly uncompromising in his attitude
+toward life. When he was first put into shoes he fought with
+desperation, and surrendered at last, neither to persuasion nor to
+punishment, but to an exhaustion so profound that he slept for hours
+with his small protesting feet doubled under him and sobs of fury still
+bursting from his swollen lips. The next day the struggle began again,
+and Mrs. Fowler remarked sympathetically:
+
+"You'll never be able to break his will, Gabriella. He is unmanageable."
+
+"I don't want to break his will, mamma," replied Gabriella, for she
+belonged to a less Scriptural generation, "but he must be disciplined,
+if it kills me." Pale, gentle, resolute, she waited for Archibald to
+surrender. In the end she carried her point and won the adoring
+obedience of Archibald. There was a magnanimous strain in him even at
+that age, Gabriella used to say, and though he fought to the bitter end,
+he bore no malice after he was once soundly defeated.
+
+Long afterwards, when Gabriella looked back on the next few years of her
+life, she could remember nothing of them except the tremendous
+difference that the children had made. All the rest was blotted out, a
+drab blur of what Mrs. Fowler described with dignity as "social duties,"
+moving always against the variable atmosphere of the house, which was
+gay or sombre, light or gloomy, according to the fluctuating financial
+conditions in Wall Street. There were extravagant winters and frugal
+winters; winters of large entertainments and winters of "women's
+luncheons"; but always the summers shimmered green and peaceful against
+the blue background of the Virginia mountains. The summers she loved
+even in memory; but of the winters she could recall but one glowing
+vision, and that was of Patty. Though she had lost George, she had
+gained Patty, and it was impossible to deny that Patty might be
+compensation for almost any lack.
+
+For the rest she made few friends, partly from reserve, partly from the
+shyness she always felt in the presence of strangers. It was difficult
+to establish fundamental relations at dinners or even at women's
+luncheons; social reforms were scarcely beginning to be fashionable; and
+apart from the reading which she did in order, as she said, "to keep her
+mind open," her life narrowed down gradually to a single vivid centre of
+activity. She lived in her children and in the few books she obtained
+from the library--(since the purchase of books, even in extravagant
+years, represented gross prodigality to Mrs. Fowler)--in Patty's
+friendship, and in the weekly gossiping letters she received from her
+mother.
+
+Mrs. Carr had long ago given up her plan to live with Gabriella and
+George; and a failure of circumstances, which fitted so perfectly into
+the general scheme of her philosophy, had done much to fortify the
+natural melancholy of her soul. Since even so gentle a pessimist was not
+devoid of a saving trace of spiritual arrogance, she found consoling
+balm in the thought that she had refrained from reminding Gabriella how
+very badly the Carrs had all married. There was, for example, poor
+Gabriel's brother Tom, whose wife had "gone deranged" six months after
+her wedding, and poor Gabriel's sister Johanna, who had died (it was
+common gossip) of a broken heart; and besides these instances, nobody
+could possibly maintain that Jane had not made a disastrous choice when
+she had persisted, against the urgent advice of her mother, in marrying
+Charley. Yes, the Carrs had all married badly, reflected Mrs. Carr, with
+the grief of a mother and the pride of a philosopher whose favourite
+theory has been substantially verified--every one of them, with, of
+course, the solitary exception of poor Gabriel himself.
+
+Her weekly letters, pious, gossipy, flowing, reached Gabriella regularly
+every Monday morning, and were read at breakfast while Mr. Fowler
+studied the financial columns of the newspaper, and his wife opened her
+invitations in the intervals between pouring out cups of coffee and
+inquiring solicitously if any one wanted cream and sugar.
+
+"What's the news?" George would sometimes ask carelessly; and Gabriella
+would glance down the pages covered with the formless characters of Mrs.
+Carr's fine Italian handwriting (the ladylike hand of the 'sixties), and
+read out carefully selected bits of provincial gossip, to which a
+cosmopolitan dash was usually contributed by the adventures, matrimonial
+or merely amorous, of Florrie Caperton. Hard, dashing, brilliant on the
+surface at least, a frank hedonist by inclination, if not by philosophy,
+Florrie had triumphantly smashed her way through the conventions and the
+traditions of centuries.
+
+"It's really dreadfully sad about Florrie," wrote Mrs. Carr. "I am so
+sorry for poor Bessie, who must feel it more than she lets any one see.
+While Algernon was alive we always hoped he would keep Florrie straight
+(you remember how everybody used to talk about her when she was a girl),
+but now he has been, dead only a year and a half, and she has already
+married again and gotten a divorce from her second husband. You know
+she ran away with a man named Tom Westcott--nobody ever heard of him,
+but she met him at the White Sulphur Springs, where he had something to
+do with the horses, I believe--and the marriage turned out very badly,
+though for my part I don't believe he was the least bit to blame.
+Florrie is so reckless that she would make any man unhappy, and two
+weeks after the wedding she was separated from him and was back here
+with Bessie, looking as well and pretty as I ever saw her. You know
+black was so becoming to her that she didn't take it off even when she
+eloped, and now after her divorce she always wears it, just as if she
+were still in mourning for poor Algernon. Nobody would believe, unless
+they had seen her in it, how very loud black can be. I used to think
+widows ought to wear it because it kept them from being noticed, but on
+Florrie it is the most conspicuous thing you ever imagined--as Cousin
+Jimmy says it simply makes her blaze, and you know how striking she
+always was anyway. I am sure I should think it would be embarrassing for
+her to go in the street in New York where nobody knows that she is
+really a lady--or at least that she was born a lady on her father's
+side--and this reminds me--(I declare I ramble on so I can never
+remember what I started to say)--but this reminds me that she has just
+been in to tell Jane that she is going to New York to take an apartment
+somewhere downtown; she told me the street and the number, but I have
+forgotten both of them. Jane says she looks more beautiful than ever
+after her last tragic experience (though she doesn't seem to think it
+tragic at all), but I was brought up to believe that a divorced woman,
+even if she is in the right, ought to live in a retired way and show
+that she feels her position. Now, I saw Florrie for a minute as she was
+going out and she ran on like a girl of sixteen--you would think from
+her talk that she is not a bit sensitive about the unfortunate situation
+she is in. She had on a huge bunch of violets, and Cousin Pussy tells me
+another man is paying her the most devoted attention. Please don't
+mention this to a soul--I hate so to spread gossip--but I felt that you
+ought to be prepared, for Florrie will certainly come to see you, and
+you must be kind and polite to her, though I do not think you ought ever
+to be intimate again. It is not as if she were merely unfortunate--many
+divorced women are that, and we sympathize with them because they show
+that they realize their position--but I cannot believe that Florrie is
+unfortunate if she allows another man to pay her such marked attention,
+and even accepts handsome presents from him. So do be careful, my child,
+and if you find yourself in an embarrassing situation, consult Mrs.
+Fowler and be guided by her advice."
+
+"Florrie Spencer is coming to New York," said Gabriella on the morning
+she received Mrs. Carr's letter. "You know she has just been divorced
+from her second husband--somebody she met at the White Sulphur Springs."
+
+George looked up interested, from his breakfast.
+
+"Florrie coming, is she?" he remarked. "Well, she's great fun. I wonder
+if she has her eye on anybody now?"
+
+"Not on you, I hope," observed his father, who joked mildly on the
+mornings when the news was good; "but she's a beautiful woman, and
+she'll doubtless be able to get whatever she has set either her heart or
+her eye on."
+
+"She'll marry again within six months," prophesied Mrs. Fowler, with an
+anxious glance in the direction of her husband's coffee cup. "Poor Algy,
+I always thought he was a hundred times too good for her," she added,
+while she abstractedly buttered her toast. It was one of their
+extravagant years, and the butter was delicious.
+
+"He adored her," said Gabriella. "I shall never forget the evening they
+spent here. He couldn't keep his eyes away from her. If she had been the
+most admirable character on earth he couldn't have loved her better."
+
+"As if a man ever loved a woman because of her character!" remarked Mrs.
+Fowler, from the security of her experience.
+
+Several months later Florrie arrived, gay, brilliant, and beautiful,
+with her waxlike complexion as unlined by care as if it had been on the
+face of a doll. Though she had lightened her mourning since Mrs. Carr
+had described her to Gabriella, she still wore black, and her flaring
+skirt, her inflexible collar, and her lace sleeves, narrow at the
+shoulder and full at the wrists, resembled a fashion plate. Perched at a
+daring angle above her wheaten-red pompadour, with its exaggerated
+Marcel wave, she wore a curiously distorted hat of black velvet,
+lavishly overtrimmed with ostrich feathers; and before this miracle of
+style, Gabriella became at once oppressively aware of her own lack of
+the quality which Florrie would have described as "dash." Already
+Florrie's figure was becoming slightly too protuberant for the style of
+the new century, and after kissing Gabriella effusively, she stood for a
+minute struggling for breath, in the attitude of her mother, with her
+hands pressed to the palpitating sides of her waist.
+
+"I told mother I was certainly coming to see you right straight," began
+Florrie, while, with her recovered breath, her figure curved as suddenly
+as if it were moved by a spring into the fashionable bend of the period.
+"I've been perfectly crazy to come, but between dressmakers and theatres
+and I don't know what else, I simply haven't had a minute in which I
+could sit down and breathe. Mother says I ought to be downright ashamed
+of myself for being so frivolous when I've just got out of such a
+scrape--did you ever hear before of anybody getting married for two
+weeks, Gabriella? But I know you never did--you needn't trouble to tell
+me so. Well, mother says I oughtn't to look so pleased, and I tell her
+there might be some sense in that if I'd stayed in the scrape, but if I
+haven't a right to look pleased at getting out, I'd like to know who
+has. It was all too funny for words, now, wasn't it? Of course, I
+shouldn't dream of talking to everybody like this--even if I am a big
+talker, I reckon I know when to hold my tongue and when not to--but I've
+always told you everything, Gabriella, and I don't mind the least bit in
+the world telling you about this. It always relieves my mind to talk to
+somebody I can trust, and I know I can trust you. Don't you remember the
+way I used to run in on rainy afternoons when you lived way over in Hill
+Street, and tell you all about Fred Dudley and Barbour Willis? And then
+I used to come and talk about poor Algy by the hour. Wasn't it too
+distressing about poor Algy? I don't believe I'll ever get over it if I
+live to be a hundred, and even if I do run on like this, it doesn't mean
+that my heart isn't broken--simply broken--because it is. Mother used
+to say, after father died, that you couldn't measure a widow's grief by
+the length of her veil; and that's just exactly the way I feel about
+Algy. I know you'll understand, Gabriella, because you always understand
+everything--"
+
+"He was so deeply in love with you," observed Gabriella sympathetically,
+while Florrie, diving amid the foam of her laces, brought out a tiny
+handkerchief, and delicately pecked at the corner of her eye, not near
+enough to redden the lid and not far enough away to disturb the rice
+powder on the side of her nose.
+
+"He was crazy about me to the very last, you never saw anything like it.
+Of course we weren't a bit alike, I don't mind telling you so,
+Gabriella, because I know you'll never repeat it. We weren't really
+congenial, for Algy was just wrapped up in his law books, and there were
+whole days together when he wouldn't open his mouth, but that didn't
+seem to make any difference because, as he used to say, one of us had to
+listen sometimes. But, you know, mother says a pair of opposites makes
+the happiest marriage, and after being married to Algy, I feel how true
+that is. I got into the habit of talking so much when I used to run on
+about nothing to cheer him up--he was always so grave and glum even as a
+boy, you remember--and during his last illness--you know he died of
+Bright's disease, poor darling, and it came on just like that!--he used
+to make me talk to him for hours and hours just to keep him from
+thinking. Well, well, that's all over now, and I don't care what anybody
+says, my heart's buried with Algy. I don't believe you were ever in love
+but once either, were you, Gabriella?" she inquired cheerfully.
+
+"Well, what about Mr. Westcott? Is that his name?" asked Gabriella,
+without malice. As a study Florrie had always interested her, for she
+regarded her less as an individual than as an awful example of the utter
+futility of moral maxims. Florrie was without intelligence, without
+feeling, without imagination, virtue, breeding, or good taste, yet
+possessing none of these qualities, she had by sheer beauty and "dash"
+achieved all the ends for which these qualities usually strive. Good
+humour she had as long as one did not get in her way; but, beyond this
+single redeeming grace, she was as empty of substance as a tinted shell
+filled with sea foam. If power and efficiency are the two supreme
+attributes of success, then by all the laws and principles of logic,
+Florrie ought to have been a failure. But she was not a failure. She was
+a fool whose incomparable foolishness had conferred not only prosperity,
+but happiness upon her. She shone, she scintillated, she diffused the
+glow of success. Though she was undeserving of admiration, she had been
+surfeited on it from her childhood; though she was devoid of the moral
+excellence which should command love, by a flashing glance or a waving
+curl, she could bring the most exalted love down from the heavens. There
+was no question that Algernon had really loved her to distraction, and
+Algernon was a man of sense, of breeding, of distinction. As for
+Florrie, she had, of course, as little capacity for loving as she had
+for thinking.
+
+"Tom Westcott! I declare, Gabriella, I am almost ashamed to tell you
+about him. You've never been to a Virginia summer resort, so you
+couldn't understand that there is something about a Virginia summer
+resort that just seems to make any man better than none at all. You get
+so bored, you know, that you'd flirt with a lamp-post if there wasn't
+anything human around; and when you haven't laid eyes on a real sure
+enough man for several months, it's surprising how easy it is to take up
+with the imitation ones. Of course, I don't mean that Tom wasn't all
+right as far as family and all that goes; but he was simply no earthly
+account--he was just mean all through, and as soon as I found it out, I
+packed right straight up and left him. After Algy I couldn't have stood
+one of that sort, and there was no sense in my trying to. Life is too
+short, I always say, for experiments. There's no use sticking to a bad
+job when you can get away from it. That's the trouble with so many
+women, you know; they try and try to stand the wrong man when they know
+all the time that it isn't a particle of use, and that they are just
+bringing wrinkles into their faces; and then by the time they give up,
+they're all worn out and it's too late to look about for another chance.
+Now, I've seen too much of that kind of thing, and so I thought two
+weeks weren't long enough to bring wrinkles in my face, but they were
+plenty long for me to find out whether or not I could stand any man on
+earth. So here I am in little old New York instead of being stuck away
+in some God-forsaken Virginia town, where there isn't even a theatre,
+darning stockings for a family of children. But there's no use talking
+about that--" And Florrie, who had been born a lady on her father's
+side, adjusted her pompadour under the high bandeau of her hat, and rose
+with a dashing air from the sofa.
+
+"I'd love to see the babies, darling," she said; "I'm just crazy about
+babies."
+
+"They are out in the Park. I'm so sorry. Perhaps they are coming in now,
+I hear the door-bell."
+
+But it was George instead of the children; and he entered presently with
+a moody look, which vanished quickly before the brilliant vision of
+Florrie.
+
+"I thought I heard you," he observed with the casual intimacy of an old
+playmate, "so I came in. Have you got fixed yet? What about the
+apartment? You'd better let me help you hunt for it?"
+
+"Oh, I'm not sure about the apartment. I may take a house--a teeny weeny
+one, you know," said Florrie, as she bent softly toward him, scented and
+blooming. If one didn't know there wasn't really a bit of harm in her,
+one would be puzzled just what to think of her, Gabriella reflected.
+Amid the perfect order of Gabriella's inner life, the controlled
+emotion, the serene efficiency, the balanced power, Florrie's noisy
+beauty produced a disturbing effect. She liked her because she had known
+her from childhood, and it was impossible to think any harm of a girl
+one had played with at school; but she could not deny that Florrie was
+vulgar. As a matter of fact, Florrie's mother had been vulgar before
+her, and the thin strain of refinement inherited from her father's stock
+had obviously been overborne by the torrential vulgarity of the maternal
+blood.
+
+"A house? Well, that's even better," replied George. "I've no use for
+apartments, have I, Gabriella?"
+
+His effrontery was incredible! That he should joke about his broken
+promise before Florrie amazed Gabriella even after her disillusioning
+experience with him.
+
+"Then I'll get you to help me. Will you lend him to me, darling?"
+trilled Florrie piercingly from the door, where she stood in a striking
+pose which revealed her "fine figure" to the best advantage. The request
+was directed to Gabriella, but her blue eyes mocked a challenge to
+George while she spoke.
+
+"Oh, I'll give him," answered Gabriella pleasantly. There was no harm in
+it, she told herself innocently again; but it was a pity that Florrie,
+with her remarkable beauty, should be quite so ill bred.
+
+Five minutes later when George came back from putting Florrie into her
+hansom, he remarked carelessly:
+
+"She's got a figure all right."
+
+"Yes, she looks beautiful in black. No wonder she won't leave it off."
+
+"By Jove, to think it's little Florrie! Why, I don't believe there's a
+finer figure in New York. When she passed by the club yesterday the men
+were breaking their necks to look out of the window." Then, as if struck
+by a sudden suspicion, he added quickly: "Where did she get her money
+from? I thought Algy died rather hard up."
+
+"I never heard much about it. Mrs. Spencer must give her something."
+
+"I don't believe the old lady has a penny over three thousand a year,
+and that won't do in New York. This Westcott didn't have anything, did
+he?"
+
+"It never occurred to me to ask," replied Gabriella indifferently. What
+did it matter to George where Florrie got her money? But, then, George
+was always like that, and though he never made a penny himself, he was
+possessed of an insatiable curiosity about the amount and the sources of
+other people's incomes.
+
+"Well, it looks queer," he observed with intense interest after a
+prolonged pause. "That short pearl necklace she had on couldn't have
+cost a cent under ten thousand dollars."
+
+"It was lovely. I noticed how well the pearls matched," replied his
+wife. She was not in the least excited about the methods by which
+Florrie had obtained the necklace--all that was a part of the miraculous
+way she got everything she wanted in life--but she liked the pearls and
+she had envied Florrie while she looked at them.
+
+A deep furrow had appeared between George's eyebrows, and his mouth
+sagged suddenly at the corners, giving his face the ugly look Gabriella
+distrusted and dreaded. While she watched him she recalled vaguely that
+she had once thought the latent brutality in his face an expression of
+power. How young she had been when she married him! How inconceivably
+ignorant! Yet at twenty years she had imagined herself wise enough to
+judge a man. She had deluded herself with the sanctified fallacy that
+mere instinct would guide her aright--that her marriage would be
+protected from disaster by the infallible impulse which she had mistaken
+for love.
+
+"I wonder," said George with a suddenness that startled her out of her
+musing--"I wonder if it can be Winston Camp!"
+
+And Gabriella, who had forgotten Florrie, looked up to remark
+absentmindedly: "Winston Camp? You mean the man who dined here last
+winter and couldn't eat anything but nuts?"
+
+In the months that followed George did not mention Florrie again, and if
+he pursued his investigations into the obscure sources of her
+livelihood, his researches did not lead him back in the direction of
+Gabriella. But, from the day of Florrie's visit, it seemed to Gabriella,
+when she thought of it afterwards, his casual indifference began to
+develop into brutal neglect. Not that she regretted his affection, or
+even his politeness, not that she cared in the least what his manner
+was--this she made quite plain to herself--but her passion to see life
+clearly, to test experience, to weigh events, brought her almost
+breathlessly round again to the question, "What does it mean? Is there
+something hidden? Am I still the poor abject fool that Jane was or am I
+beginning really to be myself?"
+
+"You aren't looking well, Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler at breakfast one
+morning when George, as she confided afterwards to Patty, had behaved
+unspeakably to his wife before his father came down. "I want you to go
+about with me more, as you used to do before the children took up all
+your time."
+
+Gabriella had just crossed George's will about something--a mere trifle,
+something about calling on Florrie--and he had turned to her with a look
+of hatred in his eyes, a kind of nervous, excitable hatred which she had
+never seen until then. "Why does he look at me like that?" she had
+thought quite coldly; "and why should he have begun all of a sudden to
+hate me? Why should my words, my voice, my gestures even, exasperate him
+so profoundly? Of course he has stopped loving me, but why should that
+make him hate me? I stopped loving him, too, long ago, yet there is only
+indifference, not hate, in my heart."
+
+"You must go about with me more, dear," repeated Mrs. Fowler, in
+obedience to a vague but amiable instinct, which prompted her to shield
+George, to deceive Gabriella, to deny the truth of facts, to do anything
+on earth except acknowledge the actual situation in which she found
+herself. "Don't you think she ought to go about more, George?"
+
+"I don't care what she does," returned George brutally, while his blue
+eyes squinted in the old charming way from which all charm had departed.
+"I don't care--I don't care--" He checked himself, snapping his words in
+two with a virulent outburst of temper, and then, rising hurriedly, as
+his father entered the room, he left the table with his breakfast
+uneaten.
+
+"He's so nervous. I can't imagine what's the matter. I hope Burrows
+wasn't in the pantry. Did you say anything to hurt his feelings before
+you came down, Gabriella?" asked Mrs. Fowler, distractedly, with one eye
+on her daughter-in-law and the other on the pantry door, through which
+the discreet Burrows had disappeared at the opportune instant.
+
+"No, I haven't said anything that I can remember," answered Gabriella
+with calmness. It occurred to her that George's behaviour was hardly
+that of a man whose "feelings" had been wounded, but she made no audible
+record of her reflection; "and of course I'll go out with you if you
+want me to," she added, for she felt sincerely sorry for her
+mother-in-law, even though she had ruined George in his infancy. "I am
+going to the library to return a book, and we might pay some calls
+afterwards."
+
+"That's just what I was thinking," responded Mrs. Fowler, embarrassed,
+bewildered. Was it possible, she asked herself, that Gabriella had not
+noticed George's outrageous behaviour?
+
+But Gabriella did not "go about" with her mother-in-law that season, for
+a higher will than Mrs. Fowler's frustrated that lady's benevolent
+intentions. To a casual glance it would have seemed the merest accident
+which disturbed these felicitous plans, but such accidents, when
+Gabriella looked back on them afterwards, appeared to her to be woven
+into the very web and pattern of life. It was plainly incredible that
+her whole existence should be changed merely because Archibald was
+naughty, as incredible as the idea that Destiny should have used so
+small a medium for the accomplishment of its tragic designs.
+
+But Archibald had hardly reached the Park before he was brought home,
+resisting with all his strength, because he had given his shoes and
+stockings away; and the next ten minutes, while Gabriella gently
+reasoned with him on the pavement, were pregnant with consequences.
+
+"He's fierce, that's what he is," declared the nurse, who was Irish and
+militant. "He kicked me so I'm black and blue, ma'am, all over the
+shins, and every bit because I wouldn't let him pull off his shoes and
+socks and give 'em to a barefooted boy in the Park. You tell her,
+darlin'"--to Frances, who stood, bright-eyed and indignant, in her white
+fur coat and little fur cap which she wore drawn down tight over her
+curls--"you tell your mamma, darlin', you tell her how fierce and bold
+he was, and how he kicked me about the shins because I wouldn't let him
+take off his shoes and socks."
+
+"The poor boy wanted 'em! I won't wear 'em! I will give 'em to the poor
+boy!" screamed Archibald, furious, scowling, struggling in the
+restraining hold of his nurse. He was a robust, thick-set child of four
+years, with a thatch of dark-brown hair, and strange near-sighted brown
+eyes, behind spectacles which he had worn from the time he could walk.
+
+"What is it, Archibald? Tell me about it. Tell mother," pleaded
+Gabriella while he struggled desperately to escape from her tender
+grasp. "Who was the poor boy and where did you see him?"
+
+"He oughtn't to have been in the Park, ought he, mamma?" inquired
+Frances, who was guiltless of democratic tendencies. "Ragged people have
+no right to be in the Park, have they?"
+
+"Hush, darling, I want to hear what Archibald has to say. Tell me about
+him, Archibald. Shall you and I go out to look for him?"
+
+"If you do, he'll pull his shoes and socks right off again," insisted
+Frances emphatically. "He had got one quite off and had given it to the
+boy before we saw him, and Nanny was obliged to go and take it back, and
+I had to hold Archibald while she put it on him. He screamed very loud
+and everybody stopped to ask what was the matter, and one old gentleman
+with a long beard, like Moses in the Bible, gave Archibald a little box
+of candy--he took it out of his pocket--but Archibald threw it away, and
+kept on hollerin' louder than ever--"
+
+"That's right, darlin', you tell her," urged nurse, a stout woman with a
+red face and three gold teeth in the front of her mouth.
+
+"I understand now. Don't tell any more, Fanny," said Gabriella. "Now,
+Archibald dear, will you stop crying and be good?"
+
+"Am," replied Archibald sullenly, twisting out of her hands.
+
+"Am what, darling?"
+
+"Am good."
+
+"Well, will you stop crying?"
+
+"Have."
+
+"Then what do you want? Shall we go back and look for the poor boy?"
+
+"Hadn't any shoes. Feet were red. Wanted to give him shoes, 'cause I had
+plenty more at home. Nanny jerked him back. Hated Nanny. Hoped she would
+die. Hoped bears would eat her. Hoped tigers would eat her. Hoped lions
+would eat her. Hoped robins would cover her with leaves in the Park--"
+
+While he sobbed out his accusations against nurse, Gabriella, holding
+his hand tightly in hers, turned toward Fifth Avenue, and by the time he
+was pacified, they had walked several blocks together, with nurse and
+Fanny sedately bringing up the rear. Then, at last, having reasoned him
+alike out of his temper and his generosity, Gabriella retraced her
+steps, and entering the house with her latchkey, ran quickly up the
+stairs to the closed door of Mrs. Fowler's room. As she raised her hand
+to knock the sound of her own name reached her, and almost involuntarily
+she hesitated for an instant.
+
+"Yes, Gabriella is out. I saw her a minute ago on her way to the Park
+with the children."
+
+"Well, somebody ought to tell her, mother. I think it is perfectly
+outrageous to keep her in ignorance. Everybody is talking about it."
+
+"Oh, Patty, you couldn't! How on earth could you tell her a thing like
+that?" wailed George's mother, and she went on with a plaintive sigh as
+Gabriella opened the door: "George was always so mad about beauty, and
+though Gabriella has a fine face, she isn't exactly--"
+
+Then, at the startling apparition of Gabriella, with her face paling
+slowly above her black furs and her large indignant eyes fixed on them
+both, Mrs. Fowler wavered and broke off with a pathetic clutch at the
+pleasantness which had entirely departed from her manner. "Why,
+Gabriella, I didn't know you had come in! I was just saying to Patty--"
+It was, as she said afterwards to her husband, exactly as if her mind
+had become suddenly blank. She couldn't to save her life think of a
+single word to add to her sentence, and all the time Gabriella was
+standing there, as white as a ghost, with her accusing eyes turning
+slowly from one to the other of them. "Somehow I just couldn't lie to
+her when she looked like that, and the truth seemed too dreadful," Mrs.
+Fowler added that night to Archibald. "Damn George!" was Mr. Fowler's
+fervent retort. "And it took me so by surprise I almost fainted, for I'd
+never in my life heard him swear before," his wife had commented later.
+"But aren't men strange? To think he knew how all the time and kept it
+to himself! I declare they are entirely too secretive for anything!"
+
+"I heard what you were saying when I knocked," began Gabriella, with
+perfect composure. "I don't quite know what it was about, but I think--I
+think--"
+
+"It was nothing, dear; Patty and I were gossiping," replied Mrs. Fowler,
+with an eagerness that was almost violent. "Oh, Patty, you
+wouldn't!"--for Patty had broken in, conquering and merciless, with the
+declaration: "If you don't tell Gabriella, mamma, I'm going to. It's
+outrageous, anyhow, I've always said so, the way people keep things from
+women. Gabriella has a right to know what everybody is saying."
+
+"Of course I've a right to know," rejoined Gabriella, with a firmness
+before which Mrs. Fowler felt herself gradually dissolving--"melting
+away" was the description she gave of her feeling. "If anybody has a
+right to know, I suppose I have. Of course, it's about George. I know
+that much, anyhow," she added quietly.
+
+"I don't believe it's half so bad as they say," protested Mrs. Fowler
+feverishly. "I don't believe he really keeps her. His father says he
+couldn't possibly do it on the allowance he gives him, and, you know,
+George doesn't make a cent himself--not a cent. He never supported
+himself in his life--"
+
+She paused breathlessly, with a bright and confident glance as if she
+had made a point--a minor one perhaps, but still a point--in George's
+favour. The jet fringe on her bosom, which had rattled furiously with
+her excited palpitations, became gradually quiet, and as she pressed her
+lips firmly with her handkerchief, which she had rolled into a ball, she
+appeared to be pressing her customary smile back into place.
+
+"It won't last, Gabriella," she began again very suddenly with renewed
+assurance. "These things never last, and I think Patty is quite wrong to
+insist upon telling you. Of course it is humiliating for a time,
+but--but"--she hesitated, and then brought out triumphantly--"he married
+very young, you know, and men aren't like women--there's no use
+pretending they are. Now when a woman loves a man--"
+
+"But, you see, I don't love George," answered Gabriella, and her awful
+words seemed to reverberate through the horrified silence that
+surrounded her.
+
+"Not love him? O Gabriella! Of course, it's natural that you should feel
+angry and wounded, and that your pride should resent what looks like an
+affront to you; but you can't mean in your heart that you've got over
+caring. Women don't change so easily. Why, you're his wife--poor foolish
+boy that he is--and Florrie--"
+
+"So it's Florrie?" observed Gabriella, with a strangely dispassionate
+interest. It was queer, she reflected afterwards, that she had not felt
+the faintest curiosity about the woman.
+
+"I always suspected that there was something wrong about her," pursued
+Mrs. Fowler, reassured by the knowledge that she was placing the blame
+where it belonged according to all the laws of custom and tradition. "I
+must say I never liked her manner and her way of dressing, and she made
+eyes at every man she was introduced to--even at Archibald--"
+
+"Well, I didn't believe there was any real harm in her," said Gabriella,
+in a tone she might have used at one of her mother-in-law's luncheons.
+She was still standing near the door, in the very spot where she had
+paused at her entrance, with her head held high above the black fur at
+her throat, and one gloved hand playing with a bit of cord on the end of
+her muff. She could not possibly have taken it better. Bad as the
+situation was, it might have been a hundred times worse except for
+Gabriella's composure, thought Mrs. Fowler discreetly, adding with an
+inexplicable regret, that in her youth women were different. Yes, they
+had shown more feeling then, though they had behaved perhaps less well
+in a crisis. In spite of her gratitude--and she was sincerely grateful
+to her daughter-in-law for not making a scene--she became conscious
+presently that she was beginning to cherish an emotion not unlike
+resentment on George's account. That the discovery of George's
+faithlessness should be received so coolly by George's wife appeared
+almost an affront to him. Mrs. Fowler liked Gabriella, she was fond of
+her--and nobody could look in the girl's face and not see that she was a
+fine woman--but there were times, and this was one of them, when she
+thought her a little hard. Had Gabriella wept, had she raged, had she
+threatened Florrie's life or happiness, it might have been painful, but
+at least it would have been human; and above all things Mrs. Fowler felt
+that she liked women to be human.
+
+"Nothing that anybody says or does can excuse George," said Patty
+sternly. "He has behaved abominably, and if I were Gabriella, I'd simply
+wash my hands of him. I don't care if he is my brother, that doesn't
+make me blind, does it? If he were my husband," she concluded
+passionately, "I'd feel just the same way about it."
+
+"Oh, you mustn't! Oh, Patty, hush, it's wicked! It's sinful!" moaned
+Mrs. Fowler, shutting her eyes, as if the sight of Patty's indignant
+loveliness gave her a headache. "Don't try to harden Gabriella's heart
+against him. Don't try to make her think she's really stopped loving
+him."
+
+Gabriella's answer to this outburst was a look which, as poor Mrs.
+Fowler said afterwards, "cut her to the heart." Backing weakly to a
+chair, the valiant little lady sat down suddenly, because she felt that
+her legs were giving way beneath the weight of her body. And, though she
+was unaware of its significance, her action was deeply symbolical of the
+failure of the old order to withstand the devastating advance of the
+new spirit. She felt vaguely that she wished women and things were both
+what they used to be; but this, since she had little imagination, was as
+far as she penetrated into the psychology of Gabriella's behaviour.
+
+"But, you see, you're making the mistake of thinking that I love
+George," said Gabriella, with a reasonableness which made Mrs. Fowler
+feel that she wanted to scream, "and I don't love him--I don't love him
+at all. I haven't loved him for a long time--not since the night I saw
+him drunk. How could I love a man I've seen drunk--disgustingly drunk--a
+man I couldn't respect? I'm not made that way, and I can't help it. Some
+women may be like that, but I'm not. I couldn't, even if I wanted to,
+love a man who has treated me as George has done. I don't see how any
+woman could--any woman with a particle of pride and self-respect. Of
+course I had to live with him after I married him," she finished
+abruptly. "Marriage isn't made for love. I used to think it was--but it
+isn't--"
+
+"But, Gabriella, you don't mean--you can't--" Mrs. Fowler was really
+pitiable, for, after all, George was her son, and the ties of blood
+would not break so easily as the ties of marriage. In the depths of her
+humiliation she had almost convinced herself that she had never
+respected George, that she had never believed in him, forgetting the
+pride and adoration of her young motherhood. Whatever George did she
+could not change his relation to her--she could not shatter the one
+indissoluble bond that holds mankind together.
+
+"Gabriella, you don't--you can't--" she repeated wildly.
+
+Then, as Gabriella turned quickly and left the room, a scene--she
+became conscious presently that she was beginning to cherish an emotion
+not unlike resentment on George's account. That the discovery of
+George's faithlessness should be received so coolly by George's wife
+appeared almost an affront to him. Mrs. Fowler liked Gabriella, she was
+fond of her--and nobody could look in the girl's face and not see that
+she was a fine woman--but there were times, and this was one of them,
+when she thought her a little hard. Had Gabriella wept, had she raged,
+had she threatened Florrie's life or happiness, it might have been
+painful, but at least it would have been human; and above all things
+Mrs. Fowler felt that she liked women to be human.
+
+"Nothing that anybody says or does can excuse George," said Patty
+sternly. "He has behaved abominably, and if I were Gabriella, I'd simply
+wash my hands of him. I don't care if he is my brother, that doesn't
+make me blind, does it? If he were my husband," she concluded
+passionately, "I'd feel just the same way about it."
+
+"Oh, you mustn't! Oh, Patty, hush, it's wicked! It's sinful!" moaned
+Mrs. Fowler, shutting her eyes, as if the sight of Patty's indignant
+loveliness gave her a headache. "Don't try to harden Gabriella's heart
+against him. Don't try to make her think she's really stopped loving
+him."
+
+Gabriella's answer to this outburst was a look which, as poor Mrs.
+Fowler said afterwards, "cut her to the heart." Backing weakly to a
+chair, the valiant little lady sat down suddenly, because she felt that
+her legs were giving way beneath the weight of her body. And, though she
+was unaware of its significance, her action was deeply symbolical of the
+failure of the old order to withstand the devastating advance of the
+new spirit. She felt vaguely that she wished women and things were both
+what they used to be; but this, since she had little imagination, was as
+far as she penetrated into the psychology of Gabriella's behaviour.
+
+"But, you see, you're making the mistake of thinking that I love
+George," said Gabriella, with a reasonableness which made Mrs. Fowler
+feel that she wanted to scream, "and I don't love him--I don't love him
+at all. I haven't loved him for a long time--not since the night I saw
+him drunk. How could I love a man I've seen drunk--disgustingly drunk--a
+man I couldn't respect? I'm not made that way, and I can't help it. Some
+women may be like that, but I'm not. I couldn't, even if I wanted to,
+love a man who has treated me as George has done. I don't see how any
+woman could--any woman with a particle of pride and self-respect. Of
+course I had to live with him after I married him," she finished
+abruptly. "Marriage isn't made for love. I used to think it was--but it
+isn't--"
+
+"But, Gabriella, you don't mean--you can't--" Mrs. Fowler was really
+pitiable, for, after all, George was her son, and the ties of blood
+would not break so easily as the ties of marriage. In the depths of her
+humiliation she had almost convinced herself that she had never
+respected George, that she had never believed in him, forgetting the
+pride and adoration of her young motherhood. Whatever George did she
+could not change his relation to her--she could not shatter the one
+indissoluble bond that holds mankind together.
+
+"Gabriella, you don't--you can't--" she repeated wildly.
+
+Then, as Gabriella turned quickly and left the room, Mrs. Fowler rose
+stoically to her feet, adjusted her belt with a tremulous movement of
+her hands, and smiled bravely as she went to the mirror to put on her
+hat. Heartbroken and distraught of mind though she was, she submitted
+instinctively to the lifelong tyranny of appearances.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A SECOND START IN LIFE
+
+
+With deliberation Gabriella walked the length of the hall to her room,
+turned and locked the door after she had entered, and took off her hat
+and wraps and put them away in the closet. Her head was still carried
+high and her eyes were defiant and dark in the marble-like pallor of her
+face. Except for her burning eyes and the scarlet line of her tightly
+closed lips, she looked as still and as cold as a statue.
+
+"I'd rather die than have them know that it made any difference," she
+thought. "I'd rather die than have them know that I cared." Then sinking
+into a chair by the dressing-table, she laid her head on her arm and
+wept tears, not of wounded love, but of deep and passionate anger.
+
+She had spoiled her life! Because of her mad and headstrong folly, she
+had spoiled her life, and she was barely twenty-seven! Had she been the
+veriest fool she couldn't have done worse--she who had thought herself
+so sensible, so strong, so efficient! Jane couldn't have done worse, and
+yet she had always despised Jane for her weakness. But she had been as
+weak as Jane, she had been as unreasonable, she had been as incredibly
+sentimental and silly. And even in her folly she had irretrievably
+failed. She had made her choice, and yet she had not been able to keep
+the thing she had chosen. George had tired of her--here was the
+sharpest sting--a man had tired of her after a few months--had tired of
+her while she was still deeply in love with him. Her humiliation, while
+she sat there strangling her sobs, was so intense that it ran in little
+flames over her body. At the moment she was not angry with George, she
+was not even angry with Florrie. It was as if all the slumbering
+violence of her nature was aroused to a burning and relentless hatred of
+her own weakness. This emotion, which was so profound, so torrential, in
+its force that it seemed to shake the depths of her being, left room for
+no other feeling--for no other thought in her consciousness. She had but
+one life to live, and by her own fault, she had ruined it in its
+beginning.
+
+Then her mood changed, and she sat up, straight and stern, while she
+wiped her reddened eyelids with an impetuous and resolute gesture. No,
+she was not crushed; she would not allow herself even to be hurt. Her
+lot might be as sordid as Jane's, but she would make it different by the
+strength and the effectiveness of her resistance. She would never submit
+as Jane submitted; she would never become, through sheer inertia, a part
+of the ugliness that enveloped her. Thanks to the vein of iron in her
+soul she would never--no, not if she died fighting--become one of the
+victims of life.
+
+Going into the dressing-room, she bathed her eyes with cold water; and
+she was still drying them before the mirror when the children came in,
+flushed and blooming, with their hands in Miss Polly Hatch's. What
+splendid children they were, she thought, looking wistfully at their
+eager faces. Any father, any mother in the world, might be proud of
+them. Fanny, the elder, was like an angel in her white fur coat and
+pert little cap, with her short golden curls like bunches of yellow silk
+on her shoulders, and her blue eyes, as grave as a philosopher's,
+beaming softly under her thick jet-black lashes. She was not
+particularly bright; she was, for her age, an unconscionable snob; but
+no one could deny that she was as beautiful as an angel to look at.
+
+"Miss Polly wanted to kiss me, mamma, but I wouldn't," she said coolly
+as she examined a little bundle of sewing the seamstress had put down on
+the table. "I needn't kiss people if I don't want to, need I? Archibald
+doesn't like to kiss either. He's naughty about it sometimes when ladies
+ask him to. He doesn't like scratchin'. Isn't it funny to call kissing,
+'scratchin'? He told me Miss Polly scratched him and he didn't like it.
+He is afraid of her because she is so ugly. Why are you ugly, Miss
+Polly? Couldn't you help it? Did God make you ugly just for fun? Why
+doesn't he make everybody pretty? I would if I were God. What is God's
+last name? Archibald says it is Walker. Is it Walker, mamma, and how
+does Archibald know? Who told him--"
+
+When at last she was suppressed and sent out of the room with the nurse,
+she went at a dancing step, turning to make faces at Archibald, who
+stood stolidly at his mother's knee, biting deep bites into a red apple
+Miss Polly had given him. He was not a handsome child, even Gabriella
+admitted that his spectacles spoiled his appearance; but he was
+remarkably intelligent for his four years, and he was so strong and
+sturdy that he had never had a day's illness in his life. His face was
+unusually thoughtful and expressive, and his eyes, in spite of the
+disfiguring glasses, were large, brown, and beautiful, with something of
+the luminous softness of Cousin Jimmy's. Though she could not remember
+her father, it pleased Gabriella to think that Archibald was like him,
+and Miss Polly declared, with conviction, that he was "already his
+living image." Of the two children, for some obscure reason which she
+could not define and which was probably rooted in instinct, Gabriella
+had the greater tenderness for her son; and though she denied this
+preference to herself, Mrs. Fowler and Miss Polly had both commented
+upon it. Even his temper, which was uncontrollable at times, endeared
+him to her, and the streak of savage in his nature seemed to awaken some
+dim ancestral memories in her brain.
+
+"Thank Miss Polly for the apple and run away to Fanny," said his mother,
+after she had held him pressed closely to her breast for a minute. While
+she did so, she felt, with profound sadness, that her whole universe had
+dwindled down to her children. Of all her happiness only her children
+remained to her.
+
+"Don't want to run," replied Archibald with beaming good humour. In his
+passion for brevity he eliminated pronouns whenever it was possible.
+
+"But Fanny is waiting for you."
+
+"Would rather stay with mother than go with Fanny and Mutton." That was
+another of his eccentricities. Just as he had insisted that God's "last
+name was Walker," so he had begun of his own accord, and for no visible
+reason, to call nurse "Mutton." He was always fitting names of his own
+invention to persons; and in his selection he was guided by a principle
+so obscure that Gabriella had never been able to discover its origin.
+Thus his grandmother from the first had been "Budd," and he had
+immediately started to call Miss Polly "Pang."
+
+"Don't you want to go back to the Park, Archibald? You must finish your
+walk."
+
+"Will the poor boy be there?" He never forgot anything. It was quite
+probable that he would inquire for "the poor boy" a year hence.
+
+"Perhaps. You might take him an apple and a penny."
+
+He stood gravely considering the plan, with one hand in his mother's and
+one on Miss Polly's knee.
+
+"I'll take Pang to nurse him," he said when he had decided against the
+suggestion of the apple and the penny. "He hasn't any nurse, and Fanny
+wouldn't like him to have hers. I'll take Pang."
+
+"But Pang isn't a nurse, dear. There, now, run to Fanny. Miss Polly
+lives so far away she can't stay very long."
+
+He went obediently, for he was usually amenable to his mother's
+commands, stopping only once at the door to ask if "Pang lived as far
+away as God and could she manage to get a message to Him about the poor
+boy needing shoes?"
+
+"I declare I can't make out that child to save my soul," remarked Miss
+Polly as he shut the door carefully and ran down the hall to the
+nursery. "The more I study him the curiouser he seems to me. If he wan't
+so quick about some things you might think his wits were sort of
+addled--but they ain't, are they? Now, whatever do you reckon put the
+notion in his head to call me 'Pang?"
+
+All the smiling, circular wrinkles in her face were working with
+amusement while her little black eyes twinkled like jet beads above the
+ruddy creases in her cheeks.
+
+"I can't imagine, for he must have made up the word for himself. But
+don't you think he is like father, Miss Polly? I love to hear you say
+so."
+
+"That child? Why, he's the very spit of yo' pa, Gabriella, and there
+ain't any two ideas about it. I thought so the very first time I ever
+saw him, and now that I come to think of it, it is exactly like yo' pa
+to be makin' up all kinds of foolish names out of nothin'. Yo' pa used
+to call me Poll Parrot, that he did."
+
+"Mother thinks Archibald is going to be very much like him. She saw him
+in the mountains last summer."
+
+"So she told me when I was down home. You ain't looking a bit well,
+Gabriella. You've got exactly the look Miss Letty Marshall had before
+she came down with heart complaint. The doctors were fussin' over her
+for weeks before they could find out what the trouble was, but I said
+all along it wan't nothin' in the world but a bruised heart, and sure
+enough that was just what they found out was the matter. You ain't had a
+feelin' of heart burn after you eat, have you? Sometimes it don't take
+you that way, though; you just begin to have palpitations when you go up
+and down stairs and then you start to wakin' up in the night with
+shortness of breath. That's the way my Aunt Lydy had it. You know I
+nursed her till she died, and I've seen her get right black in the face
+when she stooped to pick up a pin. It's her daughter Lydy that's waiting
+on old Mrs. Peyton now. You know Mrs. Peyton was feelin' kind of run
+down so her son Arthur--I call him Arthur to his face because I used to
+sew there when he wan't more'n knee high--well, Arthur said she'd have
+to have somebody to wait on her every minute and she thought she'd
+rather have Lydy than anybody else because Lydy was always so handy in a
+sickroom. That was six months ago, and Lydy's been stayin' on there ever
+since. She says there ain't anybody on earth like Mr. Arthur, and she
+never could make out why you didn't marry him. He ain't ever had an eye
+for anybody but you, and he's got yo' picture--the one in the white
+dress--on his bureau and he keeps a rose in a vase before it all the
+time. That ain't much like a man, but then there always was a heap of a
+girl in Arthur in little ways, wan't there?"
+
+"I wonder why I didn't marry him?" said Gabriella softly; and not until
+Miss Polly answered her, was she aware that she had spoken aloud. In her
+spiritual reaction from the grosser reality of passion, the delicacy and
+remoteness of Arthur's love borrowed the pious and mystic qualities of
+religious worship. She had seen the sordid and ugly sides of sex; and
+she felt now a profound disgust for the emotion which drew men and women
+together--for the light in the eyes, the touch of the lips, the clinging
+of the hands. Once she had idealized these things into love itself; now
+the very memory of them filled her with repulsion. She still wanted
+love, but a love so pure, so disembodied, so ethereal that it was
+liberated from the dominion of flesh. In the beginning, as a girl, she
+had accepted love as the supreme good, as the essential reality; now,
+utterly disillusioned, she asked herself: "What is there left in life?
+What is the thing that really counts, after all? What is the possession
+that makes all the striving worth while in the end? At twenty-seven love
+is over for me, and if love is over, what remains to fill the rest of
+my life? There must be something else--there must be a reality somewhere
+which is truer, which is profounder, than love." This, she knew, was the
+question which neither tradition nor custom could answer. Religion,
+perhaps, might have helped her; but it was characteristic of her
+generation that she should give religion hardly a thought as a possible
+solution of the problem of life. She wanted substance, facts,
+experience; she wanted to examine, to analyze, to discover; and it was
+just here that religion hopelessly failed her as a guide. Faith she had
+had in her cradle--faith in life, faith in love, faith in herself; and
+it was faith that had brought her to this bleak disenchantment of
+spirit. No, she wanted knowledge now, not faith; she wanted truth, not
+illusion.
+
+"Well, you never can tell about a thing like that," Miss Polly was
+saying in her sprightly way, quite as if she were discussing the pattern
+of a dress or the stitching of a seam. "It was feelin', I reckon, and
+feelin' is one of the things nobody can count on. But you did mighty
+well, even if you didn't marry Arthur. I saw Mr. George downtown
+yesterday, when I went around to Stern's to match the edging for a baby
+dress, and I thought to myself I'd seldom seen a handsomer piece of
+flesh than he was. He was walkin' along up Fifth Avenue with Florrie
+Spencer--I'll always call her Florrie Spencer I don't care how many
+times she marries--and everybody in the street turned right plumb round
+to look at 'em. She's prettier than she ever was, ain't she? And such a
+fit as her dress was! One of them trailin' black things that fit as
+tight as wax over the hips and flares out all round the feet. She was
+holdin' up her skirts to show her feet, I reckon, and her collar was so
+high behind her ears, she could hardly turn her head to look at Mr.
+George. But I never saw anybody with more style--no, not if it was that
+Mrs. Pletheridge who is everlastingly in the Sunday papers. I declare
+Florrie's waist didn't look much bigger round than the leg of that
+table--honestly it didn't--and her hat was perched on a bandeau so high
+that you could see the new sort of way she'd gone and had her hair
+crimped--they call it Marcellin' up here, don't they?"
+
+"Was she with George?" asked Gabriella indifferently.
+
+"They were goin' to some restaurant or another for tea, I reckon, and
+they certainly were a fine-lookin' pair. I wish you could have seen 'em.
+Not that you wouldn't have been a match for 'em," she added consolingly.
+"You and Mr. George look mighty well when you're together. You're just
+on a level, and if you could manage to tighten yo' corset a little mite
+at the waist, and hold yo'self with that bend out at the back the way
+Florrie does, you'd have pretty near as fine a figure as she has. Ain't
+it funny," she added irrelevantly, "but I was just studyin' last night
+about the way yo' ma used to say that all yo' folks married badly. I
+reckon she got that idea along of yo' pa's kin. You don't recollect much
+about 'em, but one of yo' pa's brothers married a woman who went clean
+deranged inside of a year and tried to kill him. Then there was yo'
+Cousin Nelly Harrison--she married badly, or only middlin' well anyway.
+There certainly was a lot of 'em when you come to think--not countin'
+Jane and Mr. Charley, and I can't help what happens," she concluded
+sentimentally, "I ain't ever goin' back on Mr. Charley--not after the
+way he sent me two loads of coal the winter I was laid up with
+rheumatism and couldn't work. Well, it's about time for me to be goin',
+Gabriella. If you want me for anything, you just drop me a line to say
+so. William's children are gettin' so big, I can come out for the day
+'most any time now, and if William's courtin' goes on all right, I
+reckon he won't be wantin' me much longer. He's been waitin' on a young
+woman right steady for more'n six months, and it wouldn't surprise me a
+bit if something was to come of it befo' summer."
+
+"Then you'd go South again, wouldn't you?" There was a wistful sound in
+Gabriella's voice as she put the question. Miss Polly was a tiresome
+person, but at least she was faithful, and long habit had established a
+bond of tolerance, if not of affection, between them. In the last few
+months Gabriella had grown to look upon her as the one living
+association with her childhood, and she was so lonely that she dreaded
+to sever the single tie with the past that still remained to her. "I
+believe she'd work her fingers to the bone for me, and, of course, she
+can't help being so garrulous," she thought.
+
+"I reckon I will, if it comes to that, but I'd hate like anything to
+leave you and the children," answered Miss Polly. "I feel somehow as if
+I belonged up here with you all, and I've grown real fond of Archibald."
+
+"Yes, I'd hate to give you up," said Gabriella, as she let her go and
+turned back again into the room. Her brain had worked quickly while Miss
+Polly was talking, and the undercurrent of gossip had helped, rather
+than retarded, the clearness and rapidity of her thoughts. All her
+weakness, all her anger had passed. She saw the situation without
+exaggeration and without illusion, for she had made her decision in the
+few minutes between the entrance and the departure of the seamstress.
+The embittering memories of her life with George were submerged in the
+invigorating waves of energy that flooded her being. Her inert body
+responded to the miraculous restoration of her spirit; and, while she
+walked swiftly from the door to the window, she had a sensation of
+lightness and ease as if she had just awakened from a refreshing sleep.
+For seven years all the strength of her character had been drained by
+the supreme function of motherhood; but now her children had ceased to
+need the whole of her life, and she was free to belong at least in part
+to herself--free to enter unrestricted into the broader human
+activities. And, above all, she was free from George. She had escaped
+from the humiliating bondage of her marriage; for, since he had broken
+the tie between them, she realized with a strange, an almost unnatural,
+exhilaration, how little except duty--how little except the bare legal
+husk of the marriage contract--still held her to him. She had loved him
+once, but she loved him no longer, and she resolved passionately that
+she would not allow her life to be spoiled because of a single mistake.
+Seven years were lost out of her youth, it was true, but those years had
+given her her children, and so they were not wasted in spite of the
+mistakes she had made, of the shame she had suffered. Judged simply as a
+machine she was of greater value at twenty-seven than she had been at
+twenty, and a part of this value lay in her deeper knowledge of life.
+She had had her adventure, and she was cured forever of adventurous
+desires. Her imagination, as well as her body, was firmer, harder, more
+disciplined than it had been in her girlhood; and if her vision of the
+universe was less sympathetic, it was also less sentimental. The bluest
+eyes in the world, she told herself sternly, could not trouble her fancy
+to-day, nor could the wildest romance quicken her pulses.
+
+A wagon, filled with blue and white hyacinths, passed by in the street,
+and while she watched it, there flashed into her mind, with the
+swiftness of light, a memory of the evening when she had broken her
+engagement to Arthur. All her life he had loved her, and, but for an
+accident, she might have married him. If she had not seen George at
+Florrie's party--if she had not seen him under a yellow lantern, with
+the glow in his eyes, and a dreamy waltz floating from the arbour of
+roses at the end of the garden--if this had not happened, she would have
+married Arthur instead of George, and her whole life would have been
+different. Because of a single instant, because of a chance meeting, she
+had wrecked the happiness of three lives. Now, when the bloom had
+dropped from her love, it was impossible for her to gather the withered
+leaves and bare stems in her hands and find any fragrance about them; it
+was impossible for her to understand how or why she had followed so
+fleeting an impulse. People had told her that love lasted forever, yet
+she knew that her emotion for George was so utterly dead that there was
+no warmth left in the ashes. It had all been so vivid once, and now it
+was as dull and colourless as the dust drifting after the blue and white
+hyacinths.
+
+From the trail of dust and the fragrance of the hyacinths, Arthur's face
+floated up to her, grave, gentle, and thin-featured, with its look of
+detached culture, of nameless distinction. She recalled the colour of
+his eyes, as clear and cool as running water, his sensitive lips under
+the thin, brown moustache, and his slender, aristocratic hands, with
+their touch as soft and as tender as a woman's. "He had intellect--he
+had culture--I suppose these are the things that really matter," she
+thought, for George, she knew, possessed neither of these qualities.
+And, as she remembered Arthur, she was stirred, not by tenderness, but
+by a passionate gratitude. He had loved her, and by loving her, he had
+saved her pride from defeat. In the hour of her deepest humiliation, she
+found comfort in the knowledge of his bleeding heart, of his tragic and
+beautiful loyalty; for though she was strong enough to live without
+love, she was not strong enough to live with the thought that no man had
+ever loved her.
+
+For a few minutes she allowed her fancy to play with the comforting
+memory of Arthur's devotion--with the image of her photograph on his
+bureau and the single rose in the vase he kept always before it. "But
+for an accident I might have loved him," she said, and the thought of
+this love which might have been sent a wave of sweetness to her heart.
+"I might have loved him and been happy." The vision was so dangerously
+beautiful that she put it resolutely away from her, and told herself,
+with an effort to be philosophical, that there was no use whatever in
+regretting the past, and since love was over for her, she must set her
+mind to solve the problem of work. "I've got my life to live," she said
+with stoical calmness, "and however bad it is I've nobody to blame for
+it but myself."
+
+Then, because she had only one talent, however small, she changed her
+dress, and went out to ask for a position as designer, saleswoman, or
+milliner in the house of Dinard.
+
+The Irish woman, voluble, painted, powdered, bewigged, and with the
+remains of her handsome figure laced into a black satin gown, nodded her
+false golden locks and smiled an ambiguous smile when she heard the
+explanation of young Mrs. Fowler's afternoon call.
+
+"But, no, it ees impossible," she protested, forgetting her foreign
+shrug and preserving with difficulty the trace of an accent. Then,
+becoming suddenly natural as she realized that no immediate profit was
+to be derived from affectation, she added decisively, "you have no
+training, and I have quite as many salesladies as I need at this season.
+Not that you are not chic," she hastened to conclude, "not that you
+would not in appearance be an adornment to any establishment."
+
+"I am willing to do anything," said Gabriella, pressing her point with
+characteristic tenacity. "I want to learn, you know, I want to learn
+everything I possibly can. You yourself told me that I had a natural
+gift for designing, and I am anxious to turn it to some account. I
+believe I can make a very good milliner, and I want to try."
+
+"But what would Madame Fowler, your mother-in-law, say to this? Surely
+no one would want to earn her living unless she was obliged to."
+
+For Madame had known life, as she often remarked, and the knowledge so
+patiently acquired had gone far to confirm her natural suspicion of
+human nature. She had got on, as she observed in confidential moments,
+by believing in nobody; and this skepticism, which was fundamental and
+rooted in principle, had inspired her behaviour not only to her patrons,
+but to her husband, her children, her domestic servants, her
+tradespeople, and the policeman at the corner. Thirty years ago she had
+suspected the entire masculine world of amorous designs upon her person;
+to-day, secretly numbering her years at sixty-two, and publicly
+acknowledging forty-five of them, she suspected the same world of
+equally active, if less romantic, intentions regarding her purse. And if
+she distrusted men, she both distrusted and despised women. She
+distrusted and despised them because they were poor workers, because
+they were idlers by nature, because they allowed themselves to be
+cheated, slighted, underpaid, underfed, and oppressed, and, most of all,
+she despised them because they were the victims of their own emotions.
+Love was all very well, she was accustomed to observe, as a pleasurable
+pursuit, but, as with any other pursuit, when it began to impair the
+appetite and to affect the quality and the quantity of one's work, then
+a serious person would at once contrive to get rid of the passion. And
+Madame prided herself with reason upon being a strictly serious person.
+She had been through the experience of love innumerable times; she had
+lost four husbands, and, as she pointed out with complacency, she was
+still living.
+
+In the dubious splendour of her showrooms, which were curtained and
+carpeted in velvet, and decorated with artificial rose-bushes flowering
+magnificently from white and gold jardinières, six arrogant young women,
+in marvellously fitting gowns of black satin, strolled back and forth
+all day long, or stood gracefully, with the exaggerated curve of the
+period, awaiting possible customers. Though they were as human within as
+Madame Dinard--and beneath her make-up she was very human
+indeed--nothing so variable as an expression ever crossed the waxlike
+immobility of their faces; and while they trailed their black satin
+trains over the rich carpets, amid the lustrous piles of silks and
+velvets which covered the white and gold tables, they appeared to float
+through an atmosphere of eternal enchantment. Watching them, Gabriella
+wondered idly if they could ever unbend at the waist, if they could ever
+let down those elaborate and intricate piles of hair. Then she overheard
+the tallest and most arrogant of them remark, "I'm just crazy about him,
+but he's dead broke," and she realized that they also belonged to the
+unsatisfied world of humanity.
+
+Madame, who had slipped away to answer the telephone, came rustling
+back, and sank, wheezing, into a white and gilt chair, which was too
+small to contain the whole of her ample person. Though she had spoken
+quite sharply at the telephone, her voice was mellifluous when she
+attuned it to Gabriella.
+
+"That gown is perfect on you," she remarked in honied accents. "It was
+one of my best models last season, and as I said before, Madame, you are
+so fortunate as to wear your clothes with a grace." She was urbane, but
+she was anxious to be rid of her, this young Mrs. Fowler could see at a
+glance. "Your head is well set on your shoulders, and that is rare--very
+rare! It would surprise you to know how few women have heads that are
+well set on their shoulders. Yes, I understand. You wish to learn, but
+not to make a living. That is very good, for the only comfortable way
+for a woman to make her living is to marry one--a man is the only
+perfectly satisfactory means of livelihood. I tell this to my daughter,
+who wishes to go on the stage. If you are looking for pleasure, that is
+different, but when you talk of a living--well, there is but one way to
+insure it, and that is to marry a man who is able to provide it--either
+as allowance or as alimony. The best that a woman can do gives her only
+bread and meat--an existence, not a living. Only a man can provide one
+with the essential things--with clothes and jewels and carriages and
+trips to Europe. These are the important things in life, and what woman
+was ever able to procure these except from a man?"
+
+Her face, so thickly covered with rouge and liquid powder that it was as
+expressionless as a mask, turned its hollow eyes on a funeral which was
+slowly passing in the street; and though her creed was hardly the kind
+to fortify one's spiritual part against the contemplation of death, she
+surveyed the solemn procession as tranquilly as any devoted adherent of
+either religion or philosophy could have done. Not a shadow passed over
+her fantastic mockery of youth as she glanced back at her visitor.
+
+"But you have worked--you have supported yourself," insisted Gabriella
+with firmness.
+
+"Myself and six children, to say nothing of three husbands. Yes, I
+supported three of my four husbands, but what did I get out of it?"
+replied Madame, shrugging her ample shoulders. "What was there in it for
+me? Since we are talking freely, I may say that I have worked hard all
+my life, and I got nothing out of it that I couldn't have got with much
+less trouble by a suitable marriage. Of course this is not for my girls
+to hear. I don't tell them this, but it is true nevertheless. Men should
+do the work of the world, and they should support women; that is how God
+intended it, that is according to both nature and religion; any priest
+will say as much to you." And she, who had defied both God and Nature,
+wagged her false golden head toward the funeral procession.
+
+"Yet you have been successful. You have built up a good business. The
+work has repaid you."
+
+"A woman's work!" She snapped her gouty fingers with a playful gesture.
+"Does a woman's work ever repay her? Think of the pleasures I have
+missed in my life--the excursions, the theatres, the shows. All these I
+might have had if I hadn't shut myself up every day until dark. And now
+you wish to do this! You with your youth, with your style, with your
+husband!"
+
+She protested, she pleaded, she reasoned, but in the end Gabriella won
+her point by the stubborn force of her will. Madame would take her for a
+few weeks, a few months, a few years, as long as she cared to stay and
+gave satisfaction. Madame would have her taught what she could learn,
+would discover by degrees the natural gifts and the amount of training
+already possessed by young Mrs. Fowler. Young Mrs. Fowler, on the other
+hand, must "stand around" when required in the showrooms (it was just
+here that Gabriella won her victory); she must assist at the ordering of
+gowns, at the selections, and while Madame's patrons were fitted, young
+Mrs. Fowler must be prepared to assume graceful attitudes in the
+background and to offer her suggestions with a persuasive air.
+Suggestions, even futile ones, offered in a charming voice from a
+distinguished figure in black satin had borne wonderful results in
+Madame's experience.
+
+"I began that way myself, Mrs. Fowler. You may not believe it, but I was
+once slenderer than you are--my waist measured only nineteen inches and
+my bust thirty-six--just the figure a man most admires. The result was,
+you see, that I have had four husbands, though it is true that I
+supported three of them, and it is always easy to marry if one provides
+the support. Men are like that. It is their nature. Yes, I began that
+way with little training, but much natural talent, and a head full of
+ideas. If one has ideas it is always possible to become a success, but
+they are rarer even than waists measuring nineteen inches. And I had
+charm, though you might not believe it now, for charm does not wear. But
+I made my way up from the bottom, first as errand girl, at the age of
+ten, and I made it, not by work, for I could never handle a needle, but
+by ideas. They were once plentiful, and now they are so scarce," she
+broke off with a sigh of resignation which seemed to accept every fact
+of experience except the fact of age. "It was a hard life, but it was
+life, after all. One is not put here to be contented, or one would dread
+death too much for the purpose of God." In spite of her uncompromising
+materialism, she was not without an ineradicable streak of superstition
+which she would probably have called piety.
+
+"I am ready to begin at once--to-morrow," said Gabriella, and she added
+without explanation, obeying, perhaps, an intuitive feeling that to
+explain a statement is to weaken it, "and I should like to be called by
+my maiden name while I am here--just Mrs. Carr, if you don't mind."
+
+To this request Madame agreed with effusion, if not with sincerity. For
+her own part she would have preferred to speak of her saleswoman as
+young Mrs. Fowler; but she reflected comfortably that many of her
+patrons would know young Mrs. Fowler by sight at least, and to the
+others she might conveniently drop a word or two in due season. To drop
+a word or two would provide entertainment throughout the length of a
+fitting; and, for the rest, the mystery of the situation had its charm
+for the romantic Irish strain in her blood. The prospect of securing
+both entertainment and mystery at the modest expenditure of fifteen
+dollars a week impressed her as very good business, for she combined in
+the superlative degree the opposite qualities of romance and economy. To
+be sure, except for the advertisement she afforded and the gossip she
+provided, young Mrs. Fowler might not prove to be worth even her modest
+salary; but there was, on the other hand, a remote possibility that she
+might turn out to be gifted, and Madame would then be able to use her
+inventiveness to some purpose before the gifted one discovered her
+value. In any case, Madame was at liberty to discharge her with a day's
+notice, and her salary would hardly be increased for three months even
+should she persist in her eccentricity and develop a positive talent for
+dressmaking. And if young Mrs. Fowler could do nothing else, Madame
+reflected as they parted, she could at least receive customers and
+display models with an imposing, even an aristocratic, demeanour.
+
+To receive Madame's customers and display Madame's models were the last
+occupations Gabriella would have chosen had she been able to penetrate
+Madame's frivolous wig to her busy brain and detect her prudent schemes
+for the future; but the girl was sick of her dependence on George's
+father, and, in the revolt of her pride, she would have accepted any
+honest work which would have enabled her to escape from the insecurity
+of her position. Of her competence to earn a living, of her ability to
+excel in any work that she undertook, of the sufficiency and soundness
+of her resources, she was as absolutely assured as she had been when she
+entered the millinery department of Brandywine & Plummer. If Madame,
+starting penniless, had nevertheless contrived, through her native
+abilities, to support three husbands and six children, surely the
+capable and industrious Gabriella might assume smaller burdens with the
+certainty of moderate success. It was not, when one considered it, the
+life which one would have chosen, but who, since the world began, had
+ever lived exactly the life of his choice? Many women, she reflected
+stoically, were far worse off than she, since she started not only with
+a modicum of business experience (for surely the three months with
+Brandywine & Plummer might weigh as that) but with a knowledge of the
+world and a social position which she had found to be fairly marketable.
+That Madame Dinard would have accepted an unknown and undistinguished
+applicant for work at a salary of fifteen dollars a week she did not for
+an instant imagine. This inadequate sum, she concluded with a touch of
+ironic humour, represented the exact value in open market of her
+marriage to George.
+
+In the front room, where a sparse mid-winter collection of hats
+ornamented the scattered stands, she stopped for a few minutes to
+inspect, with a critical eye, the dingy array. "I wonder what makes them
+buy so many they can't sell?" she said half aloud to the model at which
+she was gazing. "Nobody would wear these hats--certainly nobody who
+could afford to buy Parisian models. I could design far better hats
+than these, I myself, and if I were the head of the house I should never
+have accepted any of them, no matter who bought them. I suppose, after
+all, it's the fault of the buyer, but it's a waste--it's not economy."
+
+Lifting a green velvet toque trimmed with a skinny white ostrich feather
+from the peg before which she was standing, she surveyed the august
+French name emblazoned in gold on the lining. "Everything isn't good
+that comes from Paris," she thought, with a shrug which was worthy of
+Madame at her best. "Why, I wonder, can't Americans produce 'ideas'
+themselves? Why do we always have to depend on the things the French
+send over to us? Half the hats and gowns Madame has aren't really good,
+and yet she makes people pay tremendous prices for things she knows are
+bad and undistinguished. All that ought to be changed, and if I ever
+succeed, if I ever catch on, I am going to change it." An idea, a whole
+flock of ideas, came to her while she stood there with her rapt gaze on
+the green velvet toque, which nobody had bought, and which she knew
+would shortly be "marked down," august French name included, from forty
+to fifteen and from fifteen to five dollars. Her constructive
+imagination was at work recreating the business, and she saw it in fancy
+made over and made right from the bottom--she saw Madame's duplicity
+succeeded by something of Brandywine & Plummer's inflexible honesty, and
+the flimsy base of the structure supplanted by a solid foundation of
+credit. For she had come often enough to Dinard's to discern the
+slipshod and unsystematic methods beneath the ornate and extravagant
+surface. Her naturally quick powers of observation had detected at a
+glance conditions of which the elder Mrs. Fowler was never aware. To
+sell gowns and hats at treble their actual value, to cajole her
+customers into buying what they did not want and what did not suit them,
+to give inferior goods, inferior workmanship, inferior style wherever
+they would be accepted, and to get always the most money for the least
+possible expenditure of ability, industry, and honesty--these were the
+fundamental principles, Gabriella had already discovered, beneath
+Madame's flourishing, but shallow-rooted, prosperity. Brandywine &
+Plummer did not carry Parisian models; their shop was not fashionable in
+the way that the establishment of a New York dressmaker and milliner
+must be fashionable; but the standard of excellence in all things
+excepting style was far higher in the old Broad Street house in the
+middle 'nineties than it was at Madame Dinard's during the early years
+of the new century. Quality had been essential in every hat that went
+from Brandywine & Plummer's millinery department; and Gabriella,
+deriving from a mother who worked only in fine linen, rejected
+instinctively the cheap, the tawdry, and the inferior. She had heard a
+customer complain one day of the quality of the velvet on a hat Madame
+had made to order; and pausing to look at the material as she went out,
+she had decided that the most prosperous house in New York could not
+survive many incidents of that deplorable sort. To be sure, such
+material would not have been supplied to Mrs. Pletheridge, or even to
+the elder Mrs. Fowler, who, though Southern, was always particular and
+very often severe; but here again, since this cheap hat had been sold at
+a high price, was a vital weakness in Madame's business philosophy.
+
+On the whole, there were many of Madame's methods which might be
+improved; and when Gabriella passed through the ivory and gold doorway
+into the street, she had convinced herself that she was preëminently
+designed by Nature to undertake the necessary work of improvement. The
+tawdriness she particularly disliked--the trashy gold and ivory of the
+decorations, the artificial rose-bushes from which the dust was never
+removed, the sumptuous velvet carpets which were not taken up in the
+summer.
+
+While she was crossing the street a man joined her; and glancing up as
+soon as she was clear of the traffic, she saw that it was Judge
+Crowborough. In the last seven years her dislike for him had gradually
+disappeared, and though she had never found him attractive, she had
+grown to accept the general estimate of his character and ability. A man
+so gifted ought not to be judged as severely as poorer or less actively
+intelligent mortals; and as long as other men did not judge him, she
+felt no inclination to usurp so unfeminine a prerogative. He had always
+been kind to her, and she understood now from his manner that he meant
+to be still kinder. It occurred to her at once that he knew of George's
+infatuation for Florrie, and that he was chivalrously extending to
+George's wife a sympathy which he would probably have withheld in such
+circumstances from his own. Had it been possible she would have liked to
+explain to him that in her case his sympathy was not needed; but she
+realized, with resentment, that one of her most galling burdens would be
+the wasted pity which her unfortunate situation would inspire in the
+friends of the family. Social conventions made it impossible for her to
+tell the world, including Judge Crowborough, that George's infidelity
+was a matter of slight importance to her, since it struck only at her
+pride, not at her heart. Her pride, it is true, had suffered sharply for
+an hour; but so superficial was the wound that the distraction of
+seeking work had been almost sufficient to heal it.
+
+"A most extraordinary day for January," remarked the judge as they
+reached a corner. "You hardly need your furs, the air is so mild."
+
+Overhead small, birdlike clouds drifted in flocks across a sky of
+changeable brightness, and the wind, blowing past the tray of a flower
+vendor at the corner, was faintly scented with violets. It was one of
+those rare days when happiness seems as natural as the wind or the
+sunlight, when the wildest dreams appear not too wild to come true in
+reality, when one hopes by instinct and believes, not with the reason,
+but with the blood. To Gabriella, forgetting her humiliation, it was a
+day when life for the sake of the mere act of living--when life, in
+spite of disappointment and loss and treachery and shame, was enough to
+set the heart bounding with happiness. For she was one of those who
+loved life, not for what it brought to her of pleasure, but for what it
+was in itself.
+
+"Yes, it is a lovely afternoon," she answered, and added impulsively:
+"It is good to be alive, isn't it?" She had forgotten George, but even
+if she had remembered him, it would have made little difference. For six
+years, not for a few hours, George had been lost to her; and in six
+years one has time to forget almost anything.
+
+The judge's answer to this was a look which penetrated like a flash of
+light into her brain. By this light she read all that he thought of
+her, and she saw that he was divided between admiration of her spirit
+and an uneasy suspicion of its perfect propriety. Tier offence, she
+knew, was that, being by all the logic of facts an unhappy wife, she
+should persist so stubbornly in denying the visible evidence of her
+unhappiness. Had her denial been merely a pretence, it would, according
+to his code, have appeared both natural and womanly; but the conviction
+that she was sincere, that she was not lying, that she was not even
+tragically "keeping up an appearance," increased the amazement and
+suspicion with which he had begun to regard her. He walked on
+thoughtfully at her side, fingering the end of his long yellowish-gray
+moustache, and bending his sleepy gaze on the pavement. When he was
+thinking, he always looked as if he were falling asleep, and he seldom
+made a remark, even to a woman, without thinking it over. Into his small
+steel-gray eyes, surrounded by purplish and wrinkled puffs of skin,
+there crept the cautious and secretive look he wore at directors'
+meetings, while a furtive smile flickered for an instant across his
+loose mouth under the drooping ends of his moustache. His ungainly body,
+with its curious suggestion of over-ripeness, of waning power,
+straightened suddenly as if in reaction from certain destructive
+processes within his soul. Though he was only just passing his prime, he
+had lived so rapidly that he bore already the marks of age in his face
+and figure.
+
+"Yes, it's good to be alive," he assented, for there was nothing in
+either his philosophy or his experience to contradict this simple
+statement. "I've always maintained, by the way, that happiness is the
+chief of the virtues."
+
+For an instant Gabriella looked at the sky; then turning her candid eyes
+to his, she answered: "Happiness and courage. I put courage
+first--before everything."
+
+Her gaze dropped, but not until she had seen his look change and the
+slightly cynical smile--the smile of one who has examined everything and
+believes in nothing--fade from his lips. She had touched some chord deep
+down within him of which he had long ago forgotten even the
+existence--some echoed harmony of what had been perhaps the living faith
+of his youth.
+
+"You're a gallant soul," he said briefly, and she wondered what it was
+that he knew, what it was that he was keeping back.
+
+At the corner where they parted, he stood for a few moments, holding her
+hand in his big, soft grasp while he looked down on her. The suspicion
+and the cynicism had gone from his face, and she understood all at once
+why people still trusted him, still liked him, notwithstanding his
+reputation, notwithstanding even his repulsiveness. He was all that--he
+was immoral, he was repulsive--but he was something else also--he was
+human.
+
+When she entered the house her first feeling was that the old atmosphere
+had returned, the old suspense, the old waiting, the old horror of
+impending calamity. A nervous dread made her hesitate to mount the
+steps, to go to her room, to inquire in a natural voice for the
+children. It was imaginary, of course, she assured herself, but it was
+very vivid as long as it lasted. Then she noticed that the usual order
+of the hall was disturbed, and when she rang, Burrows came, with a
+hurried, apologetic manner, after keeping her waiting. Mrs. Fowler's
+fur scarf hung on the massive oak post of the staircase; the cards in
+the little tray on the hail table were scattered about; and the petals
+of a yellow chrysanthemum were strewn over the carpet.
+
+Burrows, instead of explaining the confusion, appeared embarrassed when
+she questioned him, and spurred by a sharp foreboding, she ran up the
+stairs to her mother-in-law's sitting-room. At her entrance a trembling
+voice wailed in a tone of remonstrance:
+
+"Oh, Gabriella, have you been out?"
+
+"Yes, I've been out. Mamma, what is the matter?"
+
+"I looked for you everywhere. Archibald has been here, but he has just
+gone out again. I have never seen him so deeply moved--so--so
+indignant--" Mrs. Fowler broke off, bit her lip nervously, and paused
+while she tried to swallow her sobs. Her hat lay on a chair at her side,
+and in her hands she held a pair of half-soiled white gloves, which she
+smoothed out on her knee, as if she were hardly aware of what she was
+doing. In her blue eyes, so like George's, there was an agonizing terror
+and suspense. Her usually florid face was pale to the lips; and this
+pallor appeared to accentuate the dark, faintly lined shadows beneath
+her eyes and the grayness of her rigidly waved hair.
+
+"Courage!" said Gabriella in a whisper to herself, and aloud she asked
+gently: "Dear mamma, what is it? Don't be afraid. I can bear it."
+
+"Archibald has ordered George out of the house. He--George, I mean--had
+given him his promise not to see Florrie again, and it seems that he--he
+broke it. There has been a dreadful scene. I never imagined that
+Archibald could be so angry. He was terrible--and he is ill anyway and
+in great trouble about his financial affairs. I have been worried to
+death about him for weeks. He says things are going so badly downtown
+that he can't stave off the crash any longer, and now--this--this--" She
+broke down utterly, burying her convulsed face in her hands, which even
+in the instant of horror and tragedy, Gabriella noticed, had been
+manicured since the morning. "George has gone--we think he has gone off
+with Florrie," she cried, "and he--he will never come back as long as
+Archibald lives."
+
+She was not thinking of Gabriella. True to the deepest instincts of her
+nature, she thought first of her son, then of her husband. It was not
+that she did not care for her daughter-in-law, did not sympathize; but
+the fact remained that Gabriella was only George's wife to her, while
+George was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, soul of her soul.
+Though her choice was not deliberate, though it was unconscious and
+instinctive--nevertheless, she had chosen. At the crucial moment
+instinct had risen superior to reason, and she had chosen, not with her
+judgment, but with every quivering nerve and fibre of her being.
+Gabriella was right, but George was her son; and had it been possible to
+secure George's happiness by sacrificing the right to the wrong, she
+would have made that sacrifice without hesitation, without scruple, and
+without regret.
+
+"There's his father now," she whispered, lifting her disfigured face.
+"Oh, Gabriella, I believe it will kill me!"
+
+While Gabriella stood there waiting for George's father to enter, and
+listening to his slow, deliberate tread on the stairs, the heavy,
+laborious tread of a man who is uncertain of his strength, she
+remembered vividly, as if she were living it over again, the night she
+had waited by her fire to tell George that his first child was to be
+born. Many thoughts passed through her mind, and at last these thoughts
+resolved themselves into a multitude of crowding images--all distinct
+and vivid images of George's face. She saw his face as she had first
+seen and loved it, with its rich colouring, its blue-gray eyes, like
+wells of romance she had once thought, its look of poetry and emotion
+which had covered so much that was merely commonplace and gross. She saw
+him as he had looked at their marriage, as he had looked, bending over
+her after her first child was born, and then she saw him as he had
+parted from her that morning--flushed, sneering, a little coarsened, but
+still boyish, still charming. Well, it was all over now. It had been
+over so long that she had even ceased to regret it--for she was not by
+nature one of the women who could wear mourning for a lifetime.
+
+The door opened: Archibald Fowler came in very slowly; and the first
+sight of his face brought home to her with a shock the discovery that he
+was the one of them who had suffered most. He looked an old man; his
+gentle scholar's face had taken an ashen hue; and his eyes were the eyes
+of one who has only partially recovered from the blow that has
+prostrated him.
+
+"My dear child," he said; "my dear daughter," and laid his hand on her
+shoulder.
+
+She clung to him, feeling a passionate pity, not for herself, but for
+him. "You have too much to bear," she murmured caressingly. "You mustn't
+take it like this. You must try to get over it. For all our sakes you
+must try to get over it." The irony of it all--that she should be
+consoling her husband's father for her husband's desertion of her--did
+not appear to her until long afterwards. At the time she thought only
+that she--that somebody--must make the tragedy easier for him to bear.
+
+"Come and sit down, Archibald," said Mrs. Fowler pleadingly. "Let me
+give you a glass of sherry and a biscuit; you are too tired to talk."
+
+There was the old devotion in her manner, but there was also a new
+deference. For the first time in thirty years of marriage he had shown
+his strength to her, not his gentleness; for the first time he had
+opposed his will to hers in the cause of justice, and he had conquered
+her. In spite of her anguish, something of the romantic expectancy of
+her first love had returned to her heart and it showed in her softened
+voice, in her timid caresses, in her wistful eyes, which held a pathetic
+and startled brightness. He had triumphed in honour; and if her defeat
+had not involved George, she could almost have gloried in the
+completeness of her surrender.
+
+He sat down with the air of a man who is not entirely awake to his
+surroundings; and his wife, after ordering the sherry, hovered over him
+with the touching solicitude of one who is living for the moment in the
+shadow of memory. While he sipped the wine, he waited until Burrows'
+footsteps had passed down the staircase, and then said with his usual
+quietness:
+
+"There is something else, Evelyn, that I kept back. I couldn't tell you
+while you were so worried about George, but there is something else--"
+
+She caught the words from him eagerly, with a gesture almost of relief.
+
+"You mean it has come at last. I suspected it, and, oh, Archibald, I
+don't care--I don't care!"
+
+"There were several failures to-day in Wall Street, and--" He broke off
+as if he were too tired to go on, and added slowly after a moment: "I am
+too old to begin again. I'd like to go back home--to go back to the
+South for my old age. Yes, I'm old."
+
+But his wife was on her knees beside him, with her arms about his neck
+and her face hidden on his breast. "I don't care, I never cared," she
+said in a voice that was almost exultant. "We can be happy on so
+little--happier than we've ever been in our lives--just you and I to
+grow old together. We can go home to Virginia--to some small place and
+be happy. Happiness costs so little."
+
+Slipping away, Gabriella went into the hail, and passing her room,
+noiselessly pushed open the door of the nursery, where the children were
+sleeping. A night lamp was burning in one corner under a dark shade, and
+the nurse's knitting, a pile of white yarn, was lying on the table in
+the circle of green light, which was as soft as the glimmer of a
+glow-worm in a thicket. In their two little beds, separated by a strip
+of white rug, the children were sleeping quietly, with a wonderful
+freshness, like the dew of innocence, on their faces. Frances lay on her
+back, very straight and prim even in sleep, with the sheet folded neatly
+under her dimpled chin, her hands clasped on her breast, and her golden
+curls spread in perfect order over the lace-trimmed pillow. Her
+miniature features, framed in the dim gold of her hair, had the trite
+prettiness of an angel on a Christmas card; and beside her ethereal
+loveliness there was something gnome-like in the dark sturdiness of
+Archibald, who slept on his side, with his fists pressed tightly under
+the pillow, and the frown produced by near-sightedness still wrinkling
+his forehead. Though he was not beautiful, he showed already the promise
+of character in his face, and his personality, which was remarkably
+developed for a child of his age, possessed a singular charm. He was the
+kind of child people describe as "unlike other children." His
+temperament was made up of surprises, and this quality of unexpectedness
+inspired in his mother a devotion that was almost tragic in its
+intensity. Never had she loved the normal Frances Evelyn as she loved
+Archibald.
+
+As she looked down on them, sleeping so peacefully in the green light, a
+wave of sadness swept over her, and she thought of them suddenly as
+fatherless, impoverished, and unprotected, dependent on her untried
+labour for their lives and their happiness. Then, before the anxiety
+could take possession of her mind, she put it from her, and whispered,
+"Courage!" as she turned away and went out of the room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+WORK
+
+
+They had planned the future so carefully that there was a pitiless irony
+in the next turn of the screw--for when they tried to awaken Archibald
+Fowler in the morning, he did not stir, and they realized presently,
+with the rebellious shock such tragedies always bring, that he had died
+in the night--that all that he had stood for, the more than thirty years
+of work and struggle, had collapsed in an hour. When the first grief,
+the first excitement, was over, and life began to flow quietly again in
+its familiar currents, it was discovered that the crash of his fortune
+had occurred on the day of his son's flight and disgrace, and that the
+two shocks, coming together, had killed him. While they sat in the
+darkened house, surrounded by the funereal smell of crape, the practical
+details of living seemed to matter so little that they scarcely gave
+them a thought. Not until weeks afterwards, when Patty and Billy had
+sailed for France, and Mrs. Fowler, shrouded in widow's weeds, had gone
+South to her old home, did Gabriella find strength to tear aside the
+veil of mourning and confront the sordid actuality. Then she found that
+the crash had buried everything under the ruins of Archibald Fowler's
+prosperity--that nothing remained except a bare pittance which would
+insure his widow only a scant living on the impoverished family acres.
+For the rest there was nothing, and she herself was as poor as she had
+been in Hill Street before her marriage.
+
+Walking back from the station after bidding her mother-in-law a tearful
+and tender good-bye, she tried despairingly to gather her scattered
+thoughts and summon all her failing resources; but in front of her plans
+there floated always the pathetic brightness of Mrs. Fowler's eyes
+gazing up at her from the heavy shadow of the crape veil she had lifted.
+So that was the end--a little love, a little hope, a little happiness,
+and then separation and death. Effort appeared not only futile, but
+fantastic, and yet effort, she knew, must be made if she were to ward
+off destitution. She must recover her cheerfulness, she must be strong,
+she must be confident. Alone, penniless, with two children to support,
+she could not afford to waste her time and her energy in useless regret.
+Whatever it cost her, she must keep alive her fighting courage and her
+belief in life. She had youth, health, strength, intelligence,
+resourcefulness on her side; and she told herself again that there were
+thousands of women living and fighting around her who were far worse off
+than she. "What others have done, I can do also, and do better," she
+murmured aloud as she walked rapidly back to Dinard's.
+
+In the long front room the crowded mid-winter sale was in progress, and
+the six arrogant young women, goaded into a fleeting semblance of
+activity, were displaying dilapidated "left over" millinery to a throng
+of unfashionable casual customers. Madame, herself, scorned these casual
+customers, but her scorn was as water unto wine compared with the
+burning disdain of the six arrogant young women. They sauntered to and
+fro with their satin trains trailing elegantly over the carpet, with
+their fashionable curves accentuated as much as it was possible for
+pride to accentuate them, with their condescending heads turning
+haughtily above the high points of their collars. As Gabriella entered
+she saw the tallest and the most scornful of them, whose name was
+Murphy, insolently posing in the green velvet toque before a jaded
+hunter of reduced millinery, who shook her plain, sensible head at the
+hat as if she wished it to understand that she heartily disapproved of
+it.
+
+Madame was not visible, but Gabriella found her a little later in the
+workroom, where she was volubly elucidating obscure points in business
+morality to the forewoman. Of all the women employed in the house, this
+particular forewoman was the only one who appeared to Gabriella to be
+without pretence or affectation. She was an honest, blunt, capable
+creature, with a face and figure which permanently debarred her from the
+showrooms, and a painstaking method of work. There was no haughtiness,
+no condescension, about her. She had the manner of one who, being
+without fortuitous aids to happiness, is willing to give good measure of
+ability and industry in return for the bare necessaries of existence.
+"She is the only genuine thing in the whole establishment," thought
+Gabriella while she watched her.
+
+If Miss Smith, the forewoman, had been in ignorance of the failure and
+death of Archibald Fowler, she would probably have read the announcement
+in Madame's face as she watched her welcome the wife of his son. There
+was nothing offensive, nothing unkind, nothing curt; but, in some subtle
+way, the difference was emphasized between the eccentric daughter-in-law
+of a millionaire and an inexperienced young woman who must work for her
+living. For the welcome revealed at once to the observant eyes of Miss
+Smith the significant detail that Madame's role had changed from the
+benefited to the benefactor. And, as if this were not enough for one
+morning's developments, it revealed also that Gabriella's fictitious
+value as a saleswoman was beginning to decline; for Madame was disposed
+to scorn the sort of sensational advertisement which the newspapers had
+devoted of late to the unfortunate Fowlers. At one moment there had been
+grave doubt in Madame's mind as to whether or not she should employ
+young Mrs. Fowler in her respectable house; then, after a brief
+hesitation, she had shrewdly decided that ideas were worth something
+even when lacking the support of social position and financial security.
+There were undoubtedly possibilities in Gabriella; and disgrace, Madame
+concluded cheerfully, could not take away either one's natural talent or
+one's aristocratic appearance. That the girl had distinction, even rare
+distinction, Madame admitted while she nodded approvingly at the severe
+black cloth gown with its collar and cuffs of fine white crape. The
+simple arrangement of her hair, which would have ruined many a pretty
+face, suited the ivory pallor of Gabriella's features. Mourning was
+becoming to her, Madame decided, and though she was not beautiful, she
+was unusually charming.
+
+"She has few good points except her figure, and yet the whole is
+decidedly picturesque," thought Madame as impersonally as if she were
+criticising a fashion plate. "Very young men would hardly care for
+her--for very young men demand fine complexions and straight noses--but
+with older men who like an air, who admire grace, she would be taking,
+and women, yes, women would undoubtedly find her imposing. But she is
+not the sort to have followers," she concluded complacently.
+
+"Shall I go to the workroom?" asked Gabriella in a businesslike voice
+when she had taken off her hat, "or do you wish me at the sale?"
+
+Her soul shrank from the showrooms, but she had determined courageously
+that she would not allow her soul to interfere with her material
+purpose, and her purpose was to learn all that she could and to make
+herself indispensable to Madame. Only by acquiring a thorough knowledge
+of the business and making herself indispensable could she hope to
+succeed. And success was not merely desirable to her; it was vital. It
+meant the difference between food and hunger for her children.
+
+"Miss Smith will find something for you to do this morning," replied
+Madame, politely, but without enthusiasm. "If there is a rush later on
+in the millinery, I will send for you to help out."
+
+In the old days, when Dinard's was a small and exclusive house in one of
+the blocks just off Fifth Avenue, Madame would have scorned to combine
+the making of gowns and hats in a single establishment; but as she
+advanced in years and in worldly experience, she discovered that
+millinery drew the unwary passer-by even more successfully than
+dressmaking did. Then, too, hats were easy to handle; they sold for at
+least four or five times as much as they actually cost; and so,
+gradually, while she was still unaware of the disintegrating processes
+within, Madame's principles had crumbled before the temptation of
+increasing profits. A lapse of virtue, perhaps, but Madame, who had been
+born an O'Grady, was not the first to discover that one's virtuous
+principles are apt to modify with one's years. The time was when she had
+despised false hair, having a natural wealth of her own, and now, with a
+few thin gray strands hidden under her golden wig, she had become
+morally reconciled to necessity. "It is a hard world, and one lives as
+one must," was her favourite maxim.
+
+On the whole, however, having a philosophic bent of mind, she
+endeavoured to preserve, with rosy cheeks and golden hair, several other
+cheerful fictions of her youth. The chief of these, the artless delusion
+that, in spite of her obesity, her wig and her rouge, she still had
+power to charm the masculine eye, offered to her lively nature a more
+effective support than any virtuous principle could have supplied. A
+perennial, if ridiculous, coquetry sweetened her days and added
+sprightliness to the gay decline of her life. Being frankly material,
+she had confined her energies to the two unending pursuits of men and
+money, and having captured four husbands and acquired a comfortable bank
+account, she might have been content, had she been as discreet as she
+was provident, to rest on her substantial achievements. But the trouble
+with both men and money, when considered solely as rewards to
+enterprise, is that the quest of them is inexhaustible. One's income,
+however large, may reasonably become larger, and there is no limit to
+the number of husbands a prudent and fortunate woman may collect. And so
+age, which is, after all, a state of mind, not a term of years, was
+rendered harmless to Madame by her simple plan of refusing to
+acknowledge that it existed. This came of keeping one's head, she
+sometimes thought, though she never put her thought into words--this and
+all things else, including financial security and the perpetual pursuit
+of the elusive and lawless male. For at sixty-two she still felt young
+and she believed herself to be fascinating.
+
+But Gabriella, patiently stitching bias velvet bands on the brim of a
+straw hat for the early spring trade, felt that she was sustained
+neither by the pleasures of vanity nor by the sounder consolations of
+virtue. Her philosophy was quite as simple, if not so material, as
+Madame's. Human nature was divided between the victors and the victims,
+and the chief thing was not to let oneself become a victim. Her theory,
+like those of greater philosophers, was rooted not in reason, but in
+character, and she believed in life with all the sanguine richness of
+her blood. Of course it was a struggle, but she was one of those vital
+women who enjoy a struggle--who choose any aspect of life in preference
+to the condition of vegetative serenity. Unhappiness, which is so
+largely a point of view, an attitude of mind, had passed over her at a
+time when many women would have been consecrated to inconsolable misery.
+She was penniless, she was unloved, she was deserted by her husband, she
+had lost, in a few weeks, her friends, her home, and her family, and she
+faced the future alone, except for her dependent and helpless
+children--yet in spite of these things, though she was thoughtful,
+worried, and often anxious, she realized that deep down in her the
+essential core of her being was not unhappy. When she had tried and
+failed, and lost her health and her children--if such sorrows ever came
+to her, then there would be time enough for unhappiness. Now, she was
+only twenty-seven; the rich, wonderful world surrounded her; and this
+world, even if she put love out of her life, was brimming over with
+beauty. It was good to be alive; it was good to watch the crowd in the
+street, to see the sunlight on the pavement, to taste the air, to feel
+the murmurous currents of the city flow around her as she walked home in
+the twilight. It was good to earn her bread and to go back in the
+evening to the joyful shouts of two well and happy children. She saw it
+all as an adventure--the whole of life--and the imperative necessity was
+to keep to the last the ardent heart of the true adventurer. While she
+stitched with flying fingers, there passed before her the pale sad line
+of the victims--of those who had resigned themselves to unhappiness. She
+saw her mother, anxious, pensive, ineffectual, with her widow's veil,
+her drooping eyelids, and her look of mournful acquiescence, as of one
+who had grown old expecting the worst of life; she saw poor Jane,
+tragic, martyred, with the feeble virtue and the cloying sweetness of
+all the poor Janes of this world; and she saw Uncle Meriweather wearing
+his expression of worried and resentful helplessness, as if he had been
+swept onward against his will by forces which he did not understand. All
+these people were victims, and from these people she had sprung. Their
+blood was her blood; their traditions were her traditions; their
+religion was her religion; even their memories were her memories. But
+something else, which was not theirs, was in her nature, and this
+something else had been born in the instant when she revolted against
+them. Perhaps the fighting spirit of her father--of that father who had
+gone out like a flame in his youth had battled on her side when she had
+turned against the inertia and decay which had walled in her girlhood.
+
+In the afternoon Madame summoned her into the showrooms, and she
+assisted the exhausted young women at the sale of slightly damaged
+French hats to the unfashionable purchasers who preferred to pay
+reasonable prices. While she served them, which she did with a
+cheerfulness, an interest, and an amiability that distinguished her from
+the other saleswomen, she wondered how they could have so little common
+sense as to allow themselves to be deluded by the French labels on the
+soiled linings? She could have made a better hat in two hours than any
+one of those she sold at the reduced price of ten dollars; yet even the
+dingiest of them at last found a purchaser, and she saw the green velvet
+toque, which had been rejected by the sensible middle-aged woman in the
+morning, finally pass into the possession of a hard-featured spinster.
+What amazed her, for she had a natural talent for dress, was the
+infallible instinct which guided the vast majority of these customers to
+the selection of the inappropriate. A few of them had taste, or had
+learned from experience what they could not wear; but by far the larger
+number displayed an ignorance of the most elementary principles of dress
+which shocked and astonished Gabriella. The obese and middle-aged winged
+straight as a bird toward the coquettish in millinery; the lean and
+haggard intuitively yearned for the picturesque; the harsh and simple
+aspired to the severely smart. Yet beneath the vain misdirection of
+impulses there was some obscure principle of attraction which ruled the
+absurdity of the decisions. Each woman, Gabriella discovered after an
+attentive hour at the sale, was dressing not her actual substance, but
+some passionately cherished ideal of herself which she had stored in a
+remote and inaccessible chamber of her brain.
+
+In all of the tedious selections Gabriella assisted with the pleasant
+voice, the ready sympathy, and the quick understanding which had made
+her so popular when she had worked for the old shop in Broad Street. The
+truth was that human nature interested her even in its errors, and her
+pleasant manners were simply the outward manifestation of an unaffected
+benevolence.
+
+"I shouldn't mind going there if they were all like that one," remarked
+a customer, who had bought three hats, in the hearing of Madame as she
+went out; "but some of them are so disagreeable you feel like slapping
+their faces. Once last winter I had that tall girl with red hair--the
+handsome, stuck-up one, you know--and I declare she was so downright
+impertinent that I got straight up and walked out without buying a
+thing. Then I was so angry that I went down to Paula's and paid
+seventy-five dollars for this hat I've got on. It was a dreadful price,
+of course, but you'll do anything when you're in a rage."
+
+"Do you know the name of this one? I'd like to remember it."
+
+"Yes, it's Carr. I asked for her card. C-a-r-r. I think she's a widow."
+
+From her retreat behind one of the velvet curtains Madame overheard this
+conversation, and a few minutes later she stopped Gabriella on her way
+out, and said amiably that it would not be necessary for her to leave
+the showroom to-morrow.
+
+"I believe you can do better there than in the workroom," she added,
+"and, after all, that is really very important--to tell people what they
+want. It is astounding how few of them have the slightest idea what
+they are looking for."
+
+"But I want to get that hat right. I left it unfinished, and I don't
+like to give up while it is wrong," replied Gabriella, not wholly
+pleased by the command.
+
+But Madame, of a flightier substance notwithstanding her business
+talents, waved aside the remark as insignificant and without bearing
+upon her immediate purpose.
+
+"I am going to try you with the gowns," she said resolutely; "I want to
+see if you catch on there as quickly as you did with the hats--I mean
+with the sale, of course, for your work, I'm sorry to say, has been
+rather poor so far. But I'll try you with the next customer who comes to
+place a large order. They are always so eager for new suggestions, and
+you have suggestions of a sort to make, I am sure. I can't quite tell,"
+she concluded uncertainly, "whether or not your ideas have any practical
+value, but they sound well as you describe them, and to talk
+attractively helps; there is no doubt of that."
+
+It was closing time, and Miss Fisher, one of the skirt fitters, came up,
+in her black alpaca apron with a pair of scissors suspended by red tape
+from her waist, to ask Madame a question. As Mrs. Bydington had not kept
+her appointment, was it not impossible to send her gown home as they had
+promised?
+
+"Oh, it makes no difference," replied Madame blandly, for she was in a
+good humour. "She'll come back when she is ready. The next time she is
+here, by the way, I want her to see Mrs. Fowler--I mean Mrs. Carr. She
+has worn out every one else in the place, and yet she is never
+satisfied; but I'd like her to take that pink velvet from Gautier,
+because nobody else is likely to give the price." The day was over and
+Madame's blandness was convincing evidence of her satisfaction.
+
+As Gabriella passed through the last showroom, where the disorder of the
+sale was still visible, she saw Miss Murphy, the handsomest and the
+haughtiest of the young women, wearily returning the few rejected hats
+to the ivory-tinted cases.
+
+"You are glad it is over, I know," she remarked sympathetically, less
+from any active interest in Miss Murphy's state of feeling than from an
+impulsive desire to establish human relations with her fellow
+saleswoman. If Miss Murphy would have it so, she preferred to be
+friendly.
+
+"I am so tired I can hardly stand on my feet," replied Miss Murphy,
+piteously. Her pretty rose-leaf skin had faded to a dull pallor; there
+were heavy shadows under her eyes; her helmet of wheaten-red hair had
+slipped down over her forehead, and even her firmly corseted figure
+appeared to have grown limp and yielding. Without her offensive elegance
+she was merely a pathetic and rather silly young thing.
+
+"I'll help you," said Gabriella, taking up several hats from a chair.
+"The others have gone, haven't they?"
+
+"They got out before I'd finished waiting on that middle-aged frump who
+doesn't know what she wants any more than the policeman out there at the
+corner does. She's made me show her all we've got left, and after she'd
+tried them all on, she said they're too high, and she's going to think
+over them before she decides. She's still waiting for something, and my
+head's splitting so I can hardly see what I'm doing." With a final
+surrender of her arrogance, she grew suddenly confidential and
+childish. "I'm sick enough to die," she finished despairingly, "and I've
+got a friend coming to take me to the theatre at eight o'clock."
+
+"Well, run away. I'll attend to this. But I'd try to rest before I went
+out if I were you."
+
+"You're a perfect peach," responded Miss Murphy gratefully. "I said all
+along I didn't believe you were stuck up and snobbish."
+
+Then she ran out, and Gabriella, after surveying the customer for a
+minute, selected the most unpromising hat in the case, and presented it
+with a winning smile for the woman's inspection.
+
+"Perhaps something like this is what you are looking for?" she remarked
+politely, but firmly.
+
+The customer, an acidulous, sharp-featured, showily dressed person--the
+sort, Gabriella decided, who would enjoy haggling over a
+bargain--regarded the offered hat with a supercilious and guarded
+manner, the true manner of the haggler.
+
+"No, that is not bad," she observed dryly, "but I don't care to give
+more than ten dollars."
+
+"It was marked down from thirty," replied Gabriella, and her manner was
+as supercilious and as guarded as the other's. There were women, she had
+found, who were impressed only by insolence, and, when the need arose,
+she could be quite as insolent as Miss Murphy. Unlike Miss Murphy,
+however, she was able to distinguish between those you must encourage
+and those you must crush; and this ability to draw reasonable
+distinctions was, perhaps, her most valuable quality as a woman of
+business.
+
+"I don't care to pay more than ten dollars," reiterated the customer in
+a scolding voice. Rising from her chair, she fastened her furs, which
+were cheap and showy, with a defiant and jerky movement, and flounced
+out of the shop.
+
+That disposed of, Gabriella put on her coat, which she had taken off
+again for the occasion, and went out into the street, where the night
+had already fallen. After her long hours in the overheated air of the
+showrooms, she felt refreshed and invigorated by the cold wind, which
+stung her face as it blew singing over the crossings. Straight ahead
+through the grayish-violet mist the lights were blooming like flowers,
+and above them a few stars shone faintly over the obscure frowning
+outlines of the buildings. Fifth Avenue was thronged, and to her anxious
+mind there seemed to be hollowness and insincerity in the laughter of
+the crowd.
+
+At the house in East Fifty-seventh Street, from which she would be
+moving the next day, she found Judge Crowborough awaiting her in the
+dismantled drawing-room, where packing-cases of furniture and pictures
+lay scattered about in confusion. In the dreadful days after Archibald
+Fowler's death, the judge had been very kind, and she had turned to him
+instinctively as the one man in New York who was both able and willing
+to be of use to her. Though he had never attracted her, she had been
+obliged to admit that he possessed a power superior to superficial
+attractions.
+
+"I dropped in to ask what I might do for you now?" he remarked with the
+dignity of one who possesses an income of half a million dollars a year.
+"It's a pity you have to leave this house. I remember when Archibald
+bought it--somewhere back in the 'seventies--but I suppose there's no
+help for it, is there?"
+
+"No, there's no help." She sat down on a packing-case, and he stood
+gazing benevolently down on her with his big, soft hands clasped on the
+head of his walking-stick and his overcoat on his arm. "I've rented
+three rooms in one of the apartments of the old Carolina over on the
+West Side near Columbus Avenue. The rest of the apartment is rented to
+art students, I believe, and we must all use the same kitchen and the
+same bath-tub," she added with a laugh. "Of course it isn't luxury, but
+we shan't mind very much as soon as we get used to it. I couldn't be
+much poorer than I was before my marriage."
+
+"But the children? You've got to have the children looked after."
+
+"I've been so fortunate about that," her voice was quite cheerful again.
+"There's a seamstress from my old home--Miss Polly Hatch--who has known
+me all my life, and she is coming to sleep in a little bed in my room
+until we can afford to rent an extra bedroom. As long as she has to work
+at home anyhow, she can very easily look after the children while I am
+away. They are good children, and as soon as they are big enough I'll
+have to send them to school--to the public school, I'm afraid." This,
+because of Fanny's violent opposition, was a delicate point with her.
+She felt that she should like to start the children at a private school,
+but it was clearly impossible.
+
+"The boy won't be big enough for a year or two, will he?" He was
+interested, she saw, and this unaffected interest in her small affairs
+moved her almost to tears.
+
+"I wanted him to go to kindergarten, but, of course, I cannot afford it.
+He is only four and a half, and I'm teaching him myself in the
+evenings. Already he can read very well in the first reader," she
+finished proudly.
+
+For a minute the judge stared moodily down on her. His sagging cheeks
+took a pale purplish flush, and he bit his lower lip with his large
+yellow teeth, which reminded Gabriella of the tusks of a beast of prey.
+Then he laid his overcoat and his stick carefully down on a
+packing-case, and held out his hand.
+
+"I'm going now, and there's one thing I want to ask you--have you any
+money?"
+
+It was out at last, and she looked up composedly, smiling a little
+roguishly at his embarrassment.
+
+"I have six hundred dollars in bank for a rainy day, and I am making
+exactly fifteen dollars a week."
+
+"But you can't live on it. Nobody could live on it even without two
+children to bring up."
+
+She shook her head. "Oh, Judge Crowborough, how little you rich men
+really know! I've got to live on it until I can do better, and I hope
+that will be very soon. If I am worth anything now, in three months I
+ought to be worth certainly as much as twenty-five dollars a week. In a
+little while--as soon as I've caught on to the business--I'm going to
+ask for a larger salary, and I think I shall get it. Twenty-five dollars
+a week won't go very far, but you don't know how little some people can
+live on even in New York."
+
+"As soon as the six hundred dollars go you'll be headed straight for
+starvation," he protested, sincerely worried.
+
+"Perhaps, but I doubt it."
+
+"How much do you have to pay for your rooms?"
+
+"Twenty-five dollars a month. It isn't much of a place, you see, as far
+as appearances go. Fortunately, I have a little furniture of my own
+which Mrs. Fowler had given me."
+
+His embarrassment had passed away, and he was smiling now at the
+recollection of it.
+
+"Well, you're a brick, little girl," he said, "and I like your spirit,
+but, after all, why can't you put your pride in your pocket, and let me
+lend you a few thousands? You needn't borrow much--not enough to keep a
+carriage--but you might at least take a little just to show you aren't
+proud--just to show you'll be friends. It seems a downright shame that I
+should have money to throw away, and you should be starting out to pinch
+and scrape on fifteen dollars a week. Fifteen dollars a week! Good Lord,
+what are we coming to?"
+
+She was not proud, and she wanted to be friends, but she shook her head
+obstinately, though she was still smiling. "Not now--not while I can
+help it--but if I ever get in trouble--in real trouble--I'll remember
+your offer. If the children fall ill or I lose my place, I'll come to
+you in a minute."
+
+"Honour bright? It's a promise?"
+
+"It's a promise."
+
+"And you'll let me keep an eye on you?"
+
+She laughed with the natural gaiety which he found so delightful. "You
+may keep two eyes on me if you will!"
+
+He had already reached the door when, turning suddenly, he said with
+heavy gravity: "You don't mind my asking what you're going to do about
+George, do you?
+
+"No, I don't mind. As soon as I can afford it, I shall get my freedom,
+but everything costs, you know, even justice."
+
+"I could help you there, couldn't I?"
+
+From the gratitude in her eyes he read her horror of the marriage which
+still bound her. "You could--and, oh, if you would, I'd never, never
+forget it," she answered.
+
+Then they parted, and he went out into the cold, with a strange warmth
+like the fire of youth at his heart, while she ran eagerly up the
+uncarpeted stairs to the nursery.
+
+The trunks were packed, the boxes were nailed down, and the two children
+were playing shipwreck while they ate a supper of bread and milk at a
+table made from the bare top of a packing-case. Several days before the
+nurse had left without warning, and Miss Polly sat now, in hat and
+mantle, on one of the little beds which would be taken down the next day
+and sent over to the apartment on the West Side.
+
+"I've been to the Carolina and unpacked the things that had come," she
+said at Gabriella's entrance. "Those rooms ain't so bad as New York
+rooms go; but it does seem funny, don't it, to cook in the same kitchen
+with a lot of strangers you never laid eyes on befo'? I br'iled some
+chops for the children right alongside of an old maid who had come all
+the way up from New Orleans to study music--imagine, at her age! Why,
+she couldn't be a day under fifty! And on the other side there was the
+mother of a girl who's at the art school, or whatever you call it, where
+they teach you paintin'. They are from somewhere up yonder in New
+England and their home folks had sent 'em a pumpkin pie. She gave me a
+slice of it, but I never did think much of pumpkin. It can't hold a
+candle to sweet potato pudding, and I wouldn't let the children touch
+it for fear it might set too heavy in the night. I ain't got much use
+for Yankee food, nohow."
+
+"I hope the place is perfectly sanitary," was Gabriella's anxious
+rejoinder. "The front room gets some sunshine in the afternoon, doesn't
+it?"
+
+"It's a horrid street. I don't want to live there," wailed Fanny, who
+had rebelled from the beginning against her fallen fortunes. "I got my
+white shoes dirty, and there were banana peels all about. A man has a
+fruit-stand in the bottom of our house. Don't let's go there to live,
+mother."
+
+"You'll have to wear black shoes now, darling, and you mustn't mind the
+fruit-stand. It will be a good place to buy oranges."
+
+"I like it," said Archibald stoutly. "I like to slide on banana peels,
+and I like the man. He has black eyes and a red handkerchief in his
+pocket. Will you buy me a red handkerchief, mamma? He has a boy, too. I
+saw him. He can skate on roller skates, and the boy has a dog and the
+dog has a black ear. May I have roller skates for my birthday, and a
+dog--a small one--and may I ask the boy up to play with me?"
+
+"But the boy is ugly and so is the dog. I hate ugly people," complained
+Fanny.
+
+"I like ugly people," retorted Archibald, glowering, not from anger, but
+from earnestness. "Ugly people are nicer than pretty ones, aren't they,
+mamma? Pang is nicer than Fanny."
+
+He was always like that even as a baby, always on the side of the
+unfortunate, always fighting valiantly for the under dog. With his large
+head, his grotesque spectacles, and his pouting lips, he bore a curious
+resemblance to a brownie, yet when one observed him closely, one saw
+that there was a remarkable blending of strength and sweetness in his
+expression.
+
+The next day Miss Polly finished the moving, and at six o'clock
+Gabriella went home in the Harlem elevated train to the grim,
+weather-beaten apartment house on the upper West Side. The pavements, as
+Fanny had scornfully observed, were not particularly clean; the air, in
+spite of the sharp wind which blew from the river, had a curiously
+stagnant quality; and the rumble of the elevated road, at the opposite
+side of the house, reached her in a vibrating undercurrent which was
+punctuated now and then by the staccato cries of the street. The house,
+which had been built in a benighted and spacious period, stood now as an
+enduring refuge for the poor in purse but proud in spirit. A few studios
+on the roof were still occupied by artists, while the hospitable
+basement sheltered a vegetable market, a corner drug-store, a
+fruit-stand, and an Italian bootblack. Within the bleak walls, from
+which the stucco had peeled in splotches, the life of the city had ebbed
+and flowed for almost half a century, like some deep wreck-strewn
+current which bore the seeds of the future as well as the driftwood of
+the past on its bosom. One might never have set foot outside those
+gloomy doors and yet have seen the whole of life pass as in a vivid
+dream through the dim halls, lighted by flickering gas and carpeted in
+worn strips of brown carpet. And once inside the apartments one might
+have found, sometimes, cheerfulness, beauty of line and colour, and a
+certain spaciousness which the modern apartment house, with its rooms
+like closets, its startling electricity, and its more hygienic
+conditions of living, could not provide. It was because she could find
+space there that Gabriella, guided by Miss Polly, had rented the rooms.
+
+She passed the drug-store and the fruit-stand, entered the narrow hail,
+where a single gas-jet flickered dimly beside the door of the elevator,
+and after touching the bell, stood patiently waiting. After a time she
+rang again, and presently, with deliberate ease and geniality, the negro
+who worked the elevator descended slowly, with a newspaper in his hand,
+and opened the door for her.
+
+"Good evening, Robert," she said pleasantly, for he also was from
+Virginia, and the discovery of the bond between them had given Gabriella
+a feeling of confidence. Like Miss Folly, she had never become entirely
+accustomed to white servants.
+
+The ropes moved again, the elevator ascended perilously to the fifth
+floor, and Gabriella walked quickly along the hall, and slipped her
+latchkey into the keyhole of the last apartment. As the door opened, a
+woman in worn black came out and spoke to her in passing. She was the
+old maid of Miss Folly's narrative, and her face, ardent, haggard, with
+the famished look which comes from a starved soul, gazed back at
+Gabriella with a touching expression of admiration and envy. There were
+spots of vivid colour in her cheeks, and this brightness, combined with
+her gray hair, gave her a theatrical and artificial appearance.
+
+"I have been playing to your little boy, Mrs. Carr," she said with the
+manner which Miss Polly had described as "flighty." "He came into my
+room when he heard the piano, and it was a real pleasure to play for
+him."
+
+"You are very good," returned Gabriella, wondering vaguely who she was,
+for she was obviously the kind of woman people wondered about. "I hope
+Archibald didn't make himself troublesome."
+
+"Oh, no, I enjoyed him. My name is Danton. I am Miss Danton," she added
+effusively, "and I'm so glad you have come into this apartment. My room
+is the one next to yours."
+
+Then she fluttered off, with her look of spiritual hunger, and Gabriella
+closed the door and went on to her rooms, which were at the opposite end
+of the hail from the kitchen. On the way she passed the pretty art
+student, who was coming from the bathroom, with a freshly powdered face
+and a pitcher of water in her hand, and again she was obliged to stop to
+hear news of the children.
+
+"I'm so glad to have your little girl here. I want to paint her. I'm
+just crazy about her face," said the girl, whose name she learned
+afterwards was Rosy Plover. Though she was undeniably pretty, and had
+just powdered her face with scented powder, she had a slovenly, unkempt
+appearance which Gabriella, from that moment, associated with art
+students. "If she'd only dress herself properly, she'd be a beauty," she
+thought, with the aversion of one who is an artist in clothes. She
+herself, after her long, hard day, was as neat and trim as she had been
+in the morning. Her severe black suit was worn with grace, and hung
+perfectly; her crape collar was immaculately fresh; her mourning veil
+fell in charming folds over her hat brim. "It's a pity some one can't
+tell her," she mused, as she smiled and hurried on to the doubtful
+seclusion of her own end of the apartment.
+
+With the opening of the door, the children fell rapturously into her
+arms, and while she took off her hat and coat, Miss Polly laid the
+table for supper in front of the ruddy glow of the fire. On the fender a
+plate of buttered toast was keeping warm, a delicious aroma of coffee
+scented the air, and a handful of red carnations made a cheerful bit of
+colour in the centre of the white tablecloth. It was a pleasant picture
+for a tired woman to gaze on, and the ruddy glow of the fire was
+reflected in Gabriella's heart while she enfolded her children. After a
+day in Madame's hothouse atmosphere, it was delightful to return to this
+little centre of peace and love, and to feel that its very existence
+depended upon the work of her brain and hands. The children, she
+realized, had never loved her so dearly. In better days, when she was
+rarely separated from them for more than a few hours at a time, they had
+seemed rather to take her care and her presence for granted; but now,
+after an absence of nine hours, she had become a delight and an
+enchantment, something to be looked forward to and longingly talked
+about through the whole afternoon.
+
+"Mother, you've been away forever," said Fanny, folding her veil for her
+and putting away her furs.
+
+"Are you going every day just like this for ever and ever?
+
+"Every day, darling, but I'm here every night. Shall I run back to the
+kitchen and broil the chops, Miss Polly?"
+
+But the chops were already broiled, for Miss Polly had finished her
+sewing early, and she had beaten up two tiny cups of custard for the
+children.
+
+"It's nicer than nursery suppers, isn't it, Fanny?" asked Archibald a
+little later while he ate his bread and milk from a blue bowl. "Mother,
+I like being poor. Let's stay poor always."
+
+A phrase of Mrs. Fowler's, "happiness costs so little," floated through
+Gabriella's mind as she poured Miss Folly's coffee out of the tin coffee
+pot. She was so tired that her body ached; her feet were smarting and
+throbbing from the long standing; and her eyes stung from the cold wind
+and the glare of the elevated train; but she knew that in spite of these
+discomforts she was not unhappy--that she was, indeed, far happier than
+she had been for the past six years in the hushed suspense of her
+father-in-law's house. When she had carried the supper things back to
+the sink in the kitchen, had taught the children their lessons, heard
+their prayers, and put them to bed, she repeated the words to herself
+while she sat sewing beside the lamp in front of the comforting glow of
+the fire, "After all, happiness costs so little."
+
+The next morning, and on every morning throughout the winter, she was up
+by six o'clock, and had taken in the baker's rolls and the bottle of
+milk from the outer door before Miss Polly or the children were
+stirring. Then, having dressed quickly, she ran back to the kitchen and
+made the coffee and boiled the eggs while the other lodgers were still
+sleeping. Sometimes the mother of one of the art students would join her
+over the gas range, but usually her neighbours slept late and then
+darted through the hall in kimonos, with tumbled hair, to a hurried
+breakfast at the kitchen table.
+
+Her life was so busy that there was little time for anxiety, and less
+for futile and painful dwelling upon the past. To get through the day as
+best she could, to start the children well and in a good humour, to make
+herself useful, if not indispensable, to Madame, to return with a mind
+clear and fresh enough to give Fanny and Archibald intelligent lessons,
+to sew on their clothes or her own until midnight, and then to drop into
+bed, with aching limbs and a peaceful brain, too tired even to
+dream--these things made the life that she looked forward to, week after
+week, month after month, year after year. It was a hard life, as Miss
+Polly often remarked, but hard or soft, her strength was equal to it,
+her health was good, her interest in her work and in her children never
+flagged for a minute. Only on soft spring days, coming home in the dusk,
+she would sometimes pass carts filled with hyacinths, and in a wave the
+memory of Arthur and of her first love would rush over her. Then she
+would see Arthur's face, gentle, protective, tender, as it had looked on
+that last evening, and for an instant her lost girlhood and her
+girlhood's dream would envelop her like the fragrance of flowers. At
+such moments she thought of this love as tenderly as a mother might have
+thought of the exquisite dead face of an infant who had lived only an
+hour. Though it was over, though it bore no part, with its elusive
+loveliness, in her practical plans for the future, this dream became
+gradually, as the years passed, the most radiant and vital thing in her
+life. Though it was so vague as to be without warmth, it was as vivid
+and as real as light. The knowledge that in the past she had known
+perfect love, even though in her blindness she had thrust it aside, was
+a balm which healed her wounds and gave her courage to go on, friendless
+and alone, into the loveless stretch of the future. There was hardly a
+minute of her day for the next three years which was not sweetened by
+this hyacinth-scented dream of the past, there was hardly an hour of her
+drudgery which was not ennobled and irradiated by the splendour of this
+love that she had lost.
+
+Of George--even of George as the father of her children--she rarely
+thought. He had dropped out of her life like any other mistake, like any
+other illusion, and she was too sanguine by nature, too buoyant, too
+full of happiness and of energy, to waste herself on either mistakes or
+illusions. During the months when she had waited for her freedom she had
+resolutely put the thought of him out of her mind, and when at last her
+divorce was granted, she dismissed the fact as completely as if it had
+not changed the entire course of her life. The past was over, and only
+that part of it should live which contributed sweetness and beauty to
+the present--only that part of it which she could use in the better and
+stronger structure of the future. Whatever living meant in the end, she
+told herself each morning as she started out to her work, it must mean,
+not resignation, not inertia, but endeavour, enterprise, and courage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE DREAM AND THE YEARS
+
+
+In one of the small fitting-rooms, divided by red velvet curtains on
+gilt rods from the long showrooms of Madame Dinard, a nervous group,
+comprising the head skirt fitter, the head waist fitter, Miss Bellman,
+the head saleswoman, and Madame herself, stood disconsolately around the
+indignant figure of Mrs. Weederman Pletheridge, who, attired in one of
+Madame's costliest French models, was gesticulating excitedly in the
+centre of four standing mirrors. For three years Mrs. Pletheridge had
+lived in Paris, and her return to New York, and to the dressmaking
+establishments of Fifth Avenue, was an event which had shaken Dinard's,
+if not the fashionable street in which it stood, to its foundations.
+
+"I don't know what is the matter with it," she said fussily, "but it
+doesn't suit me, and yet it looked so well in the hand. I wonder if I
+could wear it if you were to take out some of this fulness, and change
+the set of the sleeves? The fashions this spring are perfectly
+hopeless."
+
+"Why, it suits you to perfection, Madame. Just a stitch or two like
+this--and this--and it will look as if it were designed for you by
+Worth. Is it not so, Miss Bellman? Don't you think it is wonderful on
+Madame?"
+
+Miss Bellman, having learned her part, agreed effusively, and then each
+of the fitters, as she was appealed to in turn, contributed an
+enraptured assent to the discussion. The price of the gown was a
+thousand dollars, and Mrs. Pletheridge's favourable decision was worth
+exactly that much in terms of money to Dinard's. As the season had been
+scarcely a brisk one, Madame was particularly anxious to have her more
+extreme models taken off her hands. "It was unpacked only yesterday,"
+she lied suavely, "and no one else has had so much as a glimpse of it."
+
+"I can't imagine what is the matter with it," Mrs. Pletheridge sighed
+dejectedly, while she regarded her ample form with a resentful and
+critical gaze. As long as one had nothing else to worry about, Madame
+reflected without sympathy, one might find cause for positive distress
+in the fact that a gown appeared to better advantage in the hand than on
+one's person. The truth--and the truth, as sometimes happens, was the
+last thing Mrs. Pletheridge cared to admit--was that she had grown too
+stout to wear pronounced fashions.
+
+"Nothing could be more charming," insisted Madame with increased
+effusion, "but if you are in doubt, let us ask the opinion of Mrs. Carr.
+She has the true eye of the artist--a wonderful eye. I don't know
+whether you remember Mrs. Archibald Fowler or not?" she added as the
+skirt fitter sped in search of Gabriella; "this is her daughter-in-law.
+Her husband ran away with another woman about three years ago. It made a
+great sensation at the time, and his wife got a divorce from him
+afterwards. Ever since then she has been in my establishment."
+
+No, Mrs. Pletheridge did not remember Mrs. Fowler; but, having had a
+notorious amount of trouble with her own husbands, she was amiably
+disposed toward the unfortunate daughter-in-law of the lady she couldn't
+remember. Thirty years ago, as a pretty, vulgar, kind-hearted girl, she
+had captured with a glance the eldest son of the newly rich Pletheridge,
+who had, perhaps, inherited his grandfather's genial admiration for
+chambermaids; but, to-day, after a generation of self-indulgence, her
+prettiness had coarsened, her vulgarity had hardened, and her kind heart
+had withered, through lack of cultivation, to the size of a cherry. And,
+from having had everything she wanted for so long, she had at last
+reached that melancholy state of mind when she could think of nothing
+more to want.
+
+A brisk step crossed the room outside, the curtains were parted with a
+commanding movement, and Gabriella joined the anxious group surrounded
+by the four mirrors.
+
+"Did you send for me, Madame?" she asked, and waited, grave, attentive,
+and perfectly composed, with her hand, the small, strong hand of the
+Carrs, on the curtain. Her hair was brushed severely back from her
+candid forehead, and though her figure had grown somewhat heavier and
+less girlish in line, she still wore her plain black dress and white
+collar with an incomparable distinction. Through all the hardship and
+suffering of the last three years she had kept her look of bright
+intelligence, of radiant energy. In dress and manner she was the
+successful woman of business, but she was the woman of business with
+something added. Though she spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, her voice
+had a vibrating quality; though she wore only the plainest clothes, her
+grace, her good-breeding, her indefinable charm, softened the severity.
+
+"Mrs. Pletheridge is uncertain about this gown," explained Madame, "but
+I tell her that it suits her to perfection, as well as if it had been
+designed for her by Worth. Do you not agree with me, Mrs. Carr? You
+have, as I said to her, the true eye of the artist."
+
+Without changing her position or moving a step into the room, Gabriella
+attentively regarded the gown and the wearer. From the mirror Mrs.
+Pletheridge stared back at her ill-humouredly, with a spiteful gleam in
+her small black eyes between the carefully darkened lids.
+
+"I can't imagine what is the matter with it," she reiterated, as if she
+were repeating a sad refrain, and her manner was as insolent as Miss
+Murphy's had been to the casual customer.
+
+For an instant Gabriella returned her look with the steady gaze of one
+who, having achieved the full courage of living, has attained also a
+calm insensibility to the shafts of arrogance. Three years ago she would
+have flinched before Mrs. Pletheridge's disdain, but in those three
+years she had passed beyond the variegated tissue of appearances to the
+bare structure of life--she had worked and wept and starved and
+suffered--and to-day her soul was invulnerable against even more
+destructive weapons than the contempt of a plutocrat. Perhaps, too,
+though she assured herself that she was without snobbishness, there was
+a secret satisfaction in the knowledge that one of her ancestors had
+been a general under Washington while the early Pletheridges were
+planting potatoes in a peasant's patch in Ireland. Her dignity was more
+assured than Madame's; for she was perfectly aware of a fact to which
+Madame was blind, and this was, that, in spite of her position in the
+social columns of the newspapers and her multitudinous possessions, Mrs.
+Pletheridge was not, and could never be, a lady. While Gabriella stood
+there these thoughts flashed recklessly through her mind; yet she
+answered Madame's question as frankly and honestly as if the woman they
+were staring at with such intentness had not been the tragic vulgarian
+she was.
+
+"I think the gown doesn't suit her at all," she said quietly to Madame,
+who made a horrified face at her over the sumptuous shoulder of Mrs.
+Pletheridge. "There is too much of it, too much billowy lace
+everywhere." She did not add that the coral and silver brocade gave Mrs.
+Pletheridge a curious resemblance to an overblown prize hollyhock.
+
+Madame's horrified face changed, as if under a spell, to one of abject
+despair; and a menacing frown convulsed the puffy features of Mrs.
+Pletheridge, while she burst out of her gorgeous sheath with a petulant
+haste which expressed her inward perturbation better than words could
+have done. For a minute one could have heard a flower drop in the
+fitting-room; then the offended customer spoke, and her words, when she
+found them, were not lacking in either force or effectiveness. "No,
+there's no use trying on anything else, I have an appointment at
+Cambon's." Cambon was Dinard's hated and wholly incompetent rival; and
+until this illuminating instant Madame had never suspected that her
+particular Mrs. Pletheridge had ever entered the high white doors of
+Cambon's establishment.
+
+"But, surely, we have something else. There is a lovely Doucet model--in
+white and silver--"
+
+But no, Mrs. Pletheridge would have none of the lovely model. "Give me
+my skirt at once," she commanded haughtily, bending her opulent bosom
+and holding the lacy frills of her petticoat together while Agnes, the
+youngest and the gentlest of the assistants, knelt at her feet with her
+dress skirt held invitingly open on the floor. As she inserted the toe
+of her exquisitely shod foot into the opening, she remarked maliciously:
+"It is impossible to find decent clothes in New York--one might as well
+give up trying. Paris dressmakers send you only their failures." And,
+having crushed Madame to silence, she finished her dressing, fastened
+her black lace veil with a flying swallow in diamonds, flung her feather
+boa over her shoulders, and taking up her gold chain bag, studded with
+rubies, marched out of the establishment with all the pomp and
+impressiveness of a military parade.
+
+"I've lost her. She will never come back," moaned Madame, and burst into
+tears.
+
+"But she couldn't possibly have worn that gown. She would have found it
+out as soon as she got home," replied Gabriella reassuringly, though her
+heart was almost as heavy as Madame's.
+
+It was all her fault, of course, as Madame, recovering her voice as she
+lost her temper, began immediately to tell her. It was all her fault,
+and yet how could she have stood there and lied to the woman in cold
+blood because Madame expected it of her as a part of her work? That she
+had infuriated Madame and imperilled her position she realized
+perfectly; but, realizing this, she still felt that she could not have
+told Mrs. Pletheridge that the gown was becoming to her. "There are
+times when one has to be honest no matter what happens," she thought
+rebelliously, while she went back to the workroom. Had Madame discharged
+her on the spot she would not have been surprised, and it was with a
+sensation of relief that she presently saw the forewoman measuring a
+dose of aromatic spirits of ammonia, and heard that the crisis was
+passing. A little later, when she went into the showroom with a hat for
+Miss Bellman, she encountered Madame bonneted, cloaked, panting, with
+moist eyes and raddled cheeks, preparing to take a slow airing in a
+hansom. As she was assisted into the vehicle by Miss Murphy and the
+driver, Madame pressed her beringed hand to her forehead with a
+despairing gesture; then the driver cracked his whip, the horse started,
+and the hansom disappeared up Fifth Avenue.
+
+"What under the sun did you do to her?" inquired Miss Murphy, holding
+her wheaten-red pompadour down in the wind. "I declare I thought at
+first it was murder!"
+
+"I told her the truth, when she asked me, that was all."
+
+"Well, I never! Now what, in the name of goodness, possessed you?"
+
+"I had to. I don't see how I could have kept from it."
+
+"Good gracious! There're always ways, but what sort of truth was it? You
+see, it's been so long since I've met one," she explained airily, "that
+I don't even know what they're like."
+
+"It was about Mrs. Pletheridge's gown--the one she wanted her to buy,
+you know. I told her it didn't suit her. And it didn't--you know it
+didn't," she concluded emphatically.
+
+"Of course it didn't, but I don't see why you had to go and tell her."
+
+"She asked me. They both asked me, and if I'd lied she wouldn't have
+believed me. You can't fool people so outrageously, and I wouldn't if I
+could. It isn't honest, and it isn't good business."
+
+"Anything is good business that gets by," remarked Miss Murphy, who had
+a philosophy. "I must go indoors or this wind will blow all my puffs
+away."
+
+She departed breezily; and Gabriella, returning to the workroom, spent
+her afternoon patiently stitching flat garlands of flowers on the brim
+of a hat. When she left the house at six o'clock the April weather was
+so lovely that she decided to walk all the way home; and while she moved
+rapidly with the crowd in Fifth Avenue, she considered anxiously the
+possible disastrous results of Madame's anger. Between her and absolute
+want there stood only her salary, and she had deliberately--she realized
+now how deliberate her reply had been--undermined that thin and insecure
+protection. Though she was now earning as much as thirty dollars a week,
+an illness of a year ago, when she had been obliged to stop work for
+several months, had exhausted the remains of the modest nest egg with
+which she had started; and to lose her place, she knew, would mean
+either starvation or beggary. There was no one, with the exception of
+Cousin Jimmy, of whom she could beg, and to beg of him would be a tacit
+confession that she had failed as a breadwinner. In Mrs. Carr's last
+letter Charley had appeared in a new light as a reformed character, a
+devoted attendant at church, and an enthusiastic convert to the
+prohibition party; and Gabriella had gathered from her mother's pious
+rambling that, like other sinners who have outlived temptation, he was
+devoting his middle years to a violent crusade against the moderate
+indulgences of the abstemious. But Charley, she felt, was out of the
+question. She would die before she would stoop to ask help of a man she
+had despised as heartily as she had once despised Charley. She must sink
+or swim by her own strength, not by another's.
+
+"I wonder why I did it?" she asked herself again, and again she could
+not answer the question. She felt that she might have lied had it been
+merely a lie and not a test of courage before her; but she could not lie
+simply because she was afraid of speaking the truth. In every character
+there is one supreme vice or virtue which strikes the deepest root and
+blossoms most luxuriantly, and in the character of Gabriella this virtue
+was courage. At the crucial moments of life some primordial instinct
+prompted her to fight, not to yield. "I ought to have been evasive, I
+suppose," she thought regretfully. "But how could I have been?" There
+were instants, she had discovered, when wisdom surrendered to the more
+militant virtues.
+
+When she reached home she found Fanny, who was fretfully recovering from
+influenza, lying on the sofa in the living-room, with Miss Polly busily
+stitching at her side, while Archibald, excited by a strenuous afternoon
+with the son of the Italian fruit dealer, was kneeling before the
+window, making mysterious signs to a group of yellow-haired German
+children in the apartment house on the opposite side of the street.
+Both children were eagerly expecting their mother, and as soon as she
+entered they grew animated and cheerful.
+
+She kissed and cuddled them, and listened sympathetically to their
+excited stories of the day, and of Dr. French, who had been to see
+Fanny, and who had waited as long as he could.
+
+"He's going to take us for a drive to-morrow, mother, and we're to sit
+in the carriage while he goes in to pay his calls, and then he's to show
+us the river and we're to stop somewhere to have tea."
+
+"Did he stay long?" asked Gabriella of Miss Folly.
+
+"For more than an hour," replied Miss Folly, and commented shrewdly
+after a minute: "It looks to me as if there was more in that young man
+than you can see on the surface, Gabriella."
+
+A blush tinged Gabriella's cheek, but she shook her head almost
+indignantly. "Oh, there's nothing of that kind," she answered
+emphatically, and rose to take off her hat and prepare supper.
+
+Since her illness of a year ago, when she had summoned the strange young
+doctor who had once been the assistant of the Fowlers' family physician,
+she had grown to feel a certain dependence upon Dr. French as the only
+useful friend who was left to her. He was a thin, gray-eyed, fair-haired
+young man, who practised largely among the poor, from choice rather than
+from necessity, since Dr. Morton had given him an excellent start in
+life. His pale, ascetic face had attracted Gabriella from their first
+meeting; there was the flamelike enthusiasm of the visionary in his
+eyes; and he had, she thought, the most beautiful and sympathetic hands
+she had ever seen. Even Fanny, who was usually impervious to sensitive
+impressions, felt the charm of his touch when he stroked her forehead or
+placed his long, delicate fingers on her wrist. From that first visit he
+had been a source of comfort and strength to Gabriella; but of late she
+had felt moments of uneasiness when she was with him. Was it possible,
+she asked herself now, as she went back to the kitchen to stew the
+oysters Miss Polly had bought for supper, that the kindly doctor was
+misinterpreting the simple and unaffected nature of her friendship? For
+herself she felt that she had put the reality of love out of her life,
+and that if the emotion existed for her at all, it existed only as a
+dream and a regret. She enshrined the memory of Arthur in something of
+the sentimental worship which Mrs. Carr had consecrated to Gabriel after
+she had lost him. It was an exquisite consolation to her to feel that if
+things had been otherwise, she might have loved a man with the whole of
+her nature--with both body and spirit; there were even moments in the
+spring of the year, when, softened by the caressing air and the scent of
+hyacinths, she felt that she did so love a memory; but beyond this her
+feeling was as bodiless and ethereal as the vague image to which it was
+dedicated. And yet this gentle regret was all that she wanted of love.
+
+In the kitchen she found Miss Danton, the musical spinster, making her
+scant supper of tea and toast on the gas-range. Though the hectic flush
+still burned in Miss Danton's cheeks, the famished look in her eyes
+seemed to have devoured all the strength of her body, and she moved like
+one who has run to the point of exhaustion and is about to drop to the
+ground. Long ago Gabriella had heard her story, and she understood now
+that the yearning in her face was the yearning for life, which she had
+rejected in her youth, and which, in middle-age, had eluded her. As a
+young girl, aflame with temperament, she had sacrificed herself to a
+widowed father and a family of little brothers and sisters in a small
+town in the South. For thirty years she had fought down her dreams and
+her impulses; for thirty years she had cooked, washed, ironed, and
+sewed, until the children had all grown up and married, and her father,
+after a long illness, had died in her arms. On her fifty-second birthday
+her freedom had come--freedom not only from cares and responsibilities,
+but from love, from duty, from the constant daily thought that she was
+necessary to some one who depended on her. At fifty-three, with broken
+health and a few thousand dollars brought from the sale of the old home,
+she had come to New York to study music as she had dreamed of doing when
+she was young. And the tragedy of it was that she had a gift, she had
+temperament, she had genuine artistic feeling.
+
+"When I remember the way I used to cook for the children," she remarked
+while she measured a teaspoonful of green tea into a little Japanese
+tea-pot, "why, I'd think nothing of roasting a turkey when we had one at
+Christmas or Thanksgiving, and now, I declare, it seems too much trouble
+to do more than make a pot of tea. Sometimes I don't even take the
+trouble to toast my bread."
+
+"You ought to eat," replied Gabriella, briskly. "When one gets run down,
+one never looks at life fairly." True to her fundamental common sense,
+she had never underestimated the importance of food as a prop for
+philosophy.
+
+"I'd never eat if I could help it," rejoined Miss Danton, with the
+abhorrence of the aesthetic temperament for material details. "It's
+queer the thoughts I have sometimes," she added irrelevantly as she sat
+down before the kitchen table, and poured out a cup of tea. "I don't
+know what's come over me, but I'd give anything on earth--if it wasn't
+wicked I'd almost give my soul--to be your age and to be starting to
+live my life. I never had any life. It wasn't fair. I never had any,"
+she repeated bitterly, dropping a lump of sugar into her cup.
+
+"Well, I've had my troubles, too," observed Gabriella, busily stirring
+the oysters.
+
+"You've had them and you'll have others. It doesn't matter--nothing
+really matters as long as you're young. It's all a part of the game,
+trouble and everything else--everything except old age and death. I'm
+getting old--I'm getting old, and I began too late, and that's the worst
+that can happen to a woman. Do you know I never had a love affair in my
+life," she pursued bitterly after a moment. "I never had love, or
+pleasure, or anything but work and duty--and now it's too late. It's too
+late for it all," she finished, rising to take her toast from the oven.
+
+"Poor thing, she exaggerates so dreadfully," thought Gabriella. "I
+believe it comes from drinking too much green tea"; and she resolved
+that she would never touch green tea as long as she lived. Like most
+women whose love had ended not in unfulfilment, but in satiety and
+bitterness, she was inclined to deny the supreme importance of the
+passion in the scheme of life. As a deserted wife and the mother of two
+children, she felt that she could live for years without the desire,
+without even the thought of romantic love in her mind. "I wonder why I,
+who have known and lost love, should be so much freer from that
+obsession than poor Miss Danton, who has never been loved in her life?"
+she asked herself while she carried the supper tray down the long hall
+and into the living-room.
+
+Some hours later, when the children were asleep, and Gabriella sat
+darning Archibald's stockings beside the kerosene lamp, she described to
+Miss Polly the scene with Madame and Mrs. Pletheridge.
+
+"I don't know how it will end. She may discharge me to-morrow," she
+deliberated, as she cut off a length of black darning cotton, and bent
+over to thread her needle. "I wonder what I ought to do?"
+
+"Well, now, ain't that exactly like you, Gabriella," scolded Miss Polly;
+"but when you come to think of it," she conceded after a minute or two,
+"I reckon we're all made like that in the beginning. Why, I remember way
+back yonder in the 'seventies how I was always tryin' to persuade a
+woman with a skinny figure not to wear a cuirass basque and a woman with
+a stout figure not to put on a draped polonaise. I got to know better
+presently, and you will, too, before you've been at it much longer. They
+all think they can look like fashion plates--the skinniest and the
+stoutest alike--and there ain't a bit of use tryin' to undeceive 'em.
+The last thing a woman ever sees straight is her figure."
+
+"I can't help feeling," demurred Gabriella, forsaking the moral issue
+for the argument of mere expediency, "that honesty is good business."
+
+"Well, it ain't," retorted Miss Polly sharply. "It may be good religion
+and good behaviour, but there's one thing it certainly ain't, and that
+is good business. How many of these rich men we read about in the papers
+do you reckon spend their time settin' around and bein' honest? Mind you
+I ain't sayin' I'd lie or steal myself, Gabriella, but I'm poor, and
+what I'm sayin' is that when you feel that way about it, you're as
+likely to stay poor as not."
+
+But the next day, life, with one of those startling surprises which defy
+philosophy and make drama, confirmed the most illogical of Gabriella's
+assumptions. Madame, coming in late, with a blotched face and puffy
+eyelids, had dispatched her to the workroom, and she was sitting before
+one of the long tables, embroidering azure beads on a black collar, when
+Agnes darted through the door and jerked the needle out of her hand.
+
+"Madame is asking for you. Come as quick as you can!" she cried
+excitedly, and sped back again to the shelter of the artificial
+rose-bushes at the end of the hall.
+
+Rising hurriedly, and brushing the scraps of silk from her cloth skirt
+as she walked, Gabriella followed the sound of Madame's wheedling voice,
+and found herself, as she parted the curtains of a fitting-room, in the
+opulent presence of Mrs. Pletheridge.
+
+"Yes, as I told you, we trust implicitly to Mrs. Carr's eye. She has the
+true eye of the artist," Madame simpered fawningly as she entered. "Did
+you send for me?" asked Gabriella, business-like and alert on the
+threshold.
+
+"Good morning, Mrs. Carr! I told Madame Dinard that I wanted you to wait
+on me. I want some one who tells me the truth," explained Mrs.
+Pletheridge so graciously that Gabriella would hardly have recognized
+her. Something--sleep, pleasure, or pious meditation--had altered
+overnight not only her temper but even the fleshly vehicle of its
+uncertain manifestations. Her features appeared to have adjusted
+themselves to the size of her face, and she spoke quite affably, though
+still with her manner of addressing an inferior.
+
+"I want you to show me something that will really suit me," she said. "I
+think the grayish-green cloth from Blandin might be copied in silver,
+but I should like you to see it on me. I know you will tell me what you
+really think." Her voice faltered and deepened to a note of pathos.
+
+"Poor woman," thought Gabriella, "it must be hard for her to get people
+to tell her what they really think," and she added exultantly while she
+went for the gowns: "If I satisfy her now, I am saved with Madame!"
+
+When she returned, with the green cloth in one hand and a charming
+lavender crêpe tea-gown in the other, she approached Mrs. Pletheridge
+with the manner of intelligent sympathy, of serene and smiling
+competence, which had made her so valuable to Madame as a saleswoman.
+She had the air not only of seeking to please, but of knowing just how
+to go about the difficult matter of pleasing. With the eye of an artist
+in dress, she analyzed Mrs. Pletheridge's possibilities; and softening
+here and there her pronounced features, succeeded presently in producing
+a charming and harmonious whole. By the time a dozen gowns were tried on
+and their available points discussed and criticised in detail, Mrs.
+Pletheridge had given the largest order ever received by the house, and
+was throwing out enthusiastic hints of an even greater munificence in
+the future. She left at last in a thoroughly good humour not only with
+Dinard's, but with her own rejuvenated attractions; and Gabriella,
+exhausted but triumphant, watched Agnes gather up the French models from
+chairs and sofas and carry them back to the obscurity of the closets. In
+her heart there was both peace and rejoicing because her belief in life
+had been justified. In spite of Madame, in spite of Miss Polly, in spite
+of experience, the day had proved that it was, after all, "good
+business" to be honest. Though she was still in debt, though she was
+still compelled to scrimp and save over market bills, nevertheless she
+felt that her work had progressed beyond the experimental stages, and
+that her place at Dinard's was secured until some better opening
+appeared. For that morning at least she had made herself indispensable
+to Madame. For years, she knew, Madame had striven fawningly for the
+exclusive patronage of Mrs. Pletheridge, and she, Gabriella, had
+attained it, without loss of pride or self-respect, by a few words of
+honest and sensible criticism. She had applied her intelligence to the
+situation, and her intelligence had served Dinard's more successfully
+than Madame's duplicity had done.
+
+At home she found Dr. French, who had just brought the delighted
+children back from their drive. When she thanked him, she saw that there
+was a glow of pleasure in his rather delicate face, and that this glow
+lent an expression of ecstasy to his dark-gray eyes--the eyes of a
+mystic and a dreamer. "I wonder how he ever became a physician," she
+thought. "He is more like a priest--like a priest of the Middle Ages."
+But aloud she only said: "You have done them a world of good. Fanny has
+got some of her colour back already, and that means an appetite for
+supper."
+
+"We had tea," broke in Archibald, with enthusiasm, "but it was really
+milk, and we had cake, but it was really bread and butter." He looked so
+well and vigorous that Gabriella called the doctor's attention to the
+animation in his face. "If only he didn't have to wear glasses," she
+said. "I'm so afraid it will interfere with his love of sports. His
+ambition is to be captain of a football team and to write poetry."
+
+"It's a queer combination," responded the doctor, smiling his slightly
+whimsical smile. He was rather short, with an almost imperceptible limp,
+and he had, as he put it, "never gone in for sports." "There's so much
+else when one comes to think of it," he added, pausing, with his hat in
+his hand, at the door; "there are plenty of ways of having fun even
+without football." Then he turned away from the children, and said
+directly to Gabriella:
+
+"Will you come out with me to-morrow? It is Sunday."
+
+"And leave the children?" she asked a little blankly.
+
+"And leave the children!" He was laughing, but it occurred to her
+suddenly, for the first time, that her maternal raptures were beginning
+to bore him. For a year she had believed that his interest in her was
+mainly a professional interest in the children; and now she was
+confronted with the disturbing fact that he wanted to be rid of the
+children for a few hours at least, that he evidently saw in her
+something besides the overwhelming force of her motherhood.
+
+"But I never leave them on Sunday. It is the only day I have with them,"
+she answered.
+
+"Don't go, mother! You mustn't go!" cried Fanny, and clung to her.
+
+"Oh, very well," returned Dr. French, dismissing the subject with
+irritation. "But you look pale, and I thought the air might do you
+good."
+
+He went away rather abruptly, while Gabriella stood looking at Miss
+Polly in regret and perplexity. "I hope I didn't hurt his feelings by
+declining," she said; and then, as the children raced into the nursery
+to take off their coats, she added slowly, "He couldn't expect me to go
+without them."
+
+"If you want to know what I think," replied Miss Polly flatly, "it is
+that he's just sick to death of the children. You've stuck them down his
+throat until he's had as much of them as he can swallow."
+
+For a moment Gabriella considered this ruefully.
+
+"You don't honestly believe that he's interested in me in that way?" she
+demanded in a horrified whisper.
+
+"I don't know but one way in which a man's ever interested in a woman,"
+retorted Miss Polly. "It's either that way or it's none at all, as far
+as I can see. But if I was you, honey, I'd drop him a little
+encouragement now and then, just to keep up his spirits. Men ain't no
+mo' than flesh and blood, after all" and it's natural that he shouldn't
+be as crazy about the children as you are."
+
+"But why should I encourage him? Even if you are right, I couldn't marry
+him. I could never marry again."
+
+"I'd like to know why not, if you get a chance? You're free enough,
+ain't you?"
+
+"Yes, it isn't that--but I couldn't."
+
+"You ain't hankerin' after George, are you, Gabriella?"
+
+"After George? No!" responded Gabriella with so sincere an accent that
+Miss Polly jumped.
+
+"Well, I'm glad you ain't," observed the seamstress soothingly as she
+stooped to pick up her sewing. "I shouldn't think he was worth hankerin'
+after, myself, but you've looked kind of peaked and thin this spring, so
+I've just been wonderin'."
+
+"I never loved George. It was madness, nothing else," returned
+Gabriella, and she really believed it.
+
+"Well, your thinkin' it madness now don't mean it wan't love ten years
+ago," commented Miss Polly, with the shrewdness of a detached and
+observant spinster.
+
+"I suppose you're right," admitted Gabriella thoughtfully. Though she
+had not mentioned Arthur, her mind was full of him, and she was
+perfectly convinced that she had loved him all her life--even during her
+brief period of "madness." It was a higher love, she felt, so much
+higher, indeed, that it had been too spiritual, too ethereal, to take
+root in the earthly soil from which her passion for George had sprung.
+But, if it were not love, why was it that every faint stirring of her
+emotions revived the memory so poignantly? Why was it that Miss Polly's
+sentimental interpretation of the doctor's interest evoked the image of
+Arthur?
+
+"No, I never think of George--never," she repeated, and her fine, pure
+features assumed an expression of sternness. "But I shan't marry again,"
+she went on after a pause in which Miss Polly's sewing-machine buzzed
+cheerfully over its work. "I've had enough of marriage to last me for
+one lifetime."
+
+The machine stopped, and Miss Polly, snipping the thread as she came to
+the end of a seam, turned squarely to answer. "Don't you be too sure
+about that, honey. You may have had enough to last you for ten years or
+so, but wait till you've turned forty, and if the hankerin' for love
+don't catch you at forty, you may begin to expect it somewhere around
+fifty. Why, just look at that poor piano-playin' old maid in there.
+Wouldn't you think she'd have done with it? Well, she ain't--she ain't,
+and you ain't either, for that matter, I don't care how hard you argue!"
+
+"There are ten happy years ahead of me anyhow!" rejoined Gabriella, with
+a ringing laugh--the laugh, as Dr. French had once remarked, of a woman
+who is sound to the core. She had triumphed over the past, and was not
+afraid, she told herself valiantly, of the future.
+
+At the beginning of July the children went with Miss Polly to the
+country, and Gabriella, after seeing them off, turned back alone to
+begin a long summer of economy and drudgery. In order to keep Fanny and
+Archibald out of town she was obliged to deny herself every unnecessary
+comfort--luxuries she had given up long ago--and to stay at Dinard's, in
+Madame's place, through the worst weeks of the year, when the showroom
+was deserted except for an occasional stray Southerner, and even the six
+arrogant young women were away on vacations. Even if she had had the
+chance, the money for a trip would have been lacking, and to fill
+Madame's conspicuous place gave her, she realized, a certain importance
+and authority in the house. There was opportunity, in a small way, to
+work out some of her ideas of system and order, and there was sufficient
+time to think out a definite and practical plan for the future. Her aim
+from the first had been, not only to catch on, but to master the details
+of the business, and she knew that, in spite of Madame's sporadic
+attempts to keep her in her place, she was gradually making herself
+felt--she was slowly impressing her individual methods upon the
+establishment. Madame was no longer what she once was, and the business
+was showing it. She was getting old, she was growing tired, and her
+naturally careless methods of work were fastening upon her. In the last
+years she had offered less and less resistance to her tendency to let
+go, to leave loose ends ungathered, to allow opportunities to slip out
+of her grasp, to be inexact and unsystematic. There was urgent need of a
+strong hand at Dinard's, if the business was to be kept from running
+gradually downhill, and Gabriella became convinced, as the days passed,
+that hers was the only hand in the house strong enough to check the
+perilous descent to failure. Her plans were made, her scheme arranged,
+but, as Madame was both jealous and suspicious, she saw that she must
+move very cautiously.
+
+There were times--since this is history, not romance--when her spirits
+flagged and her strength failed her. The heat of the summer was intense,
+and the breathless days dragged on interminably into the breathless
+nights. When her work was over she would wait until the last of her
+fellow-workers had gone home, and then walk across to Sixth Avenue and
+take the Harlem elevated train for her deserted rooms, which appeared
+more desolate, more ugly than ever because the children were absent. In
+the lonely kitchen--for Miss Danton and the art students were all
+away--she would eat her supper of bread and tea, which she drank
+without cream because it was more economical; and then, lighting her
+lamp, she would sew or read until midnight. Sometimes, when it was too
+hot for the lamp, and she found it impossible to work by the flickering
+gas, she would sit by her window and look down on the panting humanity
+in the street below--on the small shopkeepers seated in chairs on the
+sidewalk, on the little son of the Italian fruiterer playing with his
+dog, on the three babies of the Jewish tobacco merchant, sprawling in
+the door of the tiny shop which was pressed like a sardine between a
+bakery and a dairy. She was alone in the apartment, and there were late
+afternoons when the grim emptiness of the rooms seemed haunted, when she
+shrank back in apprehensive foreboding as she turned her key in the
+lock, when the profound silence within preyed on her nerves like an
+obsession. On these days she dreaded to go down the long hail to the
+kitchen, where the fluttering clothes-lines on fire-escapes at the back
+of the next apartment house offered the only suggestion of human
+companionship in the unfriendly wilderness of the city. The sight of the
+children's toys, of Fanny's story books, of Archibald's roller skates,
+moved her to tears once or twice; and when this happened she caught
+herself up sharply and struggled with the vague, malignant demon of
+melancholy.
+
+"Whatever comes, I must not lose my courage," she told herself at such
+times. "If I lose my courage I shall have nothing left."
+
+Then she would put on her hat, and go down into the street, where the
+unwashed children swarmed like insects over the pavements, and the air
+was as hot and parched as the air of a desert. If the mother of the
+Jewish babies sat on her doorstep, she would stop for a little talk with
+her about the heat and the health of the children, and the increasing
+price of whatever one happened to buy in the market, or, perhaps, if the
+fruit stall still kept open, she would ask after the Italian's little
+boy, and stop to pat Archibald's friend, the white mongrel with the
+black ear. She had left her acquaintances when she left Fifty-seventh
+Street, and, with the exception of Judge Crowborough, who telephoned
+occasionally to inquire if she needed assistance, she was without
+friends in New York. Patty wrote often from Paris, but Billy was happy
+with his work, and they said nothing of returning to America. In the
+whole city, outside of Dinard's, she knew only Dr. French, and from him
+she had had no word or sign for several months.
+
+It was on one of these depressing evenings, while she was boiling an egg
+in the kitchen, that the ringing of the door-bell reverberated with an
+uncanny sound through the empty apartment. Spurred by an instinctive
+fear of a telegram, she ran to open the door, and found Dr. French
+standing in the dimly lighted hail, with the negro Robert grinning
+cheerfully at his back.
+
+"I am so glad," she said, "so glad," and her voice shook in spite of the
+effort she made.
+
+"I've been thinking about you all summer," he explained, "and the other
+day I passed you in the street as you were coming from work. You are not
+looking well. Is it the heat?"
+
+"No, it isn't the heat. I think it is the loneliness. You see it is so
+different not having the children to come back to in the afternoon, and
+when I get lonely I see things in false proportions. This apartment has
+been like a grave to me all summer."
+
+She led the way into the living-room, where her sewing, a blue cambric
+frock she was scalloping for Fanny, was lying on the chair by the
+window. "Things are all upset. I hope you won't mind," she added
+apologetically while she folded the dress and laid it aside, "but
+nothing seems to matter when I sit here all by myself."
+
+"What are you doing?"
+
+"Oh, I work all day. There is really very little to do except plan for
+the autumn, and I like that. Madame is in Paris, and I am in charge of
+the place."
+
+"And in the evenings?"
+
+She laughed with recovered spirit. "In the evening I sew and read and
+mope."
+
+"Well, we must change all that," he said, with a tenderness which
+brought tears to her eyes. "Why can't you come out with me somewhere to
+dinner?"
+
+Three years ago, when she was first separated from George, she would
+have evaded the suggestion; but to-night, at the end of the long summer,
+she caught eagerly at the small crumb of pleasure.
+
+"Oh, I'd love to! Only wait until I put out the stove and tidy my hair."
+
+"I want to see what you have to eat," he remarked in his whimsical tone,
+as he followed her back into the kitchen. "Only an egg!"
+
+"It is so hot. I wasn't hungry, but I am now," she replied gaily, her
+thin face flushing to beauty. After her loneliness there was a delight
+in being cared for, in being scolded. "But for the mistake I made this
+might happen to me always," she thought, and her mind went back to
+Arthur.
+
+When she came out of her room, wearing a fresh linen blouse, with her
+hair smoothly brushed, and her eyes sparkling with pleasure, he was
+gazing abstractedly down into the street, and she was obliged to speak
+twice to him before he heard her and turned. At last he broke away,
+almost with an effort, from his meditation, and when he looked at her
+she saw that there was the mystic gleam in his eyes--the light as of a
+star shining through clouds--which attracted her so strongly. The
+thought flashed through her vague impressions, "He loves me. I may win
+him by a smile, by a word, by a look," and, for a minute, she rested on
+the certainty with an ineffable sense of peace, of ease, of deep inward
+rejoicing. "Love is everything. There is nothing worth while except
+love," she thought; and love meant to her then, not passion, not even
+romance, but comfort, tenderness, and the companionship that sweetens
+the flat monotony of daily living. Then, beneath the beauty and
+sweetness of the vision, she felt the vein of iron in her soul as she
+had felt it whenever she struggled to escape the sterner issues of life.
+The face of Arthur rose in her memory, tender, wistful, protecting, and
+young with the eternal youth of desire. No, love was not for her again.
+Not for the second time would she betray the faith of her Dream.
+
+They dined at a little French restaurant, where the green-shaded lights,
+festooned with grape leaves, shed a romantic pallor over their faces,
+and the haunting refrains of an Italian love song stirred the buried
+ghosts in their hearts. The doctor made her drink a glass of champagne;
+and after her frugal meals and the weakening effect of the heat and the
+loneliness, the sparkle of the wine, mingling with the music and the
+lights, sent a sudden rush of joy through her veins. Her courage came
+back to her, not in slow drops, but in a radiant flood, which pervaded
+her being. After the lonely months there was delight in the clasp of a
+friend's hand, in the glance of a friend's eye, in the sound of a
+friend's voice speaking her name. Life appeared divinely precious at the
+instant; and by life she meant not happiness, not even fulfilment, but
+the very web, the very texture and pattern of experience.
+
+"You're better already," he said, with a solicitude that was more
+intoxicating than wine to her. "How I wish I'd known all summer that you
+were here. I might have done something to make you happy, and now I've
+missed my chance."
+
+"I don't think I've ever been so happy as I am to-night," she answered
+simply, and then after a pause she let fall word by word, "After all, it
+takes so little to make me happy."
+
+"One can tell that to look at you. You have the air of happiness. I
+noticed it the first moment I saw you. And yet you have not had an easy
+life. There must have been terrible hours for you in the past."
+
+"No, I haven't had an easy life, but I love it. I mean I love living."
+
+"I know, I understand," he said softly. "It is the true American
+spirit--optimism springing out of a struggle. Do you know you have
+always made me think of the American spirit at its best--of its
+unquenchable youth, its gallantry, its self-reliance--"
+
+They walked back slowly through the hot, close streets, and sat for an
+hour beside her window-sill on which a rose geranium was blooming in an
+earthen pot. Now and then a breeze entered warily, stealing the
+fragrance from the rose geranium, and rippling the dark, straying
+tendrils of Gabriella's hair. By the dim light she saw the wistful
+pallor of his face, and his blue eyes, with their exalted look, which
+moved her heart to an inexpressible tenderness.
+
+"You are so different from other physicians," she said in perplexity, "I
+can't think of you as one, no matter how hard I try. All the others I
+have known, even old Dr. Walker, were materialists."
+
+"Well, I got in some way. There are fools in every school, I suppose.
+But if it's any comfort to you, they've done their best to get rid of
+me. They don't like my theories." When he talked of his work he seemed
+all at once another man to her, and she discerned presently, while she
+listened to his earnest voice, that he was one of the men whose
+emotional natures are nourished by an abstract and impersonal
+passion--by the passion for science, for truth in its concrete form.
+After all, he was a mystic only in his eyes. Beneath his dreamer's face
+he was a scientist to the last drop of his blood, to the last fibre of
+his being. "He can't be hurt deeply through the heart," she thought;
+"only through the mind."
+
+"I've wondered about you all summer," he repeated presently, "and yet I
+kept away--partly, I suppose, because I was thinking too much of you."
+
+At his change of tone from the impersonal to the tender all the frozen
+self-pity in her heart seemed to melt suddenly, threatening in its
+overflow the very foundations of her philosophy. The temptation to yield
+utterly, to rest for a while not on her strength, but on his, assailed
+her with the swiftness and the violence of a spiritual revulsion. For an
+instant she surrendered to the uncontrollable force of this desire;
+then she drew quickly back while the world about her--the room, the
+window, the bare skeleton of the elevated road, the street, and even the
+rose geranium blooming on the sill--became as remote and impalpable as a
+phantom.
+
+"It has been a long summer," she heard herself saying from a distance in
+a thin and colourless voice.
+
+"And you suffered?"
+
+"Sometimes, but I'm interested in my work, and I've been thinking and
+planning all summer."
+
+For a moment he was silent, and though she did not look at him, she
+could feel his intense gaze on her face. The breeze, scented with rose
+geranium, touched her forehead like the healing and delicate stroke of
+his fingers.
+
+"You are still so young, so vital, not to have something else in your
+life," he went on presently in a voice so charged with feeling that her
+eyes filled while she listened to it.
+
+"I have had love, and I have my children."
+
+"But you will love again? You will marry again some day?"
+
+She shook her head, hearing, above the street cries and the muffled
+rumble of the elevated train, a voice that said: "I shall never give you
+up, Gabriella!" To her weakened nerves there appeared, with the
+vividness of an hallucination, the memory of Arthur as he had looked in
+her school-days when she had first loved him; and in this hallucination
+she saw him, not as he was in reality, but divinely glorified and
+enkindled by the light her imagination had created around him.
+
+"No, I shall never love again, I shall never love again," she answered
+at last, while a feeling of exultation surged through her.
+
+"You mean," his voice shook a little, "that your husband still holds
+you?"
+
+"My husband? No, I never think of my husband."
+
+"Is there some one else?"
+
+Before answering she looked up at him, and by his face she knew that her
+reply would cost her his friendship. She wanted his friendship--at the
+moment she felt that she would gladly give a year of her life for it. It
+meant companionship instead of loneliness, it meant plenty instead of
+famine. Yet only for an instant, only while she stopped to draw breath,
+did she hesitate. "Women must learn to be honourable," she found herself
+thinking suddenly with an extraordinary intensity.
+
+"Yes, there is some one else--there has always been some one else," she
+said, driven on by an impulsive desire for full confession, for absolute
+candour. "When I met George I was engaged to another man, and I have
+loved that man all my life."
+
+She had confessed all, she told herself; and the remarkable part was
+that she really believed her confession--she was honestly convinced that
+she had spoken only the truth. Her soul, like the soul of Cousin Jimmy,
+sheltered a romantic strain which demanded that one supreme illusion
+should endure amid a world of disillusionment. Because she was obliged
+to believe in something or die, she had built her imperishable Dream on
+the flame-swept ruins of her happiness.
+
+"He must be a big man if he can fill a life like yours," said Dr.
+French.
+
+"I don't know why I told you," she faltered; "I have never told any one
+else. It is my secret."
+
+"Well, it is safe with me. Don't be afraid."
+
+For the few minutes before he rose to go they talked indifferently of
+other things. She had lost him, she knew, and while she held his hand at
+parting, she felt a sharp regret for what was passing out of her
+life--for the one chance of love, of peace, of a tranquil and
+commonplace happiness. But beneath the regret there was a hidden spring
+of joy in her heart. At the instant of trial she had found strength to
+be true to her Dream.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SUCCESS
+
+
+"I declare you're real pretty to-night, honey," remarked Miss Polly from
+the floor, where she knelt pinning up the hem of a black serge skirt she
+was making for Gabriella. "Some days you're downright plain, and then
+you flame out just like a lamp. Nobody would ever think to look at you
+that you'd be thirty-seven years old to-morrow." For it was the evening
+before Gabriella's birthday, and she was at the end of her thirty-sixth
+year.
+
+"I feel young," she answered brightly, "and I feel happy. The children
+are well, and I've had all the success I could ask. Some day I'm going
+to own Madame's business, Miss Polly."
+
+"I reckon she's gettin' mighty old, ain't she?"
+
+"She gave up the work years ago, and I believe she'd be glad to sell out
+to me to-morrow if I had the money.
+
+"I wish you had. It would be nice for you to be at the head, now
+wouldn't it?" rejoined Miss Polly, speaking with difficulty through a
+mouthful of pins.
+
+"Yes, I wish I had, but I've thought and thought, and I don't see how I
+could borrow enough. I've sometimes thought of asking Judge Crowborough
+to invest some money in the business. It would be investing, the returns
+are so good."
+
+"He'd do it in a minute, I expect. He always set a lot of store by you,
+didn't he?"
+
+"He used to, but somehow I hate to ask favours."
+
+"You were always a heap too proud. Don't you remember how you'd never
+eat the other children's cake when you were a child unless you had some
+of your own to offer 'em?"
+
+Gabriella laughed. "No, I don't remember, but it sounds like me. I was
+horrid."
+
+"There was always a hard streak somewhere down in you, and you don't
+mind my sayin' that you ain't gettin' any softer, Gabriella. There are
+times now when your mouth gets a set look like your Aunt Becky
+Bollingbroke's. You don't recollect her, I 'spose, but she never
+married."
+
+"Well, I married," Gabriella flippantly reminded her; "so it can't be
+that."
+
+Though the hard work of the last ten years had left its visible mark
+upon her, and she looked a little older, a little tired, a little worn,
+experience had added a rare spiritual beauty to her face, and she was
+far handsomer than she had been at twenty. The rich sprinkling of silver
+in the heavy waves of hair over her ears framed the firm pale oval of
+her face with a poetic and mysterious darkness, and gave depth and
+softness to her brilliant eyes. For the struggle, which had stolen her
+first freshness and left faintly perceptible lines in her expressive
+face, had not robbed her of the eyes and the heart of a girl.
+
+"I don't count George, somehow," retorted Miss Polly. "That wan't like
+marryin' a real man, you know, and, when all's said and done, a lone
+woman gets mighty hard and dried up."
+
+"But I can't marry when there's nobody to marry me," laughed Gabriella.
+"I haven't seen a man for seven years except in the street or
+occasionally in the shop. Men have either passed me by without seeing me
+or they have wanted to sell me something."
+
+At the sound of the children's voices she slipped out of the serge
+skirt, and began hurriedly fastening the old black silk gown she wore at
+dinner. Through all the years of toil and self-denial she had preserved
+a certain formality of living, a gracious ease of manner, which she kept
+for the evenings with her children. Cares were thrust away then, to be
+taken up again as soon as Fanny and Archibald were in bed, and no matter
+how hard the day had been, she was always cheerful, always gay and
+light-hearted for the dinner hour by the fireside. Not often had she
+been too poor to buy a handful of flowers for the table, and never once,
+except during her illness, had she come home too tired to change to the
+black silk gown, which she had turned and made from bishop sleeves to
+small ones, and from "dropped" shoulders to high ones, for the last six
+or seven years. The damask on the table was darned and mended, but it
+was always spotlessly fresh. In winter the fire was made up brightly in
+the evenings; in summer the room was deliciously scented with rose
+geranium and heliotrope from the box in the window. For ten years she
+had not had a holiday; she had worked harder than a man, harder than any
+servant, for she had worked from dawn until midnight; but into her hard
+life she had instilled a quality of soul which had enabled her to endure
+the strain without breaking. "No life is so hard that you can't make it
+easier by the way you take it," she had said to herself in the
+beginning; and remembering always that courage is one of the eternal
+virtues, she had disciplined her mind as well as her body to firmness
+and elasticity of fibre. "Nobody, except myself, is ever going to make
+me happy," she would repeat over and over again when the day was
+wearying and the work heavy. "I want to be happy. I have a right to be
+happy, but it depends on myself."
+
+This indestructible belief in her "right to happiness" supported her
+through the hardest hours of her life, and diffused an invigorating
+atmosphere not only in her home, but even in her long working hours at
+Dinard's. The children grew and strengthened in its bracing air; Miss
+Polly quickly responded to it; the women in the workroom breathed it in
+as if it were the secret of health, and even Madame showed occasional
+signs that she was not entirely impervious to its vital and joyous
+influence. It was not always easy for Gabriella to keep the light in her
+eyes and the faith in her heart. There were days when both seemed to
+fail her, when, with aching body and depressed mind, she felt that she
+could not look beyond the immediate suffering minute, when she told
+herself despairingly that she had lost everything in losing her courage.
+But bad days passed as irrevocably as good ones; and left her, when they
+were over, with her strong soul unshaken, and her philosophy of
+happiness still undestroyed. Like other human beings, she found that her
+moods were largely controlled by her physical health.
+
+"Oh, mother dear, I went down to meet you, and I missed you by just five
+minutes," said Fanny, kissing her cheek. "I wanted you to go with me to
+look at the house in London Terrace. Miss Polly and I are crazy about
+it."
+
+"I know," said Gabriella tenderly, while she feasted her eyes on her
+daughter.
+
+The old apartment house in which they had spent the last ten years would
+be torn down in the summer, and Fanny and Miss Folly had devoted the
+past week to an exhaustive hunt for a home.
+
+"Then you'll look at it to-morrow, won't you, mother?" urged Fanny. "We
+can get the upper rooms and they are larger than these. There is a
+little yard in front, with an elm tree and a rose-bush, and plenty of
+space for flowers."
+
+"I can't recall the house exactly," said Gabriella thoughtfully. "It
+must be in a row, isn't it? I have a vague recollection of some old
+houses, with fronts of stuccoed pilasters, and rather nice yards. But
+West Twenty-third Street is too far away, dear. I don't like the
+neighbourhood. Wouldn't you rather be in Park Avenue?" Her ignorance of
+New York, though she had lived there seventeen years, amazed Fanny, who
+was a true child of the city.
+
+"Carlie Herndon lives in that row, mother"--Carlie Herndon, the daughter
+of a distinguished and unpopular novelist, was Fanny's best friend for
+the moment--"and I could always go out with her in the evening."
+
+"It isn't the location I should have liked, Fanny," said Gabriella,
+weakly yielding, as she always yielded to her daughter; "but if you
+really fancy the house, I'll try to look at it on my way home to-morrow.
+One has to be very careful about the plumbing in these old houses. I
+insist upon good plumbing. After that, you may have what you want."
+
+"Oh, it has brand new bathrooms, Mrs. Mallon told me so, and she's
+lived there until a year ago. And if you had only seen the new
+apartments we looked at, mother, nothing on the East Side that would
+have held us under twenty-five hundred a year, and even at that the
+bedrooms were no bigger than closets, and you'd have to have electric
+light all day in the bathroom. We searched everywhere, didn't we, Miss
+Polly?"
+
+"West Twenty-third Street is mighty far out of the way, honey," observed
+Miss Polly cautiously.
+
+"Oh, but I'd have Carlie, and she's my best friend," persisted Fanny,
+with caressing obstinacy.
+
+"Well, we'll see, precious," said Gabriella, while she assured herself
+that if Fanny cost her every penny she had, at least the child was worth
+what she spent on her. To a superficial observer, Fanny would probably
+have appeared merely an attractive girl, of Jane's willowy type, with
+something of Jane's trite prettiness of feature; but to Gabriella, who
+suffered from a maternal obliquity of vision, she seemed both brilliant
+and beautiful. Of course she was selfish, but this selfishness, as long
+as it was clothed in her youth and loveliness, was as inoffensive as the
+playfulness of a kitten. Her face was round and shallow, with exquisite
+colouring which veiled the flatness and lack of character in her
+features. Above her azure eyes her hair, which was not plentiful, but
+fine and soft, and as yellow as ripe corn, broke in a shining mist over
+her forehead. All her life, by being what she was, she had got, without
+effort, everything that she wanted. She had got dolls when she wanted
+dolls; she had got Miss Ludwell's expensive school when she wanted an
+expensive private school; she would get the house in West Twenty-third
+Street to-morrow, and when she began to want love, she would get it as
+easily and as undeservedly as she got everything else. She was very
+expensive, but, like the flowers on the table and the spotless damask
+and the lace in Gabriella's sleeves, she was one of her mother's
+luxuries to be paid for by additional hours of work and thought.
+
+"Wasn't Archibald with you?" inquired Gabriella, while she pushed the
+chairs into place and tidied the room.
+
+"He stopped at the library. There's his ring now. I'll open the door."
+
+She ran out, and Gabriella, with the tablecloth in her hand, stood
+waiting for Archibald to enter. In her eager expectancy, in the wistful
+brightness of her eyes, in the tender quivering of her lips, she was
+like a girl who is awaiting a lover. Every evening, after her day's
+work, she greeted her son with the same passionate tenderness. Never had
+it lessened, never, even when she was most discouraged, had she failed
+to summon her strength and her sweetness for this beatific end to the
+day. For Archibald was more than a son to her. As he grew older their
+characters became more perfectly adjusted, and the rare bond of a deep
+mental sympathy held them together. Fanny loved her as a spoiled child
+loves the dispenser of its happiness; but in Archibald's devotion there
+was something of the worship of a man for an ideal.
+
+Flushed and hungry, the boy came in, and after kissing her hurriedly,
+ran off to wash his face and hands before dinner. When he came back the
+table was laid, with a bunch of lilacs in a cut glass vase over the
+darned spot in the tablecloth, and Miss Polly was bringing in the
+old-fashioned soup tureen, which had belonged to Gabriella's maternal
+grandmother.
+
+"If you don't sit right straight down everything will be cold," said
+Miss Polly severely, for this was her customary manner of announcing
+dinner. Every night for ten years she had threatened them with a cold
+dinner while she served them a hot one.
+
+With a child on either side of her, Gabriella sat down, and ladled the
+soup out of the old china tureen. It was her consecrated hour--the
+single hour of her toiling day that she dedicated to personal happiness;
+and because it was her hour, her life had gradually centred about it as
+if it were the divine point of her universe--the pivot upon which her
+whole world revolved. Nothing harsh, nothing sordid, nothing sad, ever
+touched the sacred precincts of her twilight hour with her children.
+
+"I can beat any boy at school running, mother," said Archibald, watching
+his plate of soup hungrily as it travelled toward him. "If my eyes won't
+let me be captain of a football team, I'm going to become the champion
+runner in America. I bet I can, if I try."
+
+"I shouldn't wonder, dear. It's good for you, too. I never saw you look
+better."
+
+He was a tall, thin boy, with a muscular figure, and thick brown hair,
+which was always rumpled. Through his ugly spectacles his eyes showed
+large, dark, and as beautifully soft as a girl's. His mind was
+remarkably keen and active, and there was in his carriage something of
+Gabriella's capable and commanding air, as if, like her, he embodied
+those qualities which compel acknowledgment. Though she had never
+admitted it even to herself, he was her favourite child.
+
+When dinner was over she had the children to herself--to the gracious,
+unhurried self she gave them--until ten o'clock. Then their books were
+put away, and after she had kissed them good-night, and tucked the
+covers about them, she came back to the living-room, and sat down to her
+sewing with Miss Polly. The ease and cheerfulness dropped from her at
+the approach of midnight, and while the two women bent over their
+needles they talked of their anxieties, and planned innumerable and
+intricate ways of economy.
+
+"Fanny's school costs so much, and, of course, she must have clothes.
+All the other girls dress so expensively."
+
+"You spend three times as much on her as you do on Archibald."
+
+"I know," her voice melted to the mother note, "but Archibald is
+different. He is a man, and he will make his way in the world. Then,
+too, his expenses will be trebled next year when he goes off to school,
+and after that, of course, will come college. I don't believe anything
+or anybody can keep Archibald back," she went on proudly. "Do you know
+he talks already of going to work in a shipping office in order to help
+me?"
+
+"It's a pity about his eyes."
+
+"There's nothing wrong except near-sightedness, but he'll have to wear
+glasses all his life."
+
+For a minute Miss Polly stitched almost furiously, while her small
+weatherbeaten face, with its grotesque features, was visited by an
+illumination that softened and ennobled its ugliness. From living
+entirely in the lives of others, she had attained the spiritual serenity
+and detachment of a saint as well as the saint's immunity from the
+intenser personal forms of suffering. Long habit had accustomed her to
+think of herself only in connection with somebody's need of her, and
+beyond this she hardly appeared as an individual existence even in her
+own secret reflections. As far as it is possible to achieve absolute
+unselfishness in a world planned upon egoistic principles Miss Polly had
+achieved it; and the result was that she was almost perfectly happy.
+
+"Fanny seems right set on goin' down to Twenty-third Street, don't she?"
+she inquired, after an interval of musing.
+
+"It's all because Carlie lives in the row, and by next year, after we've
+had all the trouble of moving, she'll find another bosom friend and want
+to go to Park Avenue."
+
+"It's a real comfortable sort of house, more like Richmond than New
+York, and I reckon we could get flowers to grow there just about as well
+as they did in Hill Street."
+
+"I don't like having those O'Haras on the lower floor. If they are loud
+and common, it might be very disagreeable."
+
+"There ain't but one, a man, and he's hardly ever there, the caretaker's
+wife told me. She said he was almost always in the West, and anyway his
+lease is up next year, and he thinks he'll give up his rooms. She says
+he has made piles of money in mines somewhere out West, and he only
+keeps those rooms because they used to belong to a man who picked him
+out of the street when he was a little boy selling newspapers. That
+caretaker's wife seems to be a mighty kind-hearted creature, but she
+talks as if she was never goin' to stop."
+
+"I think I could afford to take an apartment in Park Avenue," returned
+Gabriella, dismissing the name of O'Hara; "but, of course, I want to
+save as much as I can in order to invest in the business. If it wasn't
+for that, I could stop scraping and pinching. I can't bear, though, to
+think of leaving nothing for the children when I die."
+
+"Go away from here, honey. The idea of your talkin' about dyin'! You
+look healthier than you ever did in your life, only you're gettin' that
+set look again about your mouth."
+
+"I wonder if I'm growing hard," said Gabriella, stopping to glance in
+the mirror. "I suppose that's the problem of life for the working
+woman--not to grow hard." In some ways, she realized, Miss Polly was
+right. She was a handsome woman, as Madame occasionally informed her;
+but she was no longer shrinking, she was no longer alluringly feminine.
+To dress smartly for Dinard's was a part of her work, and she had grown
+quite indifferent to having men turn and stare after her in the street
+or when she entered a restaurant. But the men who stared never spoke to
+her as they did to Fanny when she was alone. They regarded her
+admiringly, but she aroused neither disrespect nor the protective
+instinct in their minds. Only when she smiled her face grew as young as
+her eyes, and with the powdering of silver on her hair, gave her a look
+of radiance and charm; but at other times, when she was grave or
+preoccupied with the management of Dinard's, the "set look" that Miss
+Polly dreaded hardened her mouth.
+
+"I wish you could go easier now for a while," resumed the little
+seamstress, after a pause which she had filled with vague speculations
+about Gabriella's sentimental prospects. "I just hate like anything to
+see you wearing yourself out. Of course I'd like you to own part of the
+business, and I can't help thinkin' that the judge could get you the
+money as easy as not. It ain't as if you couldn't pay him the interest
+regular, is it?" she pursued with the financial helplessness of a woman
+who has never thought in terms of figures. "You couldn't be doin' any
+better, could you? There ain't anybody can run the business as well as
+you do, I don't care who 'tis."
+
+"I sometimes think," returned Gabriella deliberately, while she draped a
+lace bertha on a white silk frock she was making for Fanny, "that I will
+try to borrow the money."
+
+"It couldn't hurt, could it?"
+
+"No, I don't suppose it could hurt."
+
+Her eyes were on the lace, which she was adjusting over the shoulder,
+and Miss Polly followed her gaze with a look which was not entirely
+approving.
+
+"There ain't a bit of sense in your wearin' yourself out over that
+child," said the seamstress presently, with so sharp an accent that
+Gabriella glanced up quickly from her work. "It was just the way Mrs.
+Spencer started Florrie, and it ain't right."
+
+"Florrie!" exclaimed Gabriella, startled, and she added slowly, "I
+wonder what has become of her? I haven't thought of her for years."
+
+"It was a mean trick she played you, Gabriella. I'd never have believed
+it of Florrie if I hadn't been there to see it with my own eyes."
+
+"Yes, it was mean," assented Gabriella, but there was no anger in her
+voice. She had left the past so far behind her that its disappointments
+and its cruelties had become as dim and shadowy to her imagination as
+if they had been phantoms of the mind instead of actual events through
+which she had lived.
+
+"Well, I'm glad she didn't spoil your life for you, honey."
+
+"No, she didn't spoil my life. Don't I look happy? And Madame told me
+to-day that my figure was distinguished. Now, when a woman's life is
+spoiled her figure and her complexion are the first things to show it."
+
+"Of course you ain't gettin' slouchy, I don't mean anything like that.
+But I hate to see you workin' your fingers to the bone and bringin'
+lines around your eyes when you ought to be taken care of. I don't hold
+with women workin' unless they're obliged to."
+
+"But I'm obliged to. How on earth could I take care of the children if I
+didn't work?"
+
+For a minute there was an austere silence while Miss Polly reflected
+grimly that Gabriella Mary--she thought of her as "Gabriella Mary" in
+moments of disapprobation"--was gettin' almost as set as her ma."
+
+"You could marry," she said flatly at last, stopping to press down the
+hem she had turned with the blunted nail of her thumb. "Of course your
+ma would be dead against it, but there ain't any reason in the world why
+you shouldn't go back home and marry Arthur Peyton, as you ought to have
+done seventeen years ago."
+
+Though Gabriella laughed in reply, there was no merriment in the sound,
+and a look of sadness crept into the eyes she turned away from the sharp
+gaze of the little seamstress.
+
+"You've forgotten that I haven't seen him for seventeen years," she
+answered.
+
+"That don't make any difference in his sort, and you know it. He ain't
+ever married anybody else, and he ain't goin' to. The faithfulness that
+ought to be spread over the whole sex gets stored up in a few, and he's
+one of 'em."
+
+"He has never written to me. No, he must have got over it," responded
+Gabriella, with an impassioned emphasis, "and, besides, even if he
+cared, I don't want to marry again. My children are enough for me."
+
+"It won't look that way next year when both the children are away at
+school, and when they once break away from your apron strings they're
+the sort that will go the way they want to and look out for their own
+happiness. You won't have much of Archibald while he's at school and
+college, and Fanny will marry befo' she's twenty just as sure as you
+live. Why, she's already got her head full of beaux. Have you noticed
+that picture of an actor she keeps on her bureau?"
+
+"Yes" admitted Gabriella anxiously, "I've noticed it, but when I asked
+her about it, she only laughed."
+
+After this the conversation dropped, and the two women put away their
+work for the might; but hours later, while Miss Polly lay in her hard
+little bed wondering if it would be possible to "fix" things between
+Gabriella and Arthur, the stern heroine of her romance wept a few tender
+tears on her pillow.
+
+In the morning, with the tears still ready to spring at a touch,
+Gabriella read a letter from her mother, which he had found, beside the
+baker's rolls, at the door.
+
+     _Richmond, Thursday_.
+
+     DEAR CHILD:
+
+     As the others are all out to-night, and I have finished the mat I
+     was crocheting, I thought I would send you a letter to reach you
+     on your birthday instead of the telegram from the family. I am so
+     thankful to hear that you keep well and happy and that Fanny has
+     quite recovered from her cold. It was thoughtful of you to send the
+     check, and I shall find it very useful, though Jane refuses to let
+     me pay any board since Charley has inherited such a large income
+     from his brother Tom. I sent you all the papers about the dreadful
+     accident on the River road in which poor Tom and his wife were
+     killed, but you haven't heard yet that Tom left his new house in
+     Monument Avenue--they had only just moved into it--and almost all
+     of his property to Charley. Of course, this will make a great
+     difference in our manner of living; but just now none of us can
+     think of anything except poor Tom and Gertrude, to whom we were all
+     so deeply attached. No amount of money could in any way soften the
+     blow of their loss, and the accident has given me such a horror of
+     automobiles, though both Charley and Jane tell me this is very
+     foolish.
+
+     To turn to more cheerful subjects, I can't begin to tell you how
+     much the last photograph of Fanny has been admired. She is such a
+     lovely girl, almost as pretty, we think, as Jane used to be when
+     she first grew up, and I'm sure there could be no higher praise
+     than that. You pleased me by saying that Archibald is like his
+     grandfather, even if he isn't so handsome, and that he has a strong
+     character. Good looks aren't nearly so important in a man as they
+     are in a woman, and, you know, I don't think that men are as
+     handsome to-day as they used to be when I was a girl. They have
+     lost something--I can't make out just what it is.
+
+     Charley and Jane are at the Prohibition meeting. It is the first
+     time they have gone anywhere since the accident, but we all felt
+     that Tom and Gertrude would have wanted them to go for the sake of
+     the cause. I don't suppose you, would recognize Charley now if you
+     were to meet him. He is entirely changed, and I believe our new
+     minister is the reason for it, though Jane likes to think that her
+     influence reclaimed him. But, you remember, neither you nor I ever
+     thought that Jane went about reforming Charley in the right way;
+     and even now, though I wouldn't hurt dear Jane's feelings for
+     anything in the world, I am afraid she nags Charley and the
+     children too much. Of course, she means it for the best. No one
+     could look at the dear child without realizing what a beautiful
+     character she is.
+
+     But the change in Charley is really remarkable, and he won't allow
+     a drop of alcohol to come into the house--not even as medicine. I
+     can't help feeling sorry for poor old Uncle Meriweather, who
+     despises grape juice and misses his mint julep when he comes to
+     dine on Sunday; but Charley forbids Jane to make him a julep; and I
+     suppose he is right since he says it is a matter of principle. Even
+     Jane, however, thinks dear Charley is going a little too far when
+     he refuses to let me have the sherry and egg the doctor ordered.
+     However, I tell Jane that, since Charley feels so strongly about my
+     taking it, she must not try to persuade him against his
+     convictions. Dr. Darrow doesn't know that I stopped the sherry when
+     Charley found out I was buying it. Perhaps the plain eggs will do
+     me quite as much good. Anyhow, I wouldn't let my health stand in
+     the way of Charley's salvation.
+
+     Margaret has gone out to a concert, and you would never guess who
+     came to take her. I said to her when she was starting, "Well, I'm
+     going to sit straight down and write your Aunt Gabriella that
+     you've gone out with her old sweetheart." But doesn't it make you
+     realize how time flies when you think of Arthur Peyton's paying
+     attention to Jane's daughter? Of course, it isn't anything
+     serious--everybody knows that he has never recovered from his
+     feeling for you--but last winter he took Margaret to two germans
+     and to any number of plays. I believe Jane would be really pleased
+     if he were to take a fancy to Margaret, but I don't think there is
+     the faintest chance of it, for his Cousin Lizzie told me last
+     winter that she couldn't mention your name in his presence. She
+     says his faithfulness is perfectly beautiful, and she ought to know
+     for she has lived with him ever since his mother's death. Of
+     course, he has never accomplished very much in his profession.
+     Chancy says all the men downtown look upon him as a failure; but,
+     then, he is such a perfect gentleman, and, as I tell Charley and
+     Jane, one can't have everything. How different your life would have
+     been, my dear daughter, if you had listened to the prayers of your
+     mother, and married a gentle Christian character like Arthur
+     Peyton.
+
+     But I mustn't let my thoughts run away with me. Of course, even if
+     your heart had not been broken, it would be impossible for you to
+     think of another man as long as your husband is living. No pure
+     woman could do that, and when people tell me about divorced women
+     who remarry, I always maintain that they are not what my mother and
+     I would call "pure women." I would rather think of you nursing your
+     broken heart forever in solitude than that you should put such a
+     blot upon your character and the name of the Carrs. Of course, you
+     were right to divorce George after he forsook you for Florrie--even
+     his mother tells everybody that you were right--but the thought of
+     a second marriage would, I know, be intolerable to your refined and
+     sensitive nature. After all, he is still your husband in the sight
+     of God, and I said this to Miss Lizzie Peyton when we were talking
+     of Arthur.
+
+     It is almost eleven o'clock, and I must stop and undress. Kiss the
+     dear children, and remember me kindly to Miss Polly.
+
+     Your loving MOTHER.
+
+As she refolded the letter Gabriella stood for an instant with her
+dreaming gaze on the delicate Italian handwriting on the envelope.
+
+"It's amazing how wide the gulf is between the generations," she
+thought, not without humour. "I believe mother thinks of George oftener
+than I do, and I'd marry Arthur to-morrow if he wanted me to--except for
+the children."
+
+Then, as Archibald rushed into the room, she caught him in her arms, and
+held him hungrily to her bosom.
+
+"My darling, you want to keep your mother, don't you?"
+
+"I jolly well do. What's the trouble, mother? I believe it's all that
+sitting up over Fanny's old dresses. Why don't you make something pretty
+for yourself?"
+
+"She has to have things, and you love me just as well without them,
+don't you?"
+
+"But I want you to have them, too. I like you to look pretty, and you
+are pretty."
+
+"Then I can look pretty in plain clothes, can't I?"
+
+"I tell you what I am going to do," he hesitated a minute, knitting his
+heavy brows over his spectacles, which looked so odd on a boy. "Next
+summer when school is over I'm going to work and make some money so you
+can have a velvet dress in the autumn--a black velvet dress with lace on
+it--lots of lace--and a hat with feathers."
+
+"You foolish boy!" laughed Gabriella. "Do you think for an instant I'd
+let you?" Her voice was gay, but when he had broken away from her clasp,
+and was racing along the hail for his school books, she turned aside to
+wipe the tears from her eyes.
+
+"It's wrong, but I love, him more than I love Fanny," she said. "I love
+him more than all the rest of the world.".
+
+An hour later, sitting beside an Italian labourer in an elevated train,
+she tried hard to keep her mind on the day's work and on the morning
+paper, which she held open before her--for in adopting a business life
+she had adopted instinctively a man's businesslike habits. A subtle
+distinction divided her from the over-dressed shopgirls around her as
+completely as her sex separated her from the portly masculine
+breadwinner in the opposite seat. Her tailored suit of black serge, with
+its immaculate white collar and cuffs, had an air of charming
+simplicity, and the cameolike outline of her features against the
+luminous background of the window-pane was the aristocratic racial
+outline of the Carrs. In the whirlpool of modern business she still
+preserved the finer attributes which Nature had bred in her race. The
+bitter sweetness of the mother's inheritance, grafted on the hardy stock
+of the Carr character, had flavoured without weakening the daughter's
+spirit, and, though few of the men in the train glanced in the direction
+of Gabriella, the few who noticed her in her corner surmised by
+intuition that she possessed not only the manner, but the heart of a
+lady. She was not particularly handsome, not particularly young, and her
+charm was scarcely the kind to flash like a lantern before the eye of
+the beholder. To the portly breadwinner she was probably a nice-looking
+American business woman, nothing more; to the Italian labourer she was,
+doubtless, a lady with a pleasant face, who would be polite if you asked
+her a question; and to the other passengers she must have appeared
+merely a woman reading her newspaper on her way down to work. Her primal
+qualities of force, restraint, and capability were the last things these
+superficial observers would have thought of; and yet it was by these
+qualities that she must succeed or fail in her struggle for life.
+
+When she reached Dinard's she found Miss Smith, the only woman in
+Madame's employ who was ever punctual, ill-humouredly poking the spring
+hats out of the cases. Miss Smith, who excelled in the cardinal virtues,
+manifested at times a few of those minor frailties by which the cardinal
+virtues are not infrequently attended. Her one pronounced fault was a
+bad temper, and on this particular morning that fault was conspicuous.
+As she carried the hats from the cases to the window, which she was
+decorating with the festive millinery of the spring, she looked as if
+she were resisting an impulse to throw Madame's choicest confections at
+the jovial figure of the traffic policeman. Gabriella, who was used to
+what she called the "peculiarities" of the forewoman, said "good
+morning" with her bright amiability, and hurried back to the dim regions
+where she changed from her street suit to the picturesque French gown
+which she wore in the showroom. When she came out again Miss Smith had
+finished ornamenting the white pegs in the window, and was vigorously
+upbraiding a messenger boy who had delivered a parcel at the wrong door.
+
+"You are always so prompt," remarked Gabriella cheerfully, as she
+arranged the hats in the front room. Her rule of business conduct was
+simple, and consisted chiefly of the precept that whatever happened she
+must keep her temper. Never once, never even in Madame's most trying
+moments, had she permitted herself to appear angry, and her strict
+adherence to this resolution had established her in an enviable position
+of authority. Obeying unconsciously some inherited strain of prudence
+in her nature, she had sacrificed her temper on the solid altar of
+business expediency.
+
+"Somebody has to be on time, I guess," replied Miss Smith snappishly.
+"I'd like to know who would be here if I wasn't?"
+
+She was a thin, soured, ugly little woman, with an extraordinary
+capacity for work, and an excess of nervous vitality bordering on
+hysteria. Gabriella, who knew something of her story, was aware of the
+self-sacrificing goodness of her private life, and secure in her own
+unclouded cheerfulness, could afford to smile tolerantly at the waspish
+sting.
+
+"It's a pity we can't get more system here," she observed, for Miss
+Smith, she knew, was no tale-bearer. "The waste of time and misdirected
+energy are appalling. The business would be worth three times as much to
+anybody who could give her whole attention to it, but, as Madame is
+forever telling us, her health keeps her from really overlooking
+things."
+
+"I wonder why she doesn't sell out?" asked Miss Smith, suddenly
+good-humoured and interested. "There's a lot in it for the right person,
+and it isn't in nature that she can hold on much longer. If I could find
+the money, I'd buy it and cut down expenses until I made a big profit.
+It would be easy enough." Then she added, while she slammed the
+ivory-tinted door of a case: "I wish you could run the house, Mrs. Carr.
+You are so pleasant to work with. Nothing ever seems to depress you."
+
+"It would be nice, wouldn't it?" responded Gabriella promptly, and as
+she said the words, she decided that she would try to borrow the money
+from Judge Crowborough. For three months she had been struggling to
+bring herself to the point of asking his help--or at least his
+advice--and now, in a flash, without argument or discussion, she had
+settled the question. "It's a simple business proposition--a promising
+investment," she thought. "I'll ask him to get the money for me at a
+fair interest--to get me enough anyhow to give me control of the
+business. The worst he can do is to refuse," she concluded, with a kind
+of forlorn optimism; "at least he can't kill me."
+
+Making a hurried excuse, she went back to the telephone, and calling up
+the judge, asked for an appointment in his office at five o'clock. From
+his surprised response she inferred his curiosity, and from his hearty
+acquiescence, she gathered that his surprise was not an unpleasant one.
+"At five o'clock, then. It is so good of you. There is a little matter
+of business. Yes, I know how kind you are, and of course your advice is
+invaluable. I can't think of anybody else on earth I can ask. Oh, thank
+you. Yes, at five o'clock. I shan't be late and I promise to keep you
+but a minute. Good-bye. What? Oh, yes, I'll come straight from
+Dinard's."
+
+His voice, eager and friendly over the telephone, had given her
+confidence, and when she went back to the showroom, where the saleswomen
+were assembling, she was already planning the interview.
+
+At eleven o'clock Madame, who never arrived earlier, was seen descending
+from a hansom, and a few minutes later she waddled, wheezing, asthmatic,
+and infirm of joints, through the ivory and gold doorway. Like some
+fantastically garlanded Oriental goddess of death, her rouged and
+powdered face nodded grotesquely beneath the flowery wreath on her hat.
+The indestructible youth of her spirit, struggling valiantly against the
+inert weight of the flesh, had squeezed her enormous figure into the
+curveless stays of the period, and had painted into some ghastly
+semblance of health the wrinkled skin of her cheeks. For underneath the
+decaying mockery of Madame's body, the indomitable soul of Madame still
+fought the everlasting battle of mind against matter, of the immaterial
+against the material elements.
+
+"There was no use my trying to get here any sooner," she began in an
+apologetic tone when she was face to face with Gabriella behind the red
+velvet curtains of her private office. "My asthma was so bad all night,
+I had to doze sitting up, and I didn't get any sound sleep until
+daybreak. If I don't begin to mend before long I'll have to give up,
+that's all there is to it. There ain't any use my trying to hold on much
+longer. I'm too sick to think about fighting, and sometimes I don't care
+what becomes of the business. I want to go to some high place in Europe
+where I can get my breath, and I'm going to stay there, I don't care
+what happens. There ain't any use my trying to hold on," she repeated
+disconsolately.
+
+Gabriella's opportunity had come, and she grasped it with the quickness
+of judgment which had enabled her to achieve her moderate success.
+
+"I believe I could carry on this business," she said, and her quiet
+assurance impressed Madame's turbulent temper. With a brief return of
+her mental alertness, the old woman studied her carefully.
+
+"I don't want any responsibility. I want to be rid of the whole thing,"
+she said after a pause.
+
+Gabriella nodded comprehendingly. "I believe I could carry it on
+successfully," she repeated. "Your customers like me. I think I
+understand how the business ought to be run. I have been here ten years,
+and I feel perfectly confident that I could make it successful."
+
+"I've had offers--good offers," observed Madame warily, for she was
+incapable of liberating herself at the age of seventy-two from the
+lifelong suspicion that some one was taking advantage of her, that
+something was being got from her for nothing, "and, of course, I was
+only joking about having to stop work," she added, "I am retiring from
+choice, not from necessity."
+
+"I understand," agreed Gabriella quietly.
+
+"But I should like you to have the name," pursued Madame "A little money
+would be necessary, of course--perhaps you might buy a half
+interest--that would be simple. You could make a big success of it with
+your social position and your wealthy acquaintances. Surely you can find
+some one who is ready to make such a splendid investment?"
+
+"Perhaps," admitted Gabriella, as quietly as before. Unlike Madame, who,
+being an incurable idealist, had won her victories not by accepting but
+by evading facts, Gabriella was frankly skeptical about the practical
+value of either her social position or her wealthy acquaintances.
+Neither possession impressed her at the moment as marketable, except in
+the vivid imagination of Madame, and her social position, at least, was
+constructed of a very thin and unsubstantial fabric. Guided by the
+prudent streak in her character, she rested her hope not upon
+incorporeal possessions, but upon the solid bodies of her patrons that
+must be clothed. Her imposing acquaintances would avail her scarcely
+more, she suspected, than would the noble ghost of that ancestor who was
+a general in the Revolution. What she relied on was the certainty that
+she knew her work, and that Madame's customers from the greatest to the
+least, from Mrs. Pletheridge to poor Miss Peterson, who bought only one
+good gown a year, admitted the thoroughness of her knowledge. She had
+got on by learning all that there was to learn about the details of the
+work, and she stood now, secure and unassailable, on the foundation of
+her achievement. In ten years she had fulfilled her resolution--she had
+made herself indispensable. By patience, by hard work, by self-control,
+by ceaseless thought, and by innumerable sacrifices, she had made
+herself indispensable; and the result was that, as Madame weakened, she
+had grown steadily stronger. Without her Dinard's would have dropped
+long ago to the position of a second-rate house, and she was aware that
+Madame understood this quite as clearly as she did. For whatever
+Madame's executive ability may have been in the past, it had dwindled
+now to the capricious endeavours of a chronic invalid--of an aging
+invalid, notwithstanding her desperate struggle for youth. Half as much
+energy as Madame had spent resisting Nature might have won for her a
+sanctified memory had it been directed toward the practice of piety, or
+a tablet of imperishable granite had it been devoted to as tireless a
+pursuit of art or science. To her battle against age she had brought the
+ambition of a conqueror and the devotion of a martyr; and at the last,
+even to-day, there was a superb defiance in her refusal to acknowledge
+defeat, in her demand that her surrender should be regarded as a
+capitulation.
+
+"In a day or two I hope to be able to discuss my plan with you," said
+Gabriella, and she could not keep the softness of pity out of her voice.
+So this was what life came to, after all? For an instant she felt the
+overwhelming discouragement which is the portion of those who approach
+life not through vision, but through outward events, who seek a solution
+not in the deeper consciousness of the spirit, but in the changing
+surface of experience. Then, even before her glance had left Madame's
+golden head, her natural optimism regained control of her mind, and she
+told herself stoutly that if this was Madame's present, then it followed
+logically that Madame must have had a past, and that past must have been
+an agreeable one. It was inconceivable that she should defy the laws of
+God for the sake of a prolongation of tragedy.
+
+"It is a splendid investment," croaked the old woman in the midst of
+Gabriella's painful reflections. "The house was never more flourishing."
+
+The ruling principle which decreed that Gabriella should keep her temper
+had disciplined her not less thoroughly in the habit of holding her
+tongue. The house was in a flourishing condition; but she remembered how
+fragile and thinly rooted had been its showy prosperity, when she had
+entered it; and had she cared to confound Madame utterly, she might have
+reminded her of that unwritten history of the past ten years in which
+the secret episode of Mrs. Pletheridge occurred. For Gabriella was not
+inclined to underrate her own efficiency, and her confidence was
+supported by the knowledge that if she left Dinard's the most
+fashionable of Madame's clientele would follow her.
+
+"You'll never have such another opportunity--not if you live to be a
+hundred. At your age I should have jumped at the idea," persisted
+Madame.
+
+"So should I," responded Gabriella merrily, "if I were sure of landing
+on my feet."
+
+"You'll always land on your feet--you're that sort. You've got push, and
+it's push that counts most in business. A woman may have all the brains
+in the world, but without push she might as well give up the struggle.
+That was what brought me up in spite of four husbands and six children,"
+pursued Madame, while she took out a small flask from one of the drawers
+of her desk and measured out, as she remarked in parenthesis, "a little
+stimulant." "Yes, I had a great success in my line, and if I could only
+have kept clear of men, I might have saved a fortune to retire on in my
+old age. But I had a natural taste for men, and they were the ruin of
+me. As soon as I lost one husband and managed to get on a bit, another
+would come, and I couldn't resist him. I never could resist marriage;
+that was the undoing of me as a woman of business."
+
+"Four husbands, and yet you were remarkably successful," observed
+Gabriella, because it was the only thing with a cheerful sound she could
+think of to utter, and an intermittent cheerful sound was all that
+Madame required from a listener when she was under the enlivening
+influence of brandy.
+
+"But think what I might have done with my talent if I had remained a
+widow, as you have done. It was my misfortune to attract men whether I
+wanted to or not," wheezed Madame, wiping her eyes; "some women are like
+that."
+
+"So I have heard," murmured Gabriella, seeing that Madame paused for the
+note of encouragement.
+
+"I don't suppose that has been your trouble, for there's a
+stand-offishness about you that puts men at a distance, and they don't
+like to be put at a distance. Then, though your figure is very fine for
+showing off models, it isn't exactly the kind that men lean to. If you'd
+fatten up it might be different, but that would spoil you for the
+clothes, and that, after all, is more important. It's strange, isn't
+it?" she croaked, with an alcoholic chuckle, "how partial men are to
+full figures even after they have gone out of fashion?"
+
+And with this wonder still ringing in her ears, Gabriella turned away,
+to attend a customer, who demanded, in cool defiance of man and nature,
+to be transformed into a straight silhouette.
+
+Gabriella had not seen Judge Crowborough for several years, and her
+first impression, when she entered his office at five o'clock, was one
+of surprise at his ugliness. Though he had changed but little since
+their first meeting at Mrs. Fowler's dinner, the years had softened her
+memory of his appearance, and she had skilfully persuaded herself that
+one should not judge a man by a repelling exterior, which, after all,
+might cover a great deal of goodness. After George's flight and
+Archibald Fowler's death he had been very kind to her. "I don't know
+what I should have done without him at that time," she thought now, as
+she stood with his big, soft hand clasping hers and his admiring fishy
+eyes on her face. "No, it is impossible to judge by appearances, and all
+men think well of him, all men respect him," she concluded, feeling
+suddenly reassured.
+
+"It's been a long time--it must be nearly' three years--since I saw
+you," he remarked, with flattering geniality, "and you look younger than
+ever."
+
+"Hard work keeps me young, then. I work very hard." Her charming smile
+flashed like an edge of light on her lips, and lent glow and fervor to
+her pale face beneath the silver-brightened cloud of her hair. She read
+his admiration in the bold gaze he fastened upon her, and though she was
+without coquetry, she was conscious that her vanity was agreeably
+soothed.
+
+"What is it? Dressmaking?" He was obviously interested.
+
+"Yes--dresses and hats. Hats are rather my specialty. I manage things
+now almost entirely at Dinard's. Have you ever heard of the house?"
+
+He nodded. "I remember. That's where you went after Archibald died,
+wasn't it?" His memory amazed her. What a mind for trifles he had! What
+a wonderful man he was for his years!
+
+"Yes, I've been there ever since. I've done well as things go, but, of
+course, it has been hard. It has been a hard life."
+
+"And you never came to me. I wanted to help you. I'd have done anything
+I could to make it easier for you, but you were so proud. You'd have got
+on twice as well if you had given up your pride."
+
+The telephone rang, and while he answered it, she watched his broad,
+slouching back, his swelling paunch overflowing now above the stays he
+wore to reduce it, the coarsened flesh of his neck, bulging above the
+edge of his collar, and the shining, baldness on the top of his head,
+which gave an appearance of commanding intellect to his empurpled
+forehead. How hideous he was, how revolting, and yet what a power! A
+face like his on a woman would have condemned her to isolation and
+misery, but, so far as one could judge, it had scarcely interfered with
+his happiness. His mental force had risen superior to his face, to his
+paunch, to his whole repulsive appearance. Greater than Madame because
+of his sex, he had achieved a triumph over the corporeal mass of his
+body which she, fortified and abetted by a hundred cosmetics and
+manipulations, could never attain. Where Madame relied on futile
+artificial aids in her battle against decay, he hurled the tremendous
+power of his personality, and ugliness became at once as insignificant
+as immorality in his life. "One can't judge him by the standards of
+other men," thought Gabriella, using a remembered phrase of
+Fifty-seventh Street.
+
+Judge Crowborough was still talking earnestly into the telephone, and
+she gathered vaguely that his earnestness related to a donation he had
+promised his church. "Raise two hundred thousand, and I'll double it,"
+he said abruptly, and hung up the receiver. "We want a new
+organ--something really fine, you know," he observed casually as he
+turned back to Gabriella. "We are moving--everything is moving up, and
+the church has to keep step with the age. You can't keep progress out of
+religion any more than you can out of business--not that I'm in favour
+of modernism or any of that stuff--but we've got to keep moving." He
+spoke with conviction, and there was no doubt that he sincerely believed
+himself to be an important factor in the religious movement of his
+country. Then his tone changed to one of intimate friendliness and he
+asked: "Have you heard any music this winter? If I'd only known about
+you, I'd have sent you tickets to the opera."
+
+"The children go sometimes," she answered. That he should imagine her
+buying opera tickets for herself, with the children needing every penny
+she made, seemed to her ridiculous; but rich men were always like that,
+she reflected a little scornfully.
+
+"If I'd only remembered about you," he murmured, and turning heavily in
+his chair, he added authoritatively: "Now tell me about it. Tell me the
+whole thing straight through. I am going to help you."
+
+She told him rapidly, and while she talked a sense of perfect peace and
+security enveloped her. It was so long since she had been able to ask
+advice of a man; it was so long since anybody bigger and stronger than
+she had undertaken to adjust her perplexities. The past returned to her
+as a dream, and she felt again that absolute reliance on the masculine
+ability to control events, to ease burdens, to remove difficulties,
+which had visited her in her childhood when Cousin Jimmy appeared in the
+front parlour in Hill Street. "It's wonderful how men manage things,"
+she thought. "It's wonderful being a man. Everything is so simple for
+men."
+
+"Well, don't worry a minute longer. It's all as easy as--as possible,"
+observed the great man serenely when she had finished. "From what you
+tell me it looks as if it were a pretty good investment to begin with,
+and there are plenty of people around looking for ways to invest money.
+I'm looking for ways myself, when it comes to that," he proclaimed, with
+a paternal smile as he sank back on the luxurious leather cushions of
+his chair.
+
+"You are so good," she responded gratefully, "so good"; and she was
+speaking sincerely.
+
+With his casual gaze, which seemed to turn inward, fixed on the ceiling
+above her head, he invited her confidence by a few perfectly chosen
+expressions of comprehension and sympathy. The acuteness and activity
+of his mental processes delighted her while he questioned her. After the
+slovenly methods of Madame, after the loose reasoning and the muddled
+thinking of all the women she met in the course of her work, there was a
+positive pleasure in following the exactness and inflexibility of his
+logic. His reasoning was orderly, neat, elastic, without loose ends or
+tangled skeins to unravel, and she felt again, while she listened to
+him, the confidence which had come to her as soon as she entered his
+office. He was efficiency incarnate, and from her childhood up she had
+respected efficiency. In an hour, in less time than it had taken her to
+tell her story, he had lifted the weight from her shoulders, had
+mastered the details of Madame's intricate problems, and had outlined
+the terms by which Gabriella could accept the old woman's offer without
+placing herself under financial obligations. Her pride, he had discerned
+at a glance, shrank from obligation, and he was as alert to save her
+pride as he was to make a good bargain with Madame.
+
+"It's a good thing. It's good business. Don't think I'm losing for a
+minute," he said as she rose to go, and she felt that some secret
+delicacy, the last feeling she would have attributed to him, was
+prompting his words.
+
+"I can't tell you what a relief it is to talk to you," she said, holding
+out her hand while she hesitated between the desk and the door. "I can't
+even begin to tell you how grateful I am. I haven't had any one to
+advise me since I left Richmond, and it is such a comfort"
+
+"Well, I'll give you the best advice in my power. I'll give you the very
+best," he replied as frankly as if he were discussing his gift to the
+church. "What's more, I'll think it over a bit while I'm at the Hot
+Springs, and talk to you about it when I come back. I suppose I can
+always get you on the telephone, can't I?"
+
+His manner was still casual and business-like, and it did not change by
+so much as a shade when he moved a step nearer and put his arm about her
+waist. If he had taken down his hat or lighted a cigar, he would
+probably have performed either action with the same air of automatic
+efficiency; and she realized, in the very instant of her amazement, that
+his manner was merely an authoritative expression of his power. What
+astonished her most in the incident, after all, was not the judge's
+share in it, but the vividness and coolness of her own mental
+impressions. She was not frightened, she was not even disturbed, she was
+merely disgusted. Never before had she understood so clearly the
+immeasurable distance that divided the Gabriella of seventeen years ago
+from the Gabriella who released herself calmly from the appalling clasp
+of the casual and business-like old man. To the Gabriella who had loved
+George such an episode would have appeared as an inconceivable horror.
+Now, with her worldly wisdom and her bitter knowledge of love, she found
+herself regarding the situation with sardonic humour. The stupendous,
+the incredible vanity of man!--she reflected disdainfully. Was there
+ever a man too ugly, too repulsive, or too old to delude himself with
+the belief that he might still become the object of passion?
+
+"Now you've spoiled it," she said shortly, but without embarrassment.
+"Now you've spoiled it." She put the case to him plainly, the Gabriella
+who would have blushed and trembled and wept seventeen years ago.
+
+"But I meant nothing," he said, genuinely disturbed. "I assure you I am
+truly sorry if I have offended you. It was nothing--a mere matter of--"
+the word "habit," she knew, hovered on his lips, though he did not utter
+it, and broke off inconclusively.
+
+So there had not been even the excuse of emotion about it. He had
+embraced her as instinctively, as methodically, as he might have
+switched on the electric light over his desk. Here again she was brought
+to a stop before an overwhelming realization of the fundamental
+differences between man and woman. To think of woman behaving like that
+merely because it had become a matter of habit!
+
+"I always liked you, you know," he said abruptly, with a sincere
+emphasis.
+
+"Well, there are different ways of liking," she rejoined coldly, "and I
+happen not to care for this way."
+
+"If you don't like it, I'll never do it again," he promised, almost
+humbly. "I'll be a good friend to you, honestly I will. I'll treat you
+as if you were--you were--"
+
+"A gentleman," finished Gabriella, and smiled in spite of herself. After
+all, what was the use of resenting the facts of life? What was the use
+of reproaching the mud that spattered over one's clothes?
+
+"Well, that's a bargain. I'll treat you as a gentleman." There was a
+fine quality about the man; she could not deny it.
+
+"I'll forgive you then and forget it." It was the tolerant Gabriella who
+spoke--the Gabriella of disillusioning experience and a clear vision of
+life--not the impassioned idealist of the 'nineties. When all was said,
+you had to take men and things as you found them. That was philosophy,
+and that was also "good business." It was foolish to apply romantic
+theories to the positive actuality.
+
+"Well, you _are_ a gentleman," exclaimed the judge, with facetiousness.
+"That's why I always liked you, I suppose. You're straight and you're
+honest and there's no nonsense about you."
+
+If he had only known! She thought of the romantic girl of the 'nineties,
+of her buoyant optimism, her childlike ignorance, her violent
+certainties, and of her triumphant, "I can manage my life!" If he had
+only known how she had "muddled things" at the beginning, would he have
+said that she had "no nonsense about her?"
+
+In the subway, a little later, clinging to a dirty strap, with a
+blackened mechanic in the seat before her, a box of tools at her feet,
+and a garlic-scented charwoman jolting against her shoulder, she was
+overcome by a sudden cloud of despondency. Her courage, her hopefulness,
+her philosophy, seemed to melt like frost in her thoughts, leaving
+behind only a sodden sense of loss, of emptiness, of defeat. "I've had a
+mean life," she said to herself resentfully. "I've had a mean life. What
+has ever happened to me that was worth while? What have I ever had
+except hard work and disappointment? I am thirty-seven years old. My
+youth is going, and I have nothing to show for it but ten years of
+dressmaking. The best of my life is over, and when I look back on it, it
+is only a blank." It was as if the interview with the great man she had
+just left had completed the desolating retrospect of a lifetime. Was
+there nothing but disenchantment ahead of her? Was life merely the
+dropping of illusion after illusion, the falling of petals at the first
+touch from a flower that is beginning to fade? "Yes, nothing has ever
+happened to me that was worth while," she repeated, forgetting her
+children for the moment. Then, because the heavy air stifled her, she
+left the car and turned into West Twenty-third Street where the lights
+were coming out softly in the spring twilight. Though it was too late to
+go over the house Fanny wanted, it occurred to her that she might look
+at the outside of it before she took the Harlem elevated train at one of
+the West Side stations. The walk would do her good and perhaps blow away
+the disquieting recollections of her encounter with Judge Crowborough.
+Not until her mood changed, she determined, would she go back to the
+children.
+
+At the corner she bought a bunch of lilacs because a man held them out
+to her temptingly when she approached, and as she buried her face in the
+blossoms, she said resolutely: "No, I haven't had a mean life. It can't
+be mean unless I think it so, and I won't--I won't. After all, it isn't
+the kind of life you have, but the way you think about it that matters."
+
+The air was deliciously mild; streaks of pale gold lingered above the
+grim outlines of the buildings; and the wild, sweet spirit of spring
+fluttered like an imprisoned creature in the gray streets of the city.
+It was May again, and the pipes of Pan were fluting the ancient songs in
+the ancient racial fields of the memory. There was a spring softness in
+the fleecy white of the clouds, in the flowing gold of the sunset, in
+the languorous kiss of the breeze, in the gentle rippling waves of the
+dust on the pavement. For years she had been so tranquil, and now
+suddenly, at the flitting touch of the spirit of spring, she knew that
+youth was slipping, slipping, and that with youth, went romance,
+enchantment, adventure. It was slipping from her, and she had never
+really held it. She had had only the second-rate; she had missed the
+best always--the best of life, the best of love, the best of endeavour
+and achievement. She had missed the finer reality. From somewhere, from
+the past or the present, from the dream or the actuality, her young
+illusions and her young longings rushed over her, driven by the
+fragrance of the lilacs, which was stinging her blood into revolt. Only
+an instant the revolt lasted, but in that instant of vision nothing
+mattered in life except romance, enchantment, adventure.
+
+"Yes, I've missed life," she thought, and the regret was still in her
+mind when one of those miracles which in our ignorance we call accidents
+occurred. Out of the lilac-scented twilight, out of the wild, sweet
+spirit of spring, a voice said in her ear, "Alice, you waited!"
+
+Turning quickly, she had a vivid impression of height, breadth, bigness,
+of roughened dark red hair, of gray eyes so clean that they looked 'as
+if they had been washed by the sea. Then the voice spoke again: "I beg
+your pardon. It was a mistake." And the next instant she was alone in
+the street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+DISCOVERIES
+
+
+"Who is Alice?" she wondered on her way home, "and for whom was she
+waiting?" A shopgirl perhaps, and he was, probably--not a clerk in a
+shop--he looked more like a mechanic--but hardly a gentleman. Not, at
+any rate, what her mother or Jane would call a gentleman--not the kind
+of gentleman that George was, or Charley Gracey, for instance. He was
+doubtless devoid of those noble traditions by and through which, her
+mother had always told her, a gentleman was made out of a man--the
+traditions which had created Arthur and Cousin Jimmy as surely as they
+had created George and Charley. "I wonder what tradition really amounts
+to?" she thought, while she stood on the rear platform of a Harlem
+train, grasping the handle of the door as the car swung round a curve.
+"All my life, I have been getting farther away from it--a woman has to,
+I suppose, when she works--and if I get away from it myself how can I
+honestly hold to it for men, who, according to mother, can't be
+gentlemen without it?" Then reverting to her first question, she resumed
+musingly: "Who _is_ Alice? It would be rather amusing to be Alice for
+one evening, and to find out what it means to be loved by a man like
+that, even if he isn't a gentleman. He was, I think, the cleanest
+creature I ever saw, and it wasn't just the cleanness of soap and
+water--it went deeper than that. It was the cleanness of the winds and
+the sea--as if his eyes had been washed by the sea. I wonder who Alice
+is? A common little shopgirl probably from Sixth Avenue, with padded
+hair and painted lips, and smelling of cheap powder. That's just the
+kind of girl to fascinate a big, strong, simple creature like that Yes,
+of course, Alice is cheap and tawdry and vulgar, with no substance to
+her mind." She tried to think of Arthur, but her mental image of him had
+become as thin and unsubstantial as a shadow.
+
+When she reached the apartment, Fanny rushed into her arms, and inquired
+breathlessly if she had taken the house?
+
+"We went down again to look at it, mother, and we like it even better
+than ever. It will be so lovely to live next door to Carlie. We can
+tango every evening, and Carlie knows a lot of boys who come in to dance
+because the floor is so good."
+
+Her cheeks flushed while she talked, and, for the moment, she lost
+entirely her resemblance to Jane, who was never animated, though she
+made a perpetual murmurous sound. Unlike Jane, Fanny was vivacious,
+pert, and, for her years, extraordinarily sophisticated. Already she
+dressed with extreme smartness; already she was thinking of men as of
+possible lovers; and already she was beginning, in her mother's phrase,
+"to manage her life." Her trite little face, in its mist of golden hair,
+which she took hours to arrange, still reminded one of the insipid angel
+on a Christmas card; but in spite of the engaging innocence of her look,
+she was prodigiously experienced in the beguiling arts of her sex.
+Almost from the cradle she had had "a way" with men; and her "way" was
+as far superior in finesse to the simple coquetry of Cousin Pussy as the
+worldliness of Broadway was superior to the worldliness of Hill Street.
+From her yellow hair, which she wore very low over her forehead and
+ears, to her silk stockings of the gray called "London smoke," which
+showed coquettishly below her "hobble" skirt, and above the flashing
+silver buckles on her little pointed shoes of; patent leather, Fanny was
+as uncompromisingly modern in her appearance as she was in her tastes or
+her philosophy. Her mind, which was small and trite like her face, was
+of a curiously speculative bent, though its speculations were directed
+mainly toward the by-paths of knowledge which Gabriella, in her busy
+life, had had neither the time nor the inclination to explore. For Fanny
+was frankly interested in vice with the cool and dispassionate interest
+of the inquiring spectator. She was perfectly aware of the social evil;
+and unknown to Gabriella she had investigated, through the ample medium
+of the theatre and fiction, every dramatic phase of the traffic in white
+slaves. Her coolness never deserted her, for she was as temperamental as
+a fish, and, for all the sunny white and gold of her surface, she had
+the shallow restlessness of a meadow brook. At twelve years of age she
+had devoted herself to music and had planned an operatic career; at
+fourteen, she had turned to literature, and was writing a novel; and a
+year later, encouraged by her practical mother, she had plunged into the
+movement for woman suffrage, and had marched, in a white dress and
+carrying a purple banner, through an admiring crowd in Fifth Avenue.
+To-day, after a variable period, when she had dabbled in kindergarten,
+wood engraving, the tango, and settlement work, she was studying for
+the stage, and had fallen in love with a matinée idol. Gabriella, who
+had welcomed the wood engraving and the kindergartening and had been
+sympathetically, though impersonally, aware of the suffrage movement,
+just as she had been aware many years before of the Spanish War, was
+deeply disturbed by her daughter's recent effervescence of emotion.
+
+"I suppose she'll get over it. She gets over everything," she had said
+to Miss Polly, drawing painful comfort from the shallowness and
+insincerity of Fanny's nature, "but something dreadful might happen
+while she is in one of her moods."
+
+"Not with Fanny," Miss Polly had replied reassuringly. "Fanny knows more
+already than you and I put together, and she's got about as much red
+blood as a lemon. She ain't the sort that things happen to, so don't you
+begin to worry about her. She's got mighty little sense, that's the
+gospel truth, but the little she's got has been sharpened down to a
+p'int."
+
+"I can't help feeling that she hasn't been well brought up. I did what I
+could, but she needed more time and care than I could give her. It
+wasn't, of course, as if I'd chosen to neglect her. I have been obliged
+to work or she would have starved."
+
+"Oh, well, I wouldn't bother about that. It's like wishing chickens back
+in the shell after they're hatched--there ain't a particle of use in it.
+If you ask me what I think--then, I'd say that Fanny would be just
+exactly what she is if you'd raised her down yonder in Virginia. Her
+father's in her as well as you, and it seems to me that she grows more
+like him every day that she lives. Now, Archibald is your child,
+anybody can tell that at a glance. It's queer, ain't it how the boys
+almost always seem to take after the mother?"
+
+"But Charley has a splendid daughter. Think of his Margaret."
+
+"Of course, there ain't any rule that works out every time; but you
+know, I'll always take up for Mr. Charley if it's with the last breath I
+draw. It ain't always the woman that gets the worst of marriage, though
+to hear some people talk you'd think it was nothin' but turkey and plum
+puddin' for men. But it ain't, I don't care who says so, and if anybody
+but a saint could have married Jane without takin' to drink, I'd like to
+have seen him try it, that's all."
+
+That was three weeks ago, and to-night, while Fanny rattled on about the
+house in West Twenty-third Street, her mother watched her with a
+tolerant affection in which there was neither admiration nor pride. She
+was not deluded about Fanny's character, though the maternal mote in her
+eye obscured her critical vision of her appearance. But, notwithstanding
+the fact that she thought Fanny beautiful, she was clearly aware that
+the girl had never been, since she left the cradle, anything but a
+source of anxiety; and for the last week or two Gabriella had been more
+than usually worried about her infatuation for the matinée idol. In
+spite of Miss Polly's assurances that Fanny was too calculating for rash
+adventures, Gabriella had spent several sleepless nights over the remote
+possibility of an entanglement, and her anxiety was heightened by the
+fact that the child told her nothing. They were so different that there
+was little real sympathy between them, and confidences from daughter to
+mother must spring, she knew, from fulness of sympathy. "I wonder if
+she ever realizes how hard I have worked for her?" she thought. "How
+completely I've given up my life?" And there rose in her thoughts the
+wish that her children could have stayed children forever. "As long as
+they were little, they filled my life, but as soon as they get big
+enough for other things, they break away from me--even Archibald will
+change when he goes away to school, next year, and I shall never have
+him again as he is now." At the very time, she knew, when she needed
+them most--when middle-age was approaching--her children were failing
+her not only as companions, but as a supreme and vital reason for
+living. If they could have stayed babies, she felt that she should have
+been satisfied to go on forever with nothing else in her life; but in a
+little while they would grow up and begin to lead their own intense
+personal lives, while she, having outlived her usefulness, would be left
+with only her work, with only dressmaking and millinery for a life
+interest. "Something is wrong with me," she thought sternly; "the visit
+to the judge must have upset me. I don't usually have such wretched
+thoughts in the evening."
+
+"Did you bring me your school report, darling?" she asked.
+
+Yes, Fanny had brought it, and she drew it forth reluctantly from the
+pages of a novel. It was impossible to make her study. She was as
+incapable of application as a butterfly. "I thought you were going to do
+better this month, Fanny," said Gabriella reproachfully.
+
+"Oh, mother dear, I want to leave school. I hate it! Please let me begin
+to study for the stage. You know you always said the study of
+Shakespeare was improving."
+
+They were in the midst of the argument when Archibald came in, and he
+showed little sympathy with Fanny's dramatic ambition.
+
+"The stage? Nonsense! What you want is to get safely married," he
+remarked scornfully, and Gabriella agreed with him. There was no doubt
+in her mind that for some women, and Fanny promised to be one of these,
+marriage was the only safeguard. Then she looked at Archibald, strong,
+sturdy, self-reliant, and clever; and she realized, with a pang, that
+some day he also would marry--that she must lose him as well as Fanny.
+
+"I've had a letter from Pelham Forest, dear," she said--Pelham Forest
+was a school in Virginia--"and I am making up my mind to let you go
+there next autumn."
+
+"And then to the University of Virginia where Grandfather went?"
+
+"Yes, and then to the University of Virginia."
+
+Though she tried to speak lightly, the thought of the coming separation
+brought a pang to her heart.
+
+"Well, I'd rather work," said Archibald stoutly. "I don't want to go
+away to school. I'd a long sight rather start in with a railroad or a
+steamship company and make my way up."
+
+"But, darling, I couldn't bear that. You must have an education. It's
+what I've worked for from the beginning, and when you've finished at the
+university, I want to send you abroad to study. If only Fanny would go
+to college, too, I'd be so happy."
+
+"Don't you waste any money on Fanny's education," retorted Archibald,
+"because it isn't worth it. What we ought to do is to get to work and
+let you take a rest. The first money I make, I'm going to spend on
+giving you pretty clothes and a rest."
+
+"I don't want to rest, dear," replied Gabriella, with a laugh. "I'm not
+an old lady yet, you silly boy." How ridiculous it was that he always
+spoke of her work as if it were a hardship--a burden from which she must
+be released at the first opportunity. That was so like Cousin Jimmy, a
+survival, she supposed, from the tradition of the South. Unlike Fanny,
+whose horizon was bounded by her personal inclinations, Archibald seemed
+never to think of himself, never to put either his comfort or his career
+before his love for his mother. To attempt to shape Fanny's character
+was like working in tissue paper, but there was stout substance in
+Archibald. Gabriella had tried hard--she told herself over and over
+again that she had tried as hard as she could--with both of her
+children; and with one of them at least she felt that she had succeeded.
+There was, she knew, the making of a splendid man in her son; and his
+very ugliness, which had been so noticeable when he was a child, was
+developing now into attractiveness. For it was the ugliness of strength,
+not of weakness, and there was no trace in his nature of the
+self-indulgence which had ruined his father.
+
+"But I don't want to go to college, mother dear," protested Fanny, who
+always addressed Gabriella as "dear" when she was about to become
+intractable; "I want to go on the stage."
+
+"You are not to see another play, except when I take you, for a whole
+year. Remember what I tell you, Fanny!" replied Gabriella sternly. Not
+Mrs. Carr herself, not Cousin Becky Bollingbroke, of sanctified memory,
+could have regarded an actress's career with greater horror than did the
+advanced and independent Gabriella. Any career, indeed, appeared to her
+to be out of the question for Fanny (a girl who couldn't even get on a
+street car without being spoken to), and of all careers the one the
+stage afforded was certainly the last she would have selected for her
+daughter.
+
+"I'll remember," responded Fanny coolly, and Gabriella knew in her heart
+that the girl would disobey her at the first opportunity. It was
+impossible to chaperon her every minute, and Fanny, unchaperoned, was,
+in the realistic phrase of her brother, "looking for trouble."
+
+"I'll send her to boarding-school next year," Gabriella determined; and
+she reflected gloomily that with Fanny and, Archibald both away, she
+might as well be a bachelor woman.
+
+"Well, children, you're both going away next winter," she said
+positively. "I can't look after you, Fanny, and make your living at the
+same time, so I shall send you to boarding-school. What do you say to
+Miss Bradfordine's?"
+
+"That's up on the Hudson, mother. I don't want to go out of New York."
+Fanny was genuinely alarmed at last.
+
+"The farther away from New York the better, my daughter."
+
+"What will you do here all alone with Miss Polly?
+
+"Oh, we'll do very well," answered Gabriella with cheerful promptness;
+"you need not worry about me."
+
+"If I'm good this summer, will you change your mind, mother?"
+
+"Try being good, and see." Though Gabriella spoke sweetly, it was with
+the obstinate sweetness of Mrs. Carr. One thing she had resolved firmly
+in the last quarter of an hour: Fanny should go away to boarding-school
+next September.
+
+"Ain't you goin' to walk in the suffrage parade this year, Fanny?"
+inquired Miss Polly, who always thought it necessary to interrupt an
+argument between Gabriella and her daughter.
+
+"I haven't anything to wear," replied Fanny pettishly. Her brief
+interest in "votes for women" had evaporated with the entrance of the
+matinée idol into her life.
+
+"There's a lovely white gown just in from Paris I'll get for you," said
+Gabriella pleasantly. She was tired, for she had had a trying day; but
+long ago, when her children were babies, she had determined that she
+would never permit herself to speak sharply to them. In Fanny's most
+exasperating humours, Gabriella tried to remember her own youthful
+mistakes, tried to be lenient to George's faults which she recognized in
+the girl's character.
+
+"As if anybody needed to be dressed up to march!" exclaimed Archibald
+scornfully, and he added: "She's always acting, isn't she, mother?"
+
+"Hush, dear, you mustn't tease your sister," Gabriella admonished the
+boy, though her voice when she spoke to him was attuned to a deeper and
+softer note.
+
+"If you make me go to boarding-school next year, I don't care whether
+you take the rooms in Twenty-third Street or not," said Fanny sullenly,
+for, in spite of her fickle temperament, there was a remarkable tenacity
+in her thwarted inclinations.
+
+"Very well. I'll look at the house and decide to-morrow." As the servant
+came in to lay the table, Gabriella dismissed the subject of Fanny's
+school, and opened the book--it chanced to be a volume of
+Browning--which she was reading aloud to the children.
+
+"I am really worried about Fanny," she said to Miss Folly at midnight,
+while she lingered in the living-room before going to bed. "I honestly
+don't know what to make of her, and I feel, somehow, that she is one of
+my failures."
+
+"Well, you can't expect everything to go the way you want it. Did you
+see the judge?"
+
+"Yes, I saw him, but it was no use." Her visit to Judge Crowborough
+appeared to her perturbed mind as a piece of headstrong and extravagant
+folly, and she dismissed it from her thoughts as she had dismissed
+heavier burdens in the past. "Men simply won't treat Women in business
+as they treat men, and I don't see unless human nature changes, how it
+is to be helped. But what about the house in Twenty-third Street? Do you
+think I ought to look at it?"
+
+"It was the most homelike place we saw, by a long way. There ain't many
+places in New York where you can have a flower-bed in the front yard."
+
+"Do you think Fanny will be happy there? A year before this stage mania
+seized her, you know, she was wild to move to Park Avenue."
+
+"Well, you know I've got a suspicion," Miss Folly dropped her voice to a
+whisper. "Of course it ain't nothin' but a suspicion, for she never
+opens her mouth about it to me, but I've got a right smart suspicion
+that that young actor she is so crazy about lives somewhere down there
+in that neighbourhood, and she thinks she could watch him go by in the
+street. I don't believe, you know, that she's ever so much as spoken to
+him in her life."
+
+"It's impossible!" exclaimed Gabriella, for this revelation of Miss
+Polly's discernment was astonishing to her; "but if that's the case,"
+she added gravely, "I oughtn't to think of moving into the house."
+
+"Oh, well, I don't know that he's anywhere very near, and Fanny's goin'
+to be at boarding-school for a year or two and away with Jane at the
+White Sulphur in the summers. She won't be there much anyhow, will she?"
+
+"Not much, but how I shall miss her--and, of course, if I miss her, I'll
+miss Archibald even more, because he gives me no anxiety. It's odd," she
+finished abruptly, "but I've been depressed all day. I suppose my
+birthday has something to do with it."
+
+"You ain't often like that, Gabriella. I never saw anybody keep in
+better spirits than you do."
+
+"I'm happy, but the spring makes me restless. I feel as if I'd missed
+something I ought to have had."
+
+"All of us feel that way at times, I reckon, but it don't last, and we
+settle down comfortably after a while to doin' without what we haven't
+got. And you've been mighty successful, honey. You've succeeded in
+everything you undertook except marriage."
+
+"Yes, except my marriage."
+
+"Well, I reckon things happen and you can't do 'em over again," observed
+the little seamstress, with the natural fatalism of the "poor white" of
+the South.
+
+As she undressed and got into bed, Gabriella told herself cheerfully
+that there was, indeed, no need to worry over things that you couldn't
+change after they happened. From the open window a shaft of light fell
+on her mirror, and while she watched it, she tried to convince her
+rebellious imagination that she was perfectly satisfied, that life had
+given her all that she had ever desired. "I have more than most women
+anyhow," she insisted, weakening a little. "I've accomplished what I
+undertook, and by the time I'm fifty, if things go well, I may become a
+rich woman. I'll be able to give Fanny everything that she wants, and if
+she hasn't married, we can go abroad every summer, and Archibald can
+join us in Switzerland or the Tyrol. About Archibald, at least, I can
+feel perfectly easy. He is the kind of boy to succeed. He is strong, he
+hasn't a weakness, and I am sure there isn't a brighter boy in the
+world." Around the shaft of light in the mirror a stream of sparks, like
+tiny comets, began to form and quiver back and forth as if they were
+flying. "It's a pity the judge can't help me, but it wouldn't do. I'd
+never forget what happened to-day, and you can never tell when trouble
+like that is coming. I'll either make Madame give me half the profits
+for managing the business or I'll go to Blakeley & Grymn at a salary of
+ten thousand a year. She won't let me go, of course, because she knows
+I'd take two thirds of her customers with the. Then I'll invest all I
+can save in the business until finally I am able to buy it entirely--"
+An elevated train passed the corner, and while the rumble died slowly in
+the distance, she found herself thinking of Arthur. "How different my
+life might have been if I had only stayed true to him. That's the
+happiest lot that could fall to a woman, to be loved by a man as
+faithful and tender as Arthur." For a few minutes she lay, without
+thought, watching the lights quiver and dance in the mirror, and
+listening to the faint rumble of the elevated train far up the street.
+Then, just as she was falling asleep, a question flashed out of the
+flickering lights into her mind, and she started awake again. "I wonder
+who Alice is?" she said aloud to the night.
+
+Several weeks, later, at the end of a busy day, Gabriella stood in front
+of the house in London Terrace, watching her furniture as it passed
+across the pavement and up the flagged walk into the hail. The yard was
+neglected and overgrown with dandelions and wire-grass; but an old
+rose-bush by the steps was in full bloom, and already Miss Polly was
+surveying the tangled weeds with the eye of a destroyer.
+
+"I declare I'm just hungerin' for flowers," she said wistfully,
+following the dining-room table as far as the foot of the steps where
+Gabriella stood. "The very first thing in the morning before I get
+breakfast, I'm goin' to sow some mignonette and nasturtium seeds in that
+border along the wall, and fix some window boxes with clove pinks and
+sweet alyssum in 'em like your ma used to have in summer. I reckon
+that's why I was so set on this place from the first. It looks more like
+Richmond in old times than it does like New York."
+
+Beyond the grass and weeds, over which Gabriella was gazing, the street
+was so quiet for the moment that it might have been one of those
+forgotten squares in Richmond (she had never called them blocks) where
+needy gentlewomen still practised "light housekeeping" in the social
+twilight of the last century. Now and then a tired man or woman slouched
+by from work; once a newsboy stopped at the gate to shout the name of
+his paper in belligerent accents; and a few wagons or a clanging car
+passed rapidly in the direction of Broadway. From the corner of Ninth
+Avenue the elevated road, which seemed to her at times the only
+permanent thing in her surroundings, still roared and rumbled its
+disturbing undercurrent in her life.
+
+"I think we shall be quite comfortable here," she said, watching the
+last piece of furniture pass through the door. "Where are the children?"
+The air had the rich softness of summer, and the roving fragrance from
+the old garden rose-bush by the steps awakened a strange homesickness in
+her heart--that mysterious homesickness which the spring gives us for
+places we have never seen.
+
+"The children are upstairs fixing their rooms," replied Miss. Polly,
+stooping to pluck up a weed by the roots. "I reckon I'd better go and
+tell Minnie to begin gettin' dinner, hadn't I?"
+
+"Yes, I'll come in presently. I hate to leave the air and the roses."
+
+"I wish we had the whole house, Gabriella."
+
+"It would be ever so much nicer, because I'm afraid the man on the first
+floor is dreadfully common. I don't like the look of that golden-oak
+hatrack in the hail."
+
+"Well, men never did have much taste. Think of the things your Cousin
+Jimmy would admire if Miss Pussy didn't tell him not to. Do you
+recollect that paper in your parlour at home? Now Mr. Jimmy thought that
+paper downright handsome. I've heard him say so."
+
+"It was dreadful, but, do you know, I designed a gown last winter in
+peacock blue like that paper, and it was a tremendous success. Poor
+mother, I wish she could have seen it--peacock blue with an embossed
+border."
+
+"You may laugh about it now, but I don't believe your mother minded it
+much. People in old times didn't let things get on their nerves the way
+they do to-day."
+
+She went indoors to attend to the dinner table; and as Gabriella turned
+back to the steps, she heard the gate slam and a man's voice exclaim
+heartily: "I'll see you about it to-morrow." Then a figure came rapidly
+up the walk--a large, free figure, with a buoyant swing, which awoke a
+trivial and fleeting association in her memory. Without noticing her,
+the man stooped for an instant beside the rose-bush, plucked a bud, and
+held it to his nostrils as he turned to the steps. His voice, singing a
+snatch of ragtime which she recognized without recalling the name of it,
+rang out, gay and powerful, as he approached her.
+
+"I've seen him somewhere. Who can he be?" she thought, and then swiftly,
+as in a blaze of light, she remembered the May afternoon in West
+Twenty-third Street, and "Alice," whom she had wondered about and
+forgotten. She had again a vivid impression of bigness, of freshness,
+and of gray eyes that, reminded her vaguely of the colour of a storm on
+the sea.
+
+"Good evening!" he remarked with impersonal friendliness as he passed
+her; and from the quality of his voice she inferred, as she had done on
+that May afternoon, that he was without culture, probably without
+education.
+
+He went inside; the door of his front room opened and shut, and after a
+minute or two the snatch of ragtime floated merrily through his window.
+If there was anything on earth she disliked, she reflected impatiently,
+it was a comic song.
+
+"He isn't a gentleman. I was right, he is common," she thought
+disdainfully, as she went indoors and ascended the stairs. "And he may
+make it very disagreeable for us if he insists on bringing common people
+into the houses" There was a vague impression in her mind that the males
+of the lower classes were invariably noisy.
+
+"I saw the man on the first floor as I came up," she remarked to Miss
+Folly. "I hope he isn't going to be an annoyance."
+
+"Mrs. Squires says he's never in evenings. He gets all his meals out
+except breakfast, and she fixes that for him. She told me he was hardly
+ever here unless he was eatin' or sleepin', so I don't reckon he'll
+bother us?"
+
+"Well, I'm glad of that, because he isn't the kind of person I'd like
+the children to see anything of. You can tell that he is quite common."
+
+"What does he look like? Is he rough?"
+
+"Oh, no, he is good looking enough--a fine animal. I suppose he's
+handsome in a way, and he was dressed very carefully, but, of course, he
+isn't a gentleman." For the second time this stranger had made her feel
+that she had missed something in life, and she felt almost that she
+hated him.
+
+"Oh, well, I don't reckon it will hurt us to pass him in the hall,"
+replied Miss Polly soothingly, "as long as he don't bring in any
+diseases."
+
+The next day they settled comfortably in the upper rooms and, as far as
+sound or movement went, the floor below might have been tenanted by the
+dead. When she went out Gabriella passed the dreadful hatrack of
+golden-oak in the lower hail; and after a day or two she noticed that
+it held a collection of soft felt hats, two overcoats of good cut and
+material, and an assortment of gold-headed walking-sticks, which
+appeared never to be used. Though she tried to ignore the presence of
+the hatrack, there was an aggressive masculinity about it which revived
+in her the almost forgotten feeling of having "a man in the house." The
+mere existence of a man--of an unknown man--on the first floor, altered
+the character not only of the lower hail, but of the entire house; it
+was, she felt instinctively, a different place from a house occupied by
+women alone. She had seen so little of men in the last ten years that
+she had almost forgotten their distinguishing characteristics, and the
+scent of tobacco stealing through the closed door of the front room
+downstairs came as a fresh surprise when she passed Out in the morning.
+"I suppose I'm getting old maidish," she thought. "That comes of leading
+a one-sided life. Yes, I am getting into a groove." And she determined
+that she would go out more in the evenings and try to take an interest
+in the theatre and the new dances. But even while she was in the act of
+resolving, she realized that when her hard day's work was over, and she
+came home at six o'clock, she was too tired; too utterly worn out, for
+anything except dinner and bed. There was still the cheerful hour with
+the children (that she had kept up in the busiest seasons); but when the
+question of going out was discussed at dinner, she usually ended by
+sending the children to a lecture or a harmless play with Miss Polly.
+"When you work as hard as I do, there isn't much else for you in life,"
+she concluded regretfully, and there swept over her, as on that May
+afternoon, a sense of failure, of dissatisfaction, of disappointment.
+Youth was slipping, slipping, and she had missed something.
+
+At such moments she thought sadly of her life, of its possibilities and
+its significance. It ought in the nature of things, she felt, to mean so
+much more than it had meant; it ought to have been so much more vital,
+so much more satisfying and complete. As it was, she could remember of
+it only scattered ends, frayed places, useless beginnings, and broken
+promises. With how many beliefs had she started, and now not one of them
+remained with her--well, hardly one of them! The dropping of illusion
+after illusion--that was what the years had brought to her as they
+passed; for she saw that she had always been growing farther and farther
+away from tradition, from accepted opinions, from the dogmas and the
+ideals of the ages. The experience and the wisdom of others had failed
+her at the very beginning.
+
+At the end of the week, when she and Miss Polly were watering seeds in
+the yard one afternoon at sunset, the man from the first floor came
+leisurely up the walk, and removing a big black cigar from his mouth,
+wished them "good evening" as he passed.
+
+"Good evening," responded Gabriella coolly. She had resolved that there
+should be no interchange of unnecessary civilities between the first
+floor and the upper storeys. "One can never tell how far men of that
+class will presume," she thought sternly.
+
+"Don't you think he's good lookin', honey?" inquired Miss Polly in a
+whisper when O'Hara had entered the house with his latchkey and closed
+the door after him.
+
+"Is he? I didn't look at him."
+
+"You wouldn't think he'd ever had a day's sickness in his life. I
+reckon he's as big as your Cousin Micajah Berkeley was. You don't
+recollect, him, do you?"
+
+"He died before I was born. Are those wisps of gray green, in the
+border, pinks, Miss Polly?"
+
+"Clove pinks like your ma used to raise. It ain't the right time to set
+'em out, but I sent all the way down to Richmond for 'em. I'm goin' to
+get a microphylla rose, too, in the fall. Do you reckon it would grow up
+North, Gabriella?"
+
+"Well, we might try, anyhow. Where are the children?"
+
+"Fanny's over at Carlie's, an' Archibald said he was goin' to the
+gymnasium befo' dinner. He's just crazy about gettin' as strong as the
+man on the first floor. He was punching a ball this mornin', and
+Archibald saw him. I never knew the boy to take such a sudden fancy."
+
+"When did he speak to him?" asked Gabriella, and her tone had a touch of
+asperity so unusual that Miss Polly exclaimed in astonishment: "For
+goodness sake, Gabriella, what has come over you? Do you feel any sort
+of palpitations? Shall I run after the harts-horn?"
+
+"No, I'm not ill, but I don't like Archibald to pick up acquaintances I
+know nothing about."
+
+"I reckon if you're goin' to sample all Archibald's acquaintances,
+you'll have a job on your hands. You ain't gone an' taken a dislike to
+Mr. O'Hara for nothin', have you?"
+
+"Oh, no, but I have to be careful about the children. Suppose he should
+begin speaking to Fanny?" She had been vividly aware of the man as he
+passed, and the sensation had provoked her. "If it wasn't for Alice, I
+shouldn't have given him another thought," she told herself savagely.
+"Imagine me at my age blushing because a strange man spoke to me in the
+street!"
+
+"You needn't worry about his admirin' Fanny," replied Miss Polly, in her
+matter-of-fact manner, while she lifted the green watering-pot. "He was
+on the steps when she set out for school this mornin', an' he didn't
+notice her any more than he did me. Fanny ain't the sort he takes notice
+of, I could see that in a minute."
+
+"Then he must be blind." There was a resentful sound in Gabriella's
+voice. "It embarrasses me when I get on a street car with her because
+the men stare so."
+
+"Well, he didn't stare. But it's a mighty good thing that all men
+haven't got the same kind of eyes, ain't it? What I could never make out
+was why men ever marry women who haven't got curly hair, an' yet they do
+it every day--they go right straight out an' do it with their wits about
+'em."
+
+The front door opened suddenly, and the man came out again, and,
+descended the walk with the springy step Gabriella had noticed at their
+first meeting. Notwithstanding his size, he moved with the lightness and
+agility of a boy, and without looking at him she could see, as she bent
+over the flower-bed, that he had the look of exuberant vitality which
+accompanies perfect physical condition. Without meaning to, without
+knowing why she did it, she glanced up quickly and met his eyes.
+
+"So you are making a garden?" he remarked, and stopped beside the
+freshly turned flower-bed. Against the gray twilight the red of his hair
+was like a dark flame, and the vivid colour appeared to intensify the
+sanguine glow in his face, the steady gaze of his eyes, and the
+cheerful heartiness of his voice.
+
+"He is cyclonic," she said to herself. "Yes, that is the word--he is
+cyclonic--but he isn't a gentleman."
+
+"It's a pity to let the yard run to waste," she responded, with an
+imperiousness which took Miss Polly's breath away, though it left the
+irrepressible O'Hara still buoyantly gay and kind.
+
+"Now it takes a woman to think of that," he observed with an off-hand
+geniality which she felt was directed less toward herself than toward an
+impersonal universe. "I like to look at that old rose-bush when it is in
+bloom, but the idea"--(he pronounced it idee)--"of planting anything
+would never have occurred to me."
+
+Gabriella's lips closed firmly, while she sprinkled the earth with an
+air of patient finality which made Miss Polly think of Mrs. Carr on one
+of her neuralgic days.
+
+"What's that stringy looking grass over there?" pursued the man,
+undismayed by her manner.
+
+"Clove pinks." Nothing, she told herself indignantly, could persuade her
+to encourage the acquaintance of a man who mispronounced his words so
+outrageously.
+
+"And here?" He pointed to the flower-bed she was watering.
+
+"Mignonette and nasturtium seeds."
+
+"When will they come up?"
+
+"Very soon if they're watered."
+
+"And they'll bloom about July, I guess?"
+
+"They ought to bloom all summer. In the autumn, if we have room, we're
+going to plant some dahlias, and a row of hollyhocks against the house.
+By next summer the yard will look much better."
+
+"By George!" he exclaimed abruptly, and after a minute or two: "Do you
+know, I can remember the first time I ever saw a flower--or the first
+time I took notice of one, anyway. It was red--a red geranium. There was
+a whole cart of 'em, and that's why I noticed 'em, I expect. But a red
+geranium is a Jim-dandy flower, ain't it?"
+
+To this outburst Gabriella made no reply. Her will had hardened with the
+determination not to be drawn into conversation, and while he waited
+with his eager gray eyes--so like the alert, wistful eyes of a great
+dog--on her profile, she began carelessly plucking up spears of grass
+from the flower-bed.
+
+For a minute he waited expectantly; then, as she did not look up, he
+remarked, "So long!" in a voice of serene friendliness, and went on to
+the gate. He had actually said "So long" to her, Gabriella, and he had
+said it with a manner of established intimacy!
+
+"Well, what do you think of that?" she demanded scornfully of Miss Polly
+when he had disappeared up the street.
+
+"I reckon he don't know any better, honey. You don't learn much about
+manners in a mine, I 'spose, and when he ain't down in a mine, Mrs.
+Squires says he's building railroads across deserts. She says he ain't
+ever had anything, education or money, that he didn't pick up for
+himself, and you oughtn't to judge him as you do some others you've
+known. Anyway, she says he's made a big pile of money."
+
+"I believe you're taking up for him, Miss Polly. Has he bewitched you?"
+
+"I don't like to see you hard, Gabriella. You're almost always so
+tolerant. It ain't like you to sit in judgment."
+
+"I am not sitting in judgment, but I don't see why I'm obliged to be
+friendly with a strange man who says 'idee.' It would be bad for the
+children."
+
+"Mrs. Squires has known him for thirty years--he's forty-five now--and
+she says it's a miracle the way he's come up. He was born in a cellar."
+
+"I dare say he has a great deal of force, but you must admit that blood
+tells, Miss Polly."
+
+"I never said it didn't, Gabriella--only that there's much more credit
+to a man that comes up without it."
+
+"Oh, I'll admire him all you please," retorted Gabriella, "if you'll
+promise to keep him away from the children."
+
+Though she spoke sharply, the sharpness was directed not to Miss Polly,
+but to herself--to her own incomprehensible childishness. The man
+interested her; already she had thought of him daily since she first
+came to the house; already she had begun to wonder about him, and she
+realized that she should wonder still more because of what Miss Polly
+had told her. When he had approached her in the yard, she had been
+vaguely disturbed, vaguely thrilled by the strangeness and the mystery
+surrounding him; she had been subtly aware of his nearness before she
+heard his step, and turning, found his eyes fixed upon her. Her own
+weakness in not controlling her curiosity, in recurring, in spite of her
+determined resolve to that first meeting, in allowing a coarse, rough
+stranger--yes, a coarse, rough, uneducated stranger, she insisted
+desperately--to hold her attention for a minute--the incredible weakness
+of these things goaded her into a feeling of positive anger. For ten
+years there had been no men in her life, and now at thirty-seven, when
+she was almost middle-aged, she was beginning to feel curious about the
+history of the first good-looking man she encountered--about a mere
+robust, boisterous embodiment of masculinity. "What difference can it
+make to me who Alice is?" she demanded indignantly. "What possible
+difference?" She forced herself to think tenderly of Arthur; but during
+the last few months the image of Arthur had receded an immeasurable
+distance from her life. His remoteness and his unreality distressed her;
+but try as she would, she could not recall him from the gauzy fabric of
+dreams to the tangible substance of flesh.
+
+"It isn't that I care for myself," she said to Miss Polly abruptly, as
+if she were defending herself against an unspoken accusation.
+"I am a working woman, and a working woman can't afford to be
+snobbish--certainly a dressmaker can't--but I must look after my
+children. That is an imperative duty. I must see that they form
+friendships in their own class."
+
+But life, as she had already discovered, has a sardonic manner of its
+own in such crises. That night she planned carefully, lying awake in the
+darkness, the subterfuges and excuses by which she would keep Archibald
+away from O'Hara, and the very next afternoon when she came home from
+work she found confusion in the street, a fire engine at the corner,
+and, on the steps of her home, the boy clinging rapturously to the hand
+of the man.
+
+"You ought to have been here, mother," cried Archibald in tones of
+ecstatic excitement. "We had a fire down the street in that apartment
+house--and before the firemen came Mr. O'Hara went in and got out a
+woman and some children who had been overcome by smoke. He had to lower
+them from a fire-escape, and he got every one of them out before the
+engine could get here. I saw it all. I was on the corner and saw it all.
+
+"I hope Mr. O'Hara wasn't hurt," remarked Gabriella, but her voice was
+not enthusiastic.
+
+"To hear the kid run on," responded O'Hara, overpowered by
+embarrassment, "you'd think I'd really done something, wouldn't you?
+Well, it wasn't anything. It was as easy as--as eating. Now, I was
+caught down in a mine once in Arizona--"
+
+"Tell me about it. Mother, ask him to tell you about it," entreated
+Archibald. The boy was obviously consumed with curiosity and delight.
+Gabriella had never seen him so enthusiastic, so swept away by emotion.
+Already, she suspected, he had fallen a victim to the passion of hero
+worship, and O'Hara--the man who spoke of "idees"--was his hero! "I
+shall have to be careful," she thought. "I shall have to be very careful
+or Archibald will come under his influence."
+
+"Well, I guess I must be going along," remarked O'Hara, a little
+nervously, for he was evidently confused by her imperious manner. "A
+fellow is expecting me to dinner over at the club."
+
+"But I want to hear about the mine. Mother, make him tell us about the
+mine!" cried Archibald insistently.
+
+"I'll tell you another time, sonny. We'll get together some day when
+your mother don't want you, and we'll start off on a regular bat. How
+would you like that?"
+
+"When?" demanded the boy eagerly. His fear of losing O'Hara showed in
+the fervour with which he spoke, in the frantic grasp with which he
+still clung to his hand. It occurred to Gabriella suddenly that she
+ought to have thrown Archibald more in the companionship of men, that
+she had kept him too much with women, that 'she had smothered him in her
+love. This was the result of her selfish devotion--that he should turn
+from her to the first male creature that came into his life!
+
+Her heart was sore, but she said merely: "That is very kind of you, Mr.
+O'Hara, but I'm afraid I mustn't let my boy go off on a regular bat
+without me."
+
+"Oh, yes, I may, mother. Say I may," interrupted Archibald with
+rebellious determination.
+
+"Well, we'll see about it when the time comes." She turned her head,
+meeting O'Hara's gaze, and for an instant they looked unflinchingly into
+each other's eyes. In her look there was surprise, indignation, and a
+suspicion of fear--why should he, a stranger, come between her and her
+son?--and in his steady gaze there was surprise, also, but it was
+mingled, not with indignation and fear, but with careless and tolerant
+amusement. She knew from his smile that he was perfectly indifferent to
+her resentment, that he was even momentarily entertained by it, and the
+knowledge enraged her. The glance he gave her was as impersonal as the
+glance he gave Miss Polly or the rose-bush or the street with its casual
+stream of pedestrians. It was the glance of a man who had lived deeply,
+and to whom living meant action and achievement rather than criticism or
+philosophy. He would not judge her, she understood, simply because his
+mind was not in the habit of judging. His interest in her was merely a
+part of his intense, zestful interest in life. She shared with Miss
+Polly and Archibald, and any chance object that attracted his attention
+for an instant, the redundant vitality of his inquiring spirit. "No
+wonder he has worked his way up with all that energy," she reflected.
+"No wonder he has made money." His face, with its clear ruddiness, was
+the face of a man who has breathed strong winds and tasted the sharp
+tang of sage and pine; and she noticed again that his deep gray eyes had
+the unwavering look of eyes that have watched wide horizons of sea or
+desert. There was no suggestion of the city about him, though his
+clothes were well cut, and she was quick to observe, followed the latest
+styles of Fifth Avenue. "Yes, he is good looking," she admitted
+reluctantly. "There is no question about that, and he has personality,
+too--of a kind." His hat was in his hand--a soft hat of greenish-gray
+felt--and her eye rested for a moment on his uncovered head with its
+thick waves of red hair, a little disordered as if a high wind had
+roughened them. "If he only had breeding or education, he might be
+really worth while," she added, almost approvingly.
+
+When he spoke again O'Hara ignored Gabriella, and turned his alert
+questioning glance on the little seamstress. Fanny had sauntered up the
+walk to join the group--Fanny in all the glory of her yellow curls, and
+her "debutante slouch "--and he bowed gravely to her without the
+faintest change of expression. If he admired Fanny's beauty and pitied
+Miss Polly's plainness, there was no hint of it in the indifferent look
+he turned from the girl to the old woman.
+
+"The next time you're planting things," he said earnestly, "I wish you'd
+set out a red geranium. I saw a cart of 'em go by in the street this
+morning and I had half a mind to buy a pot or two for the yard. If I
+get some, will you put 'em out?"
+
+"Why, of course, I will. I'll be real glad to," responded Miss Polly,
+agreeably flattered by his request. "Is there any special place you want
+me to plant them?"
+
+"Anywhere I can see 'em from the window. I'd like to look at 'em while I
+eat my breakfast. And while we are about it, wouldn't it be just as well
+to set out a whole bed of 'em?" he asked with a munificent gesture which
+included in one comprehensive sweep the weeds, the walk, the elm tree,
+the blossoming rose-bush, and the freshly turned flower-borders. The
+large free movement of his arm expressed a splendid scorn of small
+things, of little makeshifts, of subterfuges and evasions.
+
+"Don't you think it would cut up the yard too much to make another bed?"
+asked Gabriella, inspired by the whimsical demon of opposition. It was
+true that she had no particular fondness for red geraniums; but if Miss
+Polly had expressed, on her own account, a desire to plant the street
+with them, she would never have thought of objecting.
+
+"Well, the yard ain't much to brag of anyhow," replied Miss Polly with
+that careful penetration which never sees below the surface of things.
+"To tell the truth I've always had a sort of leanin' toward geraniums
+myself--especially rose geraniums. I don't know why on earth," she
+concluded with animated wonder, "I never thought of putting rose
+geraniums in that window box along with the sweet alyssum. They would
+have been the very things and they don't take so much watering."
+
+"That's a bargain, then," said O'Hara, with his ringing laugh which made
+Gabriella smile in spite of herself. Then, after shaking hands with each
+one of the group, he went down the walk and passed with his vigorous
+stride in the direction of Broadway.
+
+When the gate had closed, and his large figure had vanished in the
+distance, Gabriella said sternly: "Archibald, you must not lose your
+head over strangers. We know nothing on earth about Mr. O'Hara except
+that he lives in this house."
+
+"Oh, but, mother, he was splendid at the fire! You ought to have seen
+him holding a girl by one arm out of the window. He was as brave as a
+fireman, everybody said so, didn't they, Miss Polly?"
+
+"Men of that sort always have courage," observed Gabriella
+contemptuously, and despised herself for the remark. What was the matter
+with her this afternoon? Why did this man arouse in her the instinct of
+combativeness, the fever of opposition? Was it all because she suspected
+him of a vulgar intrigue with a shopgirl? And why had she decided so
+positively that Alice was vulgar? Certainly, she, a dressmaker, should
+be the last to condemn shopgirls as vulgar.
+
+"I declare, I can't begin to make you out, Gabriella," said Miss Polly
+uneasily. "I never heard you talk about folks bein' common before. It
+don't sound like you."
+
+"Well, he is common, you know," protested Gabriella, with a strange,
+almost tearful violence. "Why did he have to shake hands with us
+all--with each one of us, even Fanny, when he went away? We'd hardly
+spoken to him."
+
+"I don't know what's come over you," observed the seamstress gloomily.
+"I reckon I'm common, too, so I don't notice it. But I must say I like
+the way he spoke about geraniums. He showed a real nice feelin'."
+
+The words were hardly out of her mouth before Gabriella had caught her
+in her arms. "I know I'm horrid, dear Miss Polly," she said penitently,
+"but I don't like Mr. O'Hara."
+
+"Then I shouldn't see any more of him than I was obliged to, honey, and
+there ain't a bit of use in Archibald's goin' with him if you don't want
+him to."
+
+"I don't like to forbid him. Of course, I know nothing against the
+man--it is only a feeling."
+
+"Well, feelin's are mighty queer things sometimes," remarked Miss Polly,
+scoring a triumph which left the indignant Gabriella at her mercy; "and
+when I come to think of it; I don't recollect that yours have always
+been such good judges of folks."
+
+The geraniums arrived in a small cart the next morning, but O'Hara did
+not appear, and for several weeks, though Gabriella glanced suspiciously
+at the hatrack each morning when she passed through the hail, there was
+no sign of life in his rooms. Then one afternoon he reappeared as
+suddenly as he had vanished, and she found Archibald with him in the
+yard when she came home at six o'clock. That the boy would be her
+difficulty, she knew by instinct, for he had been seized by one of those
+unaccountable romantic fancies to which the young of the race are
+disposed. Though the sentiment was certainly far less dangerous than
+Fanny's passion for the, matinée idol, since it revealed itself
+principally as a robust and wholly masculine ambition to follow in the
+footsteps of adventure, Gabriella fought it almost as fiercely as she
+had fought Fanny's incipient love affair.
+
+"He is making Archibald rough," she said to Miss Polly, after a
+fortnight of unavailing opposition to the new influence in Archibald's
+life. "Until we came here," she added despondently, "Archibald loved me
+better than anything in the world, and now he seems to think of nothing
+but this man."
+
+"It looks to me as if it was mighty good for the child, honey. You can't
+keep a boy tied to your apron-strings all the time. Archibald needs a
+father the same as other boys, and if he hasn't got one, he's either
+goin' to break loose or he's goin' to become a mollycoddle. You don't
+want to make a mollycoddle of him, do you?"
+
+"Of course not," answered Gabriella honestly, for, in spite of her
+strange fits of unreasonableness, she was still sensible enough in
+theory. "I've tried hard to keep him manly--not to spoil him, you know
+that as well as I do. And it isn't that I object to his making friends.
+I'd give anything in the world if he could know Arthur. If it had been
+Arthur," she went on gently, "I should have been glad to have him come
+first. I shouldn't have cared a bit if he had loved Arthur better than
+me."
+
+"You oughtn't to talk like that, Gabriella, for you know just as well as
+can be that Archibald don't love anybody better than he loves you. As
+far as I can make out though, Mr. O'Hara sets him a real good example. I
+don't see that he's doin' the child a particle of harm, and I don't
+believe you see it either. To be sure you don't think much of football,
+but it's a long ways better than loafin' round with nothin' to do, and
+this boy scout business that Archibald talks so much about sounds all
+right to me. Now, he never would have thought a thing about that except
+for Mr. O'Hara."
+
+"Yes, that's all right. I approve of that, but I can't help hating to
+see a stranger get so strong an influence over my son. It isn't fair of
+him."
+
+"Then why don't you tell him to stop it. I believe he'd be sensible
+about it, and if I was you, I'd have it every bit out with him."
+
+"If it doesn't stop, I'll find some way of showing him that I object to
+the friendship. But, after all, it may be only a fancy of Archibald's.
+Anyhow, I'll wait a while before I take any step."
+
+At the beginning of August Gabriella sent the children to the country
+with Miss Polly, and sailed, on a fast boat, for a brief visit to the
+great dress designers of Paris. Ever since Madame's age and infirmities
+had forced her to relinquish this annual trip, Gabriella had taken her
+place, and all through the year she looked forward to it as to the last
+of her youthful adventures. On her last visit, Billy and Patty had been
+in Switzerland; but this summer they met her at Cherbourg; and she spent
+several brilliant days with them before they flitted off again, and left
+her to the doubtful consideration of dressmakers and milliners. Patty,
+who appeared to grow younger and lovelier with each passing year, came
+to her room the evening before they parted, and asked her in a whisper
+if she had heard of George or Florrie in the ten years since their
+elopement?
+
+"Not a word--not a single word, darling. I haven't heard his name
+mentioned since I got my divorce."
+
+"You didn't know, then, that Florrie left him six months after they ran
+away?"
+
+"No, I didn't know. Does he ever write to you?"
+
+"Not to me, but mother hears from him every now and then when he wants
+money badly. Of course she doesn't have much to send him, but she gives
+him every penny she can spare. A year ago she had a letter from some
+doctor in New Jersey telling her that he was treating George for the
+drink habit, and that he needed to be kept somewhere for treatment for
+several months. We sent her the money she needed, Billy and I, but in
+her next letter she said that George had escaped from the hospital and
+that she hadn't heard of him since. That must have been about six months
+ago."
+
+"It's dreadful for his mother," observed Gabriella, with vague
+compassion, for she felt as if Patty were speaking of a stranger whose
+face she was incapable of visualizing in her memory. In the last ten
+years she had not only forgotten George, but she had forgotten as
+completely the Gabriella who had once loved him. Though it was still
+possible for her to revoke the hollow images of the past, she could not
+restore to these images even the remotest semblance of reality and
+passion. It was as if some nerve--the sentimental nerve--had atrophied.
+She could remember George as she remembered the house in Fifty-seventh
+Street or her wedding-gown which Miss Polly had made; she could say to
+herself, "I loved him when I married him," or, "It was in such a year
+that he left me"; but the empty phrases awoke no responsive echoes in
+her heart; and it would have been impossible to imagine a woman less
+crushed or permanently saddened by the wreck of her happiness. "I
+suppose it's hard work that keeps me from thinking about the past," she
+reflected while she watched Patty's beautiful face framed by the pale
+gold of her hair. "I suppose it's work that has driven everything else
+out of my thoughts."
+
+"Have you any idea what became of Florrie?" she asked, moved by a
+passing curiosity.
+
+"She left George for a very rich man she met in London. I believe he had
+a wife already, but things like that never stood in Florrie's way."
+
+"It's queer, isn't it, because she really has a kind heart."
+
+"Yes, she is kind-hearted when you don't get in her way, but she was
+born without any morality just as some people are born without any sense
+of smell or hearing. I know several women over here who are like
+that--American women, too--and, do you know, they are all surprisingly
+successful. Nobody seems to suspect their infirmity, least of all the
+men who become their victims."
+
+"I sometimes think," observed Gabriella cynically, "that men like women
+to be without feeling. It saves them so much trouble."
+
+The next day Patty fluttered off like a brilliant butterfly, and
+Gabriella began to suffer acute homesickness for the house in
+Twenty-third Street and her children. Not once during her stay in Paris
+did the thought of O'Hara enter her mind; and so completely had she
+ceased to worry about his friendship for Archibald that it was almost a
+shock to her when, after landing one September afternoon, she drove up
+to the gate and found the man and the boy standing together beside a
+flourishing border of red geraniums, which appeared almost to cover the
+yard.
+
+"Oh, look, Ben, there's mother!" cried Archibald; and turning quickly,
+the two came to meet her.
+
+"My darling, I thought you were still in the country," said Gabriella,
+kissing her son.
+
+"We've been here almost a week.. The place closed, so we decided to come
+back to town. It's much nicer here," replied Archibald eagerly. He
+looked sunburned and vigorous, and it seemed to Gabriella that he had
+grown prodigiously in six weeks.
+
+"Why, you look so much taller, Archibald!" she exclaimed, laughing with
+happiness, "or, perhaps, I've been thinking of you as a little boy."
+Then, while her manner grew formal, she held out her hand to O'Hara.
+"How do you do, Mr. O'Hara?"
+
+He was standing bareheaded in the faint sunshine, and while her eyes
+rested on his dark red hair, still moist and burnished from brushing,
+his tanned and glowing face, and on the tiny flecks of black in the
+clear gray of his eyes, she was startled by a sensation of strangeness
+and unreality as if she were looking into his face for the first time.
+
+"Oh, we're well. I've been playing with Archibald. Did you have a good
+crossing?"
+
+"It was smooth enough, but I got so impatient. I wanted to be with the
+children."
+
+"Well, I went once, and I was jolly glad to get back again. There was
+nothing to do over there but loaf and lie around."
+
+There would be nothing else for him, of course, she reflected; and she
+wondered vaguely if he had ever entered a picture gallery? What would
+Europe offer to a person possessing neither culture nor a passion for
+clothes?
+
+The driver had placed her bags inside the gate; and O'Hara took charge
+of them as if it were the most natural thing in the world to carry for
+a fellow tenant. Upstairs in the sitting-room he put his burden down,
+unfastened the straps, and commented upon the leather of a bag she had
+bought in Paris.
+
+"I'd like to have a grip like that myself. Is there anything else I can
+help about?"
+
+"No, thank you." She was embracing Fanny, and she did not glance at him
+as she responded: "You are very kind, but my trunks are arranged for."
+
+At this he went without a word, and Gabriella began a joyous account of
+her trip to the children.
+
+"Year after next, if you work hard with your French, you may both go
+with me. Then you'll be big enough to look after each other while I am
+with the dressmakers."
+
+"Oh, tell me about the dressmakers, mother. What did you bring me?"
+urged Fanny, prettily excited by the thought of her gifts. "I need
+dreadfully some dancing frocks. Carlie has a lovely one her mother has
+just bought for her."
+
+"I have all your autumn dresses, darling; everything you can possibly
+need at Miss Bradfordine's."
+
+Fanny's eager face grew suddenly fretful. "Am I really to go away to
+school, mother?"
+
+"Really, precious, both you and Archibald. Think of your poor lonely
+mother." Breaking off with a start she glanced inquiringly about the
+room, and turned a hurt look on Miss Polly. "Why, where is Archibald? I
+thought he was in the room."
+
+"I reckon he must have gone down after Mr. O'Hara. They had just got
+back from a ball game, and I 'spose they felt like talking about it.
+He'll be up again in a minute, because Mr. O'Hara goes out at six
+o'clock."
+
+"But I've just come home." Her lip trembled. "I should think Archibald
+would rather be with me."
+
+"Oh, he won't stay, and you'll have him all the evening. Archibald is
+just crazy about gettin' you back."
+
+Taking off her hat, a jaunty twist of black velvet from Paris, Gabriella
+went into her bedroom and changed to a gown of clear blue crape, which
+she took out of the new bag. When she came out again, with her arms
+filled with Fanny's gifts, there was a flush in her usually pale face,
+and her eyes were bright with determination.
+
+"I put these in my bag, Fanny, so you wouldn't have to wait for the
+trunks. Try on this little white silk."
+
+"Oh, mother, you look so sweet in that blue gown!"
+
+"I got it for almost nothing, dear, but the colour is lovely." Turning
+restlessly away, she walked to the window and stood looking over Miss
+Polly's window box down on the brilliant border of red geraniums.
+
+"Has Archibald come upstairs yet, Miss Polly?"
+
+"Not yet, but he'll be up directly. Don't you worry."
+
+For an instant Gabriella hesitated; then crossing the room with a
+resolute step, she turned, with her hand on the knob, and looked back at
+the startled face of the little seamstress, who was fastening Fanny's
+white gown.
+
+"Well, I'm going after him," she said sternly; "I am going straight
+downstairs to find him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+READJUSTMENTS
+
+
+For a minute Gabriella stood outside the door of what had once been the
+drawing-room of the house, while she listened attentively to the sound
+of animated voices within. Then suddenly Archibald's breezy laugh rang
+out into the hail, and raising her hand from the knob, she knocked
+softly on the white-painted panel of the door.
+
+"Come in!" called O'Hara's voice carelessly; and Gabriell entered and
+imperatively held out her hand to her son, who was standing by the
+window.
+
+"Come, Archibald, I want you," she said gravely. "You went off without
+seeing your gifts." She had invaded the sitting-room of a strange man,
+but her purpose was a righteous one, and there was no embarrassment in
+her manner.
+
+"Oh, mother, are they upstairs? I'll run up and see them!" cried,
+Archibald delightedly. "I thought they were all in the trunks."
+
+Darting past her in a flash, he bounded up the staircase, while
+Gabriella stood facing O'Hara, who had risen and thrown away his cigar
+at her entrance. The room was still fragrant with tobacco; there was a
+light cloud of smoke over the mignonette in the window box, and beyond
+it, she could see the dim foliage of the elm tree waving over the
+flagged walk to the gate. With an eye trained to recognize the value of
+details, she saw that the sitting-room was furnished with the same
+deplorable taste which had selected the golden-oak hatrack and the
+assortment of ornamental walking-sticks. The woodwork had been stained
+to match the oak of the barbarous writing-table, which held a distorted
+bronze lamp, with the base composed of a heavily draped feminine figure,
+a massive desk set, also of bronze, a pile of newspapers, a dictionary,
+and several dull-looking books with worn covers and dog's eared pages.
+She noticed that the chairs were all large and solid, with deep arms and
+backs upholstered in red leather, which looked as if it would never wear
+out, that the rug was good, and that, except for a few meretricious oil
+paintings on the greenish walls, the room was agreeably bare of
+decoration. After her first hesitating glance, she surmised that a
+certain expensive comfort was the end sought for and achieved, and that
+in the furnishing beauty had evidently been estimated in figures.
+
+"Mr. O'Hara," she began firmly, "I wish you would not take my son away
+from me."
+
+He did not lower his gaze, and she saw, after an instant in which he
+appeared merely surprised, a look of amusement creep into his expressive
+eyes. Within four walls, in his light summer clothes, with the gauzy
+drift of tobacco smoke over his head, he looked larger and more
+irrepressibly energetic than he had done out of doors.
+
+"I am sorry you feel that way," he returned very slowly after a pause.
+Already she had discovered that he had great difficulty with his words
+except when he was stirred by excitement into self-forgetfulness. At
+other times he seemed curiously inarticulate, and she saw now that,
+while she waited for his answer, he was groping about in his mind for a
+suitable phrase in which to repel her accusation.
+
+"I appreciate your interest in him," she resumed smoothly, "but he is
+with you too much. I do not know you. I know nothing in the world about
+you."
+
+"Well--" Again he hesitated as if over an impediment in his speech.
+Then, finding with an effort the words he needed, he went on more
+easily: "If there's anything you'd like to know, I guess you can ask
+me."
+
+She frowned slightly, and leaving the door moved resolutely to the
+writing-table, where she stopped with her hand on the pile of
+newspapers. Against the indeterminate colour of the walls her head, with
+its dark, silver-powdered hair, worn smooth and close after the Parisian
+fashion, showed as clear and fine as an etching. In her blue summer gown
+she looked almost girlish in spite of the imperious dignity of her
+carriage; and from her delicate head to her slender feet, she diffused
+an air of fashion which perplexed and embarrassed him, though he was
+unaware of the conscious art which produced it.
+
+"The only thing I'd like to know about you," she answered, "is why you
+have taken so sudden a fancy to my son?"
+
+At this he laughed outright, with a boyish zest which dispelled the
+oppressive formality of her manner. He was completely at his ease again,
+and while he ran his hand impatiently through his hair, he answered
+frankly:
+
+"Well, you see, when it comes to that, I didn't take any sudden fancy,
+as you call it--I didn't take any fancy at all--it was the other way
+about. The boy is a nice boy--a bully good boy, anybody can see
+that--and I like boys, that's all. When he began trotting round after
+me, we got to be chums in a way, but it would have been the same with
+any other boy who had come to the house--especially," he added with a
+clean blow given straight from the shoulder, "if he'd been a decent chap
+that a parcel of women were making into a muff."
+
+For a minute anger, righteous anger, kept her silent; then she responded
+with stateliness: "I suppose I have a right to decide how my son shall
+be brought up?"
+
+He met her stern gaze with a smile; and in the midst of her resentment
+she was distinctly aware of the impeccable honesty of his judgment. The
+peculiar breeziness she had always thought of as "Western" sounded in
+his voice as he answered:
+
+"By George, I'm not so sure that you have!"
+
+Before his earnestness she felt her anger melt slowly away. The basic
+reasonableness of her character--her passion to investigate experience,
+to examine facts, to search for truth--this temperamental attitude
+survived the superficial wave of indignation which had swept over her.
+
+"So you think I am making a mistake with Archibald?" she asked quietly;
+and growing tired of standing, she sank instinctively into one of the
+capacious leather-covered chairs by the table. "But the question is--are
+you able to judge?"
+
+"Well, I'm a man, and I hate to see a boy coddled. It's going to be
+devilish hard on the kid when he grows up."
+
+"Perhaps you're right"--her manner had grown softer--"and because I've
+thought of this, I am going to send him away to school this autumn--in a
+few weeks. Much as it will hurt me to part with them, I am going to send
+both of my children away from me. I have made the arrangements."
+
+Insensibly the note of triumph had crept into her voice. By the simple
+statement of her purpose she had vindicated her motherhood to this man.
+She stood clear now of his aspersions on her wisdom and her devotion.
+
+"I don't know much about girls," he replied, seating himself on the
+opposite side of the table, where the green light from the shaded lamp
+fell directly on his features. "I can't remember ever noticing one until
+I grew up, and then I was afraid to death of them, particularly when
+they were young--but I've been a boy, and I know all about boys. There
+isn't a blooming thing you could tell me about boys!" he concluded with
+animation.
+
+"And you think that all boys are alike?"
+
+"More or less under the skin. Of course some are washed and some are
+dirty--I was dirty--but they're all boys, every last one of them, and
+all boys are just kids. With the first money I made out West, I started
+a lodging-house for them--the dirty ones--down in the Bowery," he added.
+"They can get a wash and a supper and a night's lodging in a bed with
+real sheets any night in the year."
+
+She was suddenly interested. "Do you care for boys just because you were
+a boy yourself?" she asked.
+
+"Because I was such a God-forsaken little chap, I guess. You were never
+down in a cellar, I suppose, the kind of cellar people live in? Well, I
+was born in one, and my father had killed himself the week before
+because he was ill with consumption, and couldn't get work. He'd been a
+teamster, and he lost his job when he came down with pneumonia, and
+after they let him out of the hospital, he looked such a scarehead that
+nobody would employ him. After he died, my mother struggled on somehow,
+taking in washing or scrubbing floors--God knows how she managed
+it!--and by the time I was five, and precious big for my age, I was in
+the street selling papers. I used to say I was seven when anybody asked
+me, but I wasn't more than five; and I remember as plain as if it was
+yesterday, the way mother used to take me to a corner of Broadway, and
+put a bundle of papers in my arms, and how I used to hang on to the
+coppers when the bigger boys tried to get 'em away from me. Sometimes
+I'd get an extra dime or nickel, and then we'd have Irish stew or fried
+onions for supper. After my mother died, when I was about eight, I still
+kept on selling papers because I didn't know what else to do, but I
+didn't have any place to sleep then so I used to crawl into machine
+shops or areas (he said 'aries') or warehouses, when the watchmen
+weren't looking. In summer I'd sometimes hide under a bush in the park,
+and the policeman would never see me until I slipped by him in the
+morning. There was one policeman I hated like the devil, and I used to
+swear that I'd get even with him if it took me all the rest of my life."
+For a moment he paused, brooding complacently. "I did get even with him,
+too," he added, "and it didn't take me more than twenty years."
+
+"You never forget anything?"
+
+"Forget?" he laughed shortly. "When you find a thing I forget, it'll be
+so small you'll have to put on spectacles to recognize it!"
+
+She nodded comprehendingly. "And after that?"
+
+"After that they caught me and sent me to school, and I learned to read
+and write and do sums--I always had a wonderful head for figures--but
+after school I went on selling papers so I'd have something to eat---"
+
+The door burst open, and Archibald rushed in to show the evening clothes
+Gabriella had brought him from Paris.
+
+"They are jolly, mother! May I keep them on?"
+
+"If you like, dear, but they'll have to be altered a little. The coat
+doesn't quite fit across the shoulders."
+
+"You're a dandy, kid, a regular dandy," observed O'Hara, with humorous
+gravity.
+
+After a few moments Archibald rushed off again, and Gabriella made an
+uncertain movement to follow him. "I must go," she said, without rising,
+and added abruptly: "So you got on in spite of everything?"
+
+"Right you are!" He leaned back in his chair and regarded her with
+benevolent optimism. "You can always get on if the stuff is in you. I
+meant to get on, and a steam engine couldn't have kept me back. It's the
+gospel truth that I believe I came into the world meaning to get out of
+that cellar, and it was the same thing with areas and ash-bins. I knew
+all the time I wasn't going to keep grubbing a living out of an ash-bin.
+I was always growing, shooting up like one of those mullein stalks out
+there, and eating? Great Scott! I used to eat so much when I was a kid
+that mother starved herself near to death so as to give me a square
+meal. By the time I was twelve I had grown so fast that I got a job at
+cleaning the streets--my first job from the city. But I never went
+hungry. As far as I recollect I never went hungry except the time I beat
+my way out to Chicago--"
+
+Without moving, without lowering her eyes from his face, Gabriella
+listened, while she clasped and unclasped the hands in her lap. There is
+a personality that compels attention, and she realized for the first
+time that O'Hara possessed it. A new vision of life had opened suddenly
+before her, and she felt, with the illuminating intensity of a religious
+conversion, that the world she had been living in was merely a fiction.
+In spite of her experience she had really known nothing of life.
+
+"Yes, a lot of 'em went hungry, but I never did," he resumed in a tone
+of frank congratulation. "Sometimes, of course, I'd go without supper or
+breakfast, but that was nothing--that was not being really hungry, you
+know. I always managed, even when I was at school, to make enough to
+keep satisfied. What I minded most," he added musingly, "was not having
+a regular place to go home to at night, and that's why I started that
+lodging-house. When you've slept in holes and on benches, and under
+freight cars, and hidden away in machine shops, you know there's nothing
+on God's earth--not a blessed thing--that can take the place of a real
+sure enough bed with real sure enough sheets and pillow cases on it."
+
+"But how did you come out of it? How did you succeed? For you have
+succeeded beyond your dreams, haven't you?"
+
+"Beyond my dreams?" He threw back his big, bright head, laughing
+happily. "Did any man alive ever succeed beyond his dreams? Why, I used
+to dream of being President, and I guess I shan't be President this
+side of the Great Divide, shall I? But I made money, if that's what you
+mean. Why, I have a million to-day to every dollar I had when I was
+twenty. Do you mind my smoking? I can't talk unless I've got hold of a
+cigar."
+
+While he struck a match, she noticed with surprise how very neat and
+orderly he was about the ashes of his cigars, which lay in an exact gray
+heap in the massive bronze ash-tray. What a pity, she thought, moved by
+a feeling of compassion, that he had had no advantages!
+
+"I'll tell you how I got on," he pursued after a minute, leaning forward
+with the cigar in his hand--it was a good cigar, she knew from the smell
+of it. "Do you see this room?"--he glanced proudly about him--"do you
+know why I keep this place even when I am in the West?" She shook her
+head, and he went on with a kind of half-ashamed, whimsical tenderness:
+"Well, a man lived here once you never heard of--a common Irishman--just
+a common Irish politician--the Tammany sort, just the sort the
+newspapers are so down on. I guess he wasn't strong on civic morality as
+they call it, and the social conscience and all the other new-fashion
+catchwords, but he found me out there in the snow one night selling
+newspapers without any overcoat, and he brought me in and gave me one of
+his. He was a little fellow--not big as the Irish usually grow--and I
+could wear his clothes, though I wasn't thirteen at the time. The coat
+wasn't an old one, either," he explained with retrospective complacency;
+"no, sirree, he had just bought it, and he made me take it off after I'd
+tried it on and sit down at the table in that back room there--it's all
+just as he left it--and eat supper with him--the best supper I ever had
+in my life before or since, you may take my word for it. Then when I'd
+finished he gave me a dollar and told me to go out and rent a bed--" He
+broke off, glanced about the room with the pride of ownership, and added
+softly: "Who'd ever have thought on that night that this place would one
+day belong to me?"
+
+"Did you see him again?"
+
+"After that he never lost sight of me. He got me a room, he sent me to
+school--not that he thought much of education, the more's the pity--and
+when I was through with school he got me into the Mechanics' Institute,
+and gave me a job at engineering. But the job was too small for me, and
+so was New York--there ain't room enough here to get on without stepping
+on somebody's toes--and when I was twenty I set out to beat my way to
+Chicago, and went clean out to Arizona. That's a long story--I'll tell
+you that some day, for I've been everything on earth you can be in order
+to keep alive, and done pretty much everything you can do with two hands
+that will earn you a square meal. I've cut corn and ploughed fields, and
+greased wheels, and chopped wood, and mended machinery, and cleaned the
+snow away, and once out in some little town in Arizona, I even dug a
+grave because the sexton was down with pneumonia. I've been brakesman,
+and freightman, and, after that, freight agent. That was just before I
+struck it rich in Colorado. I was one of the first men at Bonanza City,
+and when I went there with the railroad--I was on the very first train
+that ever ran there--the whole town was just a row of miners' shacks
+near the foot of old Bonanza. It's the richest mineral streak in the
+State, and yet twenty-five years ago, before the C.A. & F.W. tapped it,
+there wasn't even a saloon out there at Bonanza. City. When you wanted a
+drink--and that didn't worry me, for I haven't tasted anything but water
+since I was twenty-five--you had to go all the way to Olympia to get it;
+and what was worse, all the ore had to go to Olympia, too, on a little
+no account branch road to be shipped over the main line. Well, as soon
+as I discovered Bonanza City I said that had to change, and it did
+change. I guess I did as much to make that town as any man out there,
+and to-day I own about two thirds of it. I've got a house on Phoenix
+Avenue, and I gave the town a church and a theatre and the ground for a
+library. We've got one of the handsomest churches in the State," he
+proclaimed with his unconquerable optimism, "and we've just begun
+growing. Why, in ten years more Bonanza City will be in the race with
+Denver."
+
+"And what about your friend?" she asked, finding it difficult to become
+enthusiastic over the most progressive town in Colorado, a State which
+she always pictured imaginatively as a kind of rocky desert, inhabited
+by tribes of gregarious invalids, which one visited for the sake of the
+scenery or the climate, when one had exhausted the civilized excitements
+of Europe.
+
+"I am coming back to him," he responded with a manner of genial
+remonstrance. "You just give me time. But I'd honestly like you to see
+Bonanza City. Why, it would take your breath away if I told you it
+hadn't even begun to grow twenty years ago. You people in New York don't
+know what progress means. Why, out there in Bonanza City we do things
+while you're thinking about doing them. But to come back to
+Barney--that was his name, Barney McGoldrick--after I made my pile out
+of Bonanza, I used to strike here once in a while to see how he was
+getting along, and when he died I took these rooms just as he left 'em.
+There wasn't a chick or a child to come after him, but he had a string
+of pensioners as long as the C.A. & F.W. His money--it must have been
+half a million--all went to charity, but I kept on in the rooms."
+
+"What kind of man was he?" she asked, sincerely interested.
+
+"What kind?" He pondered the question with deep puffs of his cigar.
+"Well, do you know, I don't believe, to save my life, I could tell you.
+The more you know of men, and of women, too, for they're all alike, the
+more you understand, somehow, that you can't judge unless you've been
+right in the other man's place--unless you know exactly what they've had
+to pull up against and how hard they have pulled. Now, if I was drawing
+my last breath, and you asked me what I thought of Barney McGoldrick,
+I'd be obliged to answer that he was the best man I ever knew, though
+there are others in this town, I guess, and the newspapers among 'em,
+who would tell you that he was--" He broke off abruptly, and she waited
+without speaking, until he solaced himself with his cigar, and went on
+less boisterously: "It's a downright shame, isn't it, that the same man
+can't manage to corner all the virtues. I can't explain how it is, but
+I've noticed that the virtues don't seem able to work along peaceably in
+one another's company, for if they did, I guess we'd have pure saints or
+pure sinners instead of the mixed lot we've got to make a world out of.
+I've seen a man who wouldn't have lied or stolen to save his wife from
+starving, and who was the first in the pew at church every Sunday, grind
+the flesh and blood out of his factory girls until they were driven into
+the streets, or crush the very life out of the little children he put to
+work in his mills. Yes, and I've seen a tombstone over him with 'I know
+that my Redeemer liveth' carved an inch deep in the marble. Well, Barney
+wasn't like that, but he had his weaknesses, and they were the kind
+people don't raise marble tombstones over. I never had a taste for
+politics myself, but it seems to be like any other weakness, and to drag
+a man a little lower down if it once gets too strong a hold on him. It's
+all right, of course, if you keep it in moderation, but there's precious
+few chaps, particularly if it's in their blood, and they're Irish, who
+can keep the taste under control. Barney was the most decent man to
+women I ever knew. He wouldn't have hurt one for a million dollars, in a
+factory or out of it, and he was faithful to his old wife up to the day
+of her death and long after. He grieved for her till he died, and I
+don't believe any woman ever asked his help without getting it. His
+private life was absolutely clean, but his public morality--well, I
+guess that wasn't exactly spotless. At any rate, they had an
+investigation--there was a committee of citizens appointed to sit in
+judgment on his record. The chairman was a pillar of the church and a
+public benefactor; he had led every political reform for a generation;
+and I happened to know that he kept two mistresses up somewhere in the
+Bronx, and his wife, who was old and ugly, wore herself to a shadow
+because he neglected her. Mark you, I'm not upholding Barney, but, good
+Lord! ain't it queer how easy men get off when they just sin against
+women and not against men or against the State?"
+
+"It's all queer." She rose from the leather chair, and held out her
+hand. "I'm glad I came in, Mr. O'Hara. Some day you must tell me the
+rest."
+
+"The rest?" His embarrassment had descended upon him, and he was
+awkwardly stammering for words, with her cool hand in his grasp. As long
+as his enthusiasm had lasted he had talked fluently and naturally, swept
+away from his self-consciousness; but with the return of the formal
+amenities he became as ill at ease and shy as a boy. "There ain't
+anything more except that we're building a railroad out there, and I'm
+going back to finish it next spring if I'm alive."
+
+The September breeze entered from the dim stretch of yard, under the
+waving elm boughs, and in an instant the room was filled with the
+fragrance of mignonette.
+
+"But you won't be if you never get your dinner," she retorted, as she
+smiled brilliantly. Then, turning quickly, she crossed the threshold,
+and went down the hall to the staircase.
+
+She was tremendously excited, and while she mounted the stairs she felt
+that she had not been so alive, so filled with energy since her girlhood
+in Richmond. It was as if a closed door into the world had been suddenly
+flung open, and she knew that she had passed beyond the narrow paths of
+convention into the sunny roads and broad fields of vision. In a moment
+of enlightenment she saw deeper and farther than she had ever dreamed
+of seeing before. "It teaches one not to judge," she thought, with a
+stab of self-reproach, "it teaches one not to judge others until one
+really knows." Twice before to-night, on the day when she resolved for
+the sake of Jane's children to go to work, and again on the June evening
+when George returned to her, she had felt this sudden quickening of
+life, this magical sense of the unexplored mystery and beauty of the
+world that surrounded her. But she had been very young then, and on that
+June evening she had been deeply in love. To-night, she assured herself,
+there was no touch of personal romance. In some inexplicable way the
+talk with O'Hara had renewed her broken connection with her Dream, and
+she felt closer in sympathy to Arthur than she had been able to feel for
+months. No, this awakening was utterly different from the awakening of
+love, for it shed its illumination not on a single person, but on the
+whole of humanity. O'Hara had moved her, not as a man, but as a force--a
+force as impersonal as the wind or the sea, which had swept her
+intellect away from its anchorage in the deeps of tradition. She had
+thought herself free, but she understood now that she had never really
+broken away--that in spite of her struggles to escape, the past had
+still held her. To-night it was more than an awakening, it was a
+conversion through which she was passing, and she knew she could never
+again believe as she had believed a few hours ago, that she could never
+judge again as unintelligently as she had judged yesterday. "So that is
+a man's world," and then with a rush of impulse: "What a mean little
+life I have been living--what a mean little life!" For she really knew
+nothing of life except dressmaking; she was familiar with no part of it
+except the way to Dinard's. She had been living a little life, with
+little standards, little creeds, little compromises. And yet, though the
+personality of O'Hara had enlarged her vision of the world, it had not
+altered her superficial view of the man. She still saw him outwardly at
+least without the glamour of romance--she still thought of him as
+boisterous, uneducated, slangy--but she was beginning almost
+unconsciously to distinguish between the faults of manner and the faults
+of character; she was beginning to be tolerant.
+
+From Fanny's open door a humming voice floated out to her, and going
+inside, she found the girl, in a new frock, practising a dance step
+before the mirror. "This is the lame duck, mother, but it's different
+from the one we danced last year."
+
+"Yes, dear, it's very pretty." Stopping before the dressing-table,
+Gabriella frowned on the photograph of a young man in a silver frame--a
+young man with a fascinating smile and inane features.
+
+"Fanny, where did you get this?"
+
+"Oh, mother, I didn't mean you to see it. I meant to put it away."
+
+"Where did you get it?"
+
+"He sent it to me. I wrote and asked him for it, and it has his
+autograph. Isn't he handsome? That's just the way he looked in 'Stolen
+Sweets' last winter."
+
+"Well, he looks like a calf, I think," returned Gabriella severely. "I
+suppose you may keep it out until you get tired of it, but please try to
+be sensible, Fanny." Though she spoke jestingly, she was secretly
+disturbed by the discovery of the photograph. "If she were not pretty,
+it wouldn't matter," she thought, "but she is so pretty that almost any
+man might be tempted to begin a flirtation. Thank Heaven, she didn't
+take a fancy to Mr. O'Hara. That would have been a calamity." For, in
+spite of the fact that she had become personally reconciled to O'Hara,
+she was as firmly resolved as ever to keep Fanny out of his sight. "You
+know so many nice boys, dear," she resumed after a minute, "that I think
+you might be content to let actors alone."
+
+"But boys are so stupid, mother." Fanny's tone was withering in its
+disdain. "They are wrapped up in sports, and I despise sports."
+
+"Then you oughtn't to tease them as you do. You're too young to have
+fancies."
+
+"I am sixteen."
+
+"Well, that is much too young for anything of that sort. I like you to
+have boy friends, but I don't like you to be foolish. What has become of
+that attractive boy, Carlie's brother? He doesn't come here any more,
+and I'm afraid you've hurt his feelings."
+
+"Oh, mother," hummed Fanny to the music of the lame duck as she
+practised before the mirror, "how can you really hurt a man?"
+
+The next morning when Gabriella, in a Parisian gown of black taffeta and
+one of the absurdly small hats of the autumn, started for Dinard's, she
+found herself thinking, not of Fanny's flirtation, but of her long talk
+with O'Hara. She cast a friendly glance on the golden-oak hatrack as she
+passed--for O'Hara had risen in her regard since she had discovered that
+he had not selected the furniture on the first floor--and then stopping
+for a few moments on the front steps, she closed her eyes, and inhaled
+the fragrance of the mignonette in the window box. The yard was
+brilliant in the early sunshine; and at the gate she saw the wife of the
+caretaker, who had looked after the flowers in her absence. Detaining
+the woman by a gesture, she joined her in the street, and the two
+started together to walk the long blocks that stretched to Fifth Avenue.
+
+"You are going home early to-day, Mrs. Squires."
+
+"Yes, ma'am; it's Johnny's birthday and I promised to take him up to the
+Bronx. Mr. O'Hara had his breakfast at seven, and I got through earlier
+than usual. He is so tidy that there ain't much to do except to dust
+around a little."
+
+She was a neat, red-faced woman, in rusty mourning for a child she had
+lost in the early summer, and while she talked, Gabriella felt an
+irresistible impulse to question her about O'Hara. "She has known him
+for thirty years, and I can find out more from her than I could discover
+for myself in six months," she thought; but she only said indifferently:
+
+"You've worked at this house a long time, haven't you?"
+
+"For thirty years--ever since I came here at eighteen as housemaid to
+Mr. McGoldrick. My husband was coachman for Mr. McGoldrick, you know--he
+drove the prettiest pair of bays in New York--and that was how I met
+him. When we married, Mr. McGoldrick set us up, and John drove his
+carriage for him as long as he lived. I often wonder what the old
+gentleman would think of everybody having automobiles. They were just
+beginning to come into fashion when he died."
+
+"You knew Mr. O'Hara then?"
+
+"Oh, yes, he was a great deal with Mr. McGoldrick. After he went West we
+didn't see much of him for a time--that was while he was making his
+money. Then he came back and brought his wife to a place here to be
+treated--"
+
+"His wife?"
+
+"Didn't you know? She died a few years ago, but before that he used to
+keep her with some doctor over on Long Island, and he went regularly to
+see her every Sunday afternoon as long as she lived."
+
+"What was the matter?"
+
+"Drugs. Drugs and drink, too, they said, though I never knew for certain
+about that. But they couldn't do anything with her. They tried all the
+cures anybody ever heard of, and she went back every time. No sooner
+would one thing fail, however, than Mr. O'Hara would hear of something
+or other over in Europe, and make them begin trying it. Finally for the
+last ten or twelve years she was quite out of her mind--clean crazy they
+said, and didn't know anybody. But he still went to see her every Sunday
+when he was staying in town, and he still made the doctors go on trying
+new things. He never gave up till the very last. Mr. McGoldrick used to
+say of him that he was the sort that would go on hoping in hell."
+
+"Who was she? Where did he meet her?"
+
+"God only knows. He never would say much about her even to Mr.
+McGoldrick, but John always stuck it out that she was never the right
+sort in the beginning, and that Mr. O'Hara got tangled up with her
+somewhere in a mining town out West, and couldn't get out. I've heard
+she was a chambermaid or a barmaid or something in a miners' hotel, but
+I don't know, and nobody else knows, for Mr. O'Hara never opened his
+mouth about her. All we know positive is that she must have been a drug
+fiend long before he ever married her, and that he stuck to her for
+better or for worse until she died and was buried. Some men are like
+that, you know, a few of 'em. When a thing once belongs to 'em, no
+matter what it is or how little it's worth, they'll go through fire and
+water for the sake of it--and it makes no difference whether it's a
+woman or a railroad or a dog or a mine. They've got the sense of
+responsibility like a disease. You see, Mr. O'Hara is that sort, and you
+might as well try to turn a steam roller as to start to reason him out
+of a notion. It would have been as easy as talking for him to have got a
+divorce. Time and again Mr. McGoldrick used to go after him about it,
+and talk himself hoarse; but it didn't do any good, not a particle.
+Instead of getting free out there in the West where it was easy, he kept
+on lugging that crazy woman back and forth, trying to cure her long
+after everybody else had given up hope and was wishing that she was
+dead."
+
+"Well, I suppose he loved her."
+
+"No, ma'am, that's the funny part, but it didn't look like love to
+me--not like what men call love, anyway. If it had been love, it would
+have worn itself out long ago. Who on earth could love a crazy, yellow,
+shrieking, cursing creature like that? I saw her sometimes when he'd
+send me to take things down to her, and I tell you it wasn't love--not
+man's love, anyhow--that made him do what he did."
+
+"Then it must have been something finer even than love," Gabriella
+acquiesced after a moment. "It's strange, when we come to think of it,
+how often we find spirituality in places where we'd never expect it to
+be."
+
+"I don't know that I'd call Mr. O'Hara spiritual exactly," replied Mrs.
+Squires thoughtfully. "I don't believe he ever puts his foot inside a
+church, and I've heard him swear when he got ready till you'd expect the
+roof to drop in on you, but when you come to think of it," she
+concluded, "I guess there's a good deal of religion floating around
+outside of walls."
+
+At the next corner they parted, and as the caretaker stopped to shake
+hands with Gabriella and thank her for a birthday present for Johnny,
+she added nervously: "I hope I haven't said anything that I oughtn't to
+have said, Mrs. Carr. Mr. O'Hara has been as good as gold to me, and I
+shouldn't like him to hear I'd been talking about him."
+
+"He shan't hear, I promise you"; and while Mrs. Squires hurried,
+reassured, to her home in Sixth Avenue, Gabriella walked briskly with
+the crowd which was streaming along Twenty-third Street into Broadway.
+
+A week ago she would scarcely have noticed the people about her. For ten
+years she had gone every morning to her work through the streets, and
+she had felt herself to be as aloof from the masses as the soaring
+skyscraper at the corner of Broadway. The psychology of the crowd had
+not touched her; even when she walked with it, when she made a part of
+it, she had felt herself to be detached from its purposes.
+
+To-day, however, a change had come over her, and she was happy with a
+large and impersonal happiness which seemed to belong less to herself
+than to the throng which surged about her and gathered her in. Her
+little standards, her little creeds, had become a part of the larger
+standards and creeds of humanity. In Broadway, moving onward with the
+other workers who were returning to the day's work, she was aware of an
+invisible current of joy which flowed from the crowd into her thoughts
+and through her thoughts back again into the crowd. For the first time
+she was feeling and thinking in unison with the multitude.
+
+That night, when she sat alone with Miss Polly, she said to her
+suddenly:
+
+"I believe I was wrong to wish Archibald not to see anything of Mr.
+O'Hara. Yesterday we had a long talk, and I think he must have some very
+fine traits."
+
+"Maybe," replied Miss Polly, a little snappishly. "I never could see
+what set you so against him, Gabriella."
+
+"Oh, he is dreadfully slangy, and, of course, he isn't educated. I
+suppose if I mentioned Hamlet to him, he'd think I was talking about
+some town in Oklahoma."
+
+"Well, I reckon he's been his own Hamlet," retorted Miss Polly; "and
+knowing about Hamlet don't make a man, anyhow. George knew all about
+Hamlet, but it didn't make him easy to live with."
+
+"Yes, that's just it. What did George's advantages do for him? I used to
+think it was love that mattered most," she said musingly after a pause,
+"and then, when love failed, I began to think it was culture. But I see
+now that it is something else. Do you ever wonder what the essential
+thing really is, Miss Polly?"
+
+"No, I never wonder," responded Miss Polly tartly, "but when you stew it
+down to the bones, I reckon it's just plain character."
+
+"Yes, if you can't have both culture and character, of course character
+is the more important. But think how much that man might have made of
+the university training that was wasted on George." While she spoke
+there came back to her in snatches a conversation she had had with an
+Englishman on the boat last summer, and she remembered that he had
+alluded to Judge Crowborough as "a man of the broadest culture." Surely
+the "broadest culture" must include character, and yet she could feel
+even now the casual and business-like clasp of the judge, she could see
+again the admiring gleam in his small, fishy eyes. "After all, I suppose
+it is a kind of spiritual consciousness that makes character," she said
+aloud, "and you can't train that into a man if he isn't born with it."
+
+"It seems to me that Mr. O'Hara has done mighty well, all things
+considered," pursued Miss Polly, and she inquired suspiciously: "Did
+Mrs. Squires ever tell you anything about his marriage?"
+
+"I met her this morning on my way to work, and she told me about it."
+
+"Well, what do you make of it? Don't it beat anything you ever heard?"
+
+"It does. There's not the slightest doubt of it. And, do you know,"
+Gabriella went on hurriedly, "that story made a remarkable impression on
+me--I've been thinking about it ever since. It made me see everything
+differently, and I've even asked myself if I had enough patience with
+George. If I wasn't too hard and intolerant with him in the beginning?"
+
+"I shouldn't worry about that, honey, because I don't believe it would
+have made any difference if you'd been gentler. It's the stuff in a man,
+I reckon, that counts more than the way a woman handles him. You
+couldn't have saved George any more than that other woman could ruin the
+man downstairs."
+
+"Perhaps not." Rising from her chair, Gabriella drew the pins from the
+smooth, close coil of her hair. "But I see things so differently since I
+had that talk with Mr. O'Hara. I am glad to have him for a friend," she
+added generously, "but of course I still feel the same about Fanny. I
+hope he won't begin to notice Fanny."
+
+"Well, he won't. He ain't thinkin' about it. I declare, Gabriella," the
+little woman went on with a change of tone, "your head don't look much
+bigger than a pincushion with your hair fixed that way. It makes you
+seem mighty young, but there ain't many women that could stand it."
+
+"It's the fashion in Paris. I have to be smart. Do you suppose many
+people guess that I wear extreme styles," she added laughingly, "because
+they are so hard to sell?"
+
+"You certainly do look well in 'em. I never saw anybody with more
+natural style. Why, you can put on those slouchy things without a piece
+of corset and look as if you'd just stepped out of a fashion plate."
+
+"When you aren't pretty, you're obliged to be smart."
+
+"Well, of course you never had the small features and pink and white
+colouring that Jane had; but you always had a way of your own even as a
+girl, and you're handsomer now than you ever were in your life. If you
+were to ask Mr. O'Hara, I bet you he'd say you were a heap better
+lookin' than Fanny."
+
+A gasp broke from Gabriella, and she turned from the mirror to stare
+blankly at the seamstress. "Mr. O'Hara! Why, what in the world made you
+think of him?"
+
+But Miss Polly had grown suddenly impenetrable. "Oh, nothin'," she
+responded evasively; "I've just seen him look at you both when you were
+together."
+
+Gabriella laughed brightly. "Oh, he looks at everything. I never saw
+such eyes."
+
+There was the note of accomplishment, of success, in her voice, and she
+brushed her fine, soft hair with long, vigorous strokes which had in
+them something of this same quality of unwavering confidence. To look at
+her as she sat, relaxed yet dominant, before the glass, was to recognize
+that she was a woman who had achieved the purpose of her life, who had
+succeeded in whatever she had undertaken. Not a great purpose,
+perhaps--there were hours when her purpose seemed to her to be
+particularly trivial--but still, great or small, she had accomplished
+it. She was not only directing Dinard's now--she _was_ Dinard's. Without
+her the business would collapse like a house of cards, and it was
+because she knew this, because Madame also knew this, that she had been
+able to perfect the arrangements she had planned that May afternoon
+after her depressing visit to Judge Crowborough. For she managed the
+house of Dinard's now by an arrangement which gave her one third of the
+profits; and in the last six months, since this scheme had gone into
+effect, the business had grown tremendously in certain directions. The
+millinery department, for instance, which Madame had once treated with
+such supercilious disdain, had become to-day the most fashionable hat
+shop in Fifth Avenue. The work was hard, but the returns were wonderful;
+and with a strange gloating, she told herself that she was making
+money--always more money for the children. "When Fanny finishes school
+year after next, we'll take a large apartment in Park Avenue, and spend
+every summer in Europe," she concluded.
+
+In the morning she rather expected to see O'Hara, but a month passed
+before she met him one evening in October, when she came home late from
+work. The autumn rains had come and gone, destroying the fugitive bloom
+of Miss Polly's flower-beds, and scattering the leaves of the elm tree
+in a moist, delicately tinted carpet over the grass. An hour ago the sun
+had set in a purple cloud, and beneath the electric lights, which shone
+through the fog with a wan and spectral glimmer, the dark outlines of
+the city assumed an ominous vagueness. There was no light in the house;
+and the deserted yard, silvered from frost and strewn with dead leaves,
+which lay in wind-drifts along the flagged walk, had the haunted aspect
+of a place where youth and happiness have passed so recently that the
+fragrance of them still lingers.
+
+"Archibald went off to school without telling you good-bye," she said in
+a friendly voice. "He was much disappointed."
+
+Stopping in the walk, he looked at her with unaffected surprise.
+
+"Why, I thought that was what you wanted!"
+
+She met this quite honestly. "Not after I talked to you."
+
+"What in thunder did I say to change your opinion of me?" The strong
+west wind blowing around him and lifting the roughened red hair from his
+forehead, appeared to lessen by contrast the breezy animation of his
+manner.
+
+"It wasn't anything you said," she answered simply. "I found out you
+were different from what I thought, that is all."
+
+"Then you must have thought something!" he laughed aloud.
+
+"I was afraid at first that you might have a bad influence over
+Archibald."
+
+"Oh, the kid!" His mirth was as irrepressible as his energy.
+
+"You see I have to be very careful," she went on gently. "I want to do
+my best by him."
+
+At this he turned on her with sudden earnestness. "You can't do your
+best by being too careful--take my word for it. If you want him to be a
+man, don't begin by making a mollycoddle of him. Let him rough it a bit,
+or it will be twice as hard for him when he grows up."
+
+"But I do--I do. I am sending him away from me. Isn't that right?"
+
+"You bet it is. Let him learn his own strength. I've lived among men
+ever since I was born, and I tell you, nine times out of ten, the boy
+who is tied to his mother's apron-strings, loses his grip when he is
+turned out into the world. At the first knock-down he goes under."
+
+Instinctively she flinched. If only he wouldn't!
+
+"After he leaves school of course he will go to the university," she
+said.
+
+"That's right," he agreed emphatically, and pursued a little wistfully:
+"Now, that's what I was cheated out of, and there've been times when I'd
+have given my right arm to have been through college instead of having
+to keep my mouth shut and then run home and look up the meaning of
+things in an encyclopædia. It's a handicap, not knowing things. Nobody
+who hasn't had to get along in spite of, it knows what a darned handicap
+it is!"
+
+"But you read, don't you?"
+
+"Not much. Never had time to form the habit. But I've read
+Shakespeare--at least I've read Julius Cæsar six times," he explained.
+"I had it in the desert once where there wasn't a newspaper for two
+months. And I've read the Kings, too--most of 'em."
+
+"But not Hamlet?" She was smiling as she looked from him into the
+street.
+
+He shook his head with a laugh. "Too much meandering in that. I don't
+like talk unless it is straight."
+
+Though he was upon the most distant terms of acquaintance with the
+English language, it occurred to her that he probably possessed a
+knowledge of men and things which no university training could have
+given him.
+
+"It is wonderful," she remarked, touched to sympathy by his confession,
+"that you should have succeeded."
+
+"Oh, any man could have done it--any man, that is, who loved a fight as
+much as I do. It was half luck and half bulldog grip, I suppose. When I
+once get my grip on a thing, I'll hold on no matter what happens. There
+ain't the power this side of Kingdom Come that could make me let go if I
+don't want to."
+
+She thought of his wife, of his losing fight against the craving for
+morphine, and she replied very gently: "If you hadn't been a good
+fighter, I suppose you would have been beaten long ago."
+
+"So long ago," he retorted with jovial humour, "that you wouldn't have
+known me."
+
+An impulse of curiosity urged her to an utterly irrelevant response. "I
+wonder if you have known many women?" She felt that she should like to
+hear his story from him, there in the deserted yard; but when he
+answered her, he revealed a personal reticence worthy of the
+aristocratic traditions of Mrs. Carr. "Oh, I haven't had time for them,"
+he replied indifferently.
+
+"Perhaps there aren't so many in Bonanza City?"
+
+"Oh, there're plenty," he rejoined gaily, "if you take the trouble to
+look for them."
+
+"And you didn't?" They had entered the house, and she spoke merrily as
+she crossed to the staircase.
+
+"Well, the sort I found didn't take my fancy, you see!" he tossed back
+playfully from his door.
+
+Her foot was on the lowest step, when, hesitating with a birdlike
+movement, she looked at him over her right shoulder.
+
+"Well, that's a pity. A woman could have told you a good many things,"
+she observed.
+
+"For instance?" He was still jesting.
+
+Poised for flight, she gazed back at him, challenging his eyes.
+
+"Oh, not to collect gold-headed walking-sticks, not to believe in
+golden-oak, and not to be so extravagantly--slangy."
+
+As she ran up the staircase, a burst of laughter followed her in the
+midst of which she distinguished the retort: "Well, I own to the slang,
+but I inherited the oak, and the sticks were all given me--by women."
+
+The temptation to fling back, "of a sort?" came to her; but she
+conquered it as she passed demurely into the sitting-room, where Miss
+Polly was reading the afternoon paper before an open fire. "I mustn't
+get too friendly," she told herself, reprovingly. "It is better to keep
+up a certain formality." And she determined that at the next meeting she
+would be dignified and aloof.
+
+But the next meeting did not occur until January, for O'Hara went West
+the following day, and for more than two months Miss Polly and Gabriella
+were alone in the house. Though she was working doubly hard at Dinard's,
+the loneliness of the winter evenings after the Christmas holidays were
+over became almost intolerable to Gabriella; and the bleak month of
+January stretched ahead of her in an interminable prospect of cold and
+gloom. For the past ten years the children had absorbed her life, after
+her working hours, so entirely that the parting from them had been an
+unbearable wrench, and had left her with an aching feeling as if an arm
+had been cut away. She had had little time to make friends; the streets
+of the city isolated her as completely as if they had been spaces of
+uninhabited wilderness; and, except for her casual remarks to Miss
+Polly, she had lived from day to day without speaking a word that was
+not directly concerned with the management or the sales of Dinard's.
+Since her divorce, obeying perhaps some inherited tradition, she had
+avoided men almost instinctively; and even if she had cared to make
+friends among them, her life was so narrow that it would have been
+almost impossible for her to do so. When she was not too tired, she
+still read as widely as she could; but at thirty-seven books had become
+but a poor substitute for the more robust human activities. As the
+theatres and the lecture rooms offered the only opportunities of
+relaxation and amusement, she went twice a week, accompanied by the
+little seamstress, who appeared to thrive on self-sacrifice, to see a
+play that was noticed in the papers, or to listen to explanatory
+descriptions of the scenery of South America or the grievances of the
+oppressed natives of Asia.
+
+"You mustn't let yourself mope, honey," urged Miss Polly, one snowy
+morning in January, when Gabriella was putting on a fur coat, cut in the
+latest fashion, which had been left on her hands after the mid-winter
+sales. "The children had to go sooner or later, and it's just as well it
+happened while you are young enough to get over it. A boy never stays at
+home anyway, and you know I always told you Fanny was the sort to marry
+before she is out of her teens."
+
+"Oh, I'm not moping, but of course I can't help missing them. The house
+seems so empty."
+
+"It's obliged to be empty with only us two women in it. I declare I got
+such a creepy feelin' about burglars last night that I kept wishin' Mr.
+O'Hara would hurry up and come home. Mrs. Squires says she was expectin'
+him all last week, but he didn't turn up, so she is kind of lookin' for
+him to-day."
+
+"Is she?" Gabriella's voice was charged with sincere thankfulness.
+Merely to know that there was a man on the first floor afforded a sense
+of security; and an occasional meeting with him would make, she was
+aware, a trivial diversion from the monotony of her existence. The
+loneliness of the winter had driven her like a storm-swept bird back to
+the enduring refuge of her Dream; but, after all, the flesh and blood
+presence of O'Hara could not seriously interfere with the tender and
+pensive visions her memory spun of the past. Every morning, standing
+beside her window and gazing on the bleak street and the bare elm
+boughs, she thought of Arthur and of her first love, with a pious and
+reverent mind--for they occupied in her day the hour and mood which her
+mother, belonging to a more orthodox generation, piously dedicated to
+"Daily Strength for Daily Need." But never for an instant would it have
+occurred to the granddaughter of that sanctified snob, Bartholomew
+Berkeley, who despised the lower orders and fraternized with the Deity
+in his pulpit every Sabbath, that the red-blooded and boisterous
+O'Hara--the man of force and slang--could by any accident usurp the
+sacred shrine where the consecrated relics of her first love reposed.
+Before the whirlwind of O'Hara's energy, she would congratulate herself
+that her Arthur, with the milder fluid of the Peytons in his veins,
+would never allow himself to be carried away by his impulses.
+
+"Well, I'm glad he's coming back, if it's only to protect us," she said,
+while she fastened her fur coat. "I wonder what he has been doing out
+West all this time?"
+
+"Makin' money, I reckon. They say he makes so much he don't know what to
+do with it."
+
+"We could teach him, couldn't we? But he ought to marry and let his wife
+spend it for him. Only," she concluded carelessly, "I suppose he'd
+select some dizzy chorus girl who would bring him to ruin. Men of his
+kind always pick out chorus girls, don't they?"
+
+"I thought 'twas the other sort that did that," observed Miss Polly,
+fresh from the perusal of the Sunday newspapers; "Dukes and society men
+and the sons of millionaires."
+
+"Perhaps. Maybe they're all alike," and taking up her umbrella,
+Gabriella started bravely out into the storm.
+
+At six o'clock, when she struggled back along Twenty-third Street, the
+wind had changed, and the storm driving furiously down the long blocks
+caught her in a whirl of blinding snowflakes. In the swirling whiteness
+of the distance, the black outlines of the city appeared remote and
+shadowy, while the waning lights, which shone like dim moons at the
+crossing, revealed the ghostly figures of a few struggling pedestrians.
+
+The gate was open, and she had almost reached it, when the lurching form
+of a man, emerging suddenly from the storm, was flung against her with
+such violence that she fell back for support on the icy railing of the
+yard. Then, as the obscure figure, drawing away from her with a
+staggering motion, began fumbling blindly at the gate, she caught sight
+of a ghastly face, which looked as if it had been stricken by an
+incurable illness. The man wore no overcoat; a knitted muffler was
+wrapped tightly about his neck; and she saw that the hands fumbling at
+the gate were red and trembling from cold.
+
+Steadying herself against the fence, she drew her purse from her muff,
+and she had already taken out a piece of silver, when she heard her name
+called in a voice which sounded vaguely familiar, though it awoke no
+immediate associations in her mind.
+
+"Gabriella! My God! I was looking for you, Gabriella!"
+
+With the money still in her hand, she stooped to look into his face.
+
+"You don't know me. I'm George," he said in an angry voice as if he were
+about to burst into tears. "I'm George, but you don't know me."
+
+The storm drove him against her, and he clung weakly to her arm, crying
+softly in a terrified whimper like a child that is awaking from a
+horrible nightmare. Though she did not realize that he was dying, not of
+disease, but of drink, the thought shot through her mind: "So this is
+George. So this is what George has come to--George who took everything
+that he wanted!"
+
+"Where are you going?" she asked, for the shock had restored him to some
+poor semblance of sanity.
+
+"I was looking for you. I heard you lived down here, and I knew you'd
+take me in. I've been ill--I'm ill enough to die, and they turned me out
+of the hotel. There was a woman who stole everything I had. She stole it
+and ran off in the night, damn her!"
+
+He shivered violently while he spoke, and she saw a glassy look creep
+into his eyes and over his face, as if his features had been frozen in
+an instant of terror. Panic seized her lest he should die there in the
+street, and she grasped his arm almost roughly as if she would shake him
+back into life. As she supported him his teeth began to rattle, not as
+the teeth of the living chatter from fear, but as the teeth of a dead
+man might rattle when he is jolted in his coffin. For a minute she felt
+the madness of her panic pass from her pulses to her brain, and her
+terror of him turned her as cold as the sleet-covered iron railing
+against which she leaned. A cowardly impulse tempted her to desert him
+and run for her life, to seek shelter behind bolted doors, to leave him
+there alone to freeze to death at her gate.
+
+"Gabriella, I'm afraid," he whined, clinging to her arm. "I'm afraid,
+Gabriella. You can't let go of me!"
+
+An unspeakable loathing swept over her; his very touch seemed
+contamination; and while she turned toward the gate, she knew that
+every fibre of her flesh, every quiver of her nerves, revolted against
+the thing she was doing. But something stronger than her flesh or her
+nerves--the vein of iron in her soul--decided the issue.
+
+"Come in with me, and I'll take care of you," she said. "There is the
+step. Don't stumble. Here, steady yourself with the umbrella. We are
+almost there now." Her voice was cold and hard; but the words were those
+she might have used to Archibald had she been leading him in out of the
+storm.
+
+Still whimpering and stumbling, George clung to her with his desperate
+clutch, while she dragged him up the short walk, which was deep in snow,
+to the six steps, which appeared to her to reach upward into eternity.
+As she approached the house, a light shone out suddenly in one of the
+windows and a sense of safety, of perfect security descended upon her,
+for she knew that it was the red glimmer of O'Hara's fire. With the
+sensation, she heard again her mother's voice speaking above the storm:
+"Gabriella, we'll send immediately for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn!" So, in
+the old days of her childhood, Cousin Jimmy had brought her this feeling
+of relief in the midst of distress.
+
+Opening the door with her latchkey, she dragged George into the hall,
+where her thankful eyes fell on O'Hara's overcoat, from which the water
+was, still dripping. For an instant she was tempted to call to him; then
+checking the impulse, she went on to the staircase, which she ascended
+with difficulty because George's legs seemed to give way when he tried
+to lift them to a step. At last, after what she felt to be an eternity,
+they reached the upper floor, and she pushed her burden into
+Archibald's room, where he fell like a log on the hearthrug. The sound
+of his fall shook the house, and when Miss Polly came running in, with a
+cry of alarm, Gabriella almost expected to see O'Hara behind her. But
+O'Hara did not come, and before the seamstress could recover from the
+palpitations the shock had produced, George was on his feet again, and
+was staring blankly, as if fascinated, at the reflection of the electric
+light in the mirror.
+
+"It's George," Gabriella explained in a harsh voice. "I found him in the
+street. He was looking for me, and I couldn't leave him to freeze. I
+think he's either drunk or ill. I don't know which it is, but it sounds
+like pneumonia."
+
+"God have mercy!" exclaimed Miss Polly, which was quite as lucid as she
+ever became in a crisis. Her face had turned blue, she was trembling
+with terror, and the violence of her palpitations almost exceeded the
+painful sounds in George's chest. "If there was only a man we could send
+for," she wailed hysterically. "Oh, Gabriella, if there was only a man!"
+
+"Well, there's the doctor," replied Gabriella shortly. "You'd better
+telephone for him at once. Get the nearest one. I think his name is
+McFarland."
+
+"And a nurse? You'll want a nurse, won't you?"
+
+"I'll want anything I can get, and I'll want it quickly. There, hurry,
+while I find a bathrobe of Archibald's. He's wet through--soaking wet.
+He must have been out all day in the storm."
+
+Miss Polly vanished into the dimness of the hall, and after a few
+minutes Gabriella heard her fluttering voice demanding a telephone
+number as if she were still supplicating the Deity.
+
+"Take off your wet clothes while I get you a drink and some hot
+blankets!" said Gabriella when she had found one of Archibald's
+bathrobes in the closet. It occurred to her that George was really
+incapable of undressing himself, but she felt that she would rather die
+than touch him again. The loathing which had overpowered her outside in
+the storm became stronger in the close air of the house. "I can't touch
+him. I don't care what happens I can't touch him," she told herself,
+while she placed the flannel robe on the rug, and hurried back to the
+kitchen. Her whole body was benumbed and chilled, not from cold, but
+from disgust, yet her mind was almost unnaturally active, and she found
+herself thinking over and over again: "So this is the man I loved, this
+is the man I married instead of Arthur!"
+
+When she came back with a cup of broth and some hot blankets, she found
+George in the flannel gown of Archibald's, with his wet clothes on the
+floor at his feet, from which he had forgotten to remove his shoes. He
+drank the soup greedily, while Miss Polly lighted the wood-fire she had
+laid in the open grate.
+
+"The heat's comin' up all right in the radiator," she said, "but I
+thought a blaze might make him more comfortable."
+
+"Yes, it's better," replied Gabriella sternly, while she stooped to
+unlace George's boots. There was no compassion in her heart, and it
+seemed to her, while she struggled with the wet lacing, that the fumes
+of whiskey spread contagion and disease over the room. She was not only
+hard and bitter--she felt that she loathed him with unspeakable
+loathing.
+
+"I declare, Gabriella, I believe he has gone deranged!" Miss Polly
+cried out sharply, dropping the poker and starting to her feet in an
+erratic impulse of flight.
+
+With the flannel gown clutched tightly to his chest, where the dull
+rattling sounds went on unceasingly, George was staring in fascinated
+intensity at the reflection of the electric light in the mirror. Then
+suddenly, with a scream of terror, he lifted the poker Miss Polly had
+dropped, and flung it over Gabriella's head in the direction of the
+dressing-table. At the noise of breaking glass, Gabriella rose from her
+knees, and said in the hard, quiet voice she had used ever since the
+first shock of the meeting:
+
+"If you are afraid, lock yourself in your room, Miss Polly. I am going
+downstairs for Mr. O'Hara."
+
+Without waiting for a response, she ran out into the hall and down the
+staircase, while her eyes clung to the comforting glimmer of light under
+the drawing-room door. As her feet touched the lowest step, the door
+opened quickly, and O'Hara stood on the threshold.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE TEST
+
+
+"I knew something was wrong," he said, emerging, big and efficient, from
+the firelight, "and I was just coming up." Before she could answer she
+felt his warm grasp on her hands, and it seemed to her suddenly that it
+was not only her hands he enfolded, but her agonized and suffering mind.
+
+"There's a man up there--" she faltered helplessly. "I was once married
+to him long ago--oh, long ago. Just now I found him in the street and he
+seems to be out of his mind. We are frightened."
+
+But he seemed not to hear her, not to demand an explanation, not even to
+wait to discover what she wanted. Already his long stride was
+outstripping her on the staircase, and while she followed more slowly,
+pausing now and then to take breath, she realized thankfully that the
+situation had passed completely away from her power of command. As Miss
+Polly's strength to hers, so was her strength to O'Hara's.
+
+Faint, despairing moans issued from Archibald's room as she reached the
+landing; and going inside, she saw George wrestling feebly with O'Hara,
+who held him with one hand while with the other he waved authoritative
+directions to Miss Polly.
+
+"Get the bed ready for him, with plenty of hot blankets. He's about at
+the end of his rope now. It's a jag, but it's more than a jag, too. If
+I'm not mistaken he's in for a case of pneumonia."
+
+Miss Polly, hovering timidly at a safe distance, held out the blankets
+and the hot water bottles, while O'Hara carried George across the room
+to the bed, and then covered him warmly. When he turned to glance about
+his gaze fell on Gabriella, and he remarked bluntly: "You'd better get
+out. You aren't wanted."
+
+"But I am obliged to be here. It is my business, not yours," she
+replied, while a sensation of sickness passed over her.
+
+For a moment he regarded her stubbornly, "Well, I don't know whose
+business it was a minute ago," he rejoined, "but it's mine now. I am
+boss of this particular hell, and you're going to keep out of it. I
+guess I know more about D.T. than you and Miss Polly put together would
+know in a thousand years."
+
+She was very humble. In the sweetness of her relief, of her security,
+she would have submitted cheerfully not only to slang, but to downright
+profanity. It was one of those unforgettable instants when character,
+she understood, was more effective than culture. Even Arthur would have
+appeared at a disadvantage beside O'Hara at that moment.
+
+"I think I ought to help you," she insisted.
+
+"Well, I think you oughtn't. Out you go! I guess I know what I'm up
+against."
+
+Before she could protest, before she could even resist, he had pushed
+her out into the hail, and while she still hesitated there at the head
+of the staircase, the door opened far enough to allow the huddled figure
+of Miss Polly to creep through the crack. Then the key turned in the
+lock; and O'Hara's voice was heard pacifying George as he might have
+pacified a child or a lunatic. After a few minutes the shrieks stopped
+suddenly; the door was unlocked again for a minute, and there floated
+out the reassuring words:
+
+"Don't stand out there any longer. It's as right as right. I've got him
+buffaloed!"
+
+"What does he mean?" inquired Gabriella helplessly of the seamstress.
+
+"I don't know, but I reckon it's all right," responded Miss Polly. "He
+seems to know just what to do, and anyhow the doctor'll be here in a
+minute. It seems funny to give him whiskey, don't it, but that was the
+first thing Mr. O'Hara thought of."
+
+"I suppose his heart was weak. He looked as if he were dying," answered
+Gabriella. "He asked for more whiskey, didn't he?"
+
+"Yes; I'm goin' right straight to get it. Oh, Gabriella, ain't a man a
+real solid comfort sometimes?"
+
+Without replying to this ejaculation, Gabriella went after the whiskey,
+and when she came back with the bottle in her hand, she found the doctor
+on the landing outside the locked door. He was a stranger to her, and
+she had scarcely begun her explanation when O'Hara called him into the
+room.
+
+"The sooner you take a look at him the better." Everything was taken out
+of her hands--everything, even her explanation of George's presence in
+her apartment.
+
+As there was nothing more for her to do, she went back to the
+sitting-room, where a fire burned brightly, and began to talk to Miss
+Polly.
+
+"I don't know what I should have done if he hadn't been here," she
+said.
+
+"Who? Mr. O'Hara? Well, it certainly was providential, honey, when you
+come to think of it."
+
+The door of Archibald's room opened and shut, and the doctor came down
+the hall to the telephone. They heard him order medicines from a chemist
+near-by; and then, after a minute, he took up the receiver, and spoke to
+a nurse at the hospital. At first he gave merely the ordinary
+directions, but at the end of the conversation he said sharply in answer
+to a question: "No, there's no need of a restraining sheet. He's too far
+gone to be violent. It is only a matter of hours."
+
+His voice stopped, and Gabriella went out to him. "Will you tell me what
+you think, Doctor?" she asked.
+
+"Is he your husband?" He had a blank, secretive face, with light eyes,
+and a hard mouth--so different, she thought from the poetic face of Dr.
+French.
+
+"I divorced him ten years ago."
+
+He looked at her searchingly. "Well, he may last until morning, but it
+is doubtful. His heart has given out."
+
+"Is there anything I can do?"
+
+"No. Morphine is the only thing. We are going to try camphorated oil,
+but there is hardly a chance--not a chance." He turned to go back into
+the room, then stopped, and added in the same tone of professional
+stoicism: "The nurse will be here in half an hour, and I shall wait till
+she comes."
+
+When Gabriella went back to the sitting-room, Miss Polly was weeping. "I
+followed you and heard what he said. Oh, Gabriella, ain't life too
+awful!"
+
+"I'll be glad when the nurse comes," answered Gabriella with impatience.
+Emotionally she felt as if she had turned to stone, and she had little
+inclination to explore the trite and tangled paths of Miss Polly's
+philosophy.
+
+The nurse, a stout, blond woman in spectacles, arrived on the stroke of
+the half-hour, and after talking with her a few minutes, the doctor took
+up his bag and came to tell Gabriella that he would return about
+daybreak. "I've given instructions to the nurse, and Mr. O'Hara will sit
+up in case he is needed, but there is nothing to do except keep the
+patient perfectly quiet and give the hypodermics. It is too late to try
+anything else."
+
+"May I go in there?"
+
+"Well, you can't do any good, but you may go in if you'd rather."
+
+Then he went, as if glad of his release, and after Gabriella had
+prevailed upon Miss Folly to go to bed, she changed her street dress for
+a tea-gown, and threw herself on a couch before the fire in the
+sitting-room. An overpowering fatigue weighed her down; the yellow
+firelight had become an anodyne to her nerves; and after a few minutes
+in which she thought confusedly of O'Hara and Cousin Jimmy, she let
+herself fall asleep.
+
+When she awoke a man was replenishing the fire, and as she struggled
+drowsily back into consciousness, she realized that he was not Cousin
+Jimmy, but O'Hara, and that he was placing the lumps of coal very softly
+in the fear of awaking her.
+
+"Hallo, there!" he exclaimed when he turned with the scuttle still in
+his hand; "so you're awake, are you?"
+
+She started up. "I've been asleep!" she exclaimed in surprise.
+
+"You looked like a kid when I came in," he responded cheerfully, and she
+reflected that even the presence of death could not shadow his jubilant
+spirit. "I went back to the kitchen to make some coffee for the nurse
+and myself, and I thought you might like a cup. It's first-rate coffee,
+if I do say it. Two lumps and a little cream, I guess that's the way. I
+rummaged in the icebox, and found a bottle of cream hidden away at the
+back. That was right, wasn't it?"
+
+A strange, an almost uncanny feeling of reminiscence, of vague yet
+profound familiarity, was stealing over her. It all seemed to have
+happened before, somewhere, somehow--the slow awakening to the large
+dark form in the yellow firelight, O'Hara's sudden turning to look at
+her, his exuberance, his sanguine magnetism, and even the cup of coffee
+he made and brought to her side. She felt that it was the most natural
+thing in the world to awake and find him there and to drink his coffee.
+
+"It's good," she answered; "I had no dinner, and I am very hungry."
+
+"I thought you'd be. That's why I brought a snack with it." He was
+cutting a chicken sandwich on the tray he had placed under the green
+shaded light, and after a minute he brought it to her and held the cup
+while she ate. A nurse could not have been gentler about the little
+things she needed; yet she knew that he was rough, off-hand,
+careless--she could imagine that he might become almost brutal if he
+were crossed in his purpose. She had believed him to be so simple; but
+he was in reality, she saw, a mass of complexities, of actions and
+reactions, of intricacies and involutions of character.
+
+"I don't know what I should have done if you hadn't been here," she said
+gratefully while she ate the sandwich and he sat beside her holding her
+cup. "But I'm so unused to being taken care of," she added with a
+trembling little laugh, "that I don't quite know how to behave."
+
+"Oh, you would have got on all right," he rejoined carelessly; "but I'm
+glad all the same that I was here."
+
+She motioned toward the hall. "Has there been any change?"
+
+"No, there won't be until morning. He'll last that long, I think. We're
+giving him a hypodermic every four hours, but it really ain't any good,
+you know. It is merely professional." For a minute he was silent,
+watching her gravely; then recovering his casual manner, he added: "I
+shouldn't let it upset me if I were you. Things happen that way, and
+we've got to take them standing."
+
+She shook her head. "I'm not upset. I'm not feeling it in the least.
+Somehow, I can't even realize that I ever knew him. If you told me it
+was all a dream, I should believe you."
+
+"Well, you're a plucky sort. I could tell that the first minute I saw
+you."
+
+"It's not pluck. I don't feel things, that's all. I suppose I'm hard,
+but I can't help it."
+
+"Hard things come useful sometimes; they don't break."
+
+"Yes, I suppose if I'd been soft, I should have broken long ago," she
+replied almost bitterly.
+
+After putting the plate and cup aside, he sat down by the table, and
+gazed at her attentively for a long moment. "Well, you look as soft as a
+white rose anyhow," he remarked with a curiously impersonal air of
+criticism.
+
+A rosy glow flooded her face. It was so long since any man had commented
+upon her appearance that she felt painfully shy and displeased.
+
+"All the same I've had a hard life," she returned with passionate
+earnestness. "I married when I was twenty, and seven years later my
+husband left me for another woman."
+
+"The one in there?"
+
+She shuddered, "Yes, the one in there."
+
+"The darn fool!" he exclaimed briefly.
+
+"There was a divorce, and then I had my two children to support and
+educate. Because I had a natural talent for dressmaking, I turned to
+that, and in the end I succeeded. But for ten years I never heard a word
+of the man I married--until--I met him downstairs--in the street."
+
+"And you brought him in?"
+
+"What else could I do? He was dying."
+
+"Do you know what he was doing out there?"
+
+"He was looking for me, I think. He thought. I would take him in."
+
+"Well, it's strange how things work out," was his comment after a pause.
+"There's something in it somewhere that we can't see. It's impossible to
+reason it out or explain it, but life has a way of jerking you up at
+times and making you stand still and think. I know I'm putting it badly,
+but I can't talk--I never could. Words, don't mean much to me, and yet I
+know--I know--" He hesitated, and she watched his thought struggle
+obscurely for expression. "I know you can't slip away from things and be
+a quitter, no matter how hard you try. Life pulls you back again and
+again till you've learned to play the game squarely."
+
+He was gazing into the fire with a look that was strangely spiritual on
+his face, which was half in shadow, half in the transfiguring glow of
+the flames. For the second time she became acutely aware of the hidden
+subtleties beneath his apparent simplicity.
+
+"I've felt that myself often enough," he resumed presently in a low
+voice. "I've been pulled up by something inside of me when I was
+plunging ahead with the bit in my teeth, and it's been just exactly as
+if this something said: 'Go steady or you'll run amuck and bu'st up the
+whole blooming show.' You can't talk about it. It sounds like plain
+foolishness when you put it into words, but when it comes to you, no
+matter where you are, you have to stand still and listen."
+
+"And is it only when you are running amuck that you hear it?" she asked.
+
+"No, there've been other times--a few of them. Once or twice I've had it
+come to me up in the Rockies when there didn't seem more than a few feet
+between me and the sky, and then there was a time out on the prairie
+when I was lost and thought I'd never get to the end of those darned
+miles of blankness. Well, I've had a funny road to travel when I look
+back at it."
+
+"Tell me about some of the women you knew in the West." An insatiable
+curiosity to hear the truth about his marriage seized her; but no sooner
+had she yielded to it than she felt an impulsive regret. What right had
+she to pry into the hidden sanctities of his past?
+
+A frown contracted his forehead, but he said merely: "Oh, there wasn't
+much about that," and she felt curiously baffled and resentful. "I think
+I'll go and take a look in there," he added, rising and walking softly
+in the direction of the room at the end of the hall.
+
+He was gone so long that Gabriella, crushing down the revolt of her
+nerves, went to the door, and opening it very gently, looked cautiously
+into the room. The window was wide open to the night, where the snow was
+still falling, and beside the candlestand at the head of the bed the
+nurse was filling a hypodermic syringe from a teaspoon. By the open
+window O'Hara stood inhaling the frosty air; and Gabriella crossed the
+floor so silently that he did not notice her presence until he turned to
+watch the nurse give the injection.
+
+Then he said in a whisper: "You'd better go out. You can't do any good."
+But she made an impatient gesture of dissent, and stopping between the
+bed and the wall, waited while the nurse bared George's arm and inserted
+the point of the needle. He was lying so motionless that she thought at
+first that he was already dead; but presently he stirred faintly, a
+shiver ran through the thin arm on the sheet, and a low, half-strangled
+moan escaped from his lips. Had she come upon him in a hospital ward,
+she knew that she should not have recognized him. He was not the man she
+had once loved; he was not the father of her children; he was only a
+stranger who was dying in her house. She could feel nothing while she
+looked down at him. When she tried to remember her young love she could
+recall but a shadow. That, too, was dead; that, too, had not left even a
+memory.
+
+As she bent there above him she made an effort to remember what he had
+once been, to recall his face as she had first seen it, to revive the
+burning radiance of that summer when they had been lovers. But a gray
+veil of forgetfulness wrapped the past; and her mind, when she tried to
+bring back the emotions of seventeen years ago, became vacant. For so
+long she had stoically put the thought of that past out of her life,
+that when she returned to it now, she found that only ashes remained.
+Then a swift stab of pity pierced her heart like a blade, and she saw
+again, not George her lover, not George her husband, but the photograph
+Mrs. Fowler had shown her of the boy in velvet clothes with the wealth
+of curls over his lace collar. So it was that boy who lay dying like a
+stranger in the bed of his son!
+
+She turned hurriedly and went out without speaking, without looking back
+when she opened the door.
+
+"If one could only understand it," she said aloud as she entered the
+sitting-room; and then, with a start of surprise, she realized that
+O'Hara had followed her. "You walked so softly I didn't hear you," she
+explained.
+
+"The rugs are thick, and I have on slippers. My boots were soaking when
+I came in, and I'd just taken them off when you called."
+
+They sat down again in front of the fire; and while she stared silently
+at the flames, with her chin on her hand and her elbow on the arm of the
+chair, he burst out so unexpectedly that she caught her breath in a
+gasp:
+
+"You didn't know that I was married, too, did you?" His words, and even
+more than his words, his voice, filled with suppressed emotion, awoke
+her from her reverie in which she had been dreaming of Arthur.
+
+She smiled evasively, remembering her promise to Mrs. Squires.
+
+He hesitated again, and then spoke with an effort. "Well, it was hell!"
+he said grimly.
+
+"I know"--she was very gentle, full of understanding and sympathy--"but
+you went through it bravely."
+
+"I stuck to her." His hand clenched while he answered. Then, after a
+pause in which she watched him struggle against some savage instinct for
+secrecy, he added quietly: "If she were alive to-day, I'd be sticking to
+her still."
+
+"You must have loved her." It was all she could think of to say, and yet
+the words sounded trite and canting as soon as she had uttered them.
+
+Lifting his head quickly, he made a contemptuous gesture of dissent.
+"No, it wasn't that. I never loved her, except, perhaps, just at the
+first. But there's something that comes before love, I guess. I don't
+know what it is, but there's something. It may be just plain doggedness,
+but after I married her there wasn't anything on top this earth that
+could have made me give up and let go. As soon as I found what I was up
+against--it was morphine--I knew I'd either got to fight it out or be a
+quitter, and I've never been a quitter. Until she got so bad she had to
+be shut up I kept a home for her out there in Colorado, and I lived with
+her in hell as long as she wasn't too bad to be out of a hospital. Then
+I brought her on here and we found a private place down on Long Island
+where she stayed till she died--"
+
+"And you still saw her?"
+
+"Except when I was out West, and that's where I was most of the time,
+you know. My work was out there, and there's nothing like hell behind
+you to keep you running. I made piles of money those years. That's all
+I ever cared for about money--just making it. I'd fight the devil to get
+it, but after I've once got it, I'll give it to the first fool who comes
+begging. But the getting of it is great."
+
+"How long did it last?"
+
+"My marriage? Going on eighteen years. She was down on Long Island for
+the last ten of them."
+
+"Then you lived with her eight. Was she always--always-"
+
+"Took it before I ever married her, and I found it out in a month. She
+wasn't so much to blame as you might think," he pursued thoughtfully.
+"You see she had a tough time of it, and she was little and weak, and
+everything was against her. She came out West first to teach school, and
+then she got mixed up with some skunk of a man who pretended to marry
+her when he had a wife living in Chicago, and after that I guess she
+went on taking a dope just to keep up her spirits and ease the pain of
+some spinal trouble she'd had since she was a child. There was nothing
+bad in her--she was just weak--and I began to feel sorry for her, and so
+I did it. If I had it to do over again, I'm not so sure I'd act
+differently. She was a poor little creature that didn't have any man to
+look after her, and I was just muddling along anyway, thinking about
+money. Heaven knows what would have become of her if I hadn't happened
+along when I did."
+
+He had lifted his head toward the light, while he ran his hand through
+his hair, and again she saw the look, so like spiritual exaltation,
+transfigure his face. Before this man, who had sprung from poverty and
+dirt, who had struggled up by his own force, overcoming and triumphing,
+fighting and winning, fighting and holding, fighting and losing, but
+always fighting--before this man, who had been born in a cellar, she
+felt suddenly humbled. Without friends, without knowledge, except the
+bitter knowledge of the streets, he had fought his fight, and had kept
+untarnished a certain hardy standard of honour. Beside this tremendous
+achievement she weighed his roughness, his ignorance of books and of the
+superficial conventions, and she realized how little these things really
+mattered--how little any outside things mattered in the final judgment
+of life. She thought of George, dying a drunkard's death in the room at
+the end of the hail--of George whose way had been smoothed for him from
+birth, who had taken everything that he had wanted.
+
+"I wish there was something I could do for you--something to help you,"
+she said impetuously. "But I never saw any one who seemed to need help
+so little."
+
+His face brightened, and she saw that her words had brought a touching
+wistfulness into his eyes.
+
+"Well, if you'd let me come and talk to you sometimes" he answered
+shyly. "There're a lot of things I'd like to talk to you about--things I
+don't know, things I do know, and things I half know."
+
+From the brilliant look she turned on him, he understood that he must
+have given her pleasure, and she saw the smile return to his face.
+
+"I'll tell you everything I know and welcome," she replied readily; "but
+that isn't much. Better than that, I'll read to you."
+
+"If you don't mind, I think I'd rather you'd just talk." Then he rose
+with one of his abrupt movements, "I'd better look in again now. The
+nurse might want something."
+
+"I feel that you oughtn't to stay up," urged Gabriella, rising as he
+turned away from her. "You have done all you can."
+
+His only response was an impatient negative gesture, and without looking
+at her, he crossed the room quickly and went out into the hall. Hardly a
+minute had passed, and she was still standing where he had left her,
+when he returned and said in a whisper:
+
+"He is going now--very quietly. Will you come?"
+
+She shook her head, crying out sharply: "No! no!" Then before something
+in his face her opposition melted swiftly away, and she added: "Yes,
+I'll come. He might like to have some one by him who knew him as he used
+to be."
+
+"After all, he got the worst of it, poor devil!" he answered gently as
+he opened the door.
+
+By a miracle of memory her resentment was swept out of her thoughts, and
+she was conscious of an infinite pity. In George's face, while she
+watched it, there flickered back for an instant the glory of that
+enchanted spring when she had first loved him. Of his brilliant promise,
+his ardent youth, there remained only this fading glimmer in the face of
+a man who was dying. And it seemed to her suddenly that she saw embodied
+in this wreck of youth and love all the inscrutable mystery not of
+death, but of life. Her tears fell quickly, and while they fell O'Hara's
+grasp enfolded her hand.
+
+"It's over now. The best thing that could happen to him has happened,"
+he said, and the touch of his hand was like the touch of life itself,
+consoling, strengthening, restoring.
+
+In the days that followed it was as if the helpful spirit of Cousin
+Jimmy had returned to her in the unfamiliar character of O'Hara. The
+ghastly details of George's burial were not only taken out of her hands,
+she was hardly permitted to know even that they were necessary. All
+explanations were made, not by her, but by O'Hara; and when they
+returned together from the cemetery, Gabriella brought with her a
+feeling that she had been watching something that belonged to O'Hara
+laid in the earth. But when she tried to thank him, she found that he
+was apparently unaware that he had done anything deserving of gratitude.
+
+"Oh, that's nothing. Anybody would have done it," he remarked, and
+dismissed the subject forever.
+
+For a week after this she did not see him again; and then one Saturday
+afternoon, when she was leaving Dinard's, they met by chance and walked
+home together. It was the first time she had been in the street with
+him, and she was conscious of feeling absurdly young and girlish--she,
+the mother of a daughter old enough to have love affairs! A soft
+flush--the flush of youth--tinted her pale cheek; her step, which so
+often dragged wearily after the day's work, was as buoyant as Fanny's;
+and her low, beautiful laugh was as gay as if she were not burdened by
+innumerable anxieties. As they passed a shop window, her reflection
+flashed back at her, and she thought happily: "Yes, it is true, you are
+better looking at thirty-seven, Gabriella, than you were at twenty."
+
+"Shall we walk down?" asked O'Hara, and added: "So that was your shop? I
+am glad that I saw it. But what do you do there all day?"
+
+She laughed merrily. "Put in pins and take them out again. Design,
+direct, scold, and flatter. We are getting in the spring models now,
+and it's very exciting."
+
+He glanced down at her figure, noting, as if for the first time, the
+narrowness at the feet, the large loose waist, and the bunchiness around
+the hips.
+
+"Did you make that?" he inquired.
+
+"This coat? Oh, no; it came from Paris. It was left on my hands," she
+explained, "or I shouldn't be wearing it. I wear only what people won't
+buy, you know."
+
+"No, I didn't know," he returned abstractedly, and she observed
+humorously after a minute that he was not thinking of her because he was
+thinking so profoundly about her clothes. It was his way, she had
+discovered, to concentrate his mind intensely upon the object before
+him, no matter how trivial or insignificant it might appear. He seemed
+never to have learned how to divide either his interest or his
+attention.
+
+"If you could make what you wanted," he remarked, "I should think you'd
+make them more comfortable. Are you going to wear those hobble skirts
+this spring?"
+
+"They'll be narrow at the feet but very bunchy at the top--doesn't that
+sound delightful? I am making a white taffeta for Fanny that has five or
+six yards of perfectly good material puffed out in the most ridiculous
+way at the back over a petticoat of silver lace."
+
+Her spirits felt so light, so effervescent, that she wanted to jest, to
+laugh, to talk nonsense interminably; and after his first moments of
+bewilderment, when he appeared still unable to detach his mind from his
+business, he entered gaily and heartily into her mood. His perplexities
+once disposed of, he gave himself entirely to the enjoyment of the walk
+with her, and she noticed for the first time his boyish delight in the
+simplest details of life. With the simplicity of a man to whom large
+pleasures are unknown, he threw himself whole-heartedly into the
+momentary diversion of small ones. Every person in the crowd, she
+discovered, excited his interest, and his humour bubbled over at the
+most insignificant things--at the grimace of a newsboy who offered him a
+paper, at the absurd hat worn by a woman in a motor car, at the
+expression of disgusted solemnity on the face of a servant in livery, at
+the giggles of an over-dressed girl who hung on the arm of an anemic and
+exhausted admirer. Never before had she encountered such vitality, such
+careless, pure, and uncalculating joy of life. There was a tonic quality
+in his physical presence, and while she walked at his side down Fifth
+Avenue she felt as if she were swept onward by one of the health-giving,
+pine-scented winds of Colorado. And she told herself reassuringly that
+only a man who had lived decently could have kept himself so
+extraordinarily young and exuberant at forty-five.
+
+The shop windows, particularly those displaying men's shirtings,
+enchanted him; and he stopped a moment before each one, while she
+yielded as obligingly as she might have yielded to a fancy of
+Archibald's, though she was aware that her son would have scorned to
+look into a window.
+
+"It's so seldom I get out on the Avenue, that's why I like it, I
+suppose," he remarked while they were surveying a festive arrangement of
+pink madras.
+
+She smiled up at him, and her smile, gay as it was, held a touch of
+maternal solicitude. Notwithstanding his bigness and his success and his
+forty-five years, there was something appealingly boyish about him.
+
+"It would be so easy to get out, wouldn't it?" she asked as they walked
+on again.
+
+"Well, there ain't much fun when you are by yourself."
+
+"But you know plenty of people."
+
+"Oh, yes, I know people enough in a business way, but that don't mean
+having friends, does it? Of course, I've men friends scattered
+everywhere," he added. "The West is full of 'em, but it's funny when you
+come to think of it--" He broke off, hesitated an instant, and then went
+on again: "It's funny, but I don't believe. I ever had a woman friend in
+my life--I mean a friend who wasn't just the wife of some man I knew in
+business."
+
+The confession touched her, and she answered impulsively: "Well, that's
+just what I want to be to you--a good friend."
+
+He laughed, but his eyes shone as he looked down on her. "If you'd only
+take the trouble."
+
+"It won't be any trouble--not a bit of it. After your goodness to me,
+how could I help being your friend?"
+
+Lifting her eyes she would have met his squarely while she spoke, but he
+was not looking at her--he appeared, indeed, to be looking almost
+obstinately away from her.
+
+"There wasn't anything in what I did," he responded in a barely audible
+voice, and she understood that he was embarrassed by her gratitude.
+
+"But there was something in it--there was a great deal in it," she
+insisted. It was so easy to be natural with a man, so easy to be candid
+and sincere when there was no question of sentiment, and, she thought
+almost gratefully of the elusive and mysterious Alice. The faintest
+suggestion of romance would have spoiled things in the beginning; but
+thanks to the hidden Alice, she might be as kind and frank as she
+pleased. Besides, she was nearly thirty-eight, and a woman of
+thirty-eight might certainly be trusted to make a friend of a man of
+forty-five.
+
+With this thought, over which the memory of Arthur brooded benevolently,
+in her mind, she said warmly: "It will make so much difference to me,
+too, having a real friend in New York."
+
+He turned to her with a start. "Do you mean that I could make a
+difference to you?"
+
+"The greatest difference, of course," she rejoined brightly, eager to
+convince him of his importance in her life. "I can't tell you--you would
+never understand how lonely I get at times, and now with the children
+away it is worse than ever--the loneliness, I mean, and the feeling that
+there isn't anybody one could turn to in trouble."
+
+For a minute he appeared to ponder this deeply. "Well, you could always
+come to me if you needed anything," he answered at last, and she felt
+intuitively that for some reason he was distrustful either of himself or
+of her. "I am not here very much of my time, but whenever I am, I am
+entirely at your service."
+
+"But that's only half of it." She was determined to reassure him. "A
+friendship can't be one-sided, can it? And it isn't fair when you give
+everything, that I should give nothing."
+
+His scruples surrendered immediately to her argument. "You give
+everything--you give happiness," he said--a strange speech certainly
+from the twilight lover of Alice. However, as she reasoned clearly
+after her first perplexity, men were often strange when one least
+expected or desired strangeness. At thirty-seven, whatever else life had
+denied her, she felt that it had granted her a complete understanding of
+men; and it was out of this complete understanding that she observed
+brightly after a minute:
+
+"Well, if you feel that way, we are obliged to be friends." At least she
+would prove by her frankness that she was not one of those foolish women
+who are always taking things seriously.
+
+"Yes, you give happiness. You scatter it, all over the place," he went
+on, groping an instant after the right words.
+
+"Cousin Jimmy used to say," she laughed back, "that I had a sunny
+temper."
+
+"That's it--that's what I meant," he replied eagerly; and she was
+impressed again by his utter inability to make light conversation. When
+he was once started, when he had lost himself in his subject, she knew
+that he could speak both fluently and convincingly; but she realized
+that he simply couldn't talk unless he had something to say. In order to
+put him at his ease again, she remarked with pleasant firmness: "Do you
+know there is something about you that reminds me of my Cousin Jimmy. It
+gives me almost a cousinly feeling for you."
+
+She had the air of expecting him to be interested, but he met it with
+the rather vague interrogation: "Cousin Jimmy?"
+
+"The cousin who always came to our help when we were in trouble. We used
+to say that if the bread didn't rise, mother sent for Cousin Jimmy."
+
+Though he laughed readily enough, she could see that his attention was
+still wandering. "I never had a cousin," he returned after a pause, "or
+a relation of any sort, for that matter."
+
+His voice was curiously distant, and she was conscious of a slight
+shock, as if she had run against one of the hard places in his
+character. "Well, I've done my best," she thought impatiently. "If he
+doesn't want to be friends he needn't be." Then, with a change of
+manner, she observed flippantly: "Sometimes one's relatives are useful
+and sometimes they're not." Really, he was impossibly heavy except in a
+crisis; and one could scarcely be expected to produce crises in order to
+put him thoroughly at his ease.
+
+As he made no response to her trite remark, she, also, fell silent,
+while they turned into Twenty-third Street, and began the long walk to
+Ninth Avenue. Once or twice, glancing inquiringly into his face, which
+wore a preoccupied look, she wondered if he were thinking of Alice.
+Then, as the silence became suddenly oppressive, she ventured warily in
+the effort to dispel it: "I hope you are not disturbed about anything?"
+
+"Disturbed?" He turned to her with a start. "No, I was only wondering if
+you knew how much your friendship would mean to me."
+
+It was out at last, and confirmed once more in her knowledge of men, she
+retorted gaily: "How can I know if you won't take the trouble to tell
+me?" After all, she reflected cheerfully, the education she had derived
+from George and Judge Crowborough, though lacking in the higher
+branches, was fundamentally sound. All men were alike in one thing at
+least--they invariably disappointed one's expectations.
+
+"I've been trying to tell you for a quarter of an hour," he answered,
+"and I didn't know how to put it."
+
+"But at last you didn't have to put it at all," she said laughingly; "it
+simply put itself, didn't it?"
+
+"I am still wondering," he persisted gravely.
+
+"Wondering if I know?" She spoke in the sweetly practical tone of one
+who is firmly resolved not to permit any nonsense. "Yes, I do know--that
+is, I know there are ways in which I might be useful to you."
+
+"For instance?"
+
+"Well, there are some little--some very little things I might tell you
+if we were friends--real friends," she made this plain, "just as two men
+might be."
+
+"But the very last things two men would tell each other," he was
+laughing now, "are the little things--the things about slang and
+walking-sticks and oak furniture."
+
+So he hadn't forgotten! The recollection of her impertinence confused
+her, and she hastened to make light of it by protesting gaily: "I was
+only joking. Of course, you didn't take that seriously."
+
+"I don't know how much more seriously," he replied emphatically, "I
+could have taken it."
+
+"But you haven't thought of it since?"
+
+"What would you say if I told you I hadn't thought of anything else?"
+
+"Then I wish I hadn't said it." She was obviously worried by his
+admission. "It was horrid of me--perfectly horrid. I ought to have been
+ashamed of myself. I had no right to criticise you, and you have been so
+heavenly kind."
+
+"After that"--he appeared to be hammering the idea into her mind--"I
+was so grateful I'd have done almost anything. Do you know," he burst
+out with evident emotion, "that was the first criticism--I mean
+downright honest criticism--I've ever had in my life. Nobody--that is
+nobody who knew--ever thought enough of me before to tell me where I was
+wrong."
+
+It was all a pathetic mistake, she saw, but she saw also that it was
+impossible for her to explain it away. She could not tell him the ugly
+truth that she had been merely laughing at him when he had believed, in
+his beautiful simplicity, that she was speaking as a friend. Though she
+felt ashamed, humbled, remorseful, there was nothing that she could say
+now which would not hurt him more than the original misunderstanding had
+done.
+
+In her desire to atone as far as possible, she remarked recklessly: "I
+only wish I could be of some real help to you."
+
+"You can," he answered frankly. "You can let me come to see you
+sometimes before I go West again."
+
+"You are going back in the spring?"
+
+He laughed happily, drawing himself erect with a large, free movement as
+if he needed to stretch his limbs. "I can't stand more than six months
+of the East, and I've been here a year now, off and on. After a time I
+begin to want air. I want to breathe."
+
+"Yet you lived here once."
+
+"A sort of life, yes, but that don't count."
+
+"What does count with you, I wonder?" She was smiling up at him, and as
+they passed under a street light her eyes shone with a misty brightness
+through her veil of dotted net.
+
+For a minute he thought over her question. "I guess fighting does," he
+answered at last. "Getting on in spite of hard knocks, and smashing
+things that stand in your way. I like the feeling that comes after
+you've put through a big deal or got the better of the desert or the
+mountains. I got joy in Arizona out of my first silver mine; but I
+didn't get the joy exactly out of the silver. I don't suppose you
+understand."
+
+"Oh, yes, I do. I understand perfectly. It's the pure spirit of
+adventure. Whenever we do a thing for the sake of the struggle, not for
+the thing itself, it's pure adventure, isn't it?"
+
+"Well, I like money," he said with the air of being entirely honest.
+"I'm not a romantic chap, don't think that about me. I care a lot about
+money, only after I've made it, somehow, I never know what to do with
+it. All I want for myself is a place to sleep and a bite to eat--I'm not
+over-particular what it is--and clothes to wear, good clothes, too--but
+I don't give a hang for motor cars except to go long distances in when
+there are no trains running."
+
+It was the commonplace problem, worked out in intricate detail, of the
+newly rich, of the uncultivated rich, of the rich whose strenuously
+active processes of enrichment had permanently closed all other highways
+to experience. Seventeen years ago the Gabriella of Hill Street would
+have had only disdain for the newly rich and their problems; but life,
+which had softened her judgment and modified her convictions, had
+completely reversed her inherited opinion of such a case as O'Hara's.
+Though he was as raw as unbaked brick, she was penetrating enough to
+discern that he was also as genuine; and, so radically had events
+altered her point of view, that at thirty-seven she found genuine
+rawness more appealing than superficial refinement. George had wearied
+her of the sham and the superficial, of gloss without depth, of manner
+without substance, of charm without character.
+
+"But there is so much that you might do to help," she said presently.
+"After all, money is power, isn't it?"
+
+"Misused power too often," he answered. "Of course, you can always build
+lodging-houses and tenements and hospitals; but when you come squarely
+down to facts, I've never in my life tried to help a man by giving him
+money that I haven't regretted it. Why, I've ruined men by helping to
+make their way too easy at the start."
+
+"Perhaps you're right," she admitted; "I don't know much about it, I
+confess; but I should have been spared a great deal of suffering if I
+had had something to start with when I was obliged to make my living."
+
+"That's different." His voice had grown gentle in an instant. "I can't
+think of your ever having had a hard time. You seem so strong, so
+successful, so happy."
+
+If she had answered straight from her heart, Gabriella would have
+retorted frankly: "A good deal of that is in the shape of my face and
+the way I dress," but instead of speaking sincerely, she remarked with
+impersonal cheerfulness: "Oh, well, happiness, like everything else, is
+mainly a habit, isn't it? I cultivated the habit of happiness at the
+most miserable time of my life, and I've never quite lost it."
+
+"But I don't like to think of your ever having worried," he protested.
+
+Of her ever having worried! Was he becoming dangerously sentimental or
+was it merely a random spark of his unquenchable Western chivalry?
+
+Though she told herself emphatically again that she was not falling in
+love with O'Hara, though she was perfectly faithful in her heart to the
+memory of Arthur, still she was vividly aware with every drop of her
+blood, with every beat of her pulses, of the man at her side. And
+through her magnetic sense of his nearness there flowed to her presently
+a deeper and clearer perception of the multitudinous movements of life
+which surrounded her--of the variable darkness out of which lights
+flashed and gigantic spectacular outlines loomed against a dim
+background of sky, of the vague shapes stirring, swarming, creating
+there in the darkness, and always of the pitiless, insatiable hunger
+from which the city had sprung. For the first time, flowing like a
+current from the mind of the man beside her, there came to her an
+understanding of her own share in the common progress of life--for the
+first time she felt herself to be not merely a woman who lived in a
+city, but an integral part of that city, one cell among closely packed
+millions of cells. Something of the responsibility she felt for her own
+children seemed to spread out and cover the city lying there in its
+dimness and mystery.
+
+"But I don't like to think of your ever having worried," he repeated.
+
+"Oh, it's over now," she returned, severely matter-of-fact. "It took me
+years to make my way, but I've made it at last, and I may settle down to
+a comfortable middle-age without the dread of the poorhouse to spur me
+into activity. My business is doing very well; our custom has doubled in
+the last two or three years."
+
+"But wasn't it a tough pull at one time?"
+
+"It was hard; but what isn't? Of course, when I was obliged to work from
+nine till six and then come home to cook the children's dinner and teach
+them their lessons, I used to be tired out by the end of the day--but
+that lasted only a few years: five or six at the most--and now I can
+afford to let Fanny wear imported gowns when she goes out to parties."
+
+Though she spoke gaily, making a jest of her struggle, she saw the
+gravity of his face deepen until his features looked almost wooden.
+
+"And through it all you kept something that so many other women seem to
+lose when they work for a living," he said. "You've kept your--your
+charm."
+
+Again she found herself on the point of exclaiming frankly: "heaven
+knows I've tried to!"--and again, checking herself, she proceeded
+cautiously: "I've never understood why charm should be merely a hothouse
+flower."
+
+"I suppose it does depend a good deal upon a sunny temper," he rejoined
+in his blindness.
+
+They had reached the gate, and stopping him when he would have entered,
+she said with the directness of a man: "So we're friends, and you're
+coming to see me?"
+
+"Yes, I'm coming," he replied gravely. Then, standing beside the gate,
+he watched her while she went up the walk and opened the door with her
+key.
+
+Upstairs, with her knitting on her lap and her feet on the fender, Miss
+Polly looked up to observe: "You're late, Gabriella. You must have
+walked all the way."
+
+"Yes, I walked all the way. Mr. O'Hara joined me."
+
+"Where did you run across him?"
+
+"Just as I left the shop. He was walking down Fifth Avenue."
+
+"Do you reckon he was waitin' outside?"
+
+"Oh, no, he said he had been up to Fifty-ninth Street on business."
+
+"Well, the walk certainly did you good. You are bloomin' like a rose."
+
+"The air was delicious, and I really like talking to Mr. O'Hara. He is
+quite interesting after you get over the first impression, and he isn't
+nearly so ignorant about things as I imagined. He has thought a great
+deal even if he hasn't read very much. It's wonderful, isn't it, what
+the West can do with a man? Now, if he'd stayed in New York he would
+have been merely impossible, but because he has lived out of doors he
+has achieved a certain distinction. I can understand a woman falling in
+love with him just because of his force and his bigness. They are the
+qualities a woman likes most, I think."
+
+"He must have made a great deal of money."
+
+"Yes, he's rich, and that's a good thing. I like money tremendously,
+though I used to think that I didn't. I wonder if he had been poor if I
+should have liked him quite so much?" she asked herself honestly.
+
+"I don't 'spose you could ever--ever bring yourself to think of him,
+honey? It would be a mighty good thing in some ways."
+
+Gabriella, being in a candid mood, pondered the question without
+subterfuge or evasion. "Of course I've passed the sentimental age," she
+answered. "If Mr. O'Hara had been poor, I suppose I should never have
+thought of him; but his money does make a difference. It stands for
+success, achievement, and ability, and I like all those qualities. Then
+he is rough in many ways, but he isn't a bit vulgar. He has genuine
+character. There is absolutely no pretence about him."
+
+"You could catch him in a minute," replied Miss Polly hopefully,
+animated by the inveterate match-making instinct of her class.
+
+Gabriella laughed merrily. "Oh, yes, I might capture him if I went
+questing for him. I am not a child. But put that out of your head
+forever, Miss Polly. I have given him clearly to understand that there
+must be no nonsense, though, for the matter of that, I doubt if he
+needed the warning. There is an Alice."
+
+"I reckon it would take more than an Alice to stand in the way if you
+wanted him," insisted the little seamstress, possessed by an obstinate
+conviction that fate could provide no happiness apart from marriage.
+
+"Perhaps. But you see I don't want him." Gabriella had become perfectly
+serious, and to Miss Polly's amazement a hint of petulance showed in her
+manner. "Everything of that kind was over for me long ago. I never think
+of love now, and if I did there wouldn't be but one--but one--"
+
+"I know, honey," agreed Miss Polly, suddenly softened, "and I'd give
+anything on earth if you and Arthur could come together again."
+
+"It wouldn't be any use. I made my choice, and I have had to abide by
+it. He could never forgive me--". She stopped as if she were choking,
+and Miss Polly said sympathetically:
+
+"Well, I wish he had a chance to, that's all. Why don't you run down to
+Richmond for a few days this spring to see your folks? Your ma and all
+would be so glad to see you, and it ain't as if you had the children to
+keep you back. The thing that worries me," she added with feeling, "is
+the thought of your spendin' the summer here without the children. If
+Archibald goes to camp from school and Fanny joins Jane at the White
+Sulphur Springs as soon as her school is out, you won't have them at
+all, will you?"
+
+"No, but they will be happy; that is the only thing that matters."
+
+"It seems all wrong to me. What do you get out of life, honey?"
+
+"What do any of us get out of it, dear little Miss Polly, except the joy
+of triumphing? It's overcoming that really matters, nothing else, and it
+is the same thing to you and to me that it is to the man downstairs. I
+am happy because in my little way I stood the test of struggle, and so
+are you, and so is Mr. O'Hara."
+
+"But you're young yet, and it ain't natural for you to live as you're
+doin'. Lots of women marry when they're older than you are."
+
+"Oh, yes, if they want to--"
+
+For a minute the little seamstress rattled her newspaper while she
+looked at her without replying. Then, after folding the paper, and
+removing her spectacles, she asked grimly: "Can you look me in the eyes,
+Gabriella, and tell me that you ain't still hankerin' after Arthur?"
+
+The blush of a girl made the business-like Gabriella appear as young and
+as piquantly feminine as her daughter.
+
+"No, Miss Polly, I cannot," she answered with incomparable directness;
+"I have loved Arthur all my life."
+
+"That's just what I thought all along, and yet you went off and married
+somebody else." Excited by the unexpected confession, Miss Polly was
+quivering with sympathy.
+
+In that supreme instant of self-revelation Gabriella answered this
+accusation as if it had been uttered by her remorseful conscience. "But
+that wasn't love," she said slowly; "it was my youth craving experience;
+it was my youth reaching after the unknown, the untried, the
+undiscovered. We all go questing for adventure one way or another, I
+suppose, but it was not the reality."
+
+"I wonder what is," said Miss Polly in a whisper; "I wonder what is,
+Gabriella?"
+
+"That," replied Gabriella softly, "is what I am still trying to
+discover."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE PAST
+
+
+It was the morning of Gabriella's thirty-eighth birthday, and she was
+standing, with her hat on, before the window of her sitting-room, gazing
+with dreaming eyes at the young leaves on the elm tree. The day's work
+was ahead of her, but for a little while, standing there by the open
+window, she gave herself, with a sense of pleasure, of abandonment, to
+the rare luxury of regret. Out of her whole year it was the one day
+when, for a few hours, she permitted herself to think sadly of the past
+and the future, when she cherished in her heart something of the gentle
+melancholy of her mother's retrospective philosophy.
+
+In the street, beyond the narrow yard, where the grass lay like a veil,
+there was a curious deadening of sounds, as if the traffic had become
+suddenly muffled in the languorous softness of spring. Out of this
+imaginary stillness floated the sharp twittering of sparrows and the
+bright laugh of a child at play in one of the neighbouring yards. Above
+the grim outlines of the city the sky shone divinely clear and blue,
+flecked by a single cloud, soft as an eagle's feather, which drifted in
+a mist of light above the horizon. The city, beneath that azure sky,
+borrowed the transparent brightness of an object that is imprisoned in
+crystal. White magic had transformed it for an hour, and the street,
+the houses, the shining elm tree, and the distant frowning brows of the
+skyscrapers, all seemed as unreal as the vivid yet impalpable images in
+a dream. And into this world of crystal there drifted, like the essence
+of spring, the dreamy fragrance from the window box filled with white
+hyacinths.
+
+While she stood there Gabriella thought pensively of many things. She
+thought of the day's work before her, of the gown she was designing for
+Mrs. Pletheridge, of Fanny's latest lover, the brother of a schoolmate,
+of the clothes she should send the child to the White Sulphur Springs,
+of her mother, and of Jane's eldest daughter, Margaret; and then very
+slowly, with the scent of the hyacinths drowning all merely prosaic
+memories, she began to think hopelessly and tenderly of Arthur Peyton.
+She thought of him as he had looked on the day when she had told him of
+her engagement of the sympathetic expression in his eyes, and of his
+beautiful manner, which she had felt at the time she could never forget.
+Well, after eighteen years she had not forgotten it. Compared with
+Arthur, all other men seemed to her as unreal as shadows. "How could
+Miss Polly imagine that I'd think of Ben O'Hara after a love like that?"
+she reflected indignantly.
+
+And then, perhaps because for a shadow he was so solidly substantial,
+she became aware that O'Hara's image was trespassing upon the hallowed
+soil of her reverie. To be sure, she had seen a great deal of him since
+George's death, when he had been so wonderfully considerate and helpful.
+Scarcely a day had passed since then that he had not brightened by some
+reminder of his friendship. They had spent long evenings together; and
+occasionally, accompanied by the delighted Miss Polly, they had gone to
+dinner at a restaurant and later to a concert or a play. That he had
+been almost too kind it was impossible for her to deny; but she had
+tried her best to repay him--she had, when one came to the point, done
+as much as she could to remedy the defects of his education. At first
+she had given zest, sympathy, eagerness, to her self-appointed task of
+making him over; then, as the months went by, a sense of doubt, of
+discouragement, of approaching failure, had tempered her enthusiasm, and
+at last she had realized that her work, except in the merest details,
+had been ineffectual and futile. The differences, which she had regarded
+as superficial, were, in reality, fundamental. It was impossible to make
+him over because he was so completely himself. He stood quite definitely
+for certain tendencies in democracy, and by no ingenious manipulation
+could she twist him about until he presented the sham appearance of
+moving in the opposite direction. For the logic of her failure was
+perfectly simple--he couldn't see, however hard he tried, the things she
+wanted him to look at. The difficulty was far deeper than a mere matter
+of finish, or even of education--for it was, after all, not one of
+manner, but of material. Day by day she had realized more clearly that
+the problem confronting them was one which involved their different
+standards of living and their individual philosophies. The things which
+she regarded as essential were to him only the accidental variations of
+life. He had lived so long in touch with the basic realities--with vast
+spaces and the stark aspect of desert horizons, with droughts, and
+winds, and the unquenchable pangs of thirst and hunger, with the vital
+issues of birth and death in their most primitive forms--he had lived so
+long in touch with the simplest and most elemental forces of Nature,
+that his spirit, as well as his vision, had adjusted itself to a
+trackless and limitless field of view. No, what he was now he must
+remain, since to change him, except in trivial details, was out of her
+power.
+
+And of course he had his virtues--she would have been the last to deny
+him his virtues. Whenever she applied the touchstone of character, she
+realized how little alloy there was in the pure gold of his nature. He
+was truthful, he was generous, he was brave, kind, and tolerant; but his
+virtues, like his personality, were large, flamboyant, and without
+gradations of colour. Custom had not pruned their natural luxuriance,
+nor had tradition toned down the violence of their contrasts. They were
+experimental, not established virtues, as obviously the expression of
+the man himself as was his uncultivated preference for red geraniums.
+For he possessed, she admitted, a sincerity such as she had not believed
+compatible with human designs--certainly not with human achievement.
+According to the code of the sheltered half of her sex--according to the
+inflexible code of her mother and Jane--he was not a gentleman. He
+lacked breeding, he lacked taste, he lacked the necessary education of
+schools; but in other ways, in ways peculiarly his own, she was
+beginning dimly to realize that he possessed qualities immeasurably
+larger than any superficial lack in his nature. In balance, moderation,
+restraint--in all the gracious attributes with which Arthur was endowed
+in her memory, in all the attributes she had particularly esteemed in
+the past--she understood that O'Hara would undoubtedly fall below her
+inherited standards. But, failing in these things, he had been able to
+command her respect by the sheer force of his character. Though he had,
+as he had confessed to her, gone down into hell, she could not talk to
+him for an hour without recognizing that he had never lost a natural
+chivalry of mind beside which the cultivated chivalry of manner appeared
+as exotic as an orchid in a hothouse. Even Arthur, she was aware, would
+have lied to her for her own good; but she would have trusted O'Hara to
+speak the truth to her at any cost. In this, as well as in his practical
+efficiency, and his crude yet vital optimism, he embodied, she felt, the
+triumphs and the failures of American democracy--this democracy of ugly
+fact and of fine ideals, of crooked deeds and of straight feeling, of
+little codes and of large adventures, of puny lives and of heroic
+deaths--this democracy of the smoky present and the clear future. "If
+this is our raw material to-day," she thought hopefully, "what will the
+finished and signed product of to-morrow be?"
+
+"Gabriella, ain't these lovely?"
+
+Whirling out of the sunshine, she saw Miss Polly holding a rustic basket
+of primroses and cowslips. "Mr. O'Hara wants to know if he may speak to
+you for a minute before you go out?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I'm not in a hurry this morning." Then Miss Polly disappeared
+and an instant later the vacant space in the doorway was filled
+exuberantly by O'Hara.
+
+"I wanted to be the first to wish you a happy birthday," he began, a
+little shyly, a little awkwardly, though his face was flushing with
+pleasure.
+
+"The flowers are wonderful!" For a minute, while she answered him, he
+seemed to be a part of the unreal intense brightness of the world
+outside--of that magic world where the elm tree and the grass and the
+sunny street were all imprisoned in crystal. He diffused a glowing
+consciousness of success, a sanguine faith in the inherent goodness of
+experience. For, as she had discovered long ago, O'Hara was one of those
+who stood not for the elimination of struggle, but for the complete
+acceptance of life. He had sprung out of ugliness, he had lived
+intimately with evil; and yet more than any one she had ever known, he
+seemed to her to radiate the simple, uncalculating joy of living. He was
+the strongest person she knew, as well as the happiest. He had never
+evaded facts, never feared a risk, never shirked an issue, never lacked
+the hardy, adventurous courage of battle. In his own words, life had
+never "found him a quitter."
+
+He stood in front of her now, fresh, smiling, robust, with his look of
+suddenly arrested energy, and the dark red of his hair, which was still
+moist from his bath, striking a vivid note against the cool grays and
+blues of the background. The sunshine, falling through the open window,
+warmed the ruddy tan of his face, and made his eyes like pools of clear
+light in which the jubilant spirit of the spring was reflected. "After
+all, it isn't what one does, it is what one is, that matters," she
+thought while she looked at him. "At the end, as Miss Polly said, it is
+character, not circumstances, that counts."
+
+"I've been all over New York this morning looking for that basket," he
+said. Though he had been so eager to make light of his services to her
+in her trouble, she was amused from time to time by a childlike vanity
+which prompted him to impress her with the value of small attentions;
+and this she was swift to recognize as the opposite of Arthur's
+delicacy. It was the only littleness she had observed in O'Hara so
+far--this reluctance to hide his smaller lights under a bushel--and in
+its place, it was amusing. Here was an obvious instance where nature
+unassisted by training appeared to fall short.
+
+"They couldn't be lovelier if you'd gone all over the world," she
+responded sincerely.
+
+Before answering her he hesitated a moment, and she watched pityingly
+the struggle he was making toward an impossible self-expression. The
+thing he wanted to say, the thing struggling so pathetically in the
+inarticulateness of his feeling, would not, she knew, be uttered in
+words.
+
+"You are the first woman I ever wanted to send flowers to," he said
+presently; and added with abject infelicity: "It's strange, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, it's strange," she assented pleasantly. Though his words were
+ineffectual, she was aware suddenly of a force before which she felt a
+vague impulse of flight. Now, if ever, she understood that she must keep
+their relations as superficial as she had always meant them to be--that
+she must cling with all her strength to the comfortable surface of
+appearances. "But you haven't had many women friends, have you?"
+
+"I've wanted to give other things," he went on hurriedly; "but not
+flowers. I never thought of flowers until I met you."
+
+"That's nice for me." She was growing nervous, and in her nervousness
+she precipitated the explosion by venturing rashly: "But there's Alice,
+too, isn't there, to like them?" Her voice was firm and friendly. Once
+for all she intended him to understand how aloof she stood from any
+sentimental advances.
+
+"Alice?" For an instant his response hung fire, enveloped in a fog of
+perplexity. Then, with an air of dispelling the cloud, he made a
+vigorous gesture of denial, and moved nearer to her with the swiftness
+and directness of a natural force. "Why, Alice was you! You were Alice
+all the time!" he exclaimed energetically.
+
+"You mean--" She checked herself in alarm, paralyzed the next instant by
+the tremendous, unexpected blow of her discovery.
+
+"So you thought there was somebody else!" The delight in his face kept
+her silent, amazed, incapable of explanation. His arm was still
+outstretched, as if he were brushing aside the last flimsy barrier
+between them, and his voice, with its unrestrained and radiant joy,
+stirred some faintly quivering echoes in the secret depths of her being.
+It was as if the jubilant spirit of spring had flowered suddenly in his
+look.
+
+"There wasn't anybody else." He came still nearer, and she stood there,
+startled, incredulous, powerless either to retreat or to prevent the
+inevitable instant that was approaching. "At least, there wasn't anybody
+I ever knew named Alice except a school teacher when I was a kid. She
+was good and she was pretty like you, and I used to dream about her
+after school, and every evening at dusk I would go out of my way to
+speak to her in Sixth Avenue. Once she told me that she'd wait for me to
+grow up and get rich so I could marry her, and after I went out to
+Arizona I used to think about her a lot. When I came on you suddenly,
+standing there in the dusk with your hands full of lilacs, it all came
+back to me because you, looked like her, with your dark hair and your
+tall slenderness. Then before I knew what I was, doing I called you by
+her name. I oughtn't to have done it," he finished ecstatically, "but
+I'm jolly glad now that I did."
+
+So he also, the man of action and of enterprise, he, the worker and the
+adventurer, so he also cultivated his garden of dreams!
+
+"I didn't know--I didn't know--" she found herself murmuring faintly in
+protest.
+
+"But you know now!" His voice rang out exultantly, and, though she felt
+that the thing she feared and dreaded was coming upon her, she still
+stood there without moving a step, without lifting a hand, mesmerized,
+enchanted, by the force of the man. "You know now," he repeated. "You
+know now, Gabriella, and you knew all along."
+
+It was true. In spite of her surprise, in spite of her shrinking, in
+spite of her evasion, she confessed it in her heart. She had known all
+the time. Something deep down in her, something secret and profound and
+clairvoyant, had discerned the truth from the beginning.
+
+"No! no!" she cried out sharply, for, mistaking her silence, he had
+stooped to her with the directness which impelled all his movements,
+which so easily brushed aside and discarded intervening encumbrances,
+and had kissed her on the lips.
+
+For an instant, in the merciless tenderness of his arms, her resistance
+melted from her. Beneath the crash of the storm she did not think, she
+did not struggle, she did not murmur. Her consciousness seemed
+suspended, and with her consciousness, her memory, her judgment, even
+her passionate unshaken loyalty to the love of her youth. Then, after
+the moment of weakness, of passive submission, it was as if her soul and
+body caught fire at a flash, and a quiver of anger ran through her,
+enkindling her glance and nerving her spirit.
+
+"But I do not love you! I never meant that I loved you!" she cried.
+
+At her words his arms dropped to his sides, and he stood as if turned to
+stone, with only his questioning eyes and the vivid red of his hair
+seeming alive. There was no need now for her to struggle. At her first
+movement to escape he had released her and drawn to a distance.
+
+"You don't love me?" he stammered. "Why, I saw it. I've seen it for
+weeks. I see it now in your face."
+
+"You see nothing--nothing." She denied it bitterly. "I liked you as a
+friend. I did not think of this. I never suspected it. I don't love you.
+I don't love you in the least."
+
+He was very still. The jubilant spirit of the spring had ebbed away from
+his look, and even in the height of her anger she was struck by the
+change in his face.
+
+"I don't believe you," he said gravely after a minute. "I don't believe
+you."
+
+"You must believe me. I don't love you. I have never thought of you
+except as a friend. I have loved another man all my life."
+
+Her voice rose accusingly, triumphantly, and so fervent was her look
+that she might have been repeating a creed. It was as if she hoped by
+convincing him to persuade her own rebellious heart of the truth she
+proclaimed.
+
+Now at last he understood. She had been lucid enough even for the
+crystalline lucidity of his thought.
+
+"I am sorry. I made a mistake," he said quietly, and after the exultant
+note of a few moments ago there was a dull level of flatness in his
+voice. "I am sorry. There don't seem to be anything else that I can say
+or do, but--but it wouldn't have happened if I had understood--" He
+paused, looked at her closely for a minute, and then added stubbornly,
+with an echo of the old confidence in his tone: "I still don't believe
+it."
+
+"It is true, nevertheless." She was trembling with indignation, and this
+indignation, in spite of her natural fairness, was not directed against
+herself, against her own blindness and folly. Though she knew that she
+was to blame, she was furious, not with herself, but with O'Hara. He had
+insulted her, and she resolved bitterly that she would never forgive
+him. Even now, whenever she was silent, she could still feel his kiss on
+her mouth, and the vividness of the sensation stung her into passionate
+anger. She was no longer the reasonable and competent Gabriella, who had
+so successfully "managed her life"; she was primitive woman in the grip
+of primitive anger; and balance, moderation, restraint, had flown from
+her soul. The very mystery of her feeling, its complexity, its
+suddenness, its remorselessness--these emotions worked together to
+deepen the sense of insult, of injury, with which she burned.
+
+"It is true, and you have no right to doubt it. You have no right." She
+caught her breath sharply, and then went on with inexcusable harshness:
+"Even if there hadn't been any one else, I should never--I could never
+in the world--"
+
+Her loss of self-control gave him an advantage, which he was either too
+generous or too stupid to perceive. "Well, forget all about it. I am
+going now," he answered quietly.
+
+While she watched him moving away from her, she was conscious of an
+inexplicable longing to stab him again more deeply before she lost him
+forever. It was intolerable to her that he should leave her while she
+was still indignant, that he should evade her just resentment by the
+natural cowardice of flight.
+
+"I can't forget it," she said; "how can you expect me to?"
+
+For an instant he seemed on the point of smiling. Then, turning, at the
+door, he walked back to where she was standing, and said gravely: "When
+I came in here it was to ask you to marry me, and, if it's the last word
+I ever speak, I thought you understood--that you knew how I felt. I was
+even fool enough to think you would be willing to marry me. That's all I
+can say. I haven't any other excuses."
+
+For the second time he went to the door, opened it, and then turning
+quickly, came back again. "I am not the sort to change, and I shan't
+change about this. You are a free woman, and if you ever feel that you
+made a mistake, if you ever want me or need me, you can just come to me.
+I shan't stop caring for you, and if you choose to come, I'll be
+waiting. I believed you were meant for me when I first saw you--and I
+believe it now. In spite of all you say, I am going to keep on believing
+it--"
+
+He went out, closing the door softly, and five minutes later, feeling
+extraordinarily young, she watched him pass through the gate, and walk
+as buoyantly as ever in the direction of Broadway. While she looked
+after him she wondered suddenly why novelists always dropped their
+heroines as soon as they passed twenty-seven? "If I'd been in a play,
+they'd have put me in the background, dressed in lavender, and made me
+look on and do fancywork," she thought humorously, "but this is real
+life, and I've just had a real love scene on my thirty-eighth birthday.
+He couldn't have been more romantic if I'd been Fanny," she mused with
+an agreeable complacency. "It's only in books and plays that people stop
+falling in love when they pass the twenties. I don't believe they ever
+stop in real life. I believe it goes on forever." And glancing at the
+glass, she added truthfully: "I want love more to-day than I wanted it
+when I was twenty--and so does Ben O'Hara."
+
+A sensation of stifling, as if her throat were closing together,
+oppressed her suddenly, and picking up her hand-bag, she ran downstairs
+and out of the house.
+
+By the time she reached Broadway her anger had ebbed, but the
+oppression, the feeling that she was being slowly smothered, was still
+in her throat and bosom. After all, seen in the sober light of reason,
+why had she been so indignant? There had been a misapprehension; he had
+thought that she was in love with him, and thinking so, he had kissed
+her. That was the case plainly stated; and what was there in this to
+send a burning, rush of anger to her heart? What was there in this that
+had made her turn and insult him? For the first time in her life she had
+lost her temper without cause, and had raged, she told herself sternly,
+like a fury. And beneath her rage she had been conscious always of some
+vague, incomprehensible disloyalty to Arthur--of a feeling of,
+humiliation, of self-reproach, which appeared ridiculous when she
+remembered that she had been kissed against her will and without
+warning. But, in spite of this, she knew intuitively, with a knowledge
+deeper than reason, that the glory of her Dream had paled in the moment
+when she lay in O'Hara's arms.
+
+A subtle change had come over the spirit of spring since she had left
+the elm tree and the emerald veil of the grass. It was no longer
+jubilant, but languorous, wistful, haunting, as if it eternally pursued,
+through the fugitive seasons, an immortal and ineffable beauty. The
+enchanted crystal had been shattered in an instant, and she saw life
+now, not imprisoned in magical sunshine, but gray, sordid, monotonous,
+as utterly hopeless as the faces thronging in Broadway. Yet not many
+months ago she had seen in these, same faces the inward hope, the joy in
+sadness, the gaiety in disappointment, which had brightened the world
+for her. Then she had been aware of an invisible current flowing from
+the crowd to herself; but to-day this shining current was broken or
+turned aside, and she felt detached, adrift, and distrustful of the
+future. That mental correspondence with the mood of the crowd, with the
+life of the city, which had come to her first on the brilliant morning
+in September, and then again when she walked home with O'Hara in the
+winter's dusk--which had released a new faculty in her soul, and had
+given her a fresh perception of human responsibilities--this had
+deserted her so utterly that she could barely remember its miraculous
+visitation. Then her personal life had seemed to become a part of the
+life of the street, of the sky, of the mysterious city outlined against
+the gray background of dusk. To-day she walked alone and without
+sympathy through the crowd. Her feet dragged, and she felt dully that
+she had lost her share in both the street and the sky. The very faces of
+the men and women around her--those lethargic foreign faces which
+crowded out the finer American type--awoke in her the sensation of
+hopeless revolt which one feels before the impending destruction of
+higher forms by masses of inert and conscienceless matter. She thought
+gloomily: "I have lost the vision--there is no hope either for me or for
+America except in the clear vision of the future." And while she spoke
+there passed over her the vague feeling of loss, of something missing,
+as if a precious possession had slipped from her grasp.
+
+Her morning's work was unusually trying, and at one o'clock, when she
+put on her hat before going out to lunch, she asked herself dejectedly:
+"What can be the matter with me? Before I go home I'll take a taxicab
+and drive up Riverside for an hour. If only the children were here, I
+should not feel so depressed." She remembered regretfully that Archibald
+and Fanny would be away all summer; and then from thinking of her
+children, she passed by almost insensible degrees of despondency to
+meditating pensively about Arthur Peyton. What a wreck, what an
+inconceivably stupid wreck she had made of her happiness!
+
+As she entered the outer showroom on her way to the street, she heard
+the voice of Miss Murphy attuned to a cooing pitch, and glancing around
+a little, painted cabinet, filled with useless ornaments, which stood in
+the centre of the floor, she beheld a dazzling head of reddish gold
+before one of the elaborately decorated French mirrors. While she
+advanced the red-gold waves, worn with extreme flatness over a forehead
+of pearly whiteness, were submerged for a minute in the smallest and
+roundest hat in the shop, and from a fashionable figure, reminding her
+vaguely of an ambulatory dressmaker's model, there issued a high,
+fluting note of delighted ejaculation.
+
+"This is just exactly what I've been looking all over New York for! Now,
+isn't it too funny for anything that I should have found it right here
+the very minute I came in?" As Gabriella's face flashed back from the
+mirror the fashionable figure sprang suddenly to life, and the voice,
+still fluting delightedly, exclaimed:
+
+"Why, Gabriella! Where on earth did you come from?"
+
+For a minute sheer amazement kept Gabriella clinging helplessly to the
+ridiculous cabinet, from the top of which an artificial rose-bush seemed
+to shower artificial pink petals down on her head. Then, recovering
+herself, with a sharp effort of will, she went forward a few steps
+beyond the shelter of the cabinet, and said composedly:
+
+"How do you do, Florrie? I did not recognize you at first."
+
+For it was Florrie herself, Florrie in the flesh, Florrie, glowing,
+sparkling, prosperous, victorious. Her figure, conforming to the latest
+mode, had lost its pinched protuberances, and was long, slender, sinuous
+in its perfection of line. Beneath the small round hat, her hair, glossy
+with brilliantine, was like melted gold in the large loose waves which
+revealed the rosy tips of her ears. She was thirty-nine, and she looked
+scarcely a day over twenty-five. The peach-blossom texture of her skin
+was as unlined by care or pain as if she had spent the last ten years
+immured in a convent; for in this case, at least, Gabriella realized
+while she looked at her, the retribution which awaits upon sinners had
+been tardy in its fulfilment.
+
+As she moved toward her, without noticing the friendly hand that Florrie
+held out, Gabriella was conscious of an ironical inclination to laugh.
+Though she felt no bitter personal resentment against Florrie--for,
+after all, Florrie had not been able to hurt her--there struggled in her
+bosom an indignation more profound, more moving, than any merely
+personal emotion could be. Her resentment was directed not against
+Florrie, but against some abstract destiny which had permitted Florrie
+to have her way without paying the price. For on the pinnacle of a
+destructive career, unsinged by the conflagration she had so carelessly
+started, Florrie was poised securely, crowned, triumphant, rejoicing. On
+her dazzling height, successful and happy, she was as far removed as one
+could imaginably be from the repentant Magdalen of tradition. The memory
+of George's face as it looked in death, floated before the austere
+mental vision of Gabriella, and she reflected grimly that tradition was
+not always the mirror of life. For in this one case at least, the man,
+not the woman, had been the victim of natural law, and Florrie, fool
+though she was, had shown herself at the hour of requital to be stronger
+than fate. By that instinctive wisdom, which is so much older, so much
+truer than civilization, she had triumphed over the ordination of life.
+In refusing to suffer she had blunted every weapon with which Nature
+might have punished her in the end. Not by virtue, since she had none,
+but by pure insensibility, she had escaped the wages of sin. She was a
+sensualist whose sensuality, hard, metallic, glittering, encased her
+like armour.
+
+At Gabriella's approach Miss Murphy fluttered off cooingly in the
+direction of a fresh customer, and only the festively garlanded French
+mirror witnessed the meeting of the two who had been schoolgirls
+together. Swift as an arrow there shot through Gabriella's mind, "I
+wonder what Ben O'Hara would think of her?" Then she checked the
+dangerous flight of her fancy, for she remembered that O'Hara's thoughts
+about anything no longer concerned her.
+
+"Are you buying a hat?" inquired Florrie curiously.
+
+"No, I belong here. I am Madame Dinard."
+
+"You don't mean it! I never should have believed it! The idea of your
+being a dressmaker. That's why you look so smart, I suppose. You're the
+smartest thing I've seen anywhere, but you look older, Gabriella."
+
+"Well, you don't." It was perfectly true. Except for the gaudy
+decorations and the twanging accents of the arrogant young women,
+Gabriella might have imagined herself in the last century atmosphere of
+Broad Street in the middle 'nineties.
+
+"I must tell you about the things I use." Florrie was always generous.
+"But, I declare if I'd known this place was yours, I'd have got my hats
+here ages ago. Of course I knew it was dreadfully swell, but I thought
+the prices were beyond anything."
+
+"They are," responded Gabriella with business-like brevity, while she
+glanced about for the flitting Miss Murphy.
+
+"Look here, Gabriella, I hope you don't bear me any malice," Florrie
+burst out solicitously, for her frankness, like her sensuality, was
+elemental in its audacity. "You oughtn't to if you know what I saved you
+from," she proceeded convincingly. "Anyway, we were chums long before
+either of us ever thought about a man, and I didn't really do you a bit
+of harm. It wasn't as if you cared about George, was it?"
+
+"No, it wasn't as if I'd cared about him." Gabriella was answering the
+appeal as truthfully as if Florrie had been the most excellent of her
+sex. "You didn't harm me in any way--not in any way," she repeated with
+firmness.
+
+"That's just the way I told mother you'd look at it. I knew you were
+always so broad-minded even as a girl. Then there isn't any reason we
+shouldn't be friends just as we used to be."
+
+Gabriella shook her head, polite but implacable in her refusal. "It
+isn't what you did to me, Florrie," she answered gently, "it's what you
+are that I can't forgive. I can imagine that a good woman might do
+almost anything--might even run off with another woman's husband, but
+you aren't good. You wouldn't be good if you'd spent your life in a
+convent."
+
+A quick flush--the flush of temper--stained the pearly whiteness of
+Florrie's skin. "Oh, of course, if you don't want to," she retorted, a
+little shrilly, though she tried to subdue her rebellious voice to the
+pitch of Fifth Avenue. "I only thought that being a working woman, you
+wouldn't have so very many friends, and you might get lonely. I had
+seats at the opera every night last winter, and time and again I'd have
+been glad to have given them to you. Then, too, I might have been able
+to bring you some custom. I know any number of rich women who don't
+think anything of paying a thousand dollars for a dress--"
+
+Her insolence was so evidently the result of anger that Gabriella,
+without interrupting the flow, waited courteously until she paused.
+
+"No, you cannot do anything for me, Florrie." Though Gabriella's voice
+was crisp and firm, her face looked suddenly older, and little lines,
+stamped by weariness and regret, appeared at the corners of her still
+brilliant eyes. "I don't wish you any harm," she went on more softly.
+"If you were in trouble I'd do what I could for you, but somehow I don't
+seem able to forgive you for being what you are. Would you like to look
+at anything else?" she inquired in her professional tone. "Miss Murphy
+is waiting to show you some hats."
+
+Her cheeks were burning when she passed out of the ivory and gold door,
+saluted deferentially by the attendant in livery. "The effrontery!" she
+thought, "the barefaced effrontery!" and then, as her eyes fell on
+Florrie's trim little electric coupé beside the curb, she exclaimed
+mentally, recalling George's animated perplexity about the pearl
+necklace, "I wonder how in the world she does it?"
+
+The meeting with Florrie appeared to her, as she walked home that
+afternoon, to be the last touch needed to push her into a state of utter
+despondency. The oppressive languor of the day had exhausted her
+strength, and when she left Dinard's she felt too indifferent, too
+spiritless even for the drive in the Park. It was still light when she
+got out of the stage at Twenty-third Street, and while she strolled
+listlessly down the blocks on the West Side, she had again that curious
+sensation of smothering which had come to her after her talk with
+O'Hara.
+
+At the corner of Sixth Avenue a young Italian, with the face of a poet,
+was roasting peanuts in a little kerosene stove beside a flickering
+torch which enkindled the romantic youth in his eyes. Farther away some
+ragged children were dancing to the music of a hand-organ, which ground
+out a melancholy waltz; and from a tiny flower stall behind the stand of
+a bootblack there drifted the intense sweetness of hyacinths. An old
+negro, carrying a basket of clothes, passed her in the middle of the
+block, and she thought: "That might have been in Richmond--that and the
+hand-organ and the perfume of hyacinths." A vision of Hill Street
+floated before her--the long straight street, with the sudden drop of
+ragged hill at the end; the old houses, with crumbling porches and
+countless signs: "Boarders Wanted" in the windows between the patched
+curtains; the irregular rows of tulip poplar, elm, or sycamore trees
+throwing their crooked shadows over the cobblestones; the blades of
+grass sprouting along the edges of the brick pavement--the vision of
+Hill Street as she remembered it twenty years ago in her girlhood; and
+then the image of her mother's face gazing out beneath the creamy
+blossoms and the dark shining leaves of the old magnolia tree.
+"Everything must have changed, I'd hardly recognize it," she thought.
+"Nobody we know lives on that side now, mother says. Yes, it has been a
+long time." She sighed, and then a little laugh broke from her lips, as
+she remembered that Charley, who had recently been West on a business
+trip, had brought home the good news that Richmond was as progressive as
+Denver. "At least it seems so to Charley," Mrs. Carr had hastened to
+add, "but you know how proud Charley is of all our newness. He says
+there is not a street in the West that looks fresher or more beautiful
+than Monument Avenue, and I am sure that is a great comfort. Cousin
+Jimmy says it shows what the South can do when it tries."
+
+"I'd like to go back," mused Gabriella, walking more and more slowly. "I
+haven't been home for eighteen years, and I am thirty-eight to-day."
+With the fugitive sweetness of the hyacinths there rushed over her again
+the feeling that life was slipping, slipping, and that she was missing
+something infinitely precious, something infinitely desirable. It was
+the panic of fleeting youth, of youth unsatisfied, denied, and still
+insatiable.
+
+As she entered the gate she saw that O'Hara's windows were dark, and
+while a sigh of relief escaped her, she felt a swift contraction of her
+throat as if she had become suddenly paralyzed and was unable to
+swallow. "I hope he has gone," she said to herself in a whisper. "If he
+has gone, everything will be so much easier." But even to herself she
+could not explain what it was that would be made easier. Her relief was
+so vague that when she endeavoured to put it into words it seemed to
+dissolve and evaporate.
+
+Miss Polly was watering the flowers in the window box, and turning, with
+the green watering-pot in her hand, she stared at Gabriella in silence
+for a minute before she exclaimed anxiously: "Mercy on us, Gabriella,
+what on earth, is the matter?"
+
+"Nothing. I've had a hard day, and I'm tired."
+
+"Well, you lie right straight down as soon as you take off your hat. I
+declare you look ten years older than you did this morning."
+
+"I have seen Florrie for a minute."
+
+"I reckon that was enough to upset anybody. Did she say she was sorry?"
+
+"Sorry! She looked as if she had never been sorry for anything in her
+life. She was handsomer than ever--don't you remember how much you
+always admired her figure?--and she didn't look a day over twenty-five.
+I don't believe she has ever known what it is to feel a regret."
+
+"Well, you just wait, honey," responded Miss Polly consolingly, "you
+just wait. She'll be punished yet as sure as you're born."
+
+"Oh, I'm not waiting for that. I don't wish her to be punished. Why
+should I? She is what she is."
+
+"Do you s'pose she knows about George?"
+
+"I doubt it. She didn't speak of his death. She is quite capable of
+forgetting that she ever knew him, and if she does, think of him, it is
+probably as a man who betrayed her innocence. You may be sure she has
+twisted it all about until every shred of the blame rests on somebody
+else. Florrie isn't the only woman who is made like that, but I
+believe," she reasoned it out coolly, "that it is her way of keeping her
+youth."
+
+Miss Polly had put down the watering-pot, and she came presently with a
+bottle of camphor to the sofa where Gabriella was lying. "Are you sure
+you wouldn't like me to rub your head?" she inquired. "Dinner will be
+ready in a minute, but I shouldn't change my dress if I were you."
+
+Gabriella rose slowly to a sitting position, and then stood up while she
+pushed the camphor away. "I hate the smell of it," she answered; "it
+makes me think of one of Jane's attacks. And, besides, I don't need it.
+There is nothing in the world the matter with me." A moment later, to
+Miss Polly's unspeakable amazement, she sank down again, flung her arms
+over the back of the sofa, and burst into tears.
+
+"Well, I never!" ejaculated Miss Polly, rooted to the spot. "Well, I
+never!" In the ten years she had lived with Gabriella she had never seen
+her cry--not even after George's flight--and she felt as if the solid
+ground on which she stood had crumbled without warning, and left her
+insecurely balanced in space. "Something certainly must be wrong, for it
+ain't like you to give way. Are you real sure you ain't got a pain
+somewhere?"
+
+Shaking her head, and swallowing her sobs with an effort, Gabriella rose
+to her feet. "I'm just tired out, that's all," she said, strangely
+humble and deprecating.
+
+"You must have been working too hard. It ain't right." For a minute or
+two the little seamstress brooded anxiously; then guided by an
+infallible instinct, she added decisively: "It's been a long time since
+you've seen your ma, and she's gettin' right smart along. Why don't you
+run down home for a few days while the flowers are blooming?"
+
+A change passed over Gabriella's face, and drying her eyes, she looked
+down on Miss Polly with a lovely enigmatical smile.
+
+"I wonder if I might?" she said doubtfully.
+
+"There ain't any earthly reason why you shouldn't. To-morrow's Friday,
+and they can get along without you at Dinard's perfectly well till the
+first of the week."
+
+"Oh, yes, they can get along. I was only wondering"--a faint breeze
+stole in through the window, wafting toward her the scent of wet
+flowers--"I was only wondering"--her eyes grew suddenly radiant, and
+lifting her arms, she made a gesture as of one escaping from bondage--"I
+was only wondering if I might go to-morrow," she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE DREAM AND THE REALITY
+
+
+At the upper station a little group stood awaiting her, and as the train
+pulled slowly to the platform, Gabriella distinguished her mother's
+pallid face framed in the hanging crape of her veil; Jane, thin,
+anxious, anæmic, with her look of pinched sweetness; Chancy, florid,
+portly, and virtuously middle-aged, and their eldest daughter Margaret,
+a blooming, beautiful girl. Alighting, Gabriella was embraced by Mrs.
+Carr, who shed a few gentle tears on her shoulders.
+
+"Gabriella, my child, I thought you would never come back to us," she
+lamented; "and now everything is so changed that you will hardly
+recognize it as home."
+
+"Well, if she can find a change that isn't for the better, I hope she'll
+point it out and let me make a note of it," boasted Charley, with
+hilarity. "I tell you what, Gabriella, my dear, we're becoming a number
+one city. Everything's new. We haven't left so much as an old brick
+lying around if we could help it. If you were to go back there to Hill
+Street, you'd scarcely know it for the hospitals and schools we've got
+there, and as for this part of the town--well, I reckon the apartment
+houses will fairly take your breath away. Apartment houses! Well, that's
+what I call progress--apartment houses and skyscrapers, and we've got
+them, too, down on Main Street. I'll show them to you to-morrow. Yes,
+by George, we're progressing so fast you can hardly see how we grow.
+Why, there wasn't a skyscraper or an apartment house in the city when
+you left here, and precious few hospitals. But now--well, I'll show you!
+We're the hospital city of the South, and more than that, we're becoming
+a metropolis. Yes, that's the word--we're becoming a metropolis. If you
+don't believe me, just watch as we go up Franklin Street to Monument
+Avenue. I suppose you thought of us still as a poor folksy little
+Southern city, with a lot of ground going to waste in gardens and green
+stuff. Well, you just wait till you see Monument Avenue. It's the
+handsomest boulevard south of Washington. It's all new, every brick of
+it. There's not a house the whole way up that isn't as fresh as paint,
+and the avenue is just as straight as if you'd drawn it with a ruler--"
+
+But the change in the city, Gabriella reflected while she embraced Jane,
+was as nothing compared to the incredible change in Charley himself.
+Middle-age had passed over him like some fattening and solidifying
+process. He was healthy, he was corpulent, he was prosperous,
+conventional, and commonplace. If Gabriella had been seeking, with
+Hogarthian humour, to portray the evils of torpid and self-satisfied
+respectability, she could scarcely have found a better picture of the
+condition than Charley presented. And the more Charley expanded, the
+more bloodless and wan Jane appeared at his side. Her small, flat face
+with its yellowish and unhealthy tinge, its light melancholy eyes, and
+its look of lifeless and inhuman sanctification, exhaled the dried
+fragrance of a pressed flower. So disheartening was her appearance to
+Gabriella that it was a relief to turn from her to the freshness of
+Margaret, handsome, athletic, with cheeks like roses and the natural
+grace of a young animal.
+
+"Oh, Aunt Gabriella, I hadn't any idea you were like this!" cried the
+girl with naïve enthusiasm.
+
+"You thought of me as gray-haired and wearing a bonnet and mantle?"
+
+"No, not that, but I didn't dream you were so handsome. I thought mother
+was the beauty of the family. But what a wonderful dress you have on!
+Are they wearing all those flounces around the hips?"
+
+"There is no doubt about it, you are getting a lot better looking as you
+grow older," observed Charley, with genial pleasantry.
+
+"She keeps herself up. There is a great deal in that," remarked Jane,
+and the speech was so characteristic of her that Gabriella tossed back
+gaily:
+
+"Well, I'm not old, you know. I am only thirty-eight."
+
+"She married so young," said Mrs. Carr mournfully. "I hope none of your
+girls will marry young, Jane. Gabriella must be a warning to them and to
+clear little Fanny."
+
+"But you married young, mother, and so did I," replied Jane, a trifle
+tartly.
+
+For some incommunicable reason Jane's sweetness had become decidedly
+prickly. Charley's reformation had left her with the hurt and
+incredulous air of a missionary whose heathen have been converted under
+his eyes by a rival denomination: and obeying an entirely natural
+impulse, she appeared ever so slightly, and in the most refined manner
+possible to revenge herself on the other members of her family. Though
+she had of late devoted her attention to the Associated Charities and
+the Confederate Museum, neither of these worthy objects provided so
+agreeable an opportunity for the exercise of her benevolent instincts as
+did the presence of a wayward husband in the household. For there could
+be no question of the thoroughness of Charley's redemption. The very cut
+of his clothes, the very colour of his necktie, proclaimed a triumph,
+for the prohibition party.
+
+At last they were packed tightly in the touring car, and Charley, after
+imparting directions with the manner of a man who regards himself as the
+fount of wisdom, began expounding the noisy gospel of progress to
+Gabriella. Mrs. Carr, who had never been active, and was now over
+seventy, was visibly excited by the suddenness with which she had been
+whisked from the platform, and while they shot away from the station,
+she clutched her crape veil despairingly to the sides of her face, and
+fixed her blank and terrified stare on her son-in-law. After a whispered
+conference with Jane, Gabriella discovered that her mother was less
+afraid of an accident than she was of fresh air. "She's afraid of
+neuralgia," whispered Jane, "but the doctor says the air can't possibly
+do her any harm."
+
+In Franklin Street the trees were in full leaf, and the charming vista
+through which Gabriella looked at the sunset, softened mercifully the
+impending symbols of the ironic Spirit of Progress. It was modern; it
+was progressive; yet there was the ancient lassitude of spring in the
+faint sunshine; and the women passing under the vivid green of the elms
+and maples moved with a flowing walk which one did not see in Fifth
+Avenue. On the porches, too, groups were assembled in chairs after the
+Southern fashion, while children, in white frocks and gay sashes,
+accompanied by negro nurses wheeling perambulators, made a spring
+pageant in the parks. Though the gardens had either disappeared or
+dwindled to mere emerald patches of grass, a few climbing roses, of
+modern varieties, lent brightness and fragrance to the solid, if
+undistinguished, architecture of the houses.
+
+"That's the finest apartment house in the city!" exclaimed Charley, with
+enthusiasm. "Looks pretty tall, doesn't it? But it's nothing to the
+height of some of the buildings downtown. As for changes--well, I hope
+Jane will take you on Broad Street to-morrow, and then you'll see what
+we're doing. Why, there's not a shop left there now where you used to
+deal. Brandywine's--you recollect old Brandywine & Plummer's, don't
+you?--isn't there any longer. Got a new department store, with a
+restaurant and a basement in the very spot where it used to be. Look
+sharp now, we're coming to a hospital. That belongs to Dr. Browning. You
+don't remember Dr. Browning. After your day, I reckon. He's a young
+chap, but he's got his hospital like all the rest, and every bed
+filled--he told me so yesterday. But they've all got their hospitals.
+Darrow--you recollect Darrow who used to be old Dr. Walker's
+assistant--well, he's got his, too, just around the corner on the next
+street. They say he cuts up more people than any man in the South except
+Spendlow--".
+
+"I miss the old-fashioned flowers," said Gabriella to her mother in one
+of Charley's plethoric pauses. "The microphylla roses and snowballs."
+
+"Everybody is planting crimson ramblers and hydrangeas now," responded
+Mrs. Carr, with something of her son-in-law's pride in the onward
+movement of her surroundings.
+
+"Here are the monuments!" cried Charley, who had treated each apartment
+house or hospital as if it were a bright, inestimable jewel in the
+city's crown. "You don't see many streets finer than this in New York,
+do you?"
+
+"It looks very pretty and attractive," answered Gabriella, as they swung
+dangerously round a statue, and then started in a race up the avenue,
+"but I miss the shrubs and the flowers."
+
+"Oh, there are flowers enough. You just wait till you get on a bit.
+We've got some urns filled with hydrangeas, that queer new sort between
+blue and pink. But what do you want with shrubs? All they're good for is
+to get in your way whenever you want to look out into the street. Mrs.
+Madison was telling me only yesterday that she cut down the lilac bushes
+in her front yard because they kept her from recognizing the people in
+motor cars. Look at that house now, that's one of the finest, in the
+city. Rushington built it--he made his money in fertilizers, and the one
+next with the green tiles belongs to Hanly, the tobacco trust fellow,
+you know, and this whopper on the next square is where Albertson lives.
+He made his pile out of railroad stocks--he's one of the banking firm of
+Albertson, Jacobstein, Moss & Company. Awfully clever fellows, but too
+tricky for me, I give them a wide berth when I go out to do business--"
+
+"But where are the old people--the people I used to know?"
+
+"Oh, they're scattered about everywhere, but they haven't got most of
+the money. A lot of 'em live up here, and a lot are down in Franklin
+Street in the same old houses."
+
+"Tell me about Cousin Jimmy."
+
+"He's up here, too. Pussy planned that red brick house with the green
+shutters next door to us. I reckon Jimmy is about as prosperous as is
+good for him, but he's getting on. He must be over seventy now. He has a
+son who is a chip of the old block, and his youngest daughter was the
+prettiest girl who ever came out here. Margaret will tell you about
+her."
+
+"And the Peytons?" Her voice trembled, and she looked hastily away from
+the keen eyes of Margaret.
+
+"They are still in the old home--at least Arthur lives there with his
+Cousin Nelly. You know Mrs Peyton died about nine or ten years ago?"
+
+"Yes, I heard it."
+
+"She was getting on, but it was a great loss to Arthur. Somehow, I could
+never make up my mind about Arthur. He was bright enough as a young
+chap, and we used to think he would have a brilliant future; but when
+the time came, he never seemed to catch on. He wasn't progressive, and
+he has never amounted to much more than he did when he left college.
+What I say about him is that he had the wrong ideas--Yes, Jane, I mean
+exactly what I say, he had the wrong ideas. He doesn't know what he is
+driving at. No progress, no push, no punch in him."
+
+"Why, Charley," murmured Mrs. Carr reproachfully, while Jane, recovering
+her nagging manner with an accession of spirit, remonstrated feelingly:
+"Charley, you really must be more careful what you say."
+
+"Oh, fudge!" retorted Charley, with playful rudeness. "You see she's at
+it still, Gabriella," he pursued, winking audaciously. "If it isn't one
+thing, it's another, but she wouldn't be satisfied with perfection.
+Well, here we are. There are the hydrangeas. I hope you're pleased."
+
+"I declare, those waste papers have blown right back again on the grass,
+and I had them picked up the last thing before I left," said Jane in a
+tone of annoyance.
+
+"Never mind the papers; Gabriella isn't looking for papers," returned
+Charley, while he helped Mrs. Carr out of the motor and up the steps.
+"So here you are, mother, and the air didn't kill you."
+
+"I may have neuralgia to-morrow. You never can tell," replied Mrs. Carr.
+"I shouldn't worry about the papers, Jane. Nobody can help the way they
+blow about. I want Gabriella to see the children the first thing."
+
+As they entered the house Jane's children, a flock of five girls and two
+boys, fluttered up to be introduced, and among them Gabriella discovered
+the composed baby of Jane's tragic flight. It seemed an age ago, and she
+felt not thirty-eight, but a thousand.
+
+After dinner Charley, who had eaten immoderately, unfolded the evening
+paper under the electric lamp in the library, and dozed torpidly while
+the girls plied their aunt with innumerable questions about New York and
+the spring fashions. "It will be lovely to have Fanny with us at the
+White Sulphur. I know her clothes will be wonderful," they chirped
+happily, clustering eagerly about the sofa on which Gabriella was
+sitting. Jane's children, deriving from some hardy stock of an earlier
+generation, were handsome, vigorous, optimistic in blood and fibre, and
+so uncompromisingly modern that Gabriella wondered how Mrs. Carr, with
+her spiritual neuralgia and her perpetual mourning, had survived the
+unceasing currents of fresh air with which they surrounded her.
+
+"Yes, things have changed. It is the age," thought Gabriella; and
+presently, when Cousin Jimmy and Cousin Pussy came in to welcome her,
+she repeated: "Yes, it is the age. There is no escaping it."
+
+"Why, my dear child, you are looking splendidly," trilled Cousin Pussy,
+with her old delightful manner and her flattering vision so different
+from Florrie's. She was still trim, plump, and rosy, though her hair was
+now snow white and her pretty face was covered with cheerful wrinkles.
+"You're handsomer than you ever were in your life, and the dash of gray
+on your temples doesn't make you look, a day older--not a day. Some
+people turn gray so very young. I remember Cousin Becky Bollingbroke's
+hair was almost white by the time she was thirty-five. It runs like that
+in some families. But you look just as girlish as ever. It's wonderful,
+isn't it, Cousin Fanny, the way the women of this generation stay girls
+until they are fifty? I don't believe you'll ever look any older,
+Gabriella, than you do now. Of course, I suppose your business has
+something to do with it, but if I met you for the first time, it would
+never cross my mind that you were a day over twenty-five."
+
+"Well, well, so little Gabriella went to New York and became a
+dressmaker," observed Jimmy, who was seldom original, "and she's the
+same Gabriella, too. I always said, you know, that she was the sort you
+could count on."
+
+Age, though it had not entirely passed him by, had, on the whole,
+treated him with great gentleness. He was a remarkably handsome old man,
+with a distinguished and courtly presence, a head of wonderful white
+hair, which looked as if it had been powdered, a ruddy unwrinkled face,
+and the dark shining eyes of the adventurous youth he had never lost.
+
+"Of course, she couldn't have been a dressmaker here where everybody
+knows her," purred Cousin Pussy, with her arm about Gabriella, "but in
+New York it is different, and they tell me that even titled women are
+dressmakers in London."
+
+"Well, she has pluck," declared Cousin Jimmy, as he had declared
+eighteen years ago at the family council. "There's nothing like pluck
+when it comes to getting along in the world."
+
+Then they sat down in Jane's library, which, contained most of the
+things Gabriella associated with the old parlour in Hill Street, and
+Cousin Pussy asked if Gabriella had found many changes.
+
+"A great many. Everything, looks new to me except this room. The only
+thing I miss here is the horsehair sofa."
+
+"I keep that in the back hall," said Jane. "The town does look different
+up here, but the Peytons' house is just as you remember it--even the
+scarlet sage is in the garden. Miss Nelly plants it still every summer."
+
+A lovely light shone in Gabriella's eyes, and Cousin Pussy watched it
+tenderly, while a smile hovered about the corners of her shrewd though
+still pretty mouth.
+
+"It has been such a disappointment that Arthur hasn't done more in his
+profession," she said presently, "but, as I was saying to Mr. Wrenn only
+the other day, I have always felt that dear Gabriella was to blame for
+it."
+
+"The trouble with Arthur," observed Charley, awaking truculently from
+his doze, "is that he's got the wrong ideas. When a man has the wrong
+ideas in these days, he might as well go out and hang himself."
+
+"Well, I don't know that I'd call his ideas wrong exactly," reasoned
+Cousin Jimmy, with the judicial manner befitting the best judge of
+tobacco in Virginia; "I shouldn't call them wrong, but they're out of
+date. They belong to the last century."
+
+"I always say that dear Arthur is a perfect gentleman of the old
+school," remonstrated Mrs. Carr, meekly obstinate. "There aren't many of
+them left now, so I tell myself regretfully whenever I see him."
+
+"And there'll be fewer than ever by the time you Suffragists get your
+rights," remarked Charley, with bitterness, while Mrs. Carr, incensed by
+the word, which she associated with various indelicacies, stared at him
+with an indignant expression.
+
+"Charley, be careful what you say," nagged Jane acridly from her corner.
+"Now that so many of our relatives have gone in for suffrage, you
+mustn't be intolerant."
+
+"I cannot help it, Jane. I shall never knowingly bow to one even if she
+is related to me," announced Mrs. Carr more assertively than Gabriella
+would have believed possible.
+
+"Well, for my part, Cousin Fanny, I can't feel that it hurts me to bow
+to anybody," said Pussy, with her unfailing kindness of heart. "Why, I
+even bowed to Florrie Spencer last winter. I wanted to cut her, but I
+just couldn't bring myself to do it when I met her face to face. I hope
+you don't mind, dear," she whispered to Gabriella. "I suppose I oughtn't
+to have mentioned her, but I forgot."
+
+"Oh, it doesn't matter in the least," responded Gabriella cheerfully. "I
+bowed to her myself the day before I left New York."
+
+Though she tried to be independent, to be advanced and resolute, she
+felt the last eighteen years receding slowly from her consciousness. The
+family point of view, the family soul, had enveloped her again, and, in
+spite of her experience and her success, she seemed inwardly as young
+and ignorant as on the evening when she broke her engagement to Arthur.
+The spirit of the place had defeated her individual endeavour. Except
+for the wall paper of pale gray, and the Persian rugs on the floor,
+Jane's library might have been the old front parlour in Hill Street, and
+it was as if the French mirror, the crystal candelabra, the rosewood
+bookcases, with their diamond-shaped panes lined with fluted magenta
+silk, the family portraits, the speckled engravings of the Burial of
+Latané and of the groups of amiable children feeding chickens and
+fish--it was as if these inanimate objects exuded a spiritual anodyne
+which enfeebled the will. Across the hall, in the modern pink and gray
+drawing-room, the five girls were playing bridge with several young men
+whom Gabriella remembered as babies, and the sounds of their voices
+floated to her now and then as thinly as if they had come out of a
+phonograph. "There is nothing better than peace, after all," she
+thought, while her, eyes rested tenderly on the simple, affectionate
+face of Cousin Jimmy. "Goodness and peace, these things are really worth
+while."
+
+Then the telephone rang gently, and after a minute Margaret, who had
+gone to answer it, came in with a roguish smile on her lips. "Aunt
+Gabriella, Mr. Peyton wishes to come to-morrow at five," she said; and
+the roguish smile flitted from her lips to the lips of Cousin Pussy, and
+from Cousin Pussy to each sympathetic and watchful face in the group.
+
+"You may say what you please," argued Charley, still truculent, "the
+whole trouble with Arthur is that he has got the wrong ideas."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At five o'clock the next day the family crowded into the touring car for
+an excursion, and left Gabriella in a deserted house to receive the
+lover of her girlhood. Before going Mrs. Carr had embraced her
+sentimentally; Charley had dropped one of his broad jokes on the subject
+of the reunion; Jane had murmured sweetly that there was no man on earth
+she admired as much as she did Arthur; and the girls had effusively
+complimented Gabriella on her appearance. Even Willy, the baby of
+eighteen years ago, had prophesied with hilarity that "Old Arthur Peyton
+wasn't coming for nothing." One and all they appeared to take her part
+in the romance for granted; and while she waited in the drawing-room,
+gazing through the interstices of Jane's new lace curtains into the
+avenue, where beyond the flying motor cars the grassy strip in the
+middle of the street was dappled with shadows, she wondered if she also
+were taking Arthur's devotion for granted. She had not seen him for
+eighteen years, and yet she was awaiting him as expectantly as if he
+were still her lover. Would his presence really quiet this strange new
+restlessness in her heart--this restlessness which had come to her so
+suddenly after her meeting with Florrie? Was it true that her youth was
+slipping from her before she had grasped all the happiness that life
+offered? Or was it only the stirring of the spring winds, of the young
+green against the blue sky, of the mating birds, of the roving,
+provocative scents of flowers, of the checkered light and shade on the
+grassy strip under the maples? Was it all these things, or was it none
+of them, that awoke this longing, so vague and yet so unquenchable, in
+her heart?
+
+A car stopped in the street outside, the bell rang, and she watched the
+figure of a trim mulatto maid flit through the hall to the door. An
+instant later Arthur's name was announced, and Gabriella, with her hands
+in his clasp, stood looking into his face. It had been eighteen years
+since they parted, and in those eighteen years she had carried his image
+like some sacred talisman in her breast.
+
+"How little you've changed, Gabriella," he said after a moment of
+silence in which she told herself that he was far better looking, far
+more distinguished than she had remembered him. "You are larger than you
+used to be, but your face is as girlish as ever."
+
+"And I have two children nearly grown," she replied with a trembling
+little laugh; "a daughter who is already thinking of the White Sulphur."
+
+They sat down in the pink chairs on the gray carpet, and leaned forward,
+looking into each other's faces as tenderly as they had done when they
+were lovers.
+
+"It's hard to believe it," he answered a little stiffly, in his dry and
+gentle voice, which held a curious note of finality, of failure. For the
+first time, while he spoke, she let her eyes rest frankly upon him, and
+there came to her, as she did so, a vivid realization of the emptiness
+and aimlessness of his life. He looked handsomer than ever; he looked
+stately and formal and impressive; but he looked old--though he was only
+forty-five--he looked old and ineffectual and acquiescent. The fighting
+strength, such as it was, had gone out of him, and the stamp of failure
+was on him, from his high, pale, intellectual forehead, where the fine
+brown hair had retreated to the crown of his head, to his narrow
+features, and his relaxed slender limbs, with their slow and indolent
+movements. He was one of those, she felt intuitively, who had stood
+aloof from the rewards as well as from the strains of the struggle, who
+had withered to the core, not from age, but from an inherent distrust of
+all effort, of all endeavour. For his immobility went deeper than any
+physical habit: it attacked, like an incurable malady, the very fibre
+and substance of his nature. With his intellect, his training, his
+traditions, she discerned, with a flash of insight, that he had failed
+because he lacked the essential faith in the future. He had lost, not
+because he had risked, but because he had hesitated, not because he had
+loved ease, but because he had feared effort. For fear of a misstep, he
+had not dared to go forward; from dread of pain, he had refused the
+opportunity of happiness. She knew now why he had never come to her, why
+he had let her slip from his grasp. All that was a part of his failure,
+of his distrust of life, of his profound negation of spirit.
+
+"Yes, it is hard," she assented; and there came over her like a sudden
+sense of discomfort, of physical hardship, the knowledge that, in the
+very beginning, she was trying to make conversation. Meeting his
+sympathetic smile--the smile that still delighted the impressionable
+hearts of old ladies--she told herself obstinately, with desperate
+determination, that she was not disappointed, that he was just as she
+had remembered him, dear and lovable and kind and conventional. When she
+recalled what he had been at twenty-seven, it appeared inevitable to her
+that at forty-five he should have settled a little more firmly into the
+mould of the past, that his opinions should have crystallized and
+imprisoned his mind immovably in the centre of them.
+
+She told him what she could about Archibald and Fanny--about her choice
+of schools, her maternal pride in Archibald's intellect and Fanny's
+appearance, her hopeful plans for the future--and he listened
+attentively, with his manner of slightly pompous consideration, while he
+passed one of his long narrow hands over his forehead. When she had
+finished her vivacious recital, he began to talk slowly and gravely
+about himself, with the tolerant and impersonal detachment of one who
+has reduced life to a gesture, a manner. "I wonder if he has ever really
+cared about anything--even about me?" she questioned, after a minute;
+but while the thought was still in her mind, he mentioned his mother's
+name, and it was impossible to doubt the sincerity of his sorrow and his
+tenderness. "I have seemed only half alive since I lost her," he said;
+and the words were like a searchlight which flashed over his character
+and illumined its obscurities. Did his whole attitude of immobility and
+negation result from the depth and the intensity of his feeling, from
+the exquisite reticence and sensitiveness of his soul?
+
+"I know, I know," she murmured in a voice of sympathy. After all, she
+was not disappointed in him. He was as tender, as chivalrous, as noble
+as she had believed him to be. The Dream was true; and yet in spite of
+its truthfulness, it seemed to evaporate slowly while she sat there in
+Jane's pink satin chair and looked out at the sunlight. Only the
+restlessness, the inappeasable longing in her heart had not changed.
+Looking across the hall into the library she could see the old French
+mirror reflecting the bronze candelabra, with crystal pendants, and the
+thought flitted into her brain: "It is all real. I am here, talking to
+Arthur. It is every bit true." But her words failed to convince her, and
+she had a curious sensation of vagueness and thinness, as if their low,
+gentle voices were issuing from shadows.
+
+"I should like to show you some of our improvements," he said presently,
+with a faintly perceptible ripple of animation. "I wonder if you would
+care to come out in my car? We might go up Monument Avenue into the
+country."
+
+The idea was delightful, she told him with convincing enthusiasm; and
+while she ran upstairs to put on her hat, he went out to the car, which
+was standing in front of the house. So preoccupied was he with his
+reflections, that when Gabriella appeared, he started almost as if he
+had forgotten that he was waiting for her.
+
+The air was as soft and fragrant as summer; the grassy strip under the
+young maples was diapered with sunlight, and an edge of rosy gold was
+tinting the far horizon. As they sped up the avenue Arthur pointed out
+the houses to her as possessively as Charley had done the afternoon
+before, and in the pride with which he told her the cost of them she
+recognized an admirable freedom from envy or bitterness. If, he had not
+achieved things, his attitude seemed to say, it was because he had never
+been in the race, because he had preferred to stand aside and enjoy the
+reposeful entertainment of the spectator.
+
+The avenue, which swept on indefinitely after the houses had stopped,
+dwindled at last to two straight and narrow walks binding the town to
+the country with bands of concrete. The pines had fallen in blackened
+ruins, and where Gabriella remembered thickets of wildflowers there were
+masses of red clay furrowed by cart wheels.
+
+"You see, we're developing all this property now," observed Arthur, in a
+gratified tone as they whirled past an old field intersected by a
+concrete walk which informed the curious that it was "Arlington Avenue."
+"Honeysuckle Lane has gone, too, and we're grading a street there now in
+front of the old Berkeley place."
+
+"The growth has been wonderful," said Gabriella, a little pensively;
+"but do you remember how lovely Honeysuckle Lane used to be? That's
+where we went for wild honeysuckle in the spring."
+
+"Oh, we'll find plenty of honeysuckle farther out. I gathered a big
+bunch of it for Cousin Nelly yesterday."
+
+For a while they sped on in silence. Arthur was intent on the wheel, and
+Gabriella could think of nothing to say to him that she had not said in
+Jane's drawing-room. When at last they left the desolation of
+improvement, and came out into the natural country, the sun was already
+low, and the forest of pines along the glowing, horizon was like an
+impending storm. Once Arthur stopped, and they got out to gather wild
+honeysuckle by the roadside; then with the sticky, heavily scented
+blossoms in her lap, they went on again toward the sunset, still silent,
+still separated by an impalpable barrier. "He is just what I thought he
+would be," she thought sadly. "He is just where I left him eighteen
+years ago, and yet it is different. In some inexplicable way it is
+different from what I expected." And she told herself that the fault was
+her own--that she had changed, hardened, and become hopelessly
+matter-of-fact--that she had lost her youth and her sentiment.
+
+Suddenly, as if the action had been forced upon him by the steady
+pressure of some deep conviction, some inner necessity, Arthur turned
+his face toward her, and asked gently: "Gabriella, do you ever think of
+the past?"
+
+Facing the rosy sunset, his features looked wan and colourless, and she
+noticed again that he seemed to have dried through and through, like
+some rare fruit that has lain wrapped in tissue paper too long.
+
+She looked at him with wistful and sombre eyes. Now that the desired
+moment had come, she felt only that she would have given her whole
+future to escape before it overtook her, to avoid the inevitable,
+crowning hour of her destiny.
+
+"I think of it very often," she answered truthfully, while she buried
+her face in the intoxicating bloom of the honeysuckle.
+
+"Do you remember my telling you once that I'd never give you up--that
+I'd never stop caring?"
+
+"Yes, I remember--but, oh, Arthur, you mustn't--" She sat up with a
+start, gazing straight ahead into the rose and gold of the afterglow.
+From the deserted road, winding flat and dun-coloured in the soft
+light, she heard another voice--the strong and buoyant voice of
+O'Hara--saying: "I'm not the sort to change--" and then over again, "I'm
+not the sort to change--"
+
+"I suppose it's too late," Arthur went on, with his patient tenderness.
+"Things usually come too late for me or else I miss them altogether.
+That's been the way always--and now--" With his left hand he made a
+large, slow, commemorative gesture.
+
+"You're the best--the kindest--" An urgent desire moved her to stop him
+before he put into words the feeling she could see in his face. Though
+she knew that it was but the ghost of a feeling, the habit of a desire,
+which had become interwoven with his orderly and unchangeable custom of
+life, she realized nevertheless that its imaginary vividness might cause
+him great suffering. A vision of what might have been eighteen years
+ago--of their possible marriage--rose before her while she struggled for
+words. How could her energetic nature have borne with his philosophy of
+hesitation, her imperative affirmation of life with his denial of
+effort, her unconquered optimism with his deeply rooted mistrust of
+happiness?
+
+There was beauty in his face, in his ascetic and over-refined features,
+in his sympathetic smile and his cultured voice; but it was the beauty
+of resignation, of defeat nobly borne, of a spirit confirmed in the
+bitter sweetness of renouncement. "It would make an old woman of me to
+marry him," she thought, "an old, patient, resigned woman."
+
+"Most things have slipped by me," he resumed presently, while they raced
+down a long hill toward the black pines and the fading red of the
+afterglow. In a marshy pond near the roadside frogs were croaking,
+while from the darkening fields, encircled with webs of mist, there
+floated the mingled scents of freshly mown grass, of dewy flowers, of
+trodden weeds, of ploughed earth, of ancient mould--all the fugitive and
+immemorially suggestive odours of the country at twilight. And at the
+touch of these scents, some unforgotten longing seemed to stir in her
+brain as if it had slept there, covered by clustering memories, from
+another lifetime. She wanted something with an unbearable intensity; the
+vague and elusive yearning for happiness had become suddenly poignant
+and definite. In that instant she knew unerringly that she was in love
+not with a dream, but with a fact, that she was in love not with Arthur,
+but with O'Hara. For days, weeks, months, she had been blindly groping
+toward the knowledge; and now, in a flash of intuition, it had come to
+her like one of those discoveries of science, which baffle investigators
+for years, and then miraculously reveal themselves in a moment of
+insight. Her first antagonism, her injustice, her unreasonable
+resentments and suspicions, she recognized now, in the piercing light of
+this discovery, as the inexplicable disguises of love. And she was not
+old--she was not even middle-aged--she was as young as Fanny, as young
+as the eternal, ageless spirit of romance, of adventure. This was life
+in her pulses, in her brain, in her heart--life, not pale, not bitter
+sweet, but sparkling, glowing, bubbling like wine.
+
+At the foot of the long hill Arthur turned the car, and they flew back
+between the dim fields where the croaking of frogs sounded louder in the
+darkness. Ahead of them the lights of the car flitted like golden moths
+over the dust of the road, and in the sky, beyond the thin veil of mist,
+the stars were shining over the city. Spring, which possessed the earth,
+bloomed in Gabriella's heart with a wonderful colour, a wonderful
+fragrance. She was young again with the imperishable youth of magic, of
+enchantment. To love, to hope, to strive, this was both romance and
+adventure.
+
+"Is it too late, then, Gabriella?" asked Arthur, after a long silence,
+and in his voice there was the sound of suffering acquiescence.
+
+"I'm afraid it is, dear Arthur," she answered softly, and they did not
+speak again until the lights blazed over them, and they ran into
+Monument Avenue. After all, it was too late. What could she have added
+to the answer she had given him?
+
+When they reached the house, he did not come in with her, and tears
+stained her face while she went slowly up the steps, and stood beside
+Jane's hydrangeas with her hand on the bell. Then, as the door opened
+quickly, she saw her mother waiting, with an eager, expectant look, at
+the door of the library, and heard her excited voice murmur: "Well,
+dear?"
+
+"We had a lovely drive, mother. Arthur is just as I remembered him,
+except that he has grown so much older."
+
+A disappointed expression crossed Mrs. Carr's face. "Is that all?" she
+asked regretfully.
+
+Gabriella laughed happily. "That is all--only I found out exactly what I
+wanted to know."
+
+For the rest of the week she devoted herself to her mother with a
+solicitude which aroused in the brain of that melancholy lady serious
+apprehensions of a hastening decline; and when her visit was over, she
+packed her trunks, with girlish, delicious thrills of happiness, and
+started back to New York.
+
+"Do you really think I am failing so rapidly, Gabriella?" Mrs. Carr
+inquired anxiously while they waited for the train on the platform of
+the upper station.
+
+"Failing? Why, no, mother. You look splendidly," Gabriella assured her,
+a little surprised, a little startled. "Why should you ask me such a
+thing?"
+
+"Oh, nothing, dear. I had a fancy," murmured Mrs. Carr meekly; and then
+as the train rushed into view, she kissed her daughter reproachfully,
+and stood gazing after her until the last coach and the last white
+jacket of the dining-car attendants vanished in the smoky sunshine of
+the distance.
+
+Through the long day, lying back in her chair, with her eyes on the
+flying green landscape, Gabriella thought of the discovery she had made
+while she was driving with Arthur. The restlessness, the uncertainty,
+the vague yet poignant longing for an indefinite good, had passed out of
+her happy and exultant heart. In obedience to the law of her nature,
+which decreed that she should move swiftly and directly toward the end
+of her destiny, she was returning to O'Hara as resolutely, as
+unswervingly, as she had fled from him.
+
+"It's strange how little I've ever understood, how little I've ever
+known myself," she thought, staring vacantly at a severe spinster, with
+crimped hair and a soured expression, who sat before the opposite
+window. "I've gone on in the dark, making mistakes and discoveries from
+the very beginning, undoing and doing over again, creating illusions and
+then destroying them--always moving, always changing, always growing in
+new directions. A year ago I'd have laughed at the idea that I could
+love any man but Arthur--that of all men I could love Ben O'Hara; and
+to-day I know that he is the future for me--that he is the beginning
+again of my youth. A year ago I thought only how I might change him, how
+I might make him over, and now I realize that I shall never change him,
+that I shall never make him over, and that it doesn't really matter. It
+isn't the vital thing. The vital thing is character, and I wouldn't
+change that if I could. For the rest, I shall probably always wish him
+different in some ways, just as I wish myself different. I'd like to
+have him more like Arthur on the surface, just as I'd like to have
+myself more like Fanny. I'd like to give him Arthur's manner just as I'd
+like to give myself Fanny's complexion. But it isn't possible. He will
+always be what he is now, and, after all, it is what he is--it is not
+something else that I want--"
+
+With a glimmer of the clairvoyant insight which had come to her on the
+country road, she understood that O'Hara was for her an embodied symbol
+of life--that she must either take him or leave him completely and
+without reserve or evasion. He was not an ideal. In the love she felt
+for him there was none of the sentimental glamour of her passion for
+George. She saw his imperfections, but she saw that the man was bigger
+than any attributes, that his faults were as nothing compared to the
+abundance of his virtues, and that, perfect or imperfect, the tremendous
+fact remained that she loved him.
+
+In the opposite chair, the severe spinster had taken a strip of knitted
+silk out of her bag, and was working industriously on a man's necktie of
+blue and gray. From her intent and preoccupied look, from the nervous
+twitching of her thin lips, the close peering of her near-sighted eyes,
+through rimless glasses which she wore attached by a gold chain to her
+hair, she might have found in the act of knitting a supreme consolation
+for the inexorable denials of destiny. "I wonder if it satisfies her,
+just knitting?" thought Gabriella. "Has she submitted like Arthur to
+chance, to the way things happen when one no longer resists? Is she
+really contented merely to knit, or is she knitting as a condemned
+prisoner might knit while he is waiting for the scaffold?" And while she
+watched the patient fingers, she added: "One must either conquer or be
+conquered, and I will never be conquered."
+
+It was eight o'clock when she reached New York, and as she drove the
+short distance to West Twenty-third Street she began to wonder when she
+should see O'Hara, and what she should say to him. In the end she
+decided that she would wait for a chance meeting, that she would let it
+happen when it would without moving a step or lifting a hand. Before
+many days they would be obliged to meet in the yard or the hall, and
+some obscure, consecrated tradition of sex, some secret strain of her
+mother's ineradicable feminine instinct, opposed the direct and sensible
+way. "As soon as I meet him--and in the end I shall surely meet
+him--everything will be right," she thought, with her eyes on the
+streets where the spring multitude of children were swarming. And from
+this multitude of children, of young, ardent, and adventurous life,
+there seemed to emanate a colossal and irresistible will--the will to
+be, to live, to love, to create, and to conquer.
+
+The taxicab turned swiftly into Twenty-third Street, and while it
+stopped beside the pavement, she saw that Mrs. Squires was standing,
+with her arms on the gate, staring into the street. As Gabriella
+alighted, the woman came forward and said, with suppressed emotion,
+while she wiped her eyes on the back of her hand: "You came just a
+minute too late to say good-bye to Mr. O'Hara."
+
+"Good-bye? But where has he gone?"
+
+"He has gone to Washington to-night. To-morrow he is starting to the
+West."
+
+"When is he coming back? Did he tell you?"
+
+At this Mrs. Squires broke down. "He ain't ever coming back, that's what
+I'm crying for. He's given up his rooms, and his furniture all went to
+the auction yesterday. He says he's going to live out in Colorado or
+Wyoming for the rest of his life, and he didn't even tell me where I
+could write to him. It's a great loss to me, Mrs. Carr. I'd got used to
+him and his ways, and when you've once got used to a man, it ain't easy
+to give him up."
+
+She sobbed audibly as she finished; and it seemed to Gabriella that a
+lifetime of experience passed in the instant while she stood there, with
+her pulses drumming in her ears, her throat contracting until she
+struggled for breath, and the lights of the city swimming in a nebulous
+blur before her eyes. Yet in that instant, as in every crisis of her
+life, she turned instinctively to action, to movement, to exertion,
+however futile. While she walked across the pavement to the waiting cab,
+for the crowning and ultimate choice of her life, she abandoned forever
+the authority and guide of tradition. Tradition, she knew, bade her sit
+and wait on destiny until she withered, like Arthur, to the vital core
+of her nature; but something mightier than tradition, something which
+she shared with the swarming multitude of children in the streets--the
+will to live, to strive, and to conquer--this had risen superior to the
+empty rules of the past. With her hand on the door of the taxicab, she
+spoke rapidly to the driver: "Drive back to the station as fast as you
+can, there is not a minute to lose."
+
+When the cab started, she leaned forward, with her hands clasped on her
+knees, and her eyes on the street, where the children were playing.
+Because of the children, they drove very slowly, and once, when the
+traffic held them up for a few minutes, she felt an impulse to scream.
+Suppose she missed him, after all! Suppose she lost him in the station!
+Suppose she never saw him again! And beside this possibly it seemed to
+her that all the other suffering of her life--George's desertion, her
+humiliation, her struggle to make a living for her children, the
+loneliness of the long summers, her poverty and hunger and
+self-denial--that all these things were merely superficial annoyances.
+"If we don't go on, I shall die," she said aloud suddenly; "if we don't
+go on, I shall die," and when at last the cab started again, she heard
+the words like an undercurrent beneath the innumerable noises of the
+street, "If we don't go on, I shall die."
+
+The taxicab stopped; a porter ran forward to take her bag, and while she
+thrust the money into the driver's hand, she heard her voice coolly and
+calmly giving directions.
+
+"I must catch the next train to Washington."
+
+"Have you got your ticket, Miss?"
+
+She stared back at him blankly. Though she saw his lips moving, it was
+impossible for her to distinguish the words because she was still
+hearing in a muffled undercurrent the roar of the streets.
+
+"Have you got your ticket?" They were passing through the station now,
+and he explained hurriedly: "You can't go through the gate without a
+ticket."
+
+She drew out her purse, and panic seized her afresh while she waited
+before the window behind a bald-headed man who counted his change twice
+before he would move aside, and let her step into his place. Then, when
+the ticket was given to her, she turned and ran after the porter through
+the gate and down the steps to the platform. As she ran, her eyes
+wavered to the long platform, and the little groups gathered beside the
+waiting train, which seemed to shake like a moving black and white
+picture.
+
+"Suppose I miss him, after all! Suppose I never see him again!" she
+thought, and all that was young in her, all that was vital and alive,
+strained forward as her feet touched the platform. Except for several
+coloured porters and a woman holding a child by the hand, the place was
+deserted. Then a man stepped quickly out of one of the last coaches, and
+by his bigness and the red of his hair, she knew that it was O'Hara. At
+the first sight of him the panic died suddenly in her heart, and the old
+peace, the old sense of security and protection swept over her. Her
+face, which had been lowered, was lifted like a flower that revives, and
+her feet, which had stumbled, became the swift, flying feet of a girl.
+It was as if both her spirit and her body sprang toward him.
+
+At the sound of his name, he turned and stood motionless, as if hardly
+believing his vision.
+
+"I came back because I couldn't help it," she said.
+
+But he was always hard to convince, and he waited now, still transfixed,
+still incredulous.
+
+"I came back because I wanted you more than anything else," she added.
+
+"You came back to me?" he asked, slowly, as if doubting her.
+
+"I came back to you. I wanted you," she repeated, and her voice did not
+quaver, her eyes did not drop from his questioning gaze. It was all so
+simple at last; it was all as natural as the joyous beating of her
+heart.
+
+"And you'll marry me now--to-night?"
+
+It was the ultimate test, she knew, the test not only of her love for
+O'Hara, but of her strength, her firmness, her courage, and of her
+belief in life. The choice was hers that comes to all men and women
+sooner or later--the choice between action and inaction, between
+endeavour and relinquishment, between affirmation and denial, between
+adventure and deliberation, between youth and age. One thought only made
+her hesitate, and she almost whispered the words:
+
+"But the children?"
+
+He laughed softly. "Oh, the children are always there. We're not
+quitters," and in a graver tone, he asked for the second time: "Will you
+come with me now--to-night, Gabriella?"
+
+At the repeated question she stretched out her hands, while she watched
+the light break on his face.
+
+"I'll come with you now--anywhere--toward the future," she answered.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Life and Gabriella, by Ellen Glasgow
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14571 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14571 ***</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/001.jpg"><img src=
+"images/001.jpg" width="50%" alt="" title="" /></a></div>
+<div>
+<h1>LIFE AND<br />
+GABRIELLA</h1>
+</div>
+<h4>THE STORY OF A WOMAN'S COURAGE</h4>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>ELLEN GLASGOW</h2>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<img src="images/002.png" width="15%" alt="" title="" /></div>
+<div>
+<h4>FRONTISPIECE<br />
+BY<br />
+C. ALLAN GILBERT</h4>
+</div>
+<h5>GARDEN CITY -- NEW YORK</h5>
+<h4>DOUBLEDAY, PAGE &amp; COMPANY</h4>
+<h4>1916</h4>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<div class="center">
+<h3><a href="#BOOK_FIRST">BOOK FIRST&mdash;THE AGE OF
+FAITH</a></h3>
+<br />
+<table summary="">
+<tr>
+<td>CHAPTER</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_I">Presents a Shameless Heroine</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">3</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_II">Poor Jane</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">30</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_III">A Start in Life</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">61</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">Mirage</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">90</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_V">The New World</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">122</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">The Old Serpent</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">148</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">Motherhood</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">176</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<br />
+<h3><a href="#BOOK_SECOND">BOOK SECOND&mdash;THE AGE OF
+KNOWLEDGE</a></h3>
+<br />
+<table summary="">
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_Ia">I.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_Ia">Disenchantment.</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_Ia">211</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IIa">II.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_IIa">A Second Start in Life</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IIa">241</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IIIa">III.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_III">Work</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">274</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IVa">IV.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_IVa">The Dream and the Years</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IVa">300</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_Va">V.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_Va">Success</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_Va">331</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIa">VI.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VIa">Discoveries</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIa">368</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIIa">VII.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VIIa">Readjustments</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIIa">406</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIIIa">VIII.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VIIIa">The Test</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIIIa">444</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IXa">IX.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_IXa">The Past</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IXa">476</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_Xa">X.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_Xa">Dream and the Reality</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_Xa">501</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<br /></div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_FIRST" id="BOOK_FIRST"></a>BOOK FIRST</h2>
+<h3>THE AGE OF FAITH</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h3>PRESENTS A SHAMELESS HEROINE</h3>
+<p>After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock
+and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front
+parlour. On the window-sill, midway between the white curtains, a
+pot of blue hyacinths stood in a cracked china plate, and as the
+sunlight shone into the room, the scent of the blossoms floated to
+the corner where Gabriella was patiently pulling basting threads
+out of the hem of a skirt. For a minute her capable hands stopped
+at their work, and raising her smooth dark head she looked
+compassionately at her sister Jane, who was sitting, like a frozen
+image of martyrdom, in the middle of the long horsehair sofa. Three
+times within the last twelve months Jane had fled from her
+husband's roof to the protection of her widowed mother, a weak
+person of excellent ancestry, who could hardly have protected a
+sparrow had one taken refuge beneath her skirt. Twice before Mrs.
+Carr had wept over her daughter's woes and returned her, a sullen
+saint, to the arms of the discreetly repentant Charley; but to-day,
+while the four older children were bribed to good behaviour with
+bread and damson preserves in the pantry, and the baby was
+contentedly playing with his rubber ring in his mother's arms,
+Gabriella had passionately declared that "Jane must never, never go
+back!" Nothing so dreadful as this had ever happened before, for
+the repentant Charley had been discovered making love to his wife's
+dressmaker, a pretty French girl whom Jane had engaged for her
+spring sewing because she had more "style" than had fallen to the
+austerely virtuous lot of the Carr's regular seamstress, Miss Folly
+Hatch. "I might have known she was too pretty to be good," moaned
+Jane, while Mrs. Carr, in her willow rocking-chair by the window,
+wiped her reddened eyelids on the strip of cambric ruffling she was
+hemming.</p>
+<p>Unmoved among them the baby beat methodically on his mother's
+breast with his rubber ring, as indifferent to her sobs as to the
+intermittent tearful "coos" of his grandmother. He had a smooth
+bald head, fringed, like the head of a very old man, with pale
+silken hair that was almost white in the sunshine, and his eyes, as
+expressionless as marbles, stared over the pot of hyacinths at a
+sparrow perched against the deep blue sky on the red brick wall of
+the opposite house. From beneath his starched little skirt his
+feet, in pink crocheted shoes, protruded with a forlorn and
+helpless air as if they hardly belonged to him.</p>
+<p>"Oh, my poor child, what are we going to do?" asked Mrs. Carr in
+a resigned voice as she returned to her hemming.</p>
+<p>"There's nothing to do, mother," answered Jane, without lifting
+her eyes from the baby's head, without moving an inch out of the
+position she had dropped into when she entered the room. Then,
+after a sobbing pause, she defined in a classic formula her whole
+philosophy of life: "It wasn't my fault," she said.</p>
+<p>"But one can always do something if it's only to scream,"
+rejoined Gabriella with spirit.</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't scream," replied Jane, while the pale cast of
+resolution hardened her small flat features, "not&mdash;not if he
+killed me. My one comfort," she added pathetically, "is that only
+you and mother know how he treats me."</p>
+<p>Her pretty vacant face with its faded bloom resembled a pastel
+portrait in which the artist had forgotten to paint an expression.
+"Poor Jane Gracey," as she was generally called, had wasted the
+last ten years in a futile effort to hide the fact of an
+unfortunate marriage beneath an excessively cheerful manner. She
+talked continually because talking seemed to her the most
+successful way of "keeping up an appearance." Though everybody who
+knew her knew also that Charley Gracey neglected her shamefully,
+she spent twelve hours of the twenty-four pretending that she was
+perfectly happy. At nineteen she had been a belle and beauty of the
+willowy sort; but at thirty she had relapsed into one of the women
+whom men admire in theory and despise in reality. She had started
+with a natural tendency to clinging sweetness; as the years went on
+the sweetness, instead of growing fainter, had become almost
+cloying, while the clinging had hysterically tightened into a
+clutch. Charley Gracey, who had married her under the mistaken
+impression that her type was restful for a reforming rake, (not
+realizing that there is nothing so mentally disturbing as a fool)
+had been changed by marriage from a gay bird of the barnyard into a
+veritable hawk of the air. His behaviour was the scandal of the
+town, yet the greater his sins, the intenser grew Jane's sweetness,
+the more twining her hold. "Nobody will ever think of blaming you,
+darling," said Mrs. Carr consolingly. "You have behaved beautifully
+from the beginning. We all know what a perfect wife you have
+been."</p>
+<p>"I've tried to do my duty even if Charley failed in his,"
+replied the perfect wife, unfastening the hooks of her small
+heliotrope wrap trimmed with tarnished silver passementerie. Above
+her short flaxen "bang" she wore a crumpled purple hat ornamented
+with bunches of velvet pansies; and though it was two years old,
+and out of fashion at a period when fashions changed less rapidly,
+it lent an air of indecent festivity to her tearful face. Her youth
+was already gone, for her beauty had been of the fragile kind that
+breaks early, and her wan, aristocratic features had settled into
+the downward droop which comes to the faces of people who
+habitually "expect the worst."</p>
+<p>"I know, Jane, I know," murmured Mrs. Carr, dropping her thimble
+as she nervously tried to hasten her sewing. "But don't you think
+it would be a comfort, dear, to have the advice of a man about
+Charley? Won't you let me send Marthy for your Cousin Jimmy
+Wrenn?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother, I couldn't. It would kill me to have everybody know
+I'm unhappy!" wailed Jane, breaking down.</p>
+<p>"But everybody knows anyway, Jane," said Gabriella, sticking the
+point of her scissors into a strip of buckram, for she was
+stiffening the bottom of the skirt after the fashion of the middle
+'nineties.</p>
+<p>"Of course I'm foolishly sensitive," returned Jane, while she
+lifted the baby from her lap and placed him in a pile of cushions
+by the deep arm of the sofa, where he sat imperturbably gazing at
+the blue sky and the red wall from which the sparrow had flown.
+"You can never understand my feelings because you are so
+different."</p>
+<p>"Gabriella is not married," observed Mrs. Carr, with sentimental
+finality. "But I'm sure, Jane&mdash;I'm just as sure as I can be of
+anything that it wouldn't do a bit of harm to speak to Cousin Jimmy
+Wrenn. Men know so much more than women about such matters."</p>
+<p>In her effort to recover her thimble she dropped her spool of
+thread, which rolled under the sofa on which Jane was sitting, and
+while she waited for Gabriella to find it, she gazed pensively into
+the almost deserted street where the slender shadows of poplar
+trees slanted over the wet cobblestones. Though Mrs. Carr worked
+every instant of her time, except the few hours when she lay in bed
+trying to sleep, and the few minutes when she sat at the table
+trying to eat, nothing that she began was ever finished until
+Gabriella took it out of her hands. She did her best, for she was
+as conscientious in her way as poor Jane, yet through some tragic
+perversity of fate her best seemed always to fall short of the
+simplest requirements of life. Her face, like Jane's, was long and
+thin, with a pathetic droop at the corners of the mouth, a small
+bony nose, always slightly reddened at the tip, and faded blue eyes
+beneath an even row of little flat round curls which looked as if
+they were plastered on her forehead.</p>
+<p>Thirty-three years before, in the romantic and fiery 'sixties,
+she had married dashing young Gabriel Carr for no better reason
+apparently than that she was falling vaguely in love with love; and
+the marriage, which had been one of reckless passion on his side,
+had been for her scarcely more than the dreamer's hesitating
+compromise with reality. Passion, which she had been taught to
+regard as an unholy attribute implanted by the Creator, with
+inscrutable wisdom, in the nature of man, and left out of the
+nature of woman, had never troubled her gentle and affectionate
+soul; and not until the sudden death of her husband did she begin
+even remotely to fall in love with the man. But when he was once
+safely dead she worshipped his memory with an ardour which would
+have seemed to her indelicate had he been still alive. For sixteen
+years she had worn a crape veil on her bonnet, and she still went
+occasionally, after the morning service was over on Sunday, to
+place fresh flowers on his grave. Now that his "earthly nature,"
+against which she had struggled so earnestly while he was living,
+was no longer in need of the pious exorcisms with which she had
+treated its frequent manifestations, she remembered only the dark
+beauty of his face, his robust and vigorous youth, the tenderness
+and gallantry of his passion. For her daughters she had drawn an
+imaginary portrait of him which combined the pagan beauty of
+Antinous with the militant purity of Saint Paul; and this romantic
+blending of the heathen and the Presbyterian virtues had passed
+through her young imagination into the awakening soul of
+Gabriella.</p>
+<p>By the town at large Mrs. Carr's sorrow was alluded to as "a
+beautiful grief," yet so deeply rooted in her being was the
+instinct to twine, that for the first few years of her bereavement
+she had simply sat in her widow's weeds, with her rent paid by
+Cousin Jimmy Wrenn and her market bills settled monthly by Uncle
+Beverly Blair, and waited patiently for some man to come and
+support her.</p>
+<p>When no man came, and Uncle Beverly died of a stroke of apoplexy
+with his will unsigned, she had turned, with the wasted energy of
+the unfit and the incompetent, to solve the inexplicable problem of
+indigent ladyhood. And it was at this crucial instant that Becky
+Bollingbroke had put her awful question: "Have you made up your
+mind, Fanny, what you are going to do?" That was twelve years ago,
+but deep down in some secret cave of Fanny's being the ghastly echo
+of the words still reverberated through the emptiness and the
+silence.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think, darling," she pleaded now, as she had pleaded
+to Becky on that other dreadful occasion, "that we had better send
+immediately for Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"</p>
+<p>"I&mdash;I can't think," gasped Jane, "but you may if you want
+to, mother."</p>
+<p>"Send, Gabriella," said Mrs. Carr quickly, and she added
+tenderly, while Gabriella dropped her work and ran to the outside
+kitchen for Marthy, the coloured drudge, "you will feel so much
+better, Jane, after you have had his advice."</p>
+<p>Then at the sight of Jane's stricken face, which had turned blue
+as if from a sudden chill, she hurriedly opened the drawer of her
+sewing machine, and taking out a bottle of camphor she kept there,
+began tremulously rubbing her daughter's forehead. As she did so,
+she remembered, with the startling irrelevance of the
+intellectually untrained, the way Jane had looked in her veil and
+orange blossoms on the day of her wedding.</p>
+<p>"I wonder what on earth we have done to deserve our troubles?"
+she found herself thinking while she put the stopper back into the
+bottle and returned to her sewing.</p>
+<p>"Marthy has gone, mother," said Gabriella, with her cheerful air
+as she came back into the room, "and I shut the children in the
+laundry with Dolly who is doing the washing."</p>
+<p>"I hope they won't make themselves sick with preserves,"
+remarked Jane, with the first dart of energy she had shown.
+"Perhaps I'd better go and see. If Fanny eats too much we'll be up
+all night with her."</p>
+<p>"I told Dolly not to let them stuff," answered Gabriella, as she
+sat down by the window and threaded her needle. She was a tall,
+dark girl, slender and straight as a young poplar, with a face that
+was frank and pleasant rather than pretty, and sparkling brown eyes
+which turned golden and grew bright as swords when she was angry.
+Seen by the strong light of the window, her face showed sallow in
+tone, with a certain nobility about the bony structure beneath the
+soft girlish flesh, and a look of almost stern decision in the
+square chin and in the full rich curve of the mouth. Her hair,
+which was too fine and soft to show its thickness, drooped from its
+parting at the side in a dark wing over her forehead, where it
+shadowed her arched black eyebrows and the clear sweet gravity of
+her eyes. As she bent over her sewing the thin pure lines of her
+body had a look of arrested energy, of relaxed but exuberant
+vitality.</p>
+<p>"You won't go to the dance to-night, will you, Gabriella?"
+inquired Mrs. Carr nervously.</p>
+<p>"No, I'm not going," answered the girl regretfully, for she
+loved dancing, and her white organdie dress, trimmed with quillings
+of blue ribbon, lay upstairs on the bed. "I'll never dance again if
+only Jane won't go back to Charley. I'll work my fingers to the
+bone to help her take care of the children."</p>
+<p>"I'll never, never go back," chanted Jane with feverish
+passion.</p>
+<p>"But I thought Arthur Peyton was coming for you," said Mrs.
+Carr. "He will be so disappointed."</p>
+<p>"Oh, he'll understand&mdash;he'll have to," replied Gabriella
+carelessly.</p>
+<p>The sunshine faded slowly from the hyacinths on the window-sill,
+and drawing her crocheted cape of purple wool closer about her,
+Mrs. Carr moved a little nearer the fireplace. Outside the March
+wind was blowing with a melancholy sound up the long straight
+street, and rocking the glossy boughs of an old magnolia tree in
+the yard From the shining leaves of the tree a few drops of water
+fell on the brick pavement, where several joyous sparrows were
+drinking, and farther off, as bright as silver in the clear wind, a
+solitary church spire rose above the huddled roofs of the town.
+When the wind lulled, as it did now and then, a warm breath seemed
+to stir in the sunshine, which grew suddenly brighter, while a
+promise of spring floated like a faint provocative scent on the
+air. And this scent, so vague, so roving, that it was like the
+ghostly perfume of flowers, stole at last into the memory, and made
+the old dream of youth and the young grow restless at the call of
+Life, which sang to the music of flutes in the brain. But the wind,
+rising afresh, drove the spirit of spring from the street, and
+swept the broken leaves of the magnolia tree over the drenched
+grass to the green-painted iron urns on either side of the
+steps.</p>
+<p>The house, a small brick dwelling, set midway of an
+expressionless row and wearing on its front a look of desiccated
+gentility, stood in one of those forgotten streets where needy
+gentlewomen do "light housekeeping" in an obscure hinterland of
+respectability. Hill Street, which had once known fashion, and that
+only yesterday, as old ladies count, had sunk at last into a humble
+state of decay. Here and there the edges of porches had crumbled;
+grass was beginning to sprout by the curbstone; and the once
+comfortable homes had opened their doors to boarders or let their
+large, high-ceiled rooms to the impoverished relicts of Confederate
+soldiers. Only a few blocks away the stream of modern progress,
+sweeping along Broad Street, was rapidly changing the old Southern
+city into one of those bustling centres of activity which the press
+of the community agreed to describe as "a metropolis"; but this
+river of industrialism was spanned by no social bridge connecting
+Hill Street and its wistful relicts with the statelier dignities
+and the more ephemeral gaieties of the opposite side. To be really
+"in society" one must cross over, either for good and all, or in
+the dilapidated "hack" which carried Gabriella to the parties of
+her schoolmates in West Franklin Street.</p>
+<p>For in the middle 'nineties, before social life in Richmond had
+become both complicated and expensive, it was still possible for a
+girl in Gabriella's position&mdash;provided, of course, she came of
+a "good family"&mdash;to sew all day over the plain sewing of her
+relatives, and in the evening to reign as the acknowledged belle of
+a ball. "Society," it is true, did not reach any longer, except in
+the historic sense, to Hill Street; but the inhabitants of Hill
+Street, if they were young and energetic, not infrequently made
+triumphant excursions into "society." Though Gabriella was poor and
+sewed for her living, she had been, from the moment she left
+school, one of the most popular girls in town. To be sure, she was
+neither so pretty as Florrie Spencer nor so clever as Julia
+Caperton, but in the words of Julia's brother Algernon, she was
+"the sort you could count on." Even in her childhood it had become
+the habit of those about her to count on Gabriella. Without
+Gabriella, her mother was fond of saying, it would have been
+impossible to keep a roof over their heads.</p>
+<p>Twelve years before, when they had moved into the house in Hill
+Street, Mrs. Carr had accepted from Jimmy Wrenn the rent of the
+first floor and the outside kitchen, which was connected with the
+back porch by a winding brick walk, overgrown with wild violets,
+while the upper story was let to two elderly spinsters, bearing the
+lordly, though fallen, name of Peterborough. These spinsters, like
+Mrs. Carr, spent their lives in a beautiful and futile
+pretence&mdash;the pretence of keeping up an appearance. They also
+took in the plain sewing of their richer relatives, who lived in
+Franklin Street, and sent them little trays of sweet things as soon
+as the midday dinner was over on Sunday. Sometimes they would drop
+in to see Mrs. Carr just before supper was ready, and then they
+would pretend that they lived on tea and toast because they were
+naturally "light eaters," and that they sewed all day, not for the
+money, but because they liked to have "something to do with their
+hands" They were tall thin women in organdie caps and black alpaca
+dresses made with long basques which showed a greenish cast in the
+daylight. The walls of their rooms were covered with family
+portraits of the colonial period, and Mrs. Carr, who had parted
+with most of her treasures, often wondered how they had preserved
+so many proofs of a distinguished descent. Even her silver had
+gone&mdash;first the quaint old service with the Bolton crest,
+which had belonged to her mother; then, one by one, the forks and
+spoons; and, last of all, Gabriella's silver mug, which was
+carried, wrapped in a shawl, to the shop of old Mr. Camberwell. She
+was a woman who loved inanimate things with the passion which other
+women give only to children, and a thousand delicate fibres of
+sentiment knit her soul to the portraits on the wall, to the
+furniture with which she lived, to the silver and glass that had
+once belonged to her mother. When one after one these things went
+from her, she felt as if the very roots of her being were torn up
+from the warm familiar earth in which they had grown. "There's
+nothing left in the parlour that I shouldn't be ashamed to have
+your grandmother look at," she had once confessed to her
+daughters.</p>
+<p>Seen by the light of history, this parlour, in which so much of
+Gabriella's childhood was spent, was not without interest as an
+archaic survival of the fundamental errors of the mid-Victorian
+mind. The walls were covered with bottle-green paper on which
+endless processions of dwarfed blue peacocks marched relentlessly
+toward an embossed border&mdash;the result of an artistic frenzy of
+the early 'eighties. Neither Mrs. Carr nor Jimmy Wrenn, who paid
+the rent, had chosen this paper, but having been left on the
+dealer's hands, it had come under the eye of the landlord, who,
+since he did not have to live with it had secured it at a bargain.
+Too unused to remonstrance to make it effective, Mrs. Carr had
+suffered the offending decoration in meekness, while Jimmy, having
+a taste for embossment, honestly regarded the peacocks as
+"handsome." From the centre of the ceiling a massive gilt
+chandelier, elaborately festooned with damaged garlands, shed, when
+it was lighted, a dim and troubled gloom down on the threadbare
+Axminster carpet. Above the white marble mantelpiece, the old
+French mirror, one of the few good things left over from a public
+sale of Mrs. Carr's possessions, reflected a pair of bronze
+candelabra with crystal pendants, and a mahogany clock, which had
+kept excellent time for half a century and then had stopped
+suddenly one day while Marthy was cleaning. In the corner, between
+the door and the window, there was a rosewood bookcase, with the
+bare shelves hidden behind plaited magenta silk, and directly above
+it hung an engraving of a group of amiable children feeding fish in
+a pond. Across the room, over the walnut whatnot, a companion
+picture represented the same group of children scattering crumbs
+before a polite brood of chickens in a barnyard. Between the
+windows a third engraving immortalized the "Burial of
+Latan&eacute;" in the presence of several sad and resigned ladies
+in crinolines, while the sofa on which Jane sat was presided over
+by a Sully portrait of the beautiful Angelica Carr, wearing a white
+scarf on her head and holding a single rose in her hand. This
+portrait and a Saint Memin drawing of Mrs. Carr's grandfather, the
+Reverend Bartholomew Berkeley as a young man in a high stock, were
+the solitary existing relics of that consecrated past when Fanny
+Berkeley was "not brought up to do anything."</p>
+<p>To Mrs. Carr, whose mind was so constituted that any change in
+her surroundings produced a sensation of shock, the room was
+hallowed by the simple fact that she had lived in it for a number
+of years. That an object or a custom had existed in the past
+appeared to her to be an incontestible reason why it should
+continue to exist in the present. It was distressing to her to be
+obliged to move a picture or to alter the position of a piece of
+furniture, and she had worn one shape of bonnet and one style of
+hairdressing, slightly modified to suit the changing fashions, for
+almost twenty years. Her long pale face, her pensive blue eyes, and
+her look of anxious sweetness, made a touching picture of feminine
+incompetence; and yet it was from this pallid warmth, this gentle
+inefficiency of soul, that the buoyant spirit of Gabriella had
+sprung.</p>
+<p>For Gabriella was the incarnation of energy. From the moment of
+her birth when, in the words of her negro "mammy" she had looked
+"as peart as life," she had begun her battle against the enveloping
+twin powers of decay and inertia. To the intense secret
+mortification of her mother, who had prayed for a second waxlike
+infant after the fashion of poor Jane, she had been a notoriously
+ugly baby (almost as ugly as her Aunt Becky Bollingbroke who had
+never married), and as she grew up, this ugliness was barely
+redeemed by what Jane, in her vague way, described as "the
+something else in her face." According to Cousin Jimmy, who never
+recognized charm unless its manifestations were soft and purring,
+this "something else" was merely "a sunny temper"; and one of the
+constant afflictions of Gabriella's childhood was overhearing her
+mother remark to visitors: "No, she isn't so pretty as poor Jane,
+but, as Cousin Jimmy tells us, she is blessed with a sunny
+temper."</p>
+<p>"Give me that ruffle, mother, and I'll whip the lace on while
+we're waiting," she said now, laying aside the skirt of her Easter
+dress, and stretching out her hand for the strip of cambric in her
+mother's lap. But Mrs. Carr did not hear, for she was gazing, with
+the concentrated stare of Jane's baby, at a beautiful old lady who
+was walking slowly through the faint sunshine on the opposite
+pavement.</p>
+<p>"I wonder where Mrs. Peyton can be coming from in her best
+dress?" she remarked, forgetting Jane for an instant while her
+sense of tragedy yielded to the keener impulse of curiosity.</p>
+<p>"She never goes anywhere but to church or to the Old Ladies'
+home," replied Gabriella. "Arthur says she hasn't paid a call since
+her husband's death."</p>
+<p>"Well, I haven't made one, except of course to my relatives, for
+fifteen years," rejoined Mrs. Carr a trifle tartly. Then her manner
+lost its unusual asperity, and she added excitedly, "They're coming
+now, Jane. There's Cousin Jimmy and he's bringing Cousin Pussy and
+Uncle Meriweather!"</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother, I can't possibly see them! I feel as if it would
+kill me!" cried Jane in desperation.</p>
+<p>"Give her the camphor, mother," said Gabriella with grim humour
+as she went to open the door.</p>
+<p>"Brace yourself, my darling. They are coming," pleaded Mrs.
+Carr, as she slipped her arm under Jane's head. At the first hint
+of any excitement she invariably lost her presence of mind and
+became distracted; and Jane's hysterical outbursts never failed to
+convince her, though they usually left the more skeptical Gabriella
+unmoved. "Don't you think you would feel better if you lay back on
+the pillows?" she urged.</p>
+<p>Then the bell rang, and before Jane could swallow her sobs, her
+sister ushered in Jimmy and Pussy Wrenn, who were closely followed
+by the ponderous figure of Uncle Meriweather, a gouty but benign
+old gentleman, whose jet-black eyebrows and white imperial gave him
+a misleading military air.</p>
+<p>"Well, well, my dear, what's this I hear about Charley?"
+demanded Cousin Jimmy, whose sprightly manner was never sprightlier
+than in the hour of tragedy or the house of mourning. "What does he
+mean by letting you run away from him?"</p>
+<p>"I've done my duty by Charley. I've never, never failed in my
+duty!" wept Jane, breaking down on Pussy's tender bosom, and waking
+the sleeping baby.</p>
+<p>"We know, darling, we know," said Pussy, patting Jane's
+shoulder, while Jimmy drew a white silk handkerchief from his
+pocket, and hid his face under the pretence of blowing his
+nose.</p>
+<p>To see a woman cry never failed to wring a sympathetic tear from
+Jimmy. Though he was a man of hard common sense, possessed of an
+inflexible determination to make money, there was a soft spot
+inside of him which was reached only by the distress of one of the
+opposite sex. The suffering&mdash;particularly the financial
+suffering&mdash;of men left him unmoved. He could foreclose a
+mortgage or press a debt (as long as the debtor's wife or daughter
+did not appeal to him) as well as another; but the instant a skirt
+fluttered on the horizon that soft something inside of him
+appeared, as he expressed it, "to give way." Apart from their
+afflictions, he had an eye, he used to boast, for but one woman in
+the world, and she, thank God, was his wife. Handsome, portly,
+full-blooded, and slightly overfed, he had let Pussy twine him
+about her little finger ever since the afternoon when he had first
+seen her, small, trim, and with "a way with her," at the age of
+six.</p>
+<p>"Poor, poor child," said Pussy, cuddling Jane and the baby
+together against her sympathetic bosom. "Something must be done,
+Cousin Fanny. Something must be done, as Mr. Wrenn said on the way
+down, if it's only for the satisfaction of letting Charley know
+what we think of him."</p>
+<p>"We've got to put down our pride and take some step," declared
+Jimmy, wondering vaguely how he could have forgotten the spirited
+utterance his wife attributed to him. "I'm all for the authority of
+the husband, of course, and the sanctity of the home, and
+everything according to the Bible and all that&mdash;but, bless my
+soul, there's got to be a limit to what a woman is expected to
+stand. There're some things, and I know Uncle Meriweather will
+agree with me, that it isn't in human nature to put up with."</p>
+<p>"If I were forty years younger I'd call him out and give him a
+whipping he wouldn't forget in a jiffy," blustered Uncle
+Meriweather, feebly violent. "There's no way of defending a lady in
+these Godforsaken days. Why, I remember when I was a boy, my poor
+father&mdash;God bless him!&mdash;you recollect him, don't you
+Fanny?&mdash;never used a walking stick in his life and could read
+print without glasses at ninety&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Making love to the dressmaker," pursued Jimmy, whose righteous
+anger refused to be turned aside from its end.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think, Cousin Fanny," whispered Pussy, "that
+Gabriella had better leave the room?"</p>
+<p>"Gabriella? Why, how on earth can we spare her?" Mrs. Carr
+whispered back rather nervously. Then, beneath Pussy's compelling
+glance, she added timidly: "Hadn't you better go, darling, and see
+what the children are doing?"</p>
+<p>"They are playing in the laundry," replied Gabriella
+reassuringly. "I told Dolly not to let them go out of her
+sight."</p>
+<p>"She knows so much already for her age," murmured Mrs. Carr
+apologetically to Pussy.</p>
+<p>"I don't know what Mr. Wrenn will think of your staying, dear,"
+said Pussy, smiling archly at the girl. "Mr. Wrenn, I was just
+saying that I didn't know what you would think of Gabriella's
+staying in the room."</p>
+<p>Jimmy's large handsome face, with its look of perpetual
+innocence&mdash;the incorruptible innocence of a man who has never
+imagined anything&mdash;turned helplessly in the direction of his
+wife. All things relating to propriety came, he felt instinctively,
+within the natural sphere of woman, and to be forced, on the spur
+of the moment, to decide a delicate question of manners, awoke in
+him the dismay of one who sees his accustomed prop of authority
+beginning to crumble. Surely Pussy knew best about things like
+that! He would as soon have thought of interfering with her
+housekeeping as of instructing her in the details of ladylike
+conduct. And, indeed, he had not observed that Gabriella was in the
+room until his wife, for her own purpose, had adroitly presented
+the fact to his notice.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella in the room?" he repeated in perplexity. "Why, you'd
+better go, hadn't you, Gabriella? Oughtn't she to go, Pussy?"</p>
+<p>"Just as you think best, dear, but it seems to me&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Certainly she ought to go," said Uncle Meriweather decisively.
+"The less women and girls know about such matters, the better. I
+don't understand, Fanny, how you could possibly have consented to
+Gabriella's being present."</p>
+<p>"I didn't consent, Uncle Meriweather," protested poor Mrs. Carr,
+who could not bear the mildest rebuke without tears; "I only said
+to Pussy that Gabriella knew a great deal more already than she
+ought to, and I'm sure I'm not to blame for it. If I'd had my way
+she would have been just as sheltered as other girls."</p>
+<p>"Don't cry, mother, it isn't your fault," said Gabriella. "Uncle
+Meriweather, if you make mother cry I'll never forgive you. How can
+she help all these dreadful things going on?"</p>
+<p>She was sensible, she was composed, she was perfectly sweet
+about it; but, and this fact made Pussy gasp with dismay, she did
+not budge an inch from her position. With her clear grave eyes,
+which lost their sparkle when she grew serious, and her manner of
+eager sympathy, she appeared, indeed, to be the only one in the
+room who was capable of facing the situation with frankness. That
+she meant to face it to the end, Pussy could not doubt while she
+looked at her.</p>
+<p>"Oh, it doesn't matter about Gabriella. She knows everything,"
+said Jane, with the prickly sweetness of suffering virtue.</p>
+<p>"But she's a young girl&mdash;young girls oughtn't to hear such
+things," argued Uncle Meriweather, feeling helplessly that
+something was wrong with the universe, and that, since it was
+different from anything he had ever known in the past, he was
+unable to cope with it. Into his eyes, gentle and bloodshot above
+his fierce white moustache&mdash;the eyes of one who has never
+suffered the painful process of thinking things out, but has
+accepted his opinions as unquestioningly as he has accepted his
+religion or the cut of his clothes&mdash;there came the troubled
+look of one who is struggling against forces that he does not
+understand. For Gabriella was serious. There was not the slightest
+hope in the disturbed mind of Uncle Meriweather that she was
+anything but perfectly serious. Caprice, being a womanly quality,
+was not without a certain charm for him. He was quite used to it;
+he knew how to take it; he had been taught to recognize it from his
+childhood up. It was pretty, it was playful; and his mind, if so
+ponderous a vehicle could indulge in such activity, was fond of
+play. But after the first perplexed minute or two he had
+relinquished forever the hope that Gabriella was merely capricious.
+Clearly the girl knew what she was talking about; and this
+knowledge, so surprising in one of her age and sex, gave him a
+strange dreamy sense of having just awakened from sleep.</p>
+<p>"I must say I like girls to be girls, Fanny," he pursued
+testily; "I reckon I'm only an old fogy, but I like girls to be
+girls. When a woman loses her innocence, she loses her greatest
+charm in the eyes of a man&mdash;of the right sort of a man. Pluck
+the peach with the bloom on it, my poor father used to say. He
+didn't believe in all this new-fangled nonsense about the higher
+education of women&mdash;none of his daughters could do more I than
+read and write and spell after a fashion, and yet look what wives
+and mothers they made! Pokey married three times, and was the
+mother of fourteen children, nine of them sons. And are we any
+better off now than then, I ask? Whoever heard of a woman running
+away from her husband before the war, and now here is poor
+Jane&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But it isn't my fault, Uncle Meriweather!" cried Jane, in
+desperation at his obtuseness. "I've tried to be the best wife I
+could&mdash;ask Charley if I haven't. He neglected me long before I
+let any one know&mdash;even mother. I forgave him again and again,
+and I'd go on forgiving him forever if he would let me. I've told
+him over and over that I was going to be a faithful wife to him if
+he killed me."</p>
+<p>"Of course, my dear, I'm not meaning to reproach you," said
+Uncle Meriweather, overcome by the effect of his words. "We all
+know that you've stood as much as any woman could and keep her
+self-respect. It isn't possible, I suppose, for you to go on living
+with Charley?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, I couldn't bear a separation, not a legal one at any rate,"
+groaned Mrs. Carr. "Of course she must come away for a time, but
+nobody must hear of it or it would kill me. They are one in the
+sight of God, and my dear old father had such a horror of
+separations."</p>
+<p>"Well, I'd kick him out&mdash;I'd kick him out so quickly he
+wouldn't know it," declared Jimmy. "If a daughter of mine were
+married to that scamp, she'd never lay eyes on him except over my
+dead body. I reckon God would enjoy the sight of his getting his
+deserts."</p>
+<p>Deep down in Cousin Jimmy, deeper than sentiment, deeper than
+tradition, deeper even than the solid bedrock of common sense,
+there was the romantic essence of his soul, which hated baseness
+with a fiery hatred. His ruddy face, still boyish in spite of his
+fifty years, blanched slowly, and there came into his soft dark
+eyes the look he had worn at Malvern Hill under the fire of the
+enemy.</p>
+<p>At the sight Gabriella thrilled as she did when drums were
+beating and armies were marching. "Oh, Cousin Jimmy, don't let her
+go back!" she cried.</p>
+<p>"I can't go back to him now! I can never, never go back to him
+again!" intoned Jane with passionate energy.</p>
+<p>"No, God bless her, she shan't go back," declared Jimmy, as
+profoundly stirred as Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"But the children? What will become of the children?" demanded
+Mrs. Carr, not of Jimmy, but of the universe. Her helpless gaze,
+roving wildly from face to face, and resting nowhere, was like the
+gaze of a small animal caught in a trap. "If Jane separates the
+children from their father what will people think of her?" she
+asked, still vainly addressing Heaven.</p>
+<p>"As long as she is right it doesn't matter what people think,"
+retorted Gabriella; but her protest, unlike her mother's, was
+directed to the visible rather than to the invisible powers. The
+thought of Jane's children&mdash;of the innocent souls so unaware
+of the awful predicament in which they were placed that their
+bodies could be devouring bread and damson preserves in the
+laundry. The poignant thought of these children moved her more
+deeply than she had ever been moved before in her twenty years. A
+passion for self-sacrifice rushed through her with the piercing
+sweetness of religious ecstasy. Nothing like this had ever happened
+to her before&mdash;not when she was confirmed, not when she had
+stood at the head of her class, not when she had engaged herself to
+Arthur Peyton two years before. It was the pure flame of experience
+at its highest point that burned in her.</p>
+<p>"I will take care of the children," she said breathlessly. "I
+will give up my whole life to them. I will get a place in a store
+and work my fingers to the bone, if only Jane will never go
+back."</p>
+<p>For a moment there was silence; but while Gabriella waited for
+somebody to answer, she felt that it was a silence which had become
+vocal with inexpressible things. The traditions of Uncle
+Meriweather, the conventions of Mrs. Carr, the prejudices of Jimmy,
+and the weak impulses of Jane, all these filled the dusk through
+which the blank faces of her family stared back at her. Then, while
+she stood white and trembling with her resolve&mdash;with the
+passionate desire to give herself, body and soul, to Jane and to
+Jane's children&mdash;the voice of Experience spoke pleasantly, but
+firmly, through Cousin Pussy's lips, and it dealt with Gabriella's
+outburst as Experience usually deals with Youth.</p>
+<p>"You are a dear child, Gabriella," it said; "but how in the
+world could you help Jane by going into a store?"</p>
+<p>In the midst of the emotional scene, Cousin Pussy alone remained
+sweetly matter-of-fact. Though she was not without orderly
+sentiments, her character had long ago been swept of heroics, and
+from her arched gray hair, worn &agrave; la Pompadour, to her
+pretty foot in its small neat boot, she was a practical soul who
+had as little use for religious ecstasy as she had for downright
+infidelity. There seemed to her something positively unnatural in
+Gabriella's manner&mdash;a hint of that "sudden conversion" she
+associated with the lower classes or with the negroes.</p>
+<p>"You are a dear child," she repeated, biting her fresh lips;
+"but how will you help Jane by going into a store?"</p>
+<p>"I can trim hats," returned Gabriella stubbornly. "Mr.
+Brandywine will take me into his new millinery department, I know,
+for I said something to him about it the other day."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Gabriella, not in a store! It would kill mother!" cried
+Jane, with the prophetic wail of Cassandra.</p>
+<p>"Not in a store!" echoed Mrs. Carr; "you couldn't work in a
+store. If you want to work," she concluded feebly, "why can't you
+work just as well in your home?"</p>
+<p>"But it isn't the same thing, mother," explained Gabriella, with
+angelic patience. "Nobody will get me to make hats at home, and,
+besides, I've got to learn how to do it. I've got to learn business
+methods."</p>
+<p>"But not in a shop, my dear," protested Uncle Meriweather in the
+precise English of his youth.</p>
+<p>"Bless my heart!" chuckled Cousin Jimmy. "Business methods!
+You're as good as a show, Gabriella, and, by George! you've plenty
+of pluck. I like pluck in man or woman."</p>
+<p>"I shouldn't encourage her if I were you, Mr. Wrenn," said
+Cousin Pussy, almost forgetting to be indirect.</p>
+<p>"Well, of course, I don't approve of that store business,"
+replied Jimmy, deprecatingly, "but I can't help liking pluck when I
+see it. Look here, Gabriella, if you're bent on working, why don't
+you turn in and teach?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, let her teach by all means," agreed Uncle Meriweather,
+with genuine enthusiasm for the idea. "I've always regarded
+teaching as an occupation that ought to be restricted by law to
+needy ladies."</p>
+<p>"But I can't teach, I don't know enough, and, besides, I'd hate
+it," protested Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"I'm sure you might start a school for very little children,"
+said Mrs. Carr. "You don't have to know much, to teach them, and
+you write a very good hand."</p>
+<p>"What about plain sewing?" asked Pussy in her ready way.
+"Couldn't you learn to make those new waists all the girls are
+wearing?"</p>
+<p>"I haven't the patience to sew well. Look how hard mother works,
+making buttonholes with stitches so fine you can hardly see them,
+and yet she doesn't get enough to put bread into her mouth, and but
+for her relatives she'd have been in the poorhouse long ago. I'm
+tired of being on charity just because we are women. Now that Jane
+has come home for good I am simply obliged to find something to
+do."</p>
+<p>"I don't mind your wanting to work, dear, I think it's splendid
+of you," returned Pussy, "but I do feel that you ought to work in a
+ladylike way&mdash;a way that wouldn't interfere with your social
+position and your going to germans and having attention from young
+men and all that."</p>
+<p>"Why don't you make lampshades, Gabriella?" demanded Jane in an
+emphatic burst of inspiration. "Sophy Madison earns enough from
+lampshades to send her sister and herself to the White Sulphur
+Springs every summer."</p>
+<p>"Sophy makes all the lampshades that anybody wants, and,
+besides, she gets orders from the North&mdash;she told me so
+yesterday."</p>
+<p>"Gabriella crochets beautifully," remarked Mrs. Carr a little
+nervously because of the failure of her first suggestion. "The last
+time I went to see Miss Matoaca Chambers in the Old Ladies' Home,
+she told me she made quite a nice little sum for her church by
+crocheting mats."</p>
+<p>"And Gabriella can cook, too," rejoined Pussy, with exaggerated
+sprightliness, for she felt that Mrs. Carr's solution of the
+problem had not been entirely felicitous. "Why doesn't she try
+sending some of her angel food to the Woman's Exchange?"</p>
+<p>Jimmy, who had listened to this advice with the expression of
+tolerant amusement he always wore when women began to talk about
+the more serious affairs of life in his presence, made an honest,
+if vulgar, attempt to lighten the solemnity of the situation with a
+joke.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella isn't trying to earn church money. You're out gunning
+for a living, aren't you, Ella?" he inquired.</p>
+<p>"I'm sick of being dependent," repeated Gabriella, while her
+face grew stern. "Do you think if Jane had had enough money to live
+on that she would ever have stood Charley so long?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, I should, Gabriella. Marriage is sacred to me!"
+exclaimed Jane, whose perfect wifeliness atoned, even in the
+opinion of Jimmy, for any discrepancies in logic. "Nothing on earth
+could have induced me to leave him until&mdash;until this
+happened."</p>
+<p>The conviction that she had never at any moment since her
+marriage "failed in her duty to Charley" lent a touching sanctity
+to her expression, while the bitter lines around her mouth faded in
+the wan glow that flooded her face. Whatever her affliction,
+however intense her humiliation, Jane was supported always by the
+most comforting of beliefs&mdash;the belief that she had been
+absolutely right and Charley absolutely wrong through the ten
+disillusioning years of their married life. Never for an
+instant&mdash;never even in a nightmare&mdash;had she been visited
+by the disquieting suspicion that she was not entirely
+blameless.</p>
+<p>"Well, you've left him now anyway," said Gabriella, with the
+disarming candour which delighted Jimmy and perplexed Uncle
+Meriweather, "so somebody has got to help you take care of the
+children."</p>
+<p>"She shall never come to want as long as Pussy and I have a cent
+left," declared Cousin Jimmy, and his voice expressed what Mrs.
+Carr described afterward as "proper feeling."</p>
+<p>"And we'd really rather that you'd earn less and keep in your
+own station of life," said Pussy decisively.</p>
+<p>"If you mean that you'd rather I'd work buttonholes or crochet
+mats than go into a store and earn a salary, then I can't do it,"
+answered Gabriella, as resolute, though not so right-minded, as
+poor Jane. "I'd rather die than be dependent all my life, and I'm
+going to earn my living if I have to break rocks to do it."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h3>POOR JANE</h3>
+<p>Supper was over, and Gabriella, still in the dress she had worn
+all day, was picking up the children's clothes from the floor of
+her room. According to Mrs. Carr's hereditary habit in sorrow or
+sickness, Jane had been served in bed with tea and toast, while
+several small hard cots had been brought down from the attic and
+arranged in the available space in the two bedrooms. As Gabriella
+looked at the sleeping children, who had kicked the covering away,
+and lay with round rosy limbs gleaming in the lamplight, she
+remembered that Arthur Peyton was coming at nine o'clock to take
+her to Florrie's party, and she told herself with grim
+determination that she would never go to a party again. The
+Berkeley conscience, that vein of iron which lay beneath the
+outward softness and incompetence of her mother and sister, held
+her, in spite of her tempting youth, to the resolution she had
+made. She had told Jimmy that she meant to earn her living if she
+had to break rocks to do it, and Gabriella, like Pussy, came of a
+race that "did not easily change its mind."</p>
+<p>Turning to the bureau, she smoothed out the children's hair
+ribbons and pinned them, in two tight little blue and pink rolls,
+to the pincushion. Then taking up a broken comb, she ran it through
+the soft lock of hair that fell like a brown wing over her
+forehead. Her bright dark eyes, fringed in short thick lashes and
+set wide apart under arched eyebrows, gazed questioningly back at
+her from a row of german favours with which she had decorated the
+glass; and it was as if the face of youth, flickering with a
+flamelike glow and intensity, swam there for an instant in the dim
+greenish pool of the mirror. Beneath the charm of the face there
+was the character which one associates, not with youth, but with
+age and experience. Beneath the fine, clear lines of her head and
+limbs, the tall slenderness of her figure, the look of swiftness
+and of energy, which was almost birdlike in its grace and poise,
+there was a strength and vigour which suggested a gallant boy
+rather than the slighter and softer frame of a girl.</p>
+<p>While she stood there, Gabriella thought regretfully of all that
+it would mean to give up her half-dependent and wholly ladylike
+existence and go to work in a shop. Necessity not choice was
+driving her; and in spirit she looked back almost wistfully to the
+securely circumscribed lot of her grandmother. For there was little
+of the rebel in her temperament; and had she been free to choose,
+she would have instinctively selected, guided by generations of
+gregarious ancestors, the festive girlhood which Cousin Pussy had
+so ardently described. She wanted passionately all the things that
+other girls had, and her only quarrel, indeed, with the sheltered
+life was that she couldn't afford it. In the expressive phrase of
+Cousin Jimmy, the sheltered life "cost money," and to cost money
+was to be beyond the eager grasp of Gabriella.</p>
+<p>The door opened as if yielding under protest, and Marthy
+entered, still hurriedly tying the strings of the clean apron she
+had slipped on over her soiled one before answering the
+door-bell.</p>
+<p>"Yo' beau done come, Miss Ella. Ain't you gwine?"</p>
+<p>"No, I'm not going to the party, Marthy, but ask him to wait
+just a minute."</p>
+<p>"He's settin' over yonder in de parlour wid his overcoat
+on."</p>
+<p>"Well, ask him to take it off; I'll be there in a moment." She
+spoke as gravely as Marthy had done, yet in her face there was a
+light play of humour.</p>
+<p>Two years ago she would have thrilled with joy at the thought
+that Arthur was waiting for her; but in those two years since her
+engagement she had grown to look upon her first love as the
+gossamer, fairylike romance of a child. For months she had known
+that the engagement must be broken sooner or later; and she knew
+now, while she listened to Marthy's shuffling feet hastening to
+deliver her message, that she must break it to-night. In the dim
+pool of her mirror a face looked back at her that was not the face
+of Arthur Peyton; she saw it take form there as one sees a face
+grow gradually into life from the dimness of dreams. It was, she
+told herself to-night, the very face of her dream that she saw.</p>
+<p>"Well, I must get it over," she said with a sternness which gave
+her a passing resemblance to the Saint Memin portrait of the
+Reverend Bartholomew Berkeley; "I've got to get it over to-night,
+and whatever happens I've got to be honest." Then, with a last
+glance at the sleeping children, she lowered the gas, and went
+across the darkened hail, which smelt of pickles and bacon because
+one end of it was used as a storeroom.</p>
+<p>The parlour had been swept since the family council had
+deliberated there over Jane's destiny. The scraps of cambric had
+been gathered up from the threadbare arabesques in the carpet; the
+chairs had been placed at respectable distances apart; the gas-jets
+in the chandelier were flaming extravagantly under the damaged
+garlands; and the sewing machine had been wheeled into the
+obscurity of the hail, for it would have humiliated Gabriella's
+mother to think that her daughter received young men in a room
+which looked as if somebody had worked there.</p>
+<p>When Gabriella entered, Arthur Peyton was standing in front of
+the fireplace, gazing abstractedly at his reflection in the French
+mirror. Though his chestnut hair was carefully brushed, he had
+instinctively lifted his hand to smooth down an imaginary lock, and
+while he did this, he frowned slightly as if at a recollection that
+had ruffled his temper. His features were straight and very narrow,
+with the look of sensitiveness one associates with the
+thoroughbred, and the delicate texture of his skin emphasized this
+quality of high-breeding, which was the only thing that one
+remembered about him. In his light-gray eyes there was a
+sympathetic expression which invariably won the hearts of old
+ladies, and these old ladies were certain to say of him afterward,
+"such a gentleman, my dear&mdash;almost of the old school, you
+know, and we haven't many of them left in this hurrying age."</p>
+<p>He had done well, though not brilliantly, at college, for his
+mind, if unoriginal, had never given anybody, not even his mother,
+the least bit of trouble. For three years he had worked with
+admirable regularity in the office of his uncle, Carter Peyton, one
+of the most distinguished lawyers in the Virginia of his period,
+and it was generally felt that young Arthur Peyton would have "a
+brilliant future." For the present, however, he lived an uneventful
+life with his widowed mother in a charming old house, surrounded by
+a walled garden, in Franklin Street. Like the house, he was always
+in perfect order; and everything about him, from his loosely
+fitting clothes and his immaculate linen to his inherited
+conceptions of life, was arranged with such exquisite precision
+that it was impossible to improve it in any way. He knew exactly
+what he thought, and he knew also his reason, which was usually a
+precedent in law or custom, for thinking as he did. His opinions,
+which were both active and abundant, were all perfectly legitimate
+descendants of tradition, and the phrase "nobody ever heard of such
+a thing," was quite as convincing to him as to Mrs. Carr or to
+Cousin Jimmy Wrenn.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, aren't you going?" he asked reproachfully as the
+girl entered.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Arthur, we've had such a dreadful day! Poor Jane has left
+Charley for good and has come home, with all the children. We've
+been busy dividing them among us, and we're going to turn the
+dining-room into a nursery.</p>
+<p>"Left Charley? That's bad, isn't it?" asked Arthur
+doubtfully.</p>
+<p>"I feel so sorry for her, Arthur. It must be terrible to have
+love end like that."</p>
+<p>"But she isn't to blame. Everybody knows that she has forgiven
+him again and again."</p>
+<p>"Yes, everybody knows it," repeated Gabriella, as if she drew
+bitter comfort from the knowledge, "and she says now that she will
+never, never go back to him."</p>
+<p>For the first time a shadow appeared in Arthur's clear eyes.</p>
+<p>"Do you think she ought to make up her mind, darling, until she
+sees whether or not he will reform? After all, she is his
+wife."</p>
+<p>"That's what mother says, and yet I believe Charley is the only
+person on earth mother really hates. Now Cousin Jimmy and I will do
+everything we can to keep her away from him."</p>
+<p>"I think I shouldn't meddle if I were you, dearest. She'll
+probably go back to him in the end because of the children.</p>
+<p>"But I am going to help her take care of the children," replied
+Gabriella stanchly. "Of course, my life will be entirely different
+now, Arthur," she added gently. "Everything is altered for me, too,
+since yesterday. I have thought it all over for hours, and I am
+going to try to get a place in Brandywine's store."</p>
+<p>"In a store?" repeated Arthur slowly, and she saw the muscles of
+his mouth tighten and grow rigid.</p>
+<p>"Mother doesn't like the idea any more than you do, but what are
+we to come to if we go on in the old aimless way? One can't make a
+living out of plain sewing, and though, of course, Charley will be
+supposed to provide for his children, he isn't exactly the sort one
+can count on. Brandywine's, you see, is only a beginning. What I
+mean is that I am obliged to learn how to support myself."</p>
+<p>"But couldn't you work just as well in your home, darling?</p>
+<p>"People don't pay anything for home work. You must see what I
+mean, Arthur."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I see," he replied tenderly; but after a moment's thought,
+he went on again with the gentle obstinacy of a man whose thinking
+had all been done for him before he was born. "I wish, though, that
+you would try to hold out a little longer, working at home with
+your mother. In a year or two we shall be able to marry."</p>
+<p>"I couldn't," said Gabriella, shaking her head. "Don't urge me,
+Arthur."</p>
+<p>"If you would only consent to live with mother, we might marry
+now," he pursued, after a minute, as if he had not heard her.</p>
+<p>"But it wouldn't be fair to her, and how could I ask her to take
+mother and Jane and the children? No, I've thought it all out,
+dear, and I must go to work."</p>
+<p>"But I'll work for them, Gabriella. I'll do anything on earth
+rather than see you ordered about by old Brandywine."</p>
+<p>"He won't order me about," answered Gabriella cheerfully; "but
+mother feels just as you do. She says I am going out of my class
+because I won't stay at home and work buttonholes."</p>
+<p>"You couldn't go out of your class," replied Arthur, with an
+instinctive gallantry which even his distress could not overcome;
+"but I can't get used to the thought of it, darling&mdash;I simply
+can't. You're so sacred to me. There's something about the woman a
+man loves that's different from every other woman, and the bare
+idea of your working in a shop sickens me. I always think of you as
+apart from the workaday world. I always think of you as a star
+shining serenely above the sordid struggle&mdash;" Overwhelmed by
+the glowing train of his rhetoric, he broke down suddenly and
+caught passionately at the cool hand of Gabriella.</p>
+<p>As he looked at her slender finger, on which he had placed her
+engagement ring two years before, it seemed to him that the
+situation was becoming intolerable&mdash;that it was an affront not
+only to his ideal of Gabriella, as something essentially starlike
+and remote, but to that peculiar veneration for women which he
+always spoke and thought of as "Southern." His ideal woman was
+gentle, clinging, so perfectly a "lady" that she would have
+perished had she been put into a shop; and, though he was aware
+that Gabriella was a girl of much character and determination, his
+mind was so constructed that he was able, without difficulty, to
+think of her as corresponding to this exalted type of her sex. By
+the simple act of falling in love with her he had endowed her with
+every virtue except the ones that she actually possessed.</p>
+<p>"I know, I know," said Gabriella tenderly, for she saw that he
+suffered. Her training had been a hard one, though she had got it
+at home, and in a violent reaction from the sentimentality of her
+mother and Jane she had become suspicious of any language that
+sounded "flowery" to her sensitive ears. With her clear-sighted
+judgment, she knew perfectly well that by no stretch of mind or
+metaphor could she be supposed to resemble a star&mdash;that she
+was not shining, not remote, not even "ideal" in Arthur's delicate
+sense of the word. She had known the horrors of poverty, of that
+bitter genteel poverty which must keep up an appearance at any
+cost; and she could never forget the grim days, after the death of
+Uncle Beverly Blair, when they had shivered in fireless rooms and
+gone for weeks without butter on their bread. For the one strong
+quality in Mrs. Carr's character was the feeling she spoke of
+complacently, though modestly, as "proper pride"; and this proper
+pride, which was now resisting Gabriella's struggle for
+independence, had in the past resisted quite as stubbornly the
+thought of an appeal to the ready charity of her masculine
+relatives. To seek a man's advice had been from her girlhood the
+primal impulse of Mrs. Carr's nature; but, until Fate had starved
+her into sincerity, she had kept alive the ladylike fiction that
+she was in need of moral, not material, assistance.</p>
+<p>"Of course, if there were any other way, Arthur," said
+Gabriella, remembering the earlier battles with her mother, and
+eager to compromise when she could do so with dignity; "but how can
+I go on being dependent on Cousin Jimmy and Uncle Meriweather.
+Neither of them is rich, and Cousin Jimmy has a large family."</p>
+<p>Of course she was reasonable. The most disagreeable thing about
+Gabriella, Jane had once said, was her inveterate habit of being
+reasonable. But then Jane, who was of an exquisite sensibility,
+felt that Gabriella's reasonableness belonged to a distinctly lower
+order of intelligence. When all was said, Gabriella saw clearly
+because she had a practical mind, and a practical mind is usually
+engrossed with material matters.</p>
+<p>"I understand exactly how you feel, dear, but if only you could
+go on just as you are for a few years longer," said Arthur,
+sticking to his original idea with a tenacity which made it
+possible for him to argue for hours and yet remain exactly where he
+had started. Though they talked all night, though she convinced him
+according to all the laws and principles of logic, she knew that he
+would still think precisely what he had thought in the beginning,
+for his conviction was rooted, deeper than reason, in the
+unconquerable prejudices which had passed from the brain into the
+very blood of his race. He would probably say at the end: "I admit
+all that you tell me, Gabriella, but my sentiment is against it;"
+and this sentiment, overruling sense, would insist, with sublime
+obstinacy, that Gabriella must not work in a shop. It would ignore,
+after the exalted habit of sentiment, such merely sordid facts as
+poverty and starvation (who ever heard of a woman of good family
+starving in Virginia?), and, at last, if Gabriella were really in
+love with Arthur, it would triumph over her finer judgment and
+reduce her to submission. But while she watched him, in the very
+minute when, failing for words, he caught her in his arms, she said
+to herself, suddenly chilled and determined: "I must get it over
+to-night, and I've got to be honest." The scent of the hyacinths
+floated to her again, but it seemed to bring a cold wind, as if a
+draught had blown in through the closed slats of the shutters.</p>
+<p>"Everything has changed, Arthur," she said, "and I don't think I
+ought to go on being engaged." Then because her words sounded
+insincere, she added sternly: "Even if we could be
+married&mdash;and of course we can't be&mdash;I&mdash;I don't feel
+that I should want to marry. I am not sure that I love you enough
+to marry you."</p>
+<p>It was all so unromantic, so unemotional, so utterly different
+from the scene she had pictured when she imagined what "breaking
+her engagement" would be like. Then she had always thought of
+herself as dissolving in tears on the horsehair sofa, which had
+become sacred to the tragedy of poor Jane; but, to her surprise,
+she did not feel now the faintest inclination to cry. It ought to
+have been theatrical, but it wasn't&mdash;not even when she took
+off her engagement ring, as she had read in novels that girls did
+at the decisive instant, and laid it down on the table. When she
+remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but Arthur
+seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the fire
+in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray's Elegy
+and brought it back to Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"I'll never give you up," said Arthur stubbornly, and knowing
+his character, she felt that he had spoken the truth. He could not
+give her up even had he wished it, for, like a belief, she had
+passed from his brain into the fibre of his being. She had become a
+habit to him, and not love, but the inability to change, to cease
+thinking what he had always thought, to break a fixed manner of
+life, would keep him faithful to her in his heart.</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry&mdash;oh, I'm sorry," she murmured, longing to have
+it over and to return to Jane and the children. It occurred to her
+almost resentfully that love was not always an unmixed delight.</p>
+<p>"Is there any one else, Gabriella?" he asked with a sudden
+choking sound in his voice. "I have sometimes thought&mdash;in the
+last four or five months&mdash;that there might be&mdash;that you
+had changed&mdash;that&mdash;" He stopped abruptly, and she
+answered him with a beautiful frankness which would have horrified
+the imperishable, if desiccated, coquetry of her mother.</p>
+<p>"There is some one else and there isn't," she replied simply. "I
+mean I think of some one else very often&mdash;of some one who
+isn't in my life at all&mdash;from whom I never hear&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Is it George Fowler?"</p>
+<p>She bowed her head, and, though she did not blush, her eyes grew
+radiant.</p>
+<p>"And you have known him less than a year?"</p>
+<p>Again she bowed her head without speaking. What was there, after
+all, that she could say in justification of her behaviour?</p>
+<p>A groan escaped him, smothered into a gentle murmur of protest.
+"And I thought women were more constant than men!" he exclaimed
+with something of the baffled and helpless feeling which had
+overtaken Uncle Meriweather while he regarded Gabriella.</p>
+<p>The generalization was not without interest for Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"I thought so, too," she observed dispassionately. "I thought
+so, too, and that is why it was such a dreadful surprise to me when
+it happened. You yourself aren't more shocked and surprised than I
+was in the beginning," she added.</p>
+<p>"But you've got used to the thought, I suppose?"</p>
+<p>"Well, one has to, you see. What else is there to do? I always
+understood from mother"&mdash;she went on with the same eager
+interest, as if she were stumbling upon new and important
+intellectual discoveries&mdash;"I always understood that women
+never fell in love with men first&mdash;I mean until they had had
+positive proof that their love would be returned. But in this case
+that didn't seem to matter at all. Nothing mattered, and the more I
+fought against it and tried to be true to my engagement, the more I
+found myself being false. It's all very strange," she concluded,
+"but that is just how it happened."</p>
+<p>"And he knows nothing about it?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, no. I told him I was engaged to you, and then he went
+away."</p>
+<p>For an instant he was silent, and watching his face, so
+carefully guarded and controlled by habit that it had the curious
+blank look of a statue's, Gabriella could form no idea of the
+suppressed inarticulate suffering in his heart.</p>
+<p>"And if he came back would you marry him?" he asked.</p>
+<p>Before replying she sat for a minute gazing down on her folded
+hands and weighing each separate word of her answer.</p>
+<p>"I should try not to, Arthur," she said at last, "but&mdash;but
+I am not sure that I should be able to help it."</p>
+<p>When at last he had said "good-bye" rather grimly, and gone out
+of the door without looking back, she was conscious of an immense
+relief, of a feeling that she could breathe freely again after an
+age of oppression. There was a curious sense of unreality about the
+hour she had just passed through, as if it belonged not to actual
+life, but to a play she had been rehearsing. She had felt nothing.
+The breaking of her engagement had failed utterly to move her.</p>
+<p>After bolting the front door, she turned out the gas in the
+parlour, pushed back the lump of coal in the grate in the hope of
+saving it for the morrow, and went cautiously down the hall to her
+room. As she passed her mother's door, a glimmer of light along the
+threshold made her pause for a minute, and while she hesitated, an
+anxious voice floated out to her:</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, is that you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, Mother, do you want anything?"</p>
+<p>"Jane has one of her heart attacks. I put her to bed in my room
+because it is more comfortable than the dining-room. Don't you
+think you had better go back and wake Marthy?"</p>
+<p>"Is she ill? Let me come in," answered Gabriella, pushing open
+the door and brushing by Mrs. Carr, who stood, shrunken and
+shivering, in a gray flannel wrapper and felt slippers.</p>
+<p>Though Jane's attacks were familiar occurrences, they never
+failed to produce an immediate panic in the household. As a child
+of nine, Gabriella remembered being aroused in the middle of a
+bitter night, hastily wrapped in her mother's shawl and a blanket,
+and hurried up the staircase to Jane, who had broken her engagement
+to Charley the evening before. Jane, pale, angelic, palpitating,
+appeared to draw her last breath as they entered, while the old
+doctor supported her in his arms, and Marthy, in a frenzy of
+service, rattled the dead embers in the grate. It had all been
+horribly vivid, and when Jane had murmured Charley's name in a
+dying voice, they had stood, trembling and blue with cold, around
+her bed, waiting for the end. But the end had not come, and three
+months later Jane was married to Charley Gracey.</p>
+<p>After that scene, Gabriella had associated Jane's attacks with a
+freezing January night and a fireless grate (though the last but
+one had occurred in mid-August), and she was relieved now to find a
+fire burning in her mother's room and a kettle singing merrily on
+the fender. The elder children, with their flannel petticoats
+pinned over their thin little shoulders, were sitting straight and
+stiff on a box couch which had been turned into a bed, and their
+strange little faces looked wan and peaked in the firelight.</p>
+<p>Jane was really ill, Gabriella decided, after a glance at her
+sister. Nothing except acute suffering could have given her that
+ghastly pallor or made her eyes sink so far back in her head. She
+lay quite motionless on the far side of the big tester bed, staring
+straight up at the ceiling with an expression which terrified
+Gabriella, though she had seen it on her sister's face at least a
+dozen times before to-night.</p>
+<p>"Has Arthur gone?" asked Mrs. Carr in a voice that sounded as if
+she were running.</p>
+<p>"Yes. Did you want him, mother?"</p>
+<p>"I thought we might send him for the doctor and for Charley.
+Don't you think Charley ought to be told of her condition? She has
+asked for the children."</p>
+<p>"Have you given her the digitalis?"</p>
+<p>"I can't make her swallow it. There are the drops on the table
+by the bed. My hands tremble so I had to measure them three
+times."</p>
+<p>Taking the glass from the table, Gabriella bent over her sister
+and implored her to swallow the drops, but, without appearing to
+hear her voice, Jane still stared blankly upward, with the rigid,
+convulsed look of a woman who has been stricken with dumbness. Her
+flaxen hair, damp with camphor, which Mrs. Carr had wildly splashed
+on her forehead, clung flat and close to her head, while the only
+pulse in her body seemed to beat in irregular, spasmodic throbs in
+her throat.</p>
+<p>"Don't go, mother. I'll wake Marthy," cried Gabriella, for Mrs.
+Carr, inspired by the spirit of panic, was darting out of the door
+in her felt slippers. Then, while the children, crying
+distractedly, rushed to Jane's bedside, the girl ran out of the
+house and along the brick walk to the kitchen and the room above it
+where Marthy lived the little life she had apart from her work. In
+answer to Gabriella's call she emerged entirely dressed from the
+darkness; and at the news of Jane's illness she was seized with the
+spurious energy which visits her race in the moment of tragedy. She
+offered at once to run for the doctor, and suggested, without a
+hint from Gabriella, that she had better leave word, on her way
+home, for Marse Charley.</p>
+<p>"I knowed 'twuz comin' jez ez soon ez I lay eyes on 'er," she
+muttered, for she was an old family servant. "Dar ain' no use 'n
+tryin' ter come betweenst dem de good Lawd is done jine tergedder
+fur worse. A baid husban'! Hi! Dar ain't un 'oman erlive, I reckon,
+dat 'ouldn't ruther own a baid husban' den no husban' at all. You
+all is got to teck 'em de way dey's made, en dar's moughty few un
+um dat is made right."</p>
+<p>Still muttering, she stumbled down the walk and out of the gate,
+while Gabriella returned to her mother's room and hurried the
+weeping children into their shoes and stockings. Mrs. Carr, still
+in her flannel wrapper, with her little flat gray curls screwed up
+on pins for the night, and her thin ankles showing pathetically
+above her felt slippers, ran nervously to and fro with mustard
+plasters and bottles of hot water which she continually refilled
+from the kettle on the fender. Occasionally she paused long enough
+to hold the camphor to Jane's nose or to lift the quilt from the
+bottom of the bed and then put it carefully back in the very spot
+where it had lain before she had touched it. And because she was
+born to take two steps to every one that was necessary, because she
+could not accomplish the simplest act without a prodigious waste of
+energy and emotion, because she died twenty deaths over the
+slightest anxiety, and, most of all, because she was the last
+person on earth who ought to have been burdened with poverty and
+hard work and an unhappily married daughter&mdash;because of all
+these things Mrs. Carr wore herself to a shadow in the quarter of
+an hour they spent waiting for the doctor and Charley Gracey.</p>
+<p>Though she had brought Jane through at least a dozen "attacks,"
+she still lost her presence of mind as completely as on that
+January night when, utterly distraught, she had hurried Gabriella
+to the first death-bed scene of her sister; she still grew as
+forgetful of herself and her own feelings, and, in obedience to
+some profound law of her nature, she still as confidently "expected
+the worst." For Mrs. Carr's philosophy, like Jane's, was of that
+active but dreary sort that thrives best upon misery. Just as Jane,
+who had lost every illusion about Charley, went on loving him in
+spite of it, so Mrs. Carr, having lost her illusions about life,
+retained a kind of wistful fondness for the thing that had wounded
+her.</p>
+<p>The door-bell rang sharply, and Gabriella went to let in the
+doctor, a brisk, authoritative young man of the new school, who had
+learned everything there was to be known about medicine except the
+way to behave in a sickroom, and who abhorred a bedside manner as
+heartily as if it were calomel or castor oil. His name was Darrow,
+and he was the assistant of old Dr. Walker, Mrs. Carr's family
+physician, who never went out at night since he had passed his
+seventieth birthday. Gabriella, who liked him because he was not
+anecdotal and gave small doses of medicine, hastily led the way to
+her mother's room before she ran back to meet Charley Gracey at the
+door of the dark parlour.</p>
+<p>"You can't see her now. The doctor is with her," she whispered.
+"I'll make a light in here and you can wait."</p>
+<p>"Let me," said Charley, quite as pleasantly as if he were not a
+bad husband, while he found a match and struck it on the sole of
+his foot. Then, as the gas flared up, he exclaimed, with a low
+whistle, "By Jove, you're a sight, Gabriella!"</p>
+<p>"Well, it's your fault," replied Gabriella sharply, letting him
+see, as she told herself, exactly what she thought of him. "You've
+made Jane so ill we thought she was dying."</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry for that," he said, suddenly smitten with gravity.
+"Is she really so bad?"</p>
+<p>His charming freckled face, with its irrepressible humour, grew
+almost grotesquely solemn, while the habitual merriment faded
+slowly from his light-gray eyes, leaving them empty of expression.
+He was a short, rather thick-set man, not particularly
+good-looking, not particularly clever, but possessing a singular,
+if unaccountable, charm. Everybody liked Charley, though nobody
+respected him. He was a scamp, but a lovable scamp, while Jane,
+with the best intentions in the world, had managed to make every
+virtue unattractive. When people condemned him, they said that he
+was "utterly unprincipled"; when they softened in their judgment,
+they admitted that he had "the best heart in the world."</p>
+<p>"I suppose it isn't any worse than other attacks," answered
+Gabriella, "but you know what they are like."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I know," replied Charley. "Oh, Lord, don't I?"</p>
+<p>"She asked mother to send for you," continued Gabriella. "She
+wants you to know that she has forgiven you."</p>
+<p>"Has she?" said Charley, without elation. Turning away, he
+stared for a minute or two at the engraving of the children feeding
+fish in a pond; then, with his eyes still glued to the picture, he
+burst out passionately: "Gabriella, I'd hoped she wouldn't this
+time!"</p>
+<p>"If I were she," retorted Gabriella crushingly, "I would never
+speak to you again until the day of my death."</p>
+<p>"If she were you," rejoined Charley, with barefaced audacity,
+"I'd have been a good husband. Why, I was simply starving to be a
+good husband when I married Jane. It's my ideal in life. I'm all
+for the domestic thing by nature. I was tired&mdash;positively
+dog-tired of the other kind. I wanted a wife. I adored&mdash;I've
+always adored babies&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"If that is true," returned Gabriella sternly, for she was not
+disposed to soften to Charley, and in her heart she deeply resented
+what she called Jane's "weakness," "if that is true why do you
+behave so outrageously to Jane and the children? Why can't you be
+decent?"</p>
+<p>"I could," answered Charley, with engaging lucidity, "if she
+were less so. It's her infernal virtue I can't stand, Gabriella. No
+man could stand it without taking to drink."</p>
+<p>"But you knew she was that way. She was always trying to make
+people better. It is her mission. Why, I remember one winter night
+before you were married mother got me out of bed in the cold to
+come and hear Jane forgive you beautifully about something."</p>
+<p>"That was the first time, and it was very touching. I suppose
+the first time always is touching. Of course, I didn't know she
+meant to keep it up. No man could possibly have kept it up," said
+Charley, with bitterness, "but she married me to reform me, and it
+is the only thing she has really enjoyed about her marriage. She's
+a born reformer. I haven't eaten a thing I cared about, nor drank a
+drop I wanted, nor used a bad word I was fond of, since I married,
+without being nagged at about it. She loved me for my vices, and
+yet she hasn't let me keep a single one&mdash;not even the
+smallest&mdash;not even cigarettes. Nag! Good God! She's nagged me
+to perfection ever since the day of our wedding when she made me
+sign the pledge before she let me kiss her!"</p>
+<p>"Well, that doesn't make it any easier for us or for the
+children," replied Gabriella, without sympathy; "and if you don't
+think of Jane, you might at least think of your children."</p>
+<p>"Of course it's hard on the kids," admitted Charley ruefully.
+"But as for Jane&mdash;now, will you tell me what would become of
+Jane after she had reformed me? Why, she'd be bored to death. She'd
+be a martyr without any martyrdom. When she made me give up
+tobacco, she lost interest in everything for a week. She was like
+your Uncle Meriweather after the surrender. There wasn't anything
+left to fight about, and fighting was all he could do&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"I believe&mdash;I really believe you have been drinking,"
+interrupted Gabriella with cold disgust. "Suppose Jane were to
+die?"</p>
+<p>"She won't die. She'll be all right as soon as she has forgiven
+me."</p>
+<p>He was not only bad, she told herself, he was perfectly
+shameless. He appeared to have been born without the faintest sense
+of responsibility. And yet, while Gabriella listened to him, she
+realized that, in some ways, he might be a less trying companion
+than poor Jane. His candour was as simple, as unaffected, as the
+serene artlessness of a child. It was impossible not to believe in
+his sincerity. Though she "despised him," as she told herself,
+still she was obliged to admit that there was something to be said
+on his side. The harsh judgment of youth&mdash;of youth that never
+tries to understand, that never makes allowances&mdash;softened
+under the influence of Charley's reprehensible charm. Even badness,
+Gabriella conceded grudgingly, might be easier to live with in some
+circumstances than a too exalted self-righteousness.</p>
+<p>"If you'll bring Jane to that way of thinking," retorted
+Charley, with vulgar frankness, "I'll give you five hundred dollars
+down. If you'll thoroughly corrupt her mind and persuade her to
+neglect her duty to me, I'll make it a thousand."</p>
+<p>He was jesting! It was monstrous, with Jane lying ill in her
+mother's room; it was indecent; it was grossly immoral; but he was
+actually jesting! Not even scandal, not even the doctor's presence
+in the house, could suppress his incorrigible spirit of levity. "If
+I were Jane, I'd never speak to him," thought Gabriella, and the
+question flashed through her mind, "how in the world could she ever
+have loved him?" It was impossible for her to conceive of any
+situation when Charley could have made a girl fall in love with
+him. Though she had heard stories of his early conquests, she had
+never believed them. There were times when she almost liked him,
+but it was the kind of liking one gave to an inferior, not to an
+equal. She admitted his charm, but it was the charm of an
+irresponsible creature&mdash;the capricious attraction of a child
+or an animal. Her common sense, she told herself, would keep her
+from making a mistake such as Jane had made with her life; and,
+besides, she was utterly devoid of the missionary instinct which
+had lured Jane to destruction. "If I ever marry, it will be
+different from that," she thought passionately. "It will be utterly
+different!"</p>
+<p>The door of Mrs. Carr's room opened suddenly, Marthy's name was
+called in a high voice, and the doctor was heard saying
+reassuringly: "She is over the worst. There is no need to
+worry."</p>
+<p>"Don't send me in there alone, Gabriella," begged Charley
+piteously. "I'd rather face bullets than Jane in an attack." His
+bravado had deserted him, and he appeared positively craven. The
+stiffness seemed to have gone not only out of his character, but
+out of his clothes also. Even his collar had become limp with
+emotion.</p>
+<p>"Well, I don't care," answered Gabriella, "you've got to stand
+it. There's no use squirming when you've only yourself to blame."
+With a malicious pleasure, she watched the consternation in
+Charley's face, while the doctor's footsteps came rapidly down the
+hall and stopped at the threshold of the parlour.</p>
+<p>"You may go in, Mr. Gracey&mdash;your wife is asking for you;
+but be very careful not to say anything that might disturb her.
+Just keep her as quiet as you can for a few hours."</p>
+<p>Then the door in the distance opened again, and Mrs. Carr, in
+the hollow tones of destiny, called: "Gabriella, Jane is waiting to
+speak to her husband."</p>
+<p>"Come, Charley," ordered Gabriella, grimly, and a moment later
+she pushed him across her mother's threshold and turned back into
+the hall. "I hope she'll make him squirm," she said to herself,
+with relish. Nothing, she felt, except the certainty of Charley's
+squirming, could make up to her for the half-hour she had just
+spent with him.</p>
+<p>She was still standing there when Jane's medicine came from the
+druggist at the corner, and for a while she waited outside the
+door, fearing to lighten Charley's punishment by her entrance. The
+medicine had to be measured in drops, and she went into the
+dining-room, where the children were huddled together in an
+improvised bed, and diluted the mixture with water before she could
+persuade herself to go into her mother's room. Even then she
+hesitated until she remembered that the doctor had said Jane must
+take the first dose immediately. Not by her, if she could help it,
+should the divine wrath of the furies be appeased.</p>
+<p>But with the first touch of her hand on the knob, Charley's
+flippant voice greeted her with, "Won't you come in, Gabriella?"
+and swallowing her angry retort, she entered stiffly, with the
+glass held out straight before her. Charley, on his knees beside
+the bed, with his arm under his wife's pillow, stared up at his
+sister-in-law with the guilty look of a whipped terrier, while
+Jane, pallid, suffering, saintly, rested one thin blue-veined hand
+on his shoulder. Her face was the colour of the sheet, her eyes
+were unnaturally large and surrounded by violet circles; and her
+hair, drenched with camphor, spread over the pillow like the hair
+of a drowned woman. Never had she appeared so broken, so resigned,
+so ineffably spiritual; and Gabriella's solitary comfort was the
+thought that Jane's attack had conquered Charley as completely as
+it had conquered the rest of them.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, I've forgiven him," said Jane, with fainting
+sweetness, "and he wants you and mother to do so. He has promised
+to be good in the future."</p>
+<p>"Well, I shan't forgive him for keeping me up all night,"
+answered Gabriella resentfully, and she felt that even if it killed
+Jane, she could not keep back her reply. "I can't answer for
+mother, but I haven't forgiven him and I never shall." She felt her
+anger hardened to a rock inside of her, and it hurt her so that she
+put the glass hurriedly down on the table and ran out of the room.
+As she closed the door behind her she heard Jane saying gently:
+"Yes, I forgive you, Charley, but I can't help feeling that you
+don't love me as you ought to."</p>
+<p>An old cape of her mother's was lying on a chair in the hall,
+and, throwing it over her shoulders, Gabriella went out on the
+porch and stood breathing quickly in the cold air, with her hand
+pressed on her bosom, which rose and fell as if she had been
+running. She was not only furious, she was grossly affronted,
+though she had known from the beginning, she said to herself,
+exactly how it would end. She had never trusted Jane&mdash;no, not
+a minute; she had never really trusted her mother. Something had
+told her that Jane had never meant in her heart to leave Charley,
+that she was only making a scene, after the immemorial habit of
+women, before going back to him. And yet, though she had suspected
+this all along, she was as indignant as if she had been deceived by
+a conspiracy of the three of them. Her sense of decency was
+outraged. She despised Jane because she had no strength of
+character; but even while this thought was still in her mind, she
+admitted that Jane had had sufficient strength of character to
+upset the household, bring Charley to repentance, and emerge, faint
+but victorious, from the wreck of their peace. Yes, she despised
+Jane, though it was impossible to deny that Jane's methods were
+successful, since she had got what she wanted.</p>
+<p>The street was very quiet, for it was in the small gray hours
+between midnight and dawn, and a solitary policeman, strolling by
+on his beat, appeared as wan and spectral as the bare boughs of the
+poplar trees beneath which he moved. The wind was still blowing
+over the brow of the hill, and now and then it tossed a wisp of
+straw or a handful of dust on the porch where Gabriella was
+standing. As it swept onward it drove a flock of shadows, like
+black birds, up the open street into the clear space under the
+old-fashioned gas lamp at the corner. All the lights were out in
+the neighbouring houses, but from a boarding-house down the block
+there floated suddenly the gay snatch of a waltz played on a banjo
+with a broken string. Then the music stopped, the policeman passed,
+and Gabriella and the wind were alone in the street. Overhead the
+stars shone dimly through a web of mist; and it seemed to her that
+the sadness of the sky and the sadness of the earth had mingled
+there in the long straight street where the wind blew with a
+melancholy sound between rows of silent and darkened houses.</p>
+<p>A noise in the hall made her turn, and, looking up, she saw the
+gaunt figure of Miss Amelia Peterborough standing in the bend of
+the staircase. In her hand the old maid held a twisted candlestick
+of greenish brass, and the yellow flame of the candle cast a
+trembling, fantastic shadow on the wall at her back. Her head,
+shorn of the false "front" she wore in the day, appeared to have
+become all forehead and beaked nose; her eyes had dwindled to mere
+points of blackness; her mouth, sunken and drawn over toothless
+gums, was like the mouth of a witch. The wind, blowing in gusts
+through the open door, inflated her gray shawl and the skirt of her
+dressing-gown, while, with each flutter of her garments, the
+grotesque shadow on the white wall danced and gibbered behind her.
+And, as she gazed down on the girl, it was as if the end of life,
+with its pathos, its cruelties, its bitterness and its
+disillusionment, had stopped for a fleeting instant to look back at
+life in the pride and ignorance of its beginning.</p>
+<p>"There was so much moving about, I thought something might have
+happened," said Miss Amelia apologetically, while Gabriella,
+closing the door, shut the draught from the staircase.</p>
+<p>"Jane had one of her heart attacks," answered the girl. "I'm so
+sorry we waked you."</p>
+<p>But she was thinking while she spoke, "So that is old
+age&mdash;so that is what it means to be old?" There is a vague
+compassion in the thought, but it held no terror, for the decay of
+Miss Amelia seemed as utterly remote and detached from her own life
+as one of the past ages in history. The youth in her brain created
+a radiant illusion of immortality. By no stretch of imagination
+could she picture herself like the infirm and loveless creature
+before her. Yet she knew, without realizing it, that Miss Amelia
+had once been young, that she had once even been beautiful. There
+was a legend, fading now into tradition, that her lover had been
+killed in a duel, fought for her while she was still a girl, and
+that she had worn only white or black since that day&mdash;she who
+was now well over eighty. She had known love; a man had died for
+her; it was said that she had been a famous coquette in the
+'thirties; and now she stood there, grotesque and sexless, with her
+eyes empty of dreams and of memories, and her face as gray and
+sinister as the face of her shadow.</p>
+<p>"I hope she is better, poor child," she said, for, like the rest
+of Richmond, she believed Jane to be all saint and Charley all
+sinner. "If I can be of any help, be sure to let me know."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I'll let you know, thank you. I hope we didn't disturb
+Miss Jemima."</p>
+<p>The younger Miss Peterborough&mdash;called "the happy one" by
+Gabriella and Mrs. Carr because she was always cheerful, though, as
+far as any one could tell, she had nothing and had never had
+anything to be cheerful about&mdash;was named Jemima. A chronic
+invalid, from some obscure trouble which had not left her for
+twenty years, she was seldom free from pain, and yet Gabriella had
+never seen her (except at funerals, for which she entertained a
+perfectly healthy fondness as diversions free to the poor) without
+a smile on her face.</p>
+<p>"Sister Jemima doesn't wake easily. She is a sound sleeper and
+she's getting a little hard of hearing"; and lifting the
+candlestick to light her way, Miss Amelia turned back up the
+stairs, while the flame flitted like a golden moth into the
+dimness.</p>
+<p>"Poor old thing," thought Gabriella, imagining in her ignorance
+that she could understand the tragedy of Miss Amelia's life; "poor
+old thing, she must have had a terrible time."</p>
+<p>As she approached her mother's door, Charley came out, glanced
+at her sheepishly, and hurried to where his hat hung on the walnut
+hatrack in the front hall. Then, as if overcoming his first impulse
+to avoid her, he beckoned to her furtively, and said in a
+sepulchral whisper: "Gabriella, be very careful what you say to
+her."</p>
+<p>The audacity of it! This from Charley, the abandoned, the
+depraved, the unutterably abhorrent in her sight. Without replying,
+she turned indignantly away and opened her mother's door.</p>
+<p>Lying in the middle of the bed now, and slightly propped with
+pillows, Jane was sipping a second dose of medicine from a glass
+Mrs. Carr held to her lips.</p>
+<p>"I know you don't understand my forgiving him, Gabriella," she
+said very gently, "but some day, after you are married, you will
+realize that I do it from a sacred duty&mdash;from a sacred duty,"
+she repeated firmly, while the shining light of martyrdom illumined
+her features.</p>
+<p>"Well, it's none of my business," answered Gabriella crossly,
+"but the sooner you do it, I suppose the sooner you will have to do
+it again." If only for once Jane would be direct, if only she would
+be natural, if only she would speak the truth and not fiction.</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, dear, you don't understand him any better than you do
+me," said Jane as sweetly as ever in spite of Gabriella's
+deplorable loss of temper. "He is really dreadfully penitent, and
+he sees that he hasn't always treated me as he ought to have done.
+But you'll know what I mean when you marry, Gabriella. She'll
+understand me then, won't she, mother?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sometimes tempted to hope that Gabriella will never marry,"
+replied Mrs. Carr with the uncompromising bitterness of abject
+despair; "the Carrs all seem to marry so badly."</p>
+<p>In her normal mood she would never have uttered this heresy, for
+she belonged to a generation that regarded even a bad marriage as
+better for a woman than no marriage at all; but the night had worn
+her out, and one of her spells of neuralgia, which followed
+fatigue, was already beginning in her face. The purple crocheted
+"fascinator" she had caught up at the doctor's entrance was still
+on her head, and her long pale face, beneath the airy scallops,
+appeared frozen in an expression of incurable melancholy. For the
+rest she had been too frightened, too forgetful of herself and her
+own comfort even to put on her stockings, though Gabriella had
+begged her to do so. "Don't think about me. Attend to poor Jane,"
+she had repeated over and over.</p>
+<p>"Mother, go into my room and get into bed," commanded Gabriella,
+whose patience, never abundant, was ebbing low. "If you don't get
+some sleep your neuralgia won't be any better."</p>
+<p>"It isn't any better. I don't expect it to be any better."</p>
+<p>"Well, you must go to bed or it will get worse. I'll heat you a
+cup of milk and wrap you up in warm blankets."</p>
+<p>"Don't worry about me, dear. Think of poor Jane."</p>
+<p>"We've been thinking of Jane all night, and you need it now more
+than she does. I can tell by your eyes how you are suffering."</p>
+<p>In the first streak of dawn, which was beginning to glimmer
+faintly on the window-panes, Mrs. Carr looked as if she had
+withered overnight.</p>
+<p>"It's only my left temple," she said dully, "otherwise I am
+quite well. No, dear, I must rub Jane's forehead until she falls
+asleep. The doctor said it was important that we should keep her
+soothed."</p>
+<p>But it was a law of Gabriella's nature that she never knew when
+she was beaten. Failure aroused the sleeping forces within her, and
+when these forces were once liberated, the spasmodic efforts of
+Mrs. Carr and the indirect methods of Jane were alike powerless to
+oppose them. At such times a faint flush rose to her pale cheeks,
+her eyes shone with a burning darkness, while her mouth lost its
+fresh young red and grew hard in outline.</p>
+<p>"You must go to bed, mother," she repeated in a voice which Mrs.
+Carr would have obeyed had it issued from the wall or a piece of
+furniture.</p>
+<p>Fifteen minutes later Gabriella stood authoritatively beside the
+bed, while her mother, with a mustard plaster at the back of her
+neck, obediently sipped hot milk from a teacup. Mrs. Carr had
+surrendered to the conquering spirit of her daughter, but her
+surrender, which was unwilling and weakly defiant, gave out
+presently a last feeble flicker of resistance.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think, Gabriella, we might arrange to live with
+Jane?" she asked. "It would be a saving of expense for us both, and
+we might be so helpful about the children."</p>
+<p>"And about Charley, too, I suppose," suggested Gabriella
+maliciously.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Carr, having been born without a sense of humour, never
+understood the broadest joke unless it was illustrated; but even to
+her it became evident, after a moment's anxious thought, that
+Gabriella was teasing her.</p>
+<p>"You seem to forget that he is her husband," she replied, with a
+pathetic clutch at her dignity, which, owing perhaps to the purple
+"fascinator" and the mustard plaster, she failed completely to
+recapture. Then, as she finished the milk and handed back the empty
+cup to her daughter, she added wearily, for life, as she often said
+to herself of late, was becoming almost too much for her, and she
+was feeling worn out and old:</p>
+<p>"My one comfort, Gabriella, is the thought that Arthur Peyton
+loves you. There couldn't be anybody more unlike Charley."</p>
+<p>"There couldn't be," agreed Gabriella mildly, for she felt that
+another blow would prostrate her mother.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<h3>A START IN LIFE</h3>
+<p>In the late 'seventies and early 'eighties the most important
+shop in the town of Gabriella's birth was known to its patrons
+(chiefly ladies in long basques, tightly tied back skirts, and
+small eccentric bonnets) as Brandywine &amp; Plummer's drygoods
+store. At that period, when old Mrs. Carr, just completing her
+ninetieth year with a mind fixed upon heaven, would have dropped
+dead at the idea that her granddaughter should ever step out of her
+class, Gabriella's mother bought her dresses (grosgrain of the very
+best quality) from Major Brandywine. To be sure, even in those
+days, there were other shops in the city&mdash;for was not Broad
+Street already alluded to in the newspapers as "the shopping
+thoroughfare of the South?"&mdash;but, though they were as numerous
+as dandelions in June, these places were by no means patronized so
+widely by "the best people." Small shops, of course, carrying a
+single line of goods and supplying their particular products to an
+exacting and discriminating class, held their own even against the
+established reputation of Brandywine &amp; Plummer's. O'Connell's
+linen store, Twitlow's china store, Mrs. Tonk's doll store, and
+Green &amp; Brady's store for notions&mdash;all these were situated
+in Broad Street hardly a stone's throw from the Second Market. But
+none of these, excellent as they were, could bear comparison with
+the refined atmosphere, so different from the vulgar bustle of a
+modern department store, which enveloped one in the quiet gloom of
+Brandywine &amp; Plummer's. In the first place, one could be
+perfectly sure that one would be waited on by a lady&mdash;for
+Brandywine &amp; Plummer's, with a distinguished Confederate
+soldier at its head and front, provided an almost conventual
+shelter for distressed feminine gentility. There was, for instance,
+Miss Marye of the black silk counter, whose father had belonged to
+Stuart's cavalry and had fallen at Yellow Tavern; there was Miss
+Meason of the glove counter, and there was Mrs. Burwell Smith of
+the ribbon counter&mdash;for, though she had married beneath her,
+it was impossible to forget that she was a direct descendant of
+Colonel Micajah Burwell, of Crow's Nest Plantation.</p>
+<p>Then, if one happened to be in search of cotton goods, one would
+be almost certain to remark on the way home: "Miss Peters, who
+waited on me in Brandywine's this morning, has unmistakably the
+manner of a lady," or "that Mrs. Jones in Brandywine's must be
+related to the real Joneses, she has such a refined appearance."
+And, at last, in the middle 'nineties, after the opening of the new
+millinery department, which was reached by a short flight of steps,
+decorated at discreet intervals with baskets of pink paper roses,
+customers were beginning to ask: "May I speak to Miss Gabriella for
+a minute? I wish to speak to Miss Gabriella about the hat she is
+having trimmed for me."</p>
+<p>For here, also, because of what poor Jane called her "practical
+mind," the patrons of Brandywine &amp; Plummer's were learning that
+Gabriella was "the sort you could count on." As far as the actual
+work went, she could not, of course, hold a candle (this was Mr.
+Plummer's way of putting it) to Miss Kemp or Miss Treadway, who had
+a decided talent for trimming; but no customer in balloon sleeves
+and bell-shaped skirt was ever heard to remark of these young women
+as they remarked of Gabriella, "No, I don't want anybody else,
+please. She takes such an interest." To take an interest in other
+people might become quite as marketable an asset, Mr. Plummer was
+discovering, after fifty years of adherence to strictly business
+methods, as a gift for the needle; and, added to her engaging
+interest, Gabriella appeared to know by instinct exactly what a
+customer wanted.</p>
+<p>"I declare Miss Kemp had almost persuaded me to take that brown
+straw with the green velvet bandeau before I thought of asking
+Gabriella's advice," Mrs. Spencer was overheard saying to her
+daughter, as she paused, panting and breathless, at the head of the
+short flight of steps.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Gabriella always had taste; I'll ask her about mine,"
+Florrie tossed back gaily in the high fluting notes which expressed
+so perfectly the brilliant, if slightly metallic, quality of her
+personality.</p>
+<p>Beside her mother, a plump, bouncing person, with a noisy though
+imperfectly articulate habit of speech, and the prominent hips and
+bust which composed the "fine figure" of the period, Florrie seemed
+to float with all the elusive, magic loveliness of a sunbeam. From
+the shining nimbus of her hair to her small tripping feet she was
+the incarnation of girlhood&mdash;of that white and gold girlhood
+which has intoxicated the imagination of man. She shed the
+allurement of sex as unconsciously as a flower sheds its perfume.
+Though her eyes were softly veiled by her lashes, every male clerk
+in Brandywine &amp; Plummer's was dazzled by the deep blue light of
+her glances. In her red mouth, with its parted lips, in the pure
+rose and white of her flesh, in the rich curve of her bosom, which
+promised already the "fine figure" of her mother, youth and summer
+were calling as they called in the velvet softness of the June
+breeze. Innocent though she was, the powers of Life had selected
+her as a vehicle for their inscrutable ends.</p>
+<p>"Where is Miss Carr? I must speak to Miss Carr, please," she
+said to one of the shop girls who came up, eager to serve her.
+"Will you tell her that Miss Spencer is waiting to speak to
+her?"</p>
+<p>Responding to the girl's artless stare of admiration, she threw
+a friendly glance at her before she turned away to try on a
+monstrous white Leghorn hat decorated around the crown with a
+trellis of pink roses. Unless she happened to be in a particularly
+bad humour&mdash;and this was not often the case&mdash;Florrie was
+imperturbably amiable. She enjoyed flattery as a cat enjoys the
+firelight on its back, and while she purred happily in the pleasant
+warmth, she had something of the sleek and glossy look of a pretty
+kitten.</p>
+<p>"How does this look on me, mother?" she asked over her shoulder
+of Mrs. Spencer, who was babbling cheerfully in her loud tones to
+Miss Lancaster, the forewoman.</p>
+<p>Though some of the best blood in Virginia, profusely diluted
+with some of the worst, flowed comfortably in Mrs. Spencer's veins,
+it was impossible even for her relatives to deny that she could be
+at times decidedly vulgar. Having been a conspicuous belle and
+beauty of a bold and dashing type in her youth, she now devoted her
+middle-age to the enjoyment of those pleasures which she had
+formerly sacrificed to the preservation of her figure and her
+complexion. Though she still dyed her somewhat damaged hair, and
+strenuously pinched in her widening waist, she had ceased, since
+her fiftieth birthday, to forego the lesser comforts of the body.
+As she was a person of small imagination, and of no sentiment, it
+is probable that she was happier now than she had been in the days
+when she suffered the deprivations and enjoyed the triumphs of
+beauty.</p>
+<p>"What's that, Florrie?" she inquired shrilly. "No, I shouldn't
+get that if I were you. It doesn't flare enough. I'm crazy about a
+flare."</p>
+<p>"But I want a pink bandeau, mother," replied Florrie a little
+pettishly, as she patted her golden-red fringe. "I wonder where
+Gabriella is? Isn't she ever coming, Miss Lancaster?"</p>
+<p>"I thought I saw her when I came in," observed Mrs. Spencer,
+craning her handsome neck, which was running to fat, in the
+direction of the trimming room. "Florrie, just turn your head after
+a minute and look at the hat Patty Carrington is buying&mdash;pea
+green, and it makes her face look like a walnut. She hasn't the
+faintest idea how to dress. Do you think I ought to speak to her
+about it?"</p>
+<p>"No, let her alone," replied Florrie impatiently. "Is this any
+better than the Leghorn?"</p>
+<p>"Well, I must say I don't think there is much style about it,
+though, of course, with your hair, you can carry off anything.
+Isn't it odd how exactly she inherited my hair, Miss Lancaster? I
+remember her father used to say that he would have fallen in love
+with a gatepost if it had had golden-red hair."</p>
+<p>Miss Lancaster, a thin, erect woman of fifty, with impassive
+features, and iron-gray hair that looked as if it were rolled over
+wood, glanced resignedly from Mrs. Spencer's orange-coloured crimps
+to the imprisoned sunlight in Florrie's hair.</p>
+<p>"I'd know you were mother and daughter anywhere," she remarked
+in the noncommittal manner she had acquired in thirty years of
+independence; "and she is going to have your beautiful figure, too,
+Mrs. Spencer."</p>
+<p>"Well, I reckon I'll lose my figure now that I've stopped
+dieting," remarked the lively lady, casting an appreciative glance
+in the mirror. "Florrie tells me I wear my sleeves too large, but I
+think they make me look smaller."</p>
+<p>"They are wearing them very large in Paris," replied Miss
+Lancaster, as if she were reciting a verse out of a catalogue. She
+had, as she sometimes found occasion to remark, been "born tired,"
+and this temperamental weariness showed now in her handsome face,
+so wrinkled and dark around her bravely smiling eyes. Where she
+came from, or how she spent her time between the hour she left the
+shop and the hour she returned to it, the two women knew as little
+as they knew the intimate personal history of the Leghorn hat on
+the peg by the mirror. Beyond the fact that she played the part of
+a sympathetic chorus, they were without curiosity about her life.
+Their own personalities absorbed them, and for the time at least
+appeared to absorb Miss Lancaster.</p>
+<p>"I like the Leghorn hat," said Florrie decisively, as she tried
+it on for the third time, "but I'll wait till I ask Gabriella's
+opinion."</p>
+<p>"I hope she's getting on well here," said Mrs. Spencer, who
+found it impossible to concentrate on Florrie's hat. "Don't you
+think it was very brave of her to go to work, Miss Lancaster?"</p>
+<p>"I understood that she was obliged to," rejoined Miss Lancaster,
+with the weary amiability of her professional manner.</p>
+<p>"She might have married, I happen to know that," returned Mrs.
+Spencer. "Arthur Peyton has been in love with her ever since she
+was a child, and there was a young man from New York last winter
+who seemed crazy about her. Florrie, don't you think George Fowler
+was just crazy about Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sure I don't know, mother. He paid her a great deal of
+attention, but you never can tell about men."</p>
+<p>"Julia Caperton told me, and, of course, she's very intimate
+with George's sister, that he went back to New York because he
+heard that Gabriella was engaged to Arthur. Florrie, do you suppose
+she is really engaged to Arthur?"</p>
+<p>Thus appealed to, Florrie removed the Leghorn hat from her head,
+and answered abstractedly: "Jane thought so, but if she is engaged,
+I don't see why she should have started to work. I know Arthur
+would hate it."</p>
+<p>"But isn't he too poor to marry?" inquired Mrs. Spencer, whose
+curiosity was as robust as her constitution. "Haven't you always
+understood that the Peytons were poor, Miss Lancaster, in spite of
+the lovely house they live in?"</p>
+<p>Her large, good-humoured face, which had once been as delicate
+as a flower, but was now growing puffed and mottled under a
+plentiful layer of rice powder, became almost violently animated,
+while she adjusted her belt with a single effective jerk of her
+waist. Though Bessie Spencer was admitted to have one of the
+kindest hearts in the world, she was chiefly remarkable for her
+unhappy faculty of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. An
+inveterate, though benevolent, gossip, she would babble on for
+hours, reciting the private affairs of her relatives, her friends,
+and her neighbours. Everybody feared her, and yet everybody was
+assured that "she never meant any harm." The secrets of the town
+flowed through her mind as grist flows through a mill, and though
+she was entirely without malice, she contrived, in the most
+innocent manner, to do an incalculable amount of injury. Possessing
+a singularly active intelligence, and having reached middle-age
+without acquiring sufficient concentration to enjoy books, she
+directed a vigorous, if casual, understanding toward the human
+beings among whom she lived. She knew everything that it was
+possible to know about the people who lived in Franklin Street, and
+yet her mind was so constituted that she never by any chance knew
+it correctly. Though she was not old, she had already passed into a
+proverb. To receive any statement with the remark, "You have heard
+that from Bessie Spencer," was to cast doubt upon it.</p>
+<p>"You don't think I'm getting any stouter, do you, Miss
+Lancaster?" she inquired dubiously, with her hands on her hips and
+her eyes measuring the dimensions of her waist. "I'm making up my
+mind to try one of those B. and T. corsets that Mrs. Murray is
+wearing. She told me it reduced her waist at least three
+inches."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you aren't like Mrs. Murray&mdash;she didn't measure a
+fraction under thirty inches," replied Miss Lancaster, with her
+patient politeness. Then, after a pause, which Mrs. Spencer's
+nimble wit filled with a story about the amazing number of mint
+juleps Mrs. Murray was seen to drink at the White Sulphur Springs
+last summer, Florrie exclaimed eagerly:</p>
+<p>"Why, there is Gabriella! Won't you get her for us, Miss
+Lancaster?"</p>
+<p>Near one of the long windows, beyond which large greenish flies
+were buzzing around the branch of a mulberry tree in the alley,
+Gabriella was trying a purple hat on a prim-looking lady who
+regarded herself in the mirror with a furtive and deprecating air
+as if she were afraid of being unjustly blamed for her appearance.
+"I'm not sure&mdash;but I don't think it suits me exactly," she
+appeared to murmur in a strangled whisper, while she twisted her
+mouth, which held a jet-headed hatpin, into a quivering
+grimace.</p>
+<p>"She's waiting on Matty French," said Mrs. Spencer, and she
+added impulsively, "I wonder what it is that men see in Gabriella.
+You wouldn't call her really pretty, would you, Miss
+Lancaster?"</p>
+<p>"Well, not exactly pretty, but she has an interesting face. It
+is so full of life."</p>
+<p>"Can't you get her, mother?" asked Florrie; and Mrs. Spencer,
+always eager to oblige, rustled across the room and pounced
+vivaciously upon the prim lady and Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"We've been looking for you everywhere, Gabriella," she began,
+nodding agreeably to Miss French. "Florrie has tried on all the
+hats in the room, and she wants you to tell her if that white
+Leghorn is becoming. Good morning, Matty! That blue wing is so
+stylish. I think you are very sensible to wear colours and not to
+stick to black as Susie Chamberlain does. It makes her look as old
+as the hills, and I believe she does it just to depress people.
+Life is too short, as I said when I left off mourning, to be an ink
+blot wherever you go. And it doesn't mean that she grieves a bit
+more for her husband than anybody else does. Everybody knows they
+led a cat and dog's life together, and I've even heard, though I
+can't remember who told me, that she was on the point of getting a
+divorce when he died. Are you going? Well, I'm glad you decided on
+that blue hat. I don't believe you'll ever regret it. Good-bye. Be
+sure and come to see me soon. Gabriella, will you help Florrie
+about her hat now? I declare, I thought Matty would never get
+through with you. And, of course, we didn't want anybody but you to
+wait on us. We were just saying that you had the most beautiful
+taste, and it is so wise of you to go out to work and not sit down
+and sew at home in order to support your position. A position that
+can't support itself isn't much of a prop, my husband used to say.
+But I don't believe you'll stay here long, you sly piece. You'll be
+married before the year is up, mark my word. The men are all crazy
+about you, everybody knows that. Why, Florrie met George Fowler in
+the street this morning, and when he asked after you, his face
+turned as hot as fire, she said&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Gabriella's face, above her starched collar with its neat red
+tie, was slowly flooded with colour. Her brown eyes shone golden
+under her dark lashes, and Mrs. Spencer told herself that the girl
+looked almost pretty for a minute. "If she wasn't so sallow, she'd
+be really good looking."</p>
+<p>Happily unaware that her face had betrayed her, Gabriella slid
+back a glass door, took a hat out of the case, and answered
+indifferently, while she adjusted the ribbon bow on one side of the
+crown:</p>
+<p>"I didn't know Mr. Fowler had come back. I haven't seen him for
+ages."</p>
+<p>From her small, smooth head to her slender feet she had acquired
+in three months the composed efficiency of Miss Lancaster; and one
+might have imagined, as Mrs. Spencer remarked to Florrie
+afterwards, that "she had been born in a hat shop."</p>
+<p>But instead of the weary patience of Miss Lancaster, she brought
+to her work the brimming energy and the joyous self-confidence of
+youth. It was impossible to watch her and not realize that she had
+given both ability and the finer gift of personality to the selling
+of hats. Had she started life as a funeral director instead of a
+milliner, it is probable that she would have infused into the
+dreary business something of the living quality of genius.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Florrie hadn't seen him for ages either," chirped Mrs.
+Spencer, with her restless eyes on the hat in Gabriella's hand. "I
+don't know whether I ought to tell you or not, but you and Florrie
+are so intimate I suppose I might as well&mdash;Julia Caperton told
+Florrie that George came back because he heard in some way that you
+had broken your engagement to Arthur. Of course, as I told Julia
+afterwards, you hadn't mentioned a word of it to me, but I've got
+eyes and I can't help using them. I was obliged to see that George
+was simply out of his mind about you. It would be a splendid match,
+too, for they say his father has made quite a large fortune since
+he went to New York&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Mother!" interrupted Florrie sternly, over her shoulder, "you
+know Julia told you not to breathe a single word as coming from
+her. She is the bosom friend of George's sister."</p>
+<p>"But, Florrie, I haven't told a soul except Gabriella, and I
+know she wouldn't repeat a thing that I said to her."</p>
+<p>"Now, isn't that exactly like mother?" observed Florrie, with
+the casual disapprobation of youth. "She was on the point of
+telling Miss Lancaster all about it when I stopped her."</p>
+<p>"Why, Florrie, I didn't say a word except that men were crazy
+about Gabriella&mdash;you know I didn't. Of course, I talk a great
+deal," she pursued in an aggrieved, explanatory tone to Gabriella,
+"but I never repeat a word&mdash;not a single word that is told me
+in confidence. If Julia had asked me not to tell Gabriella what she
+said, I shouldn't have dreamed of doing so."</p>
+<p>"Oh, it doesn't matter in the least, Mrs. Spencer," said
+Gabriella hastily, "only there isn't a word of truth in it."</p>
+<p>The becoming flush was still in her cheeks, and she poised a hat
+over Florrie's head with a swift, flying grace which Mrs. Spencer
+had never noticed in her before. "I wonder if Gabriella can really
+care about George?" she thought quickly. "But if it is George she
+is in love with, why on earth did she start to work in a shop?"
+Then suddenly, following a flash of light, she reasoned it out to
+her complete satisfaction. "It must have been that she didn't know
+that George cared&mdash;that is why she is blushing so at this
+minute."</p>
+<p>An hour or so later, when Florrie and her mother had fluttered
+volubly downstairs, and the exhausted assistants were putting the
+hats away before closing the cases, Gabriella went into the
+dressing-room, where Miss Nash, a stout, pleasant-looking girl, was
+sitting in a broken chair, with her shoes off, her blue serge skirt
+rolled back from her knees, and her head bowed, over her crossed
+arms, on the window-sill.</p>
+<p>At Gabriella's entrance she glanced up, and remarked cheerfully:
+"My feet were killing me. I just had to take off my shoes."</p>
+<p>"They do get dreadfully tired," assented Gabriella in the tone
+of sympathetic intimacy she had caught from the other girls.</p>
+<p>Her naturally friendly spirit had refused to "hold aloof" from
+her companions, as her mother had begged her to do, and at the end
+of three months she had learned things about most of them which
+interested her profoundly. One supported an invalid father, another
+had a family of six little brothers and sisters to care for, and
+still another had lost her lover through a railroad accident only
+two days before her marriage. Several of them were extravagantly
+loud, one or two were inclined to be vulgar; but the others were
+quite as refined and gentle as the girls with whom she had grown
+up, and what impressed her about them all was their courageous and
+yet essentially light-hearted Southern spirit. To her surprise, she
+found an utter absence of jealousy among them. The elder women were
+invariably kind and helpful, and though she liked the girls, she
+soon discovered in herself a growing feeling of respect for these
+older women. They represented a different type, for the hardness
+she noticed in some of the younger girls was entirely lacking in
+the women of Miss Lancaster's generation. Many of them even her
+mother would have called well born, and one and all, they were
+almost painfully ladylike. With their thin, erect figures, their
+wan, colourless faces, their graying hair, and their sweet Southern
+voices, they imparted a delicate social air to the shop.</p>
+<p>Usually Gabriella stopped to talk to the girls who crowded in
+from the workroom, brushing shreds of silk or ribbon from their
+skirts, but to-day her mind wandered while she answered Miss Nash,
+and when, a minute later, Miss Lancaster spoke to her on her way
+out, and asked her to match the flowers for Florrie's hat, she was
+obliged to make an effort before she could recall her roving
+attention. She was thinking not of Florrie's hat, but of Mrs.
+Spencer's words, "He has come back because he heard that your
+engagement was broken." And at the first insurgent rise of emotion,
+she ceased to be the business woman and became merely an
+imaginative girl, dreaming of love.</p>
+<p>"They aren't quite the right shade, are they?" she asked with an
+uncertainty which was tactful rather than sincere, "or, perhaps,
+the ribbon might be darker?"</p>
+<p>Her eyes questioned Miss Lancaster, who moved a step nearer the
+window as she held the bolt of ribbon toward the daylight.</p>
+<p>"Well, we'd better look at it again in the morning. You are in a
+hurry, Miss Carr?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, I've all the time in the world," answered Gabriella,
+though she longed to be out with the June scents and her dreams,
+"but I am sure the ribbon ought to be a deeper blue to tone with
+the ragged robins."</p>
+<p>"You've a wonderful eye for colour, that's why I ask your
+advice," said the other, and a sudden friendliness shone in her
+tired eyes, for she had liked Gabriella from the beginning. That
+the girl possessed a genuine gift of taste, the elder woman had
+already discovered. For herself, Miss Lancaster had always hated
+the sight of hats, and had taken up the work merely because a place
+in Brandywine &amp; Plummer's had been offered her shortly after
+her father, a gallant fighter but a poor worker, had gone to end
+his kindly anecdotal days in the Home for Confederate Soldiers. She
+was a repressed, conscientious woman, who had never been younger
+than she was now at fifty, and who regarded youth, not with envy,
+but with admiring awe. For she, also, patient and uncomplaining
+creature, belonged to that world of decay and inertia from which
+Gabriella had revolted. It was a world where things happened to-day
+just as they happened yesterday, where no miracles had occurred
+since the miracles of Scripture, where people hated change, not
+because they were satisfied, but because they were incapable of
+imagination. Miss Lancaster, who had never wanted anything with
+passion, except to be a perfect lady, was proud of the fact that
+she had been twenty years in business without losing her "shrinking
+manner."</p>
+<p>"Yes, you have an eye for colour," she repeated gently; "if you
+could only learn to sew, you might command a most desirable
+position."</p>
+<p>"I despise sewing," replied Gabriella, with serene good-humour,
+"and I could never learn, even at school, anything that I despised.
+But I suppose I can always tell somebody else how it ought to be
+done."</p>
+<p>Then, because her work always interested her, she forgot the
+disturbing words Mrs. Spencer had spoken&mdash;she forgot even her
+impatience to feel the June air in her face. Her best gift, the
+power of mental control, enabled her to bring the needed discipline
+to her emotion; and when the moment of her release came, she found
+that the brief restlessness had passed from her mind. "There's no
+use letting myself get impatient," she thought; "I've got to stick
+to it, so it won't do a bit of good to begin wriggling."</p>
+<p>All the other girls had gone home before her, and on the
+sidewalk Miss Meason, of the glove counter, stood talking about the
+spring sales to Mr. Brandywine. As Gabriella passed them, in her
+white shirtwaist and dark belted skirt, they looked thoughtfully
+after her until her sailor hat, with the scarlet band, crossed
+Broad Street and disappeared on the opposite side.</p>
+<p>"She's a remarkable girl," observed Mr. Brandywine, with his
+paternal manner. "I hope she is beginning to feel at home with
+us."</p>
+<p>"I believe she'd feel at home anywhere," replied Miss Meason,
+"and she's obliged to get on. There's no doubt of it."</p>
+<p>"A pleasant face, too. Not exactly pretty, I suppose, but you
+would call it a pleasant face."</p>
+<p>"Oh, well, I'd call her pretty in her way," answered Miss
+Meason. "Her eyes are lovely, and she has a singularly bright
+expression. I always say that a bright expression makes up for
+anything."</p>
+<p>"Her mother was a beauty in her day," said Mr. Brandywine
+reminiscently; "she was the snow and roses sort, and her eldest
+daughter took after her, though she is a wreck now, poor lady."</p>
+<p>"That's Charley Gracey," remarked Miss Meason tartly, for she
+had the self-supporting woman's contempt for the rake. "Yes, she
+was lovely as a girl. I remember as well as if it were yesterday
+how happy she looked when I sold her her wedding gloves. She is a
+beautiful character, too, they say, but somehow Gabriella, even as
+a child, appealed to me more. She has three times the sense of her
+sister."</p>
+<p>Then they shook hands and parted, while Gabriella, tripping
+through the Second Market, was saying to herself: "There's not the
+least bit of sense in your thinking about him, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>In Hill Street, maple and poplar trees were in full leaf, and
+little flakes of sunshine, as soft as flowers, were scattered over
+the brick pavement. Beyond the housetops the sky was golden, and at
+the corner the rusty ironwork of an old balcony had turned to the
+colour of bronze. The burning light of the sunset blinded her eyes,
+while an intense sweetness came to her from the honeysuckle
+clambering over a low white porch; and this light and this
+sweetness possessed an ineffable quality. Life, which had been
+merely placid a few hours before, had become suddenly
+poignant&mdash;every instant was pregnant with happiness, every
+detail was piercingly vivid. Her whole being was flooded with a
+sensation of richness and wonder, as if she had awakened with
+surprise to a different world from the one she had closed her eyes
+on a minute before.</p>
+<p>As she crossed the street she saw her mother's head above a box
+of clove pinks in the window; and a little later the front door
+opened and Miss Polly Hatch, a small, indomitable spinster who
+sewed out by the day, walked rapidly between the iron urns and
+stopped under the creamy blossoms of the old magnolia tree in the
+yard.</p>
+<p>"It's too late for your ma to be workin', Gabriella. You'd
+better stop her."</p>
+<p>Pausing in the middle of the walk, she comfortably tucked under
+her arm an unwieldy bundle she carried, and added, with the
+shrewdness which was the result of a long and painful experience
+with human nature: "It's funny&mdash;ain't it?&mdash;how downright
+mulish your ma can be when she wants to?"</p>
+<p>"I can't do a thing on earth with her," answered Gabriella in
+distress. "You have more influence over her than I have, Miss
+Polly."</p>
+<p>Miss Polly, who had the composed and efficient bearing of a
+machine, shook her head discouragingly as she opened the gate and
+passed out.</p>
+<p>"I reckon she's set for good and all," she remarked
+emphatically, and went on her way.</p>
+<p>"Mother, it's time to stop sewing and think about supper,"
+called Gabriella gaily, as she ran into the room and bent to kiss
+her mother, who turned a flat, soft cheek in her direction, and
+remarked gloomily: "Gabriella, you've had a visitor."</p>
+<p>Not for worlds would Mrs. Carr have surrendered to the disarming
+cheerfulness of her daughter's manner; for since Gabriella had gone
+to work in a shop, her mother's countenance implied that she was
+piously resigned to disgrace as well as to poverty. It was
+inconceivable to her that any girl with Berkeley blood in her veins
+could be so utterly devoid of proper pride as Gabriella had proved
+herself to be; and the shock of this discovery had left a hurt look
+in her face. There were days when she hardly spoke to the girl,
+when refusing food, she opened her lips only to moisten her thread,
+when the slow tears seemed forever welling between her reddened
+eyelids. As they had just passed through one of these painful
+periods, Gabriella was surprised to find that, for the moment at
+least, her mother appeared to have forgotten her righteous
+resentment. Though it could hardly be said that Mrs. Carr spoke
+cheerfully&mdash;since cheerfulness was foreign to her
+nature&mdash;at least she had spoken. Of her own accord,
+unquestioned and unurged, she had volunteered a remark to her
+daughter; and Gabriella felt that, for a brief respite, the
+universe had ceased to be menacing.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, you have had a visitor," repeated Mrs. Carr, and it
+was clear that her sorrow (she never yielded to passion) had been
+overcome by a natural human eagerness to tell her news.</p>
+<p>"Not Cousin Jimmy?" asked the girl lightly.</p>
+<p>"No, you could never guess, if you guessed all night."</p>
+<p>"Not Charley Gracey surely? I wouldn't speak to him for the
+world."</p>
+<p>Though Jane had returned to Charley, and even Mrs. Carr, feeling
+in her heart that her younger daughter had dealt her the hardest
+blow, had been heard to say that she "pitied her son-in-law more
+than she censured him," Gabriella had not softened in her
+implacable judgment.</p>
+<p>"Of course it wasn't Charley. I shouldn't have mentioned it if
+it had been, because you are so bitter against him. But it was
+somebody you haven't seen for months. Do you remember Evelyn
+Randolph's son who paid you so much attention last winter?"</p>
+<p>"George Fowler! Has he been here?" asked Gabriella, and her
+voice quivered like a harp.</p>
+<p>"I told Marthy to say you were out. Of course I wasn't fit to
+see company, but he caught sight of me on his way to the gate and
+came back on the porch to speak to me. He remembered all about my
+having gone to school with his mother, and it seems she had told
+him about the time she was Queen of May and I maid of honour. I
+asked him how Evelyn stood living in New York, but he said she
+likes it better than his father does. Archie Fowler insists that he
+is coming back to Virginia to end his days. They seem to have
+plenty of money. I expect Archie has made a fortune up there or he
+wouldn't be satisfied to live out of Virginia."</p>
+<p>"Did George ask when I'd be at home?" inquired Gabriella.</p>
+<p>Though she knew that it was unwise to divert her mother's
+attention from the main narrative, her whole body ached with the
+longing to hear what George had said of her, and she felt that it
+was impossible to resist the temptation to question.</p>
+<p>"He said something about you as he was going away, but I can't
+remember whether he asked when you would be in or not." In spite of
+the fact that Mrs. Carr had the most tenacious memory for useless
+detail, she was never able to recall the significant points of an
+interview.</p>
+<p>"He didn't ask where I was?"</p>
+<p>The question was indiscreet, for it jerked Mrs. Carr's mind back
+with violence from its innocent ramble into the past, while it
+reminded her of Gabriella's present unladylike occupation. She shut
+her lips with soft but obstinate determination, and Gabriella,
+watching her closely, told herself that "wild horses couldn't drag
+another word out of her mother to-night." The girl longed to talk
+it over; but she might have tried as successfully to gossip with
+the angel on a marble tombstone. She wanted to hear what George had
+said, to ask how he was looking, and to wonder aloud why he had
+come back. She wanted to throw herself into her mother's arms and
+listen to all the little important things that filled the world for
+her. If only the aloof virtue in Mrs. Carr's face would relax into
+a human expression!</p>
+<p>Taking off her hat, Gabriella went into the bedroom, and then,
+coming back again after a short absence, remarked with forced
+gaiety: "I suppose he didn't have anything interesting to tell you,
+did he?"</p>
+<p>"No." Though the light had almost waned, Mrs. Carr broke off a
+fresh piece of thread and leaned nearer the window, while she tried
+to find the eye of the needle.</p>
+<p>"Let me thread your needle, mother. It is too late to work,
+anyway. You will ruin your eyesight."</p>
+<p>"I have never considered my eyesight, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"I know you haven't, and that's why you ought to begin."</p>
+<p>As it was really growing too dark to see, Mrs. Carr rolled the
+thread back on the spool, stuck the needle into the last
+buttonhole, and folding the infant's dress on which she was
+working, laid it away in her straw work-basket.</p>
+<p>"Will you light the gas, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"Don't work any more to-night, mother. It is almost supper
+time."</p>
+<p>Without replying, Mrs. Carr moved with her basket to a chair
+under the chandelier. Once seated there, she unfolded the dress,
+took the needle from the unfinished buttonhole, and tried again
+unsuccessfully to run the thread through the eye. Then, while
+Gabriella rushed to her aid, she removed her glasses and patiently
+polished them on a bit of chamois skin she kept in her basket.</p>
+<p>"Don't you feel as if you could eat a chop to-night,
+mother?"</p>
+<p>"I haven't been able to swallow a morsel all day,
+Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"I've saved you a little cream. Shall I make you a toddy?"</p>
+<p>"I don't want it. Drink it yourself, dear."</p>
+<p>After this there followed one of those pauses which fill not
+only the room, but the universe with a fury of sound. There were
+times when Gabriella felt that she could stand anything if only her
+mother would fly into a rage&mdash;when she positively envied
+Florrie Spencer because her plebeian parent scolded her at the top
+of her voice instead of maintaining a calm and ladylike reticence.
+But Mrs. Carr was one of those women who never, even in the most
+trying circumstances, cease to be patient, who never lose for an
+instant so much as the palest or the thinnest of the Christian
+virtues.</p>
+<p>Going into the bedroom, Gabriella changed from her shirtwaist
+into a gown of flowered muslin, with sleeves that looked small
+beside the balloon ones of the season, and a skirt which was
+shrunken and pale from many washings the summer before. She had
+worn the frock when she met George, and though it was old, she knew
+it was becoming, and she told herself joyfully that if she put it
+on to-night, "something must come of it." As she smoothed her hair
+by the dim gas-jet over the mirror, she saw again the face of
+George as it had first smiled down on her beneath the boughs of a
+mimosa tree in Mrs. Spencer's front garden. At the time, a year
+ago, she was engaged to Arthur&mdash;she had even called the placid
+preference she felt for him "being in love"&mdash;but while she
+talked to George she had found herself thinking, "I wonder how it
+would feel to be engaged to a man like this instead of to Arthur?"
+Then, since all Southern engagements of the period were secret, she
+had seen a good deal of George during the summer; and in the
+autumn, while she was still trying to make believe that it was
+merely a friendship, he had gone back to New York without saying
+good-bye. She had tried her best to stop thinking of him, and until
+this evening, she had never really let herself confess that she
+cared. But if she didn't care why was she so happy to-night? If she
+didn't care why was there such intoxicating sweetness in the
+thought of his return? If she didn't care why had she dressed
+herself so carefully in the flowered muslin he had once said that
+he liked? Her face, smiling back at her from the mirror, was
+suffused with a delicate glow&mdash;not pink, not white, but softly
+luminous as if a lamp, shining behind it, enkindled its expression.
+She had never seen herself so nearly pretty, and with this thought
+in her mind, she went back to her mother, who was still working
+buttonholes under the chandelier.</p>
+<p>"Marthy has brought the lamp, mother. Why don't you move over to
+the table?"</p>
+<p>"I can see perfectly, thank you, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"I hate to see you working. Let me finish those
+buttonholes."</p>
+<p>"I'd rather get through them myself, dear."</p>
+<p>"Have you seen Jane to-day?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Has Cousin Pussy been here?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Did you get out for a walk?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>The appalling silence again filled the room like a fog, and
+Gabriella, moving cautiously about in it, began straightening
+chairs and picking up shreds of cambric from the carpet. She felt
+suddenly that she could not endure the strain for another minute,
+and glancing at Mrs. Carr's bent head, where the thin hair was
+wound into a tight knot and held in place by a tortoise-shell comb
+with a carved top, she wondered how her mother could possibly keep
+it up day after day as she did? But, if she had only known it, this
+silence, which tried her nerves to the breaking point, was
+positively soothing to her mother. Mrs. Carr could keep it up not
+only for days and weeks, but, had it been necessary, she could have
+kept it up with equal success for half a lifetime. While she sat
+there, working buttonholes in a bad light, she thought quite as
+passionately as Gabriella, though her mental processes were
+different. She thought sadly, but firmly, with a pensive melancholy
+not untinged with pleasure, that "life was becoming almost too much
+for her." It seemed incredible to her that after all her struggles
+to keep up an appearance things should have turned out as they had;
+it seemed incredible that after all her sacrifices her children
+should not consider her more. "They have no consideration for me,"
+she reflected, while she took the finest stitch possible to the
+needle she held. "If Jane had considered me she would never have
+married Charley. If Gabriella had considered me, or anybody but
+herself, she would not have gone to work in a store." No, they had
+never considered her, they had never asked her advice before
+acting, though she had brought them into the world and had worked
+like a slave in order to keep them in that respected station of
+life in which they had been born. Then, her sorrow getting the
+better of her resolution, she turned her head and spoke:</p>
+<p>"I know you never tell me anything on purpose, Gabriella, but I
+think I have a right to know whether or not you have discarded
+Arthur for good."</p>
+<p>"I told you all about it, mother. I told you I found I was
+mistaken."</p>
+<p>"I suppose you never thought for a moment how much it would
+distress me? Though Lydia Peyton is so much older than I am, she
+was always my best friend&mdash;we often stayed in the room
+together when we were girls. I had set my heart on your marrying
+her son."</p>
+<p>"I know that, mother, and I am very sorry, but when it came to
+the point I couldn't marry him. You can't make yourself
+care&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"I should have thought that my wishes might influence you. I
+should never wish you to do anything that wasn't for your good,
+Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"Of course, mother, you've given up your life to us. I know
+that, and Jane knows it as well as I do. That's why I want to earn
+money enough to let you rest. I want you to stop work for good and
+be happy."</p>
+<p>"There are worse things than work," replied Mrs. Carr in a tone
+which implied that Gabriella had brought them upon her.</p>
+<p>After a pause, in which her needle flew mournfully, she added:
+"I hope for your own sake that you will marry some good man before
+you lose your attractions. Poor Becky Bollingbroke proved to me how
+unfortunate it is for a woman to remain unmarried."</p>
+<p>For an instant Gabriella looked at her mother without replying.
+She felt tempted&mdash;strongly tempted, she told herself&mdash;to
+say something cross. Then the sight of the bent gray head, of the
+bowed shoulders, of the knotted needle-pricked fingers, pierced her
+heart. Though she could not always agree with her mother, she loved
+her devotedly, and the thought that she must lose her some day had
+been the most terrible nightmare of her childhood.</p>
+<p>"Don't worry about me, mother, dear," she answered tenderly. "I
+can always take care of myself. I can manage my life, you know
+that, don't you?" Then she stopped quickly while her heart gave a
+single bound and lay quiet. She had heard the click of the gate,
+and a minute later, as Mrs. Carr gathered up her sewing, there was
+a ring at the bell.</p>
+<p>"It can't be a visitor before supper, can it, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"I think not, mother, but I shouldn't run away if I were
+you."</p>
+<p>"I'd better go. I don't feel dressed. Wait a minute, Marthy, and
+let me get out of the room before you open the door." She fled,
+clutching her work-basket, while Gabriella, turning to lower the
+flaming wick of the lamp, heard George's voice at the door and his
+footsteps crossing the hall.</p>
+<p>"I knew something would happen," she thought wildly, as she went
+forward to meet him.</p>
+<p>"I saw you pull down the shade as I was going by," he began
+rather lamely; and she hardly heard his words because of the divine
+tumult in her brain. Her heart sang; her pulses throbbed; every
+drop of her blood seemed to become suddenly alive with ecstasy.
+Under the tarnished garlands of the chandelier his face looked
+younger, gayer, more intensely vivid than it had looked in her
+dreams. It was the face of her dreams made real; but with what a
+difference! She saw his crisp brown hair brushed smoothly back from
+its parting, his blue eyes, with their gay and conquering look, the
+firm red brown of his cheek, and even the bluish shadow encircling
+his shaven mouth. In his eyes, which said enchanting things, she
+could not read the trivial and commonplace quality of his
+soul&mdash;for he was not only a man, he was romance, he was
+adventure, he was the radiant miracle of youth!</p>
+<p>"Florrie told me this morning that you had come back," she
+answered coldly, as she held out her hand.</p>
+<p>Her words seemed to come to her from a distance&mdash;from the
+next room, from the street outside, from the farthest
+star&mdash;but while she uttered them, she knew that her words
+meant nothing. She shed her joy as if it were fragrance; and her
+softness was like the magnolia-scented softness of the June night.
+Even her mother would not have known her, so greatly had she
+changed in a minute. Of the businesslike figure in the sailor hat
+and trim shirtwaist&mdash;of the Gabriella who had said, "I can
+manage my life"&mdash;there remained only an outline. The very feet
+of the capable woman had changed into the shrinking and timid feet
+of a lovesick girl. She was afraid to go forward, afraid to move,
+afraid to breathe lest she break the wonderful spell of the magic.
+Not only her basic common sense, but the very soul that shaped her
+body had become as light, as sweet, as formless as liquid
+honey.</p>
+<p>But of course, she knew nothing of this. She was innocent of
+deception; she was innocent even of any definite purpose to allure.
+The thought in her mind, if there were any thought, which is
+doubtful, was that she must be composed, she must be indifferent if
+it killed her.</p>
+<p>"I know I've come at an awkward hour, but I simply couldn't go
+by after I saw you."</p>
+<p>"Won't you stay?" she asked, trying in vain to shut out the
+ominous sound of Marthy bringing their scant supper. She
+remembered, with horror, that she had ordered only two chops, and a
+wave of rebellion swept over her because life always spoiled its
+divine instants.</p>
+<p>"No, I can't stay. I've an engagement for supper. I merely
+wanted to see you. You've no idea how I've wanted to see you."</p>
+<p>"Have you?" said Gabriella in so low a voice that he hardly
+heard her. Then, lifting her glowing eyes, she added softly, "I am
+glad that you wanted to."</p>
+<p>"There were times when I simply couldn't get you out of my
+mind," he responded, and went on almost joyously, with the romantic
+look which had first enchanted her imagination. "You see I believed
+that you were going to marry Arthur Peyton. Julia told me that your
+engagement was broken. That was why I came back. Didn't you guess
+it?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I guessed it," she answered simply, and all the softness,
+the sweetness, the beauty of her feeling passed into her voice.</p>
+<p>Then, in the very midst of her happiness, there occurred one of
+those sordid facts which appear to spring, like vultures, upon the
+ineffable moments. She heard the bell&mdash;the awful supper bell
+which her mother insisted upon having rung because her parents had
+had it rung for generations before her. As the horrible sound
+reverberated through the house, Gabriella felt that the noise
+passed through her ears, not into her brain, but into the very
+depths of her suffering soul.</p>
+<p>"There, I must go," said George, without embarrassment, for
+which she blessed him. From his manner, the supper bell might have
+made a delightful harmony instead of a hideous discord. "I'll see
+you to-morrow, if I may. May I, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>He smiled charmingly as he went, and looking after him, a minute
+later, over the clove pinks in the window-box, she saw him turn and
+gaze back at her from the opposite pavement.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<h3>MIRAGE</h3>
+<p>On a bright Sunday in October Mrs. Carr stopped on her way from
+church to tell Mrs. Peyton of Gabriella's engagement. A crape veil,
+slightly scented with camphor, hung from her bonnet, and in her
+gloved hands she carried a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums, for she
+intended to go on to Hollywood, where her husband was buried. The
+sermon had been unusually inspiring, and there was a pensive
+exaltation in her look as she laid her hand on the gate of the
+walled garden.</p>
+<p>"If it couldn't be Arthur&mdash;and of course my heart was set
+on her marrying Arthur&mdash;I suppose George is the one I should
+have chosen," she said to Mrs. Peyton with tender melancholy as she
+turned her soft, clammy cheek, which was never warm even in summer,
+to be kissed.</p>
+<p>There was nothing against George that she could advance even to
+Gabriella. He was well born, for his mother had been a Randolph; he
+was comfortably rich (at least his father was); he was
+good-looking; he was almost arrogantly healthy&mdash;yet because
+she was obliged to regret something, she found herself clinging
+fondly to the memory of Arthur. "If it could only have been
+Arthur," she repeated sadly, gazing through the French window of
+the drawing-room to the garden where beds of scarlet sage flaunted
+brilliantly in the sunshine.</p>
+<p>"I hope and pray that dear Gabriella will be happy," replied
+Mrs. Peyton, a beautiful old lady, with wonderful white hair under
+the widow's ruching in her bonnet. The exquisite simplicity of her
+soul was reflected in the rose-leaf delicacy of her skin, in her
+benignant and innocent smile, in the serene and joyous glance of
+her eyes. Never in her life had she thought evil of any one, and
+she did not mean to begin on the verge of the grave, with the hope
+of a peaceful eternity before her. If dear Gabriella had
+"discarded" dear Arthur, then she could only hope and pray that
+dear Gabriella would not live to regret it.</p>
+<p>"She will be married at once, I suppose?" she said, and beamed
+as happily as if Gabriella had not disappointed the dearest hope of
+her heart. "There is no need to wait, is there?"</p>
+<p>"They have decided on the 17th of November. I wanted you to know
+it first of all, Lydia, so I haven't mentioned it to a soul except
+to Cousin Jimmy Wrenn."</p>
+<p>"You will live with dear Jane, will you not? Poor child, what a
+blessing you will be to her."</p>
+<p>"No, I shall be with Jane only for a month or two until
+Gabriella and George have taken a house in New York. She wouldn't
+consent to be married so soon until I promised to live with them.
+But how on earth shall I ever manage to go so far away, Lydia? To
+think of being so far from Hollywood almost breaks my heart, and
+yet what can I do?"</p>
+<p>Mrs. Peyton's loving gaze enfolded not only her visitor, but the
+house and the dreamy garden where frost was already blighting the
+flowers.</p>
+<p>"I understand your feeling, of course, Fanny," she said, "but
+you must think of Gabriella. How different it will be for her if
+her mother is with her. I shall miss you every minute, but for the
+sake of that splendid child of yours, I must not allow myself to be
+sorry."</p>
+<p>If Mrs. Carr's features could have lost the fixed impression of
+a lifetime, they would have appeared almost cheerful while her old
+friend held her hand and gazed benignly upon her; but so relaxed
+had the muscles of her face become that, even when her spirits
+rose, her countenance did not alter, and the flicker of light in
+her smile only served to illumine its profound melancholy.</p>
+<p>"I try to think of Gabriella," she answered, "but I oughtn't to
+forget poor Jane. Whenever I remember her, I begin to reproach
+myself."</p>
+<p>"Don't reproach yourself, Fanny. There is nothing on earth for
+which you can justly be blamed. I am sure you have never considered
+your own wishes for a minute in your life. If ever a mother gave up
+everything for her children, you have done so, Fanny, and you
+needn't deny it. But tell me about Gabriella. How thankful you
+ought to be that she has given up that work in a store!"</p>
+<p>"If it had been God's will, I suppose I must have borne it,
+Lydia, but I felt as if it was killing me."</p>
+<p>"The dear child has a strong character," observed Mrs. Peyton,
+and it seemed to her, while she thought of Gabriella, that a strong
+character was a beautiful and wonderful thing.</p>
+<p>"You would hardly know Gabriella, she is so changed," replied
+Mrs. Carr. "I declare I sometimes think that I never saw a girl so
+wildly in love as she is. She positively worships George, and when
+I look at her, I remember Becky Bollingbroke's saying that a smart
+woman in love is worse than a silly one. She has that much more to
+get foolish with, poor Becky used to say.</p>
+<p>"How happy it must make you," murmured the other. "There is
+nothing in life I'd rather see than my Arthur happily married."</p>
+<p>"I always thought that he and Gabriella were made for each
+other, but one never can tell&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"That must be Gabriella now," said Mrs. Peyton as the bell rang.
+"Is she coming for you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, Cousin Jimmy was to bring her, and then drive me out to
+Hollywood. Isn't that Arthur's voice talking to her?"</p>
+<p>"Poor boy," whispered Mrs. Peyton, and then she rustled forward
+and enveloped Gabriella in a warm embrace. "My darling girl, your
+mother has just told me," she said.</p>
+<p>"And Gabriella has just told me," added Arthur at her elbow.
+Though there was a hurt look in his eyes, his manner was perfect.
+Years afterwards, whenever Gabriella thought of him, she remembered
+how perfect his manner was on that morning.</p>
+<p>"I wanted you to know first of all," said Gabriella.</p>
+<p>As the old lady looked at her with loving eyes, it seemed to her
+that the girl was softly glowing with happiness. She accepted joy
+as she accepted sorrow, with quietness, but there was a look in her
+face which made her appear, for the moment, transfigured. A
+radiance like that of a veiled flame shone in her eyes; the cool
+tones of her voice had grown richer and gentler; and at last, as
+Mrs. Peyton said to herself, Gabriella, the sensible and practical
+Gabriella, was sweet with the honeysuckle sweetness of Jane.</p>
+<p>"She must be over head and ears in love," she thought; and the
+next minute, "I wonder how it will end?"</p>
+<p>The question brought a pang to her kind old heart, which longed
+to make everybody, and particularly her boy Arthur, happy. Then,
+because her eyes were filling, she stroked the girl's arm gently,
+and said:</p>
+<p>"That's a pretty dress, my dear. I never saw you look
+better."</p>
+<p>"She's really getting pretty," remarked Mrs. Carr. "Cousin Jimmy
+was saying only yesterday that if Gabriella keeps it up, she'll be
+a better looking old lady than Jane."</p>
+<p>"Well, I think her a very pretty young one," replied Mrs.
+Peyton. "She hasn't such small features as Jane has, but there is
+more in her face. Now, I'm willing to wager that George thinks her
+a beauty."</p>
+<p>Gabriella laughed happily. "He hasn't the faintest idea what I
+look like, but he declares he won't be a bit disappointed if he
+finds out some day that I am ugly."</p>
+<p>The glow of youth, of hope, of love, gave to her expressive face
+an almost unearthly brightness. She seemed to draw to her all that
+was vital and alive in the dim old house, so filled with memories,
+and in the October pageantry of the garden. It was the day of her
+miracle, and against the splendour of the scarlet sage, she shone
+with an unforgettable radiance.</p>
+<p>When, a little later, Mrs. Carr, in Cousin Jimmy's buggy, with
+her bunch of chrysanthemums held rigidly in her lap, drove off at
+an amble to Hollywood, and Gabriella, turning to wave her hand, had
+vanished behind the corner of the gray wall, Mrs. Peyton said
+gently:</p>
+<p>"She looked very happy, dear boy. You and I must pray for her
+happiness."</p>
+<p>The beauty which all her life she had created through faith
+awoke in Arthur's suffering heart while she spoke to him. She
+demanded nobility of being, and it existed; she exacted generosity
+of nature, and it was there. By her mere presence, by the
+overflowing love in her heart, she not only banished jealousy and
+envy, but made the very idea of them unthinkable.</p>
+<p>"She is obliged to be happy. It is her nature," answered Arthur,
+for his disposition was hardly less perfect than his manner.</p>
+<p>Crossing Broad Street, which wore its look of Sabbath
+sleepiness, Gabriella hurried on to Hill Street, and saw George
+waiting for her between the two green-painted urns filled with the
+summer's fading bloom of portulaca.</p>
+<p>He was staring straight upward at one of the poplar trees, where
+a gray squirrel was playing among the branches, and for several
+minutes before he was aware of her presence, she watched him with
+her impassioned, yet not wholly uncritical, gaze. The sunlight
+sparkled in his eyes, which shone brightly blue against the red
+brown of his flesh; and between his smiling lips, which were thick
+and somewhat loosely moulded, she saw the gleaming whiteness of his
+teeth. She could not explain&mdash;she had never even tried to
+understand&mdash;why this face, which was not in the least a
+remarkable one, should so profoundly appeal to her. When George was
+absent, his look haunted her with the intensity of an
+hallucination; when at last she saw it again, she felt that nothing
+else in the world mattered to her, so supreme was the contentment
+that swept over her. Though she was more intelligent than Jane, not
+even Jane herself had surrendered so unconditionally to the primal
+force. At least Jane had made exactions, but so complete was the
+subjugation of Gabriella that she exacted nothing, not even a
+return of her love. To give was all she asked, and in the giving
+she bloomed into a beauty and fullness of nature which Jane's
+small, closed soul could never attain.</p>
+<p>"George!" she called, and went swiftly toward him.</p>
+<p>He turned, threw away the cigar in his hand, and held open the
+gate while she entered.</p>
+<p>"There's a jolly little beggar up in the poplar," he said; "I've
+been watching him for ten minutes."</p>
+<p>Then, as she passed before him into the parlour, he shut the
+door, and catching her in his arms, kissed the back of her
+neck.</p>
+<p>"Oh, George!" she murmured, and her voice was like music. Even
+to his short-sighted vision there was pathos at the heart of her
+happiness&mdash;the pathos of ignorance, Of innocence, of the
+reckless generosity of soul that spends its best for the pure joy
+of spending. With the instinctive miserliness of the man who
+realizes that passion to last must be hoarded, not scattered, he
+had drawn back almost unconsciously from the simple abandonment of
+her love. He wanted her because the deep discomfort of his nature
+could not be satisfied without her; but in possessing her he did
+not mean to give up anything else. Never for an instant had he
+deluded himself with the mystic ecstasies of Gabriella. The passion
+which had changed her whole being as if by a miracle, had altered
+neither his fundamental egoism nor his superficial philosophy. He
+loved her, he knew, as much as it was possible for him to love any
+woman; but he was still able to take a profound and healthy
+interest in his physical comfort. In one thing, however, they were
+passionately agreed, and that was that the aim and end of their
+marriage was to make George perfectly happy.</p>
+<p>"You are sweet enough to eat this morning," he said as he kissed
+her.</p>
+<p>"I told Mrs. Peyton that you didn't know whether I was pretty or
+ugly," she answered merrily.</p>
+<p>"It isn't beauty that takes a man, though women think so," he
+rejoined lightly, and yet as if he were imparting one of the basic
+facts of experience. "I don't know what it is&mdash;but it's
+something else, and you've got it, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>She looked at him with luminous eyes.</p>
+<p>"I've got you," she answered in a whisper; "that's
+all&mdash;nothing else on earth matters. I want nothing but
+love."</p>
+<p>"But you let me go away for six months. I could never understand
+that."</p>
+<p>"I had to, George. I couldn't be mean even for you, could
+I?"</p>
+<p>"Well, I don't know." His gaze dwelt on her moodily. "Sometimes
+I wonder if you haven't too much conscience in your body?"</p>
+<p>Careless as were his words, they brought stinging tears to her
+eyes. Her throat ached with the longing to pour out her love; but
+it seemed to her suddenly that a wall of personality had risen
+between them, and that she could only beat blindly against the
+impenetrable mass that divided them. She knew now that he could
+never understand, and yet the knowledge of this intensified rather
+than diminished her love. The mere physical attraction, which she
+had glorified into passion, was invested with the beauty and the
+mystery of an unattainable ideal.</p>
+<p>"I believe you are going to cry, darling. Don't be so serious,"
+he said, laughing.</p>
+<p>"But you know&mdash;tell me you know that I love you."</p>
+<p>"Of course I know it. Am I blind or a fool?"</p>
+<p>Then before the glowing worship in her face, he caught her in
+his arms, while he said over and over, "I love you! I love
+you!"</p>
+<p>He held her close, thrilling at her touch, seeking her warm lips
+with an eagerness which comforted her because she was too
+inexperienced to understand how ephemeral was its nature and its
+sweetness.</p>
+<p>"Promise to love me always, George, as you do now," she said,
+passionately trying to make the fugitive joy immortal.</p>
+<p>"If you'll tell me how to help it, I shall be grateful," he
+retorted as gaily as if her eyes had not filled with tears.</p>
+<p>"Swear it!"</p>
+<p>"I swear it. Now, are you satisfied?"</p>
+<p>"I don't believe it. I'll never believe that you love me as much
+as I love you. Nobody could."</p>
+<p>In his heart he agreed with her. That Gabriella loved him more
+than he loved her was a fact to which he was easily reconciled. He
+loved her quite as much as he could love anybody except himself and
+be comfortable, and if she demanded more, she merely proved herself
+to be an unreasonable person. Women did love more than men, he
+supposed, but what else were they here for? During the six months
+when he had thought that she belonged to another, she had, he told
+himself, almost driven him out of his mind; but possession once
+assured, he had speedily recovered his health and his sanity. Her
+worship flattered him, and in this flattery she had, perhaps, her
+strongest hold on his heart. Nothing in his engagement had pleased
+him more than the readiness with which she had given up her work at
+his request. He abhorred independence in a wife; and Gabriella's
+immediate and unresisting acquiescence in his desire appeared to
+him to establish the fact of her essential and inherent femininity.
+Had not all laws, as well as all religions, proclaimed that woman
+should be content to lay down not only her life but her very
+identity for love; and that Gabriella was womanly to the core of
+her nature, in spite of her work in Brandywine's millinery
+department, it was impossible to doubt while he kissed her. There
+were times, indeed, when the exaltation of Gabriella's womanliness
+seemed to have left her without a will of her own; when, in a
+divine submission to love, she appeared to exist only for the
+laudable purpose of making her lover happy.</p>
+<p>"I'd do anything on earth for you, Gabriella," said George
+suddenly. "I wonder if you would make a sacrifice for me if I asked
+it?" From his face as he looked down on her it was evident that he
+was not speaking from impulse, but that he had seized an opportune
+moment.</p>
+<p>"You know I would, George. I'd give up the whole world for you.
+I'd beg my bread with you by the roadside."</p>
+<p>"Well, it isn't so bad as that, darling&mdash;it's only about
+your mother coming to us so soon. I've had a letter from home, and
+it seems that father has had losses and can't help me out as he
+intended to do. He's always either losing or making piles of money,
+so don't bother your precious head about that. In six months he'll
+probably be making piles again, but, in the meantime, mother
+suggests that we should postpone taking a house, and come and live
+with her for a few months."</p>
+<p>"I'd rather live on your income, George, no matter how small it
+is. I'm an awfully good manager, and you'd be surprised to see how
+far I can make a little money go. Why can't we take an apartment
+somewhere in an inexpensive neighbourhood&mdash;one just big enough
+for mother and you and me?"</p>
+<p>"We couldn't live half so well in the first place, and, besides,
+I'd hate like the devil to see you working yourself to death and
+losing your looks. That's just exactly what Patty is doing. She was
+the family's greatest investment, you know. Everything we had for
+years was spent on her because she was such a ripping beauty, and
+mother set her heart on her marrying nothing less than a duke. So
+we sent her abroad to be educated and squandered a fortune on her
+clothes, and then, just as mother was gloating over her triumphs,
+the very day after the Duke of Toxbridge proposed to her, Patty
+walked out one morning and married Billy King at the Little Church
+Around the Corner. Billy, of course, hasn't a cent to his name
+except what he makes painting blue pictures, and that's precious
+little. They're up on the West Side now, living in four rooms with
+neighbours who fry onions at nine o'clock in the morning next door
+to them, and half the time Patty hasn't even a maid, I believe, and
+has to do her work with the help of a charwoman."</p>
+<p>"And is she happy?" There was eagerness in Gabriella's voice,
+for she was sure that she should love Patty.</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, Patty is happy, but mother isn't. It's rough on
+mother."</p>
+<p>"I think she ought to have told your mother before she
+married."</p>
+<p>"Well, Patty thought she could stand the fuss better after she'd
+done it than she could before. She said she needed the support of
+knowing they couldn't stop it. Cheeky, wasn't it?"</p>
+<p>"And is she really so beautiful?"</p>
+<p>"Ripping," said George; "simply ripping."</p>
+<p>"I know I shall love her. Is she dark or fair?"</p>
+<p>"I never thought about it, but she's a towering
+beauty&mdash;something between dark and fair, I suppose. She has
+golden hair, you know."</p>
+<p>His arm was around her, and lifting her earnest face to his,
+Gabriella began in her softest voice: "I shouldn't mind a bit
+living like that, George&mdash;honestly I shouldn't."</p>
+<p>"Yes, you would. It would be rotten."</p>
+<p>"I wish you would tell me just how much we shall have to live
+on, dear. Even if it is very, very little, it would be so much
+better not to expect anything from your father. If the worst comes
+to the worst, I can always go back to work, you know, and I feel as
+if I ought to help because you are so generous about wanting mother
+to live with us."</p>
+<p>He frowned slightly, while a dark flush rose to his forehead.
+Already Gabriella was learning how dangerously easy it was to
+irritate George. Serious discussions always appeared to disturb
+him, and at the first allusion to the responsibilities he had
+assumed, she could see the look of bored restlessness creep into
+his face. It was evidently abhorrent to him to hear her talk about
+business; but with her practical nature and her fundamental common
+sense it was impossible that she should be content to remain in a
+fool's paradise of financial mysteries. She had only the vaguest
+idea how he earned a living, and a still vaguer one of what that
+living represented. There was an impression in her mind that he
+worked in his father's office somewhere in Wall Street&mdash;he had
+once given her the number&mdash;and that he went "downtown" every
+morning after breakfast and did not get home to luncheon. Cousin
+Jimmy had once told her that George's father was a stockbroker, but
+this information conveyed little to her mind. The men she knew in
+Richmond were lawyers, doctors, clergymen, or engaged, like Cousin
+Jimmy, in the "tobacco business," and she supposed that "a
+stockbroker" must necessarily belong to a profession which was
+restricted to New York. The whole matter was hazy in her thoughts,
+but she hoped in time, by intelligent and tactful application, to
+overcome her ignorance as well as George's deeply rooted objection
+to her enlightenment.</p>
+<p>"Well, you see, my income is uncertain, Gabriella. It depends a
+good deal upon the stock market and the sort of stuff we've been
+buying. Look here, darling, don't, for heaven sake, get the
+business bee in your bonnet. A mannish woman is worse than poison,
+and the less you know about stocks the more attractive you will be.
+Mother has lived for thirty years with father, and she doesn't know
+any more how he makes his money than you do at this minute."</p>
+<p>This was as lucid, she suspected, as George was ever likely to
+be on the subject, and, since he was becoming visibly annoyed, she
+abandoned her fruitless search for information. After she was
+married there would be time and opportunity to find out all that
+she wanted to know; and even if he never told her anything
+more&mdash;well, she was quite accustomed to the masculine habit of
+never telling women anything more. Her mother and Jane were as
+ignorant of finance as they had been in their cradles; Cousin Pussy
+spoke of the "tobacco business" as if it were a sacred mystery
+superior to the delicate feminine faculties; and while Gabriella
+was engaged to Arthur, he had fallen into the habit of gently
+reminding her that she "knew nothing of law."</p>
+<p>"Very well, dearest, I shan't bother you," she said cheerfully,
+"only, of course, I couldn't possibly leave mother with Jane and
+Charley. She doesn't realize it, but she would be perfectly
+miserable."</p>
+<p>"She told me that leaving Richmond was like death to her."</p>
+<p>"That's only because she knows she's going," answered Gabriella,
+but her endeavour to explain her mother's habit of mind appeared to
+her to be so hopeless that she added unconvincingly: "You can't
+imagine how dependent she is on me. Jane doesn't know how to manage
+her at all, though they are so much alike."</p>
+<p>"Well, of course, if we live at home&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But you promised me we'd be to ourselves, George; you can't
+have forgotten it. We talked it over, every bit of it, and I told
+you in the beginning I couldn't leave mother."</p>
+<p>"If you loved me enough to marry me, I should think you'd be
+willing to give up your family for me." He spoke doggedly; it was
+his way to speak doggedly when he was driving a point.</p>
+<p>"It isn't that, dear, you know it isn't that."</p>
+<p>Taking a letter from his pocket, he drew a sheet of blue note
+paper, closely interlined, from the envelope, and handed it to
+her.</p>
+<p>"You can see for yourself how it is," he said in an aggrieved
+voice. By his tone he had managed to put her in the wrong as
+utterly as if she, not he, were trying to break her word. Yet she
+had told him in the very beginning that she could not leave her
+mother; she had refused to engage herself to him until he had
+offered Mrs. Carr a home with them. It had all been carefully
+arranged at the start, and now, within a month of their marriage,
+he had apparently forgotten that the matter was settled.</p>
+<p>Leaning forward until the light fell on the paper, she read with
+trembling lips:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">My Dear Son:<br />
+<br />
+Your letter was a blow to me because you had said nothing of
+Gabriella's plan to bring her mother to New York to live with her,
+and, of course, this makes it out of the question that you should
+come straight to us. Now that Patty has gone&mdash;poor child, I am
+afraid she will live to repent her rashness&mdash;your father and I
+had quite looked forward to having you young people in the house;
+but we haven't room, even if I could bring myself to face the
+prospect of a rival mother-in-law under the same roof with
+me&mdash;and frankly I can't. And your father has simply put his
+foot down on the idea. As you know he hasn't been very well of
+late&mdash;the doctor says he is threatened with diabetes&mdash;so
+my one thought is to spare him every useless anxiety. He sleeps
+very badly and doesn't seem able, even at night, to detach his mind
+from his business worries. If he hadn't had such a bad summer, he
+might have been able to help you start housekeeping, but there have
+been a great many failures in the last few months, and he says he
+is obliged to cut down all his expenses in order to tide over the
+depression in the market. We are trying to retrench in every
+possible way, and, for this reason, I fear we shall hardly be able
+to go down to your wedding. This is a terrible disappointment to us
+both, and your father is particularly distressed because he will
+not be able to add to your income this year. Of course, if you
+should change your mind and decide to come to us, we can get
+Patty's old room ready for you at once, and turn yours into a
+sitting-room. Think this over and let me know as soon as you
+possibly can.<br />
+<br />
+I see Patty occasionally. She is in high spirits, but looking a
+little thinner, I think. Billy has painted a portrait of Mrs.
+Pletheridge, but it isn't a bit flattering, and he wouldn't let her
+wear her pearls, so I'm afraid she won't buy it. I don't believe he
+will ever make anything of himself. What a waste when Patty might
+have been Duchess of Toxbridge. Though I am not a bit worldly, I
+can't help regretting all that she has lost.<br />
+<br />
+Your loving mother,<br />
+<br />
+EVELYN FOWLER.</div>
+<p>When she had folded the letter and given it back to him,
+Gabriella dropped her hands in her lap and sat gazing thoughtfully
+at the square of sunlight by the window.</p>
+<p>"If you cared as much as I do, you'd be willing to give up your
+family," he said suddenly, encouraged not only by her manner, which
+appeared yielding, but by his secret ineradicable conviction that
+her love was greater than his. Across the romantic screen of his
+features there flashed a swift change of expression, like the
+flicker of light on a coloured mask. If she could only have looked
+through the charming vacancy of his face, she would have been
+surprised to discover the directness and simplicity of his mental
+processes. He wanted his way, and he meant, provided it was humanly
+possible, to have whatever he wanted.</p>
+<p>"It isn't that, George. Love has nothing to do with it. It is a
+question of right."</p>
+<p>For a minute he surveyed her moodily; then, rising from her side
+on the sofa, he took two steps to the window and looked up at the
+boughs of the poplar tree. The gray squirrel was still there, and
+he watched it attentively while he pondered his answer. Yes, the
+whole trouble with Gabriella was too much conscience. This
+conscience of hers had got in his way before now, and he had
+suddenly an uneasy feeling, as if he had struck against the vein of
+iron which lay beneath the rich bloom of her passion. The thought
+of her opposition, of her secret hardness, bitterly angered him. He
+wanted her&mdash;no other woman could satisfy him&mdash;but he
+wanted her utterly different from what she was. He was seized with
+an indomitable desire to make her over, to change her entirely from
+that Gabriella with whom he had fallen in love. Of course, she was
+right as far as the mere facts of the case were concerned. He had
+promised that her mother should live with them; but he felt
+indignantly that it was an act of disloyalty for her to be right at
+his expense. She ought to have given in, and she ought to have
+given in gracefully, there was no question of that. When a woman
+loved a man as much as she loved him, it was unreasonable of her to
+let these innumerable little points of fact come between them; it
+was ungenerous of her to cling so stubbornly to her advantage. Her
+very quietness&mdash;that look of gentle obstinacy which refused
+either to fight back or to surrender&mdash;irritated him almost to
+desperation. His temper, always inflammable, suddenly burst out,
+and he felt that he wanted to shake her. He wanted, indeed, to do
+anything in the world except the sensible thing of walking out of
+the house and leaving her to reflection.</p>
+<p>"I should think your first duty would be to your husband," he
+said, while the streak of cruelty which was at the heart of his
+love showed like a livid mark on the surface of his nature. His
+mind was conscious of but a single thought while he stood there in
+the wind which fluttered the curtains and filled the room with the
+roving scents of October, and this was the bitter longing to make
+Gabriella over into the girl that he wanted her to become. Though
+it cost him her love, he felt that he must punish her for being
+herself.</p>
+<p>"Do you mean always to put your mother before me?" he asked
+passionately, after a minute.</p>
+<p>Still she did not answer, and in the deep, earnest eyes that she
+turned on him he saw not anger, not sorrow even, but wonder. As he
+stretched out his hand, it fell on Mrs. Carr's window box, where a
+rose geranium remained bright green in the midst of the withered
+stems of the clove pinks, and the scent of the leaves, as he
+crushed them between his fingers, evoked a swift memory of
+Gabriella in one of her soft moods, saying over and over, "I love
+you! Oh, I do love you!" At the image his temper changed as if by
+magic, and crossing the room, he bent down and kissed her with a
+fierceness that bruised her lips.</p>
+<p>"I adore you, Gabriella," he said.</p>
+<p>Though she had seen these sudden changes in him before, she had
+never grown wholly used to them. Her deeper nature, with its
+tranquil brightness, untroubled by passing storms, was unprepared
+for the shallow violence which swept over him, leaving no visible
+trace of its passage. No, she could not understand him&mdash;she
+could only hope that after they were married the blindness would
+pass from her love, and she would attain that completer knowledge
+for which she was striving so patiently. The transforming miracle
+of marriage, she trusted, would reveal this mystery, with so many
+others.</p>
+<p>"How can you hurt me so, George?" she asked with reproachful
+tenderness.</p>
+<p>"It's because you are so stubborn, darling. If you weren't so
+stubborn I shouldn't do it. Do you know you get almost mulish at
+times," he added, laughing, while she moved nearer and rubbed her
+cheek softly against his sleeve.</p>
+<p>"You frighten me," she whispered. "I was just beginning to
+believe that you really meant it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, lovers always quarrel. There's nothing in that."</p>
+<p>"But I hate to see you angry. It would almost kill me if it
+lasted longer than a minute. Never let it last, will you,
+George?"</p>
+<p>"Of course not, Goosey. It never has lasted, has it?"</p>
+<p>"Goosey" was one of his favourite names for her. He liked it
+because it gave him a merry feeling of superiority when he said it,
+and Gabriella liked it for perhaps the same reason. In the first
+ardour of her self-surrender she caught eagerly at any straw that
+she might cast on the flame of her passion.</p>
+<p>"And I'm not really stubborn, dear. Tell me that I'm not really
+stubborn."</p>
+<p>"You darling! I was only teasing you."</p>
+<p>"I'll do anything on earth for you that I can, George."</p>
+<p>"I know you will, dearest, and you don't honestly care more for
+your family, do you?"</p>
+<p>"I love you better than all the rest of the world put together.
+There are times when I think it must be wrong to love any man as
+much as I love you. My grandmother used to say that when you loved
+like that you 'tempted Providence.' Isn't it dreadful to believe
+that you could tempt Providence by loving?"</p>
+<p>He kissed her throat where a loosened strand of dark hair had
+fallen against the whiteness.</p>
+<p>"Will you do what I ask, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>So it was all to begin over again! He had not really given in,
+he had not really yielded even while he was kissing her. She closed
+her eyes, leaning her head on his shoulder. For a moment she felt
+as if a physical pain were pressing into her forehead.</p>
+<p>"Will you do it, Gabriella?" It was as if he put his soul into
+his voice, wooing her tenderly away from her better judgment. He
+was testing his power to dominate her; and never had she felt it so
+vividly, never had her will been so incapable of resisting him as
+at that instant. Moving slightly in his arms she looked at the
+clear red brown of his throat, at his sensitive mouth, with the
+faint dent in the lower lip, at his bright blue eyes, which had
+grown soft while he pleaded. His physical power over her was
+complete, and he knew it. Her flesh had become as soft as flowers
+in his arms, while her eyes, like dark flames, trembled and fell
+away from his look.</p>
+<p>"It isn't only the thing itself, darling, but I don't like you
+to refuse me. It hurts me that you won't do what I ask of you."</p>
+<p>"If it were anything else, George."</p>
+<p>"But it isn't anything else. It is just that I want you to
+myself&mdash;all to myself, after we are married."</p>
+<p>"Don't ask me, dearest. If you only knew how it makes me
+suffer."</p>
+<p>Her voice was a caress when she answered, but, as he told
+himself passionately, she had not yielded an inch. Once again he
+had run against the iron hidden under the bloom.</p>
+<p>"Then you refuse absolutely?" he asked, and though his voice
+quivered still, it was no longer from tenderness. He hated
+stubbornness, and, most of all, he hated it in the woman who was
+going to be his wife. A life of continual contradiction, he felt,
+would be intolerable. A strong will, which he had always admired in
+himself, became a positive failing in Gabriella. A woman's strength
+lay, after all, not in force of character, but in sweetness of
+nature. And yet how lovely she was! How soft, how sweet she looked
+as she gazed up at him with her radiant eyes. There was a
+fascination for him in her tall slenderness, in the graceful curve
+of her head, which drooped slightly like a dark flower on its stem.
+Everything about her charmed him, and yet he had never called her
+beautiful in his thoughts.</p>
+<p>"I told you how it was, dear, when you first asked me to marry
+you," she said, with infinite patience. "I told you that it wasn't
+fair to ask you to take mother, but that I couldn't possibly leave
+her alone in her old age. Jane's home is wretchedly
+unhappy&mdash;she can never tell when Charley is to be counted
+on&mdash;and it would kill mother to be dependent on Charley even
+if he were willing. I see your side, George, indeed, indeed, I do,
+but I can't&mdash;I simply can't act differently. I have always
+known it was my duty to look after mother&mdash;nothing can change
+that, not even love. She worked for us while we were little, and it
+is trouble that has made her what she is to-day. You must see that
+I am right, George; you can't possibly help it."</p>
+<p>But he couldn't see it. If the truth had been twice as evident,
+if Gabriella had been twice as reasonable, he could still have seen
+only his wishes.</p>
+<p>"I am only asking you to do what is best for us both,
+Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"But how can it be best for me to become an ungrateful child,
+George?"</p>
+<p>Neither of them wanted to quarrel, yet in a minute the barbed
+words were flying between them; in a minute they faced each other
+as coldly as if they had been strangers instead of adoring lovers.
+At the last, he looked at her an instant in silence while she sat
+perfectly motionless with her deep eyes changing to gold in the
+sunlight; then, turning on his heel, without a word, he left the
+house, and walked rapidly over the coloured leaves on the pavement.
+As he passed under the poplar tree the gray squirrel darted gaily
+along a bough over his head, but he did not look up, and a minute
+later Gabriella saw him cross the street and vanish beyond the
+pointed yew tree in the yard at the corner.</p>
+<p>"I wonder if this is the end?" she thought bitterly, and she
+knew that even if it were the end, that even if she died of it, she
+could never give way. Something stronger than herself&mdash;that
+vein of iron in her soul&mdash;would not bend, would not break
+though every fibre of her being struggled against it. All the
+happiness of her life vanished with George as he passed beyond the
+yew tree at the corner, yet she sat there with her hands still
+folded, her lips still firm, watching the tree long after its
+pointed dusk had hidden her lover's figure. Had she followed her
+desire as lightly as George followed his, she would have run after
+him as he disappeared, and bringing him back to the room he had
+left, dissolved in tears on his breast. She longed to do this, but
+the vein of iron held her firm in spite of herself. She could not
+move toward him, she could not even have put out her hand had he
+entered.</p>
+<p>The bell rang, and her blood drummed in her ears; but it was
+only Cousin Jimmy bringing Mrs. Carr back from the cemetery.
+Hearty, deep-chested, meticulously brushed and groomed, he wore his
+Sunday frock with an unnatural stiffness, as if he were still
+hearing Pussy's parting warning to be "careful about his clothes."
+His dark hair, trained for twenty years from a side parting, shone
+with the lustre of satin, and his shining eyes, so like the eyes of
+adventurous youth, wore their accustomed Sabbath look of veiled and
+ashamed sleepiness.</p>
+<p>"So you're going to take the old lady to New York with you,
+Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"I can't bear to think of it, Cousin Jimmy," remarked Mrs. Carr,
+while she adjusted her crape veil over the back of her chair. "I
+don't see how I can stand living in the North."</p>
+<p>"Well, what about our friend Charley? Do you think you could get
+on any better with Charley for a son-in-law?"</p>
+<p>"You oughtn't to joke about it, Cousin Jimmy. It is too serious
+for joking."</p>
+<p>"I beg your pardon, Cousin Fanny&mdash;but where is George,
+Gabriella? I thought he was to meet you here."</p>
+<p>"He had to go just before you came. Don't you think mother is
+looking well?"</p>
+<p>"As well as I ever saw her. I was telling her so as we drove
+back from Hollywood. All she needs is to leave off moping for a
+while and she'd lose ten years of her age. Why, I tell you if it
+were I, I'd jump at the chance to go to New York for a few years.
+If there wasn't a single thing there except the theatres, I'd jump
+at it. You can go to a different show every night of your life,
+Cousin Fanny."</p>
+<p>"I have never been inside of a theatre in my life. You ought to
+know me better than to think it," replied Mrs. Carr, while the
+corners of her mouth drooped. She had laid her bag of grosgrain
+silk on the table at her elbow, and untying the strings of her
+bonnet, she neatly rolled them into two tight little wads which she
+fastened with jet-headed pins.</p>
+<p>"You make her go, honey, when you get hold of her," said Jimmy
+to Gabriella in a sympathetic aside "What she needs is bracing
+up&mdash;I was saying so to Pussy only this morning. 'If you could
+just brace up Cousin Fanny, she'd be as well as you or I,' was what
+I said to her Now I don't believe there's a better place on earth
+to brace a body up than old New York. I remember I took my poor old
+father there just a month or two before his last illness, when he
+was getting over a spell of lumbago, and it worked on him like
+magic. We stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel&mdash;you must be sure
+to get a dinner at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Cousin Fanny&mdash;and
+went to a show every blessed night for a week. It made the old man
+young again, upon my word it did, and he was still talking about it
+when he came down with his last illness. Well, I must be going home
+to Pussy now. The boys and I went out squirrel hunting yesterday,
+and Pussy promised me Brunswick stew for dinner. Now, don't you
+forget to brace up, Cousin Fanny. That's all on earth you need. The
+world ain't such a bad place, after all, when you sit down and
+think right hard about it."</p>
+<p>He went out gaily, followed by Mrs. Carr's accusing eyes to the
+hatrack, where he stopped to take his glossy silk hat from a peg.
+Turning in the buggy as he drove off, he waved merrily back at them
+with the whip before he touched the fat flanks of his gray.</p>
+<p>"Cousin Jimmy means well, but he has a most unfortunate manner
+at times," observed Mrs. Carr.</p>
+<p>"What is the matter, Gabriella? Have you a headache?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, but the sunshine is so strong."</p>
+<p>"Then you'd better lower the shade. Why, what in the world has
+happened to my rose geranium? I was just going to pot it for the
+winter."</p>
+<p>"I'm sure it isn't hurt, mother. George broke the leaves when he
+was looking out of the window."</p>
+<p>"I thought he was going to stay for dinner. Did you make the
+jelly and syllabub?"</p>
+<p>"I made it, but he wouldn't stay."</p>
+<p>"Well, we'll send some upstairs to Miss Jemima. Do you know she
+had to have the doctor this morning? I met him as I was going out,
+and he said he was sorry to hear I was going to leave Richmond. I
+can't imagine where on earth he could have heard it, for I haven't
+mentioned it to a soul except Lydia Peyton. Yes, I believe I did
+speak of it to Bessie Spencer at the meeting of the Ladies' Aid
+Society the other day. Where are you going, Gabriella? Would you
+mind putting my bonnet in the bandbox?"</p>
+<p>No, Gabriella wouldn't mind, and taking the folds of crape in
+her arms, she went to get the green paper bandbox out of the
+closet. Though she had sacrificed her happiness for her mother, she
+felt that it would be impossible for her to listen with a smiling
+face to her innocent prattle.</p>
+<p>In the afternoon, when Mrs. Carr, with a small and inconspicuous
+basket in her hand, had set out on her Sunday visit to the Old
+Ladies' Home, and Marthy, attired in an apron with an embroidered
+bib, had taken the jelly and syllabub upstairs to Miss Jemima,
+Gabriella sat down in her mother's rocking-chair by the window, and
+tried desperately to be philosophical. The sound of the old maids
+from the floor above descending on their way to a funeral disturbed
+her for a minute, and she thought with an extraordinary clearness,
+"That is what my life will be if George never comes back. That is
+what it means to be old." And there was a morbid pleasure in
+pressing this thought, like a pointed weapon, into her heart. "That
+is all there will be for me&mdash;that will be my life," she went
+on after an instant of throbbing anguish. "I had no right to think
+of marriage with mother dependent on me, and the best thing for me
+to do is to start again with Mr. Brandywine. George was right in a
+way. Yes, it is hard on him, and I was wrong ever to think of
+it&mdash;ever to let him fall in love with me." The mere thought
+that George was right in a way gave her singular comfort, and while
+she dwelt on it, the discovery seemed to throw a vivid light on the
+cause of the quarrel. Of course, she had expected too much of him.
+It was natural that he should not want to be burdened with her
+family. What she had looked upon as selfishness was only the
+natural instinct of a man in love with a woman. He had said that he
+wanted her to himself, and to want her to himself appeared now to
+be the most reasonable desire in the world.</p>
+<p>Yes, she had acquitted George; but, in acquitting him, it was
+characteristic of her that she should not have yielded an inch of
+her ground. She drew comfort from declaring him innocent, but it
+was the tragic comfort of one who blesses while she renounces.
+George's blamelessness did not alter in the least her determination
+to cling to her mother.</p>
+<p>The afternoon wore on; the soft golden light on the pavement was
+dappled with shadows; and the wind, blowing over the iron urns in
+the yard, scattered the withered leaves of portulaca over the
+grass. Though the summer still lingered, and flowers were blooming
+behind the fences along the street, the faint violet haze of autumn
+was creeping slowly over the sunshine. Now and then an
+acquaintance, returning from afternoon service, looked up to bow to
+her, and while the daylight was still strong, Marthy, resplendent
+in Sunday raiment, came out of the little green gate at the side of
+the yard and passed, mincing, in the direction of the negro church.
+Then the door opened slowly, and the two old maids came in and
+stopped for a minute at the parlour door to see if Gabriella "had
+company."</p>
+<p>"Such a lovely evening, my dear"&mdash;they never used the word
+afternoon&mdash;"we went all the way to the cemetery. She was
+buried in her grandfather's lot, you know, in the old part up on
+the hill. It was a beautiful drive, but Amelia and I couldn't help
+thinking of the poor young thing all the time."</p>
+<p>It was Miss Jemima who had spoken, and her kind, plain face, all
+puffs and pleasant wrinkles, had not yet relaxed from the unnatural
+solemnity it had worn at the funeral. She was seldom grave, and
+never despondent, though to Gabriella she appeared to lead an
+unendurable life. Unlike Miss Amelia, she had not even a happy
+youth and a lover to look back upon; she had nothing, indeed,
+except her unfailing goodness and patience to support her.</p>
+<p>"I don't like to see you alone, honey," she said, untying the
+strings of her black silk bonnet, which fitted her cheerful
+features like a frame. "If the doctor hadn't told me to go to bed
+as soon as I came in, we'd sit a while with you for company."</p>
+<p>She felt that it was morbid and unnatural in Gabriella to sit
+alone in a dim room when there were so many young people out in the
+streets. "You mark my words, there's some reason back of
+Gabriella's moping all by herself," she remarked to Miss Amelia as
+she took off her "things" a few minutes later. "It wouldn't
+surprise me a bit to hear that she'd had a fuss with her
+sweetheart."</p>
+<p>"I declare, sister Jemima, you are too sentimental to live,"
+observed Miss Amelia as she filled the tea kettle on the fender
+"Anybody would think to hear you talk that there was nothing in
+life except making love."</p>
+<p>"Well, there isn't anything else so interesting when you're
+young. You used to think so yourself, sister Amelia."</p>
+<p>Standing gaunt and black, with the tea kettle held out stiffly
+before her, Miss Amelia turned her tragic face on her sister.</p>
+<p>"Well, I reckon you don't know much about it," she responded
+with the unconscious cruelty of age. Having been once the victim of
+a great passion, she had developed at last into an uncompromising
+realist, wholly devoid of sentimentality, while Miss Jemima,
+lacking experience, had enveloped the unknown in a rosy veil of
+illusion.</p>
+<p>"You don't have to know a thing to think about it, sister
+Amelia," replied the invalid timidly as she put on her flannel
+wrapper and fastened it with a safety pin at the throat.</p>
+<p>"Well, I reckon it's all right for a girl like Gabriella," said
+Miss Amelia crushingly, "but when you look back on it from my age,
+you'll know it isn't worth a row of pins in a life."</p>
+<p>And beside the window downstairs Gabriella was thinking
+passionately: "Shall I ever grow old? Is it possible that I shall
+ever grow old like that?"</p>
+<p>With the bare question, terror seized her&mdash;the terror of
+growing old without George, the terror of dying before she had
+known the full beauty of life. Looking ahead of her at the years
+empty of love, she saw them like a gray road, leaf strewn, wind
+swept, deserted, and herself creeping through them, as bent, as
+wrinkled, as disillusioned, as Miss Amelia. The very image of a
+life without love was intolerable to her since she had known
+George&mdash;for love meant George, and only George, in her
+thoughts. That she could ever be happy again, ever take a natural
+pleasure in life if she lost him, was unimaginable to her at the
+instant. She loved him, she had loved him from the first moment she
+saw him, she would never, though she lived a million years, love
+any one else. It was as absurd to think that she could love again
+as that a flower could bloom afresh when its petals were withered.
+No, without George there was only loveless old age&mdash;there was
+only the future of Miss Amelia before her. And she clung to this
+idea with a horror which Miss Amelia, who seldom reflected that she
+was loveless and by no means considered herself an object of pity,
+would have despised.</p>
+<p>"I have no right to marry George, and yet if I don't marry him I
+shall be miserable all my life," she told herself with a sensation
+of panic. It would be so long, the rest of her life, and without
+George it was as desolate as the gray road of her vision. All the
+beauties of the universe, all the miracles of hope, of youth, of
+spring; her health, her intellect, her capacity for work and for
+taking pleasure in little things&mdash;all these were as nothing to
+her if she lost George out of her life. "I oughtn't to marry him,"
+she repeated, "but if I don't marry him I shall be miserable every
+minute until I die."</p>
+<p>Then a terror more awful than any she had yet suffered clutched
+at her heart. Suppose he should never come back! Suppose he had
+really meant to leave her for good! Suppose he had ceased to love
+her since he went out of the house! The possibility was so
+agonizing that she rose blindly from her chair and turned from the
+window as if the quiet street, filled with the dreamy sunshine of
+October, had offered an appalling, an unbelievable sight to her
+eyes. If he had ceased to love her, she was helpless; and this
+sense of helplessness awoke a feeling of rage in her heart. If he
+did not come back, she could never go after him. She could only sit
+and wait until she grew as old and as ugly as Miss Amelia. While
+the minutes, which seemed hours, dragged away, she wept the
+bitterest tears of her life&mdash;tears not of wounded love, but of
+anger because she could do nothing but wait.</p>
+<p>While she wept the bell rang. When she did not answer it, it
+rang again, and after an interminable pause the footsteps of Miss
+Amelia were heard descending the stairs. Then the door opened and
+shut, the footsteps began their slow ascent of the stairs, and
+after an eternity of silence, she knew that George had entered the
+room.</p>
+<p>Wiping her eyes on the ruffle of the sofa pillow, she sat up and
+faced him, while her pride hardened again.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, I have come back."</p>
+<p>"I see you have," she answered coldly, and choked over a
+sob.</p>
+<p>"What are you crying about, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"I&mdash;I have a headache."</p>
+<p>"Have you thought about me at all to-day?"</p>
+<p>"A little."</p>
+<p>He laughed softly, the laugh of a conqueror.</p>
+<p>"I'm glad at least that I didn't give you the headache."</p>
+<p>"You didn't. I had it anyway."</p>
+<p>He was radiant, he was as fresh as the wind. Never in his life
+had he looked so gay, so handsome, so kind. His blue eyes were
+brimming with light. The mere fact of being alive appeared to fill
+him with ecstasy. And she loved him for his gaiety, for his
+lightness, for the ease with which he took for granted her
+unchangeable love. She longed with all her soul and body to prove
+this love by a surrender more complete than any she had made in the
+past. She longed to say: "I am yours to do with as you please, and
+nothing in the universe matters but you and my love for you." The
+very core of her nature longed to say this to him; but her
+indomitable pride, which even passion could not overcome, kept her
+sitting there in silence while she felt that her heart was bursting
+with happiness.</p>
+<p>"Have you thought it over, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>She nodded. To save her life, she felt, she could not utter a
+word without sobbing.</p>
+<p>"And you have absolutely and finally decided to have your
+way?"</p>
+<p>This time she shook her head, but the tears fell on her cheeks
+and she did not brush them away. From his voice she knew that she
+had triumphed, but there was no delight in the knowledge. She did
+not want to triumph; she wanted only to yield to him and to make
+him happy by yielding.</p>
+<p>"O George!" she cried suddenly, and held out her arms to
+him.</p>
+<p>As he looked down at her his expression changed suddenly to one
+of intense sadness. From his face, which had grown pale, he might
+have been contemplating the Eternal Verities, though, in reality,
+he was considering nothing more exalted than the dreary prospect of
+a lifetime spent in the society of Mrs. Carr.</p>
+<p>Then, as Gabriella enfolded him, he laughed softly. He had given
+in, but he knew in the very instant of his defeat that he should
+some day turn it to victory.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<h3>THE NEW WORLD</h3>
+<p>Gabriella stood in front of the station, ecstatically watching
+George while he struggled for a cab. In the pale beams of the early
+sunshine her face looked young, flushed, and expectant, as if she
+had just awakened from sleep, and her eyes, following her husband,
+were the happy eyes of a bride. She wore a new dress of blue
+broadcloth, passionately overtrimmed by Miss Polly Hatch; on her
+head a blue velvet toque from Brandywine's millinery department
+rested as lightly as a benediction; and her hands clasped Arthur's
+wedding present, a bag of alligator skin bearing her initials in
+gold. One blissful month ago she and George had been married, and
+now, on the reluctant return from a camp in the Adirondacks, they
+were confronting the disillusioning actuality of the New York
+streets at eight o'clock in the morning. While Gabriella waited,
+shivering a a little, for the air was sharp and her broadcloth
+dress was not warm, she amused herself planning a future which
+appeared to consist of inexhaustible happiness. And mingling with
+her dreams there were divine memories of the last month and of her
+marriage. After that one quarrel George, she told herself, had been
+"simply perfect." His manner to her mother had been beautiful; he
+had been as eager as Gabriella to obliterate all memory of the
+difference between them, though, of course, after his yielding that
+supreme point she had felt that she must give up everything
+else&mdash;and the giving up had been rapture. He had shown not the
+faintest disposition to crow over her when at last, after
+consulting Mrs. Carr, she had told him that her mother really
+preferred to stay with Jane until summer, though he had remarked
+with evident relief: "Then we'll put off looking for an apartment.
+It's easier to find one in the summer anyway, and in the meantime
+you can talk it over with mother."</p>
+<p>After this everything had gone so smoothly, so exquisitely, that
+it was more like a dream than like actual life when she looked back
+on it. She saw herself in the floating lace veil of her
+grandmother, holding white roses in her hand, and she saw George's
+face&mdash;the face of her dreams come true&mdash;looking at her
+out of a starry mist, while in the shining wilderness that
+surrounded them she heard an organ playing softly "The Voice That
+Breathed O'er Eden." Then the going away! The good-byes at the
+station in Richmond; her mother's face, pathetic and drawn against
+the folds of her crape veil; Cousin Jimmy, crimson and jovial;
+Florrie's violent waving as the train moved away; Miss Jemima, with
+her smiling, pain-tortured eyes, flinging a handful of rice; the
+last glimpse of them; the slowly vanishing streets, where the few
+pedestrians stopped to look after the cars; the park where she had
+played as a child; the brilliant flower-beds filled with an
+autumnal bloom of scarlet cannas; the white-aproned negro nurses
+and the gaily decorated perambulators; the clustering church spires
+against a sky of pure azure; the negro hovels, with frost-blighted
+sunflowers dropping brown seeds over the paling fences; the rosy
+haze of it all; and her heart saying over and over, "There is
+nothing but love in the world! There is nothing but love in the
+world!"</p>
+<p>"I've got a cab&mdash;the last one," said George, pushing his
+way through the crowd, and laying his hand on her arm with a
+possessive and authoritative touch. "Let me put you in, and then
+I'll speak to the driver."</p>
+<p>As he gave the address she watched him, still fascinated with
+the delicious strangeness of it all. It was like an adventure to
+have George whisk her so peremptorily into a cab, and then stand
+with his foot on the step while he curtly directed the driver.
+Nothing could surpass the romance&mdash;the supreme exciting
+romance of life. Every minute was an event; every act of George's
+was as thrilling as a moment in melodrama. And as they drove
+through the streets, over the pale bands of sunshine, she had a
+sense of lightness and wonder, as if she were driving in a world of
+magic toward ineffable happiness.</p>
+<p>"Isn't it strange to be here together, George?" she said. "I can
+hardly believe it." But in her heart she was thinking: "I shall
+never want anything but love in my life. If I have George I shall
+never want anything else." The bedraggled, slatternly figures of
+the women sweeping the pavements in the cross-street through which
+they were driving filled her with a fugitive sadness, so faint, so
+pale that it hardly dimmed the serene brightness of her mood. "I
+wish they were all as happy as I am," she thought; "and they might
+be if they only knew the secret of happiness. If they only knew
+that nothing in the world matters when one has love in one's
+heart."</p>
+<p>"You'll believe it soon enough when we turn into Fifth Avenue,"
+replied George, glancing with disgust out of the window. A month of
+intimacy had increased the power of his smile over her senses, and
+when he turned to her again after a minute, she felt something of
+the faint delicious tremor of their first meeting. Already she was
+beginning to discover that beyond his expressive eyes he had really
+very little of importance to express, that his prolonged silences
+covered poverty of ideas rather than abundance of feeling, that his
+limited vocabulary was due less to reticence than to the simple
+inarticulateness of the primitive mind. Through the golden glamour
+of her honeymoon there had loomed suddenly the discovery that
+George was not clever&mdash;but cleverness mattered so little, she
+told herself, as long as he loved her.</p>
+<p>"I hope your mother will like me," she said nervously after a
+minute.</p>
+<p>"I'll be sorry for her if she doesn't."</p>
+<p>"Do I look nice?"</p>
+<p>"Of course you do. I never saw you when you didn't."</p>
+<p>"I feel so dreadfully untidy. I never tried to dress in a
+sleeping-car before."</p>
+<p>"It did rock, didn't it?"</p>
+<p>"I'll never travel again at night if I can help it. There's a
+cinder in your eye; let me get it out for you." It thrilled her
+pleasantly to remove the cinder with the corner of her
+handkerchief, and to order him to sit still whenever the cab
+jolted. It was incredibly young, incredibly foolish, but it was all
+a part of the wonderful enchantment in which she moved. The cinder
+had made an agreeable episode, but when it had been removed there
+was nothing more for them to talk about. In four weeks of daily and
+hourly companionship they had said very easily, Gabriella had
+found, everything they had longed so passionately to say to each
+other. It was strange&mdash;it was positively astounding how soon
+they had talked themselves empty of ideas and fallen back upon
+repetition and ejaculation. Before her marriage she had thought
+that a lifetime would be too short to hold the full richness of
+their confidences; and yet now, after a month, though they still
+made love, they had ceased, almost with relief, to make
+conversation.</p>
+<p>After turning into Fifth Avenue they drove for ages between
+depressing examples in brownstone of an architecture which, like
+George, was trying rather vaguely to express nothing; and then
+rolling heavily into Fifty-seventh Street stopped presently before
+one of the solemn houses which stood, in the dignity of utter
+ugliness, midway of a long block. "They are all so alike I don't
+see how I shall ever know where I live," thought Gabriella. Then,
+as George helped her out of the cab, the door opened as if by
+magic, and beyond the solemn manservant she saw the short, stout
+figure of a lady in a tightly fitting morning gown of black silk.
+Hurrying up the steps, she was pressed against a large smooth bosom
+which yielded as little as if it had been upholstered in
+leather.</p>
+<p>"My dear daughter! my dear Gabriella!" exclaimed the lady in a
+charming voice; and looking down after the first kiss, Gabriella
+saw a handsome, slightly florid face, with the vivacious smile of a
+girl and a beautiful forehead under a stiffly crimped arch of gray
+hair which looked as hard and bright as silver.</p>
+<p>"I've been up since seven o'clock waiting for you. You must be
+famished. Come straight in to breakfast. Your father is already at
+the table, George. Poor man, he has to start downtown so dreadfully
+early."</p>
+<p>Bright, effusive, vivacious, and as emphatically Southern as if
+she had never left Franklin Street, Mrs. Fowler took off
+Gabriella's hat and coat, kissed her several times while she was
+doing so, and at last, still talking animatedly, led them into the
+dining-room.</p>
+<p>"Archibald, here they are," she said in a tone of unaffected
+delight, while a thin, serious-looking man, with anxious eyes,
+pale, aristocratic features, and skin that had a curious
+parchment-like texture, put down the <i>Times</i>, and came forward
+to meet them. Though he did not speak as he kissed her, Gabriella
+felt that there was sincere, if detached, friendliness in his
+little pat on her shoulder. He led her almost tenderly to her
+chair; and as soon as she was comfortably seated and supplied with
+rolls and bacon, resigned her contentedly to his wife and the
+butler. His manner of gentle abstraction, which Gabriella
+attributed first to something he had just read in the newspaper,
+she presently discovered to be his habitual attitude toward all the
+world except Wall Street. He ate his breakfast as if his attention
+were somewhere else; he spoke to his son and his daughter-in-law
+kindly, but as if he were not thinking about them; he treated his
+wife, whom he adored, as if he had not clearly perceived her. In
+the profound abstraction in which he lived every impression
+appeared to have become blurred except the tremendous impression of
+whirling forces; every detail seemed to have been obscured except
+the gigantic details of "Business." His manner was perfectly
+well-bred, but it was the manner of a man who moves through life
+rehearsing a part of which he barely remembers the words. From the
+first minute it was evident to Gabriella that her father-in-law
+adored his wife as an ideal, though he seemed scarcely aware of her
+as a person. He had given her his love, but his interests, his
+energies, his attention were elsewhere.</p>
+<p>"Is that the way George will treat me&mdash;as if I were only a
+dream woman?" thought Gabriella while she watched her father-in-law
+over the open sheet of the <i>Times</i>. Then, with her eyes on her
+husband, she realized that he was of his mother's blood, not his
+father's. Business could never absorb him. His restlessness, his
+instability, his love of pleasure, would prevent the sapping of his
+nature by one supreme interest.</p>
+<p>The table, like everything else in the room, was solid, heavy,
+and expensive. On the floor a heavy and expensive carpet, with a
+pattern in squares, stretched to the heavy and expensive moulding
+which bordered a heavy and expensive paper. Mrs. Fowler's taste,
+like Jimmy's (he was her third cousin), leaned apparently toward
+embossment, for behind a massive repouss&eacute; silver service she
+sat, as handsome and substantial as the room, with her face
+flushing in splotches from the heat of her coffee.</p>
+<p>Some twenty-odd years before the house had been furnished at
+great cost, according to the opulent taste of the early 'seventies,
+and, unchanged by severer and more frugal fashions, it remained a
+solid monument to the first great financial deal of Archibald
+Fowler. It was at the golden age, when, still young and energetic,
+luck had come to him in a day, that he had bought the brownstone
+house in Fifty-seventh Street, and his wife, also young and
+energetic, had gone out "to get whatever she liked." Trained in a
+simple school during the war, and brought up in the formal purity
+of high-ceiled rooms furnished in Chippendale and Sheraton, her
+natural tastes were, nevertheless, as ornate as the interiors of
+the New York shops. Though the blood of colonial heroes ran in her
+veins, she was still the child of her age, and her age prided
+itself upon being entirely modern in all things from religion to
+furniture.</p>
+<p>As she sat there behind the mammoth coffee urn, from which a
+spiral of steam floated, her handsome face irradiated the spirit of
+kindness. Because of her rather short figure, she appeared at her
+best when she was sitting, and now, with her large, tightly laced
+hips hidden beneath the table and her firm, jet-plastered bosom
+appearing above it, she presented a picture of calm and matronly
+beauty. Not once did she seem to think of herself or her own
+breakfast. Even while she buttered her toast and drank her steaming
+coffee, her bright blue eyes travelled unceasingly over the table,
+first to her husband's plate, then to Gabriella's, then to her
+son's. It was easy to see that she was the dominant and vital force
+in the household. She ruled Archibald, less indirectly perhaps, but
+quite as consistently as Cousin Pussy ruled Cousin Jimmy.</p>
+<p>"My dear, you must eat your breakfast," she said urgently to her
+daughter-in-law. "Archibald, let me give you your second cup of
+coffee. Remember what a trying day you have before you, and make a
+good breakfast. It is so hard to get him to eat," she explained to
+Gabriella; "I have to coax him to drink his two cups of coffee, for
+if he doesn't he is sure to come home with a headache."</p>
+<p>"Well, give me a cup, Evelyn," replied Mr. Fowler, in his gentle
+voice, yielding apparently to please her. In his youth he must have
+been very handsome, Gabriella thought; but now, though he still
+retained a certain distinction, he had the look of a man who has
+been drained of his vitality. What surprised her&mdash;for she had
+heard him described as "a hard man in business"&mdash;was the
+suggestion of the scholar in his appearance. With his narrow,
+carefully brushed head, his dreamy and rather wistful blue eyes
+behind gold-rimmed glasses, his stooping, slender shoulders, and
+his long, delicate hands covered with prominent veins, he ought to
+have been either a poet or a philosopher.</p>
+<p>"You must be happy with us, my dear," he had said to Gabriella,
+showing a minute later such gentle eagerness to return to a part of
+the newspaper which Gabriella had never read and did not
+understand, that his wife remarked pityingly: "Read your paper,
+Archibald, and don't let our chatter disturb you. There are a
+thousand things I want to say to the children."</p>
+<p>"Well, it's time for me to be going, Evelyn," Mr. Fowler
+responded, reluctantly folding the pages; "I'll look into this on
+the way down."</p>
+<p>"Remember, dear, that Judge Crowborough is coming to
+dinner."</p>
+<p>"I'll remember. Is there any one else?"</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Crowborough, of course, and Colonel Buffington, and one or
+two others. Nobody that you will care for except the judge and
+Patty and Billy."</p>
+<p>"I shan't forget, but I may be a little late getting home.
+Good-bye, my dear, until evening."</p>
+<p>Bending over her chair, he kissed her flushed cheek, while
+George remarked carelessly: "I'll see you later, father, when I've
+had a bath and a shave."</p>
+<p>After the gentle tones of Mr. Fowler, the vitality of George's
+voice sounded almost brutal, and he added just as carelessly when
+the front door had shut softly: "The old man looks seedy, doesn't
+he, mother?"</p>
+<p>A worried look brought out three startling lines in Mrs.
+Fowler's forehead, and Gabriella observed suddenly that there were
+tiny crow's feet around her blue eyes where the whites were flecked
+ever so faintly with yellow. Though she was well into the
+mid-fifties, her carefully preserved skin had kept the firmness and
+the texture of youth, and she still flushed easily and unbecomingly
+as she had done as a girl.</p>
+<p>"He hasn't been a bit well, George. I am very anxious about him.
+You know when he worries over his business, he doesn't eat his
+meals, and as soon as he stops eating he begins to have nervous
+dyspepsia. He has just had a bad attack; that's why he looks so run
+down and haggard."</p>
+<p>"Can't the doctor do anything for him?"</p>
+<p>"He gave him some drops, but it is so hard to get your father to
+take medicine. Rest is what he needs, and, of course, that is out
+of the question while things are so unsettled. You must help him
+all you can, my boy, and Gabriella and I will manage with each
+other's company."</p>
+<p>Her bright smile was still on her lips, but Gabriella noticed
+that she pushed her buttered roll away as if she were choking.</p>
+<p>In the early afternoon, when George had gone to join his father
+in the office, and Gabriella, seated at a little white and gold
+desk in the room which had been Patty's, was just finishing a
+letter to her mother, Mrs. Fowler came in, and pushing a
+chintz-covered chair close to the desk, sank into it and laid her
+small nervous hand on the arm of her daughter-in-law. She was
+wearing a velvet bonnet, with strings, and a street gown of black
+broadcloth, which fitted her like a glove and accentuated, after
+the fashion of the 'nineties, her small, compact waist and the deep
+substantial curves of her bosom and hips. Her eyes, behind the
+little veil of spotted tulle which reached to the tip of her nose,
+were bright and wistful, and though her colour was too high, a
+smile of troubled sweetness lent it a peculiar charm of
+expression.</p>
+<p>"How nice you look, my dear," she said, with her pleasant
+manner, which no anxiety, hardly any grief, could dispel. "Are you
+very busy, or may I talk to you a little while?"</p>
+<p>Drawing closer to her, Gabriella raised the plump little hand to
+her lips. Beneath the surface pleasantness of Mrs. Fowler's
+life&mdash;that pleasantness which wrapped her like a
+religion&mdash;she was beginning to discern a deep disquietude.</p>
+<p>"I want to talk to you, mamma," she said, and her manner was a
+caress.</p>
+<p>"You love George very much, dear?" asked Mrs. Fowler so suddenly
+that Gabriella looked at her startled.</p>
+<p>For a minute the girl could not speak. "Oh, yes; oh, yes," she
+answered presently, and choked over the words.</p>
+<p>"We wanted so much to go to your wedding&mdash;we were afraid
+you would think it strange that we stayed away, but Archibald had
+his attack just then, and on top of it he was terribly worried
+about his affairs. We have had a very hard year, and we feel so
+sorry, both of us, that we can't do more for your pleasure. As it
+is, we are cutting down our expenses in every way, and I have even
+decided to give up my carriage the first of next year.</p>
+<p>"I know, I know," said Gabriella, who had never had a carriage,
+and to whom the giving up of one seemed the smallest imaginable
+sacrifice. "We mustn't add to your cares," she went on after a
+minute. "Wouldn't it be better, really better, if we were to take
+an apartment at once instead of waiting until June?"</p>
+<p>"Until June?" repeated Mrs. Fowler vaguely, and she added
+quickly: "It is the greatest pleasure to have you here. Since Patty
+went I get so terribly lonely, and I don't think it would be at all
+wise for you to go to yourselves. George has hardly anything except
+what his father is able to give him, you know. The poor boy hasn't
+the least head for business."</p>
+<p>"But we shouldn't need much. I am sure I could manage just with
+what George makes&mdash;no matter how little it is."</p>
+<p>For an instant Mrs. Fowler looked at her thoughtfully.</p>
+<p>"You could, but George couldn't," she answered.</p>
+<p>"You mean he is extravagant?"</p>
+<p>"He has never had the slightest idea of the value of
+money&mdash;that is one of the things you must teach him. He is a
+dear boy, but he has never made a success of anything he has
+undertaken, and his father thinks he is too unpractical ever to do
+so. But you must try to get him to live within your means, my dear,
+or you will both be miserable. Try to keep him from borrowing."</p>
+<p>"But he refuses to talk to me about his work. It bores him,"
+said Gabriella; and her simple soul, trained to regard debt as a
+deeper disgrace than poverty, grew suddenly troubled. In her
+childhood they had gone without food rather than borrow, she
+remembered.</p>
+<p>"The matter with dear George," pursued Mrs. Fowler&mdash;and
+from the sweetness of her manner she might have been paying him a
+compliment&mdash;"is that he has never been steady. He doesn't
+stick at anything long enough to make it a success. If he were left
+to himself he would speculate wildly, and this is why his father is
+obliged to overlook all that he does in the office. It is just here
+that you can be of such wonderful help to him, Gabriella, by your
+influence. This is why I am telling you."</p>
+<p>But had she any influence over him? In spite of his passion for
+her had she ever turned him by so much as a hair's breadth from the
+direction of his impetuous desires? Once only she had withstood
+him&mdash;once only she had triumphed, and for that triumph she had
+paid by a complete surrender! She had been too glad to yield, too
+fearful of bringing a cloud over the sunny blue of his eyes.</p>
+<p>"I want to help him&mdash;I want you to tell me how I can help
+him," she said earnestly. "While we are with you this winter, you
+must teach me how to do it. Before we begin housekeeping in the
+summer, I want to learn all I possibly can about George's affairs.
+He won't talk to me about practical matters, so you must do
+it."</p>
+<p>"But where are you going, Gabriella? I thought you had decided
+to live with us?"</p>
+<p>"But didn't George tell you? Surely he must have told you. We
+are to take an apartment in June so my mother can come to us. I
+felt, of course, that I couldn't leave mother, and George
+understands. He was perfectly lovely about it."</p>
+<p>"I see, I see," murmured Mrs. Fowler, as if she were thinking of
+something else. "Well, that will all come right, dear, I hope."</p>
+<p>Rising abruptly, she began to draw on her gloves. "If you only
+knew how I long to make you happy," she said softly; "as happy as I
+have been with George's father."</p>
+<p>"They are so unlike," answered Gabriella, and the next day when
+she remembered the admission, she wondered how it had slipped from
+her.</p>
+<p>"Yes, they are unlike," agreed Mrs. Fowler. "George takes after
+me, and I am a frivolous person. But there doesn't live a better
+man than my husband," she added, glowing. "I've been his wife for
+thirty years, and in all that time I don't believe he has ever
+thought first of himself. Yes, it was thirty years ago that I drove
+through the streets with my bridal veil on, and felt so sorry for
+all the girls I saw who were not going to be married. To-day I feel
+exactly the same way&mdash;sorry for all the women who couldn't
+have Archibald for a husband. I've lived with him thirty years,
+I've borne him children, and I'm still sorry for all the other
+women&mdash;even for you, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"He seems so kind," said Gabriella; "I felt that about him, and
+it's the best thing, after all, isn't it?" It was the best thing,
+and yet she knew that George was not kind&mdash;that he was not
+even good-tempered.</p>
+<p>"Yes, it's the best thing, after all, in marriage," answered the
+older woman; "it's the thing that wears."</p>
+<p>"I have always wanted the best of life," rejoined Gabriella
+thoughtfully; and she went on gravely after a moment: "I couldn't
+love George any more than I do, but I wish that in some ways he
+would grow like his father."</p>
+<p>"The boy has a very sweet nature," replied George's mother, "and
+I hope marriage will steady him." It was a warning, Gabriella knew,
+and she wondered afterwards if her silent acquiescence in Mrs.
+Fowler's judgment had not been furtive disloyalty to George.</p>
+<p>"A great deal will depend on you, dear, for he is very much in
+love," resumed Mrs. Fowler when Gabriella did not speak, and she
+repeated very solemnly, "I hope marriage will steady him."</p>
+<p>In her heart Gabriella was hoping so, too, but all she said was,
+"I promise you that I will do all I can." She had given her word,
+and, looking into her eyes, Mrs. Fowler understood that her
+daughter-in-law was not one to give her word lightly. Gabriella
+would keep her promise. She would do her best, whatever
+happened.</p>
+<p>The older woman, with her life's history behind her, watched the
+girl for a minute in silence. There was so much that she longed to
+say, so much that could never be spoken even between women. She
+herself was an optimist, but her optimism had been wrung from the
+bitter core of experience. Her faith was firm, though it held few
+illusions, for, if she was an optimist, she was also a realist. She
+believed in life, not because it had satisfied her, but because she
+had had the wisdom to understand that the supreme failure had been,
+not life's, but her own. If she could only have lived it again and
+lived it differently from the beginning! If she could only have
+used her deeper wisdom not to regret the past, but to create the
+future! Much as she had loved her husband, she knew now that she
+had sacrificed him to the world. Much as she had loved her
+children, she would have sacrificed them, also, had it been
+possible. To the tin gods she had offered her soul&mdash;to the
+things that did not matter she had yielded up the only things that
+mattered at all. And she knew now that, in spite of her clearness
+of vision, the worldliness which had ruined her life was still
+bound up in all that was essential and endurable in her nature. She
+still wanted the illusions as passionately as if she believed in
+their reality; she still winced as sharply at the thought of
+Patty's marriage and of all that Patty had given up. In the case of
+George, she admitted that it was her fault&mdash;that she had
+spoiled him&mdash;but how could she have helped it? She remembered
+how he had looked as a child, with his round flushed face, his
+chestnut curls, and his eager, questioning eyes. He had been a
+beautiful child, more beautiful even than Patty, and because of his
+beauty she had been able to refuse him nothing. Then she thought of
+his boyhood, of his reckless extravagance at college; of the tales
+of his wildness to which she had shut her ears; of his debts, and
+still of his debts, which she had paid out of the housekeeping
+money because she was afraid to let his father know of them. Yes,
+George, in spite of his sweet nature, had given them a great deal
+of trouble, so much trouble that she had been quite reconciled to
+his marriage with any respectable girl. The memory of a chorus girl
+with whom he had once entangled himself still gave her a shiver at
+the heart when she recalled it. Money, always more money, had gone
+into that; and at last, just as she had grown hopeless of saving
+him, he had met this fine, sensible Gabriella, who looked so
+strong, so competent, and there had come an end to the disturbing
+stories which reached her at intervals. Surely it was proof of her
+son's inborn fineness that from the pink perfection of girlhood he
+should have chosen the capable Gabriella! At first she had
+regretted his choice, hoping, as the worldly and the unworldly
+alike hope for their sons, that the object of George's
+disinterested affection would prove to be wealthy. Then at the
+sight of Gabriella she had surrendered completely. The girl was
+fine all through, this she could see as soon as she looked at her.
+She liked her noble though not beautiful face, with the broad clear
+forehead from which the soft dark hair was brushed back so simply,
+and, most of all, she liked the charm and sympathy in her voice.
+George had chosen well, and if she could trust his choice, why
+could she not trust him to be true to it?</p>
+<p>"I wonder if you would like to put on your hat and come with
+me?" she asked, obeying an impulse. "I'm going to drive up to
+Patty's with some curtains for her bedroom."</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'd love to," replied Gabriella with eagerness, for she
+hated inaction, and it was impossible to spend a whole afternoon
+merely thinking about one's happiness. "It won't take me a minute
+to get ready."</p>
+<p>While she put on her hat and coat, Mrs. Fowler watched her
+thoughtfully, saying once: "It is quite cool, you'd better bring
+your furs, dear."</p>
+<p>When Gabriella answered frankly, "I haven't any, I never had any
+furs in my life," a tender expression crept into the rather hard
+blue eyes of her mother-in-law, and she said quickly: "Well, I've a
+set of white fox that I am too old to wear, and you shall have
+it."</p>
+<p>"But what of Patty?" asked Gabriella, for she had grown up
+thinking of other people and she couldn't break the habit of twenty
+years in a minute.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Patty has all the furs she'll need for years. We spent
+every penny we had on Patty before she married," answered Mrs.
+Fowler, but she was saying to herself: "Yes, the girl is the right
+wife for him. I am sure she is the right wife for him."</p>
+<p>The Park was brilliant with falling leaves, and as they drove
+beneath a perfect sky beside a lake which sparkled like sapphire,
+Gabriella, lifting her chin above the white furs, said rapturously,
+"Oh, I am so happy! Life is so beautiful!"</p>
+<p>A shadow stole into the eyes with which Mrs. Fowler was watching
+the passing carriages, and the fixed sweetness about her mouth
+melted into an expression of yearning. Tears veiled the faces of
+the women who spoke to her in passing, for she was thinking of her
+first drive in the Park with her husband, and though her marriage
+had been a happy one, she felt a strange longing as if she wanted
+to weep.</p>
+<p>"I never saw such wonderful horses," said Gabriella. "Cousin
+Jimmy would be wild about them;" and she added impetuously, "But
+the hats aren't in the least like the one I am wearing." A
+misgiving seized her as she realized that her dresses, copied by
+Miss Polly with ardent fidelity from a Paris fashion book, were all
+hopelessly wrong. She wondered if her green silk gown with the
+black velvet sleeves was different in style from the gowns the
+other women were wearing under their furs? Had sleeves of a
+different colour from the bodice, which Miss Polly considered the
+last touch of elegance, really gone out of fashion?</p>
+<p>The carriage passed out of the Park, and turning into one of the
+streets on the upper West Side stopped presently before a small
+dingy apartment house, where a dozen ragged children were playing
+leapfrog on the pavement.</p>
+<p>"Patty has the top floor&mdash;there's a studio." Drawing her
+skirts away from the children, for her generation feared contact
+with the lower classes, Mrs. Fowler walked briskly to the low brown
+steps, on which an ash can stood waiting for removal. Inside, where
+the hall smelled uninvitingly of stale cooking, they rang for the
+elevator under a dim yellow light which revealed a hundred secret
+lines in their faces.</p>
+<p>"I can't imagine how Patty puts up with the place," remarked
+Patty's mother dejectedly. "You wouldn't believe the trouble we
+went to to start her well. She was the acknowledged beauty of her
+winter&mdash;everybody was crazy about her looks&mdash;and the very
+week before she ran off with Billy she had a proposal from the Duke
+of Toxbridge. Of course, if I'd ever dreamed she had a fancy for
+Billy, I'd have kept him out of her sight instead of allowing him
+to paint her portrait whenever she had any time she could spare.
+But who on earth would have suspected it? Billy King, whom she had
+known all her life, as poor as a church mouse, and the kind of
+painter whose work will never 'take' if he lives to be a thousand!
+His portraits may be good art&mdash;I don't pretend to know
+anything about that&mdash;but I do know pictures of pretty women
+when I see them, and his women are frights, every last one of them.
+If you're thin, he paints your skeleton, and if you're fat, he
+makes you as square as a house, and, thin or fat, he always gives
+you a blue and yellow complexion. He wouldn't even make Patty
+white, though I implored him to do it&mdash;and he made her look
+exactly ten years older than her age."</p>
+<p>"I've never seen any portraits of living people&mdash;only of
+ancestors," said Gabriella, "and I am so much interested."</p>
+<p>"Well, you mustn't judge them by Billy's, my dear, even if he
+did get all those prizes in Paris. But I always said the French
+were queer, and if they hadn't been, they would never have raved so
+over the things Billy painted. Now, Augustus Featherfield's are
+really charming. One can tell to look at his portraits that he
+paints only ladies, and he gives them all the most perfectly lovely
+hair, whether they have it or not. Some day I'll take you to his
+studio and let you see for yourself."</p>
+<p>The elevator descended, creaking beneath the weight of a negro
+youth who seemed half asleep, and a little later, creaking more
+loudly, it bore them slowly upward to the top of the house.</p>
+<p>"I feel as if I were taking my life in my hands whenever I come
+here," observed Mrs. Fowler, in the tone of dispassionate
+resignation with which she always discussed Patty and the
+surroundings amid which Patty lived. Marching resolutely, though
+disapprovingly, down a long hall, she pressed a small bell at the
+side of a door, and stood, holding tightly to the bundle of
+curtains, while her expression of unnatural pleasantness grew
+almost painful in its determination. Here, also, they waited some
+time, and when at last the door was opened by an agitated maid,
+without an apron, and they were led into a long, queerly furnished
+studio, with a balcony from which they had a distant cloudless view
+of the river, Gabriella felt for a minute that she must have fallen
+into a dream. Long afterwards she learned that Billy's studio was
+charming, with its blurred Italian tapestries, which had faded to
+an exquisite tone, with its broken torsos of old marble, warming to
+deep ivory in the sunlight, with its ecstatic haloed saints praying
+against dim Tuscan landscapes, with its odd and unexpected seats of
+carved stone on which the cushions made strange splotches and pools
+of colour. At the time, seen through provincial eyes, it seemed
+merely "queer" to her; and queerer still appeared the undraped
+figures of women, all lean lines and violet shadows, which,
+unframed and unhung, filled the dusty corners.</p>
+<p>"The river is lovely, but it is so far away," she said, turning
+her abashed eyes from the nude figures, and thinking how terribly
+they would have shocked the innocence of Cousin Jimmy.</p>
+<p>"I always look at the river when I come here," responded Mrs.
+Fowler, and her tone implied that the river at least was perfectly
+proper. "A month ago the colours were wonderful."</p>
+<p>In the drive, which they could see from a corner view, a few old
+men, forgotten by time, warmed themselves in the sunlight. Far
+below, the river reflected the changeable blue of the sky, while
+the autumnal pageantry on the horizon was fading slowly, like a
+burned-out fire, to the colour of ashes.</p>
+<p>"Mother, dear, I'm so glad," said a gay voice in the doorway,
+and turning quickly, Gabriella stared with wide eyes at the vision
+of Patty&mdash;of Patty in some soft tea-gown, which borrowed its
+tone from the old tapestries on the wall, with her honey-coloured
+hair hanging over her shoulders, and her eyes as fresh as blue
+flowers in the ivory pallor of her face.</p>
+<p>"And this is Gabriella," she added, holding out her arms. "What
+a darling you are to come so soon, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>She was a tall girl, so tall that she stooped to kiss Gabriella,
+whose height measured exactly five feet and seven inches, and she
+was beautiful with the faultless beauty which is seen only once or
+twice in a generation, but which, seen once, is never forgotten.
+For Patty's beauty, as a poet once wrote of a dead woman, was the
+beauty of destiny, the beauty that changes history and turns men
+into angels or into beasts. Though Gabriella had seen lovely skins
+on Southern women&mdash;rose-leaf skins, magnolia skins,
+peach-blossom skins&mdash;she had seen nothing that resembled the
+exquisite colour and texture of Patty's face.</p>
+<p>"The curtains were finished, so I brought them," said Mrs.
+Fowler, pointing to the bundle. "I wanted Gabriella to see the
+Park. You are coming to-night without fail, aren't you, Patty?"</p>
+<p>"Without fail, even if we have to walk," answered Patty. "You
+can't imagine how much it costs to get about when one lives so far
+uptown. That's one reason we are anxious to move. Billy has been
+looking for a studio for weeks, and, do you know, he has really
+found one at last. Harry Allen is moving out of the Rubens
+Building, and we are going to take his studio on the top floor.
+We're awfully lucky, too, to get it, for it is the first vacancy
+there for years."</p>
+<p>"But it's over a stable, isn't it?" asked Mrs. Fowler. "How
+could you possibly live there? And the East Side way down there is
+just as bad as up here"</p>
+<p>"I believe there is a stable, but it won't bother us&mdash;we're
+too high," replied Patty.</p>
+<p>"Well, we can't stop; Gabriella hasn't unpacked her trunks,"
+returned Mrs. Fowler; "but be sure to come early, Patty. I want
+your father to see you."</p>
+<p>"I wish there wasn't going to be anybody else. I want to talk to
+my sister. Isn't it lovely to have a sister, and mamma was too
+selfish to give me one. Do you call her 'mamma,' too,
+Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"Of course she calls me 'mamma,'" answered Mrs. Fowler before
+Gabriella could speak, "and she is a much better daughter already
+than you ever were."</p>
+<p>"And a much better son, too, than George ever was?" asked Patty
+slyly.</p>
+<p>"We aren't talking about George. George has settled down," said
+Mrs. Fowler quickly, too quickly it occurred to Gabriella, who was
+eager to hear all that the daring Patty would say. "Don't you think
+those white furs look well on Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"She looks like the snow queen in them. Does it matter what I
+wear to-night? Who is coming?"</p>
+<p>"Nobody you will care about&mdash;only Judge and Mrs.
+Crowborough and Colonel Buffington."</p>
+<p>"That old bore of a colonel! And why do you have to ask the
+judge again so soon? He looks like a turkey gobbler, Gabriella, and
+he has so much money that it is impossible to judge him by the
+standards of other people, everybody says that&mdash;even
+Billy."</p>
+<p>"Hush, Patty. You mustn't corrupt Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"If the judge doesn't, I shan't, mamma."</p>
+<p>"Well, your father has the greatest respect for him, and as for
+asking him often to dinner, it isn't by any means so easy to get
+him as you think. I don't suppose there's another man in New York
+who is invited out so often and goes out so little."</p>
+<p>"Papa is a sweet innocent," observed Patty maliciously, "but if
+you can stand the judge, mamma, dear, I am sure I can, especially
+as I shan't have to sit by him. That honour will be reserved for
+poor Gabriella. I wish you didn't have to go, but you really must,
+I suppose?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, we must go. Come, Gabriella, or you won't have time to get
+into your trunks before dinner."</p>
+<p>On the drive home Mrs. Fowler was grimly silent, while the
+sweetness about her mouth ebbed slowly away, leaving the faintest
+quiver of the muscles. For the first time Gabriella saw George's
+mother look as she must look in her sleep, when the artificial
+cheerfulness of her expression faded into the profound
+unconsciousness which drowns not only happiness, but the very
+pretence of happiness. So here, also, was insincerity, here, also,
+was the striving, not for realities, but for appearances! In a
+different form she saw her mother's struggle again&mdash;that
+struggle, without beginning and without end, which moved always in
+a circle and led nowhere. Was there no sincerity, no reality even
+in love? Was George, too, only a shadow? And the visible sadness of
+the November afternoon, with its faint haze like the haze of a
+dream landscape, seemed a part of this invisible sadness which had
+sprung from nothing and which would change and pass away in a
+breath. "If things would only last," she thought, looking with
+wistful eyes on the gold and purple around her. "If things would
+only last, how wonderful life would be!"</p>
+<p>"To think that all Patty's beauty should have been thrown away,"
+said Mrs. Fowler suddenly.</p>
+<p>Though Gabriella had never seen Billy, she was inclined at the
+moment, in her mood of dissatisfaction with the universe, to
+sympathize with Mrs. Fowler's view of the matter. To her frugal
+mind, trained to economy of material, it seemed that Patty was
+altogether too much for a poor man&mdash;even though he could paint
+her in lean lines and violet shadows.</p>
+<p>Upstairs she found her trunks in her bedroom, and after she had
+unpacked her wedding-gown of white satin, removed the tissue paper
+stuffing from the sleeves, and shaken out the creases with gentle
+hands, she sat down and pondered deeply the problem of dressing for
+dinner. By removing the lace yoke, she might make the gown
+sufficiently indecorous for the fashion of the period, and her only
+evening dress, the white muslin she had worn to dances in Richmond,
+she reflected gloomily, would appear absurd in New York.</p>
+<p>"I wish I didn't look such a fright," she said aloud, as she
+ripped and sewed. Then, in a flash, her mind wandered from herself,
+and she thought: "I wonder why George didn't tell his mother that
+we are going to take an apartment? I wonder why he didn't tell her
+that mother is coming in June? When he comes I must ask him."</p>
+<p>Looking at the clock, she saw that it was after seven, and
+hurriedly taking the last few stitches, she laid the gown on the
+bed, bathed her face in cold water, and then, sitting down before
+her dressing-table, drew the pins from her hair. In some obscure
+way she felt herself a different person from the bride who had
+watched George so ecstatically at the station that morning. She
+could not tell how she had altered, and yet she felt perfectly
+conscious that an alteration had taken place in her soul&mdash;that
+she was not the same Gabriella&mdash;that life could never be again
+exactly as it had been before. Nothing and yet everything seemed to
+have happened to her in a day. Her face, gazing gravely back at her
+from the mirror, looked young and wistful, the face of one who,
+like a bird flying suddenly out of darkness against a lamp, is
+bewildered by the first shock of the light.</p>
+<p>When her hair was arranged in the simple way she had always worn
+it, she slipped her dress over her bare shoulders, and fastened it
+slowly&mdash;for Miss Polly had no patience with "back
+fastenings"&mdash;while she told herself again that George would
+not be satisfied. She knew that her gown was provincial, knew that
+she lacked the "dash" he admired in women; and from the first she
+had been mystified by a love which could, while still passionately
+desiring her, wish her different in so many ways. "I'd like him to
+be proud of me, but I suppose he never will be," she thought
+dejectedly, "and yet he fell in love with me just as I was, and he
+did not fall in love with any of the dashing women he knows," she
+added quickly, consoled by the reflection. "And of course in a few
+things I wish him different, too. I wish he wasn't so careless. He
+is so careless that I shall have to be twice as careful, I shall
+have to look after him all the time. Even to-night he has forgotten
+about the dinner, and he'll be obliged to dress in a hurry, which
+he hates."</p>
+<p>Glancing at the clock again, she saw that it was a quarter of
+eight, and still George had not come.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<h3>THE OLD SERPENT</h3>
+<p>At five minutes of eight o'clock he came in, with a lighted
+cigar in his mouth. For the first few days after her marriage there
+had been a pleasant excitement in the scent of George's cigars in
+her bedroom. Now, however, habit had dulled the excitement, and the
+smell of tobacco gave her a headache.</p>
+<p>"Oh, George, you are late!" she exclaimed, sinking the lesser
+into the greater offence after the habit of wives. As if he had all
+night instead of five minutes before him in which to dress, he
+stood in the centre of the room, blandly looking her over.</p>
+<p>"You're all right," he said after a pause. "I met a fellow at
+the club I hadn't seen for a year. He had been hunting big game in
+Africa, and he was telling me about it. By Jove, that is life!"</p>
+<p>They had been married but a month; it was their first day at
+home, and he could linger at the club to talk of big game while she
+waited for him. Flushed, excited, he stood there on the white
+bearskin rug midway between the bed and the wood-fire, while she
+felt his charm stealing like a drug over her senses. Though she had
+begun to realize the thinness of his mental qualities, she was
+still as completely in the power of his physical charm as she had
+been on the day of her wedding. In the flickering light of the fire
+he appeared to diffuse the glamour of romance, of adventure; and
+she felt that this single day in New York had left a vital
+impression upon him. It was as if he had become suddenly more
+alive, more inexplicable in his simplicity; and, though she had
+grasped vaguely the fact that his personality was composed of
+innumerable reactions, she had never really understood before how
+entirely he was the creature of his environment. It was as if the
+very essence of his soul floated there, a variable and fluid
+quantity, forever changing form and colour beneath the shallow
+ripples of his personality. She had seen him in many moods, but
+never in this one. Did he possess a deeper subtlety than she had
+imagined or was it the sincerity of his nature that defied
+analysis?</p>
+<p>"Did you enjoy yourself?" she asked cheerfully. Tell me about
+it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, it was rather jolly," he replied, and she knew that this
+was as much as she should ever get out of him. Beyond a few stock
+phrases, words hardly existed for him at all, or existed only in
+foreign languages, for, having been educated abroad, he spoke
+French and German fluently, if without felicity. Already his
+inarticulateness was like an encumbering veil between them&mdash;a
+veil in which she struggled as helplessly as a moth in a net. And
+only a month ago she had believed that the very immensity of his
+nature rendered him dumb.</p>
+<p>"Then you had better hurry, dear. Dinner is at eight, and you
+have only a minute."</p>
+<p>"You go down and tell them not to wait. I was detained downtown,
+but it won't take me a second to dress."</p>
+<p>As he passed under the electric light by the mirror, she saw his
+face with exaggerated distinctness, as if it were held under a
+microscope, and a heaviness, which she had never noticed before,
+marred the edge of his profile. If he hadn't been George, would she
+have said that he looked stupid at the moment? For a flashing
+instant of illumination she saw him with a vision that was not her
+own, but a stranger's, with a pitiless clearness unsoftened by any
+passion. Then the clearness faded rapidly before an impulse of
+tenderness, and she told herself that he was merely handsome, gay,
+and careless, as he had been on their honeymoon. If he would only
+talk to her, she felt that he would be perfect.</p>
+<p>"Yes, I'm going. Come as soon as you can," she said; and
+catching up her satin train, she descended the oak staircase to the
+drawing-room, where a fire was burning and the lights were shaded
+in crimson.</p>
+<p>Twenty minutes later, seated at the round table, which was
+bright with chrysanthemums in tall silver vases, she looked with a
+feeling of resentment at George's empty place. Why was he so
+careless? Time had for him, she realized, as little meaning as
+words had. Then, in the midst of her disquietude, she caught the
+serene blue eyes of George's mother fixed upon her. With her young
+face, her red lips, and her superb shoulders rising out of the rich
+black lace of her gown, Mrs. Fowler looked almost beautiful. Had
+Patty not been present, with her loveliness like a summer's day,
+her mother would have seemed hardly more than a girl; but who could
+shine while Patty, beside that long, lean man with the gray
+imperial, smiled with lips that were like a scarlet flower in her
+face?</p>
+<p>There were only four guests, but these four, as Mrs. Fowler had
+said, "counted for something." The long, lean man beside Patty was
+one Colonel Buffington, a Virginia lawyer, who had wandered North
+in search of food in the barren years after the war. As his mind
+was active in a patient accumulative fashion, he had become in time
+a musty storehouse of war anecdotes, and achieving but moderate
+success in his law practice, his chief distinction, perhaps, was as
+a professional Southerner. Combining a genial charm of manner with
+as sterile an intellect as it is possible to attain, he was
+generally regarded as a perfect example of "the old school," and
+this picturesque reputation made him desirable as a guest at club
+dinners as well as at the larger gatherings of the various Southern
+societies. His conversation, which was entirely anecdotal,
+consisted of an elaborate endless chain of more or less historical
+"stories." Social movements and the development of civilization
+interested him as little as did art or science&mdash;for which he
+entertained a chronic suspicion due to the indiscretions of Darwin.
+Change of any kind was repugnant to his deeper instincts, and of
+all changes the ones relating to the habits of women appeared to
+him to interfere most unwarrantably with the Creator's original
+plan. For the rest he had the heart of a child, would strip the
+clothes from his back to give to a friend, or even to an enemy, and
+possessed an infallible gift for making a dinner successful.</p>
+<p>On Colonel Buffington's right sat Mrs. Hamilton, a very pretty,
+very sprightly widow, with her hair coiled into the fashionable
+Psyche knot, and the short puffs of her sleeves emphasizing the
+hour-glass perfection of her figure. Next to Mrs. Hamilton there
+was Billy King, who wore a white flower in his buttonhole and
+looked like a soldier out of uniform, and beyond Billy sat Mrs.
+Crowborough, whom he was trying despairingly to entertain. She,
+renowned and estimable woman, was planning in her mind what she
+should say at a board meeting of one of her pet charities on the
+morrow, a charity which, like all of her favourite ones, concerned
+itself with the management and spiritual elevation of girl orphans.
+Tall, raw-boned, strung with jet, Mrs. Crowborough, who had been
+married for her money, looked as sympathetic as a moral principle
+or an organized charity. Unfortunately, for she was rather heavy in
+company, Judge Crowborough was obliged by custom to bring her to
+dinner; and she came willingly, inspired less by sociability than
+by the virtuous instinct which animated her being. Mr. Fowler had
+taken her in to dinner, and while she lent an inert attention to
+Billy's jests, he talked across Gabriella to Judge Crowborough, who
+was eating his soup with the complete absorption of a man to whom
+the smallest of his appetities is sacred. It was a grievance of
+Mrs. Fowler's that her husband would never, as she said, "pay any
+attention to women," and in order to feel assured of even so much
+as a cheerful noise at his end of the table, she was obliged to
+place within hearing distance of him somebody who could talk
+fluently, if not eloquently, of the stock market.</p>
+<p>To Gabriella's surprise, her father-in-law, who had appeared
+inert and listless at breakfast, became, in the stimulating
+presence of the judge, not only awake, but mildly animated. She had
+felt before the charm in his scholarly face, with its look of
+detached spirituality so strangely out of keeping with the calling
+he pursued; and she recognized now the quality of controlled force
+which had enabled him to hold his own in the financial whirlpool of
+his country. Had the girl known more of life, she would have
+understood that in the American business world there were hundreds
+of such men winning their way and leaving their mark at that moment
+of history&mdash;men whose natures were redeemed from grossness by
+the peculiar idealism they infused into their material battles. Of
+Scotch-Irish inheritance, the direct descendant of one Gregory
+Truesdale, who had died a martyr for Presbyterianism, Archibald
+Fowler was inspired by something of the austere devotion which had
+fortified his religious ancestor. Since his college days his
+private life had been irreproachable. Though he was a stronger
+character than his wife, he regarded her with almost superstitious
+reverence, and made no decision above Wall Street without
+consulting her. His heart, and as much of his time as he could
+spare from business, were hers, and she made the most of them.
+Women, as women, did not attract him, and he avoided them except at
+his own table, where custom constrained him to be polite. After a
+few courteous words to Mrs. Crowborough, he had turned with relief
+to her husband.</p>
+<p>"You've got a bright chap in your office, Stanley," he said;
+"that fellow Latham. I was talking to him this morning. He's from
+Colorado, isn't he?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, they're all from the West now," responded the
+judge&mdash;he had sat on the bench in his youth. "Ten years ago
+the bright ones were from the South, but you Southerners are
+outstripped to-day, and it's the men from the West who are doing
+it. There's a fundamental reason there, I suppose, if you go deep
+enough," he added, fingering the ends of his short gray moustache
+while he kept an eye on his champagne glass. "We've done with mere
+classifying and imitation, and we're waiting for a fresh explosion
+of raw energy. Now for pure constructive imagination the North and
+South don't hold a candle&mdash;they simply don't hold a
+candle&mdash;to the West. Mark my words, in twenty-five years
+there'll hardly be a big railroad man in the country who wasn't
+born in sight of the Rockies." Unlike Mr. Fowler, whose mind ran in
+a groove leading directly to business, the judge had a natural bent
+toward generalization, and when dining, preferred to discuss
+impersonal topics. He was a tall, florid man with an immense paunch
+flattened by artificial devices, and a vitality so excessive that
+it overflowed in numberless directions&mdash;in his hearty animal
+appetites, in his love of sports, in his delight in the theatre and
+literature, particularly in novels of the sentimental and romantic
+school, in his fondness for the lighter operas, and in his
+irrepressible admiration for pretty women. His face, large, ruddy,
+with a hooked nose, where the red was thickly veined with purple,
+and protruding lips over square yellow teeth that gripped like the
+teeth of a bulldog, aroused in Gabriella a quick repulsion which
+only the genial humour of his smile overcame. That he should have
+married his wife for her money was less amazing to the girl than
+that his wife should have married him for any reason whatsoever.
+Only a moral principle or a charitable institution, she felt, could
+have endured him and survived. But in spite of his repulsiveness he
+had evidently experienced the natural activities of humanity. He
+had taken a wife; he had begotten children; he had judged other
+men; he had dug into the bowels of the earth for mines, and had
+built railroads on its surface; he had made grass grow in deserts
+and had turned waste places into populous cities; he had read
+romances and heard music; he had attained a social position
+securely founded upon millions of dollars&mdash;and all these
+things he had achieved through his unconquerable colossal vitality.
+"I wonder why they put him by me," thought Gabriella. "I shall
+never get on with him."</p>
+<p>Then he turned to her and said bluntly, between two mouthfuls of
+lobster: "So you're George's wife! Handsome chap George, but he
+hasn't much head for business. He lacks the grip of the old man.
+Where's he to-night?"</p>
+<p>"He got home so late that he wasn't ready for dinner. He'll be
+down in a minute."</p>
+<p>"It's a bad habit. He oughtn't to be late. Now, I haven't been
+late for dinner for twenty years."</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid he doesn't pay much attention to time. I'll try to
+change him."</p>
+<p>"You won't. No woman alive ever changed a man's habits. All you
+can do is to hide them."</p>
+<p>That his blunt manner was an affectation, she was quick to
+discern. While he talked to her, he looked at her knowingly with
+his light fishy eyes, and by his look and his tone he seemed to
+establish an immediate intimacy between them&mdash;as if he and she
+were speaking a language which was foreign to the rest of the
+table. He appeared to be kind, she thought, and on his side he was
+thinking that she was a nice girl, with an attractive face and
+remarkable eyes. On the whole, he preferred brown eyes, though his
+wife's were the colour of slate. "Why the deuce did she marry that
+fool?" he questioned impatiently.</p>
+<p>Across the table Billy King was working hopelessly but valiantly
+to engage Mrs. Crowborough's attention. What a splendid figure he
+had, and how clean and fine was the modelling of his features! He
+was just the man a girl like Patty would fall in love with, and
+Gabriella no longer felt that. Patty's beauty was wasted. Once or
+twice she caught fleeting glances passing between them, and these
+glances, so winged with happiness, spoke unutterable and ecstatic
+things.</p>
+<p>A hush dropped suddenly on the table, and in this hush she heard
+the voice of Colonel Buffington telling a story in dialect. It was
+an immemorial anecdote of Cousin Jimmy's&mdash;she had heard him
+tell it a dozen times&mdash;and while she listened, it made her
+feel comfortably at home.</p>
+<p>"'Uncle Amos,' I said to him, 'we've been together thirty years,
+but we've got to part. You're a drunkard and a thief and a
+worthless darky all round, and you've lived on my place ever since
+the war without doing a lick of work for your keep. I've stood it
+as long as I can, but there's an end to human endurance. Yes, Amos,
+the time has come for us to part.'</p>
+<p>"Hi! Marse Beverly,' said the old rascal, 'whar you gwine?"</p>
+<p>"Capital!" ejaculated the judge softly. "Capital!" And he added
+for Gabriella's ear: "Buffington tells the best negro stories of
+any man I know. Ought to have heard him at the club the other
+night."</p>
+<p>Gabriella did not answer; Cousin Jimmy's story had made her
+think of Cousin Jimmy, with his soft heart and his dark shining
+eyes like the eyes of a good and gentle dog. Then she thought of
+her mother, and reminded herself that she must ask George when they
+were to begin the hunt for an apartment. He had said they were very
+hard to find when you wanted them.</p>
+<p>Another hush fell, and Colonel Buffington was just beginning a
+second story&mdash;one of Uncle Meriweather's this time&mdash;when
+George came in from the drawing-room, and after a murmured apology,
+took his seat between Patty and Mrs. Hamilton.</p>
+<p>"That's a handsome boy," said the judge in a husky whisper to
+Gabriella, "but he hasn't much to say for himself, has he?"</p>
+<p>His manner of playful intimacy conveyed the impression that the
+secret understanding between them did not include Gabriella's
+husband. George was an outsider, but this hideous old man, with his
+curious repelling suggestion of over-ripeness, as of fruit that is
+beginning to rot at the core, was the dominant personality in her
+mind at the moment. She wondered if he knew how repulsive he was,
+and while she wondered, the judge, unaware of his tragic plight,
+went on eating lobster with unimpaired relish. His importance,
+founded upon a more substantial basis than mere personal
+attraction, had risen superior not only to morality, but to the
+outward failings of the flesh. Had he been twice as repulsive, she
+realized that his millions would have commanded a respect denied to
+both beauty and virtue.</p>
+<p>"I wonder how any woman can stand him," mused Gabriella. Then,
+glancing across the table at Mrs. Crowborough, she realized
+something of the amazing insensibility of the more ethereal sex. No
+man, not even in the last extremity, could have loved a woman as
+ugly as Judge Crowborough was. The roughest man would have had
+sufficient esthetic sense to have been shocked into revolt; yet a
+woman, a refined and intelligent woman, had married the judge and
+survived it. She appeared now, not only expressionless and
+unrevolted, but filled with a healthy zest for social reforms and
+the spiritual welfare of girl orphans.</p>
+<p>"Well, I've learned something of life to-night," thought
+Gabriella while she watched her.</p>
+<p>Later in the evening, when she passed into the drawing-room,
+with Mrs. Crowborough, bleak, unbending, and trailing her chains of
+jet, she comforted herself again with the reflection that what she
+was "seeing" might not be particularly exciting, "but it was
+life."</p>
+<p>On a short, hard sofa near the fire, beside Fatty, who bloomed
+like a white rose under the red-shaded light, she listened to Mrs.
+Fowler's unflagging efforts to "get on" with the judge's wife.
+Never had the dauntless little woman revealed more surprising
+resourcefulness, never had she talked so vivaciously, never had she
+appeared so relentlessly pleasant. It was as if she said in the
+face of Mrs. Crowborough's insensibility, which was the
+insensibility not of mind, but of inanimate matter, "Whatever you
+do, you can't keep me from being sweet." And in this strained
+sweetness there was something touching, something wistful, a hint
+of inner weariness which showed now and then beneath the restless
+vivacity.</p>
+<p>"Isn't it funny," said Patty suddenly, "how much mamma cares
+about things that don't matter at all? You wouldn't believe it to
+look at her, but she is in her heart the most worldly one of the
+family. Father wouldn't give a tallow candle for anything that
+isn't real."</p>
+<p>A log broke in the centre, and fell, scattering a shower of
+golden embers over the hearth. Rising quickly, with one of her
+sprightly movements, Mrs. Fowler reached for a pair of small brass
+tongs and pushed the broken log back on the andirons. Then she
+threw some fresh wood on the flames, and resumed her seat with an
+animated gesture as if the incident had enlivened her.</p>
+<p>"Now they are talking about the everlasting Pletheridges,"
+whispered Patty. "I never understand how mother can take so much
+interest in those people just because they are rich."</p>
+<p>But to Gabriella it was more inconceivable still that her
+mother-in-law, with the bluest blood of Virginia in her veins,
+should regard with such artless reverence the social activities of
+the granddaughter of a tavern-keeper. In her native State an
+impoverished branch of Mrs. Fowler's family still lived on land
+which, tradition said, had been granted one of her ancestors by
+Charles the Second in recognition of distinguished services to that
+dubious monarch; yet she could long enviously for a closer
+acquaintance with the plutocratic descendant of an Irish
+tavern-keeper&mdash;an honest man, doubtless, who had laid the
+foundations of his fortune in a string of halfway houses stretching
+from New York to Chicago.</p>
+<p>"Yes, I dined with Mrs. Pletheridge once," she was saying in the
+tone in which her royalist ancestor might have acknowledged a
+command from his King.</p>
+<p>"It always makes me angry, I can't help it," pursued Patty. "If
+dear mamma had only some other weakness&mdash;cards or wine or
+clothes or anything else. It's queer, with all her pride, how
+little social backbone she has. Now to hear her talk, you would
+imagine that that vulgar snob, whose father kept hotels and married
+one of his chambermaids, had conferred an honour by inviting her to
+dinner. And the funniest part is that, for all her good breeding,
+and her family portraits, and her titled ancestors, mother hasn't
+half so much respect for the genuine New Yorkers&mdash;I mean the
+New Yorkers whose names really mean something&mdash;as she has for
+these mushroom plutocrats. She had set her heart on George marrying
+one of them, you know, but it's a jolly good thing he didn't."</p>
+<p>"That's the girl he told me about," said Gabriella. "Was he ever
+interested in her?"</p>
+<p>"Not for a minute. We're awfully contrary about our love
+affairs. We will marry for love&mdash;even mother did though she
+may have forgotten it. We never marry the people&mdash;" She
+clipped off the sentence, but Gabriella caught it up with a
+laugh:</p>
+<p>"I know," she said gaily, "you never marry the people your
+family pick out for you."</p>
+<p>"Well, of course, Billy went dreadfully hard with them&mdash;at
+least with mother. She wanted the Duke of Somewhere so very badly.
+But it was Billy or nobody for me. I'd have married Billy," she
+added while her beautiful face grew stern, "if I'd had to walk all
+the way across the world to him."</p>
+<p>"He looks as if he were worth it," admitted Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"He is, but that probably wasn't my reason for marrying him. One
+never knows why one marries, I suppose, unless one marries for
+money and then it is so beautifully simple. Now, you and George
+don't seem a bit alike, but it all happened on the spur of the
+moment, didn't it?"</p>
+<p>"It always seems that way when one looks back, doesn't it?"
+asked Gabriella. "But what I can't understand"&mdash;she brought it
+out with a frown&mdash;"is why marriage doesn't change one. I used
+to think I'd be different, but I'm not. And even love seems to
+leave people wanting everything else just as badly. Your mother has
+had a perfect love&mdash;she told me so&mdash;and yet it hasn't
+kept her from wanting all the other things in life, has it? I wish
+I could work it out," she finished, a little sadly, for she was
+thinking of her mother's cry on the night of Jane's attack: "I am
+tempted to hope Gabriella will never marry. The Carrs all marry so
+badly!" Why had those words come back to her to-night? She had not
+remembered them for months, she had even forgotten that she had
+heard them, and now they floated to her as clearly as if they had
+been spoken aloud.</p>
+<p>In a little while Billy came in, and when, after a few moments
+of spasmodic affability, Mrs. Crowborough rose and pleaded an early
+board meeting on the morrow, Gabriella watched Patty wrap her
+honey-coloured head in a white scarf and then stand, waiting for a
+cab, in the doorway. Happiness, with so many people an invisible
+attribute, encircled Patty like a garment of light. It crowned her
+white brow under the glory of her hair; it shone in her eyes; it
+rippled in her smile; it lingered in a beam of sunshine on her
+lips. With her arm in Billy's she looked back laughing from the
+steps, and it seemed to Gabriella that all the brightness of life
+was going with them into the darkness. Beside the curbstone an old
+cab horse, dazzled by the light from the door, turned his head
+slowly toward them; and the look in his eyes, wistful, questioning,
+expectant, seemed to say, "This is not life, but a miracle." And
+from his box the red-cheeked, wheezy Irish driver gazed down on
+Patty with the same wistfulness, the same questioning, the same
+expectancy.</p>
+<p>"I never see Patty go off in a cab that I don't feel she has
+thrown herself away," observed Mrs. Fowler, yawning, while she
+turned to the staircase. "Archibald, I hope you had a really good
+time with the judge. I must say it is like ploughing to talk to his
+wife."</p>
+<p>Upstairs in her room a little later Gabriella said to George:
+"Patty was telling me about the girl your mother wanted you to
+marry."</p>
+<p>He was pouring out a glass of water, and, absorbed in the act,
+he merely grunted for answer. It was his disagreeable habit to
+grunt when grunting saved effort.</p>
+<p>"I wish you'd talk to me, George. It is so annoying to be
+grunted at."</p>
+<p>"Well, what do you want?" he replied amiably enough. "Patty is a
+regular sieve, you know. Never tell her a secret."</p>
+<p>"Did you ever like that girl&mdash;really?"</p>
+<p>"The girl mother had in mind?" Having emptied the glass, he
+returned it to the tray and came over to her. "Yes, but if you want
+the truth, I preferred the girl in the chorus&mdash;the one the old
+lady got in a blue funk about, you know. She's still there, the
+last but one from the end, in the Golden Slipper. I'll take you to
+see it some night."</p>
+<p>"Men are strange," observed Gabriella, with philosophic
+detachment. "Now I couldn't feel the slightest interest in a man in
+comic opera. Did she really attract you?"</p>
+<p>"Um&mdash;humph," he was grunting again.</p>
+<p>"Wasn't she terribly common?"</p>
+<p>"Um&mdash;humph."</p>
+<p>"Wasn't she vulgar?"</p>
+<p>"Rather. They all are."</p>
+<p>"And fast?"</p>
+<p>"Regular streak of lightning."</p>
+<p>Then it was that Gabriella arrived at an understanding of
+masculine nature. "You never can tell what men will like," she
+concluded.</p>
+<p>While she spoke he winked at her from the mirror into which he
+was looking&mdash;mirrors always fascinated George and he could
+never keep away from them&mdash;and there was in his face the
+whimsical and appealing naughtiness of a child. Suddenly Gabriella
+felt that as far as character and experience counted, she was
+immeasurably older than George. Her superior common sense made her
+feel almost middle-aged when he was in one of his boyish moods. At
+the age of nine she had not been so utterly irresponsible as George
+was at twenty-six; as an infant in arms she had probably regarded
+the universe with a profounder philosophy. Though of course George
+was charming, he was without any sense of the deeper purpose of
+life. Like a child he must have what he wanted, and like a child he
+sulked when he was thwarted and grew angelic when his wishes were
+gratified. A single day had taught her that his father could not
+depend on him in business, that his mother could not trust him even
+to remember a dinner engagement. Gabriella loved him, she had
+chosen him, she told herself now, and she meant to abide by her
+choice; but she was not blind, she was not a fool, and she was
+deficient in the kind of loyalty which obliges one to lie even in
+the sanctity of one's own mind. She would be true to him, but she
+would be true with her eyes open, not shut.</p>
+<p>"George," she said presently, while she loosened her hair, "your
+father told me you didn't stay more than an hour in the office."
+The question, "What were you doing?" rose to her lips, but she
+strangled the words before they escaped her. Her mind was quick to
+grasp facts, and she had learned already something of a man's
+instinctive dislike to being made to give an account of
+himself.</p>
+<p>"You've been hearing too much gossip to-night," he rejoined
+gaily. "Take care what you listen to."</p>
+<p>"Don't joke, dear. I wish you would tell me things."</p>
+<p>"There isn't anything to tell, is there?"</p>
+<p>"Is your father very rich?"</p>
+<p>"Not very. Did you think you were marrying a millionaire?"</p>
+<p>"I never thought about it, but everybody at home thinks he has a
+great deal of money, and yet your mother talks as if she were
+poor."</p>
+<p>"Well, he made a pile of money in a big deal about ten years
+ago, and the papers had a lot about it. After that he lost it, or
+most of it, and the papers didn't tell. The fact is, he's always
+either making or losing, and now he's losing. That's why they
+wanted me to put off our marriage."</p>
+<p>"They wanted you to put it off?"</p>
+<p>"Mother did&mdash;the old man never interferes. She had got into
+her head, you see, that the only way for me to make a living was to
+marry one, so it was a little while before she could get used to
+the idea that I was going to marry because I wanted to, not because
+my family wanted me to. She was a brick though when she found out I
+was in earnest. Mother is true blue when you know how to take
+her."</p>
+<p>"But you never told me."</p>
+<p>"You bet I didn't. If I had, as likely as not, you would be
+Gabriella Mary Carr at this minute."</p>
+<p>Drawing gently out of his grasp, which had grown possessive, she
+stood looking at him with a smile in which tenderness and irony
+mingled; and the tenderness was her own, while the irony seemed to
+belong to the vision of an impersonal spectator of life. The smile
+fascinated him. He could not withdraw his gaze from it, and yet it
+had the disturbing effect of placing her at an emotional
+distance.</p>
+<p>"Your mother is very good to me," she said, "but I feel somehow
+as if I had taken an unfair advantage of her. And you hadn't even
+told her," she added, "that we are going to take an apartment in
+June."</p>
+<p>"Oh, that's all right&mdash;there's plenty of time," he
+responded irritably. "Only you mustn't make mountains out of
+molehills."</p>
+<p>Then, because she dreaded his anger, she gave up her point as
+she had given up many before. He was irresponsible, but he was hers
+and she loved him.</p>
+<p>"I am so sleepy," she said, stifling a yawn, "that I feel as if
+I could cry."</p>
+<p>Marriage, at the end of a month, had already disciplined the
+fearless directness of Gabriella. She had learned not to answer
+back when she knew she was right; she had learned to appear sweet
+when her inner spirit demanded a severe exterior; she had learned
+to hold her tongue when a veritable torrent of words rose to her
+lips. And these lessons, which George's temper and her own reason
+had taught her, remained with her in the future, long after she had
+forgotten George and the severity of her schooling.</p>
+<p>There were many things for her to learn, and the lessons of that
+first day and night stretched through the winter and well into the
+beginning of spring. Accompanying Mrs. Fowler on her busy rounds,
+she discovered that here also, as in the house in Hill Street, the
+chief end of life was to keep up an appearance; here also the
+supreme effort, the best energies, were devoted to a sham&mdash;to
+a thing which had no actual existence. Though Mrs. Fowler was rich
+beside Mrs. Carr, Gabriella soon found out that she was not nearly
+so rich as her neighbours were, not nearly so rich as her position
+in society exacted that she should be. She was still not rich
+enough to be spared the sordid, nerve-racking effort to make two
+ends meet without a visible break. Her small economies, to
+Gabriella's surprise, were as rigid as Mrs. Carr's; and though she
+lived in surroundings which appeared luxurious to the girl, there
+was almost as little ready money to spend as there had been in Mrs.
+Carr's household. Bills were made recklessly, and dinner parties
+were given at regular intervals; for Mrs. Fowler, who denied
+herself a hundred small comforts of living, who gave up cream in
+her coffee and bought her butter from a grocer below Washington
+Square, took quite as a matter of course the fact that she must, as
+she put it, "pay off social scores." Though they ate the simplest
+food in the market for six days of the week, on the seventh,
+hothouse flowers bloomed profusely in the lower rooms and champagne
+flowed abundantly into the delicate Venetian glasses on the round
+table. To be sure, Mrs. Fowler's gown may have been two seasons
+old, but it was covered with rare laces, which she had picked up
+during her summers abroad; and her pearls&mdash;the string was
+short, but really good, for she had matched it in
+Paris&mdash;shone, rich and costly, around her still beautiful
+neck. After one of these dinners the family lived on scraps and
+looked at fading flowers for days, while Mrs. Fowler, with the air
+of one who has done her duty, sat upstairs before the little French
+writing-desk in her room, and patiently added accounts from morning
+till night. A strained look would come into her plump, firm face,
+three little wrinkles would appear between her eyebrows, and her
+blue eyes, circled by faint shadows, would grow dark and anxious.
+Then, when at last the accounts were finished and the unpaid bills
+laid away in a pigeonhole, she would remark with animation:</p>
+<p>"I don't see how on earth I am ever to pay all these bills,"
+and, after changing her dress, set out to bring her butcher or her
+grocer to reason. On one of these days she took Gabriella (they
+went in the stage because she had given up her carriage) on a hunt
+for bargains in underwear, and, to the girl's astonishment, her
+mother-in-law, who presented so opulent an appearance on the
+surface, purchased for herself a supply of cheap and badly made
+chemises and nightgowns. As she grew to know Mrs. Fowler better,
+she found that the expenditures of that redoubtable woman, in spite
+of her naturally delicate tastes, were governed by one of the most
+elementary principles of economy. Through long habit she had
+acquired a perception as unerring as instinct, and this perception
+enabled her to tell exactly where extravagance was useful and where
+it failed in its effect. She had learned to perfection never to
+spend money on things that did not show a result. An appearance was
+what she strove for, and one's chemises and nightgowns, however
+exquisite in themselves, could not very well contribute to one's
+external appearance. "Of course I like good underclothes," she
+remarked cheerfully to her daughter-in-law, "but, after all, nobody
+sees them."</p>
+<p>This was so different from the poverty-stricken point of view of
+Gabriella's childhood, that the girl puzzled over it afterwards
+when she sat in her corner of the stage. Mrs. Carr had kept up an
+appearance, too, she reflected, but, like the old maids on the
+floor above, she had kept it up even to herself. Perhaps the
+difference lay in the immense gulf which divided the appearance of
+Hill Street from the appearance of the East Fifties. Mrs. Fowler
+was obliged by the public opinion she obeyed to appear affluent,
+while Mrs. Carr was merely constrained not to appear destitute. On
+the whole Gabriella felt that she preferred the safe middle
+distance between the two exacting standards of living.</p>
+<p>But, though she might disapprove of her mother-in-law's
+philosophy, there was no question about her fervent admiration for
+her disposition. It was Mrs. Fowler's habit to appear "sweet," and
+never once did Gabriella see her lose her temper, never once, no
+matter how hard the day or how exasperating the accounts, did she
+show so much as a passing hint of irritability. Her temper was so
+angelic that it was the more surprising George should not have
+inherited a trace of it.</p>
+<p>If George had not inherited his mother's nature, he revealed, as
+time went on, even less resemblance to the perfect reasonableness
+of his father's temperament. Ever since her first day in the house,
+Gabriella had been drawn to her father-in-law with an affection
+which his wife, for all her preoccupied kindness, had not inspired.
+She respected him for his calm strength, against which the
+boisterous moods of George reacted as harmlessly as the whims of a
+child, and she liked him for his unfailing courtesy, for his
+patience, for his gentleness, which made her feel that he was, in
+spite of the material nature of his occupation, the only member of
+the household who possessed even a glimmer of spirituality. All day
+long, and the greater part of the night, he thought about money,
+and yet he had escaped the spiritual corruption which the ceaseless
+pursuit of wealth had produced in the other rich men whom Gabriella
+met in his house. It was as if some subtle alchemy in his soul had
+transmuted the baser qualities into the pure gold of character; and
+sometimes the girl wondered if the fact that he worked not for
+himself but for others had preserved him from the grosser
+contamination of money. For he seemed to think of himself so
+little, that after three months in his house, Gabriella was still
+ignorant of his interests apart from his work, except, of course,
+his absorbing interest in the morning papers. From the time he got
+up at seven o'clock until he went to bed punctually on the stroke
+of ten, he appeared to order his life with the single purpose of
+giving as little trouble as was compatible with living at all. His
+tastes were the simplest; he drank only boiled water; he ate two
+eggs and a roll with his coffee at breakfast; he spent hardly a
+third as much on his clothes as George spent; and beyond an
+occasional visit to his club in the evening, he seemed to have
+absolutely no recreation. His life was in the stock market, and it
+was a life of almost monastic simplicity and self-sacrifice. If he
+had any pleasure, except the pleasure of providing his wife with
+the money for her dinner parties, which bored him excruciatingly,
+Gabriella had never discovered it. "He asks so little for himself
+that it is pathetic," she remarked to George one night, when Mr.
+Fowler had gone upstairs, carrying the evening papers to bed with
+him.</p>
+<p>"Oh, well, he gets what he asks for," retorted George
+indifferently, "and that's more than the rest of us can say."</p>
+<p>George was in a bad humour; he had been in a bad humour for
+weeks; and for this reason Gabriella had put off from day to day
+telling him that she expected a child in the autumn. All her
+efforts to soothe had merely exasperated him; and there were days
+when her presence worked him into a fit of nervous irritability.
+After four months of marriage prolonged boredom had replaced the
+passionate tenderness of their honeymoon. Why this should be so she
+was too well-balanced emotionally to understand. She saw only the
+outward evidences of change, of gradual disillusionment; and though
+at first she wept a little while she wondered, she ended by drying
+her tears and attributing his casual indifference and his explosive
+violence alike to some obscure disturbing condition of health.
+Every evening, except when there were guests, he spent at his club;
+he came to bed late, and his waking hour was filled with complaint
+about the number and the size of his bills. He treated these bills
+as if they had been gratuitous insults, as if they had leaped,
+without reason for being, out of a malign world to assail him. As
+yet Gabriella had bought nothing; and she dreaded the time when her
+clothes would wear out beyond the hope of repairing, and she should
+be obliged to add another bill to the growing pile under the silver
+paper weight on the little white and gold desk.</p>
+<p>But in the last few weeks even this anxiety had faded from her
+mind, for the miracle of life which stirred in her body had
+diffused its golden halo around every trivial incident of her
+existence. After days of physical wretchedness, which she had
+hidden from George, she sat one evening, utterly at peace, in front
+of the fire in the room which had been Patty's before her marriage.
+It was past midnight, and she was waiting for George to come home
+because she felt that she could not sleep until she had told him.
+In the morning he had been unusually gentle, and as he left the
+house, she had said to herself a little sternly that he must know
+about the child before the day was over. A secret consultation with
+her mother-in-law had strengthened her resolution. "Don't keep it
+from him another day, Gabriella," Mrs. Fowler had urged. "It will
+make such a difference. I shall never forget Archibald's joy when I
+told him George was coming. Men are like that about children, you
+know."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I'll tell him to-night," Gabriella had answered; and
+sitting now in the rocking-chair by the fire, she began to wonder
+if George would be exactly like other men about children.</p>
+<p>The house was very still, but even in its stillness it exhaled
+the nervous apprehension which she felt to be its living
+character&mdash;as if George's parents, sleeping two doors away,
+had dropped their guard for the night, and allowed their anxious
+thoughts the freedom of the halls until daybreak. And these
+thoughts, which had become like invisible presences to the girl,
+wandered up and down the dim staircase, where the lowered lights
+awaited George's return, invaded the drawing-room, filled with
+stuffy red velvet chairs, so like crouching human beings in the
+darkness, and even thronged about her threshold, ready to spring
+inside at the instant when George should open the door. While her
+fire burned brightly on the andirons, and rosy shadows danced on
+the white rug beside her bed, on the lace coverlet turned back for
+the night, on the deep pillows with their azure lining showing
+through the delicate linen of the slips, on her simple nightdress,
+in which the buttonholes were so beautifully worked by her
+mother,&mdash;while she looked at these things it was easy for her
+to shut out the apprehensions of yesterday. But these apprehensions
+would come with George and they would not go until George left her
+again. The house with its heavy late-Victorian furniture, its
+velvet carpets which muffled footsteps, its thick curtains which
+hid doorways, its red walls, its bevelled mirrors, its substantial
+and costly ornaments, its solid paintings in solid frames&mdash;the
+house and all that it contained diffused for Gabriella an
+inescapable atmosphere, and this atmosphere was like the one in
+which she had waited expectantly in her childhood for the roof to
+be sold over her head. Now, as then, she waited for something to
+happen, and this something was a fact of dread, a shape of terror,
+which must be ignored as long as its impending presence was not
+directly before one's eyes. But with the look she was familiar, for
+she had seen it in her mother's face as far back as she could
+remember. It was associated in her mind with the need of money,
+with scant food, with scant fires, with a brooding and sinister
+hush in the house. With the knowledge of these things in her mind
+how could she hope that George would be glad of the child that was
+coming to them in the autumn?</p>
+<p>And yet to Mrs. Fowler the news had appeared to bring no
+additional anxiety. She had seemed pleased rather than otherwise,
+mildly interested, animatedly sympathetic.</p>
+<p>"I am afraid it will be very expensive," Gabriella had reminded
+her a little timidly, feeling frankly apologetic when she thought
+of all the trouble she must bring to the harassed and over-burdened
+little woman.</p>
+<p>But into Mrs. Fowler's face there had come the look with which
+she was accustomed to receive the suggestion that her dinner
+parties were an extravagance. That economy which she practised so
+rigidly, which was so elastic to cover little pleasures and the
+minor comforts of life, broke like a cobweb when she tried to
+stretch it over larger needs and desires. The severity of her
+self-denial was directed entirely against the trivial and the
+unessential. With regard to the indispensable materials for
+happiness, she seemed to feel that she possessed an unquestionable
+right to enjoy them at any cost; and she had reassured Gabriella
+with an optimism which appeared perfectly genuine. After talking to
+her the girl had felt that she might allow herself to be happy if
+only George would change back into his old way.</p>
+<p>Four months ago, at the beginning of her marriage, she had told
+herself that she needed only the daily intimacy of life to make her
+understand him. Now, after living with him, she felt that she was
+growing to understand him less every hour&mdash;that the relation
+which ought to have brought them spiritually closer, had ended by
+thrusting them to an incalculable distance from each other. Of the
+nervous reactions which he had suffered she knew nothing. All she
+saw clearly was that the widening breach between them would soon
+become impassable unless it could be filled by their new love for
+the child. The power to hold him must slip from her hands to the
+child's, and she was more than ready, she was even eager, to
+relinquish it. In the last few months her feeling for George had
+altered, and, though she was hardly conscious of the change in
+herself, her love for him had become less passionate and more
+maternal. The tenderness was there, but the yearning, the delight
+in his mere physical presence was gone. Like every other emotion
+that she had felt in the past, her love for her husband had become
+absorbed in the passion, the longing, the delight with which she
+enfolded the thought of her child.</p>
+<p>"I wonder if mother felt like this about me," she would say to
+herself, and the wonder was like a cord drawing her back to her
+mother and to her own babyhood. Then George would become strangely
+vague, strangely remote in her thoughts; and her mother would seem
+nearer to her than everything except the child under her heart.</p>
+<p>But since her talk with Mrs. Fowler, who had shown her
+photographs of George as a baby, some in long clothes, some in his
+first short frock, with a woolly lamb in his hands, some in a
+velvet suit, with his lustrous curls falling over a lace collar,
+Gabriella had felt that she possessed a new understanding of her
+husband and of the imperative needs of his nature. The child
+quality in him, the eternal boy that he betrayed sometimes by
+accident, appeared to her now to be the salient attribute of his
+character. After all, because of this quality, which was at once
+his charm and his weakness, she could not judge him as harshly as
+she might judge another man, she could not demand of him the
+gravity and the restraint of his father, who had never been
+young.</p>
+<p>"I ought not to have kept it from him. His mother is right. She
+understands him better than I do," she thought, as she looked at
+the clock. "If I had told him sooner he might be with me now."</p>
+<p>Through the muffled stillness of the house the sound of the
+opening front door stole up to her, and she heard George come in
+and stop for a minute to take off his hat and coat in the lower
+hail. Then she heard his footsteps move to the staircase; and while
+she listened she had a curious intuitive sense that it was not
+George at all, but a stranger who was coming to her, and that this
+stranger walked like a very old man. She heard him reach the bend
+in the stairs, and without stopping to put out the light, pass on
+to her door, which was the first on the landing. As he reached the
+top of the stairs, he stumbled once; then she heard his hand on the
+knob and a fumbling sound as if the knob would not turn. The door
+seemed to take an eternity to open, and while she sprang up with
+the clutch of terror at her heart, she felt again the sharp,
+agonizing premonition that a stranger was approaching her.</p>
+<p>"George!" she called in a strangled voice, and waited, standing,
+for him to enter.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<h3>MOTHERHOOD</h3>
+<p>At noon the next day Mrs. Fowler came into Gabriella's room and
+found her sewing beside the window which looked on a gray expanse
+of sky and street, where a few snowflakes were falling.</p>
+<p>"Did you tell him, dear?" she asked, arranging a handful of red
+roses in a little alabaster vase on the desk.</p>
+<p>No, Gabriella had not told him. She felt now that she should
+never be able to tell him, but all she said was:</p>
+<p>"I didn't get a chance. How lovely those roses are."</p>
+<p>Mrs. Fowler set the vase where the gray light fell on it, and
+then turning with empty hands from the desk, asked gently:</p>
+<p>"Aren't you making a mistake, dear?" Her movements were like
+those of a character in a play who is made to fill in an awkward
+pause with some mechanical action.</p>
+<p>"I couldn't tell him last night," replied Gabriella; "he was
+sick all night."</p>
+<p>She was very pale, even her lips had lost their rich colour, and
+her eyes had a drawn and heavy look as if she had not slept.
+Without looking at her mother-in-law, she went on with her sewing,
+working buttonholes of exquisite fineness in a small white garment.
+In her lap there was a little wicker basket filled with spools of
+thread and odd bits of lace and cambric; and every now and then she
+stopped her work and gazed thoughtfully down on it as if she were
+trying to decide how she might use the jumble of scraps that it
+contained.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler suddenly, after she had watched
+her a moment, "did anything happen last night?"</p>
+<p>"Happen? No, what could have happened?"</p>
+<p>"At what time did George come in?"</p>
+<p>"About one o'clock. I sat up for him."</p>
+<p>"Was&mdash;was anything the matter with him? Was he in any way
+different?"</p>
+<p>"He was sick. He was sick all night." A look of disgust crossed
+her face while she stopped to wipe away a drop of blood from her
+finger. "I don't remember pricking my finger since I was a child,"
+she remarked.</p>
+<p>"You are keeping something from me," said Mrs. Fowler; and
+sitting down in the small chair by the desk, she leaned her elbow,
+in her full sleeve of violet cashmere, on the edge of the
+blotting-pad. She was wearing a morning gown made, as all her house
+gowns were made, after the princess style, and Gabriella could see
+the tight expanse of her bosom rising and falling under a garniture
+of purple and silver passementerie. Her hair, fresh from the
+crimping pins, rose in stiff ridges from her forehead, and her
+bright red lips were so badly chapped from cold that they cracked a
+little when she smiled. She looked as hard as granite though in
+reality her heart was breaking with pity.</p>
+<p>"I want to help you," she said, "and I can't if you keep things
+back."</p>
+<p>"I told you George was sick. I was up all night with him." Again
+a look of disgust, which she could not control, flickered and died
+in her face.</p>
+<p>"But you oughtn't to have let him keep you awake. You need all
+the sleep you can get. When he comes in late he must sleep in the
+spare room across the hall."</p>
+<p>"His things are all in here and he would come in to get them;
+that would wake me."</p>
+<p>For a moment Mrs. Fowler hesitated while the struggling breath
+grew more irregular under the passementerie on her bosom. The ripe
+colour faded from her cheeks and her lips looked blue in the harsh
+light from the window.</p>
+<p>"I think I'd better speak to George," she said. "He is spoiled
+and he always thinks first of his own comfort. I suppose it's the
+way we brought him up&mdash;but when he understands, he will be
+more considerate."</p>
+<p>For the first time Gabriella laid down her sewing and, leaning
+forward in her chair, fixed her eyes, with their look of deep
+stillness, of wistful expectancy, on the face of her
+mother-in-law.</p>
+<p>"Would you mind telling me if George was ever&mdash;ever wild
+about women?" she asked, and though her voice was very low and
+quiet, her words seemed to echo loudly through the hushed suspense
+in her brain. It was as if every piece of furniture, every vacant
+wall, every picture, and every pane of glass, repeated the
+sound.</p>
+<p>The pleasant smile on Mrs. Fowler's lips became suddenly
+painful. As if she were suffering a physical hurt, she put her
+handkerchief to her mouth while she answered:</p>
+<p>"He was once&mdash;but that was before he fell in love with you.
+We hoped that you would be able to steady him&mdash;that marriage
+would make him settle down."</p>
+<p>"Did he drink then?"</p>
+<p>"A little&mdash;not enough to make him show it. I never saw him
+really show it but once, and then he was dreadfully sick.
+Was&mdash;was he like that last night?"</p>
+<p>For a long minute, while she looked out of the window at the
+falling snowflakes, Gabriella did not reply. Then she spoke in a
+voice that was sternly accusing.</p>
+<p>"You ought to have told me. I ought to have known." Her own wild
+passion for George was forgotten. She felt only a sense of outrage,
+of wounded and stunned resentment, They had treated her as if she
+were a child or a fool. That she had been a fool she was not
+prepared to admit at the instant&mdash;and yet it was less than a
+year ago, that June night when she had watched George over the
+clove pinks while her heart melted with happiness. She had had her
+way, and she was already regretting her madness. "Is this what love
+comes to?" she asked herself bitterly as she watched the white
+flakes whirling out of the gray sky. "Is this what it all comes to
+in the end, or am I different from other women?"</p>
+<p>Moistening her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, Mrs. Fowler
+smiled bravely, though there were tears in her eyes. "Archibald
+wanted to, but I wouldn't let him," she replied; "I hoped that you
+would make everything different. He was so much in love with you. I
+thought you could do anything with him."</p>
+<p>Though her reasoning failed to convince Gabriella, it was
+sufficiently forcible to justify her in her own judgment, and with
+an easier conscience, she settled comfortably behind the
+impregnable defences of the maternal instinct. After all, she had
+only done what she believed to be best for her boy. She had not
+been selfish, she had not even been thoughtless, she had been
+merely a mother.</p>
+<p>"I wish you would tell me what really happened last night,
+Gabriella," she said, and her tone showed that she had recovered
+her shaken confidence in the righteousness of her cause.</p>
+<p>"I can't tell you," answered Gabriella. "What good would it do?
+George was disgusting, that was all." She spoke sternly, for no
+lingering tenderness softened the judgment of her youth and her
+injured pride. How could she possibly have tenderness for a man who
+had tired of her in four months, who had become so lost to common
+decency that he could let her see him revoltingly drunk? And she
+had held her head so high, she had so despised Jane for her
+weakness and folly! At the moment she knew that she was helpless,
+but deep down within her she felt that this helplessness would not
+last&mdash;that the wings of her soul were still strong, still
+free, still untouched by the shame her body had suffered. With a
+single effort she could break the net of passion, and escape into
+the wonderful world which surrounded her. Like Jane, she had been a
+fool, but, unlike Jane, she would not stay a fool always.</p>
+<p>"You seem so hard, Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler. "Is it because
+you are young? Young people never make allowances."</p>
+<p>The taste of bitterness rose to Gabriella's lips.</p>
+<p>"I suppose I am hard," she answered, "and I am going to stay so.
+There is safety in hardness."</p>
+<p>Remembering Jane, remembering the hereditary weakness of the
+Carrs, who had all married badly, she told herself that in hardness
+lay her solitary refuge from despair. After all, it was better to
+be hard than to break.</p>
+<p>"You can't judge George quite as you would other men," began
+George's mother, and she was aware after a minute that the maternal
+instinct had in this instance led her to defeat.</p>
+<p>"I am not judging other men," replied George's wife coldly; "I
+am judging George." Against men as men she had never even thought
+of cherishing a grievance. All her life she had looked to some man
+as to the saviour of the family fortunes, and her vision was still
+true enough to perceive that, as a human being, Archibald Fowler
+was finer and bigger than his wife, that Billy was finer and bigger
+than Patty. She had found men less the servants of mere instinct
+than she had found women, less the passive and unresisting vehicles
+of the elemental impulses. Then, too, they were so seldom the
+victims of life, and there was in her nature a fierce contempt for
+a victim. She despised people who submitted to circumstances, who
+resigned themselves to necessity, as if resignation were a virtue
+instead of a vice.</p>
+<p>"Well, you must try not to worry, dear; worry is so bad for you.
+I am so sorry it happened. You won't mind my speaking to George,
+will you?"</p>
+<p>Gabriella shook her head. "I don't care what you say to
+him."</p>
+<p>"Do you feel able to come down to lunch?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, perfectly. I am simply dying for a cup of tea, and
+afterwards I think I'll go out for a walk. One gets so stuffy and
+dull when one stays in the house."</p>
+<p>Her manner had changed as if by magic. In putting the thought of
+George out of her mind she seemed to have put aside her resentment
+and despondency.</p>
+<p>In the evening George came home, looking a little yellow, with a
+box of gardenias in his hand; but the scent of the flowers sickened
+Gabriella, and she put them out of the room while she dressed for
+dinner. The attention, instead of pleasing her, brought an ironic
+twist to her lips, though she thanked George quite as courteously
+as if he had been a stranger to her. At dinner when Mr. Fowler
+abruptly asked his son why he had not been to the office, she kept
+her eyes fixed on her plate, in which she seemed to see palely
+reflected the anxious pleasantness of her mother-in-law's smile. It
+hardly occurred to her to wonder where George had spent his day,
+though, when she met Mr. Fowler's kind and tired look, a pang shot
+through her heart. She was sorrier for George's father than she was
+for herself. He looked so lonely, yet so patient. He so obviously
+needed help, and no one appeared to notice it, not even his wife,
+who began planning a dinner party in the futile effort to come to
+George's assistance. It was by coming to George's assistance in
+every difficulty, Gabriella surmised, that his mother had made
+George what he was; and the girl saw in imagination an endless line
+of subterfuges, of pitiful excuses and feeble justifications, all
+hidden in the tortuous labyrinthine windings of the maternal
+instinct. She saw, with the relentless vision of a Hebrew prophet,
+the inevitable ruin of the love that does not submit to wisdom as
+its law.</p>
+<p>More than seven months afterwards, when she lay in her room with
+her child in the crook of her arm, she prayed passionately that
+some supreme Power would grant her the strength not of emotion, but
+of reason. All her life she had suffered from an unrestrained
+indulgence of the virtues&mdash;from love running to waste through
+excess, from the self-sacrifice that is capable of everything but
+self-discipline, from the intemperate devotion to duty that is as
+morbid as sin. Balance, moderation, restraint&mdash;these seemed to
+her, lying there with her child on her arm, to be the things most
+worth striving for. She saw her mother, worn to a shadow by the
+unnecessary deaths she had died, by the useless crucifixions she
+had endured; she saw Jane, haggard, wan, with her sweetness turning
+to bitterness because it was wasted; and again she found herself
+asking for balance, moderation, restraint. The child, a little
+girl, with George's eyes and hair like gauze, had liberated
+Gabriella from the last illusions of her girlhood.</p>
+<p>And yet, though Gabriella prayed for moderation, she found after
+a few months that motherhood was absorbing the full strength of her
+nature. George hardly existed for her; he came and went like the
+passing of a shadow, and she began gradually to sink her life into
+the life of her child. Not until the winter was she brought back to
+a sharp realization of her neglected duty to her mother; and this
+came with a letter from Mrs. Carr during the last week in January.
+Mrs. Carr was still living with Jane, and though she had accepted
+mildly Gabriella's reasons for postponing her coming to New York,
+she was beginning somewhat plaintively to question. She had made
+little effort to hide her disappointment at not being with her
+daughter when her grandchild was born, for, in spite of the fact
+that she had tragically assisted at the entrance of Jane's six
+children into the world, she still possessed an insatiable appetite
+for the perpetually recurring scenes of birth and death. Then only
+did her natural bent of mind appear to be justified by universal
+phenomena.</p>
+<p>And now on this morning in January, when Frances Evelyn, the
+baby, lay good and quiet in her crib, Gabriella read over again the
+disturbing letter she had just received from her mother.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>MY DEAR DAUGHTER:</p>
+<p>Jane wrote you that I had had a slight attack of pneumonia, so
+you understood why I was obliged to let so long a time go by
+without sending you a letter. Though I have been out of bed now for
+more than a fortnight, I still feel so weak and good for nothing
+that I am hardly equal to the exertion of writing. Then, too, I
+have had some trouble with my wrist&mdash;the right one&mdash;and
+this has made it really painful for me to hold a pen or even a
+fork. The doctor thinks it is a nervous affection and that it will
+pass away as soon as I get back my strength, and I am sure I hope
+and pray that it will. But sometimes I feel as if I should never
+get any stronger, and of course while my wrist is crippled I am
+unable to do any sewing. This has depressed me very much, for poor
+Jane has so many worries of her own that I dread being dependent on
+her, and Charley has not been at all well this winter, though
+kinder and more considerate than I have ever known him to be. He
+has his faults, but I have always felt that he was not entirely
+responsible and that we ought to pity rather than blame him. Women
+can never be too thankful that they are spared by a merciful
+Providence the temptations which seem to beset men. When we
+consider how much more sheltered our lives are, we ought to be
+lenient in our judgment, and I cannot help feeling that God meant
+us to be so when he gave us more spiritual natures than those of
+men. Dr. Preston gave a very instructive and impressive talk on
+that subject before the Ladies' Aid Society of our church the week
+before I was taken sick. Indeed, I am afraid I caught the cold that
+led to pneumonia sitting in Charley's pew, which gets a bad draught
+from the door of the Sunday-school room.</p>
+<p>I must apologize for this dull letter, as I haven't been able to
+get out even to market. Before I was taken ill I used to do all of
+Jane's marketing, and you know what a place the market is for
+meeting people and hearing all the latest news. There are, however,
+two things to tell you, and you'll never be able to guess them.
+First, poor Miss Amelia Peterborough is dead. She was stricken with
+paralysis a week ago when she was all alone in the house&mdash;Miss
+Jemima was at a funeral&mdash;and she never regained consciousness
+until the end, which came at three o'clock Sunday night. Poor Miss
+Jemima, I feel so sorry for her. She keeps up beautifully and is
+very pious and resigned. They say she will go into the Old Ladies'
+Home as soon as the arrangements can be made.</p>
+<p>The other piece of news is more cheerful, though, for my part,
+life seems so short and so uncertain that I can't see much
+cheerfulness anywhere. So many people are dying that you can't help
+wondering who will be next, and as Dr. Preston said when he called
+on me during my illness, our only substantial hope is in a blessed
+hereafter. My one regret will be leaving my children and
+grandchildren, and especially my precious little Frances Evelyn,
+whom I have never seen. I have no doubt that Mrs. Fowler was far
+more useful than I could have been at the time of your trial, but
+it was a great disappointment to me not to be able to receive the
+little darling into the world.</p>
+<p>But I had entirely forgotten that I started to tell you about
+Florrie Spencer's marriage to Algernon Caperton. Of course I
+couldn't go, but Jane says the wedding was lovely and that Florrie
+looked really beautiful. Bessie had on rose-coloured brocade. Did
+you ever hear of such a thing at her age? She was just as gay and
+flirtatious as a girl, Charley said, and she sent me some of the
+cake and a bottle of champagne, which, of course, I didn't touch.
+It is a pity she is so loud, for there isn't a kinder heart in the
+world. Florrie and Algernon are going to New York on their wedding
+trip. Isn't it exactly like Florrie to want to go to all the
+theatres? They send you word, by the way, that they are certainly
+coming to see you and the baby.</p>
+<p>And now that I have told all my news, I must write a little
+about myself, though I am afraid you will be upset by what I am
+obliged to tell you. I put it off as long as I could&mdash;for I do
+hate to worry you&mdash;but the doctor has just been to see me and
+he says I must go to Florida immediately to stay until the bad
+weather is over. I told him I couldn't possibly afford it&mdash;the
+trip would take a great deal of money&mdash;but he insisted that I
+should write and tell you exactly what he said. He said my lungs
+were very weak and that he ordered the change&mdash;you know they
+never seem to consider expense&mdash;and when he was leaving, he
+stopped in the hall to speak to Jane about it. Poor Jane, she is so
+worried that she has almost gone deranged over my health, but as
+far as I am concerned I feel that I would rather pass away than
+cause so much trouble and upset everybody. Jane, as you know,
+hasn't a cent to her name, and it is out of the question her asking
+Charley, because he has had a very bad winter financially. Even
+Cousin Jimmy stopped sending me the rent of the house since I moved
+to Jane's, and as for Uncle Meriweather, he has been obliged to
+give up his business and go to live with his niece in the country.
+So, much as I hate to ask you, my dear child, I feel that you would
+rather I did so&mdash;and that I ought to be perfectly frank about
+the situation, particularly since poor Jane feels so deeply her
+inability to help me. I am afraid I should need about four hundred
+dollars, as I have bought nothing to wear for years. Bessie Spencer
+has told me of a very reasonable place where I could board, and it
+is just possible that she will be going herself by the time I am
+ready. If for any reason you are unable to let me have the money,
+just destroy this letter and don't think about it again. I wouldn't
+cause you a moment's worry for anything in the world.</p>
+<p>With love to George and a dozen kisses for my precious little
+grandchild,</p>
+<p>Your devoted mother,<br />
+FANNY CARR.</p>
+<p>Did I remember to tell you that Miss Polly Hatch has gone to New
+York to look after her nephew's children? He lost his wife a few
+months ago, and was left with four little children, the youngest
+only a year old.</p>
+</div>
+<p>So her punishment had come! As Gabriella dropped the letter into
+her lap, and looked at little Frances, so good and happy in her
+crib, she felt that she was punished not only for her reckless
+marriage, but for all the subterfuge, all the deceit which had
+followed it. She had not told her mother the truth, for she, also,
+had been chiefly concerned with "keeping up an appearance." For the
+purpose of shielding George, who was blandly indifferent to her
+shielding, she had lied to her mother, if not in words, yet in an
+evasion of the truth, and the result was that her lies and her
+evasions had recoiled not on George's head, but on her own. For
+George wouldn't care. So little value did he place upon Mrs. Carr's
+good opinion, that he would not care even if Gabriella were to tell
+her the truth. And if she had only been honest! If she had only
+refused to lie because custom exacted that a wife should be willing
+to lie in defense of her husband. Some obscure strain of dogmatic
+piety struggled in the convulsed depths of her being, as if she had
+been suddenly brought up against the vein of iron in her
+soul&mdash;against the moral law, stripped bare of clustering
+delusions, which her ancestors had known and fought for as "the
+Berkeley conscience." The Berkeley conscience, bred for centuries
+on a militant faith, told her now that she was punished because she
+had lied to her mother.</p>
+<p>Then, as if this reversion to primitive theology had been merely
+an automatic reaction of certain nerve cells, she saw and condemned
+the childlike superstition. No, she was not punished so quickly;
+but she had been a fool, and she was paying the price of her
+incredible folly. How little, how pitifully little she knew of the
+world, after all! A year ago, on that horrible night, she had
+thought that her lesson was finished, but it was only beginning.
+Her immense, confiding ignorance would lead her into other abysses.
+And again, as on the morning after that night of revelation, she
+resolved passionately that she would not stay a fool
+always&mdash;that she would not become a victim of life.</p>
+<p>The empty bottle had slipped to one side of the crib, and little
+Frances lay smiling at the friendly universe, with her wet mouth
+wide open and her blue eyes, so like George's, sparkling with
+laughter. The down on her head, as fine and soft as spun silk, made
+tiny rings over her pink skull, which was as clear and delicate as
+an eggshell; and these golden rings filled Gabriella with a
+tenderness so poignant that it brought tears to her eyes. Whatever
+her mother may have thought about the world, it was perfectly
+obvious that Frances Evelyn considered her part in it remarkably
+jolly. To be a well baby in an amiable universe was her ideal of
+felicity.</p>
+<p>When George came up to luncheon, which he did sometimes now, he
+went straight to the nursery for a glimpse of his daughter. Ever
+since little Frances had lost her first hair and gained her golden
+down, he had taken an interest in the rapid stages of her
+development; and, though he never "wasted time," as he said, in the
+nursery, he liked to look in once a day and see whether or not she
+had changed in the night. On her side the baby treated her father
+as if he were an inexhaustible family joke, to be enjoyed not too
+seriously, but with a polite recognition of its humorous points. If
+she were sucking her bottle when he entered, she immediately
+stopped and laughed at him while the rubber nipple dropped from her
+toothless gums; if she awoke and discovered him at the side of her
+crib, she greeted him with subdued but inappeasable merriment; if
+he lifted her in his arms, her crocheted shoes could barely contain
+the kicks of her ecstatic feet. And because she was a jolly little
+beggar, George grew, after a time, to cherish a certain fondness
+for her. There was some use in a laughing baby, but he hated
+anything, child, woman, or animal, that cried.</p>
+<p>On this particular day the baby happened to be asleep when he
+entered, so, without stopping, he went into Gabriella's bedroom,
+where the perfume of roses mingled with the scent of the burning
+logs on the andirons.</p>
+<p>"That's a good fire," he observed, stopping on the hearth-rug.
+"I don't wonder you hate to go out."</p>
+<p>"Yes, the room was a little chilly, so I lit the fire for the
+baby's bath. I don't usually have one," replied Gabriella,
+explaining her apparent extravagance.</p>
+<p>"Has she been well?"</p>
+<p>"She is always well. I haven't had a day's anxiety about her
+since she was born."</p>
+<p>"But she isn't very old yet." Already little Frances was
+supplying conversational material to her parents.</p>
+<p>"I wish you would sit down, George," said Gabriella, with a
+change of tone. "I want to read you a part of a letter from
+mother."</p>
+<p>"Can't you tell me instead?"</p>
+<p>"If you'd rather. You know I never told mother why we couldn't
+have her to live with us. I never told her anything. I simply made
+excuses."</p>
+<p>"That was all right, wasn't it?" He was plainly nervous.</p>
+<p>"At the time I thought I couldn't do differently, but
+now&mdash;"</p>
+<p>She gave him the letter, and while he unfolded it awkwardly, she
+watched him anxiously and yet without interrupting his reading.
+Beyond the simple facts, she had told him nothing, and it was
+characteristic of her that she did not embellish these facts with
+picturesque phrases. She herself was so insensible to the appeal of
+rhetoric that she hardly thought of it as likely to influence
+anybody. Then, too, in moments of intense feeling she had always a
+sensation of dumbness.</p>
+<p>"I'm awfully sorry about her illness," he said, "but when you
+think of it, the best thing that could have happened to her was not
+to come to New York. This climate would have been the end of
+her."</p>
+<p>"Will you let me have the money, George? I will try to save in
+every way that I can. I've made all the baby's clothes, as it is,
+and I can easily make the few things I need, also. Since the baby
+came I have stopped calling with your mother."</p>
+<p>A flush rose to his face. "I know you've been a regular brick
+about money, Gabriella. I never saw a woman buy as little as you
+do, and you always manage to look well dressed."</p>
+<p>She smiled with faint irony. Her clothes were dowdy, for she had
+turned the broadcloth dress she had had at her marriage and was
+wearing it in the street; but if he thought her well dressed, it
+seemed hardly fair to undeceive him. Had she been any other woman,
+she reflected, he would probably have looked at her long enough to
+discover that she had grown decidedly shabby.</p>
+<p>Since the baby's birth, as she told him, she had stopped calling
+with her mother-in-law, and a black net dress, given her by Mrs.
+Fowler because it had grown too small in the waist, was still
+presentable enough for the family dinners. But she never worried
+about her appearance, and it was a relief to find that George was
+quite as indifferent on the subject as she was. In the days of
+their honeymoon he had been so particular that she had spent hours
+each day before the mirror.</p>
+<p>"Will you let me have the money, George?" she asked again. The
+form of the request had not changed, but there was a deeper note in
+her voice: the irony, which had been at first only a glancing edge
+to her smile, a subdued flash in her eyes, had passed now into her
+speech. George, looking sideways at the slightly austere charm of
+her profile, thought suddenly, "Gabriella is growing hard." He
+noticed, too, for the first time, that she looked older since the
+birth of the baby, that her bosom was fuller and that her figure,
+which had always been good, was now lovely in its long flowing
+lines. She was handsomer than she had been before her marriage, for
+her complexion had become clearer since she had lived in the North,
+and though she was still pale, her skin was losing its sallow
+tone.</p>
+<p>Yet, though he thought her more attractive than she had been as
+a girl, she had ceased to make the faintest appeal to his senses.
+There were times even when he wondered how she had ever appealed to
+him, for she had not been beautiful, and beauty had always seemed
+to him to be essential in the women with whom one fell in love.
+But, however it had happened, still it had happened, and she was
+now his wife and the mother of the adorable Frances Evelyn.</p>
+<p>"I'm awfully cut up about it, Gabriella," he said, "but honestly
+I am out of the money. I couldn't lay my hands on it just now to
+save my life."</p>
+<p>His excuses convinced him while he uttered them, but he had
+barely paused before Gabriella demolished them with a single blow
+of her merciless logic.</p>
+<p>"You were talking last night about buying a horse," she
+replied.</p>
+<p>He frowned resentfully, and she immediately regretted her words.
+By speaking the truth she had defeated her purpose.</p>
+<p>"It isn't as if I were buying a horse for pleasure," he answered
+doggedly; "I am dependent on exercise&mdash;you can see for
+yourself how I've gone off in the last two or three months. Of
+course if the horse were simply for enjoyment, like a carriage, it
+would be different. But mother has given up her carriage," he
+concluded triumphantly.</p>
+<p>He was a spendthrift, she realized, but he was a spendthrift
+with a streak of stinginess in his nature. Though he enjoyed
+gratifying his own desires, which were many, it pained him
+inexpressibly to witness extravagance on the part of others, and by
+a curious twist of the imagination, all money spent by Gabriella
+appeared to him to be an extravagance. To be sure, he had just told
+her that she was a brick about money, but that had been intended as
+a warning to virtue rather than as an encouragement to weakness.
+There was, to be sure, a vague understanding that she might make
+bills when they were unavoidable; but so in want of spending money
+had she been since her marriage, that several times she had been
+obliged to borrow car fare from her mother-in-law. When she had
+asked George for an allowance, however small, he had put her off
+with the permission to charge whatever she bought in the shops. As
+the bills apparently never lessened, and her conscience revolted
+from debt, she had gone without things she needed rather than
+accept the barren generosity of his promises. At Christmas her
+father-in-law had given her fifty dollars in gold, and with this
+she had bought presents for her mother and Jane and the
+servants.</p>
+<p>In the old days in Hill Street she had had little enough, but at
+least that little had really belonged to her; and since her
+marriage she had learned that when one is poor, it is better to
+live surrounded by want. To be poor in the midst of wealth&mdash;to
+be obliged to support a fictitious affluence on one's secret
+poverty&mdash;this was after all to know the supreme mortification
+of spirit. There were days when she almost prayed that the brooding
+suspense would assume a definite shape, that the blow would fall,
+the crash come, and ruin envelop them all. Any visible fact would
+be better than this impending horror of the imagination&mdash;this
+silent dread so much worse than any reality of failure&mdash;which
+encompassed them with the impalpable thickness and darkness of a
+cloud.</p>
+<p>"Then I can't help my mother even if it's a matter of life and
+death?" she asked.</p>
+<p>"I don't believe it's as bad as that, Gabriella. Ten chances to
+one the rest of the winter will be mild, and she would find Florida
+too depressing. You never can tell about doctors, you know. It's
+their business to make trouble. Now you mustn't let yourself
+worry&mdash;there's anxiety enough without that, heaven knows. Why,
+just look at father! He has lost almost all he ever had&mdash;he is
+simply staving off failure for I don't know how long, and yet from
+mother's manner who on earth would suspect that there is anything
+wrong? Now that's what I call pluck. By Jove&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Again her impetuous spirit&mdash;dangerous gift!&mdash;flashed
+out recklessly in defence of the truth.</p>
+<p>"Then why don't you try to help your father, George?" she asked.
+"He tells me that you rarely go down to the office." Her voice
+vibrated, but the stern lines of her mouth, which had lost its rich
+softness under the stress of her anger, hardly quivered.</p>
+<p>His frown darkened to a scowl. The calm disdain in her manner
+made him feel that he hated her, and he told himself stubbornly
+that if she had been gentler, if she had been more womanly, he
+would have done what she asked of him, forgetting in his rage that,
+if she had been these things, he would have found even less
+difficulty in refusing her.</p>
+<p>"You know as well as I do that I can't stand office work when
+I'm not fit," he returned sullenly. "It plays the devil with my
+nerves."</p>
+<p>Her case was hopeless. If it had not been so in the beginning,
+she had ruined it by her irrefutable arguments, and while he
+rambled on moodily, making excuses for his neglect of business, she
+sat silently planning ways by which she might get the money for her
+mother. To ask her father-in-law was, of course, out of the
+question; and Mrs. Fowler, beyond a miraculously extended credit,
+due probably to the shining bubble of her husband's financial
+security, was as penniless as Gabriella. Unless she could find
+something to sell there seemed little likelihood of securing four
+hundred dollars in a day. It was imperative, then, that she should
+find something to sell; and remembering her mother's tragic visits
+to old Mr. Camberwell, she ran hastily over her few personal
+possessions. As her wedding gifts had been entirely in the form of
+clothes&mdash;the donors doubtless surmising that the wife of a
+rich man's son would have other gifts in abundance&mdash;there
+remained only the trinkets George and George's parents had given
+her. All through luncheon, while Mrs. Fowler, with an assumed
+frivolity which Gabriella found more than usually depressing,
+rippled on over the warmed-over salmon, the girl mentally arranged
+and sorted in their cases a diamond brooch, an amethyst necklace, a
+bracelet set with pearls, and a topaz heart she occasionally wore
+on a gold chain, which she valued because it had belonged to her
+grandmother. Once she stopped, and lifting her hand, looked
+appraisingly at her engagement ring for an instant, while Mrs.
+Fowler, observing her long gaze, remarked caressingly:</p>
+<p>"I always thought it an unusually pretty stone, my dear. George
+knows a good deal about stones." Then, as if inspired by an
+impulse, she added quickly:</p>
+<p>"Wasn't George upstairs before lunch? I thought I heard his
+voice."</p>
+<p>"Yes, but he said he had an engagement at the club."</p>
+<p>"I wonder if he knows I have asked the Capertons to dinner
+to-night? You know I got Florrie's card the other day. She is here
+on her wedding journey, but even then she doesn't like to be quiet,
+for she is her mother all over again. I used to know Bessie very
+well. Kind hearted, but a little vulgar."</p>
+<p>"I didn't tell George. Perhaps you had better telephone
+him."</p>
+<p>"Oh, well, he usually comes up to dinner because of the baby.
+I've asked one or two people to meet Florrie, for I remember that
+Bessie's one idea of enjoyment was to be in a crowd. The
+Crowboroughs are coming and the Thorntons and the Blantons."</p>
+<p>"I'll be dressed in time," responded Gabriella, but she was
+thinking rapidly, "I can sell the diamond brooch and the bracelet
+and, if it is necessary, the amethyst necklace. The brooch must
+have cost at least three hundred dollars."</p>
+<p>The meal was finished in silence, for even Mrs. Fowler's
+cheerfulness would flag now and then without a spur; and Gabriella
+made no effort to keep up the strained conversation. As soon as
+they had risen from the table, she ran upstairs to dress for the
+street, and then, before going out, she sat down at her desk, and
+wrapped up the brooch and the bracelet in tissue paper. For a
+minute she gazed, undecided, at the amethyst necklace. Mr. Fowler
+had given it to her, and she hated to part with it. George's gifts
+meant nothing to her now, but she felt a singular fondness for the
+amethyst necklace.</p>
+<p>"I'd better take it with me," she thought; and wrapping it with
+the others, she put the package into her little bag, and went out
+of the room. It was her habit to stop for a last look at little
+Frances before she left the house, but to-day she hurried past the
+nursery, and ran downstairs and out of doors, where Mrs. Fowler was
+getting into a hansom with the assistance of Burrows, the English
+butler.</p>
+<p>"May I drop you somewhere, Gabriella?" inquired Mrs. Fowler,
+while Burrows arranged the parcels on the seat of the hansom. In
+the strong sunshine all the little lines which were imperceptible
+in the shadow of the house&mdash;lines of sleeplessness, of
+anxiety, of prolonged aching suspense&mdash;appeared to start out
+as if by magic in her face. And over this underlying network of
+anxious thoughts there dropped suddenly, like a veil, that look of
+artificial pleasantness. She would have died sooner than lift it
+before one of the servants.</p>
+<p>"No, thank you. I need the walk," answered Gabriella, stopping
+beside the hansom. "You will be tired if you do all those errands.
+May I help you?"</p>
+<p>"No, no, dear, take your walk. I am so glad the storm is over.
+It will be a lovely afternoon."</p>
+<p>Then the hansom drove off; Burrows, after a longing glance at
+the blue sky, slowly ascended the brownstone steps; and Gabriella,
+closing her furs at the throat, for the wind was high, hurried in
+the direction of Fifth Avenue.</p>
+<p>The streets were still white after the storm; piles of
+new-fallen snow lay in the gutters; and when Gabriella crossed
+Madison Avenue, the wind was so strong that it almost lifted her
+from the ground. Above the shining whiteness of the streets there
+was a sky of spring; and spring was blossoming in the little cart
+of a flower vendor, which had stopped to let the traffic pass at
+the corner. There were few people out of doors, and these few
+appeared remote and strangely unreal between the wintry earth and
+the April sky. Beside the gutters, where the street cleaners were
+already at work, wagons drawn by large, heavy horses moved slowly
+from crossing to crossing. At Forty-second Street the traffic was
+blocked by one of these wagons; and from the windows of the stage,
+which had stopped by the sidewalk, the eyes of the passengers
+stared with moody resignation at the hurrying pedestrians. And it
+seemed to Gabriella that these faces wore, one and all, the look of
+secret anxiety, the faint network of lines which she had seen in
+the face of her mother-in-law. "I wonder if I have it, too," she
+thought, pausing before a shop window. But her reflection flashed
+back at her from the glass, smooth, stern, unsmiling, as if her
+features had been sculptured in marble.</p>
+<p>Below Fortieth Street there was the shop of a jeweller she
+sometimes went to with Mrs. Fowler in that lady's despairing quest
+for suitable wedding presents at moderate prices; and something in
+the kindly, sympathetic face of the clerk who waited on them made
+Gabriella decide suddenly to trust him. As she unwrapped the tissue
+paper rather nervously, and keeping back the necklace, laid the
+brooch and the bracelet on the square of purple velvet he spread
+out on the counter, she raised her eyes to his with a look that was
+childlike in its appeal. Again she thought of the morning on which
+they had surreptitiously taken her silver mug, hidden in Mrs.
+Carr's gray and black shawl, to the shop of old Mr. Camberwell.</p>
+<p>"How much might I get for these? I have worn them only a few
+times. They do not suit me," she said.</p>
+<p>For a minute the clerk looked at her reflectively, but without
+curiosity; then lifting the trinkets from the square of velvet, he
+passed behind a green curtain into an adjoining room. After a short
+absence, in which she nervously examined an assortment of
+travelling clocks, he came back and told her that they would give
+her four hundred and fifty dollars for the two pieces.</p>
+<p>"The stones alone are worth that," he added, "and, of course,
+they will have to be reset before we can sell them."</p>
+<p>"May I have the check now?"</p>
+<p>"Shall we send it to you by mail?"</p>
+<p>"No, I must have it now. I want it this
+afternoon&mdash;immediately."</p>
+<p>He yielded, still with his reflective but incurious manner; and
+when she left the shop a quarter of an hour later the check was in
+her little bag beside the amethyst necklace. "I am glad I didn't
+have to sell the necklace," she thought. "Now I'll find a hotel and
+write to mother, and it will all be settled. It will all be
+settled," she repeated in a joyous tone; and this joyousness,
+overflowing her breast, showed in her eyes, in the little quivering
+smile on her lips, and in her light and buoyant step over the snow.
+A weight had been lifted from her heart, and she felt at peace with
+the world, at peace with the shivering passers-by, at peace even
+with George. The wind, hastening her walk, stung her face till it
+flushed through its pallor, and sent the warm blood bounding with
+happiness through her veins. Under the stainless blue of the sky,
+it seemed to her that the winter's earth was suddenly quickening
+with the seeds of the spring.</p>
+<p>In the Waldorf she found a corner which was deserted, except for
+an elderly man with a dried face and a girl in a green hat, who
+appeared to be writing to her lover; and sitting down at a little
+desk behind a lamp, she wrote to her mother without mentioning
+George, without explaining anything, without even making excuses
+for her failure to keep her promise. She knew now that George had
+never meant that her mother should live with them, that he had
+never meant that they should take an apartment, that he had lied to
+her, without compunction, from the beginning. She knew this as
+surely as she knew that he was faithless and selfish, as surely as
+she knew that he had ceased to love her and would never love her
+again. And this knowledge, which had once caused her such poignant
+agony, seemed now as detached and remote as any tragedy in ancient
+history. She was barely twenty-two, and her love story had already
+dwindled to an impersonal biographical interest in her mind.</p>
+<p>When she had finished her letter, she placed the check inside of
+it, and then sat for a minute pensively watching the girl in the
+green hat, whose face paled and reddened while she wrote to her
+lover.</p>
+<p>"It seems a hundred years ago since I felt like that," she
+thought, "and now it is all over." Then because melancholy had no
+part in her nature, and she was too practical to waste time in
+useless regrets, she rose quickly from the desk, and went out,
+while the exhilaration of her mood was still proof against the
+dangerous weakness of self-pity. "It's life I'm living, not a fairy
+tale," she told herself sternly as she posted the letter and left
+the hotel. "It's life I'm living, and life is hard, however you
+take it." For a few blocks she walked on briskly, thinking of the
+shop windows and of the brightness and gaiety of the crowd in Fifth
+Avenue; but in spite of her efforts, her thoughts fluttered back
+presently to herself and her own problems. "After all, you can't
+become a victim unless you give in," she said grimly; "and I'll die
+rather than become a victim."</p>
+<p>Her walk kept her out until five o'clock, and when she entered
+the house at that hour she found her mother-in-law in the front
+hall giving directions to Burrows. At sight of Gabriella she paused
+breathlessly, and said with undisguised nervousness:</p>
+<p>"A very queer-looking person who says she was sent by your
+mother has just come to see you, dear&mdash;a seamstress of some
+kind, I fancy. As she looked quite clean, I let her go upstairs to
+the nursery to wait for you. I hope you don't mind. She was so
+eager to see the baby."</p>
+<p>"Oh, it's Miss Polly!" cried Gabriella; and without stopping to
+explain, she ran upstairs and into the nursery, where little
+Frances was cooing with delight in Miss Polly's arms.</p>
+<p>The seamstress' small birdlike face, framed by the silk quilling
+of her old lady's bonnet, broke into a hundred cheerful wrinkles at
+the sight of Gabriella. Even the grotesqueness of her
+appearance&mdash;of her fantastic mantle trimmed with bugles, made
+from her best wrap in the 'seventies, of her full alpaca skirt,
+with its wide hem stiffened by buckram, of her black cotton gloves,
+and her enormous black broadcloth bag&mdash;even these things could
+not extinguish the pleasure Gabriella felt in the meeting. If Miss
+Polly was ridiculous at home, she was twice as ridiculous in New
+York, but somehow it did not seem to matter. The sight of her
+brought happy tears to the girl's eyes, and in the attempt to hide
+them, she buried her face in the warm, flower-scented neck of
+little Frances.</p>
+<p>"She's the peartest baby I ever saw," remarked Miss Polly with
+pride. "Wouldn't yo' ma dote on her?"</p>
+<p>"Wouldn't she? But how did you leave mother and Jane and the
+children? The baby must be a big boy now."</p>
+<p>"He's runnin' around all the time, and never out of mischief. I
+never saw such a child for mischief. I was tellin' yo' ma so last
+week. There's another baby on the way with Jane, you know."</p>
+<p>"How in the world will she take care of it? I suppose Charley is
+just the same?"</p>
+<p>"Well, if you ask me, Gabriella, I never was so dead set against
+Mr. Charley as the rest of you. I helped raise Jane from the time
+she was no higher than that&mdash;and I ain't sayin' nothin'
+against her except that Mr. Charley ain't half as bad to my mind as
+she makes him out. Some men respond to naggin' and some
+don't&mdash;that's what I said to her one day when she broke down
+and cried on my shoulder&mdash;and you've got to be mighty
+particular when you begin to nag that you're naggin' the right
+sort. But she won't listen, not she. 'If I don't tell Charley of
+his faults, who's goin' to?' she asks. You know Jane always did
+talk pretty free to me ever since she was a little girl. Well,
+there are some people that simply can't stand bein' told of their
+faults, and Mr. Charley is one of 'em. It ain't the kind of
+treatment that agrees with him, and if I'd been in Jane's place, I
+reckon I'd have found it out long ago. But it ain't her way to
+learn anything&mdash;you know that as well as I do. She's obliged
+to make the world over even if it drops to pieces in her
+hands."</p>
+<p>"She doesn't seem to have done much with Charley."</p>
+<p>"Well, you mark my words, Mr. Charley ain't bad, but he's full
+of natur', and Jane, is the kind of woman that's never happy unless
+she's gettin' the better of natur'. Whatever's natural is plum
+wrong, that's the way she looks at it; but mind you, I ain't sayin'
+she's all in the right. Naggin' ain't a virtue to my mind any mo'
+than drink is, but Jane, she can't see it that way, and there ain't
+a bit of use tryin' to make her. She's soft, but she's mulish, and
+the hardest thing on earth to push is a mule that looks soft."</p>
+<p>"It's such a pity, but I suppose nothing will change her. Tell
+me about mother."</p>
+<p>"Yo' ma looks downright po'ly. What with her sickness and her
+bother about Jane and the bad weather, she ain't managin' to keep
+as spry as I'd like to see her. From the stitch in her back she has
+most of the time it wouldn't surprise me any day to hear that she'd
+come down with kidney trouble, and she breathes so short that
+consumption has crossed my mind mo' than once when I was talkin' to
+her."</p>
+<p>Miss Polly, having, as she expressed it, "an eye for symptoms,"
+possessed an artistic rather than a scientific interest in disease;
+and the vivid realism of her descriptions had often, on her "sewing
+days" at home, reduced Gabriella to faintness, though Mrs. Carr,
+with her more delicate sensibilities, was able to listen with
+apparent enjoyment to the ghastly recitals. Not only had Miss Polly
+achieved in her youth a local fame as a "sick nurse," but, in the
+days when nursing was neither sanitary nor professional, she was
+often summoned hastily from her sewing machine to assist at a birth
+or a burial in one of the families for whom she worked. And happy
+always, as befits one whose life, stripped bare of ephemeral
+blessings, is centred upon the basic realities, she was never
+happier than when she put down her sewing, took off her spectacles,
+exchanged her apron for a mantle, and after carefully tying her
+bonnet strings, departed for a triumphant encounter with the
+Eternal Issues.</p>
+<p>"I am so anxious about mother," said Gabriella. "Did she tell
+you she was going to Florida?"</p>
+<p>"She cert'ny did. She was real full of it, and she talked a lot
+about you all up here&mdash;the baby and you and Mr. George. You
+know I ain't laid my eyes on Mr. George mo' than three times in my
+life. Well, I reckon I'd better be gettin' along back, or the
+children will miss me. I've got four children to do for now, and
+one of 'em ain't any bigger than Frances. It does seem
+funny&mdash;don't it, for an old maid to have her hands full of
+children? But, you know, I always did dote on children. There
+wouldn't be half so much fun in this world if it wan't for children
+and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under
+their skins. Yes, I can find my way back real easy. I always was
+good at finding my way about, and all I've got to do is to set out
+and walk in that direction till I come to a car over yonder by that
+high building, and as soon as I get on I'll ask the conductor to
+put me off right at my do'."</p>
+<p>When she had gone, Gabriella went back into the nursery, and
+stood looking down at little Frances, who had fallen asleep, with
+the smile of an angel on her face. "I wonder if I can be the least
+bit like Jane?" she said aloud while she watched the sleeping
+child.</p>
+<p>George did not come home to dinner; and the wonder was still in
+Gabriella's mind when she dressed herself in her black net gown,
+and went downstairs to meet Florrie, who looked younger and more
+brilliant than ever in a dress of white and silver brocade.
+Florrie's husband, a dreamy, quiet man,&mdash;the safe kind of man,
+Gabriella reflected, who inevitably marries a dangerous
+woman&mdash;regarded his noisy wife with a guileless admiration
+which was triumphantly surviving a complete submergence in the
+sparkling shallows of Florrie's personality. He was a man of sense
+and of breeding. He possessed the ordinary culture of a gentleman
+as well as the trained mind of a lawyer, yet he appeared impervious
+alike to the cheapness of Florrie's wit and the vulgarity of her
+taste. Her beauty had not only blinded him to her mental
+deficiencies; it had actually deluded him into a belief in her
+intelligence. He treated her slangy sallies as if they were an
+original species of humour; he accepted the sweeping comment of her
+ignorance as if it had been an inspired criticism of life. While
+she chattered, parrotlike, to the judge, who was obviously
+impressed by her appearance, Algernon listened to her ejaculatory
+conversation with a mixture of admiration and awe.</p>
+<p>"How do you think Florrie is looking?" he asked in a low tone of
+Gabriella, while his wife's laugh, high, shrill, penetrating in its
+dry soprano quality, fluted loudly on the opposite side of the
+table. Beside Patty's patrician loveliness, as serene and flawless
+as that of a marble goddess, Florrie appeared cheap, common, and
+merely pretty to Gabriella. The hard brilliancy of her surface was
+like a shining polish which would wear off with sleep and have to
+be replenished each morning; and while she watched her, Gabriella
+saw, in imagination, a vaguely ominous outline surrounding her
+which might have been the uncertain edge of her mother's shadow. In
+twenty-five years Florrie would be the image of her
+mother&mdash;protuberant hips, pinched waist, mottled complexion,
+and hopelessly tarnished hair; yet, with this awful prospect before
+him, Algernon could appear not only tolerant, but positively
+adoring. He had seen Bessie&mdash;he had known her for
+years&mdash;and he could marry her daughter!</p>
+<p>"I never saw her look handsomer," said Gabriella, "that white
+and silver gown is very becoming."</p>
+<p>"That's what I told her, but she wouldn't believe me. She
+thought it was too plain for her style. Your sister-in-law is
+something of Florrie's type, isn't she? Not quite so striking a
+figure, perhaps, but the same sort of colouring."</p>
+<p>Was it possible that for the first time in his life the simple
+Algernon was speaking in irony? Turning in her chair, she looked
+questioningly into his kind, grave face, so empty of humour, into
+his serious gray eyes, which followed each movement of his wife's
+with admiring attention. No, he was not ironic; he was perfectly
+solemn. It was a miracle&mdash;a miracle not of piety, but of
+passion&mdash;that she was witnessing.</p>
+<p>"Yes, Patty is lovely," she answered, thinking, as she reflected
+upon the eccentricities of love, how much too good he was for his
+wife.</p>
+<p>Across the table Florrie's voice was heard exclaiming: "Now, you
+don't mean it! Well, I'm just as flattered as I can be!" and
+Gabriella surmised that she was completing her conquest of the
+judge.</p>
+<p>"It's wonderful how well she gets on with everybody," observed
+Algernon. "She's never at a loss for a word, and I tell her if I
+had her ready wit, I'd be the greatest lawyer in Virginia to-day.
+Have you noticed the way she is managing Judge Crowborough?"</p>
+<p>"She always gets on well with men," acquiesced Gabriella, though
+without the enthusiasm of Algernon. "Do you remember what a belle
+she always was at the germans?" Though she was willing to admit
+that love was the ruling principle of life, it occurred to her that
+Algernon would be more amusing if he were less abundantly supplied
+with that virtue.</p>
+<p>They talked of nothing but Florrie until the women went into the
+drawing-room; and there, from the safe haven of a window, Gabriella
+listened to Florrie's ceaseless prattle about herself. She was as
+egotistical, as effervescent, as she had been as a schoolgirl; and
+it seemed to Gabriella that she was hardly a day older. Her eyes,
+of a grayish blue, like pale periwinkles, were as bold, as
+careless, as conquering in their glances; her hair was still as
+dazzling; her face, with its curious resemblance in shape to the
+face of a pretty cat, was still as frank, as na&iuml;ve, as
+confiding in its innocence. If she had changed at all, it was that,
+since her marriage to the silent Algernon, she had become even more
+talkative than she had been in her girlhood. Her vivacity was as
+disturbing as the incessant buzzing of a June beetle.</p>
+<p>"Well, you need never tell me again that you wouldn't rather
+live in New York, Gabriella," she fluted at parting, "because I
+shan't believe a single word of it. Why, we've been to the theatre
+every night for a fortnight, and we haven't seen half the good
+plays that are going on. Algy wanted to stay at Niagara
+Falls&mdash;you know we went to Niagara Falls first&mdash;but it
+was so deadly quiet I couldn't stand it. 'I don't care if I am
+married,' I said to Algy, 'what I want is the theatre.'"</p>
+<p>After she had gone, adoringly wrapped up by Algernon, Patty
+turned to her mother with a little malicious grimace:</p>
+<p>"I know it's horrid to say she's dreadful, mamma, but she really
+is."</p>
+<p>"Don't, Patty, it isn't kind, and, besides, she's a friend of
+Gabriella's. What I can't understand," she added, "is how Bessie
+ever came out of Virginia, yet there were always a few like her.
+You don't remember Pussy Prime, do you? Of course you don't, she
+died long before your day, but she was just that loud, boisterous
+kind, and all the men were in love with her."</p>
+<p>"Well, if I'm ever born again," remarked Gabriella, as she
+kissed Patty good-night, "I hope I'll be born a fat blonde. They
+always get taken care of."</p>
+<p>She ascended the stairs wearily to her room. Yes, she was barely
+twenty-two and love was over forever. "I couldn't hold a man six
+months," she thought dejectedly, "and yet Florrie, who is a fool
+and vulgar, will be adored all her life."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_SECOND" id="BOOK_SECOND"></a>BOOK SECOND</h2>
+<p>THE AGE OF KNOWLEDGE</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_Ia" id="CHAPTER_Ia"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h3>DISENCHANTMENT</h3>
+<p>In July Gabriella joined her mother in the mountains of
+Virginia, and when she returned in the autumn, she found that the
+character of her home had changed perceptibly during her absence.
+Brightness had followed gloom; the fog of suspense had dissolved,
+and the hazy sunshine of an ambiguous optimism flooded the house.
+What the change implied she could not immediately discover; but
+before the first day was over she surmised that the financial
+prospects of her father-in-law had improved since the spring. If
+she had had any doubt of his rising fortunes, the sight of the
+diminished pile of bills on Mrs. Fowler's desk would have quickly
+dispelled it.</p>
+<p>And even George had apparently altered for the better. His
+improved finances had sweetened his temper and cast the shining
+gloss of prosperity over his appearance; and, in a measure at
+least, time had revived in him the ardent, if fluctuating, emotions
+of the lover. For three months after her return, he evinced a
+fervent sentiment for Gabriella, which she, who was staunchly
+paying the price of her folly, received with an inner shrinking but
+an outward complaisance. Her feeling for George was quite
+dead&mdash;so dead that it was impossible for any artificial
+stimulus to revive it&mdash;but she had learned that marriage is
+founded upon a more substantial basis than the romantic emotions of
+either a wife or a husband. Though she had ceased to love George,
+she could still be amiable to him; and it occurred to her at times
+that if one had to choose between the two not necessarily
+inseparable qualities of love and amiability, George was not losing
+greatly by the exchange. When, however, at the end of three months,
+George's capricious symptoms disappeared as suddenly as they had
+come, and his attentions lapsed into casual expressions of a
+nonchalant kindness, she drew a breath of relief, and devoted her
+happiest days to the nursery. There at least she had found a stable
+refuge amid the turmoil of selfish human desires.</p>
+<p>In the house, which like George, began presently to show the
+gloss of prosperity, the winter brought a continuous flashing
+stream of gaiety, in which Mrs. Fowler darted joyously about like
+some bright hungry minnow beneath the iridescent ripples of a
+brook. There were new rugs, new curtains, new gowns, new bonnets;
+and Gabriella was led compliantly from dressmaker to milliner,
+until she lost in the process her look of shabbiness and developed
+into the fashionable curving figure of the period. She had always
+liked clothes; her taste was naturally good; and as she followed
+eagerly from shop to shop, she recalled the three months she had
+spent in Brandywine's millinery department, and the rudiments of a
+trade she had learned there. "I'd rather design my next gown
+myself," she said one day to Mrs. Fowler, while they were looking
+at French models in the establishment of Madame Dinard, who had
+been born an O'Grady. "I know I can do better than these, and
+besides I shan't meet duplicates of myself every time I go out."
+That night she dreamed of hats and gowns, and the next morning she
+drew pictures of them in coloured chalk. "It's the only talent I
+ever had," she remarked gaily to her mother-in-law, "and it is
+running to waste."</p>
+<p>Madame, who regarded the sketches with uncompromising disdain,
+showed great interest in the practical application of Gabriella's
+ideas to the dressing of Mrs. Fowler.</p>
+<p>"Yes, you have undoubtedly ideas," she said, discarding in her
+enthusiasm the accent she had spent twenty years in acquiring, "and
+there is nothing so rare in any department&mdash;in any walk of
+life&mdash;as ideas. You have style, too," she pursued admiringly,
+turning her eyes on Gabriella's figure in one of her Parisian
+models. "It is very rare&mdash;such chic. You wear your clothes
+with a grace."</p>
+<p>"That, also, is a marketable asset in a dressmaker," laughed
+Gabriella. "Do you know I ought to have been a dressmaker, Madame.
+Only I hate the very sight of a needle."</p>
+<p>"But I never sew! I haven't had a needle in my hand for twenty
+years&mdash;no, not for thirty," protested Madame.</p>
+<p>"Then I mustn't give up hope. If I ever have to earn my living,
+I'll come to you, Madame."</p>
+<p>Then Madame bowed and smiled and shrugged as if at a gracious
+jest, and Mrs. Fowler observed in her crisp, matter-of-fact manner:
+"Yes, my daughter has a genuine instinct for dress, and, as you
+say, that is very rare. She carries her clothes well, doesn't she?
+It's such a blessing to be tall&mdash;though my husband insists
+that the women who have ruled the world have always been small
+ones. But I do love a fine figure, and she looks so distinguished
+in that cherry-coloured cloth, doesn't she?"</p>
+<p>To all of which Madame agreed, as she bowed them out, with her
+ingratiating professional manner.</p>
+<p>"It's so lovely to have clothes," said Gabriella, sinking back
+in the victoria, "money is one of the best gifts of the gods, isn't
+it?"</p>
+<p>"It's hard to do without it," replied Mrs. Fowler, brisk and
+perfectly businesslike even in her generalizations. "I expect the
+worst suffering in the world comes from poverty."</p>
+<p>Then, after a thoughtful pause, she added with the practical air
+of one who scorns to be abstract: "But do you know I sometimes
+think Archibald and I'd both be happier if we had never made any
+money at all&mdash;I mean, of course, except just enough to live
+simply somewhere in the South. When once you begin, you can't stop,
+and I wish sometimes we had never begun." Above the narrow black
+velvet strings of her bonnet, her round florid face, from which the
+fine tracery of lines had vanished, assumed the intent and
+preoccupied expression which Gabriella associated with the pile of
+unpaid bills on the little French desk. "I believe Archibald feels
+that way, too," she concluded after a minute, while her firm and
+unemotional lips closed together over the words.</p>
+<p>"But you enjoy it so much when you have it."</p>
+<p>"That's just the trouble. You have to enjoy it as quickly as you
+can because you never know when you are going to lose every bit of
+it without warning. It's been that way ever since I
+married&mdash;rich one year, poor the next, or poor for two years
+and then rich for three. Life has been a seesaw with prosperity at
+one end of the plank and poverty at the other. Of course I know,"
+she pursued, with characteristic lucidity, "that you think me
+dreadfully extravagant, but we'd just as well spend it as lose it,
+and it's sure to be one thing or the other."</p>
+<p>"But couldn't you save something? Couldn't you put by something
+for the future?" Saving for the future was one of the habits of
+Gabriella's frugal past which still clung to her.</p>
+<p>"That would go, too. If we ever come to ruin&mdash;and heaven
+knows we've been on the brink of it before this&mdash;Archibald
+would not keep back a penny. That's his way, and that's one of the
+reasons I spend all we have&mdash;up to the very margin of his
+income."</p>
+<p>The logic of this was so confusing that Gabriella was obliged to
+stop and puzzle it out. At the end she could only admit that Mrs.
+Fowler's reasoning processes, which were by nature singularly lucid
+and exact, showed at times a remarkable subtlety&mdash;as if some
+extraneous hybrid faculty had been grafted on the simple parent
+stock of her mind.</p>
+<p>"I can't help feeling, though," resumed the practical little
+lady before Gabriella had reached the end of her analysis, "that
+I'd be a great deal happier at this minute if we'd been poor all
+our lives."</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't have suited George," observed George's wife with an
+inflection of irony.</p>
+<p>"He mightn't have liked it, but I believe it would have been a
+great deal better for him," replied Mrs. Fowler, while she bowed
+gravely to a woman in a passing victoria. "There are many things
+George can't be blamed for, and the way he was brought up is one of
+them. Of course, he's no good whatever as a business man&mdash;his
+father hardly ever sees him in the office&mdash;but it's useless to
+scold him about it, for it only exasperates him. But he might have
+been a sensible, steady boy, if he had been brought up in some
+small place in the South where there was nothing to tempt him."</p>
+<p>That there was any place in the South small enough not to afford
+temptation to George seemed improbable to Gabriella; but she felt
+that Mrs. Fowler's earnest belief, supported as it was by the
+unshakable prop of maternal feeling, hardly justified the effort
+she must make to dispel it; and she had still no answer ready when
+the carriage turned into Fifty-seventh Street, and stopped beside
+the pavement where little Frances&mdash;they had already begun to
+call her Fanny&mdash;sat in a perambulator. Flushed and smiling,
+with her red mouth gurgling delightedly, and a white wool lamb
+clasped in her arms, the adorable child was certainly worth any
+seesaw of destiny, any disillusioning experience of marriage.</p>
+<p>Before the beginning of the next winter Gabriella's second child
+was born&mdash;a brown, sturdy boy, who came into the world with a
+frowning forehead and crying lustily from rage (so the nurse said)
+not from fright. He was named Archibald after his grandfather, who
+developed immediately a passionate fondness for him. His eyes were
+brown like the eyes of the Carrs, though by the time he was two
+years old, he was discovered to be painfully near-sighted, a
+weakness which Mrs. Carr, when she heard of it, insisted he must
+have inherited from his father's side of the family. He was not
+nearly so beautiful a baby as little Fanny had been; but he was
+from the very beginning a child of much character, strong,
+mutinous, utterly uncompromising in his attitude toward life. When
+he was first put into shoes he fought with desperation, and
+surrendered at last, neither to persuasion nor to punishment, but
+to an exhaustion so profound that he slept for hours with his small
+protesting feet doubled under him and sobs of fury still bursting
+from his swollen lips. The next day the struggle began again, and
+Mrs. Fowler remarked sympathetically:</p>
+<p>"You'll never be able to break his will, Gabriella. He is
+unmanageable."</p>
+<p>"I don't want to break his will, mamma," replied Gabriella, for
+she belonged to a less Scriptural generation, "but he must be
+disciplined, if it kills me." Pale, gentle, resolute, she waited
+for Archibald to surrender. In the end she carried her point and
+won the adoring obedience of Archibald. There was a magnanimous
+strain in him even at that age, Gabriella used to say, and though
+he fought to the bitter end, he bore no malice after he was once
+soundly defeated.</p>
+<p>Long afterwards, when Gabriella looked back on the next few
+years of her life, she could remember nothing of them except the
+tremendous difference that the children had made. All the rest was
+blotted out, a drab blur of what Mrs. Fowler described with dignity
+as "social duties," moving always against the variable atmosphere
+of the house, which was gay or sombre, light or gloomy, according
+to the fluctuating financial conditions in Wall Street. There were
+extravagant winters and frugal winters; winters of large
+entertainments and winters of "women's luncheons"; but always the
+summers shimmered green and peaceful against the blue background of
+the Virginia mountains. The summers she loved even in memory; but
+of the winters she could recall but one glowing vision, and that
+was of Patty. Though she had lost George, she had gained Patty, and
+it was impossible to deny that Patty might be compensation for
+almost any lack.</p>
+<p>For the rest she made few friends, partly from reserve, partly
+from the shyness she always felt in the presence of strangers. It
+was difficult to establish fundamental relations at dinners or even
+at women's luncheons; social reforms were scarcely beginning to be
+fashionable; and apart from the reading which she did in order, as
+she said, "to keep her mind open," her life narrowed down gradually
+to a single vivid centre of activity. She lived in her children and
+in the few books she obtained from the library&mdash;(since the
+purchase of books, even in extravagant years, represented gross
+prodigality to Mrs. Fowler)&mdash;in Patty's friendship, and in the
+weekly gossiping letters she received from her mother.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Carr had long ago given up her plan to live with Gabriella
+and George; and a failure of circumstances, which fitted so
+perfectly into the general scheme of her philosophy, had done much
+to fortify the natural melancholy of her soul. Since even so gentle
+a pessimist was not devoid of a saving trace of spiritual
+arrogance, she found consoling balm in the thought that she had
+refrained from reminding Gabriella how very badly the Carrs had all
+married. There was, for example, poor Gabriel's brother Tom, whose
+wife had "gone deranged" six months after her wedding, and poor
+Gabriel's sister Johanna, who had died (it was common gossip) of a
+broken heart; and besides these instances, nobody could possibly
+maintain that Jane had not made a disastrous choice when she had
+persisted, against the urgent advice of her mother, in marrying
+Charley. Yes, the Carrs had all married badly, reflected Mrs. Carr,
+with the grief of a mother and the pride of a philosopher whose
+favourite theory has been substantially verified&mdash;every one of
+them, with, of course, the solitary exception of poor Gabriel
+himself.</p>
+<p>Her weekly letters, pious, gossipy, flowing, reached Gabriella
+regularly every Monday morning, and were read at breakfast while
+Mr. Fowler studied the financial columns of the newspaper, and his
+wife opened her invitations in the intervals between pouring out
+cups of coffee and inquiring solicitously if any one wanted cream
+and sugar.</p>
+<p>"What's the news?" George would sometimes ask carelessly; and
+Gabriella would glance down the pages covered with the formless
+characters of Mrs. Carr's fine Italian handwriting (the ladylike
+hand of the 'sixties), and read out carefully selected bits of
+provincial gossip, to which a cosmopolitan dash was usually
+contributed by the adventures, matrimonial or merely amorous, of
+Florrie Caperton. Hard, dashing, brilliant on the surface at least,
+a frank hedonist by inclination, if not by philosophy, Florrie had
+triumphantly smashed her way through the conventions and the
+traditions of centuries.</p>
+<p>"It's really dreadfully sad about Florrie," wrote Mrs. Carr. "I
+am so sorry for poor Bessie, who must feel it more than she lets
+any one see. While Algernon was alive we always hoped he would keep
+Florrie straight (you remember how everybody used to talk about her
+when she was a girl), but now he has been, dead only a year and a
+half, and she has already married again and gotten a divorce from
+her second husband. You know she ran away with a man named Tom
+Westcott&mdash;nobody ever heard of him, but she met him at the
+White Sulphur Springs, where he had something to do with the
+horses, I believe&mdash;and the marriage turned out very badly,
+though for my part I don't believe he was the least bit to blame.
+Florrie is so reckless that she would make any man unhappy, and two
+weeks after the wedding she was separated from him and was back
+here with Bessie, looking as well and pretty as I ever saw her. You
+know black was so becoming to her that she didn't take it off even
+when she eloped, and now after her divorce she always wears it,
+just as if she were still in mourning for poor Algernon. Nobody
+would believe, unless they had seen her in it, how very loud black
+can be. I used to think widows ought to wear it because it kept
+them from being noticed, but on Florrie it is the most conspicuous
+thing you ever imagined&mdash;as Cousin Jimmy says it simply makes
+her blaze, and you know how striking she always was anyway. I am
+sure I should think it would be embarrassing for her to go in the
+street in New York where nobody knows that she is really a
+lady&mdash;or at least that she was born a lady on her father's
+side&mdash;and this reminds me&mdash;(I declare I ramble on so I
+can never remember what I started to say)&mdash;but this reminds me
+that she has just been in to tell Jane that she is going to New
+York to take an apartment somewhere downtown; she told me the
+street and the number, but I have forgotten both of them. Jane says
+she looks more beautiful than ever after her last tragic experience
+(though she doesn't seem to think it tragic at all), but I was
+brought up to believe that a divorced woman, even if she is in the
+right, ought to live in a retired way and show that she feels her
+position. Now, I saw Florrie for a minute as she was going out and
+she ran on like a girl of sixteen&mdash;you would think from her
+talk that she is not a bit sensitive about the unfortunate
+situation she is in. She had on a huge bunch of violets, and Cousin
+Pussy tells me another man is paying her the most devoted
+attention. Please don't mention this to a soul&mdash;I hate so to
+spread gossip&mdash;but I felt that you ought to be prepared, for
+Florrie will certainly come to see you, and you must be kind and
+polite to her, though I do not think you ought ever to be intimate
+again. It is not as if she were merely unfortunate&mdash;many
+divorced women are that, and we sympathize with them because they
+show that they realize their position&mdash;but I cannot believe
+that Florrie is unfortunate if she allows another man to pay her
+such marked attention, and even accepts handsome presents from him.
+So do be careful, my child, and if you find yourself in an
+embarrassing situation, consult Mrs. Fowler and be guided by her
+advice."</p>
+<p>"Florrie Spencer is coming to New York," said Gabriella on the
+morning she received Mrs. Carr's letter. "You know she has just
+been divorced from her second husband&mdash;somebody she met at the
+White Sulphur Springs."</p>
+<p>George looked up interested, from his breakfast.</p>
+<p>"Florrie coming, is she?" he remarked. "Well, she's great fun. I
+wonder if she has her eye on anybody now?"</p>
+<p>"Not on you, I hope," observed his father, who joked mildly on
+the mornings when the news was good; "but she's a beautiful woman,
+and she'll doubtless be able to get whatever she has set either her
+heart or her eye on."</p>
+<p>"She'll marry again within six months," prophesied Mrs. Fowler,
+with an anxious glance in the direction of her husband's coffee
+cup. "Poor Algy, I always thought he was a hundred times too good
+for her," she added, while she abstractedly buttered her toast. It
+was one of their extravagant years, and the butter was
+delicious.</p>
+<p>"He adored her," said Gabriella. "I shall never forget the
+evening they spent here. He couldn't keep his eyes away from her.
+If she had been the most admirable character on earth he couldn't
+have loved her better."</p>
+<p>"As if a man ever loved a woman because of her character!"
+remarked Mrs. Fowler, from the security of her experience.</p>
+<p>Several months later Florrie arrived, gay, brilliant, and
+beautiful, with her waxlike complexion as unlined by care as if it
+had been on the face of a doll. Though she had lightened her
+mourning since Mrs. Carr had described her to Gabriella, she still
+wore black, and her flaring skirt, her inflexible collar, and her
+lace sleeves, narrow at the shoulder and full at the wrists,
+resembled a fashion plate. Perched at a daring angle above her
+wheaten-red pompadour, with its exaggerated Marcel wave, she wore a
+curiously distorted hat of black velvet, lavishly overtrimmed with
+ostrich feathers; and before this miracle of style, Gabriella
+became at once oppressively aware of her own lack of the quality
+which Florrie would have described as "dash." Already Florrie's
+figure was becoming slightly too protuberant for the style of the
+new century, and after kissing Gabriella effusively, she stood for
+a minute struggling for breath, in the attitude of her mother, with
+her hands pressed to the palpitating sides of her waist.</p>
+<p>"I told mother I was certainly coming to see you right
+straight," began Florrie, while, with her recovered breath, her
+figure curved as suddenly as if it were moved by a spring into the
+fashionable bend of the period. "I've been perfectly crazy to come,
+but between dressmakers and theatres and I don't know what else, I
+simply haven't had a minute in which I could sit down and breathe.
+Mother says I ought to be downright ashamed of myself for being so
+frivolous when I've just got out of such a scrape&mdash;did you
+ever hear before of anybody getting married for two weeks,
+Gabriella? But I know you never did&mdash;you needn't trouble to
+tell me so. Well, mother says I oughtn't to look so pleased, and I
+tell her there might be some sense in that if I'd stayed in the
+scrape, but if I haven't a right to look pleased at getting out,
+I'd like to know who has. It was all too funny for words, now,
+wasn't it? Of course, I shouldn't dream of talking to everybody
+like this&mdash;even if I am a big talker, I reckon I know when to
+hold my tongue and when not to&mdash;but I've always told you
+everything, Gabriella, and I don't mind the least bit in the world
+telling you about this. It always relieves my mind to talk to
+somebody I can trust, and I know I can trust you. Don't you
+remember the way I used to run in on rainy afternoons when you
+lived way over in Hill Street, and tell you all about Fred Dudley
+and Barbour Willis? And then I used to come and talk about poor
+Algy by the hour. Wasn't it too distressing about poor Algy? I
+don't believe I'll ever get over it if I live to be a hundred, and
+even if I do run on like this, it doesn't mean that my heart isn't
+broken&mdash;simply broken&mdash;because it is. Mother used to say,
+after father died, that you couldn't measure a widow's grief by the
+length of her veil; and that's just exactly the way I feel about
+Algy. I know you'll understand, Gabriella, because you always
+understand everything&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"He was so deeply in love with you," observed Gabriella
+sympathetically, while Florrie, diving amid the foam of her laces,
+brought out a tiny handkerchief, and delicately pecked at the
+corner of her eye, not near enough to redden the lid and not far
+enough away to disturb the rice powder on the side of her nose.</p>
+<p>"He was crazy about me to the very last, you never saw anything
+like it. Of course we weren't a bit alike, I don't mind telling you
+so, Gabriella, because I know you'll never repeat it. We weren't
+really congenial, for Algy was just wrapped up in his law books,
+and there were whole days together when he wouldn't open his mouth,
+but that didn't seem to make any difference because, as he used to
+say, one of us had to listen sometimes. But, you know, mother says
+a pair of opposites makes the happiest marriage, and after being
+married to Algy, I feel how true that is. I got into the habit of
+talking so much when I used to run on about nothing to cheer him
+up&mdash;he was always so grave and glum even as a boy, you
+remember&mdash;and during his last illness&mdash;you know he died
+of Bright's disease, poor darling, and it came on just like
+that!&mdash;he used to make me talk to him for hours and hours just
+to keep him from thinking. Well, well, that's all over now, and I
+don't care what anybody says, my heart's buried with Algy. I don't
+believe you were ever in love but once either, were you,
+Gabriella?" she inquired cheerfully.</p>
+<p>"Well, what about Mr. Westcott? Is that his name?" asked
+Gabriella, without malice. As a study Florrie had always interested
+her, for she regarded her less as an individual than as an awful
+example of the utter futility of moral maxims. Florrie was without
+intelligence, without feeling, without imagination, virtue,
+breeding, or good taste, yet possessing none of these qualities,
+she had by sheer beauty and "dash" achieved all the ends for which
+these qualities usually strive. Good humour she had as long as one
+did not get in her way; but, beyond this single redeeming grace,
+she was as empty of substance as a tinted shell filled with sea
+foam. If power and efficiency are the two supreme attributes of
+success, then by all the laws and principles of logic, Florrie
+ought to have been a failure. But she was not a failure. She was a
+fool whose incomparable foolishness had conferred not only
+prosperity, but happiness upon her. She shone, she scintillated,
+she diffused the glow of success. Though she was undeserving of
+admiration, she had been surfeited on it from her childhood; though
+she was devoid of the moral excellence which should command love,
+by a flashing glance or a waving curl, she could bring the most
+exalted love down from the heavens. There was no question that
+Algernon had really loved her to distraction, and Algernon was a
+man of sense, of breeding, of distinction. As for Florrie, she had,
+of course, as little capacity for loving as she had for
+thinking.</p>
+<p>"Tom Westcott! I declare, Gabriella, I am almost ashamed to tell
+you about him. You've never been to a Virginia summer resort, so
+you couldn't understand that there is something about a Virginia
+summer resort that just seems to make any man better than none at
+all. You get so bored, you know, that you'd flirt with a lamp-post
+if there wasn't anything human around; and when you haven't laid
+eyes on a real sure enough man for several months, it's surprising
+how easy it is to take up with the imitation ones. Of course, I
+don't mean that Tom wasn't all right as far as family and all that
+goes; but he was simply no earthly account&mdash;he was just mean
+all through, and as soon as I found it out, I packed right straight
+up and left him. After Algy I couldn't have stood one of that sort,
+and there was no sense in my trying to. Life is too short, I always
+say, for experiments. There's no use sticking to a bad job when you
+can get away from it. That's the trouble with so many women, you
+know; they try and try to stand the wrong man when they know all
+the time that it isn't a particle of use, and that they are just
+bringing wrinkles into their faces; and then by the time they give
+up, they're all worn out and it's too late to look about for
+another chance. Now, I've seen too much of that kind of thing, and
+so I thought two weeks weren't long enough to bring wrinkles in my
+face, but they were plenty long for me to find out whether or not I
+could stand any man on earth. So here I am in little old New York
+instead of being stuck away in some God-forsaken Virginia town,
+where there isn't even a theatre, darning stockings for a family of
+children. But there's no use talking about that&mdash;" And
+Florrie, who had been born a lady on her father's side, adjusted
+her pompadour under the high bandeau of her hat, and rose with a
+dashing air from the sofa.</p>
+<p>"I'd love to see the babies, darling," she said; "I'm just crazy
+about babies."</p>
+<p>"They are out in the Park. I'm so sorry. Perhaps they are coming
+in now, I hear the door-bell."</p>
+<p>But it was George instead of the children; and he entered
+presently with a moody look, which vanished quickly before the
+brilliant vision of Florrie.</p>
+<p>"I thought I heard you," he observed with the casual intimacy of
+an old playmate, "so I came in. Have you got fixed yet? What about
+the apartment? You'd better let me help you hunt for it?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'm not sure about the apartment. I may take a
+house&mdash;a teeny weeny one, you know," said Florrie, as she bent
+softly toward him, scented and blooming. If one didn't know there
+wasn't really a bit of harm in her, one would be puzzled just what
+to think of her, Gabriella reflected. Amid the perfect order of
+Gabriella's inner life, the controlled emotion, the serene
+efficiency, the balanced power, Florrie's noisy beauty produced a
+disturbing effect. She liked her because she had known her from
+childhood, and it was impossible to think any harm of a girl one
+had played with at school; but she could not deny that Florrie was
+vulgar. As a matter of fact, Florrie's mother had been vulgar
+before her, and the thin strain of refinement inherited from her
+father's stock had obviously been overborne by the torrential
+vulgarity of the maternal blood.</p>
+<p>"A house? Well, that's even better," replied George. "I've no
+use for apartments, have I, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>His effrontery was incredible! That he should joke about his
+broken promise before Florrie amazed Gabriella even after her
+disillusioning experience with him.</p>
+<p>"Then I'll get you to help me. Will you lend him to me,
+darling?" trilled Florrie piercingly from the door, where she stood
+in a striking pose which revealed her "fine figure" to the best
+advantage. The request was directed to Gabriella, but her blue eyes
+mocked a challenge to George while she spoke.</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'll give him," answered Gabriella pleasantly. There was no
+harm in it, she told herself innocently again; but it was a pity
+that Florrie, with her remarkable beauty, should be quite so ill
+bred.</p>
+<p>Five minutes later when George came back from putting Florrie
+into her hansom, he remarked carelessly:</p>
+<p>"She's got a figure all right."</p>
+<p>"Yes, she looks beautiful in black. No wonder she won't leave it
+off."</p>
+<p>"By Jove, to think it's little Florrie! Why, I don't believe
+there's a finer figure in New York. When she passed by the club
+yesterday the men were breaking their necks to look out of the
+window." Then, as if struck by a sudden suspicion, he added
+quickly: "Where did she get her money from? I thought Algy died
+rather hard up."</p>
+<p>"I never heard much about it. Mrs. Spencer must give her
+something."</p>
+<p>"I don't believe the old lady has a penny over three thousand a
+year, and that won't do in New York. This Westcott didn't have
+anything, did he?"</p>
+<p>"It never occurred to me to ask," replied Gabriella
+indifferently. What did it matter to George where Florrie got her
+money? But, then, George was always like that, and though he never
+made a penny himself, he was possessed of an insatiable curiosity
+about the amount and the sources of other people's incomes.</p>
+<p>"Well, it looks queer," he observed with intense interest after
+a prolonged pause. "That short pearl necklace she had on couldn't
+have cost a cent under ten thousand dollars."</p>
+<p>"It was lovely. I noticed how well the pearls matched," replied
+his wife. She was not in the least excited about the methods by
+which Florrie had obtained the necklace&mdash;all that was a part
+of the miraculous way she got everything she wanted in
+life&mdash;but she liked the pearls and she had envied Florrie
+while she looked at them.</p>
+<p>A deep furrow had appeared between George's eyebrows, and his
+mouth sagged suddenly at the corners, giving his face the ugly look
+Gabriella distrusted and dreaded. While she watched him she
+recalled vaguely that she had once thought the latent brutality in
+his face an expression of power. How young she had been when she
+married him! How inconceivably ignorant! Yet at twenty years she
+had imagined herself wise enough to judge a man. She had deluded
+herself with the sanctified fallacy that mere instinct would guide
+her aright&mdash;that her marriage would be protected from disaster
+by the infallible impulse which she had mistaken for love.</p>
+<p>"I wonder," said George with a suddenness that startled her out
+of her musing&mdash;"I wonder if it can be Winston Camp!"</p>
+<p>And Gabriella, who had forgotten Florrie, looked up to remark
+absentmindedly: "Winston Camp? You mean the man who dined here last
+winter and couldn't eat anything but nuts?"</p>
+<p>In the months that followed George did not mention Florrie
+again, and if he pursued his investigations into the obscure
+sources of her livelihood, his researches did not lead him back in
+the direction of Gabriella. But, from the day of Florrie's visit,
+it seemed to Gabriella, when she thought of it afterwards, his
+casual indifference began to develop into brutal neglect. Not that
+she regretted his affection, or even his politeness, not that she
+cared in the least what his manner was&mdash;this she made quite
+plain to herself&mdash;but her passion to see life clearly, to test
+experience, to weigh events, brought her almost breathlessly round
+again to the question, "What does it mean? Is there something
+hidden? Am I still the poor abject fool that Jane was or am I
+beginning really to be myself?"</p>
+<p>"You aren't looking well, Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler at
+breakfast one morning when George, as she confided afterwards to
+Patty, had behaved unspeakably to his wife before his father came
+down. "I want you to go about with me more, as you used to do
+before the children took up all your time."</p>
+<p>Gabriella had just crossed George's will about something&mdash;a
+mere trifle, something about calling on Florrie&mdash;and he had
+turned to her with a look of hatred in his eyes, a kind of nervous,
+excitable hatred which she had never seen until then. "Why does he
+look at me like that?" she had thought quite coldly; "and why
+should he have begun all of a sudden to hate me? Why should my
+words, my voice, my gestures even, exasperate him so profoundly? Of
+course he has stopped loving me, but why should that make him hate
+me? I stopped loving him, too, long ago, yet there is only
+indifference, not hate, in my heart."</p>
+<p>"You must go about with me more, dear," repeated Mrs. Fowler, in
+obedience to a vague but amiable instinct, which prompted her to
+shield George, to deceive Gabriella, to deny the truth of facts, to
+do anything on earth except acknowledge the actual situation in
+which she found herself. "Don't you think she ought to go about
+more, George?"</p>
+<p>"I don't care what she does," returned George brutally, while
+his blue eyes squinted in the old charming way from which all charm
+had departed. "I don't care&mdash;I don't care&mdash;" He checked
+himself, snapping his words in two with a virulent outburst of
+temper, and then, rising hurriedly, as his father entered the room,
+he left the table with his breakfast uneaten.</p>
+<p>"He's so nervous. I can't imagine what's the matter. I hope
+Burrows wasn't in the pantry. Did you say anything to hurt his
+feelings before you came down, Gabriella?" asked Mrs. Fowler,
+distractedly, with one eye on her daughter-in-law and the other on
+the pantry door, through which the discreet Burrows had disappeared
+at the opportune instant.</p>
+<p>"No, I haven't said anything that I can remember," answered
+Gabriella with calmness. It occurred to her that George's behaviour
+was hardly that of a man whose "feelings" had been wounded, but she
+made no audible record of her reflection; "and of course I'll go
+out with you if you want me to," she added, for she felt sincerely
+sorry for her mother-in-law, even though she had ruined George in
+his infancy. "I am going to the library to return a book, and we
+might pay some calls afterwards."</p>
+<p>"That's just what I was thinking," responded Mrs. Fowler,
+embarrassed, bewildered. Was it possible, she asked herself, that
+Gabriella had not noticed George's outrageous behaviour?</p>
+<p>But Gabriella did not "go about" with her mother-in-law that
+season, for a higher will than Mrs. Fowler's frustrated that lady's
+benevolent intentions. To a casual glance it would have seemed the
+merest accident which disturbed these felicitous plans, but such
+accidents, when Gabriella looked back on them afterwards, appeared
+to her to be woven into the very web and pattern of life. It was
+plainly incredible that her whole existence should be changed
+merely because Archibald was naughty, as incredible as the idea
+that Destiny should have used so small a medium for the
+accomplishment of its tragic designs.</p>
+<p>But Archibald had hardly reached the Park before he was brought
+home, resisting with all his strength, because he had given his
+shoes and stockings away; and the next ten minutes, while Gabriella
+gently reasoned with him on the pavement, were pregnant with
+consequences.</p>
+<p>"He's fierce, that's what he is," declared the nurse, who was
+Irish and militant. "He kicked me so I'm black and blue, ma'am, all
+over the shins, and every bit because I wouldn't let him pull off
+his shoes and socks and give 'em to a barefooted boy in the Park.
+You tell her, darlin'"&mdash;to Frances, who stood, bright-eyed and
+indignant, in her white fur coat and little fur cap which she wore
+drawn down tight over her curls&mdash;"you tell your mamma,
+darlin', you tell her how fierce and bold he was, and how he kicked
+me about the shins because I wouldn't let him take off his shoes
+and socks."</p>
+<p>"The poor boy wanted 'em! I won't wear 'em! I will give 'em to
+the poor boy!" screamed Archibald, furious, scowling, struggling in
+the restraining hold of his nurse. He was a robust, thick-set child
+of four years, with a thatch of dark-brown hair, and strange
+near-sighted brown eyes, behind spectacles which he had worn from
+the time he could walk.</p>
+<p>"What is it, Archibald? Tell me about it. Tell mother," pleaded
+Gabriella while he struggled desperately to escape from her tender
+grasp. "Who was the poor boy and where did you see him?"</p>
+<p>"He oughtn't to have been in the Park, ought he, mamma?"
+inquired Frances, who was guiltless of democratic tendencies.
+"Ragged people have no right to be in the Park, have they?"</p>
+<p>"Hush, darling, I want to hear what Archibald has to say. Tell
+me about him, Archibald. Shall you and I go out to look for
+him?"</p>
+<p>"If you do, he'll pull his shoes and socks right off again,"
+insisted Frances emphatically. "He had got one quite off and had
+given it to the boy before we saw him, and Nanny was obliged to go
+and take it back, and I had to hold Archibald while she put it on
+him. He screamed very loud and everybody stopped to ask what was
+the matter, and one old gentleman with a long beard, like Moses in
+the Bible, gave Archibald a little box of candy&mdash;he took it
+out of his pocket&mdash;but Archibald threw it away, and kept on
+hollerin' louder than ever&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"That's right, darlin', you tell her," urged nurse, a stout
+woman with a red face and three gold teeth in the front of her
+mouth.</p>
+<p>"I understand now. Don't tell any more, Fanny," said Gabriella.
+"Now, Archibald dear, will you stop crying and be good?"</p>
+<p>"Am," replied Archibald sullenly, twisting out of her hands.</p>
+<p>"Am what, darling?"</p>
+<p>"Am good."</p>
+<p>"Well, will you stop crying?"</p>
+<p>"Have."</p>
+<p>"Then what do you want? Shall we go back and look for the poor
+boy?"</p>
+<p>"Hadn't any shoes. Feet were red. Wanted to give him shoes,
+'cause I had plenty more at home. Nanny jerked him back. Hated
+Nanny. Hoped she would die. Hoped bears would eat her. Hoped tigers
+would eat her. Hoped lions would eat her. Hoped robins would cover
+her with leaves in the Park&mdash;"</p>
+<p>While he sobbed out his accusations against nurse, Gabriella,
+holding his hand tightly in hers, turned toward Fifth Avenue, and
+by the time he was pacified, they had walked several blocks
+together, with nurse and Fanny sedately bringing up the rear. Then,
+at last, having reasoned him alike out of his temper and his
+generosity, Gabriella retraced her steps, and entering the house
+with her latchkey, ran quickly up the stairs to the closed door of
+Mrs. Fowler's room. As she raised her hand to knock the sound of
+her own name reached her, and almost involuntarily she hesitated
+for an instant.</p>
+<p>"Yes, Gabriella is out. I saw her a minute ago on her way to the
+Park with the children."</p>
+<p>"Well, somebody ought to tell her, mother. I think it is
+perfectly outrageous to keep her in ignorance. Everybody is talking
+about it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Patty, you couldn't! How on earth could you tell her a
+thing like that?" wailed George's mother, and she went on with a
+plaintive sigh as Gabriella opened the door: "George was always so
+mad about beauty, and though Gabriella has a fine face, she isn't
+exactly&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Then, at the startling apparition of Gabriella, with her face
+paling slowly above her black furs and her large indignant eyes
+fixed on them both, Mrs. Fowler wavered and broke off with a
+pathetic clutch at the pleasantness which had entirely departed
+from her manner. "Why, Gabriella, I didn't know you had come in! I
+was just saying to Patty&mdash;" It was, as she said afterwards to
+her husband, exactly as if her mind had become suddenly blank. She
+couldn't to save her life think of a single word to add to her
+sentence, and all the time Gabriella was standing there, as white
+as a ghost, with her accusing eyes turning slowly from one to the
+other of them. "Somehow I just couldn't lie to her when she looked
+like that, and the truth seemed too dreadful," Mrs. Fowler added
+that night to Archibald. "Damn George!" was Mr. Fowler's fervent
+retort. "And it took me so by surprise I almost fainted, for I'd
+never in my life heard him swear before," his wife had commented
+later. "But aren't men strange? To think he knew how all the time
+and kept it to himself! I declare they are entirely too secretive
+for anything!"</p>
+<p>"I heard what you were saying when I knocked," began Gabriella,
+with perfect composure. "I don't quite know what it was about, but
+I think&mdash;I think&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"It was nothing, dear; Patty and I were gossiping," replied Mrs.
+Fowler, with an eagerness that was almost violent. "Oh, Patty, you
+wouldn't!"&mdash;for Patty had broken in, conquering and merciless,
+with the declaration: "If you don't tell Gabriella, mamma, I'm
+going to. It's outrageous, anyhow, I've always said so, the way
+people keep things from women. Gabriella has a right to know what
+everybody is saying."</p>
+<p>"Of course I've a right to know," rejoined Gabriella, with a
+firmness before which Mrs. Fowler felt herself gradually
+dissolving&mdash;"melting away" was the description she gave of her
+feeling. "If anybody has a right to know, I suppose I have. Of
+course, it's about George. I know that much, anyhow," she added
+quietly.</p>
+<p>"I don't believe it's half so bad as they say," protested Mrs.
+Fowler feverishly. "I don't believe he really keeps her. His father
+says he couldn't possibly do it on the allowance he gives him, and,
+you know, George doesn't make a cent himself&mdash;not a cent. He
+never supported himself in his life&mdash;"</p>
+<p>She paused breathlessly, with a bright and confident glance as
+if she had made a point&mdash;a minor one perhaps, but still a
+point&mdash;in George's favour. The jet fringe on her bosom, which
+had rattled furiously with her excited palpitations, became
+gradually quiet, and as she pressed her lips firmly with her
+handkerchief, which she had rolled into a ball, she appeared to be
+pressing her customary smile back into place.</p>
+<p>"It won't last, Gabriella," she began again very suddenly with
+renewed assurance. "These things never last, and I think Patty is
+quite wrong to insist upon telling you. Of course it is humiliating
+for a time, but&mdash;but"&mdash;she hesitated, and then brought
+out triumphantly&mdash;"he married very young, you know, and men
+aren't like women&mdash;there's no use pretending they are. Now
+when a woman loves a man&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But, you see, I don't love George," answered Gabriella, and her
+awful words seemed to reverberate through the horrified silence
+that surrounded her.</p>
+<p>"Not love him? O Gabriella! Of course, it's natural that you
+should feel angry and wounded, and that your pride should resent
+what looks like an affront to you; but you can't mean in your heart
+that you've got over caring. Women don't change so easily. Why,
+you're his wife&mdash;poor foolish boy that he is&mdash;and
+Florrie&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"So it's Florrie?" observed Gabriella, with a strangely
+dispassionate interest. It was queer, she reflected afterwards,
+that she had not felt the faintest curiosity about the woman.</p>
+<p>"I always suspected that there was something wrong about her,"
+pursued Mrs. Fowler, reassured by the knowledge that she was
+placing the blame where it belonged according to all the laws of
+custom and tradition. "I must say I never liked her manner and her
+way of dressing, and she made eyes at every man she was introduced
+to&mdash;even at Archibald&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Well, I didn't believe there was any real harm in her," said
+Gabriella, in a tone she might have used at one of her
+mother-in-law's luncheons. She was still standing near the door, in
+the very spot where she had paused at her entrance, with her head
+held high above the black fur at her throat, and one gloved hand
+playing with a bit of cord on the end of her muff. She could not
+possibly have taken it better. Bad as the situation was, it might
+have been a hundred times worse except for Gabriella's composure,
+thought Mrs. Fowler discreetly, adding with an inexplicable regret,
+that in her youth women were different. Yes, they had shown more
+feeling then, though they had behaved perhaps less well in a
+crisis. In spite of her gratitude&mdash;and she was sincerely
+grateful to her daughter-in-law for not making a scene&mdash;she
+became conscious presently that she was beginning to cherish an
+emotion not unlike resentment on George's account. That the
+discovery of George's faithlessness should be received so coolly by
+George's wife appeared almost an affront to him. Mrs. Fowler liked
+Gabriella, she was fond of her&mdash;and nobody could look in the
+girl's face and not see that she was a fine woman&mdash;but there
+were times, and this was one of them, when she thought her a little
+hard. Had Gabriella wept, had she raged, had she threatened
+Florrie's life or happiness, it might have been painful, but at
+least it would have been human; and above all things Mrs. Fowler
+felt that she liked women to be human.</p>
+<p>"Nothing that anybody says or does can excuse George," said
+Patty sternly. "He has behaved abominably, and if I were Gabriella,
+I'd simply wash my hands of him. I don't care if he is my brother,
+that doesn't make me blind, does it? If he were my husband," she
+concluded passionately, "I'd feel just the same way about it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you mustn't! Oh, Patty, hush, it's wicked! It's sinful!"
+moaned Mrs. Fowler, shutting her eyes, as if the sight of Patty's
+indignant loveliness gave her a headache. "Don't try to harden
+Gabriella's heart against him. Don't try to make her think she's
+really stopped loving him."</p>
+<p>Gabriella's answer to this outburst was a look which, as poor
+Mrs. Fowler said afterwards, "cut her to the heart." Backing weakly
+to a chair, the valiant little lady sat down suddenly, because she
+felt that her legs were giving way beneath the weight of her body.
+And, though she was unaware of its significance, her action was
+deeply symbolical of the failure of the old order to withstand the
+devastating advance of the new spirit. She felt vaguely that she
+wished women and things were both what they used to be; but this,
+since she had little imagination, was as far as she penetrated into
+the psychology of Gabriella's behaviour.</p>
+<p>"But, you see, you're making the mistake of thinking that I love
+George," said Gabriella, with a reasonableness which made Mrs.
+Fowler feel that she wanted to scream, "and I don't love
+him&mdash;I don't love him at all. I haven't loved him for a long
+time&mdash;not since the night I saw him drunk. How could I love a
+man I've seen drunk&mdash;disgustingly drunk&mdash;a man I couldn't
+respect? I'm not made that way, and I can't help it. Some women may
+be like that, but I'm not. I couldn't, even if I wanted to, love a
+man who has treated me as George has done. I don't see how any
+woman could&mdash;any woman with a particle of pride and
+self-respect. Of course I had to live with him after I married
+him," she finished abruptly. "Marriage isn't made for love. I used
+to think it was&mdash;but it isn't&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But, Gabriella, you don't mean&mdash;you can't&mdash;" Mrs.
+Fowler was really pitiable, for, after all, George was her son, and
+the ties of blood would not break so easily as the ties of
+marriage. In the depths of her humiliation she had almost convinced
+herself that she had never respected George, that she had never
+believed in him, forgetting the pride and adoration of her young
+motherhood. Whatever George did she could not change his relation
+to her&mdash;she could not shatter the one indissoluble bond that
+holds mankind together.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, you don't&mdash;you can't&mdash;" she repeated
+wildly.</p>
+<p>Then, as Gabriella turned quickly and left the room, a
+scene&mdash;she became conscious presently that she was beginning
+to cherish an emotion not unlike resentment on George's account.
+That the discovery of George's faithlessness should be received so
+coolly by George's wife appeared almost an affront to him. Mrs.
+Fowler liked Gabriella, she was fond of her&mdash;and nobody could
+look in the girl's face and not see that she was a fine
+woman&mdash;but there were times, and this was one of them, when
+she thought her a little hard. Had Gabriella wept, had she raged,
+had she threatened Florrie's life or happiness, it might have been
+painful, but at least it would have been human; and above all
+things Mrs. Fowler felt that she liked women to be human.</p>
+<p>"Nothing that anybody says or does can excuse George," said
+Patty sternly. "He has behaved abominably, and if I were Gabriella,
+I'd simply wash my hands of him. I don't care if he is my brother,
+that doesn't make me blind, does it? If he were my husband," she
+concluded passionately, "I'd feel just the same way about it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you mustn't! Oh, Patty, hush, it's wicked! It's sinful!"
+moaned Mrs. Fowler, shutting her eyes, as if the sight of Patty's
+indignant loveliness gave her a headache. "Don't try to harden
+Gabriella's heart against him. Don't try to make her think she's
+really stopped loving him."</p>
+<p>Gabriella's answer to this outburst was a look which, as poor
+Mrs. Fowler said afterwards, "cut her to the heart." Backing weakly
+to a chair, the valiant little lady sat down suddenly, because she
+felt that her legs were giving way beneath the weight of her body.
+And, though she was unaware of its significance, her action was
+deeply symbolical of the failure of the old order to withstand the
+devastating advance of the new spirit. She felt vaguely that she
+wished women and things were both what they used to be; but this,
+since she had little imagination, was as far as she penetrated into
+the psychology of Gabriella's behaviour.</p>
+<p>"But, you see, you're making the mistake of thinking that I love
+George," said Gabriella, with a reasonableness which made Mrs.
+Fowler feel that she wanted to scream, "and I don't love
+him&mdash;I don't love him at all. I haven't loved him for a long
+time&mdash;not since the night I saw him drunk. How could I love a
+man I've seen drunk&mdash;disgustingly drunk&mdash;a man I couldn't
+respect? I'm not made that way, and I can't help it. Some women may
+be like that, but I'm not. I couldn't, even if I wanted to, love a
+man who has treated me as George has done. I don't see how any
+woman could&mdash;any woman with a particle of pride and
+self-respect. Of course I had to live with him after I married
+him," she finished abruptly. "Marriage isn't made for love. I used
+to think it was&mdash;but it isn't&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But, Gabriella, you don't mean&mdash;you can't&mdash;" Mrs.
+Fowler was really pitiable, for, after all, George was her son, and
+the ties of blood would not break so easily as the ties of
+marriage. In the depths of her humiliation she had almost convinced
+herself that she had never respected George, that she had never
+believed in him, forgetting the pride and adoration of her young
+motherhood. Whatever George did she could not change his relation
+to her&mdash;she could not shatter the one indissoluble bond that
+holds mankind together.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, you don't&mdash;you can't&mdash;" she repeated
+wildly.</p>
+<p>Then, as Gabriella turned quickly and left the room, Mrs. Fowler
+rose stoically to her feet, adjusted her belt with a tremulous
+movement of her hands, and smiled bravely as she went to the mirror
+to put on her hat. Heartbroken and distraught of mind though she
+was, she submitted instinctively to the lifelong tyranny of
+appearances.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IIa" id="CHAPTER_IIa"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h3>A SECOND START IN LIFE</h3>
+<p>With deliberation Gabriella walked the length of the hall to her
+room, turned and locked the door after she had entered, and took
+off her hat and wraps and put them away in the closet. Her head was
+still carried high and her eyes were defiant and dark in the
+marble-like pallor of her face. Except for her burning eyes and the
+scarlet line of her tightly closed lips, she looked as still and as
+cold as a statue.</p>
+<p>"I'd rather die than have them know that it made any
+difference," she thought. "I'd rather die than have them know that
+I cared." Then sinking into a chair by the dressing-table, she laid
+her head on her arm and wept tears, not of wounded love, but of
+deep and passionate anger.</p>
+<p>She had spoiled her life! Because of her mad and headstrong
+folly, she had spoiled her life, and she was barely twenty-seven!
+Had she been the veriest fool she couldn't have done
+worse&mdash;she who had thought herself so sensible, so strong, so
+efficient! Jane couldn't have done worse, and yet she had always
+despised Jane for her weakness. But she had been as weak as Jane,
+she had been as unreasonable, she had been as incredibly
+sentimental and silly. And even in her folly she had irretrievably
+failed. She had made her choice, and yet she had not been able to
+keep the thing she had chosen. George had tired of her&mdash;here
+was the sharpest sting&mdash;a man had tired of her after a few
+months&mdash;had tired of her while she was still deeply in love
+with him. Her humiliation, while she sat there strangling her sobs,
+was so intense that it ran in little flames over her body. At the
+moment she was not angry with George, she was not even angry with
+Florrie. It was as if all the slumbering violence of her nature was
+aroused to a burning and relentless hatred of her own weakness.
+This emotion, which was so profound, so torrential, in its force
+that it seemed to shake the depths of her being, left room for no
+other feeling&mdash;for no other thought in her consciousness. She
+had but one life to live, and by her own fault, she had ruined it
+in its beginning.</p>
+<p>Then her mood changed, and she sat up, straight and stern, while
+she wiped her reddened eyelids with an impetuous and resolute
+gesture. No, she was not crushed; she would not allow herself even
+to be hurt. Her lot might be as sordid as Jane's, but she would
+make it different by the strength and the effectiveness of her
+resistance. She would never submit as Jane submitted; she would
+never become, through sheer inertia, a part of the ugliness that
+enveloped her. Thanks to the vein of iron in her soul she would
+never&mdash;no, not if she died fighting&mdash;become one of the
+victims of life.</p>
+<p>Going into the dressing-room, she bathed her eyes with cold
+water; and she was still drying them before the mirror when the
+children came in, flushed and blooming, with their hands in Miss
+Polly Hatch's. What splendid children they were, she thought,
+looking wistfully at their eager faces. Any father, any mother in
+the world, might be proud of them. Fanny, the elder, was like an
+angel in her white fur coat and pert little cap, with her short
+golden curls like bunches of yellow silk on her shoulders, and her
+blue eyes, as grave as a philosopher's, beaming softly under her
+thick jet-black lashes. She was not particularly bright; she was,
+for her age, an unconscionable snob; but no one could deny that she
+was as beautiful as an angel to look at.</p>
+<p>"Miss Polly wanted to kiss me, mamma, but I wouldn't," she said
+coolly as she examined a little bundle of sewing the seamstress had
+put down on the table. "I needn't kiss people if I don't want to,
+need I? Archibald doesn't like to kiss either. He's naughty about
+it sometimes when ladies ask him to. He doesn't like scratchin'.
+Isn't it funny to call kissing, 'scratchin'? He told me Miss Polly
+scratched him and he didn't like it. He is afraid of her because
+she is so ugly. Why are you ugly, Miss Polly? Couldn't you help it?
+Did God make you ugly just for fun? Why doesn't he make everybody
+pretty? I would if I were God. What is God's last name? Archibald
+says it is Walker. Is it Walker, mamma, and how does Archibald
+know? Who told him&mdash;"</p>
+<p>When at last she was suppressed and sent out of the room with
+the nurse, she went at a dancing step, turning to make faces at
+Archibald, who stood stolidly at his mother's knee, biting deep
+bites into a red apple Miss Polly had given him. He was not a
+handsome child, even Gabriella admitted that his spectacles spoiled
+his appearance; but he was remarkably intelligent for his four
+years, and he was so strong and sturdy that he had never had a
+day's illness in his life. His face was unusually thoughtful and
+expressive, and his eyes, in spite of the disfiguring glasses, were
+large, brown, and beautiful, with something of the luminous
+softness of Cousin Jimmy's. Though she could not remember her
+father, it pleased Gabriella to think that Archibald was like him,
+and Miss Polly declared, with conviction, that he was "already his
+living image." Of the two children, for some obscure reason which
+she could not define and which was probably rooted in instinct,
+Gabriella had the greater tenderness for her son; and though she
+denied this preference to herself, Mrs. Fowler and Miss Polly had
+both commented upon it. Even his temper, which was uncontrollable
+at times, endeared him to her, and the streak of savage in his
+nature seemed to awaken some dim ancestral memories in her
+brain.</p>
+<p>"Thank Miss Polly for the apple and run away to Fanny," said his
+mother, after she had held him pressed closely to her breast for a
+minute. While she did so, she felt, with profound sadness, that her
+whole universe had dwindled down to her children. Of all her
+happiness only her children remained to her.</p>
+<p>"Don't want to run," replied Archibald with beaming good humour.
+In his passion for brevity he eliminated pronouns whenever it was
+possible.</p>
+<p>"But Fanny is waiting for you."</p>
+<p>"Would rather stay with mother than go with Fanny and Mutton."
+That was another of his eccentricities. Just as he had insisted
+that God's "last name was Walker," so he had begun of his own
+accord, and for no visible reason, to call nurse "Mutton." He was
+always fitting names of his own invention to persons; and in his
+selection he was guided by a principle so obscure that Gabriella
+had never been able to discover its origin. Thus his grandmother
+from the first had been "Budd," and he had immediately started to
+call Miss Polly "Pang."</p>
+<p>"Don't you want to go back to the Park, Archibald? You must
+finish your walk."</p>
+<p>"Will the poor boy be there?" He never forgot anything. It was
+quite probable that he would inquire for "the poor boy" a year
+hence.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps. You might take him an apple and a penny."</p>
+<p>He stood gravely considering the plan, with one hand in his
+mother's and one on Miss Polly's knee.</p>
+<p>"I'll take Pang to nurse him," he said when he had decided
+against the suggestion of the apple and the penny. "He hasn't any
+nurse, and Fanny wouldn't like him to have hers. I'll take
+Pang."</p>
+<p>"But Pang isn't a nurse, dear. There, now, run to Fanny. Miss
+Polly lives so far away she can't stay very long."</p>
+<p>He went obediently, for he was usually amenable to his mother's
+commands, stopping only once at the door to ask if "Pang lived as
+far away as God and could she manage to get a message to Him about
+the poor boy needing shoes?"</p>
+<p>"I declare I can't make out that child to save my soul,"
+remarked Miss Polly as he shut the door carefully and ran down the
+hall to the nursery. "The more I study him the curiouser he seems
+to me. If he wan't so quick about some things you might think his
+wits were sort of addled&mdash;but they ain't, are they? Now,
+whatever do you reckon put the notion in his head to call me
+'Pang?"</p>
+<p>All the smiling, circular wrinkles in her face were working with
+amusement while her little black eyes twinkled like jet beads above
+the ruddy creases in her cheeks.</p>
+<p>"I can't imagine, for he must have made up the word for himself.
+But don't you think he is like father, Miss Polly? I love to hear
+you say so."</p>
+<p>"That child? Why, he's the very spit of yo' pa, Gabriella, and
+there ain't any two ideas about it. I thought so the very first
+time I ever saw him, and now that I come to think of it, it is
+exactly like yo' pa to be makin' up all kinds of foolish names out
+of nothin'. Yo' pa used to call me Poll Parrot, that he did."</p>
+<p>"Mother thinks Archibald is going to be very much like him. She
+saw him in the mountains last summer."</p>
+<p>"So she told me when I was down home. You ain't looking a bit
+well, Gabriella. You've got exactly the look Miss Letty Marshall
+had before she came down with heart complaint. The doctors were
+fussin' over her for weeks before they could find out what the
+trouble was, but I said all along it wan't nothin' in the world but
+a bruised heart, and sure enough that was just what they found out
+was the matter. You ain't had a feelin' of heart burn after you
+eat, have you? Sometimes it don't take you that way, though; you
+just begin to have palpitations when you go up and down stairs and
+then you start to wakin' up in the night with shortness of breath.
+That's the way my Aunt Lydy had it. You know I nursed her till she
+died, and I've seen her get right black in the face when she
+stooped to pick up a pin. It's her daughter Lydy that's waiting on
+old Mrs. Peyton now. You know Mrs. Peyton was feelin' kind of run
+down so her son Arthur&mdash;I call him Arthur to his face because
+I used to sew there when he wan't more'n knee high&mdash;well,
+Arthur said she'd have to have somebody to wait on her every minute
+and she thought she'd rather have Lydy than anybody else because
+Lydy was always so handy in a sickroom. That was six months ago,
+and Lydy's been stayin' on there ever since. She says there ain't
+anybody on earth like Mr. Arthur, and she never could make out why
+you didn't marry him. He ain't ever had an eye for anybody but you,
+and he's got yo' picture&mdash;the one in the white dress&mdash;on
+his bureau and he keeps a rose in a vase before it all the time.
+That ain't much like a man, but then there always was a heap of a
+girl in Arthur in little ways, wan't there?"</p>
+<p>"I wonder why I didn't marry him?" said Gabriella softly; and
+not until Miss Polly answered her, was she aware that she had
+spoken aloud. In her spiritual reaction from the grosser reality of
+passion, the delicacy and remoteness of Arthur's love borrowed the
+pious and mystic qualities of religious worship. She had seen the
+sordid and ugly sides of sex; and she felt now a profound disgust
+for the emotion which drew men and women together&mdash;for the
+light in the eyes, the touch of the lips, the clinging of the
+hands. Once she had idealized these things into love itself; now
+the very memory of them filled her with repulsion. She still wanted
+love, but a love so pure, so disembodied, so ethereal that it was
+liberated from the dominion of flesh. In the beginning, as a girl,
+she had accepted love as the supreme good, as the essential
+reality; now, utterly disillusioned, she asked herself: "What is
+there left in life? What is the thing that really counts, after
+all? What is the possession that makes all the striving worth while
+in the end? At twenty-seven love is over for me, and if love is
+over, what remains to fill the rest of my life? There must be
+something else&mdash;there must be a reality somewhere which is
+truer, which is profounder, than love." This, she knew, was the
+question which neither tradition nor custom could answer. Religion,
+perhaps, might have helped her; but it was characteristic of her
+generation that she should give religion hardly a thought as a
+possible solution of the problem of life. She wanted substance,
+facts, experience; she wanted to examine, to analyze, to discover;
+and it was just here that religion hopelessly failed her as a
+guide. Faith she had had in her cradle&mdash;faith in life, faith
+in love, faith in herself; and it was faith that had brought her to
+this bleak disenchantment of spirit. No, she wanted knowledge now,
+not faith; she wanted truth, not illusion.</p>
+<p>"Well, you never can tell about a thing like that," Miss Polly
+was saying in her sprightly way, quite as if she were discussing
+the pattern of a dress or the stitching of a seam. "It was feelin',
+I reckon, and feelin' is one of the things nobody can count on. But
+you did mighty well, even if you didn't marry Arthur. I saw Mr.
+George downtown yesterday, when I went around to Stern's to match
+the edging for a baby dress, and I thought to myself I'd seldom
+seen a handsomer piece of flesh than he was. He was walkin' along
+up Fifth Avenue with Florrie Spencer&mdash;I'll always call her
+Florrie Spencer I don't care how many times she marries&mdash;and
+everybody in the street turned right plumb round to look at 'em.
+She's prettier than she ever was, ain't she? And such a fit as her
+dress was! One of them trailin' black things that fit as tight as
+wax over the hips and flares out all round the feet. She was
+holdin' up her skirts to show her feet, I reckon, and her collar
+was so high behind her ears, she could hardly turn her head to look
+at Mr. George. But I never saw anybody with more style&mdash;no,
+not if it was that Mrs. Pletheridge who is everlastingly in the
+Sunday papers. I declare Florrie's waist didn't look much bigger
+round than the leg of that table&mdash;honestly it didn't&mdash;and
+her hat was perched on a bandeau so high that you could see the new
+sort of way she'd gone and had her hair crimped&mdash;they call it
+Marcellin' up here, don't they?"</p>
+<p>"Was she with George?" asked Gabriella indifferently.</p>
+<p>"They were goin' to some restaurant or another for tea, I
+reckon, and they certainly were a fine-lookin' pair. I wish you
+could have seen 'em. Not that you wouldn't have been a match for
+'em," she added consolingly. "You and Mr. George look mighty well
+when you're together. You're just on a level, and if you could
+manage to tighten yo' corset a little mite at the waist, and hold
+yo'self with that bend out at the back the way Florrie does, you'd
+have pretty near as fine a figure as she has. Ain't it funny," she
+added irrelevantly, "but I was just studyin' last night about the
+way yo' ma used to say that all yo' folks married badly. I reckon
+she got that idea along of yo' pa's kin. You don't recollect much
+about 'em, but one of yo' pa's brothers married a woman who went
+clean deranged inside of a year and tried to kill him. Then there
+was yo' Cousin Nelly Harrison&mdash;she married badly, or only
+middlin' well anyway. There certainly was a lot of 'em when you
+come to think&mdash;not countin' Jane and Mr. Charley, and I can't
+help what happens," she concluded sentimentally, "I ain't ever
+goin' back on Mr. Charley&mdash;not after the way he sent me two
+loads of coal the winter I was laid up with rheumatism and couldn't
+work. Well, it's about time for me to be goin', Gabriella. If you
+want me for anything, you just drop me a line to say so. William's
+children are gettin' so big, I can come out for the day 'most any
+time now, and if William's courtin' goes on all right, I reckon he
+won't be wantin' me much longer. He's been waitin' on a young woman
+right steady for more'n six months, and it wouldn't surprise me a
+bit if something was to come of it befo' summer."</p>
+<p>"Then you'd go South again, wouldn't you?" There was a wistful
+sound in Gabriella's voice as she put the question. Miss Polly was
+a tiresome person, but at least she was faithful, and long habit
+had established a bond of tolerance, if not of affection, between
+them. In the last few months Gabriella had grown to look upon her
+as the one living association with her childhood, and she was so
+lonely that she dreaded to sever the single tie with the past that
+still remained to her. "I believe she'd work her fingers to the
+bone for me, and, of course, she can't help being so garrulous,"
+she thought.</p>
+<p>"I reckon I will, if it comes to that, but I'd hate like
+anything to leave you and the children," answered Miss Polly. "I
+feel somehow as if I belonged up here with you all, and I've grown
+real fond of Archibald."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I'd hate to give you up," said Gabriella, as she let her
+go and turned back again into the room. Her brain had worked
+quickly while Miss Polly was talking, and the undercurrent of
+gossip had helped, rather than retarded, the clearness and rapidity
+of her thoughts. All her weakness, all her anger had passed. She
+saw the situation without exaggeration and without illusion, for
+she had made her decision in the few minutes between the entrance
+and the departure of the seamstress. The embittering memories of
+her life with George were submerged in the invigorating waves of
+energy that flooded her being. Her inert body responded to the
+miraculous restoration of her spirit; and, while she walked swiftly
+from the door to the window, she had a sensation of lightness and
+ease as if she had just awakened from a refreshing sleep. For seven
+years all the strength of her character had been drained by the
+supreme function of motherhood; but now her children had ceased to
+need the whole of her life, and she was free to belong at least in
+part to herself&mdash;free to enter unrestricted into the broader
+human activities. And, above all, she was free from George. She had
+escaped from the humiliating bondage of her marriage; for, since he
+had broken the tie between them, she realized with a strange, an
+almost unnatural, exhilaration, how little except duty&mdash;how
+little except the bare legal husk of the marriage
+contract&mdash;still held her to him. She had loved him once, but
+she loved him no longer, and she resolved passionately that she
+would not allow her life to be spoiled because of a single mistake.
+Seven years were lost out of her youth, it was true, but those
+years had given her her children, and so they were not wasted in
+spite of the mistakes she had made, of the shame she had suffered.
+Judged simply as a machine she was of greater value at twenty-seven
+than she had been at twenty, and a part of this value lay in her
+deeper knowledge of life. She had had her adventure, and she was
+cured forever of adventurous desires. Her imagination, as well as
+her body, was firmer, harder, more disciplined than it had been in
+her girlhood; and if her vision of the universe was less
+sympathetic, it was also less sentimental. The bluest eyes in the
+world, she told herself sternly, could not trouble her fancy
+to-day, nor could the wildest romance quicken her pulses.</p>
+<p>A wagon, filled with blue and white hyacinths, passed by in the
+street, and while she watched it, there flashed into her mind, with
+the swiftness of light, a memory of the evening when she had broken
+her engagement to Arthur. All her life he had loved her, and, but
+for an accident, she might have married him. If she had not seen
+George at Florrie's party&mdash;if she had not seen him under a
+yellow lantern, with the glow in his eyes, and a dreamy waltz
+floating from the arbour of roses at the end of the garden&mdash;if
+this had not happened, she would have married Arthur instead of
+George, and her whole life would have been different. Because of a
+single instant, because of a chance meeting, she had wrecked the
+happiness of three lives. Now, when the bloom had dropped from her
+love, it was impossible for her to gather the withered leaves and
+bare stems in her hands and find any fragrance about them; it was
+impossible for her to understand how or why she had followed so
+fleeting an impulse. People had told her that love lasted forever,
+yet she knew that her emotion for George was so utterly dead that
+there was no warmth left in the ashes. It had all been so vivid
+once, and now it was as dull and colourless as the dust drifting
+after the blue and white hyacinths.</p>
+<p>From the trail of dust and the fragrance of the hyacinths,
+Arthur's face floated up to her, grave, gentle, and thin-featured,
+with its look of detached culture, of nameless distinction. She
+recalled the colour of his eyes, as clear and cool as running
+water, his sensitive lips under the thin, brown moustache, and his
+slender, aristocratic hands, with their touch as soft and as tender
+as a woman's. "He had intellect&mdash;he had culture&mdash;I
+suppose these are the things that really matter," she thought, for
+George, she knew, possessed neither of these qualities. And, as she
+remembered Arthur, she was stirred, not by tenderness, but by a
+passionate gratitude. He had loved her, and by loving her, he had
+saved her pride from defeat. In the hour of her deepest
+humiliation, she found comfort in the knowledge of his bleeding
+heart, of his tragic and beautiful loyalty; for though she was
+strong enough to live without love, she was not strong enough to
+live with the thought that no man had ever loved her.</p>
+<p>For a few minutes she allowed her fancy to play with the
+comforting memory of Arthur's devotion&mdash;with the image of her
+photograph on his bureau and the single rose in the vase he kept
+always before it. "But for an accident I might have loved him," she
+said, and the thought of this love which might have been sent a
+wave of sweetness to her heart. "I might have loved him and been
+happy." The vision was so dangerously beautiful that she put it
+resolutely away from her, and told herself, with an effort to be
+philosophical, that there was no use whatever in regretting the
+past, and since love was over for her, she must set her mind to
+solve the problem of work. "I've got my life to live," she said
+with stoical calmness, "and however bad it is I've nobody to blame
+for it but myself."</p>
+<p>Then, because she had only one talent, however small, she
+changed her dress, and went out to ask for a position as designer,
+saleswoman, or milliner in the house of Dinard.</p>
+<p>The Irish woman, voluble, painted, powdered, bewigged, and with
+the remains of her handsome figure laced into a black satin gown,
+nodded her false golden locks and smiled an ambiguous smile when
+she heard the explanation of young Mrs. Fowler's afternoon
+call.</p>
+<p>"But, no, it ees impossible," she protested, forgetting her
+foreign shrug and preserving with difficulty the trace of an
+accent. Then, becoming suddenly natural as she realized that no
+immediate profit was to be derived from affectation, she added
+decisively, "you have no training, and I have quite as many
+salesladies as I need at this season. Not that you are not chic,"
+she hastened to conclude, "not that you would not in appearance be
+an adornment to any establishment."</p>
+<p>"I am willing to do anything," said Gabriella, pressing her
+point with characteristic tenacity. "I want to learn, you know, I
+want to learn everything I possibly can. You yourself told me that
+I had a natural gift for designing, and I am anxious to turn it to
+some account. I believe I can make a very good milliner, and I want
+to try."</p>
+<p>"But what would Madame Fowler, your mother-in-law, say to this?
+Surely no one would want to earn her living unless she was obliged
+to."</p>
+<p>For Madame had known life, as she often remarked, and the
+knowledge so patiently acquired had gone far to confirm her natural
+suspicion of human nature. She had got on, as she observed in
+confidential moments, by believing in nobody; and this skepticism,
+which was fundamental and rooted in principle, had inspired her
+behaviour not only to her patrons, but to her husband, her
+children, her domestic servants, her tradespeople, and the
+policeman at the corner. Thirty years ago she had suspected the
+entire masculine world of amorous designs upon her person; to-day,
+secretly numbering her years at sixty-two, and publicly
+acknowledging forty-five of them, she suspected the same world of
+equally active, if less romantic, intentions regarding her purse.
+And if she distrusted men, she both distrusted and despised women.
+She distrusted and despised them because they were poor workers,
+because they were idlers by nature, because they allowed themselves
+to be cheated, slighted, underpaid, underfed, and oppressed, and,
+most of all, she despised them because they were the victims of
+their own emotions. Love was all very well, she was accustomed to
+observe, as a pleasurable pursuit, but, as with any other pursuit,
+when it began to impair the appetite and to affect the quality and
+the quantity of one's work, then a serious person would at once
+contrive to get rid of the passion. And Madame prided herself with
+reason upon being a strictly serious person. She had been through
+the experience of love innumerable times; she had lost four
+husbands, and, as she pointed out with complacency, she was still
+living.</p>
+<p>In the dubious splendour of her showrooms, which were curtained
+and carpeted in velvet, and decorated with artificial rose-bushes
+flowering magnificently from white and gold jardini&egrave;res, six
+arrogant young women, in marvellously fitting gowns of black satin,
+strolled back and forth all day long, or stood gracefully, with the
+exaggerated curve of the period, awaiting possible customers.
+Though they were as human within as Madame Dinard&mdash;and beneath
+her make-up she was very human indeed&mdash;nothing so variable as
+an expression ever crossed the waxlike immobility of their faces;
+and while they trailed their black satin trains over the rich
+carpets, amid the lustrous piles of silks and velvets which covered
+the white and gold tables, they appeared to float through an
+atmosphere of eternal enchantment. Watching them, Gabriella
+wondered idly if they could ever unbend at the waist, if they could
+ever let down those elaborate and intricate piles of hair. Then she
+overheard the tallest and most arrogant of them remark, "I'm just
+crazy about him, but he's dead broke," and she realized that they
+also belonged to the unsatisfied world of humanity.</p>
+<p>Madame, who had slipped away to answer the telephone, came
+rustling back, and sank, wheezing, into a white and gilt chair,
+which was too small to contain the whole of her ample person.
+Though she had spoken quite sharply at the telephone, her voice was
+mellifluous when she attuned it to Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"That gown is perfect on you," she remarked in honied accents.
+"It was one of my best models last season, and as I said before,
+Madame, you are so fortunate as to wear your clothes with a grace."
+She was urbane, but she was anxious to be rid of her, this young
+Mrs. Fowler could see at a glance. "Your head is well set on your
+shoulders, and that is rare&mdash;very rare! It would surprise you
+to know how few women have heads that are well set on their
+shoulders. Yes, I understand. You wish to learn, but not to make a
+living. That is very good, for the only comfortable way for a woman
+to make her living is to marry one&mdash;a man is the only
+perfectly satisfactory means of livelihood. I tell this to my
+daughter, who wishes to go on the stage. If you are looking for
+pleasure, that is different, but when you talk of a
+living&mdash;well, there is but one way to insure it, and that is
+to marry a man who is able to provide it&mdash;either as allowance
+or as alimony. The best that a woman can do gives her only bread
+and meat&mdash;an existence, not a living. Only a man can provide
+one with the essential things&mdash;with clothes and jewels and
+carriages and trips to Europe. These are the important things in
+life, and what woman was ever able to procure these except from a
+man?"</p>
+<p>Her face, so thickly covered with rouge and liquid powder that
+it was as expressionless as a mask, turned its hollow eyes on a
+funeral which was slowly passing in the street; and though her
+creed was hardly the kind to fortify one's spiritual part against
+the contemplation of death, she surveyed the solemn procession as
+tranquilly as any devoted adherent of either religion or philosophy
+could have done. Not a shadow passed over her fantastic mockery of
+youth as she glanced back at her visitor.</p>
+<p>"But you have worked&mdash;you have supported yourself,"
+insisted Gabriella with firmness.</p>
+<p>"Myself and six children, to say nothing of three husbands. Yes,
+I supported three of my four husbands, but what did I get out of
+it?" replied Madame, shrugging her ample shoulders. "What was there
+in it for me? Since we are talking freely, I may say that I have
+worked hard all my life, and I got nothing out of it that I
+couldn't have got with much less trouble by a suitable marriage. Of
+course this is not for my girls to hear. I don't tell them this,
+but it is true nevertheless. Men should do the work of the world,
+and they should support women; that is how God intended it, that is
+according to both nature and religion; any priest will say as much
+to you." And she, who had defied both God and Nature, wagged her
+false golden head toward the funeral procession.</p>
+<p>"Yet you have been successful. You have built up a good
+business. The work has repaid you."</p>
+<p>"A woman's work!" She snapped her gouty fingers with a playful
+gesture. "Does a woman's work ever repay her? Think of the
+pleasures I have missed in my life&mdash;the excursions, the
+theatres, the shows. All these I might have had if I hadn't shut
+myself up every day until dark. And now you wish to do this! You
+with your youth, with your style, with your husband!"</p>
+<p>She protested, she pleaded, she reasoned, but in the end
+Gabriella won her point by the stubborn force of her will. Madame
+would take her for a few weeks, a few months, a few years, as long
+as she cared to stay and gave satisfaction. Madame would have her
+taught what she could learn, would discover by degrees the natural
+gifts and the amount of training already possessed by young Mrs.
+Fowler. Young Mrs. Fowler, on the other hand, must "stand around"
+when required in the showrooms (it was just here that Gabriella won
+her victory); she must assist at the ordering of gowns, at the
+selections, and while Madame's patrons were fitted, young Mrs.
+Fowler must be prepared to assume graceful attitudes in the
+background and to offer her suggestions with a persuasive air.
+Suggestions, even futile ones, offered in a charming voice from a
+distinguished figure in black satin had borne wonderful results in
+Madame's experience.</p>
+<p>"I began that way myself, Mrs. Fowler. You may not believe it,
+but I was once slenderer than you are&mdash;my waist measured only
+nineteen inches and my bust thirty-six&mdash;just the figure a man
+most admires. The result was, you see, that I have had four
+husbands, though it is true that I supported three of them, and it
+is always easy to marry if one provides the support. Men are like
+that. It is their nature. Yes, I began that way with little
+training, but much natural talent, and a head full of ideas. If one
+has ideas it is always possible to become a success, but they are
+rarer even than waists measuring nineteen inches. And I had charm,
+though you might not believe it now, for charm does not wear. But I
+made my way up from the bottom, first as errand girl, at the age of
+ten, and I made it, not by work, for I could never handle a needle,
+but by ideas. They were once plentiful, and now they are so
+scarce," she broke off with a sigh of resignation which seemed to
+accept every fact of experience except the fact of age. "It was a
+hard life, but it was life, after all. One is not put here to be
+contented, or one would dread death too much for the purpose of
+God." In spite of her uncompromising materialism, she was not
+without an ineradicable streak of superstition which she would
+probably have called piety.</p>
+<p>"I am ready to begin at once&mdash;to-morrow," said Gabriella,
+and she added without explanation, obeying, perhaps, an intuitive
+feeling that to explain a statement is to weaken it, "and I should
+like to be called by my maiden name while I am here&mdash;just Mrs.
+Carr, if you don't mind."</p>
+<p>To this request Madame agreed with effusion, if not with
+sincerity. For her own part she would have preferred to speak of
+her saleswoman as young Mrs. Fowler; but she reflected comfortably
+that many of her patrons would know young Mrs. Fowler by sight at
+least, and to the others she might conveniently drop a word or two
+in due season. To drop a word or two would provide entertainment
+throughout the length of a fitting; and, for the rest, the mystery
+of the situation had its charm for the romantic Irish strain in her
+blood. The prospect of securing both entertainment and mystery at
+the modest expenditure of fifteen dollars a week impressed her as
+very good business, for she combined in the superlative degree the
+opposite qualities of romance and economy. To be sure, except for
+the advertisement she afforded and the gossip she provided, young
+Mrs. Fowler might not prove to be worth even her modest salary; but
+there was, on the other hand, a remote possibility that she might
+turn out to be gifted, and Madame would then be able to use her
+inventiveness to some purpose before the gifted one discovered her
+value. In any case, Madame was at liberty to discharge her with a
+day's notice, and her salary would hardly be increased for three
+months even should she persist in her eccentricity and develop a
+positive talent for dressmaking. And if young Mrs. Fowler could do
+nothing else, Madame reflected as they parted, she could at least
+receive customers and display models with an imposing, even an
+aristocratic, demeanour.</p>
+<p>To receive Madame's customers and display Madame's models were
+the last occupations Gabriella would have chosen had she been able
+to penetrate Madame's frivolous wig to her busy brain and detect
+her prudent schemes for the future; but the girl was sick of her
+dependence on George's father, and, in the revolt of her pride, she
+would have accepted any honest work which would have enabled her to
+escape from the insecurity of her position. Of her competence to
+earn a living, of her ability to excel in any work that she
+undertook, of the sufficiency and soundness of her resources, she
+was as absolutely assured as she had been when she entered the
+millinery department of Brandywine &amp; Plummer. If Madame,
+starting penniless, had nevertheless contrived, through her native
+abilities, to support three husbands and six children, surely the
+capable and industrious Gabriella might assume smaller burdens with
+the certainty of moderate success. It was not, when one considered
+it, the life which one would have chosen, but who, since the world
+began, had ever lived exactly the life of his choice? Many women,
+she reflected stoically, were far worse off than she, since she
+started not only with a modicum of business experience (for surely
+the three months with Brandywine &amp; Plummer might weigh as that)
+but with a knowledge of the world and a social position which she
+had found to be fairly marketable. That Madame Dinard would have
+accepted an unknown and undistinguished applicant for work at a
+salary of fifteen dollars a week she did not for an instant
+imagine. This inadequate sum, she concluded with a touch of ironic
+humour, represented the exact value in open market of her marriage
+to George.</p>
+<p>In the front room, where a sparse mid-winter collection of hats
+ornamented the scattered stands, she stopped for a few minutes to
+inspect, with a critical eye, the dingy array. "I wonder what makes
+them buy so many they can't sell?" she said half aloud to the model
+at which she was gazing. "Nobody would wear these
+hats&mdash;certainly nobody who could afford to buy Parisian
+models. I could design far better hats than these, I myself, and if
+I were the head of the house I should never have accepted any of
+them, no matter who bought them. I suppose, after all, it's the
+fault of the buyer, but it's a waste&mdash;it's not economy."</p>
+<p>Lifting a green velvet toque trimmed with a skinny white ostrich
+feather from the peg before which she was standing, she surveyed
+the august French name emblazoned in gold on the lining.
+"Everything isn't good that comes from Paris," she thought, with a
+shrug which was worthy of Madame at her best. "Why, I wonder, can't
+Americans produce 'ideas' themselves? Why do we always have to
+depend on the things the French send over to us? Half the hats and
+gowns Madame has aren't really good, and yet she makes people pay
+tremendous prices for things she knows are bad and undistinguished.
+All that ought to be changed, and if I ever succeed, if I ever
+catch on, I am going to change it." An idea, a whole flock of
+ideas, came to her while she stood there with her rapt gaze on the
+green velvet toque, which nobody had bought, and which she knew
+would shortly be "marked down," august French name included, from
+forty to fifteen and from fifteen to five dollars. Her constructive
+imagination was at work recreating the business, and she saw it in
+fancy made over and made right from the bottom&mdash;she saw
+Madame's duplicity succeeded by something of Brandywine &amp;
+Plummer's inflexible honesty, and the flimsy base of the structure
+supplanted by a solid foundation of credit. For she had come often
+enough to Dinard's to discern the slipshod and unsystematic methods
+beneath the ornate and extravagant surface. Her naturally quick
+powers of observation had detected at a glance conditions of which
+the elder Mrs. Fowler was never aware. To sell gowns and hats at
+treble their actual value, to cajole her customers into buying what
+they did not want and what did not suit them, to give inferior
+goods, inferior workmanship, inferior style wherever they would be
+accepted, and to get always the most money for the least possible
+expenditure of ability, industry, and honesty&mdash;these were the
+fundamental principles, Gabriella had already discovered, beneath
+Madame's flourishing, but shallow-rooted, prosperity. Brandywine
+&amp; Plummer did not carry Parisian models; their shop was not
+fashionable in the way that the establishment of a New York
+dressmaker and milliner must be fashionable; but the standard of
+excellence in all things excepting style was far higher in the old
+Broad Street house in the middle 'nineties than it was at Madame
+Dinard's during the early years of the new century. Quality had
+been essential in every hat that went from Brandywine &amp;
+Plummer's millinery department; and Gabriella, deriving from a
+mother who worked only in fine linen, rejected instinctively the
+cheap, the tawdry, and the inferior. She had heard a customer
+complain one day of the quality of the velvet on a hat Madame had
+made to order; and pausing to look at the material as she went out,
+she had decided that the most prosperous house in New York could
+not survive many incidents of that deplorable sort. To be sure,
+such material would not have been supplied to Mrs. Pletheridge, or
+even to the elder Mrs. Fowler, who, though Southern, was always
+particular and very often severe; but here again, since this cheap
+hat had been sold at a high price, was a vital weakness in Madame's
+business philosophy.</p>
+<p>On the whole, there were many of Madame's methods which might be
+improved; and when Gabriella passed through the ivory and gold
+doorway into the street, she had convinced herself that she was
+pre&euml;minently designed by Nature to undertake the necessary
+work of improvement. The tawdriness she particularly
+disliked&mdash;the trashy gold and ivory of the decorations, the
+artificial rose-bushes from which the dust was never removed, the
+sumptuous velvet carpets which were not taken up in the summer.</p>
+<p>While she was crossing the street a man joined her; and glancing
+up as soon as she was clear of the traffic, she saw that it was
+Judge Crowborough. In the last seven years her dislike for him had
+gradually disappeared, and though she had never found him
+attractive, she had grown to accept the general estimate of his
+character and ability. A man so gifted ought not to be judged as
+severely as poorer or less actively intelligent mortals; and as
+long as other men did not judge him, she felt no inclination to
+usurp so unfeminine a prerogative. He had always been kind to her,
+and she understood now from his manner that he meant to be still
+kinder. It occurred to her at once that he knew of George's
+infatuation for Florrie, and that he was chivalrously extending to
+George's wife a sympathy which he would probably have withheld in
+such circumstances from his own. Had it been possible she would
+have liked to explain to him that in her case his sympathy was not
+needed; but she realized, with resentment, that one of her most
+galling burdens would be the wasted pity which her unfortunate
+situation would inspire in the friends of the family. Social
+conventions made it impossible for her to tell the world, including
+Judge Crowborough, that George's infidelity was a matter of slight
+importance to her, since it struck only at her pride, not at her
+heart. Her pride, it is true, had suffered sharply for an hour; but
+so superficial was the wound that the distraction of seeking work
+had been almost sufficient to heal it.</p>
+<p>"A most extraordinary day for January," remarked the judge as
+they reached a corner. "You hardly need your furs, the air is so
+mild."</p>
+<p>Overhead small, birdlike clouds drifted in flocks across a sky
+of changeable brightness, and the wind, blowing past the tray of a
+flower vendor at the corner, was faintly scented with violets. It
+was one of those rare days when happiness seems as natural as the
+wind or the sunlight, when the wildest dreams appear not too wild
+to come true in reality, when one hopes by instinct and believes,
+not with the reason, but with the blood. To Gabriella, forgetting
+her humiliation, it was a day when life for the sake of the mere
+act of living&mdash;when life, in spite of disappointment and loss
+and treachery and shame, was enough to set the heart bounding with
+happiness. For she was one of those who loved life, not for what it
+brought to her of pleasure, but for what it was in itself.</p>
+<p>"Yes, it is a lovely afternoon," she answered, and added
+impulsively: "It is good to be alive, isn't it?" She had forgotten
+George, but even if she had remembered him, it would have made
+little difference. For six years, not for a few hours, George had
+been lost to her; and in six years one has time to forget almost
+anything.</p>
+<p>The judge's answer to this was a look which penetrated like a
+flash of light into her brain. By this light she read all that he
+thought of her, and she saw that he was divided between admiration
+of her spirit and an uneasy suspicion of its perfect propriety.
+Tier offence, she knew, was that, being by all the logic of facts
+an unhappy wife, she should persist so stubbornly in denying the
+visible evidence of her unhappiness. Had her denial been merely a
+pretence, it would, according to his code, have appeared both
+natural and womanly; but the conviction that she was sincere, that
+she was not lying, that she was not even tragically "keeping up an
+appearance," increased the amazement and suspicion with which he
+had begun to regard her. He walked on thoughtfully at her side,
+fingering the end of his long yellowish-gray moustache, and bending
+his sleepy gaze on the pavement. When he was thinking, he always
+looked as if he were falling asleep, and he seldom made a remark,
+even to a woman, without thinking it over. Into his small
+steel-gray eyes, surrounded by purplish and wrinkled puffs of skin,
+there crept the cautious and secretive look he wore at directors'
+meetings, while a furtive smile flickered for an instant across his
+loose mouth under the drooping ends of his moustache. His ungainly
+body, with its curious suggestion of over-ripeness, of waning
+power, straightened suddenly as if in reaction from certain
+destructive processes within his soul. Though he was only just
+passing his prime, he had lived so rapidly that he bore already the
+marks of age in his face and figure.</p>
+<p>"Yes, it's good to be alive," he assented, for there was nothing
+in either his philosophy or his experience to contradict this
+simple statement. "I've always maintained, by the way, that
+happiness is the chief of the virtues."</p>
+<p>For an instant Gabriella looked at the sky; then turning her
+candid eyes to his, she answered: "Happiness and courage. I put
+courage first&mdash;before everything."</p>
+<p>Her gaze dropped, but not until she had seen his look change and
+the slightly cynical smile&mdash;the smile of one who has examined
+everything and believes in nothing&mdash;fade from his lips. She
+had touched some chord deep down within him of which he had long
+ago forgotten even the existence&mdash;some echoed harmony of what
+had been perhaps the living faith of his youth.</p>
+<p>"You're a gallant soul," he said briefly, and she wondered what
+it was that he knew, what it was that he was keeping back.</p>
+<p>At the corner where they parted, he stood for a few moments,
+holding her hand in his big, soft grasp while he looked down on
+her. The suspicion and the cynicism had gone from his face, and she
+understood all at once why people still trusted him, still liked
+him, notwithstanding his reputation, notwithstanding even his
+repulsiveness. He was all that&mdash;he was immoral, he was
+repulsive&mdash;but he was something else also&mdash;he was
+human.</p>
+<p>When she entered the house her first feeling was that the old
+atmosphere had returned, the old suspense, the old waiting, the old
+horror of impending calamity. A nervous dread made her hesitate to
+mount the steps, to go to her room, to inquire in a natural voice
+for the children. It was imaginary, of course, she assured herself,
+but it was very vivid as long as it lasted. Then she noticed that
+the usual order of the hall was disturbed, and when she rang,
+Burrows came, with a hurried, apologetic manner, after keeping her
+waiting. Mrs. Fowler's fur scarf hung on the massive oak post of
+the staircase; the cards in the little tray on the hail table were
+scattered about; and the petals of a yellow chrysanthemum were
+strewn over the carpet.</p>
+<p>Burrows, instead of explaining the confusion, appeared
+embarrassed when she questioned him, and spurred by a sharp
+foreboding, she ran up the stairs to her mother-in-law's
+sitting-room. At her entrance a trembling voice wailed in a tone of
+remonstrance:</p>
+<p>"Oh, Gabriella, have you been out?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I've been out. Mamma, what is the matter?"</p>
+<p>"I looked for you everywhere. Archibald has been here, but he
+has just gone out again. I have never seen him so deeply
+moved&mdash;so&mdash;so indignant&mdash;" Mrs. Fowler broke off,
+bit her lip nervously, and paused while she tried to swallow her
+sobs. Her hat lay on a chair at her side, and in her hands she held
+a pair of half-soiled white gloves, which she smoothed out on her
+knee, as if she were hardly aware of what she was doing. In her
+blue eyes, so like George's, there was an agonizing terror and
+suspense. Her usually florid face was pale to the lips; and this
+pallor appeared to accentuate the dark, faintly lined shadows
+beneath her eyes and the grayness of her rigidly waved hair.</p>
+<p>"Courage!" said Gabriella in a whisper to herself, and aloud she
+asked gently: "Dear mamma, what is it? Don't be afraid. I can bear
+it."</p>
+<p>"Archibald has ordered George out of the house. He&mdash;George,
+I mean&mdash;had given him his promise not to see Florrie again,
+and it seems that he&mdash;he broke it. There has been a dreadful
+scene. I never imagined that Archibald could be so angry. He was
+terrible&mdash;and he is ill anyway and in great trouble about his
+financial affairs. I have been worried to death about him for
+weeks. He says things are going so badly downtown that he can't
+stave off the crash any longer, and
+now&mdash;this&mdash;this&mdash;" She broke down utterly, burying
+her convulsed face in her hands, which even in the instant of
+horror and tragedy, Gabriella noticed, had been manicured since the
+morning. "George has gone&mdash;we think he has gone off with
+Florrie," she cried, "and he&mdash;he will never come back as long
+as Archibald lives."</p>
+<p>She was not thinking of Gabriella. True to the deepest instincts
+of her nature, she thought first of her son, then of her husband.
+It was not that she did not care for her daughter-in-law, did not
+sympathize; but the fact remained that Gabriella was only George's
+wife to her, while George was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone,
+soul of her soul. Though her choice was not deliberate, though it
+was unconscious and instinctive&mdash;nevertheless, she had chosen.
+At the crucial moment instinct had risen superior to reason, and
+she had chosen, not with her judgment, but with every quivering
+nerve and fibre of her being. Gabriella was right, but George was
+her son; and had it been possible to secure George's happiness by
+sacrificing the right to the wrong, she would have made that
+sacrifice without hesitation, without scruple, and without
+regret.</p>
+<p>"There's his father now," she whispered, lifting her disfigured
+face. "Oh, Gabriella, I believe it will kill me!"</p>
+<p>While Gabriella stood there waiting for George's father to
+enter, and listening to his slow, deliberate tread on the stairs,
+the heavy, laborious tread of a man who is uncertain of his
+strength, she remembered vividly, as if she were living it over
+again, the night she had waited by her fire to tell George that his
+first child was to be born. Many thoughts passed through her mind,
+and at last these thoughts resolved themselves into a multitude of
+crowding images&mdash;all distinct and vivid images of George's
+face. She saw his face as she had first seen and loved it, with its
+rich colouring, its blue-gray eyes, like wells of romance she had
+once thought, its look of poetry and emotion which had covered so
+much that was merely commonplace and gross. She saw him as he had
+looked at their marriage, as he had looked, bending over her after
+her first child was born, and then she saw him as he had parted
+from her that morning&mdash;flushed, sneering, a little coarsened,
+but still boyish, still charming. Well, it was all over now. It had
+been over so long that she had even ceased to regret it&mdash;for
+she was not by nature one of the women who could wear mourning for
+a lifetime.</p>
+<p>The door opened: Archibald Fowler came in very slowly; and the
+first sight of his face brought home to her with a shock the
+discovery that he was the one of them who had suffered most. He
+looked an old man; his gentle scholar's face had taken an ashen
+hue; and his eyes were the eyes of one who has only partially
+recovered from the blow that has prostrated him.</p>
+<p>"My dear child," he said; "my dear daughter," and laid his hand
+on her shoulder.</p>
+<p>She clung to him, feeling a passionate pity, not for herself,
+but for him. "You have too much to bear," she murmured caressingly.
+"You mustn't take it like this. You must try to get over it. For
+all our sakes you must try to get over it." The irony of it
+all&mdash;that she should be consoling her husband's father for her
+husband's desertion of her&mdash;did not appear to her until long
+afterwards. At the time she thought only that she&mdash;that
+somebody&mdash;must make the tragedy easier for him to bear.</p>
+<p>"Come and sit down, Archibald," said Mrs. Fowler pleadingly.
+"Let me give you a glass of sherry and a biscuit; you are too tired
+to talk."</p>
+<p>There was the old devotion in her manner, but there was also a
+new deference. For the first time in thirty years of marriage he
+had shown his strength to her, not his gentleness; for the first
+time he had opposed his will to hers in the cause of justice, and
+he had conquered her. In spite of her anguish, something of the
+romantic expectancy of her first love had returned to her heart and
+it showed in her softened voice, in her timid caresses, in her
+wistful eyes, which held a pathetic and startled brightness. He had
+triumphed in honour; and if her defeat had not involved George, she
+could almost have gloried in the completeness of her surrender.</p>
+<p>He sat down with the air of a man who is not entirely awake to
+his surroundings; and his wife, after ordering the sherry, hovered
+over him with the touching solicitude of one who is living for the
+moment in the shadow of memory. While he sipped the wine, he waited
+until Burrows' footsteps had passed down the staircase, and then
+said with his usual quietness:</p>
+<p>"There is something else, Evelyn, that I kept back. I couldn't
+tell you while you were so worried about George, but there is
+something else&mdash;"</p>
+<p>She caught the words from him eagerly, with a gesture almost of
+relief.</p>
+<p>"You mean it has come at last. I suspected it, and, oh,
+Archibald, I don't care&mdash;I don't care!"</p>
+<p>"There were several failures to-day in Wall Street, and&mdash;"
+He broke off as if he were too tired to go on, and added slowly
+after a moment: "I am too old to begin again. I'd like to go back
+home&mdash;to go back to the South for my old age. Yes, I'm
+old."</p>
+<p>But his wife was on her knees beside him, with her arms about
+his neck and her face hidden on his breast. "I don't care, I never
+cared," she said in a voice that was almost exultant. "We can be
+happy on so little&mdash;happier than we've ever been in our
+lives&mdash;just you and I to grow old together. We can go home to
+Virginia&mdash;to some small place and be happy. Happiness costs so
+little."</p>
+<p>Slipping away, Gabriella went into the hail, and passing her
+room, noiselessly pushed open the door of the nursery, where the
+children were sleeping. A night lamp was burning in one corner
+under a dark shade, and the nurse's knitting, a pile of white yarn,
+was lying on the table in the circle of green light, which was as
+soft as the glimmer of a glow-worm in a thicket. In their two
+little beds, separated by a strip of white rug, the children were
+sleeping quietly, with a wonderful freshness, like the dew of
+innocence, on their faces. Frances lay on her back, very straight
+and prim even in sleep, with the sheet folded neatly under her
+dimpled chin, her hands clasped on her breast, and her golden curls
+spread in perfect order over the lace-trimmed pillow. Her miniature
+features, framed in the dim gold of her hair, had the trite
+prettiness of an angel on a Christmas card; and beside her ethereal
+loveliness there was something gnome-like in the dark sturdiness of
+Archibald, who slept on his side, with his fists pressed tightly
+under the pillow, and the frown produced by near-sightedness still
+wrinkling his forehead. Though he was not beautiful, he showed
+already the promise of character in his face, and his personality,
+which was remarkably developed for a child of his age, possessed a
+singular charm. He was the kind of child people describe as "unlike
+other children." His temperament was made up of surprises, and this
+quality of unexpectedness inspired in his mother a devotion that
+was almost tragic in its intensity. Never had she loved the normal
+Frances Evelyn as she loved Archibald.</p>
+<p>As she looked down on them, sleeping so peacefully in the green
+light, a wave of sadness swept over her, and she thought of them
+suddenly as fatherless, impoverished, and unprotected, dependent on
+her untried labour for their lives and their happiness. Then,
+before the anxiety could take possession of her mind, she put it
+from her, and whispered, "Courage!" as she turned away and went out
+of the room.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IIIa" id="CHAPTER_IIIa"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<h3>WORK</h3>
+<p>They had planned the future so carefully that there was a
+pitiless irony in the next turn of the screw&mdash;for when they
+tried to awaken Archibald Fowler in the morning, he did not stir,
+and they realized presently, with the rebellious shock such
+tragedies always bring, that he had died in the night&mdash;that
+all that he had stood for, the more than thirty years of work and
+struggle, had collapsed in an hour. When the first grief, the first
+excitement, was over, and life began to flow quietly again in its
+familiar currents, it was discovered that the crash of his fortune
+had occurred on the day of his son's flight and disgrace, and that
+the two shocks, coming together, had killed him. While they sat in
+the darkened house, surrounded by the funereal smell of crape, the
+practical details of living seemed to matter so little that they
+scarcely gave them a thought. Not until weeks afterwards, when
+Patty and Billy had sailed for France, and Mrs. Fowler, shrouded in
+widow's weeds, had gone South to her old home, did Gabriella find
+strength to tear aside the veil of mourning and confront the sordid
+actuality. Then she found that the crash had buried everything
+under the ruins of Archibald Fowler's prosperity&mdash;that nothing
+remained except a bare pittance which would insure his widow only a
+scant living on the impoverished family acres. For the rest there
+was nothing, and she herself was as poor as she had been in Hill
+Street before her marriage.</p>
+<p>Walking back from the station after bidding her mother-in-law a
+tearful and tender good-bye, she tried despairingly to gather her
+scattered thoughts and summon all her failing resources; but in
+front of her plans there floated always the pathetic brightness of
+Mrs. Fowler's eyes gazing up at her from the heavy shadow of the
+crape veil she had lifted. So that was the end&mdash;a little love,
+a little hope, a little happiness, and then separation and death.
+Effort appeared not only futile, but fantastic, and yet effort, she
+knew, must be made if she were to ward off destitution. She must
+recover her cheerfulness, she must be strong, she must be
+confident. Alone, penniless, with two children to support, she
+could not afford to waste her time and her energy in useless
+regret. Whatever it cost her, she must keep alive her fighting
+courage and her belief in life. She had youth, health, strength,
+intelligence, resourcefulness on her side; and she told herself
+again that there were thousands of women living and fighting around
+her who were far worse off than she. "What others have done, I can
+do also, and do better," she murmured aloud as she walked rapidly
+back to Dinard's.</p>
+<p>In the long front room the crowded mid-winter sale was in
+progress, and the six arrogant young women, goaded into a fleeting
+semblance of activity, were displaying dilapidated "left over"
+millinery to a throng of unfashionable casual customers. Madame,
+herself, scorned these casual customers, but her scorn was as water
+unto wine compared with the burning disdain of the six arrogant
+young women. They sauntered to and fro with their satin trains
+trailing elegantly over the carpet, with their fashionable curves
+accentuated as much as it was possible for pride to accentuate
+them, with their condescending heads turning haughtily above the
+high points of their collars. As Gabriella entered she saw the
+tallest and the most scornful of them, whose name was Murphy,
+insolently posing in the green velvet toque before a jaded hunter
+of reduced millinery, who shook her plain, sensible head at the hat
+as if she wished it to understand that she heartily disapproved of
+it.</p>
+<p>Madame was not visible, but Gabriella found her a little later
+in the workroom, where she was volubly elucidating obscure points
+in business morality to the forewoman. Of all the women employed in
+the house, this particular forewoman was the only one who appeared
+to Gabriella to be without pretence or affectation. She was an
+honest, blunt, capable creature, with a face and figure which
+permanently debarred her from the showrooms, and a painstaking
+method of work. There was no haughtiness, no condescension, about
+her. She had the manner of one who, being without fortuitous aids
+to happiness, is willing to give good measure of ability and
+industry in return for the bare necessaries of existence. "She is
+the only genuine thing in the whole establishment," thought
+Gabriella while she watched her.</p>
+<p>If Miss Smith, the forewoman, had been in ignorance of the
+failure and death of Archibald Fowler, she would probably have read
+the announcement in Madame's face as she watched her welcome the
+wife of his son. There was nothing offensive, nothing unkind,
+nothing curt; but, in some subtle way, the difference was
+emphasized between the eccentric daughter-in-law of a millionaire
+and an inexperienced young woman who must work for her living. For
+the welcome revealed at once to the observant eyes of Miss Smith
+the significant detail that Madame's role had changed from the
+benefited to the benefactor. And, as if this were not enough for
+one morning's developments, it revealed also that Gabriella's
+fictitious value as a saleswoman was beginning to decline; for
+Madame was disposed to scorn the sort of sensational advertisement
+which the newspapers had devoted of late to the unfortunate
+Fowlers. At one moment there had been grave doubt in Madame's mind
+as to whether or not she should employ young Mrs. Fowler in her
+respectable house; then, after a brief hesitation, she had shrewdly
+decided that ideas were worth something even when lacking the
+support of social position and financial security. There were
+undoubtedly possibilities in Gabriella; and disgrace, Madame
+concluded cheerfully, could not take away either one's natural
+talent or one's aristocratic appearance. That the girl had
+distinction, even rare distinction, Madame admitted while she
+nodded approvingly at the severe black cloth gown with its collar
+and cuffs of fine white crape. The simple arrangement of her hair,
+which would have ruined many a pretty face, suited the ivory pallor
+of Gabriella's features. Mourning was becoming to her, Madame
+decided, and though she was not beautiful, she was unusually
+charming.</p>
+<p>"She has few good points except her figure, and yet the whole is
+decidedly picturesque," thought Madame as impersonally as if she
+were criticising a fashion plate. "Very young men would hardly care
+for her&mdash;for very young men demand fine complexions and
+straight noses&mdash;but with older men who like an air, who admire
+grace, she would be taking, and women, yes, women would undoubtedly
+find her imposing. But she is not the sort to have followers," she
+concluded complacently.</p>
+<p>"Shall I go to the workroom?" asked Gabriella in a businesslike
+voice when she had taken off her hat, "or do you wish me at the
+sale?"</p>
+<p>Her soul shrank from the showrooms, but she had determined
+courageously that she would not allow her soul to interfere with
+her material purpose, and her purpose was to learn all that she
+could and to make herself indispensable to Madame. Only by
+acquiring a thorough knowledge of the business and making herself
+indispensable could she hope to succeed. And success was not merely
+desirable to her; it was vital. It meant the difference between
+food and hunger for her children.</p>
+<p>"Miss Smith will find something for you to do this morning,"
+replied Madame, politely, but without enthusiasm. "If there is a
+rush later on in the millinery, I will send for you to help
+out."</p>
+<p>In the old days, when Dinard's was a small and exclusive house
+in one of the blocks just off Fifth Avenue, Madame would have
+scorned to combine the making of gowns and hats in a single
+establishment; but as she advanced in years and in worldly
+experience, she discovered that millinery drew the unwary passer-by
+even more successfully than dressmaking did. Then, too, hats were
+easy to handle; they sold for at least four or five times as much
+as they actually cost; and so, gradually, while she was still
+unaware of the disintegrating processes within, Madame's principles
+had crumbled before the temptation of increasing profits. A lapse
+of virtue, perhaps, but Madame, who had been born an O'Grady, was
+not the first to discover that one's virtuous principles are apt to
+modify with one's years. The time was when she had despised false
+hair, having a natural wealth of her own, and now, with a few thin
+gray strands hidden under her golden wig, she had become morally
+reconciled to necessity. "It is a hard world, and one lives as one
+must," was her favourite maxim.</p>
+<p>On the whole, however, having a philosophic bent of mind, she
+endeavoured to preserve, with rosy cheeks and golden hair, several
+other cheerful fictions of her youth. The chief of these, the
+artless delusion that, in spite of her obesity, her wig and her
+rouge, she still had power to charm the masculine eye, offered to
+her lively nature a more effective support than any virtuous
+principle could have supplied. A perennial, if ridiculous, coquetry
+sweetened her days and added sprightliness to the gay decline of
+her life. Being frankly material, she had confined her energies to
+the two unending pursuits of men and money, and having captured
+four husbands and acquired a comfortable bank account, she might
+have been content, had she been as discreet as she was provident,
+to rest on her substantial achievements. But the trouble with both
+men and money, when considered solely as rewards to enterprise, is
+that the quest of them is inexhaustible. One's income, however
+large, may reasonably become larger, and there is no limit to the
+number of husbands a prudent and fortunate woman may collect. And
+so age, which is, after all, a state of mind, not a term of years,
+was rendered harmless to Madame by her simple plan of refusing to
+acknowledge that it existed. This came of keeping one's head, she
+sometimes thought, though she never put her thought into
+words&mdash;this and all things else, including financial security
+and the perpetual pursuit of the elusive and lawless male. For at
+sixty-two she still felt young and she believed herself to be
+fascinating.</p>
+<p>But Gabriella, patiently stitching bias velvet bands on the brim
+of a straw hat for the early spring trade, felt that she was
+sustained neither by the pleasures of vanity nor by the sounder
+consolations of virtue. Her philosophy was quite as simple, if not
+so material, as Madame's. Human nature was divided between the
+victors and the victims, and the chief thing was not to let oneself
+become a victim. Her theory, like those of greater philosophers,
+was rooted not in reason, but in character, and she believed in
+life with all the sanguine richness of her blood. Of course it was
+a struggle, but she was one of those vital women who enjoy a
+struggle&mdash;who choose any aspect of life in preference to the
+condition of vegetative serenity. Unhappiness, which is so largely
+a point of view, an attitude of mind, had passed over her at a time
+when many women would have been consecrated to inconsolable misery.
+She was penniless, she was unloved, she was deserted by her
+husband, she had lost, in a few weeks, her friends, her home, and
+her family, and she faced the future alone, except for her
+dependent and helpless children&mdash;yet in spite of these things,
+though she was thoughtful, worried, and often anxious, she realized
+that deep down in her the essential core of her being was not
+unhappy. When she had tried and failed, and lost her health and her
+children&mdash;if such sorrows ever came to her, then there would
+be time enough for unhappiness. Now, she was only twenty-seven; the
+rich, wonderful world surrounded her; and this world, even if she
+put love out of her life, was brimming over with beauty. It was
+good to be alive; it was good to watch the crowd in the street, to
+see the sunlight on the pavement, to taste the air, to feel the
+murmurous currents of the city flow around her as she walked home
+in the twilight. It was good to earn her bread and to go back in
+the evening to the joyful shouts of two well and happy children.
+She saw it all as an adventure&mdash;the whole of life&mdash;and
+the imperative necessity was to keep to the last the ardent heart
+of the true adventurer. While she stitched with flying fingers,
+there passed before her the pale sad line of the victims&mdash;of
+those who had resigned themselves to unhappiness. She saw her
+mother, anxious, pensive, ineffectual, with her widow's veil, her
+drooping eyelids, and her look of mournful acquiescence, as of one
+who had grown old expecting the worst of life; she saw poor Jane,
+tragic, martyred, with the feeble virtue and the cloying sweetness
+of all the poor Janes of this world; and she saw Uncle Meriweather
+wearing his expression of worried and resentful helplessness, as if
+he had been swept onward against his will by forces which he did
+not understand. All these people were victims, and from these
+people she had sprung. Their blood was her blood; their traditions
+were her traditions; their religion was her religion; even their
+memories were her memories. But something else, which was not
+theirs, was in her nature, and this something else had been born in
+the instant when she revolted against them. Perhaps the fighting
+spirit of her father&mdash;of that father who had gone out like a
+flame in his youth had battled on her side when she had turned
+against the inertia and decay which had walled in her girlhood.</p>
+<p>In the afternoon Madame summoned her into the showrooms, and she
+assisted the exhausted young women at the sale of slightly damaged
+French hats to the unfashionable purchasers who preferred to pay
+reasonable prices. While she served them, which she did with a
+cheerfulness, an interest, and an amiability that distinguished her
+from the other saleswomen, she wondered how they could have so
+little common sense as to allow themselves to be deluded by the
+French labels on the soiled linings? She could have made a better
+hat in two hours than any one of those she sold at the reduced
+price of ten dollars; yet even the dingiest of them at last found a
+purchaser, and she saw the green velvet toque, which had been
+rejected by the sensible middle-aged woman in the morning, finally
+pass into the possession of a hard-featured spinster. What amazed
+her, for she had a natural talent for dress, was the infallible
+instinct which guided the vast majority of these customers to the
+selection of the inappropriate. A few of them had taste, or had
+learned from experience what they could not wear; but by far the
+larger number displayed an ignorance of the most elementary
+principles of dress which shocked and astonished Gabriella. The
+obese and middle-aged winged straight as a bird toward the
+coquettish in millinery; the lean and haggard intuitively yearned
+for the picturesque; the harsh and simple aspired to the severely
+smart. Yet beneath the vain misdirection of impulses there was some
+obscure principle of attraction which ruled the absurdity of the
+decisions. Each woman, Gabriella discovered after an attentive hour
+at the sale, was dressing not her actual substance, but some
+passionately cherished ideal of herself which she had stored in a
+remote and inaccessible chamber of her brain.</p>
+<p>In all of the tedious selections Gabriella assisted with the
+pleasant voice, the ready sympathy, and the quick understanding
+which had made her so popular when she had worked for the old shop
+in Broad Street. The truth was that human nature interested her
+even in its errors, and her pleasant manners were simply the
+outward manifestation of an unaffected benevolence.</p>
+<p>"I shouldn't mind going there if they were all like that one,"
+remarked a customer, who had bought three hats, in the hearing of
+Madame as she went out; "but some of them are so disagreeable you
+feel like slapping their faces. Once last winter I had that tall
+girl with red hair&mdash;the handsome, stuck-up one, you
+know&mdash;and I declare she was so downright impertinent that I
+got straight up and walked out without buying a thing. Then I was
+so angry that I went down to Paula's and paid seventy-five dollars
+for this hat I've got on. It was a dreadful price, of course, but
+you'll do anything when you're in a rage."</p>
+<p>"Do you know the name of this one? I'd like to remember it."</p>
+<p>"Yes, it's Carr. I asked for her card. C-a-r-r. I think she's a
+widow."</p>
+<p>From her retreat behind one of the velvet curtains Madame
+overheard this conversation, and a few minutes later she stopped
+Gabriella on her way out, and said amiably that it would not be
+necessary for her to leave the showroom to-morrow.</p>
+<p>"I believe you can do better there than in the workroom," she
+added, "and, after all, that is really very important&mdash;to tell
+people what they want. It is astounding how few of them have the
+slightest idea what they are looking for."</p>
+<p>"But I want to get that hat right. I left it unfinished, and I
+don't like to give up while it is wrong," replied Gabriella, not
+wholly pleased by the command.</p>
+<p>But Madame, of a flightier substance notwithstanding her
+business talents, waved aside the remark as insignificant and
+without bearing upon her immediate purpose.</p>
+<p>"I am going to try you with the gowns," she said resolutely; "I
+want to see if you catch on there as quickly as you did with the
+hats&mdash;I mean with the sale, of course, for your work, I'm
+sorry to say, has been rather poor so far. But I'll try you with
+the next customer who comes to place a large order. They are always
+so eager for new suggestions, and you have suggestions of a sort to
+make, I am sure. I can't quite tell," she concluded uncertainly,
+"whether or not your ideas have any practical value, but they sound
+well as you describe them, and to talk attractively helps; there is
+no doubt of that."</p>
+<p>It was closing time, and Miss Fisher, one of the skirt fitters,
+came up, in her black alpaca apron with a pair of scissors
+suspended by red tape from her waist, to ask Madame a question. As
+Mrs. Bydington had not kept her appointment, was it not impossible
+to send her gown home as they had promised?</p>
+<p>"Oh, it makes no difference," replied Madame blandly, for she
+was in a good humour. "She'll come back when she is ready. The next
+time she is here, by the way, I want her to see Mrs. Fowler&mdash;I
+mean Mrs. Carr. She has worn out every one else in the place, and
+yet she is never satisfied; but I'd like her to take that pink
+velvet from Gautier, because nobody else is likely to give the
+price." The day was over and Madame's blandness was convincing
+evidence of her satisfaction.</p>
+<p>As Gabriella passed through the last showroom, where the
+disorder of the sale was still visible, she saw Miss Murphy, the
+handsomest and the haughtiest of the young women, wearily returning
+the few rejected hats to the ivory-tinted cases.</p>
+<p>"You are glad it is over, I know," she remarked sympathetically,
+less from any active interest in Miss Murphy's state of feeling
+than from an impulsive desire to establish human relations with her
+fellow saleswoman. If Miss Murphy would have it so, she preferred
+to be friendly.</p>
+<p>"I am so tired I can hardly stand on my feet," replied Miss
+Murphy, piteously. Her pretty rose-leaf skin had faded to a dull
+pallor; there were heavy shadows under her eyes; her helmet of
+wheaten-red hair had slipped down over her forehead, and even her
+firmly corseted figure appeared to have grown limp and yielding.
+Without her offensive elegance she was merely a pathetic and rather
+silly young thing.</p>
+<p>"I'll help you," said Gabriella, taking up several hats from a
+chair. "The others have gone, haven't they?"</p>
+<p>"They got out before I'd finished waiting on that middle-aged
+frump who doesn't know what she wants any more than the policeman
+out there at the corner does. She's made me show her all we've got
+left, and after she'd tried them all on, she said they're too high,
+and she's going to think over them before she decides. She's still
+waiting for something, and my head's splitting so I can hardly see
+what I'm doing." With a final surrender of her arrogance, she grew
+suddenly confidential and childish. "I'm sick enough to die," she
+finished despairingly, "and I've got a friend coming to take me to
+the theatre at eight o'clock."</p>
+<p>"Well, run away. I'll attend to this. But I'd try to rest before
+I went out if I were you."</p>
+<p>"You're a perfect peach," responded Miss Murphy gratefully. "I
+said all along I didn't believe you were stuck up and
+snobbish."</p>
+<p>Then she ran out, and Gabriella, after surveying the customer
+for a minute, selected the most unpromising hat in the case, and
+presented it with a winning smile for the woman's inspection.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps something like this is what you are looking for?" she
+remarked politely, but firmly.</p>
+<p>The customer, an acidulous, sharp-featured, showily dressed
+person&mdash;the sort, Gabriella decided, who would enjoy haggling
+over a bargain&mdash;regarded the offered hat with a supercilious
+and guarded manner, the true manner of the haggler.</p>
+<p>"No, that is not bad," she observed dryly, "but I don't care to
+give more than ten dollars."</p>
+<p>"It was marked down from thirty," replied Gabriella, and her
+manner was as supercilious and as guarded as the other's. There
+were women, she had found, who were impressed only by insolence,
+and, when the need arose, she could be quite as insolent as Miss
+Murphy. Unlike Miss Murphy, however, she was able to distinguish
+between those you must encourage and those you must crush; and this
+ability to draw reasonable distinctions was, perhaps, her most
+valuable quality as a woman of business.</p>
+<p>"I don't care to pay more than ten dollars," reiterated the
+customer in a scolding voice. Rising from her chair, she fastened
+her furs, which were cheap and showy, with a defiant and jerky
+movement, and flounced out of the shop.</p>
+<p>That disposed of, Gabriella put on her coat, which she had taken
+off again for the occasion, and went out into the street, where the
+night had already fallen. After her long hours in the overheated
+air of the showrooms, she felt refreshed and invigorated by the
+cold wind, which stung her face as it blew singing over the
+crossings. Straight ahead through the grayish-violet mist the
+lights were blooming like flowers, and above them a few stars shone
+faintly over the obscure frowning outlines of the buildings. Fifth
+Avenue was thronged, and to her anxious mind there seemed to be
+hollowness and insincerity in the laughter of the crowd.</p>
+<p>At the house in East Fifty-seventh Street, from which she would
+be moving the next day, she found Judge Crowborough awaiting her in
+the dismantled drawing-room, where packing-cases of furniture and
+pictures lay scattered about in confusion. In the dreadful days
+after Archibald Fowler's death, the judge had been very kind, and
+she had turned to him instinctively as the one man in New York who
+was both able and willing to be of use to her. Though he had never
+attracted her, she had been obliged to admit that he possessed a
+power superior to superficial attractions.</p>
+<p>"I dropped in to ask what I might do for you now?" he remarked
+with the dignity of one who possesses an income of half a million
+dollars a year. "It's a pity you have to leave this house. I
+remember when Archibald bought it&mdash;somewhere back in the
+'seventies&mdash;but I suppose there's no help for it, is
+there?"</p>
+<p>"No, there's no help." She sat down on a packing-case, and he
+stood gazing benevolently down on her with his big, soft hands
+clasped on the head of his walking-stick and his overcoat on his
+arm. "I've rented three rooms in one of the apartments of the old
+Carolina over on the West Side near Columbus Avenue. The rest of
+the apartment is rented to art students, I believe, and we must all
+use the same kitchen and the same bath-tub," she added with a
+laugh. "Of course it isn't luxury, but we shan't mind very much as
+soon as we get used to it. I couldn't be much poorer than I was
+before my marriage."</p>
+<p>"But the children? You've got to have the children looked
+after."</p>
+<p>"I've been so fortunate about that," her voice was quite
+cheerful again. "There's a seamstress from my old home&mdash;Miss
+Polly Hatch&mdash;who has known me all my life, and she is coming
+to sleep in a little bed in my room until we can afford to rent an
+extra bedroom. As long as she has to work at home anyhow, she can
+very easily look after the children while I am away. They are good
+children, and as soon as they are big enough I'll have to send them
+to school&mdash;to the public school, I'm afraid." This, because of
+Fanny's violent opposition, was a delicate point with her. She felt
+that she should like to start the children at a private school, but
+it was clearly impossible.</p>
+<p>"The boy won't be big enough for a year or two, will he?" He was
+interested, she saw, and this unaffected interest in her small
+affairs moved her almost to tears.</p>
+<p>"I wanted him to go to kindergarten, but, of course, I cannot
+afford it. He is only four and a half, and I'm teaching him myself
+in the evenings. Already he can read very well in the first
+reader," she finished proudly.</p>
+<p>For a minute the judge stared moodily down on her. His sagging
+cheeks took a pale purplish flush, and he bit his lower lip with
+his large yellow teeth, which reminded Gabriella of the tusks of a
+beast of prey. Then he laid his overcoat and his stick carefully
+down on a packing-case, and held out his hand.</p>
+<p>"I'm going now, and there's one thing I want to ask
+you&mdash;have you any money?"</p>
+<p>It was out at last, and she looked up composedly, smiling a
+little roguishly at his embarrassment.</p>
+<p>"I have six hundred dollars in bank for a rainy day, and I am
+making exactly fifteen dollars a week."</p>
+<p>"But you can't live on it. Nobody could live on it even without
+two children to bring up."</p>
+<p>She shook her head. "Oh, Judge Crowborough, how little you rich
+men really know! I've got to live on it until I can do better, and
+I hope that will be very soon. If I am worth anything now, in three
+months I ought to be worth certainly as much as twenty-five dollars
+a week. In a little while&mdash;as soon as I've caught on to the
+business&mdash;I'm going to ask for a larger salary, and I think I
+shall get it. Twenty-five dollars a week won't go very far, but you
+don't know how little some people can live on even in New
+York."</p>
+<p>"As soon as the six hundred dollars go you'll be headed straight
+for starvation," he protested, sincerely worried.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps, but I doubt it."</p>
+<p>"How much do you have to pay for your rooms?"</p>
+<p>"Twenty-five dollars a month. It isn't much of a place, you see,
+as far as appearances go. Fortunately, I have a little furniture of
+my own which Mrs. Fowler had given me."</p>
+<p>His embarrassment had passed away, and he was smiling now at the
+recollection of it.</p>
+<p>"Well, you're a brick, little girl," he said, "and I like your
+spirit, but, after all, why can't you put your pride in your
+pocket, and let me lend you a few thousands? You needn't borrow
+much&mdash;not enough to keep a carriage&mdash;but you might at
+least take a little just to show you aren't proud&mdash;just to
+show you'll be friends. It seems a downright shame that I should
+have money to throw away, and you should be starting out to pinch
+and scrape on fifteen dollars a week. Fifteen dollars a week! Good
+Lord, what are we coming to?"</p>
+<p>She was not proud, and she wanted to be friends, but she shook
+her head obstinately, though she was still smiling. "Not
+now&mdash;not while I can help it&mdash;but if I ever get in
+trouble&mdash;in real trouble&mdash;I'll remember your offer. If
+the children fall ill or I lose my place, I'll come to you in a
+minute."</p>
+<p>"Honour bright? It's a promise?"</p>
+<p>"It's a promise."</p>
+<p>"And you'll let me keep an eye on you?"</p>
+<p>She laughed with the natural gaiety which he found so
+delightful. "You may keep two eyes on me if you will!"</p>
+<p>He had already reached the door when, turning suddenly, he said
+with heavy gravity: "You don't mind my asking what you're going to
+do about George, do you?</p>
+<p>"No, I don't mind. As soon as I can afford it, I shall get my
+freedom, but everything costs, you know, even justice."</p>
+<p>"I could help you there, couldn't I?"</p>
+<p>From the gratitude in her eyes he read her horror of the
+marriage which still bound her. "You could&mdash;and, oh, if you
+would, I'd never, never forget it," she answered.</p>
+<p>Then they parted, and he went out into the cold, with a strange
+warmth like the fire of youth at his heart, while she ran eagerly
+up the uncarpeted stairs to the nursery.</p>
+<p>The trunks were packed, the boxes were nailed down, and the two
+children were playing shipwreck while they ate a supper of bread
+and milk at a table made from the bare top of a packing-case.
+Several days before the nurse had left without warning, and Miss
+Polly sat now, in hat and mantle, on one of the little beds which
+would be taken down the next day and sent over to the apartment on
+the West Side.</p>
+<p>"I've been to the Carolina and unpacked the things that had
+come," she said at Gabriella's entrance. "Those rooms ain't so bad
+as New York rooms go; but it does seem funny, don't it, to cook in
+the same kitchen with a lot of strangers you never laid eyes on
+befo'? I br'iled some chops for the children right alongside of an
+old maid who had come all the way up from New Orleans to study
+music&mdash;imagine, at her age! Why, she couldn't be a day under
+fifty! And on the other side there was the mother of a girl who's
+at the art school, or whatever you call it, where they teach you
+paintin'. They are from somewhere up yonder in New England and
+their home folks had sent 'em a pumpkin pie. She gave me a slice of
+it, but I never did think much of pumpkin. It can't hold a candle
+to sweet potato pudding, and I wouldn't let the children touch it
+for fear it might set too heavy in the night. I ain't got much use
+for Yankee food, nohow."</p>
+<p>"I hope the place is perfectly sanitary," was Gabriella's
+anxious rejoinder. "The front room gets some sunshine in the
+afternoon, doesn't it?"</p>
+<p>"It's a horrid street. I don't want to live there," wailed
+Fanny, who had rebelled from the beginning against her fallen
+fortunes. "I got my white shoes dirty, and there were banana peels
+all about. A man has a fruit-stand in the bottom of our house.
+Don't let's go there to live, mother."</p>
+<p>"You'll have to wear black shoes now, darling, and you mustn't
+mind the fruit-stand. It will be a good place to buy oranges."</p>
+<p>"I like it," said Archibald stoutly. "I like to slide on banana
+peels, and I like the man. He has black eyes and a red handkerchief
+in his pocket. Will you buy me a red handkerchief, mamma? He has a
+boy, too. I saw him. He can skate on roller skates, and the boy has
+a dog and the dog has a black ear. May I have roller skates for my
+birthday, and a dog&mdash;a small one&mdash;and may I ask the boy
+up to play with me?"</p>
+<p>"But the boy is ugly and so is the dog. I hate ugly people,"
+complained Fanny.</p>
+<p>"I like ugly people," retorted Archibald, glowering, not from
+anger, but from earnestness. "Ugly people are nicer than pretty
+ones, aren't they, mamma? Pang is nicer than Fanny."</p>
+<p>He was always like that even as a baby, always on the side of
+the unfortunate, always fighting valiantly for the under dog. With
+his large head, his grotesque spectacles, and his pouting lips, he
+bore a curious resemblance to a brownie, yet when one observed him
+closely, one saw that there was a remarkable blending of strength
+and sweetness in his expression.</p>
+<p>The next day Miss Polly finished the moving, and at six o'clock
+Gabriella went home in the Harlem elevated train to the grim,
+weather-beaten apartment house on the upper West Side. The
+pavements, as Fanny had scornfully observed, were not particularly
+clean; the air, in spite of the sharp wind which blew from the
+river, had a curiously stagnant quality; and the rumble of the
+elevated road, at the opposite side of the house, reached her in a
+vibrating undercurrent which was punctuated now and then by the
+staccato cries of the street. The house, which had been built in a
+benighted and spacious period, stood now as an enduring refuge for
+the poor in purse but proud in spirit. A few studios on the roof
+were still occupied by artists, while the hospitable basement
+sheltered a vegetable market, a corner drug-store, a fruit-stand,
+and an Italian bootblack. Within the bleak walls, from which the
+stucco had peeled in splotches, the life of the city had ebbed and
+flowed for almost half a century, like some deep wreck-strewn
+current which bore the seeds of the future as well as the driftwood
+of the past on its bosom. One might never have set foot outside
+those gloomy doors and yet have seen the whole of life pass as in a
+vivid dream through the dim halls, lighted by flickering gas and
+carpeted in worn strips of brown carpet. And once inside the
+apartments one might have found, sometimes, cheerfulness, beauty of
+line and colour, and a certain spaciousness which the modern
+apartment house, with its rooms like closets, its startling
+electricity, and its more hygienic conditions of living, could not
+provide. It was because she could find space there that Gabriella,
+guided by Miss Polly, had rented the rooms.</p>
+<p>She passed the drug-store and the fruit-stand, entered the
+narrow hail, where a single gas-jet flickered dimly beside the door
+of the elevator, and after touching the bell, stood patiently
+waiting. After a time she rang again, and presently, with
+deliberate ease and geniality, the negro who worked the elevator
+descended slowly, with a newspaper in his hand, and opened the door
+for her.</p>
+<p>"Good evening, Robert," she said pleasantly, for he also was
+from Virginia, and the discovery of the bond between them had given
+Gabriella a feeling of confidence. Like Miss Folly, she had never
+become entirely accustomed to white servants.</p>
+<p>The ropes moved again, the elevator ascended perilously to the
+fifth floor, and Gabriella walked quickly along the hall, and
+slipped her latchkey into the keyhole of the last apartment. As the
+door opened, a woman in worn black came out and spoke to her in
+passing. She was the old maid of Miss Folly's narrative, and her
+face, ardent, haggard, with the famished look which comes from a
+starved soul, gazed back at Gabriella with a touching expression of
+admiration and envy. There were spots of vivid colour in her
+cheeks, and this brightness, combined with her gray hair, gave her
+a theatrical and artificial appearance.</p>
+<p>"I have been playing to your little boy, Mrs. Carr," she said
+with the manner which Miss Polly had described as "flighty." "He
+came into my room when he heard the piano, and it was a real
+pleasure to play for him."</p>
+<p>"You are very good," returned Gabriella, wondering vaguely who
+she was, for she was obviously the kind of woman people wondered
+about. "I hope Archibald didn't make himself troublesome."</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, I enjoyed him. My name is Danton. I am Miss Danton,"
+she added effusively, "and I'm so glad you have come into this
+apartment. My room is the one next to yours."</p>
+<p>Then she fluttered off, with her look of spiritual hunger, and
+Gabriella closed the door and went on to her rooms, which were at
+the opposite end of the hail from the kitchen. On the way she
+passed the pretty art student, who was coming from the bathroom,
+with a freshly powdered face and a pitcher of water in her hand,
+and again she was obliged to stop to hear news of the children.</p>
+<p>"I'm so glad to have your little girl here. I want to paint her.
+I'm just crazy about her face," said the girl, whose name she
+learned afterwards was Rosy Plover. Though she was undeniably
+pretty, and had just powdered her face with scented powder, she had
+a slovenly, unkempt appearance which Gabriella, from that moment,
+associated with art students. "If she'd only dress herself
+properly, she'd be a beauty," she thought, with the aversion of one
+who is an artist in clothes. She herself, after her long, hard day,
+was as neat and trim as she had been in the morning. Her severe
+black suit was worn with grace, and hung perfectly; her crape
+collar was immaculately fresh; her mourning veil fell in charming
+folds over her hat brim. "It's a pity some one can't tell her," she
+mused, as she smiled and hurried on to the doubtful seclusion of
+her own end of the apartment.</p>
+<p>With the opening of the door, the children fell rapturously into
+her arms, and while she took off her hat and coat, Miss Polly laid
+the table for supper in front of the ruddy glow of the fire. On the
+fender a plate of buttered toast was keeping warm, a delicious
+aroma of coffee scented the air, and a handful of red carnations
+made a cheerful bit of colour in the centre of the white
+tablecloth. It was a pleasant picture for a tired woman to gaze on,
+and the ruddy glow of the fire was reflected in Gabriella's heart
+while she enfolded her children. After a day in Madame's hothouse
+atmosphere, it was delightful to return to this little centre of
+peace and love, and to feel that its very existence depended upon
+the work of her brain and hands. The children, she realized, had
+never loved her so dearly. In better days, when she was rarely
+separated from them for more than a few hours at a time, they had
+seemed rather to take her care and her presence for granted; but
+now, after an absence of nine hours, she had become a delight and
+an enchantment, something to be looked forward to and longingly
+talked about through the whole afternoon.</p>
+<p>"Mother, you've been away forever," said Fanny, folding her veil
+for her and putting away her furs.</p>
+<p>"Are you going every day just like this for ever and ever?</p>
+<p>"Every day, darling, but I'm here every night. Shall I run back
+to the kitchen and broil the chops, Miss Polly?"</p>
+<p>But the chops were already broiled, for Miss Polly had finished
+her sewing early, and she had beaten up two tiny cups of custard
+for the children.</p>
+<p>"It's nicer than nursery suppers, isn't it, Fanny?" asked
+Archibald a little later while he ate his bread and milk from a
+blue bowl. "Mother, I like being poor. Let's stay poor always."</p>
+<p>A phrase of Mrs. Fowler's, "happiness costs so little," floated
+through Gabriella's mind as she poured Miss Folly's coffee out of
+the tin coffee pot. She was so tired that her body ached; her feet
+were smarting and throbbing from the long standing; and her eyes
+stung from the cold wind and the glare of the elevated train; but
+she knew that in spite of these discomforts she was not
+unhappy&mdash;that she was, indeed, far happier than she had been
+for the past six years in the hushed suspense of her
+father-in-law's house. When she had carried the supper things back
+to the sink in the kitchen, had taught the children their lessons,
+heard their prayers, and put them to bed, she repeated the words to
+herself while she sat sewing beside the lamp in front of the
+comforting glow of the fire, "After all, happiness costs so
+little."</p>
+<p>The next morning, and on every morning throughout the winter,
+she was up by six o'clock, and had taken in the baker's rolls and
+the bottle of milk from the outer door before Miss Polly or the
+children were stirring. Then, having dressed quickly, she ran back
+to the kitchen and made the coffee and boiled the eggs while the
+other lodgers were still sleeping. Sometimes the mother of one of
+the art students would join her over the gas range, but usually her
+neighbours slept late and then darted through the hall in kimonos,
+with tumbled hair, to a hurried breakfast at the kitchen table.</p>
+<p>Her life was so busy that there was little time for anxiety, and
+less for futile and painful dwelling upon the past. To get through
+the day as best she could, to start the children well and in a good
+humour, to make herself useful, if not indispensable, to Madame, to
+return with a mind clear and fresh enough to give Fanny and
+Archibald intelligent lessons, to sew on their clothes or her own
+until midnight, and then to drop into bed, with aching limbs and a
+peaceful brain, too tired even to dream&mdash;these things made the
+life that she looked forward to, week after week, month after
+month, year after year. It was a hard life, as Miss Polly often
+remarked, but hard or soft, her strength was equal to it, her
+health was good, her interest in her work and in her children never
+flagged for a minute. Only on soft spring days, coming home in the
+dusk, she would sometimes pass carts filled with hyacinths, and in
+a wave the memory of Arthur and of her first love would rush over
+her. Then she would see Arthur's face, gentle, protective, tender,
+as it had looked on that last evening, and for an instant her lost
+girlhood and her girlhood's dream would envelop her like the
+fragrance of flowers. At such moments she thought of this love as
+tenderly as a mother might have thought of the exquisite dead face
+of an infant who had lived only an hour. Though it was over, though
+it bore no part, with its elusive loveliness, in her practical
+plans for the future, this dream became gradually, as the years
+passed, the most radiant and vital thing in her life. Though it was
+so vague as to be without warmth, it was as vivid and as real as
+light. The knowledge that in the past she had known perfect love,
+even though in her blindness she had thrust it aside, was a balm
+which healed her wounds and gave her courage to go on, friendless
+and alone, into the loveless stretch of the future. There was
+hardly a minute of her day for the next three years which was not
+sweetened by this hyacinth-scented dream of the past, there was
+hardly an hour of her drudgery which was not ennobled and
+irradiated by the splendour of this love that she had lost.</p>
+<p>Of George&mdash;even of George as the father of her
+children&mdash;she rarely thought. He had dropped out of her life
+like any other mistake, like any other illusion, and she was too
+sanguine by nature, too buoyant, too full of happiness and of
+energy, to waste herself on either mistakes or illusions. During
+the months when she had waited for her freedom she had resolutely
+put the thought of him out of her mind, and when at last her
+divorce was granted, she dismissed the fact as completely as if it
+had not changed the entire course of her life. The past was over,
+and only that part of it should live which contributed sweetness
+and beauty to the present&mdash;only that part of it which she
+could use in the better and stronger structure of the future.
+Whatever living meant in the end, she told herself each morning as
+she started out to her work, it must mean, not resignation, not
+inertia, but endeavour, enterprise, and courage.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IVa" id="CHAPTER_IVa"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<h3>THE DREAM AND THE YEARS</h3>
+<p>In one of the small fitting-rooms, divided by red velvet
+curtains on gilt rods from the long showrooms of Madame Dinard, a
+nervous group, comprising the head skirt fitter, the head waist
+fitter, Miss Bellman, the head saleswoman, and Madame herself,
+stood disconsolately around the indignant figure of Mrs. Weederman
+Pletheridge, who, attired in one of Madame's costliest French
+models, was gesticulating excitedly in the centre of four standing
+mirrors. For three years Mrs. Pletheridge had lived in Paris, and
+her return to New York, and to the dressmaking establishments of
+Fifth Avenue, was an event which had shaken Dinard's, if not the
+fashionable street in which it stood, to its foundations.</p>
+<p>"I don't know what is the matter with it," she said fussily,
+"but it doesn't suit me, and yet it looked so well in the hand. I
+wonder if I could wear it if you were to take out some of this
+fulness, and change the set of the sleeves? The fashions this
+spring are perfectly hopeless."</p>
+<p>"Why, it suits you to perfection, Madame. Just a stitch or two
+like this&mdash;and this&mdash;and it will look as if it were
+designed for you by Worth. Is it not so, Miss Bellman? Don't you
+think it is wonderful on Madame?"</p>
+<p>Miss Bellman, having learned her part, agreed effusively, and
+then each of the fitters, as she was appealed to in turn,
+contributed an enraptured assent to the discussion. The price of
+the gown was a thousand dollars, and Mrs. Pletheridge's favourable
+decision was worth exactly that much in terms of money to Dinard's.
+As the season had been scarcely a brisk one, Madame was
+particularly anxious to have her more extreme models taken off her
+hands. "It was unpacked only yesterday," she lied suavely, "and no
+one else has had so much as a glimpse of it."</p>
+<p>"I can't imagine what is the matter with it," Mrs. Pletheridge
+sighed dejectedly, while she regarded her ample form with a
+resentful and critical gaze. As long as one had nothing else to
+worry about, Madame reflected without sympathy, one might find
+cause for positive distress in the fact that a gown appeared to
+better advantage in the hand than on one's person. The
+truth&mdash;and the truth, as sometimes happens, was the last thing
+Mrs. Pletheridge cared to admit&mdash;was that she had grown too
+stout to wear pronounced fashions.</p>
+<p>"Nothing could be more charming," insisted Madame with increased
+effusion, "but if you are in doubt, let us ask the opinion of Mrs.
+Carr. She has the true eye of the artist&mdash;a wonderful eye. I
+don't know whether you remember Mrs. Archibald Fowler or not?" she
+added as the skirt fitter sped in search of Gabriella; "this is her
+daughter-in-law. Her husband ran away with another woman about
+three years ago. It made a great sensation at the time, and his
+wife got a divorce from him afterwards. Ever since then she has
+been in my establishment."</p>
+<p>No, Mrs. Pletheridge did not remember Mrs. Fowler; but, having
+had a notorious amount of trouble with her own husbands, she was
+amiably disposed toward the unfortunate daughter-in-law of the lady
+she couldn't remember. Thirty years ago, as a pretty, vulgar,
+kind-hearted girl, she had captured with a glance the eldest son of
+the newly rich Pletheridge, who had, perhaps, inherited his
+grandfather's genial admiration for chambermaids; but, to-day,
+after a generation of self-indulgence, her prettiness had
+coarsened, her vulgarity had hardened, and her kind heart had
+withered, through lack of cultivation, to the size of a cherry.
+And, from having had everything she wanted for so long, she had at
+last reached that melancholy state of mind when she could think of
+nothing more to want.</p>
+<p>A brisk step crossed the room outside, the curtains were parted
+with a commanding movement, and Gabriella joined the anxious group
+surrounded by the four mirrors.</p>
+<p>"Did you send for me, Madame?" she asked, and waited, grave,
+attentive, and perfectly composed, with her hand, the small, strong
+hand of the Carrs, on the curtain. Her hair was brushed severely
+back from her candid forehead, and though her figure had grown
+somewhat heavier and less girlish in line, she still wore her plain
+black dress and white collar with an incomparable distinction.
+Through all the hardship and suffering of the last three years she
+had kept her look of bright intelligence, of radiant energy. In
+dress and manner she was the successful woman of business, but she
+was the woman of business with something added. Though she spoke in
+a matter-of-fact tone, her voice had a vibrating quality; though
+she wore only the plainest clothes, her grace, her good-breeding,
+her indefinable charm, softened the severity.</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Pletheridge is uncertain about this gown," explained
+Madame, "but I tell her that it suits her to perfection, as well as
+if it had been designed for her by Worth. Do you not agree with me,
+Mrs. Carr? You have, as I said to her, the true eye of the
+artist."</p>
+<p>Without changing her position or moving a step into the room,
+Gabriella attentively regarded the gown and the wearer. From the
+mirror Mrs. Pletheridge stared back at her ill-humouredly, with a
+spiteful gleam in her small black eyes between the carefully
+darkened lids.</p>
+<p>"I can't imagine what is the matter with it," she reiterated, as
+if she were repeating a sad refrain, and her manner was as insolent
+as Miss Murphy's had been to the casual customer.</p>
+<p>For an instant Gabriella returned her look with the steady gaze
+of one who, having achieved the full courage of living, has
+attained also a calm insensibility to the shafts of arrogance.
+Three years ago she would have flinched before Mrs. Pletheridge's
+disdain, but in those three years she had passed beyond the
+variegated tissue of appearances to the bare structure of
+life&mdash;she had worked and wept and starved and
+suffered&mdash;and to-day her soul was invulnerable against even
+more destructive weapons than the contempt of a plutocrat. Perhaps,
+too, though she assured herself that she was without snobbishness,
+there was a secret satisfaction in the knowledge that one of her
+ancestors had been a general under Washington while the early
+Pletheridges were planting potatoes in a peasant's patch in
+Ireland. Her dignity was more assured than Madame's; for she was
+perfectly aware of a fact to which Madame was blind, and this was,
+that, in spite of her position in the social columns of the
+newspapers and her multitudinous possessions, Mrs. Pletheridge was
+not, and could never be, a lady. While Gabriella stood there these
+thoughts flashed recklessly through her mind; yet she answered
+Madame's question as frankly and honestly as if the woman they were
+staring at with such intentness had not been the tragic vulgarian
+she was.</p>
+<p>"I think the gown doesn't suit her at all," she said quietly to
+Madame, who made a horrified face at her over the sumptuous
+shoulder of Mrs. Pletheridge. "There is too much of it, too much
+billowy lace everywhere." She did not add that the coral and silver
+brocade gave Mrs. Pletheridge a curious resemblance to an overblown
+prize hollyhock.</p>
+<p>Madame's horrified face changed, as if under a spell, to one of
+abject despair; and a menacing frown convulsed the puffy features
+of Mrs. Pletheridge, while she burst out of her gorgeous sheath
+with a petulant haste which expressed her inward perturbation
+better than words could have done. For a minute one could have
+heard a flower drop in the fitting-room; then the offended customer
+spoke, and her words, when she found them, were not lacking in
+either force or effectiveness. "No, there's no use trying on
+anything else, I have an appointment at Cambon's." Cambon was
+Dinard's hated and wholly incompetent rival; and until this
+illuminating instant Madame had never suspected that her particular
+Mrs. Pletheridge had ever entered the high white doors of Cambon's
+establishment.</p>
+<p>"But, surely, we have something else. There is a lovely Doucet
+model&mdash;in white and silver&mdash;"</p>
+<p>But no, Mrs. Pletheridge would have none of the lovely model.
+"Give me my skirt at once," she commanded haughtily, bending her
+opulent bosom and holding the lacy frills of her petticoat together
+while Agnes, the youngest and the gentlest of the assistants, knelt
+at her feet with her dress skirt held invitingly open on the floor.
+As she inserted the toe of her exquisitely shod foot into the
+opening, she remarked maliciously: "It is impossible to find decent
+clothes in New York&mdash;one might as well give up trying. Paris
+dressmakers send you only their failures." And, having crushed
+Madame to silence, she finished her dressing, fastened her black
+lace veil with a flying swallow in diamonds, flung her feather boa
+over her shoulders, and taking up her gold chain bag, studded with
+rubies, marched out of the establishment with all the pomp and
+impressiveness of a military parade.</p>
+<p>"I've lost her. She will never come back," moaned Madame, and
+burst into tears.</p>
+<p>"But she couldn't possibly have worn that gown. She would have
+found it out as soon as she got home," replied Gabriella
+reassuringly, though her heart was almost as heavy as Madame's.</p>
+<p>It was all her fault, of course, as Madame, recovering her voice
+as she lost her temper, began immediately to tell her. It was all
+her fault, and yet how could she have stood there and lied to the
+woman in cold blood because Madame expected it of her as a part of
+her work? That she had infuriated Madame and imperilled her
+position she realized perfectly; but, realizing this, she still
+felt that she could not have told Mrs. Pletheridge that the gown
+was becoming to her. "There are times when one has to be honest no
+matter what happens," she thought rebelliously, while she went back
+to the workroom. Had Madame discharged her on the spot she would
+not have been surprised, and it was with a sensation of relief that
+she presently saw the forewoman measuring a dose of aromatic
+spirits of ammonia, and heard that the crisis was passing. A little
+later, when she went into the showroom with a hat for Miss Bellman,
+she encountered Madame bonneted, cloaked, panting, with moist eyes
+and raddled cheeks, preparing to take a slow airing in a hansom. As
+she was assisted into the vehicle by Miss Murphy and the driver,
+Madame pressed her beringed hand to her forehead with a despairing
+gesture; then the driver cracked his whip, the horse started, and
+the hansom disappeared up Fifth Avenue.</p>
+<p>"What under the sun did you do to her?" inquired Miss Murphy,
+holding her wheaten-red pompadour down in the wind. "I declare I
+thought at first it was murder!"</p>
+<p>"I told her the truth, when she asked me, that was all."</p>
+<p>"Well, I never! Now what, in the name of goodness, possessed
+you?"</p>
+<p>"I had to. I don't see how I could have kept from it."</p>
+<p>"Good gracious! There're always ways, but what sort of truth was
+it? You see, it's been so long since I've met one," she explained
+airily, "that I don't even know what they're like."</p>
+<p>"It was about Mrs. Pletheridge's gown&mdash;the one she wanted
+her to buy, you know. I told her it didn't suit her. And it
+didn't&mdash;you know it didn't," she concluded emphatically.</p>
+<p>"Of course it didn't, but I don't see why you had to go and tell
+her."</p>
+<p>"She asked me. They both asked me, and if I'd lied she wouldn't
+have believed me. You can't fool people so outrageously, and I
+wouldn't if I could. It isn't honest, and it isn't good
+business."</p>
+<p>"Anything is good business that gets by," remarked Miss Murphy,
+who had a philosophy. "I must go indoors or this wind will blow all
+my puffs away."</p>
+<p>She departed breezily; and Gabriella, returning to the workroom,
+spent her afternoon patiently stitching flat garlands of flowers on
+the brim of a hat. When she left the house at six o'clock the April
+weather was so lovely that she decided to walk all the way home;
+and while she moved rapidly with the crowd in Fifth Avenue, she
+considered anxiously the possible disastrous results of Madame's
+anger. Between her and absolute want there stood only her salary,
+and she had deliberately&mdash;she realized now how deliberate her
+reply had been&mdash;undermined that thin and insecure protection.
+Though she was now earning as much as thirty dollars a week, an
+illness of a year ago, when she had been obliged to stop work for
+several months, had exhausted the remains of the modest nest egg
+with which she had started; and to lose her place, she knew, would
+mean either starvation or beggary. There was no one, with the
+exception of Cousin Jimmy, of whom she could beg, and to beg of him
+would be a tacit confession that she had failed as a breadwinner.
+In Mrs. Carr's last letter Charley had appeared in a new light as a
+reformed character, a devoted attendant at church, and an
+enthusiastic convert to the prohibition party; and Gabriella had
+gathered from her mother's pious rambling that, like other sinners
+who have outlived temptation, he was devoting his middle years to a
+violent crusade against the moderate indulgences of the abstemious.
+But Charley, she felt, was out of the question. She would die
+before she would stoop to ask help of a man she had despised as
+heartily as she had once despised Charley. She must sink or swim by
+her own strength, not by another's.</p>
+<p>"I wonder why I did it?" she asked herself again, and again she
+could not answer the question. She felt that she might have lied
+had it been merely a lie and not a test of courage before her; but
+she could not lie simply because she was afraid of speaking the
+truth. In every character there is one supreme vice or virtue which
+strikes the deepest root and blossoms most luxuriantly, and in the
+character of Gabriella this virtue was courage. At the crucial
+moments of life some primordial instinct prompted her to fight, not
+to yield. "I ought to have been evasive, I suppose," she thought
+regretfully. "But how could I have been?" There were instants, she
+had discovered, when wisdom surrendered to the more militant
+virtues.</p>
+<p>When she reached home she found Fanny, who was fretfully
+recovering from influenza, lying on the sofa in the living-room,
+with Miss Polly busily stitching at her side, while Archibald,
+excited by a strenuous afternoon with the son of the Italian fruit
+dealer, was kneeling before the window, making mysterious signs to
+a group of yellow-haired German children in the apartment house on
+the opposite side of the street. Both children were eagerly
+expecting their mother, and as soon as she entered they grew
+animated and cheerful.</p>
+<p>She kissed and cuddled them, and listened sympathetically to
+their excited stories of the day, and of Dr. French, who had been
+to see Fanny, and who had waited as long as he could.</p>
+<p>"He's going to take us for a drive to-morrow, mother, and we're
+to sit in the carriage while he goes in to pay his calls, and then
+he's to show us the river and we're to stop somewhere to have
+tea."</p>
+<p>"Did he stay long?" asked Gabriella of Miss Folly.</p>
+<p>"For more than an hour," replied Miss Folly, and commented
+shrewdly after a minute: "It looks to me as if there was more in
+that young man than you can see on the surface, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>A blush tinged Gabriella's cheek, but she shook her head almost
+indignantly. "Oh, there's nothing of that kind," she answered
+emphatically, and rose to take off her hat and prepare supper.</p>
+<p>Since her illness of a year ago, when she had summoned the
+strange young doctor who had once been the assistant of the
+Fowlers' family physician, she had grown to feel a certain
+dependence upon Dr. French as the only useful friend who was left
+to her. He was a thin, gray-eyed, fair-haired young man, who
+practised largely among the poor, from choice rather than from
+necessity, since Dr. Morton had given him an excellent start in
+life. His pale, ascetic face had attracted Gabriella from their
+first meeting; there was the flamelike enthusiasm of the visionary
+in his eyes; and he had, she thought, the most beautiful and
+sympathetic hands she had ever seen. Even Fanny, who was usually
+impervious to sensitive impressions, felt the charm of his touch
+when he stroked her forehead or placed his long, delicate fingers
+on her wrist. From that first visit he had been a source of comfort
+and strength to Gabriella; but of late she had felt moments of
+uneasiness when she was with him. Was it possible, she asked
+herself now, as she went back to the kitchen to stew the oysters
+Miss Polly had bought for supper, that the kindly doctor was
+misinterpreting the simple and unaffected nature of her friendship?
+For herself she felt that she had put the reality of love out of
+her life, and that if the emotion existed for her at all, it
+existed only as a dream and a regret. She enshrined the memory of
+Arthur in something of the sentimental worship which Mrs. Carr had
+consecrated to Gabriel after she had lost him. It was an exquisite
+consolation to her to feel that if things had been otherwise, she
+might have loved a man with the whole of her nature&mdash;with both
+body and spirit; there were even moments in the spring of the year,
+when, softened by the caressing air and the scent of hyacinths, she
+felt that she did so love a memory; but beyond this her feeling was
+as bodiless and ethereal as the vague image to which it was
+dedicated. And yet this gentle regret was all that she wanted of
+love.</p>
+<p>In the kitchen she found Miss Danton, the musical spinster,
+making her scant supper of tea and toast on the gas-range. Though
+the hectic flush still burned in Miss Danton's cheeks, the famished
+look in her eyes seemed to have devoured all the strength of her
+body, and she moved like one who has run to the point of exhaustion
+and is about to drop to the ground. Long ago Gabriella had heard
+her story, and she understood now that the yearning in her face was
+the yearning for life, which she had rejected in her youth, and
+which, in middle-age, had eluded her. As a young girl, aflame with
+temperament, she had sacrificed herself to a widowed father and a
+family of little brothers and sisters in a small town in the South.
+For thirty years she had fought down her dreams and her impulses;
+for thirty years she had cooked, washed, ironed, and sewed, until
+the children had all grown up and married, and her father, after a
+long illness, had died in her arms. On her fifty-second birthday
+her freedom had come&mdash;freedom not only from cares and
+responsibilities, but from love, from duty, from the constant daily
+thought that she was necessary to some one who depended on her. At
+fifty-three, with broken health and a few thousand dollars brought
+from the sale of the old home, she had come to New York to study
+music as she had dreamed of doing when she was young. And the
+tragedy of it was that she had a gift, she had temperament, she had
+genuine artistic feeling.</p>
+<p>"When I remember the way I used to cook for the children," she
+remarked while she measured a teaspoonful of green tea into a
+little Japanese tea-pot, "why, I'd think nothing of roasting a
+turkey when we had one at Christmas or Thanksgiving, and now, I
+declare, it seems too much trouble to do more than make a pot of
+tea. Sometimes I don't even take the trouble to toast my
+bread."</p>
+<p>"You ought to eat," replied Gabriella, briskly. "When one gets
+run down, one never looks at life fairly." True to her fundamental
+common sense, she had never underestimated the importance of food
+as a prop for philosophy.</p>
+<p>"I'd never eat if I could help it," rejoined Miss Danton, with
+the abhorrence of the aesthetic temperament for material details.
+"It's queer the thoughts I have sometimes," she added irrelevantly
+as she sat down before the kitchen table, and poured out a cup of
+tea. "I don't know what's come over me, but I'd give anything on
+earth&mdash;if it wasn't wicked I'd almost give my soul&mdash;to be
+your age and to be starting to live my life. I never had any life.
+It wasn't fair. I never had any," she repeated bitterly, dropping a
+lump of sugar into her cup.</p>
+<p>"Well, I've had my troubles, too," observed Gabriella, busily
+stirring the oysters.</p>
+<p>"You've had them and you'll have others. It doesn't
+matter&mdash;nothing really matters as long as you're young. It's
+all a part of the game, trouble and everything
+else&mdash;everything except old age and death. I'm getting
+old&mdash;I'm getting old, and I began too late, and that's the
+worst that can happen to a woman. Do you know I never had a love
+affair in my life," she pursued bitterly after a moment. "I never
+had love, or pleasure, or anything but work and duty&mdash;and now
+it's too late. It's too late for it all," she finished, rising to
+take her toast from the oven.</p>
+<p>"Poor thing, she exaggerates so dreadfully," thought Gabriella.
+"I believe it comes from drinking too much green tea"; and she
+resolved that she would never touch green tea as long as she lived.
+Like most women whose love had ended not in unfulfilment, but in
+satiety and bitterness, she was inclined to deny the supreme
+importance of the passion in the scheme of life. As a deserted wife
+and the mother of two children, she felt that she could live for
+years without the desire, without even the thought of romantic love
+in her mind. "I wonder why I, who have known and lost love, should
+be so much freer from that obsession than poor Miss Danton, who has
+never been loved in her life?" she asked herself while she carried
+the supper tray down the long hall and into the living-room.</p>
+<p>Some hours later, when the children were asleep, and Gabriella
+sat darning Archibald's stockings beside the kerosene lamp, she
+described to Miss Polly the scene with Madame and Mrs.
+Pletheridge.</p>
+<p>"I don't know how it will end. She may discharge me to-morrow,"
+she deliberated, as she cut off a length of black darning cotton,
+and bent over to thread her needle. "I wonder what I ought to
+do?"</p>
+<p>"Well, now, ain't that exactly like you, Gabriella," scolded
+Miss Polly; "but when you come to think of it," she conceded after
+a minute or two, "I reckon we're all made like that in the
+beginning. Why, I remember way back yonder in the 'seventies how I
+was always tryin' to persuade a woman with a skinny figure not to
+wear a cuirass basque and a woman with a stout figure not to put on
+a draped polonaise. I got to know better presently, and you will,
+too, before you've been at it much longer. They all think they can
+look like fashion plates&mdash;the skinniest and the stoutest
+alike&mdash;and there ain't a bit of use tryin' to undeceive 'em.
+The last thing a woman ever sees straight is her figure."</p>
+<p>"I can't help feeling," demurred Gabriella, forsaking the moral
+issue for the argument of mere expediency, "that honesty is good
+business."</p>
+<p>"Well, it ain't," retorted Miss Polly sharply. "It may be good
+religion and good behaviour, but there's one thing it certainly
+ain't, and that is good business. How many of these rich men we
+read about in the papers do you reckon spend their time settin'
+around and bein' honest? Mind you I ain't sayin' I'd lie or steal
+myself, Gabriella, but I'm poor, and what I'm sayin' is that when
+you feel that way about it, you're as likely to stay poor as
+not."</p>
+<p>But the next day, life, with one of those startling surprises
+which defy philosophy and make drama, confirmed the most illogical
+of Gabriella's assumptions. Madame, coming in late, with a blotched
+face and puffy eyelids, had dispatched her to the workroom, and she
+was sitting before one of the long tables, embroidering azure beads
+on a black collar, when Agnes darted through the door and jerked
+the needle out of her hand.</p>
+<p>"Madame is asking for you. Come as quick as you can!" she cried
+excitedly, and sped back again to the shelter of the artificial
+rose-bushes at the end of the hall.</p>
+<p>Rising hurriedly, and brushing the scraps of silk from her cloth
+skirt as she walked, Gabriella followed the sound of Madame's
+wheedling voice, and found herself, as she parted the curtains of a
+fitting-room, in the opulent presence of Mrs. Pletheridge.</p>
+<p>"Yes, as I told you, we trust implicitly to Mrs. Carr's eye. She
+has the true eye of the artist," Madame simpered fawningly as she
+entered. "Did you send for me?" asked Gabriella, business-like and
+alert on the threshold.</p>
+<p>"Good morning, Mrs. Carr! I told Madame Dinard that I wanted you
+to wait on me. I want some one who tells me the truth," explained
+Mrs. Pletheridge so graciously that Gabriella would hardly have
+recognized her. Something&mdash;sleep, pleasure, or pious
+meditation&mdash;had altered overnight not only her temper but even
+the fleshly vehicle of its uncertain manifestations. Her features
+appeared to have adjusted themselves to the size of her face, and
+she spoke quite affably, though still with her manner of addressing
+an inferior.</p>
+<p>"I want you to show me something that will really suit me," she
+said. "I think the grayish-green cloth from Blandin might be copied
+in silver, but I should like you to see it on me. I know you will
+tell me what you really think." Her voice faltered and deepened to
+a note of pathos.</p>
+<p>"Poor woman," thought Gabriella, "it must be hard for her to get
+people to tell her what they really think," and she added
+exultantly while she went for the gowns: "If I satisfy her now, I
+am saved with Madame!"</p>
+<p>When she returned, with the green cloth in one hand and a
+charming lavender cr&ecirc;pe tea-gown in the other, she approached
+Mrs. Pletheridge with the manner of intelligent sympathy, of serene
+and smiling competence, which had made her so valuable to Madame as
+a saleswoman. She had the air not only of seeking to please, but of
+knowing just how to go about the difficult matter of pleasing. With
+the eye of an artist in dress, she analyzed Mrs. Pletheridge's
+possibilities; and softening here and there her pronounced
+features, succeeded presently in producing a charming and
+harmonious whole. By the time a dozen gowns were tried on and their
+available points discussed and criticised in detail, Mrs.
+Pletheridge had given the largest order ever received by the house,
+and was throwing out enthusiastic hints of an even greater
+munificence in the future. She left at last in a thoroughly good
+humour not only with Dinard's, but with her own rejuvenated
+attractions; and Gabriella, exhausted but triumphant, watched Agnes
+gather up the French models from chairs and sofas and carry them
+back to the obscurity of the closets. In her heart there was both
+peace and rejoicing because her belief in life had been justified.
+In spite of Madame, in spite of Miss Polly, in spite of experience,
+the day had proved that it was, after all, "good business" to be
+honest. Though she was still in debt, though she was still
+compelled to scrimp and save over market bills, nevertheless she
+felt that her work had progressed beyond the experimental stages,
+and that her place at Dinard's was secured until some better
+opening appeared. For that morning at least she had made herself
+indispensable to Madame. For years, she knew, Madame had striven
+fawningly for the exclusive patronage of Mrs. Pletheridge, and she,
+Gabriella, had attained it, without loss of pride or self-respect,
+by a few words of honest and sensible criticism. She had applied
+her intelligence to the situation, and her intelligence had served
+Dinard's more successfully than Madame's duplicity had done.</p>
+<p>At home she found Dr. French, who had just brought the delighted
+children back from their drive. When she thanked him, she saw that
+there was a glow of pleasure in his rather delicate face, and that
+this glow lent an expression of ecstasy to his dark-gray
+eyes&mdash;the eyes of a mystic and a dreamer. "I wonder how he
+ever became a physician," she thought. "He is more like a
+priest&mdash;like a priest of the Middle Ages." But aloud she only
+said: "You have done them a world of good. Fanny has got some of
+her colour back already, and that means an appetite for
+supper."</p>
+<p>"We had tea," broke in Archibald, with enthusiasm, "but it was
+really milk, and we had cake, but it was really bread and butter."
+He looked so well and vigorous that Gabriella called the doctor's
+attention to the animation in his face. "If only he didn't have to
+wear glasses," she said. "I'm so afraid it will interfere with his
+love of sports. His ambition is to be captain of a football team
+and to write poetry."</p>
+<p>"It's a queer combination," responded the doctor, smiling his
+slightly whimsical smile. He was rather short, with an almost
+imperceptible limp, and he had, as he put it, "never gone in for
+sports." "There's so much else when one comes to think of it," he
+added, pausing, with his hat in his hand, at the door; "there are
+plenty of ways of having fun even without football." Then he turned
+away from the children, and said directly to Gabriella:</p>
+<p>"Will you come out with me to-morrow? It is Sunday."</p>
+<p>"And leave the children?" she asked a little blankly.</p>
+<p>"And leave the children!" He was laughing, but it occurred to
+her suddenly, for the first time, that her maternal raptures were
+beginning to bore him. For a year she had believed that his
+interest in her was mainly a professional interest in the children;
+and now she was confronted with the disturbing fact that he wanted
+to be rid of the children for a few hours at least, that he
+evidently saw in her something besides the overwhelming force of
+her motherhood.</p>
+<p>"But I never leave them on Sunday. It is the only day I have
+with them," she answered.</p>
+<p>"Don't go, mother! You mustn't go!" cried Fanny, and clung to
+her.</p>
+<p>"Oh, very well," returned Dr. French, dismissing the subject
+with irritation. "But you look pale, and I thought the air might do
+you good."</p>
+<p>He went away rather abruptly, while Gabriella stood looking at
+Miss Polly in regret and perplexity. "I hope I didn't hurt his
+feelings by declining," she said; and then, as the children raced
+into the nursery to take off their coats, she added slowly, "He
+couldn't expect me to go without them."</p>
+<p>"If you want to know what I think," replied Miss Polly flatly,
+"it is that he's just sick to death of the children. You've stuck
+them down his throat until he's had as much of them as he can
+swallow."</p>
+<p>For a moment Gabriella considered this ruefully.</p>
+<p>"You don't honestly believe that he's interested in me in that
+way?" she demanded in a horrified whisper.</p>
+<p>"I don't know but one way in which a man's ever interested in a
+woman," retorted Miss Polly. "It's either that way or it's none at
+all, as far as I can see. But if I was you, honey, I'd drop him a
+little encouragement now and then, just to keep up his spirits. Men
+ain't no mo' than flesh and blood, after all" and it's natural that
+he shouldn't be as crazy about the children as you are."</p>
+<p>"But why should I encourage him? Even if you are right, I
+couldn't marry him. I could never marry again."</p>
+<p>"I'd like to know why not, if you get a chance? You're free
+enough, ain't you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, it isn't that&mdash;but I couldn't."</p>
+<p>"You ain't hankerin' after George, are you, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"After George? No!" responded Gabriella with so sincere an
+accent that Miss Polly jumped.</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm glad you ain't," observed the seamstress soothingly
+as she stooped to pick up her sewing. "I shouldn't think he was
+worth hankerin' after, myself, but you've looked kind of peaked and
+thin this spring, so I've just been wonderin'."</p>
+<p>"I never loved George. It was madness, nothing else," returned
+Gabriella, and she really believed it.</p>
+<p>"Well, your thinkin' it madness now don't mean it wan't love ten
+years ago," commented Miss Polly, with the shrewdness of a detached
+and observant spinster.</p>
+<p>"I suppose you're right," admitted Gabriella thoughtfully.
+Though she had not mentioned Arthur, her mind was full of him, and
+she was perfectly convinced that she had loved him all her
+life&mdash;even during her brief period of "madness." It was a
+higher love, she felt, so much higher, indeed, that it had been too
+spiritual, too ethereal, to take root in the earthly soil from
+which her passion for George had sprung. But, if it were not love,
+why was it that every faint stirring of her emotions revived the
+memory so poignantly? Why was it that Miss Polly's sentimental
+interpretation of the doctor's interest evoked the image of
+Arthur?</p>
+<p>"No, I never think of George&mdash;never," she repeated, and her
+fine, pure features assumed an expression of sternness. "But I
+shan't marry again," she went on after a pause in which Miss
+Polly's sewing-machine buzzed cheerfully over its work. "I've had
+enough of marriage to last me for one lifetime."</p>
+<p>The machine stopped, and Miss Polly, snipping the thread as she
+came to the end of a seam, turned squarely to answer. "Don't you be
+too sure about that, honey. You may have had enough to last you for
+ten years or so, but wait till you've turned forty, and if the
+hankerin' for love don't catch you at forty, you may begin to
+expect it somewhere around fifty. Why, just look at that poor
+piano-playin' old maid in there. Wouldn't you think she'd have done
+with it? Well, she ain't&mdash;she ain't, and you ain't either, for
+that matter, I don't care how hard you argue!"</p>
+<p>"There are ten happy years ahead of me anyhow!" rejoined
+Gabriella, with a ringing laugh&mdash;the laugh, as Dr. French had
+once remarked, of a woman who is sound to the core. She had
+triumphed over the past, and was not afraid, she told herself
+valiantly, of the future.</p>
+<p>At the beginning of July the children went with Miss Polly to
+the country, and Gabriella, after seeing them off, turned back
+alone to begin a long summer of economy and drudgery. In order to
+keep Fanny and Archibald out of town she was obliged to deny
+herself every unnecessary comfort&mdash;luxuries she had given up
+long ago&mdash;and to stay at Dinard's, in Madame's place, through
+the worst weeks of the year, when the showroom was deserted except
+for an occasional stray Southerner, and even the six arrogant young
+women were away on vacations. Even if she had had the chance, the
+money for a trip would have been lacking, and to fill Madame's
+conspicuous place gave her, she realized, a certain importance and
+authority in the house. There was opportunity, in a small way, to
+work out some of her ideas of system and order, and there was
+sufficient time to think out a definite and practical plan for the
+future. Her aim from the first had been, not only to catch on, but
+to master the details of the business, and she knew that, in spite
+of Madame's sporadic attempts to keep her in her place, she was
+gradually making herself felt&mdash;she was slowly impressing her
+individual methods upon the establishment. Madame was no longer
+what she once was, and the business was showing it. She was getting
+old, she was growing tired, and her naturally careless methods of
+work were fastening upon her. In the last years she had offered
+less and less resistance to her tendency to let go, to leave loose
+ends ungathered, to allow opportunities to slip out of her grasp,
+to be inexact and unsystematic. There was urgent need of a strong
+hand at Dinard's, if the business was to be kept from running
+gradually downhill, and Gabriella became convinced, as the days
+passed, that hers was the only hand in the house strong enough to
+check the perilous descent to failure. Her plans were made, her
+scheme arranged, but, as Madame was both jealous and suspicious,
+she saw that she must move very cautiously.</p>
+<p>There were times&mdash;since this is history, not
+romance&mdash;when her spirits flagged and her strength failed her.
+The heat of the summer was intense, and the breathless days dragged
+on interminably into the breathless nights. When her work was over
+she would wait until the last of her fellow-workers had gone home,
+and then walk across to Sixth Avenue and take the Harlem elevated
+train for her deserted rooms, which appeared more desolate, more
+ugly than ever because the children were absent. In the lonely
+kitchen&mdash;for Miss Danton and the art students were all
+away&mdash;she would eat her supper of bread and tea, which she
+drank without cream because it was more economical; and then,
+lighting her lamp, she would sew or read until midnight. Sometimes,
+when it was too hot for the lamp, and she found it impossible to
+work by the flickering gas, she would sit by her window and look
+down on the panting humanity in the street below&mdash;on the small
+shopkeepers seated in chairs on the sidewalk, on the little son of
+the Italian fruiterer playing with his dog, on the three babies of
+the Jewish tobacco merchant, sprawling in the door of the tiny shop
+which was pressed like a sardine between a bakery and a dairy. She
+was alone in the apartment, and there were late afternoons when the
+grim emptiness of the rooms seemed haunted, when she shrank back in
+apprehensive foreboding as she turned her key in the lock, when the
+profound silence within preyed on her nerves like an obsession. On
+these days she dreaded to go down the long hail to the kitchen,
+where the fluttering clothes-lines on fire-escapes at the back of
+the next apartment house offered the only suggestion of human
+companionship in the unfriendly wilderness of the city. The sight
+of the children's toys, of Fanny's story books, of Archibald's
+roller skates, moved her to tears once or twice; and when this
+happened she caught herself up sharply and struggled with the
+vague, malignant demon of melancholy.</p>
+<p>"Whatever comes, I must not lose my courage," she told herself
+at such times. "If I lose my courage I shall have nothing
+left."</p>
+<p>Then she would put on her hat, and go down into the street,
+where the unwashed children swarmed like insects over the
+pavements, and the air was as hot and parched as the air of a
+desert. If the mother of the Jewish babies sat on her doorstep, she
+would stop for a little talk with her about the heat and the health
+of the children, and the increasing price of whatever one happened
+to buy in the market, or, perhaps, if the fruit stall still kept
+open, she would ask after the Italian's little boy, and stop to pat
+Archibald's friend, the white mongrel with the black ear. She had
+left her acquaintances when she left Fifty-seventh Street, and,
+with the exception of Judge Crowborough, who telephoned
+occasionally to inquire if she needed assistance, she was without
+friends in New York. Patty wrote often from Paris, but Billy was
+happy with his work, and they said nothing of returning to America.
+In the whole city, outside of Dinard's, she knew only Dr. French,
+and from him she had had no word or sign for several months.</p>
+<p>It was on one of these depressing evenings, while she was
+boiling an egg in the kitchen, that the ringing of the door-bell
+reverberated with an uncanny sound through the empty apartment.
+Spurred by an instinctive fear of a telegram, she ran to open the
+door, and found Dr. French standing in the dimly lighted hail, with
+the negro Robert grinning cheerfully at his back.</p>
+<p>"I am so glad," she said, "so glad," and her voice shook in
+spite of the effort she made.</p>
+<p>"I've been thinking about you all summer," he explained, "and
+the other day I passed you in the street as you were coming from
+work. You are not looking well. Is it the heat?"</p>
+<p>"No, it isn't the heat. I think it is the loneliness. You see it
+is so different not having the children to come back to in the
+afternoon, and when I get lonely I see things in false proportions.
+This apartment has been like a grave to me all summer."</p>
+<p>She led the way into the living-room, where her sewing, a blue
+cambric frock she was scalloping for Fanny, was lying on the chair
+by the window. "Things are all upset. I hope you won't mind," she
+added apologetically while she folded the dress and laid it aside,
+"but nothing seems to matter when I sit here all by myself."</p>
+<p>"What are you doing?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, I work all day. There is really very little to do except
+plan for the autumn, and I like that. Madame is in Paris, and I am
+in charge of the place."</p>
+<p>"And in the evenings?"</p>
+<p>She laughed with recovered spirit. "In the evening I sew and
+read and mope."</p>
+<p>"Well, we must change all that," he said, with a tenderness
+which brought tears to her eyes. "Why can't you come out with me
+somewhere to dinner?"</p>
+<p>Three years ago, when she was first separated from George, she
+would have evaded the suggestion; but to-night, at the end of the
+long summer, she caught eagerly at the small crumb of pleasure.</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'd love to! Only wait until I put out the stove and tidy
+my hair."</p>
+<p>"I want to see what you have to eat," he remarked in his
+whimsical tone, as he followed her back into the kitchen. "Only an
+egg!"</p>
+<p>"It is so hot. I wasn't hungry, but I am now," she replied
+gaily, her thin face flushing to beauty. After her loneliness there
+was a delight in being cared for, in being scolded. "But for the
+mistake I made this might happen to me always," she thought, and
+her mind went back to Arthur.</p>
+<p>When she came out of her room, wearing a fresh linen blouse,
+with her hair smoothly brushed, and her eyes sparkling with
+pleasure, he was gazing abstractedly down into the street, and she
+was obliged to speak twice to him before he heard her and turned.
+At last he broke away, almost with an effort, from his meditation,
+and when he looked at her she saw that there was the mystic gleam
+in his eyes&mdash;the light as of a star shining through
+clouds&mdash;which attracted her so strongly. The thought flashed
+through her vague impressions, "He loves me. I may win him by a
+smile, by a word, by a look," and, for a minute, she rested on the
+certainty with an ineffable sense of peace, of ease, of deep inward
+rejoicing. "Love is everything. There is nothing worth while except
+love," she thought; and love meant to her then, not passion, not
+even romance, but comfort, tenderness, and the companionship that
+sweetens the flat monotony of daily living. Then, beneath the
+beauty and sweetness of the vision, she felt the vein of iron in
+her soul as she had felt it whenever she struggled to escape the
+sterner issues of life. The face of Arthur rose in her memory,
+tender, wistful, protecting, and young with the eternal youth of
+desire. No, love was not for her again. Not for the second time
+would she betray the faith of her Dream.</p>
+<p>They dined at a little French restaurant, where the green-shaded
+lights, festooned with grape leaves, shed a romantic pallor over
+their faces, and the haunting refrains of an Italian love song
+stirred the buried ghosts in their hearts. The doctor made her
+drink a glass of champagne; and after her frugal meals and the
+weakening effect of the heat and the loneliness, the sparkle of the
+wine, mingling with the music and the lights, sent a sudden rush of
+joy through her veins. Her courage came back to her, not in slow
+drops, but in a radiant flood, which pervaded her being. After the
+lonely months there was delight in the clasp of a friend's hand, in
+the glance of a friend's eye, in the sound of a friend's voice
+speaking her name. Life appeared divinely precious at the instant;
+and by life she meant not happiness, not even fulfilment, but the
+very web, the very texture and pattern of experience.</p>
+<p>"You're better already," he said, with a solicitude that was
+more intoxicating than wine to her. "How I wish I'd known all
+summer that you were here. I might have done something to make you
+happy, and now I've missed my chance."</p>
+<p>"I don't think I've ever been so happy as I am to-night," she
+answered simply, and then after a pause she let fall word by word,
+"After all, it takes so little to make me happy."</p>
+<p>"One can tell that to look at you. You have the air of
+happiness. I noticed it the first moment I saw you. And yet you
+have not had an easy life. There must have been terrible hours for
+you in the past."</p>
+<p>"No, I haven't had an easy life, but I love it. I mean I love
+living."</p>
+<p>"I know, I understand," he said softly. "It is the true American
+spirit&mdash;optimism springing out of a struggle. Do you know you
+have always made me think of the American spirit at its
+best&mdash;of its unquenchable youth, its gallantry, its
+self-reliance&mdash;"</p>
+<p>They walked back slowly through the hot, close streets, and sat
+for an hour beside her window-sill on which a rose geranium was
+blooming in an earthen pot. Now and then a breeze entered warily,
+stealing the fragrance from the rose geranium, and rippling the
+dark, straying tendrils of Gabriella's hair. By the dim light she
+saw the wistful pallor of his face, and his blue eyes, with their
+exalted look, which moved her heart to an inexpressible
+tenderness.</p>
+<p>"You are so different from other physicians," she said in
+perplexity, "I can't think of you as one, no matter how hard I try.
+All the others I have known, even old Dr. Walker, were
+materialists."</p>
+<p>"Well, I got in some way. There are fools in every school, I
+suppose. But if it's any comfort to you, they've done their best to
+get rid of me. They don't like my theories." When he talked of his
+work he seemed all at once another man to her, and she discerned
+presently, while she listened to his earnest voice, that he was one
+of the men whose emotional natures are nourished by an abstract and
+impersonal passion&mdash;by the passion for science, for truth in
+its concrete form. After all, he was a mystic only in his eyes.
+Beneath his dreamer's face he was a scientist to the last drop of
+his blood, to the last fibre of his being. "He can't be hurt deeply
+through the heart," she thought; "only through the mind."</p>
+<p>"I've wondered about you all summer," he repeated presently,
+"and yet I kept away&mdash;partly, I suppose, because I was
+thinking too much of you."</p>
+<p>At his change of tone from the impersonal to the tender all the
+frozen self-pity in her heart seemed to melt suddenly, threatening
+in its overflow the very foundations of her philosophy. The
+temptation to yield utterly, to rest for a while not on her
+strength, but on his, assailed her with the swiftness and the
+violence of a spiritual revulsion. For an instant she surrendered
+to the uncontrollable force of this desire; then she drew quickly
+back while the world about her&mdash;the room, the window, the bare
+skeleton of the elevated road, the street, and even the rose
+geranium blooming on the sill&mdash;became as remote and impalpable
+as a phantom.</p>
+<p>"It has been a long summer," she heard herself saying from a
+distance in a thin and colourless voice.</p>
+<p>"And you suffered?"</p>
+<p>"Sometimes, but I'm interested in my work, and I've been
+thinking and planning all summer."</p>
+<p>For a moment he was silent, and though she did not look at him,
+she could feel his intense gaze on her face. The breeze, scented
+with rose geranium, touched her forehead like the healing and
+delicate stroke of his fingers.</p>
+<p>"You are still so young, so vital, not to have something else in
+your life," he went on presently in a voice so charged with feeling
+that her eyes filled while she listened to it.</p>
+<p>"I have had love, and I have my children."</p>
+<p>"But you will love again? You will marry again some day?"</p>
+<p>She shook her head, hearing, above the street cries and the
+muffled rumble of the elevated train, a voice that said: "I shall
+never give you up, Gabriella!" To her weakened nerves there
+appeared, with the vividness of an hallucination, the memory of
+Arthur as he had looked in her school-days when she had first loved
+him; and in this hallucination she saw him, not as he was in
+reality, but divinely glorified and enkindled by the light her
+imagination had created around him.</p>
+<p>"No, I shall never love again, I shall never love again," she
+answered at last, while a feeling of exultation surged through
+her.</p>
+<p>"You mean," his voice shook a little, "that your husband still
+holds you?"</p>
+<p>"My husband? No, I never think of my husband."</p>
+<p>"Is there some one else?"</p>
+<p>Before answering she looked up at him, and by his face she knew
+that her reply would cost her his friendship. She wanted his
+friendship&mdash;at the moment she felt that she would gladly give
+a year of her life for it. It meant companionship instead of
+loneliness, it meant plenty instead of famine. Yet only for an
+instant, only while she stopped to draw breath, did she hesitate.
+"Women must learn to be honourable," she found herself thinking
+suddenly with an extraordinary intensity.</p>
+<p>"Yes, there is some one else&mdash;there has always been some
+one else," she said, driven on by an impulsive desire for full
+confession, for absolute candour. "When I met George I was engaged
+to another man, and I have loved that man all my life."</p>
+<p>She had confessed all, she told herself; and the remarkable part
+was that she really believed her confession&mdash;she was honestly
+convinced that she had spoken only the truth. Her soul, like the
+soul of Cousin Jimmy, sheltered a romantic strain which demanded
+that one supreme illusion should endure amid a world of
+disillusionment. Because she was obliged to believe in something or
+die, she had built her imperishable Dream on the flame-swept ruins
+of her happiness.</p>
+<p>"He must be a big man if he can fill a life like yours," said
+Dr. French.</p>
+<p>"I don't know why I told you," she faltered; "I have never told
+any one else. It is my secret."</p>
+<p>"Well, it is safe with me. Don't be afraid."</p>
+<p>For the few minutes before he rose to go they talked
+indifferently of other things. She had lost him, she knew, and
+while she held his hand at parting, she felt a sharp regret for
+what was passing out of her life&mdash;for the one chance of love,
+of peace, of a tranquil and commonplace happiness. But beneath the
+regret there was a hidden spring of joy in her heart. At the
+instant of trial she had found strength to be true to her
+Dream.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_Va" id="CHAPTER_Va"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<h3>SUCCESS</h3>
+<p>"I declare you're real pretty to-night, honey," remarked Miss
+Polly from the floor, where she knelt pinning up the hem of a black
+serge skirt she was making for Gabriella. "Some days you're
+downright plain, and then you flame out just like a lamp. Nobody
+would ever think to look at you that you'd be thirty-seven years
+old to-morrow." For it was the evening before Gabriella's birthday,
+and she was at the end of her thirty-sixth year.</p>
+<p>"I feel young," she answered brightly, "and I feel happy. The
+children are well, and I've had all the success I could ask. Some
+day I'm going to own Madame's business, Miss Polly."</p>
+<p>"I reckon she's gettin' mighty old, ain't she?"</p>
+<p>"She gave up the work years ago, and I believe she'd be glad to
+sell out to me to-morrow if I had the money.</p>
+<p>"I wish you had. It would be nice for you to be at the head, now
+wouldn't it?" rejoined Miss Polly, speaking with difficulty through
+a mouthful of pins.</p>
+<p>"Yes, I wish I had, but I've thought and thought, and I don't
+see how I could borrow enough. I've sometimes thought of asking
+Judge Crowborough to invest some money in the business. It would be
+investing, the returns are so good."</p>
+<p>"He'd do it in a minute, I expect. He always set a lot of store
+by you, didn't he?"</p>
+<p>"He used to, but somehow I hate to ask favours."</p>
+<p>"You were always a heap too proud. Don't you remember how you'd
+never eat the other children's cake when you were a child unless
+you had some of your own to offer 'em?"</p>
+<p>Gabriella laughed. "No, I don't remember, but it sounds like me.
+I was horrid."</p>
+<p>"There was always a hard streak somewhere down in you, and you
+don't mind my sayin' that you ain't gettin' any softer, Gabriella.
+There are times now when your mouth gets a set look like your Aunt
+Becky Bollingbroke's. You don't recollect her, I 'spose, but she
+never married."</p>
+<p>"Well, I married," Gabriella flippantly reminded her; "so it
+can't be that."</p>
+<p>Though the hard work of the last ten years had left its visible
+mark upon her, and she looked a little older, a little tired, a
+little worn, experience had added a rare spiritual beauty to her
+face, and she was far handsomer than she had been at twenty. The
+rich sprinkling of silver in the heavy waves of hair over her ears
+framed the firm pale oval of her face with a poetic and mysterious
+darkness, and gave depth and softness to her brilliant eyes. For
+the struggle, which had stolen her first freshness and left faintly
+perceptible lines in her expressive face, had not robbed her of the
+eyes and the heart of a girl.</p>
+<p>"I don't count George, somehow," retorted Miss Polly. "That
+wan't like marryin' a real man, you know, and, when all's said and
+done, a lone woman gets mighty hard and dried up."</p>
+<p>"But I can't marry when there's nobody to marry me," laughed
+Gabriella. "I haven't seen a man for seven years except in the
+street or occasionally in the shop. Men have either passed me by
+without seeing me or they have wanted to sell me something."</p>
+<p>At the sound of the children's voices she slipped out of the
+serge skirt, and began hurriedly fastening the old black silk gown
+she wore at dinner. Through all the years of toil and self-denial
+she had preserved a certain formality of living, a gracious ease of
+manner, which she kept for the evenings with her children. Cares
+were thrust away then, to be taken up again as soon as Fanny and
+Archibald were in bed, and no matter how hard the day had been, she
+was always cheerful, always gay and light-hearted for the dinner
+hour by the fireside. Not often had she been too poor to buy a
+handful of flowers for the table, and never once, except during her
+illness, had she come home too tired to change to the black silk
+gown, which she had turned and made from bishop sleeves to small
+ones, and from "dropped" shoulders to high ones, for the last six
+or seven years. The damask on the table was darned and mended, but
+it was always spotlessly fresh. In winter the fire was made up
+brightly in the evenings; in summer the room was deliciously
+scented with rose geranium and heliotrope from the box in the
+window. For ten years she had not had a holiday; she had worked
+harder than a man, harder than any servant, for she had worked from
+dawn until midnight; but into her hard life she had instilled a
+quality of soul which had enabled her to endure the strain without
+breaking. "No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the
+way you take it," she had said to herself in the beginning; and
+remembering always that courage is one of the eternal virtues, she
+had disciplined her mind as well as her body to firmness and
+elasticity of fibre. "Nobody, except myself, is ever going to make
+me happy," she would repeat over and over again when the day was
+wearying and the work heavy. "I want to be happy. I have a right to
+be happy, but it depends on myself."</p>
+<p>This indestructible belief in her "right to happiness" supported
+her through the hardest hours of her life, and diffused an
+invigorating atmosphere not only in her home, but even in her long
+working hours at Dinard's. The children grew and strengthened in
+its bracing air; Miss Polly quickly responded to it; the women in
+the workroom breathed it in as if it were the secret of health, and
+even Madame showed occasional signs that she was not entirely
+impervious to its vital and joyous influence. It was not always
+easy for Gabriella to keep the light in her eyes and the faith in
+her heart. There were days when both seemed to fail her, when, with
+aching body and depressed mind, she felt that she could not look
+beyond the immediate suffering minute, when she told herself
+despairingly that she had lost everything in losing her courage.
+But bad days passed as irrevocably as good ones; and left her, when
+they were over, with her strong soul unshaken, and her philosophy
+of happiness still undestroyed. Like other human beings, she found
+that her moods were largely controlled by her physical health.</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother dear, I went down to meet you, and I missed you by
+just five minutes," said Fanny, kissing her cheek. "I wanted you to
+go with me to look at the house in London Terrace. Miss Polly and I
+are crazy about it."</p>
+<p>"I know," said Gabriella tenderly, while she feasted her eyes on
+her daughter.</p>
+<p>The old apartment house in which they had spent the last ten
+years would be torn down in the summer, and Fanny and Miss Folly
+had devoted the past week to an exhaustive hunt for a home.</p>
+<p>"Then you'll look at it to-morrow, won't you, mother?" urged
+Fanny. "We can get the upper rooms and they are larger than these.
+There is a little yard in front, with an elm tree and a rose-bush,
+and plenty of space for flowers."</p>
+<p>"I can't recall the house exactly," said Gabriella thoughtfully.
+"It must be in a row, isn't it? I have a vague recollection of some
+old houses, with fronts of stuccoed pilasters, and rather nice
+yards. But West Twenty-third Street is too far away, dear. I don't
+like the neighbourhood. Wouldn't you rather be in Park Avenue?" Her
+ignorance of New York, though she had lived there seventeen years,
+amazed Fanny, who was a true child of the city.</p>
+<p>"Carlie Herndon lives in that row, mother"&mdash;Carlie Herndon,
+the daughter of a distinguished and unpopular novelist, was Fanny's
+best friend for the moment&mdash;"and I could always go out with
+her in the evening."</p>
+<p>"It isn't the location I should have liked, Fanny," said
+Gabriella, weakly yielding, as she always yielded to her daughter;
+"but if you really fancy the house, I'll try to look at it on my
+way home to-morrow. One has to be very careful about the plumbing
+in these old houses. I insist upon good plumbing. After that, you
+may have what you want."</p>
+<p>"Oh, it has brand new bathrooms, Mrs. Mallon told me so, and
+she's lived there until a year ago. And if you had only seen the
+new apartments we looked at, mother, nothing on the East Side that
+would have held us under twenty-five hundred a year, and even at
+that the bedrooms were no bigger than closets, and you'd have to
+have electric light all day in the bathroom. We searched
+everywhere, didn't we, Miss Polly?"</p>
+<p>"West Twenty-third Street is mighty far out of the way, honey,"
+observed Miss Polly cautiously.</p>
+<p>"Oh, but I'd have Carlie, and she's my best friend," persisted
+Fanny, with caressing obstinacy.</p>
+<p>"Well, we'll see, precious," said Gabriella, while she assured
+herself that if Fanny cost her every penny she had, at least the
+child was worth what she spent on her. To a superficial observer,
+Fanny would probably have appeared merely an attractive girl, of
+Jane's willowy type, with something of Jane's trite prettiness of
+feature; but to Gabriella, who suffered from a maternal obliquity
+of vision, she seemed both brilliant and beautiful. Of course she
+was selfish, but this selfishness, as long as it was clothed in her
+youth and loveliness, was as inoffensive as the playfulness of a
+kitten. Her face was round and shallow, with exquisite colouring
+which veiled the flatness and lack of character in her features.
+Above her azure eyes her hair, which was not plentiful, but fine
+and soft, and as yellow as ripe corn, broke in a shining mist over
+her forehead. All her life, by being what she was, she had got,
+without effort, everything that she wanted. She had got dolls when
+she wanted dolls; she had got Miss Ludwell's expensive school when
+she wanted an expensive private school; she would get the house in
+West Twenty-third Street to-morrow, and when she began to want
+love, she would get it as easily and as undeservedly as she got
+everything else. She was very expensive, but, like the flowers on
+the table and the spotless damask and the lace in Gabriella's
+sleeves, she was one of her mother's luxuries to be paid for by
+additional hours of work and thought.</p>
+<p>"Wasn't Archibald with you?" inquired Gabriella, while she
+pushed the chairs into place and tidied the room.</p>
+<p>"He stopped at the library. There's his ring now. I'll open the
+door."</p>
+<p>She ran out, and Gabriella, with the tablecloth in her hand,
+stood waiting for Archibald to enter. In her eager expectancy, in
+the wistful brightness of her eyes, in the tender quivering of her
+lips, she was like a girl who is awaiting a lover. Every evening,
+after her day's work, she greeted her son with the same passionate
+tenderness. Never had it lessened, never, even when she was most
+discouraged, had she failed to summon her strength and her
+sweetness for this beatific end to the day. For Archibald was more
+than a son to her. As he grew older their characters became more
+perfectly adjusted, and the rare bond of a deep mental sympathy
+held them together. Fanny loved her as a spoiled child loves the
+dispenser of its happiness; but in Archibald's devotion there was
+something of the worship of a man for an ideal.</p>
+<p>Flushed and hungry, the boy came in, and after kissing her
+hurriedly, ran off to wash his face and hands before dinner. When
+he came back the table was laid, with a bunch of lilacs in a cut
+glass vase over the darned spot in the tablecloth, and Miss Polly
+was bringing in the old-fashioned soup tureen, which had belonged
+to Gabriella's maternal grandmother.</p>
+<p>"If you don't sit right straight down everything will be cold,"
+said Miss Polly severely, for this was her customary manner of
+announcing dinner. Every night for ten years she had threatened
+them with a cold dinner while she served them a hot one.</p>
+<p>With a child on either side of her, Gabriella sat down, and
+ladled the soup out of the old china tureen. It was her consecrated
+hour&mdash;the single hour of her toiling day that she dedicated to
+personal happiness; and because it was her hour, her life had
+gradually centred about it as if it were the divine point of her
+universe&mdash;the pivot upon which her whole world revolved.
+Nothing harsh, nothing sordid, nothing sad, ever touched the sacred
+precincts of her twilight hour with her children.</p>
+<p>"I can beat any boy at school running, mother," said Archibald,
+watching his plate of soup hungrily as it travelled toward him. "If
+my eyes won't let me be captain of a football team, I'm going to
+become the champion runner in America. I bet I can, if I try."</p>
+<p>"I shouldn't wonder, dear. It's good for you, too. I never saw
+you look better."</p>
+<p>He was a tall, thin boy, with a muscular figure, and thick brown
+hair, which was always rumpled. Through his ugly spectacles his
+eyes showed large, dark, and as beautifully soft as a girl's. His
+mind was remarkably keen and active, and there was in his carriage
+something of Gabriella's capable and commanding air, as if, like
+her, he embodied those qualities which compel acknowledgment.
+Though she had never admitted it even to herself, he was her
+favourite child.</p>
+<p>When dinner was over she had the children to herself&mdash;to
+the gracious, unhurried self she gave them&mdash;until ten o'clock.
+Then their books were put away, and after she had kissed them
+good-night, and tucked the covers about them, she came back to the
+living-room, and sat down to her sewing with Miss Polly. The ease
+and cheerfulness dropped from her at the approach of midnight, and
+while the two women bent over their needles they talked of their
+anxieties, and planned innumerable and intricate ways of
+economy.</p>
+<p>"Fanny's school costs so much, and, of course, she must have
+clothes. All the other girls dress so expensively."</p>
+<p>"You spend three times as much on her as you do on
+Archibald."</p>
+<p>"I know," her voice melted to the mother note, "but Archibald is
+different. He is a man, and he will make his way in the world.
+Then, too, his expenses will be trebled next year when he goes off
+to school, and after that, of course, will come college. I don't
+believe anything or anybody can keep Archibald back," she went on
+proudly. "Do you know he talks already of going to work in a
+shipping office in order to help me?"</p>
+<p>"It's a pity about his eyes."</p>
+<p>"There's nothing wrong except near-sightedness, but he'll have
+to wear glasses all his life."</p>
+<p>For a minute Miss Polly stitched almost furiously, while her
+small weatherbeaten face, with its grotesque features, was visited
+by an illumination that softened and ennobled its ugliness. From
+living entirely in the lives of others, she had attained the
+spiritual serenity and detachment of a saint as well as the saint's
+immunity from the intenser personal forms of suffering. Long habit
+had accustomed her to think of herself only in connection with
+somebody's need of her, and beyond this she hardly appeared as an
+individual existence even in her own secret reflections. As far as
+it is possible to achieve absolute unselfishness in a world planned
+upon egoistic principles Miss Polly had achieved it; and the result
+was that she was almost perfectly happy.</p>
+<p>"Fanny seems right set on goin' down to Twenty-third Street,
+don't she?" she inquired, after an interval of musing.</p>
+<p>"It's all because Carlie lives in the row, and by next year,
+after we've had all the trouble of moving, she'll find another
+bosom friend and want to go to Park Avenue."</p>
+<p>"It's a real comfortable sort of house, more like Richmond than
+New York, and I reckon we could get flowers to grow there just
+about as well as they did in Hill Street."</p>
+<p>"I don't like having those O'Haras on the lower floor. If they
+are loud and common, it might be very disagreeable."</p>
+<p>"There ain't but one, a man, and he's hardly ever there, the
+caretaker's wife told me. She said he was almost always in the
+West, and anyway his lease is up next year, and he thinks he'll
+give up his rooms. She says he has made piles of money in mines
+somewhere out West, and he only keeps those rooms because they used
+to belong to a man who picked him out of the street when he was a
+little boy selling newspapers. That caretaker's wife seems to be a
+mighty kind-hearted creature, but she talks as if she was never
+goin' to stop."</p>
+<p>"I think I could afford to take an apartment in Park Avenue,"
+returned Gabriella, dismissing the name of O'Hara; "but, of course,
+I want to save as much as I can in order to invest in the business.
+If it wasn't for that, I could stop scraping and pinching. I can't
+bear, though, to think of leaving nothing for the children when I
+die."</p>
+<p>"Go away from here, honey. The idea of your talkin' about dyin'!
+You look healthier than you ever did in your life, only you're
+gettin' that set look again about your mouth."</p>
+<p>"I wonder if I'm growing hard," said Gabriella, stopping to
+glance in the mirror. "I suppose that's the problem of life for the
+working woman&mdash;not to grow hard." In some ways, she realized,
+Miss Polly was right. She was a handsome woman, as Madame
+occasionally informed her; but she was no longer shrinking, she was
+no longer alluringly feminine. To dress smartly for Dinard's was a
+part of her work, and she had grown quite indifferent to having men
+turn and stare after her in the street or when she entered a
+restaurant. But the men who stared never spoke to her as they did
+to Fanny when she was alone. They regarded her admiringly, but she
+aroused neither disrespect nor the protective instinct in their
+minds. Only when she smiled her face grew as young as her eyes, and
+with the powdering of silver on her hair, gave her a look of
+radiance and charm; but at other times, when she was grave or
+preoccupied with the management of Dinard's, the "set look" that
+Miss Polly dreaded hardened her mouth.</p>
+<p>"I wish you could go easier now for a while," resumed the little
+seamstress, after a pause which she had filled with vague
+speculations about Gabriella's sentimental prospects. "I just hate
+like anything to see you wearing yourself out. Of course I'd like
+you to own part of the business, and I can't help thinkin' that the
+judge could get you the money as easy as not. It ain't as if you
+couldn't pay him the interest regular, is it?" she pursued with the
+financial helplessness of a woman who has never thought in terms of
+figures. "You couldn't be doin' any better, could you? There ain't
+anybody can run the business as well as you do, I don't care who
+'tis."</p>
+<p>"I sometimes think," returned Gabriella deliberately, while she
+draped a lace bertha on a white silk frock she was making for
+Fanny, "that I will try to borrow the money."</p>
+<p>"It couldn't hurt, could it?"</p>
+<p>"No, I don't suppose it could hurt."</p>
+<p>Her eyes were on the lace, which she was adjusting over the
+shoulder, and Miss Polly followed her gaze with a look which was
+not entirely approving.</p>
+<p>"There ain't a bit of sense in your wearin' yourself out over
+that child," said the seamstress presently, with so sharp an accent
+that Gabriella glanced up quickly from her work. "It was just the
+way Mrs. Spencer started Florrie, and it ain't right."</p>
+<p>"Florrie!" exclaimed Gabriella, startled, and she added slowly,
+"I wonder what has become of her? I haven't thought of her for
+years."</p>
+<p>"It was a mean trick she played you, Gabriella. I'd never have
+believed it of Florrie if I hadn't been there to see it with my own
+eyes."</p>
+<p>"Yes, it was mean," assented Gabriella, but there was no anger
+in her voice. She had left the past so far behind her that its
+disappointments and its cruelties had become as dim and shadowy to
+her imagination as if they had been phantoms of the mind instead of
+actual events through which she had lived.</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm glad she didn't spoil your life for you, honey."</p>
+<p>"No, she didn't spoil my life. Don't I look happy? And Madame
+told me to-day that my figure was distinguished. Now, when a
+woman's life is spoiled her figure and her complexion are the first
+things to show it."</p>
+<p>"Of course you ain't gettin' slouchy, I don't mean anything like
+that. But I hate to see you workin' your fingers to the bone and
+bringin' lines around your eyes when you ought to be taken care of.
+I don't hold with women workin' unless they're obliged to."</p>
+<p>"But I'm obliged to. How on earth could I take care of the
+children if I didn't work?"</p>
+<p>For a minute there was an austere silence while Miss Polly
+reflected grimly that Gabriella Mary&mdash;she thought of her as
+"Gabriella Mary" in moments of disapprobation"&mdash;was gettin'
+almost as set as her ma."</p>
+<p>"You could marry," she said flatly at last, stopping to press
+down the hem she had turned with the blunted nail of her thumb. "Of
+course your ma would be dead against it, but there ain't any reason
+in the world why you shouldn't go back home and marry Arthur
+Peyton, as you ought to have done seventeen years ago."</p>
+<p>Though Gabriella laughed in reply, there was no merriment in the
+sound, and a look of sadness crept into the eyes she turned away
+from the sharp gaze of the little seamstress.</p>
+<p>"You've forgotten that I haven't seen him for seventeen years,"
+she answered.</p>
+<p>"That don't make any difference in his sort, and you know it. He
+ain't ever married anybody else, and he ain't goin' to. The
+faithfulness that ought to be spread over the whole sex gets stored
+up in a few, and he's one of 'em."</p>
+<p>"He has never written to me. No, he must have got over it,"
+responded Gabriella, with an impassioned emphasis, "and, besides,
+even if he cared, I don't want to marry again. My children are
+enough for me."</p>
+<p>"It won't look that way next year when both the children are
+away at school, and when they once break away from your apron
+strings they're the sort that will go the way they want to and look
+out for their own happiness. You won't have much of Archibald while
+he's at school and college, and Fanny will marry befo' she's twenty
+just as sure as you live. Why, she's already got her head full of
+beaux. Have you noticed that picture of an actor she keeps on her
+bureau?"</p>
+<p>"Yes" admitted Gabriella anxiously, "I've noticed it, but when I
+asked her about it, she only laughed."</p>
+<p>After this the conversation dropped, and the two women put away
+their work for the might; but hours later, while Miss Polly lay in
+her hard little bed wondering if it would be possible to "fix"
+things between Gabriella and Arthur, the stern heroine of her
+romance wept a few tender tears on her pillow.</p>
+<p>In the morning, with the tears still ready to spring at a touch,
+Gabriella read a letter from her mother, which he had found, beside
+the baker's rolls, at the door.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p><i>Richmond, Thursday</i>.</p>
+<p>DEAR CHILD:</p>
+<p>As the others are all out to-night, and I have finished the mat
+I was crocheting, I thought I would send you a letter to reach you
+on your birthday instead of the telegram from the family. I am so
+thankful to hear that you keep well and happy and that Fanny has
+quite recovered from her cold. It was thoughtful of you to send the
+check, and I shall find it very useful, though Jane refuses to let
+me pay any board since Charley has inherited such a large income
+from his brother Tom. I sent you all the papers about the dreadful
+accident on the River road in which poor Tom and his wife were
+killed, but you haven't heard yet that Tom left his new house in
+Monument Avenue&mdash;they had only just moved into it&mdash;and
+almost all of his property to Charley. Of course, this will make a
+great difference in our manner of living; but just now none of us
+can think of anything except poor Tom and Gertrude, to whom we were
+all so deeply attached. No amount of money could in any way soften
+the blow of their loss, and the accident has given me such a horror
+of automobiles, though both Charley and Jane tell me this is very
+foolish.</p>
+<p>To turn to more cheerful subjects, I can't begin to tell you how
+much the last photograph of Fanny has been admired. She is such a
+lovely girl, almost as pretty, we think, as Jane used to be when
+she first grew up, and I'm sure there could be no higher praise
+than that. You pleased me by saying that Archibald is like his
+grandfather, even if he isn't so handsome, and that he has a strong
+character. Good looks aren't nearly so important in a man as they
+are in a woman, and, you know, I don't think that men are as
+handsome to-day as they used to be when I was a girl. They have
+lost something&mdash;I can't make out just what it is.</p>
+<p>Charley and Jane are at the Prohibition meeting. It is the first
+time they have gone anywhere since the accident, but we all felt
+that Tom and Gertrude would have wanted them to go for the sake of
+the cause. I don't suppose you, would recognize Charley now if you
+were to meet him. He is entirely changed, and I believe our new
+minister is the reason for it, though Jane likes to think that her
+influence reclaimed him. But, you remember, neither you nor I ever
+thought that Jane went about reforming Charley in the right way;
+and even now, though I wouldn't hurt dear Jane's feelings for
+anything in the world, I am afraid she nags Charley and the
+children too much. Of course, she means it for the best. No one
+could look at the dear child without realizing what a beautiful
+character she is.</p>
+<p>But the change in Charley is really remarkable, and he won't
+allow a drop of alcohol to come into the house&mdash;not even as
+medicine. I can't help feeling sorry for poor old Uncle
+Meriweather, who despises grape juice and misses his mint julep
+when he comes to dine on Sunday; but Charley forbids Jane to make
+him a julep; and I suppose he is right since he says it is a matter
+of principle. Even Jane, however, thinks dear Charley is going a
+little too far when he refuses to let me have the sherry and egg
+the doctor ordered. However, I tell Jane that, since Charley feels
+so strongly about my taking it, she must not try to persuade him
+against his convictions. Dr. Darrow doesn't know that I stopped the
+sherry when Charley found out I was buying it. Perhaps the plain
+eggs will do me quite as much good. Anyhow, I wouldn't let my
+health stand in the way of Charley's salvation.</p>
+<p>Margaret has gone out to a concert, and you would never guess
+who came to take her. I said to her when she was starting, "Well,
+I'm going to sit straight down and write your Aunt Gabriella that
+you've gone out with her old sweetheart." But doesn't it make you
+realize how time flies when you think of Arthur Peyton's paying
+attention to Jane's daughter? Of course, it isn't anything
+serious&mdash;everybody knows that he has never recovered from his
+feeling for you&mdash;but last winter he took Margaret to two
+germans and to any number of plays. I believe Jane would be really
+pleased if he were to take a fancy to Margaret, but I don't think
+there is the faintest chance of it, for his Cousin Lizzie told me
+last winter that she couldn't mention your name in his presence.
+She says his faithfulness is perfectly beautiful, and she ought to
+know for she has lived with him ever since his mother's death. Of
+course, he has never accomplished very much in his profession.
+Chancy says all the men downtown look upon him as a failure; but,
+then, he is such a perfect gentleman, and, as I tell Charley and
+Jane, one can't have everything. How different your life would have
+been, my dear daughter, if you had listened to the prayers of your
+mother, and married a gentle Christian character like Arthur
+Peyton.</p>
+<p>But I mustn't let my thoughts run away with me. Of course, even
+if your heart had not been broken, it would be impossible for you
+to think of another man as long as your husband is living. No pure
+woman could do that, and when people tell me about divorced women
+who remarry, I always maintain that they are not what my mother and
+I would call "pure women." I would rather think of you nursing your
+broken heart forever in solitude than that you should put such a
+blot upon your character and the name of the Carrs. Of course, you
+were right to divorce George after he forsook you for
+Florrie&mdash;even his mother tells everybody that you were
+right&mdash;but the thought of a second marriage would, I know, be
+intolerable to your refined and sensitive nature. After all, he is
+still your husband in the sight of God, and I said this to Miss
+Lizzie Peyton when we were talking of Arthur.</p>
+<p>It is almost eleven o'clock, and I must stop and undress. Kiss
+the dear children, and remember me kindly to Miss Polly.</p>
+<p>Your loving MOTHER.</p>
+</div>
+<p>As she refolded the letter Gabriella stood for an instant with
+her dreaming gaze on the delicate Italian handwriting on the
+envelope.</p>
+<p>"It's amazing how wide the gulf is between the generations," she
+thought, not without humour. "I believe mother thinks of George
+oftener than I do, and I'd marry Arthur to-morrow if he wanted me
+to&mdash;except for the children."</p>
+<p>Then, as Archibald rushed into the room, she caught him in her
+arms, and held him hungrily to her bosom.</p>
+<p>"My darling, you want to keep your mother, don't you?"</p>
+<p>"I jolly well do. What's the trouble, mother? I believe it's all
+that sitting up over Fanny's old dresses. Why don't you make
+something pretty for yourself?"</p>
+<p>"She has to have things, and you love me just as well without
+them, don't you?"</p>
+<p>"But I want you to have them, too. I like you to look pretty,
+and you are pretty."</p>
+<p>"Then I can look pretty in plain clothes, can't I?"</p>
+<p>"I tell you what I am going to do," he hesitated a minute,
+knitting his heavy brows over his spectacles, which looked so odd
+on a boy. "Next summer when school is over I'm going to work and
+make some money so you can have a velvet dress in the
+autumn&mdash;a black velvet dress with lace on it&mdash;lots of
+lace&mdash;and a hat with feathers."</p>
+<p>"You foolish boy!" laughed Gabriella. "Do you think for an
+instant I'd let you?" Her voice was gay, but when he had broken
+away from her clasp, and was racing along the hail for his school
+books, she turned aside to wipe the tears from her eyes.</p>
+<p>"It's wrong, but I love, him more than I love Fanny," she said.
+"I love him more than all the rest of the world.".</p>
+<p>An hour later, sitting beside an Italian labourer in an elevated
+train, she tried hard to keep her mind on the day's work and on the
+morning paper, which she held open before her&mdash;for in adopting
+a business life she had adopted instinctively a man's businesslike
+habits. A subtle distinction divided her from the over-dressed
+shopgirls around her as completely as her sex separated her from
+the portly masculine breadwinner in the opposite seat. Her tailored
+suit of black serge, with its immaculate white collar and cuffs,
+had an air of charming simplicity, and the cameolike outline of her
+features against the luminous background of the window-pane was the
+aristocratic racial outline of the Carrs. In the whirlpool of
+modern business she still preserved the finer attributes which
+Nature had bred in her race. The bitter sweetness of the mother's
+inheritance, grafted on the hardy stock of the Carr character, had
+flavoured without weakening the daughter's spirit, and, though few
+of the men in the train glanced in the direction of Gabriella, the
+few who noticed her in her corner surmised by intuition that she
+possessed not only the manner, but the heart of a lady. She was not
+particularly handsome, not particularly young, and her charm was
+scarcely the kind to flash like a lantern before the eye of the
+beholder. To the portly breadwinner she was probably a nice-looking
+American business woman, nothing more; to the Italian labourer she
+was, doubtless, a lady with a pleasant face, who would be polite if
+you asked her a question; and to the other passengers she must have
+appeared merely a woman reading her newspaper on her way down to
+work. Her primal qualities of force, restraint, and capability were
+the last things these superficial observers would have thought of;
+and yet it was by these qualities that she must succeed or fail in
+her struggle for life.</p>
+<p>When she reached Dinard's she found Miss Smith, the only woman
+in Madame's employ who was ever punctual, ill-humouredly poking the
+spring hats out of the cases. Miss Smith, who excelled in the
+cardinal virtues, manifested at times a few of those minor
+frailties by which the cardinal virtues are not infrequently
+attended. Her one pronounced fault was a bad temper, and on this
+particular morning that fault was conspicuous. As she carried the
+hats from the cases to the window, which she was decorating with
+the festive millinery of the spring, she looked as if she were
+resisting an impulse to throw Madame's choicest confections at the
+jovial figure of the traffic policeman. Gabriella, who was used to
+what she called the "peculiarities" of the forewoman, said "good
+morning" with her bright amiability, and hurried back to the dim
+regions where she changed from her street suit to the picturesque
+French gown which she wore in the showroom. When she came out again
+Miss Smith had finished ornamenting the white pegs in the window,
+and was vigorously upbraiding a messenger boy who had delivered a
+parcel at the wrong door.</p>
+<p>"You are always so prompt," remarked Gabriella cheerfully, as
+she arranged the hats in the front room. Her rule of business
+conduct was simple, and consisted chiefly of the precept that
+whatever happened she must keep her temper. Never once, never even
+in Madame's most trying moments, had she permitted herself to
+appear angry, and her strict adherence to this resolution had
+established her in an enviable position of authority. Obeying
+unconsciously some inherited strain of prudence in her nature, she
+had sacrificed her temper on the solid altar of business
+expediency.</p>
+<p>"Somebody has to be on time, I guess," replied Miss Smith
+snappishly. "I'd like to know who would be here if I wasn't?"</p>
+<p>She was a thin, soured, ugly little woman, with an extraordinary
+capacity for work, and an excess of nervous vitality bordering on
+hysteria. Gabriella, who knew something of her story, was aware of
+the self-sacrificing goodness of her private life, and secure in
+her own unclouded cheerfulness, could afford to smile tolerantly at
+the waspish sting.</p>
+<p>"It's a pity we can't get more system here," she observed, for
+Miss Smith, she knew, was no tale-bearer. "The waste of time and
+misdirected energy are appalling. The business would be worth three
+times as much to anybody who could give her whole attention to it,
+but, as Madame is forever telling us, her health keeps her from
+really overlooking things."</p>
+<p>"I wonder why she doesn't sell out?" asked Miss Smith, suddenly
+good-humoured and interested. "There's a lot in it for the right
+person, and it isn't in nature that she can hold on much longer. If
+I could find the money, I'd buy it and cut down expenses until I
+made a big profit. It would be easy enough." Then she added, while
+she slammed the ivory-tinted door of a case: "I wish you could run
+the house, Mrs. Carr. You are so pleasant to work with. Nothing
+ever seems to depress you."</p>
+<p>"It would be nice, wouldn't it?" responded Gabriella promptly,
+and as she said the words, she decided that she would try to borrow
+the money from Judge Crowborough. For three months she had been
+struggling to bring herself to the point of asking his
+help&mdash;or at least his advice&mdash;and now, in a flash,
+without argument or discussion, she had settled the question. "It's
+a simple business proposition&mdash;a promising investment," she
+thought. "I'll ask him to get the money for me at a fair
+interest&mdash;to get me enough anyhow to give me control of the
+business. The worst he can do is to refuse," she concluded, with a
+kind of forlorn optimism; "at least he can't kill me."</p>
+<p>Making a hurried excuse, she went back to the telephone, and
+calling up the judge, asked for an appointment in his office at
+five o'clock. From his surprised response she inferred his
+curiosity, and from his hearty acquiescence, she gathered that his
+surprise was not an unpleasant one. "At five o'clock, then. It is
+so good of you. There is a little matter of business. Yes, I know
+how kind you are, and of course your advice is invaluable. I can't
+think of anybody else on earth I can ask. Oh, thank you. Yes, at
+five o'clock. I shan't be late and I promise to keep you but a
+minute. Good-bye. What? Oh, yes, I'll come straight from
+Dinard's."</p>
+<p>His voice, eager and friendly over the telephone, had given her
+confidence, and when she went back to the showroom, where the
+saleswomen were assembling, she was already planning the
+interview.</p>
+<p>At eleven o'clock Madame, who never arrived earlier, was seen
+descending from a hansom, and a few minutes later she waddled,
+wheezing, asthmatic, and infirm of joints, through the ivory and
+gold doorway. Like some fantastically garlanded Oriental goddess of
+death, her rouged and powdered face nodded grotesquely beneath the
+flowery wreath on her hat. The indestructible youth of her spirit,
+struggling valiantly against the inert weight of the flesh, had
+squeezed her enormous figure into the curveless stays of the
+period, and had painted into some ghastly semblance of health the
+wrinkled skin of her cheeks. For underneath the decaying mockery of
+Madame's body, the indomitable soul of Madame still fought the
+everlasting battle of mind against matter, of the immaterial
+against the material elements.</p>
+<p>"There was no use my trying to get here any sooner," she began
+in an apologetic tone when she was face to face with Gabriella
+behind the red velvet curtains of her private office. "My asthma
+was so bad all night, I had to doze sitting up, and I didn't get
+any sound sleep until daybreak. If I don't begin to mend before
+long I'll have to give up, that's all there is to it. There ain't
+any use my trying to hold on much longer. I'm too sick to think
+about fighting, and sometimes I don't care what becomes of the
+business. I want to go to some high place in Europe where I can get
+my breath, and I'm going to stay there, I don't care what happens.
+There ain't any use my trying to hold on," she repeated
+disconsolately.</p>
+<p>Gabriella's opportunity had come, and she grasped it with the
+quickness of judgment which had enabled her to achieve her moderate
+success.</p>
+<p>"I believe I could carry on this business," she said, and her
+quiet assurance impressed Madame's turbulent temper. With a brief
+return of her mental alertness, the old woman studied her
+carefully.</p>
+<p>"I don't want any responsibility. I want to be rid of the whole
+thing," she said after a pause.</p>
+<p>Gabriella nodded comprehendingly. "I believe I could carry it on
+successfully," she repeated. "Your customers like me. I think I
+understand how the business ought to be run. I have been here ten
+years, and I feel perfectly confident that I could make it
+successful."</p>
+<p>"I've had offers&mdash;good offers," observed Madame warily, for
+she was incapable of liberating herself at the age of seventy-two
+from the lifelong suspicion that some one was taking advantage of
+her, that something was being got from her for nothing, "and, of
+course, I was only joking about having to stop work," she added, "I
+am retiring from choice, not from necessity."</p>
+<p>"I understand," agreed Gabriella quietly.</p>
+<p>"But I should like you to have the name," pursued Madame "A
+little money would be necessary, of course&mdash;perhaps you might
+buy a half interest&mdash;that would be simple. You could make a
+big success of it with your social position and your wealthy
+acquaintances. Surely you can find some one who is ready to make
+such a splendid investment?"</p>
+<p>"Perhaps," admitted Gabriella, as quietly as before. Unlike
+Madame, who, being an incurable idealist, had won her victories not
+by accepting but by evading facts, Gabriella was frankly skeptical
+about the practical value of either her social position or her
+wealthy acquaintances. Neither possession impressed her at the
+moment as marketable, except in the vivid imagination of Madame,
+and her social position, at least, was constructed of a very thin
+and unsubstantial fabric. Guided by the prudent streak in her
+character, she rested her hope not upon incorporeal possessions,
+but upon the solid bodies of her patrons that must be clothed. Her
+imposing acquaintances would avail her scarcely more, she
+suspected, than would the noble ghost of that ancestor who was a
+general in the Revolution. What she relied on was the certainty
+that she knew her work, and that Madame's customers from the
+greatest to the least, from Mrs. Pletheridge to poor Miss Peterson,
+who bought only one good gown a year, admitted the thoroughness of
+her knowledge. She had got on by learning all that there was to
+learn about the details of the work, and she stood now, secure and
+unassailable, on the foundation of her achievement. In ten years
+she had fulfilled her resolution&mdash;she had made herself
+indispensable. By patience, by hard work, by self-control, by
+ceaseless thought, and by innumerable sacrifices, she had made
+herself indispensable; and the result was that, as Madame weakened,
+she had grown steadily stronger. Without her Dinard's would have
+dropped long ago to the position of a second-rate house, and she
+was aware that Madame understood this quite as clearly as she did.
+For whatever Madame's executive ability may have been in the past,
+it had dwindled now to the capricious endeavours of a chronic
+invalid&mdash;of an aging invalid, notwithstanding her desperate
+struggle for youth. Half as much energy as Madame had spent
+resisting Nature might have won for her a sanctified memory had it
+been directed toward the practice of piety, or a tablet of
+imperishable granite had it been devoted to as tireless a pursuit
+of art or science. To her battle against age she had brought the
+ambition of a conqueror and the devotion of a martyr; and at the
+last, even to-day, there was a superb defiance in her refusal to
+acknowledge defeat, in her demand that her surrender should be
+regarded as a capitulation.</p>
+<p>"In a day or two I hope to be able to discuss my plan with you,"
+said Gabriella, and she could not keep the softness of pity out of
+her voice. So this was what life came to, after all? For an instant
+she felt the overwhelming discouragement which is the portion of
+those who approach life not through vision, but through outward
+events, who seek a solution not in the deeper consciousness of the
+spirit, but in the changing surface of experience. Then, even
+before her glance had left Madame's golden head, her natural
+optimism regained control of her mind, and she told herself stoutly
+that if this was Madame's present, then it followed logically that
+Madame must have had a past, and that past must have been an
+agreeable one. It was inconceivable that she should defy the laws
+of God for the sake of a prolongation of tragedy.</p>
+<p>"It is a splendid investment," croaked the old woman in the
+midst of Gabriella's painful reflections. "The house was never more
+flourishing."</p>
+<p>The ruling principle which decreed that Gabriella should keep
+her temper had disciplined her not less thoroughly in the habit of
+holding her tongue. The house was in a flourishing condition; but
+she remembered how fragile and thinly rooted had been its showy
+prosperity, when she had entered it; and had she cared to confound
+Madame utterly, she might have reminded her of that unwritten
+history of the past ten years in which the secret episode of Mrs.
+Pletheridge occurred. For Gabriella was not inclined to underrate
+her own efficiency, and her confidence was supported by the
+knowledge that if she left Dinard's the most fashionable of
+Madame's clientele would follow her.</p>
+<p>"You'll never have such another opportunity&mdash;not if you
+live to be a hundred. At your age I should have jumped at the
+idea," persisted Madame.</p>
+<p>"So should I," responded Gabriella merrily, "if I were sure of
+landing on my feet."</p>
+<p>"You'll always land on your feet&mdash;you're that sort. You've
+got push, and it's push that counts most in business. A woman may
+have all the brains in the world, but without push she might as
+well give up the struggle. That was what brought me up in spite of
+four husbands and six children," pursued Madame, while she took out
+a small flask from one of the drawers of her desk and measured out,
+as she remarked in parenthesis, "a little stimulant." "Yes, I had a
+great success in my line, and if I could only have kept clear of
+men, I might have saved a fortune to retire on in my old age. But I
+had a natural taste for men, and they were the ruin of me. As soon
+as I lost one husband and managed to get on a bit, another would
+come, and I couldn't resist him. I never could resist marriage;
+that was the undoing of me as a woman of business."</p>
+<p>"Four husbands, and yet you were remarkably successful,"
+observed Gabriella, because it was the only thing with a cheerful
+sound she could think of to utter, and an intermittent cheerful
+sound was all that Madame required from a listener when she was
+under the enlivening influence of brandy.</p>
+<p>"But think what I might have done with my talent if I had
+remained a widow, as you have done. It was my misfortune to attract
+men whether I wanted to or not," wheezed Madame, wiping her eyes;
+"some women are like that."</p>
+<p>"So I have heard," murmured Gabriella, seeing that Madame paused
+for the note of encouragement.</p>
+<p>"I don't suppose that has been your trouble, for there's a
+stand-offishness about you that puts men at a distance, and they
+don't like to be put at a distance. Then, though your figure is
+very fine for showing off models, it isn't exactly the kind that
+men lean to. If you'd fatten up it might be different, but that
+would spoil you for the clothes, and that, after all, is more
+important. It's strange, isn't it?" she croaked, with an alcoholic
+chuckle, "how partial men are to full figures even after they have
+gone out of fashion?"</p>
+<p>And with this wonder still ringing in her ears, Gabriella turned
+away, to attend a customer, who demanded, in cool defiance of man
+and nature, to be transformed into a straight silhouette.</p>
+<p>Gabriella had not seen Judge Crowborough for several years, and
+her first impression, when she entered his office at five o'clock,
+was one of surprise at his ugliness. Though he had changed but
+little since their first meeting at Mrs. Fowler's dinner, the years
+had softened her memory of his appearance, and she had skilfully
+persuaded herself that one should not judge a man by a repelling
+exterior, which, after all, might cover a great deal of goodness.
+After George's flight and Archibald Fowler's death he had been very
+kind to her. "I don't know what I should have done without him at
+that time," she thought now, as she stood with his big, soft hand
+clasping hers and his admiring fishy eyes on her face. "No, it is
+impossible to judge by appearances, and all men think well of him,
+all men respect him," she concluded, feeling suddenly
+reassured.</p>
+<p>"It's been a long time&mdash;it must be nearly' three
+years&mdash;since I saw you," he remarked, with flattering
+geniality, "and you look younger than ever."</p>
+<p>"Hard work keeps me young, then. I work very hard." Her charming
+smile flashed like an edge of light on her lips, and lent glow and
+fervor to her pale face beneath the silver-brightened cloud of her
+hair. She read his admiration in the bold gaze he fastened upon
+her, and though she was without coquetry, she was conscious that
+her vanity was agreeably soothed.</p>
+<p>"What is it? Dressmaking?" He was obviously interested.</p>
+<p>"Yes&mdash;dresses and hats. Hats are rather my specialty. I
+manage things now almost entirely at Dinard's. Have you ever heard
+of the house?"</p>
+<p>He nodded. "I remember. That's where you went after Archibald
+died, wasn't it?" His memory amazed her. What a mind for trifles he
+had! What a wonderful man he was for his years!</p>
+<p>"Yes, I've been there ever since. I've done well as things go,
+but, of course, it has been hard. It has been a hard life."</p>
+<p>"And you never came to me. I wanted to help you. I'd have done
+anything I could to make it easier for you, but you were so proud.
+You'd have got on twice as well if you had given up your
+pride."</p>
+<p>The telephone rang, and while he answered it, she watched his
+broad, slouching back, his swelling paunch overflowing now above
+the stays he wore to reduce it, the coarsened flesh of his neck,
+bulging above the edge of his collar, and the shining, baldness on
+the top of his head, which gave an appearance of commanding
+intellect to his empurpled forehead. How hideous he was, how
+revolting, and yet what a power! A face like his on a woman would
+have condemned her to isolation and misery, but, so far as one
+could judge, it had scarcely interfered with his happiness. His
+mental force had risen superior to his face, to his paunch, to his
+whole repulsive appearance. Greater than Madame because of his sex,
+he had achieved a triumph over the corporeal mass of his body which
+she, fortified and abetted by a hundred cosmetics and
+manipulations, could never attain. Where Madame relied on futile
+artificial aids in her battle against decay, he hurled the
+tremendous power of his personality, and ugliness became at once as
+insignificant as immorality in his life. "One can't judge him by
+the standards of other men," thought Gabriella, using a remembered
+phrase of Fifty-seventh Street.</p>
+<p>Judge Crowborough was still talking earnestly into the
+telephone, and she gathered vaguely that his earnestness related to
+a donation he had promised his church. "Raise two hundred thousand,
+and I'll double it," he said abruptly, and hung up the receiver.
+"We want a new organ&mdash;something really fine, you know," he
+observed casually as he turned back to Gabriella. "We are
+moving&mdash;everything is moving up, and the church has to keep
+step with the age. You can't keep progress out of religion any more
+than you can out of business&mdash;not that I'm in favour of
+modernism or any of that stuff&mdash;but we've got to keep moving."
+He spoke with conviction, and there was no doubt that he sincerely
+believed himself to be an important factor in the religious
+movement of his country. Then his tone changed to one of intimate
+friendliness and he asked: "Have you heard any music this winter?
+If I'd only known about you, I'd have sent you tickets to the
+opera."</p>
+<p>"The children go sometimes," she answered. That he should
+imagine her buying opera tickets for herself, with the children
+needing every penny she made, seemed to her ridiculous; but rich
+men were always like that, she reflected a little scornfully.</p>
+<p>"If I'd only remembered about you," he murmured, and turning
+heavily in his chair, he added authoritatively: "Now tell me about
+it. Tell me the whole thing straight through. I am going to help
+you."</p>
+<p>She told him rapidly, and while she talked a sense of perfect
+peace and security enveloped her. It was so long since she had been
+able to ask advice of a man; it was so long since anybody bigger
+and stronger than she had undertaken to adjust her perplexities.
+The past returned to her as a dream, and she felt again that
+absolute reliance on the masculine ability to control events, to
+ease burdens, to remove difficulties, which had visited her in her
+childhood when Cousin Jimmy appeared in the front parlour in Hill
+Street. "It's wonderful how men manage things," she thought. "It's
+wonderful being a man. Everything is so simple for men."</p>
+<p>"Well, don't worry a minute longer. It's all as easy as&mdash;as
+possible," observed the great man serenely when she had finished.
+"From what you tell me it looks as if it were a pretty good
+investment to begin with, and there are plenty of people around
+looking for ways to invest money. I'm looking for ways myself, when
+it comes to that," he proclaimed, with a paternal smile as he sank
+back on the luxurious leather cushions of his chair.</p>
+<p>"You are so good," she responded gratefully, "so good"; and she
+was speaking sincerely.</p>
+<p>With his casual gaze, which seemed to turn inward, fixed on the
+ceiling above her head, he invited her confidence by a few
+perfectly chosen expressions of comprehension and sympathy. The
+acuteness and activity of his mental processes delighted her while
+he questioned her. After the slovenly methods of Madame, after the
+loose reasoning and the muddled thinking of all the women she met
+in the course of her work, there was a positive pleasure in
+following the exactness and inflexibility of his logic. His
+reasoning was orderly, neat, elastic, without loose ends or tangled
+skeins to unravel, and she felt again, while she listened to him,
+the confidence which had come to her as soon as she entered his
+office. He was efficiency incarnate, and from her childhood up she
+had respected efficiency. In an hour, in less time than it had
+taken her to tell her story, he had lifted the weight from her
+shoulders, had mastered the details of Madame's intricate problems,
+and had outlined the terms by which Gabriella could accept the old
+woman's offer without placing herself under financial obligations.
+Her pride, he had discerned at a glance, shrank from obligation,
+and he was as alert to save her pride as he was to make a good
+bargain with Madame.</p>
+<p>"It's a good thing. It's good business. Don't think I'm losing
+for a minute," he said as she rose to go, and she felt that some
+secret delicacy, the last feeling she would have attributed to him,
+was prompting his words.</p>
+<p>"I can't tell you what a relief it is to talk to you," she said,
+holding out her hand while she hesitated between the desk and the
+door. "I can't even begin to tell you how grateful I am. I haven't
+had any one to advise me since I left Richmond, and it is such a
+comfort"</p>
+<p>"Well, I'll give you the best advice in my power. I'll give you
+the very best," he replied as frankly as if he were discussing his
+gift to the church. "What's more, I'll think it over a bit while
+I'm at the Hot Springs, and talk to you about it when I come back.
+I suppose I can always get you on the telephone, can't I?"</p>
+<p>His manner was still casual and business-like, and it did not
+change by so much as a shade when he moved a step nearer and put
+his arm about her waist. If he had taken down his hat or lighted a
+cigar, he would probably have performed either action with the same
+air of automatic efficiency; and she realized, in the very instant
+of her amazement, that his manner was merely an authoritative
+expression of his power. What astonished her most in the incident,
+after all, was not the judge's share in it, but the vividness and
+coolness of her own mental impressions. She was not frightened, she
+was not even disturbed, she was merely disgusted. Never before had
+she understood so clearly the immeasurable distance that divided
+the Gabriella of seventeen years ago from the Gabriella who
+released herself calmly from the appalling clasp of the casual and
+business-like old man. To the Gabriella who had loved George such
+an episode would have appeared as an inconceivable horror. Now,
+with her worldly wisdom and her bitter knowledge of love, she found
+herself regarding the situation with sardonic humour. The
+stupendous, the incredible vanity of man!&mdash;she reflected
+disdainfully. Was there ever a man too ugly, too repulsive, or too
+old to delude himself with the belief that he might still become
+the object of passion?</p>
+<p>"Now you've spoiled it," she said shortly, but without
+embarrassment. "Now you've spoiled it." She put the case to him
+plainly, the Gabriella who would have blushed and trembled and wept
+seventeen years ago.</p>
+<p>"But I meant nothing," he said, genuinely disturbed. "I assure
+you I am truly sorry if I have offended you. It was nothing&mdash;a
+mere matter of&mdash;" the word "habit," she knew, hovered on his
+lips, though he did not utter it, and broke off inconclusively.</p>
+<p>So there had not been even the excuse of emotion about it. He
+had embraced her as instinctively, as methodically, as he might
+have switched on the electric light over his desk. Here again she
+was brought to a stop before an overwhelming realization of the
+fundamental differences between man and woman. To think of woman
+behaving like that merely because it had become a matter of
+habit!</p>
+<p>"I always liked you, you know," he said abruptly, with a sincere
+emphasis.</p>
+<p>"Well, there are different ways of liking," she rejoined coldly,
+"and I happen not to care for this way."</p>
+<p>"If you don't like it, I'll never do it again," he promised,
+almost humbly. "I'll be a good friend to you, honestly I will. I'll
+treat you as if you were&mdash;you were&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"A gentleman," finished Gabriella, and smiled in spite of
+herself. After all, what was the use of resenting the facts of
+life? What was the use of reproaching the mud that spattered over
+one's clothes?</p>
+<p>"Well, that's a bargain. I'll treat you as a gentleman." There
+was a fine quality about the man; she could not deny it.</p>
+<p>"I'll forgive you then and forget it." It was the tolerant
+Gabriella who spoke&mdash;the Gabriella of disillusioning
+experience and a clear vision of life&mdash;not the impassioned
+idealist of the 'nineties. When all was said, you had to take men
+and things as you found them. That was philosophy, and that was
+also "good business." It was foolish to apply romantic theories to
+the positive actuality.</p>
+<p>"Well, you <i>are</i> a gentleman," exclaimed the judge, with
+facetiousness. "That's why I always liked you, I suppose. You're
+straight and you're honest and there's no nonsense about you."</p>
+<p>If he had only known! She thought of the romantic girl of the
+'nineties, of her buoyant optimism, her childlike ignorance, her
+violent certainties, and of her triumphant, "I can manage my life!"
+If he had only known how she had "muddled things" at the beginning,
+would he have said that she had "no nonsense about her?"</p>
+<p>In the subway, a little later, clinging to a dirty strap, with a
+blackened mechanic in the seat before her, a box of tools at her
+feet, and a garlic-scented charwoman jolting against her shoulder,
+she was overcome by a sudden cloud of despondency. Her courage, her
+hopefulness, her philosophy, seemed to melt like frost in her
+thoughts, leaving behind only a sodden sense of loss, of emptiness,
+of defeat. "I've had a mean life," she said to herself resentfully.
+"I've had a mean life. What has ever happened to me that was worth
+while? What have I ever had except hard work and disappointment? I
+am thirty-seven years old. My youth is going, and I have nothing to
+show for it but ten years of dressmaking. The best of my life is
+over, and when I look back on it, it is only a blank." It was as if
+the interview with the great man she had just left had completed
+the desolating retrospect of a lifetime. Was there nothing but
+disenchantment ahead of her? Was life merely the dropping of
+illusion after illusion, the falling of petals at the first touch
+from a flower that is beginning to fade? "Yes, nothing has ever
+happened to me that was worth while," she repeated, forgetting her
+children for the moment. Then, because the heavy air stifled her,
+she left the car and turned into West Twenty-third Street where the
+lights were coming out softly in the spring twilight. Though it was
+too late to go over the house Fanny wanted, it occurred to her that
+she might look at the outside of it before she took the Harlem
+elevated train at one of the West Side stations. The walk would do
+her good and perhaps blow away the disquieting recollections of her
+encounter with Judge Crowborough. Not until her mood changed, she
+determined, would she go back to the children.</p>
+<p>At the corner she bought a bunch of lilacs because a man held
+them out to her temptingly when she approached, and as she buried
+her face in the blossoms, she said resolutely: "No, I haven't had a
+mean life. It can't be mean unless I think it so, and I
+won't&mdash;I won't. After all, it isn't the kind of life you have,
+but the way you think about it that matters."</p>
+<p>The air was deliciously mild; streaks of pale gold lingered
+above the grim outlines of the buildings; and the wild, sweet
+spirit of spring fluttered like an imprisoned creature in the gray
+streets of the city. It was May again, and the pipes of Pan were
+fluting the ancient songs in the ancient racial fields of the
+memory. There was a spring softness in the fleecy white of the
+clouds, in the flowing gold of the sunset, in the languorous kiss
+of the breeze, in the gentle rippling waves of the dust on the
+pavement. For years she had been so tranquil, and now suddenly, at
+the flitting touch of the spirit of spring, she knew that youth was
+slipping, slipping, and that with youth, went romance, enchantment,
+adventure. It was slipping from her, and she had never really held
+it. She had had only the second-rate; she had missed the best
+always&mdash;the best of life, the best of love, the best of
+endeavour and achievement. She had missed the finer reality. From
+somewhere, from the past or the present, from the dream or the
+actuality, her young illusions and her young longings rushed over
+her, driven by the fragrance of the lilacs, which was stinging her
+blood into revolt. Only an instant the revolt lasted, but in that
+instant of vision nothing mattered in life except romance,
+enchantment, adventure.</p>
+<p>"Yes, I've missed life," she thought, and the regret was still
+in her mind when one of those miracles which in our ignorance we
+call accidents occurred. Out of the lilac-scented twilight, out of
+the wild, sweet spirit of spring, a voice said in her ear, "Alice,
+you waited!"</p>
+<p>Turning quickly, she had a vivid impression of height, breadth,
+bigness, of roughened dark red hair, of gray eyes so clean that
+they looked 'as if they had been washed by the sea. Then the voice
+spoke again: "I beg your pardon. It was a mistake." And the next
+instant she was alone in the street.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIa" id="CHAPTER_VIa"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<h3>DISCOVERIES</h3>
+<p>"Who is Alice?" she wondered on her way home, "and for whom was
+she waiting?" A shopgirl perhaps, and he was, probably&mdash;not a
+clerk in a shop&mdash;he looked more like a mechanic&mdash;but
+hardly a gentleman. Not, at any rate, what her mother or Jane would
+call a gentleman&mdash;not the kind of gentleman that George was,
+or Charley Gracey, for instance. He was doubtless devoid of those
+noble traditions by and through which, her mother had always told
+her, a gentleman was made out of a man&mdash;the traditions which
+had created Arthur and Cousin Jimmy as surely as they had created
+George and Charley. "I wonder what tradition really amounts to?"
+she thought, while she stood on the rear platform of a Harlem
+train, grasping the handle of the door as the car swung round a
+curve. "All my life, I have been getting farther away from
+it&mdash;a woman has to, I suppose, when she works&mdash;and if I
+get away from it myself how can I honestly hold to it for men, who,
+according to mother, can't be gentlemen without it?" Then reverting
+to her first question, she resumed musingly: "Who <i>is</i> Alice?
+It would be rather amusing to be Alice for one evening, and to find
+out what it means to be loved by a man like that, even if he isn't
+a gentleman. He was, I think, the cleanest creature I ever saw, and
+it wasn't just the cleanness of soap and water&mdash;it went deeper
+than that. It was the cleanness of the winds and the sea&mdash;as
+if his eyes had been washed by the sea. I wonder who Alice is? A
+common little shopgirl probably from Sixth Avenue, with padded hair
+and painted lips, and smelling of cheap powder. That's just the
+kind of girl to fascinate a big, strong, simple creature like that
+Yes, of course, Alice is cheap and tawdry and vulgar, with no
+substance to her mind." She tried to think of Arthur, but her
+mental image of him had become as thin and unsubstantial as a
+shadow.</p>
+<p>When she reached the apartment, Fanny rushed into her arms, and
+inquired breathlessly if she had taken the house?</p>
+<p>"We went down again to look at it, mother, and we like it even
+better than ever. It will be so lovely to live next door to Carlie.
+We can tango every evening, and Carlie knows a lot of boys who come
+in to dance because the floor is so good."</p>
+<p>Her cheeks flushed while she talked, and, for the moment, she
+lost entirely her resemblance to Jane, who was never animated,
+though she made a perpetual murmurous sound. Unlike Jane, Fanny was
+vivacious, pert, and, for her years, extraordinarily sophisticated.
+Already she dressed with extreme smartness; already she was
+thinking of men as of possible lovers; and already she was
+beginning, in her mother's phrase, "to manage her life." Her trite
+little face, in its mist of golden hair, which she took hours to
+arrange, still reminded one of the insipid angel on a Christmas
+card; but in spite of the engaging innocence of her look, she was
+prodigiously experienced in the beguiling arts of her sex. Almost
+from the cradle she had had "a way" with men; and her "way" was as
+far superior in finesse to the simple coquetry of Cousin Pussy as
+the worldliness of Broadway was superior to the worldliness of Hill
+Street. From her yellow hair, which she wore very low over her
+forehead and ears, to her silk stockings of the gray called "London
+smoke," which showed coquettishly below her "hobble" skirt, and
+above the flashing silver buckles on her little pointed shoes of;
+patent leather, Fanny was as uncompromisingly modern in her
+appearance as she was in her tastes or her philosophy. Her mind,
+which was small and trite like her face, was of a curiously
+speculative bent, though its speculations were directed mainly
+toward the by-paths of knowledge which Gabriella, in her busy life,
+had had neither the time nor the inclination to explore. For Fanny
+was frankly interested in vice with the cool and dispassionate
+interest of the inquiring spectator. She was perfectly aware of the
+social evil; and unknown to Gabriella she had investigated, through
+the ample medium of the theatre and fiction, every dramatic phase
+of the traffic in white slaves. Her coolness never deserted her,
+for she was as temperamental as a fish, and, for all the sunny
+white and gold of her surface, she had the shallow restlessness of
+a meadow brook. At twelve years of age she had devoted herself to
+music and had planned an operatic career; at fourteen, she had
+turned to literature, and was writing a novel; and a year later,
+encouraged by her practical mother, she had plunged into the
+movement for woman suffrage, and had marched, in a white dress and
+carrying a purple banner, through an admiring crowd in Fifth
+Avenue. To-day, after a variable period, when she had dabbled in
+kindergarten, wood engraving, the tango, and settlement work, she
+was studying for the stage, and had fallen in love with a
+matin&eacute;e idol. Gabriella, who had welcomed the wood engraving
+and the kindergartening and had been sympathetically, though
+impersonally, aware of the suffrage movement, just as she had been
+aware many years before of the Spanish War, was deeply disturbed by
+her daughter's recent effervescence of emotion.</p>
+<p>"I suppose she'll get over it. She gets over everything," she
+had said to Miss Polly, drawing painful comfort from the
+shallowness and insincerity of Fanny's nature, "but something
+dreadful might happen while she is in one of her moods."</p>
+<p>"Not with Fanny," Miss Polly had replied reassuringly. "Fanny
+knows more already than you and I put together, and she's got about
+as much red blood as a lemon. She ain't the sort that things happen
+to, so don't you begin to worry about her. She's got mighty little
+sense, that's the gospel truth, but the little she's got has been
+sharpened down to a p'int."</p>
+<p>"I can't help feeling that she hasn't been well brought up. I
+did what I could, but she needed more time and care than I could
+give her. It wasn't, of course, as if I'd chosen to neglect her. I
+have been obliged to work or she would have starved."</p>
+<p>"Oh, well, I wouldn't bother about that. It's like wishing
+chickens back in the shell after they're hatched&mdash;there ain't
+a particle of use in it. If you ask me what I think&mdash;then, I'd
+say that Fanny would be just exactly what she is if you'd raised
+her down yonder in Virginia. Her father's in her as well as you,
+and it seems to me that she grows more like him every day that she
+lives. Now, Archibald is your child, anybody can tell that at a
+glance. It's queer, ain't it how the boys almost always seem to
+take after the mother?"</p>
+<p>"But Charley has a splendid daughter. Think of his
+Margaret."</p>
+<p>"Of course, there ain't any rule that works out every time; but
+you know, I'll always take up for Mr. Charley if it's with the last
+breath I draw. It ain't always the woman that gets the worst of
+marriage, though to hear some people talk you'd think it was
+nothin' but turkey and plum puddin' for men. But it ain't, I don't
+care who says so, and if anybody but a saint could have married
+Jane without takin' to drink, I'd like to have seen him try it,
+that's all."</p>
+<p>That was three weeks ago, and to-night, while Fanny rattled on
+about the house in West Twenty-third Street, her mother watched her
+with a tolerant affection in which there was neither admiration nor
+pride. She was not deluded about Fanny's character, though the
+maternal mote in her eye obscured her critical vision of her
+appearance. But, notwithstanding the fact that she thought Fanny
+beautiful, she was clearly aware that the girl had never been,
+since she left the cradle, anything but a source of anxiety; and
+for the last week or two Gabriella had been more than usually
+worried about her infatuation for the matin&eacute;e idol. In spite
+of Miss Polly's assurances that Fanny was too calculating for rash
+adventures, Gabriella had spent several sleepless nights over the
+remote possibility of an entanglement, and her anxiety was
+heightened by the fact that the child told her nothing. They were
+so different that there was little real sympathy between them, and
+confidences from daughter to mother must spring, she knew, from
+fulness of sympathy. "I wonder if she ever realizes how hard I have
+worked for her?" she thought. "How completely I've given up my
+life?" And there rose in her thoughts the wish that her children
+could have stayed children forever. "As long as they were little,
+they filled my life, but as soon as they get big enough for other
+things, they break away from me&mdash;even Archibald will change
+when he goes away to school, next year, and I shall never have him
+again as he is now." At the very time, she knew, when she needed
+them most&mdash;when middle-age was approaching&mdash;her children
+were failing her not only as companions, but as a supreme and vital
+reason for living. If they could have stayed babies, she felt that
+she should have been satisfied to go on forever with nothing else
+in her life; but in a little while they would grow up and begin to
+lead their own intense personal lives, while she, having outlived
+her usefulness, would be left with only her work, with only
+dressmaking and millinery for a life interest. "Something is wrong
+with me," she thought sternly; "the visit to the judge must have
+upset me. I don't usually have such wretched thoughts in the
+evening."</p>
+<p>"Did you bring me your school report, darling?" she asked.</p>
+<p>Yes, Fanny had brought it, and she drew it forth reluctantly
+from the pages of a novel. It was impossible to make her study. She
+was as incapable of application as a butterfly. "I thought you were
+going to do better this month, Fanny," said Gabriella
+reproachfully.</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother dear, I want to leave school. I hate it! Please let
+me begin to study for the stage. You know you always said the study
+of Shakespeare was improving."</p>
+<p>They were in the midst of the argument when Archibald came in,
+and he showed little sympathy with Fanny's dramatic ambition.</p>
+<p>"The stage? Nonsense! What you want is to get safely married,"
+he remarked scornfully, and Gabriella agreed with him. There was no
+doubt in her mind that for some women, and Fanny promised to be one
+of these, marriage was the only safeguard. Then she looked at
+Archibald, strong, sturdy, self-reliant, and clever; and she
+realized, with a pang, that some day he also would marry&mdash;that
+she must lose him as well as Fanny.</p>
+<p>"I've had a letter from Pelham Forest, dear," she
+said&mdash;Pelham Forest was a school in Virginia&mdash;"and I am
+making up my mind to let you go there next autumn."</p>
+<p>"And then to the University of Virginia where Grandfather
+went?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, and then to the University of Virginia."</p>
+<p>Though she tried to speak lightly, the thought of the coming
+separation brought a pang to her heart.</p>
+<p>"Well, I'd rather work," said Archibald stoutly. "I don't want
+to go away to school. I'd a long sight rather start in with a
+railroad or a steamship company and make my way up."</p>
+<p>"But, darling, I couldn't bear that. You must have an education.
+It's what I've worked for from the beginning, and when you've
+finished at the university, I want to send you abroad to study. If
+only Fanny would go to college, too, I'd be so happy."</p>
+<p>"Don't you waste any money on Fanny's education," retorted
+Archibald, "because it isn't worth it. What we ought to do is to
+get to work and let you take a rest. The first money I make, I'm
+going to spend on giving you pretty clothes and a rest."</p>
+<p>"I don't want to rest, dear," replied Gabriella, with a laugh.
+"I'm not an old lady yet, you silly boy." How ridiculous it was
+that he always spoke of her work as if it were a hardship&mdash;a
+burden from which she must be released at the first opportunity.
+That was so like Cousin Jimmy, a survival, she supposed, from the
+tradition of the South. Unlike Fanny, whose horizon was bounded by
+her personal inclinations, Archibald seemed never to think of
+himself, never to put either his comfort or his career before his
+love for his mother. To attempt to shape Fanny's character was like
+working in tissue paper, but there was stout substance in
+Archibald. Gabriella had tried hard&mdash;she told herself over and
+over again that she had tried as hard as she could&mdash;with both
+of her children; and with one of them at least she felt that she
+had succeeded. There was, she knew, the making of a splendid man in
+her son; and his very ugliness, which had been so noticeable when
+he was a child, was developing now into attractiveness. For it was
+the ugliness of strength, not of weakness, and there was no trace
+in his nature of the self-indulgence which had ruined his
+father.</p>
+<p>"But I don't want to go to college, mother dear," protested
+Fanny, who always addressed Gabriella as "dear" when she was about
+to become intractable; "I want to go on the stage."</p>
+<p>"You are not to see another play, except when I take you, for a
+whole year. Remember what I tell you, Fanny!" replied Gabriella
+sternly. Not Mrs. Carr herself, not Cousin Becky Bollingbroke, of
+sanctified memory, could have regarded an actress's career with
+greater horror than did the advanced and independent Gabriella. Any
+career, indeed, appeared to her to be out of the question for Fanny
+(a girl who couldn't even get on a street car without being spoken
+to), and of all careers the one the stage afforded was certainly
+the last she would have selected for her daughter.</p>
+<p>"I'll remember," responded Fanny coolly, and Gabriella knew in
+her heart that the girl would disobey her at the first opportunity.
+It was impossible to chaperon her every minute, and Fanny,
+unchaperoned, was, in the realistic phrase of her brother, "looking
+for trouble."</p>
+<p>"I'll send her to boarding-school next year," Gabriella
+determined; and she reflected gloomily that with Fanny and,
+Archibald both away, she might as well be a bachelor woman.</p>
+<p>"Well, children, you're both going away next winter," she said
+positively. "I can't look after you, Fanny, and make your living at
+the same time, so I shall send you to boarding-school. What do you
+say to Miss Bradfordine's?"</p>
+<p>"That's up on the Hudson, mother. I don't want to go out of New
+York." Fanny was genuinely alarmed at last.</p>
+<p>"The farther away from New York the better, my daughter."</p>
+<p>"What will you do here all alone with Miss Polly?</p>
+<p>"Oh, we'll do very well," answered Gabriella with cheerful
+promptness; "you need not worry about me."</p>
+<p>"If I'm good this summer, will you change your mind,
+mother?"</p>
+<p>"Try being good, and see." Though Gabriella spoke sweetly, it
+was with the obstinate sweetness of Mrs. Carr. One thing she had
+resolved firmly in the last quarter of an hour: Fanny should go
+away to boarding-school next September.</p>
+<p>"Ain't you goin' to walk in the suffrage parade this year,
+Fanny?" inquired Miss Polly, who always thought it necessary to
+interrupt an argument between Gabriella and her daughter.</p>
+<p>"I haven't anything to wear," replied Fanny pettishly. Her brief
+interest in "votes for women" had evaporated with the entrance of
+the matin&eacute;e idol into her life.</p>
+<p>"There's a lovely white gown just in from Paris I'll get for
+you," said Gabriella pleasantly. She was tired, for she had had a
+trying day; but long ago, when her children were babies, she had
+determined that she would never permit herself to speak sharply to
+them. In Fanny's most exasperating humours, Gabriella tried to
+remember her own youthful mistakes, tried to be lenient to George's
+faults which she recognized in the girl's character.</p>
+<p>"As if anybody needed to be dressed up to march!" exclaimed
+Archibald scornfully, and he added: "She's always acting, isn't
+she, mother?"</p>
+<p>"Hush, dear, you mustn't tease your sister," Gabriella
+admonished the boy, though her voice when she spoke to him was
+attuned to a deeper and softer note.</p>
+<p>"If you make me go to boarding-school next year, I don't care
+whether you take the rooms in Twenty-third Street or not," said
+Fanny sullenly, for, in spite of her fickle temperament, there was
+a remarkable tenacity in her thwarted inclinations.</p>
+<p>"Very well. I'll look at the house and decide to-morrow." As the
+servant came in to lay the table, Gabriella dismissed the subject
+of Fanny's school, and opened the book&mdash;it chanced to be a
+volume of Browning&mdash;which she was reading aloud to the
+children.</p>
+<p>"I am really worried about Fanny," she said to Miss Folly at
+midnight, while she lingered in the living-room before going to
+bed. "I honestly don't know what to make of her, and I feel,
+somehow, that she is one of my failures."</p>
+<p>"Well, you can't expect everything to go the way you want it.
+Did you see the judge?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I saw him, but it was no use." Her visit to Judge
+Crowborough appeared to her perturbed mind as a piece of headstrong
+and extravagant folly, and she dismissed it from her thoughts as
+she had dismissed heavier burdens in the past. "Men simply won't
+treat Women in business as they treat men, and I don't see unless
+human nature changes, how it is to be helped. But what about the
+house in Twenty-third Street? Do you think I ought to look at
+it?"</p>
+<p>"It was the most homelike place we saw, by a long way. There
+ain't many places in New York where you can have a flower-bed in
+the front yard."</p>
+<p>"Do you think Fanny will be happy there? A year before this
+stage mania seized her, you know, she was wild to move to Park
+Avenue."</p>
+<p>"Well, you know I've got a suspicion," Miss Folly dropped her
+voice to a whisper. "Of course it ain't nothin' but a suspicion,
+for she never opens her mouth about it to me, but I've got a right
+smart suspicion that that young actor she is so crazy about lives
+somewhere down there in that neighbourhood, and she thinks she
+could watch him go by in the street. I don't believe, you know,
+that she's ever so much as spoken to him in her life."</p>
+<p>"It's impossible!" exclaimed Gabriella, for this revelation of
+Miss Polly's discernment was astonishing to her; "but if that's the
+case," she added gravely, "I oughtn't to think of moving into the
+house."</p>
+<p>"Oh, well, I don't know that he's anywhere very near, and
+Fanny's goin' to be at boarding-school for a year or two and away
+with Jane at the White Sulphur in the summers. She won't be there
+much anyhow, will she?"</p>
+<p>"Not much, but how I shall miss her&mdash;and, of course, if I
+miss her, I'll miss Archibald even more, because he gives me no
+anxiety. It's odd," she finished abruptly, "but I've been depressed
+all day. I suppose my birthday has something to do with it."</p>
+<p>"You ain't often like that, Gabriella. I never saw anybody keep
+in better spirits than you do."</p>
+<p>"I'm happy, but the spring makes me restless. I feel as if I'd
+missed something I ought to have had."</p>
+<p>"All of us feel that way at times, I reckon, but it don't last,
+and we settle down comfortably after a while to doin' without what
+we haven't got. And you've been mighty successful, honey. You've
+succeeded in everything you undertook except marriage."</p>
+<p>"Yes, except my marriage."</p>
+<p>"Well, I reckon things happen and you can't do 'em over again,"
+observed the little seamstress, with the natural fatalism of the
+"poor white" of the South.</p>
+<p>As she undressed and got into bed, Gabriella told herself
+cheerfully that there was, indeed, no need to worry over things
+that you couldn't change after they happened. From the open window
+a shaft of light fell on her mirror, and while she watched it, she
+tried to convince her rebellious imagination that she was perfectly
+satisfied, that life had given her all that she had ever desired.
+"I have more than most women anyhow," she insisted, weakening a
+little. "I've accomplished what I undertook, and by the time I'm
+fifty, if things go well, I may become a rich woman. I'll be able
+to give Fanny everything that she wants, and if she hasn't married,
+we can go abroad every summer, and Archibald can join us in
+Switzerland or the Tyrol. About Archibald, at least, I can feel
+perfectly easy. He is the kind of boy to succeed. He is strong, he
+hasn't a weakness, and I am sure there isn't a brighter boy in the
+world." Around the shaft of light in the mirror a stream of sparks,
+like tiny comets, began to form and quiver back and forth as if
+they were flying. "It's a pity the judge can't help me, but it
+wouldn't do. I'd never forget what happened to-day, and you can
+never tell when trouble like that is coming. I'll either make
+Madame give me half the profits for managing the business or I'll
+go to Blakeley &amp; Grymn at a salary of ten thousand a year. She
+won't let me go, of course, because she knows I'd take two thirds
+of her customers with the. Then I'll invest all I can save in the
+business until finally I am able to buy it entirely&mdash;" An
+elevated train passed the corner, and while the rumble died slowly
+in the distance, she found herself thinking of Arthur. "How
+different my life might have been if I had only stayed true to him.
+That's the happiest lot that could fall to a woman, to be loved by
+a man as faithful and tender as Arthur." For a few minutes she lay,
+without thought, watching the lights quiver and dance in the
+mirror, and listening to the faint rumble of the elevated train far
+up the street. Then, just as she was falling asleep, a question
+flashed out of the flickering lights into her mind, and she started
+awake again. "I wonder who Alice is?" she said aloud to the
+night.</p>
+<p>Several weeks, later, at the end of a busy day, Gabriella stood
+in front of the house in London Terrace, watching her furniture as
+it passed across the pavement and up the flagged walk into the
+hail. The yard was neglected and overgrown with dandelions and
+wire-grass; but an old rose-bush by the steps was in full bloom,
+and already Miss Polly was surveying the tangled weeds with the eye
+of a destroyer.</p>
+<p>"I declare I'm just hungerin' for flowers," she said wistfully,
+following the dining-room table as far as the foot of the steps
+where Gabriella stood. "The very first thing in the morning before
+I get breakfast, I'm goin' to sow some mignonette and nasturtium
+seeds in that border along the wall, and fix some window boxes with
+clove pinks and sweet alyssum in 'em like your ma used to have in
+summer. I reckon that's why I was so set on this place from the
+first. It looks more like Richmond in old times than it does like
+New York."</p>
+<p>Beyond the grass and weeds, over which Gabriella was gazing, the
+street was so quiet for the moment that it might have been one of
+those forgotten squares in Richmond (she had never called them
+blocks) where needy gentlewomen still practised "light
+housekeeping" in the social twilight of the last century. Now and
+then a tired man or woman slouched by from work; once a newsboy
+stopped at the gate to shout the name of his paper in belligerent
+accents; and a few wagons or a clanging car passed rapidly in the
+direction of Broadway. From the corner of Ninth Avenue the elevated
+road, which seemed to her at times the only permanent thing in her
+surroundings, still roared and rumbled its disturbing undercurrent
+in her life.</p>
+<p>"I think we shall be quite comfortable here," she said, watching
+the last piece of furniture pass through the door. "Where are the
+children?" The air had the rich softness of summer, and the roving
+fragrance from the old garden rose-bush by the steps awakened a
+strange homesickness in her heart&mdash;that mysterious
+homesickness which the spring gives us for places we have never
+seen.</p>
+<p>"The children are upstairs fixing their rooms," replied Miss.
+Polly, stooping to pluck up a weed by the roots. "I reckon I'd
+better go and tell Minnie to begin gettin' dinner, hadn't I?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I'll come in presently. I hate to leave the air and the
+roses."</p>
+<p>"I wish we had the whole house, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"It would be ever so much nicer, because I'm afraid the man on
+the first floor is dreadfully common. I don't like the look of that
+golden-oak hatrack in the hail."</p>
+<p>"Well, men never did have much taste. Think of the things your
+Cousin Jimmy would admire if Miss Pussy didn't tell him not to. Do
+you recollect that paper in your parlour at home? Now Mr. Jimmy
+thought that paper downright handsome. I've heard him say so."</p>
+<p>"It was dreadful, but, do you know, I designed a gown last
+winter in peacock blue like that paper, and it was a tremendous
+success. Poor mother, I wish she could have seen it&mdash;peacock
+blue with an embossed border."</p>
+<p>"You may laugh about it now, but I don't believe your mother
+minded it much. People in old times didn't let things get on their
+nerves the way they do to-day."</p>
+<p>She went indoors to attend to the dinner table; and as Gabriella
+turned back to the steps, she heard the gate slam and a man's voice
+exclaim heartily: "I'll see you about it to-morrow." Then a figure
+came rapidly up the walk&mdash;a large, free figure, with a buoyant
+swing, which awoke a trivial and fleeting association in her
+memory. Without noticing her, the man stooped for an instant beside
+the rose-bush, plucked a bud, and held it to his nostrils as he
+turned to the steps. His voice, singing a snatch of ragtime which
+she recognized without recalling the name of it, rang out, gay and
+powerful, as he approached her.</p>
+<p>"I've seen him somewhere. Who can he be?" she thought, and then
+swiftly, as in a blaze of light, she remembered the May afternoon
+in West Twenty-third Street, and "Alice," whom she had wondered
+about and forgotten. She had again a vivid impression of bigness,
+of freshness, and of gray eyes that, reminded her vaguely of the
+colour of a storm on the sea.</p>
+<p>"Good evening!" he remarked with impersonal friendliness as he
+passed her; and from the quality of his voice she inferred, as she
+had done on that May afternoon, that he was without culture,
+probably without education.</p>
+<p>He went inside; the door of his front room opened and shut, and
+after a minute or two the snatch of ragtime floated merrily through
+his window. If there was anything on earth she disliked, she
+reflected impatiently, it was a comic song.</p>
+<p>"He isn't a gentleman. I was right, he is common," she thought
+disdainfully, as she went indoors and ascended the stairs. "And he
+may make it very disagreeable for us if he insists on bringing
+common people into the houses" There was a vague impression in her
+mind that the males of the lower classes were invariably noisy.</p>
+<p>"I saw the man on the first floor as I came up," she remarked to
+Miss Folly. "I hope he isn't going to be an annoyance."</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Squires says he's never in evenings. He gets all his meals
+out except breakfast, and she fixes that for him. She told me he
+was hardly ever here unless he was eatin' or sleepin', so I don't
+reckon he'll bother us?"</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm glad of that, because he isn't the kind of person I'd
+like the children to see anything of. You can tell that he is quite
+common."</p>
+<p>"What does he look like? Is he rough?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, he is good looking enough&mdash;a fine animal. I
+suppose he's handsome in a way, and he was dressed very carefully,
+but, of course, he isn't a gentleman." For the second time this
+stranger had made her feel that she had missed something in life,
+and she felt almost that she hated him.</p>
+<p>"Oh, well, I don't reckon it will hurt us to pass him in the
+hall," replied Miss Polly soothingly, "as long as he don't bring in
+any diseases."</p>
+<p>The next day they settled comfortably in the upper rooms and, as
+far as sound or movement went, the floor below might have been
+tenanted by the dead. When she went out Gabriella passed the
+dreadful hatrack of golden-oak in the lower hail; and after a day
+or two she noticed that it held a collection of soft felt hats, two
+overcoats of good cut and material, and an assortment of
+gold-headed walking-sticks, which appeared never to be used. Though
+she tried to ignore the presence of the hatrack, there was an
+aggressive masculinity about it which revived in her the almost
+forgotten feeling of having "a man in the house." The mere
+existence of a man&mdash;of an unknown man&mdash;on the first
+floor, altered the character not only of the lower hail, but of the
+entire house; it was, she felt instinctively, a different place
+from a house occupied by women alone. She had seen so little of men
+in the last ten years that she had almost forgotten their
+distinguishing characteristics, and the scent of tobacco stealing
+through the closed door of the front room downstairs came as a
+fresh surprise when she passed Out in the morning. "I suppose I'm
+getting old maidish," she thought. "That comes of leading a
+one-sided life. Yes, I am getting into a groove." And she
+determined that she would go out more in the evenings and try to
+take an interest in the theatre and the new dances. But even while
+she was in the act of resolving, she realized that when her hard
+day's work was over, and she came home at six o'clock, she was too
+tired; too utterly worn out, for anything except dinner and bed.
+There was still the cheerful hour with the children (that she had
+kept up in the busiest seasons); but when the question of going out
+was discussed at dinner, she usually ended by sending the children
+to a lecture or a harmless play with Miss Polly. "When you work as
+hard as I do, there isn't much else for you in life," she concluded
+regretfully, and there swept over her, as on that May afternoon, a
+sense of failure, of dissatisfaction, of disappointment. Youth was
+slipping, slipping, and she had missed something.</p>
+<p>At such moments she thought sadly of her life, of its
+possibilities and its significance. It ought in the nature of
+things, she felt, to mean so much more than it had meant; it ought
+to have been so much more vital, so much more satisfying and
+complete. As it was, she could remember of it only scattered ends,
+frayed places, useless beginnings, and broken promises. With how
+many beliefs had she started, and now not one of them remained with
+her&mdash;well, hardly one of them! The dropping of illusion after
+illusion&mdash;that was what the years had brought to her as they
+passed; for she saw that she had always been growing farther and
+farther away from tradition, from accepted opinions, from the
+dogmas and the ideals of the ages. The experience and the wisdom of
+others had failed her at the very beginning.</p>
+<p>At the end of the week, when she and Miss Polly were watering
+seeds in the yard one afternoon at sunset, the man from the first
+floor came leisurely up the walk, and removing a big black cigar
+from his mouth, wished them "good evening" as he passed.</p>
+<p>"Good evening," responded Gabriella coolly. She had resolved
+that there should be no interchange of unnecessary civilities
+between the first floor and the upper storeys. "One can never tell
+how far men of that class will presume," she thought sternly.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think he's good lookin', honey?" inquired Miss Polly
+in a whisper when O'Hara had entered the house with his latchkey
+and closed the door after him.</p>
+<p>"Is he? I didn't look at him."</p>
+<p>"You wouldn't think he'd ever had a day's sickness in his life.
+I reckon he's as big as your Cousin Micajah Berkeley was. You don't
+recollect, him, do you?"</p>
+<p>"He died before I was born. Are those wisps of gray green, in
+the border, pinks, Miss Polly?"</p>
+<p>"Clove pinks like your ma used to raise. It ain't the right time
+to set 'em out, but I sent all the way down to Richmond for 'em.
+I'm goin' to get a microphylla rose, too, in the fall. Do you
+reckon it would grow up North, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"Well, we might try, anyhow. Where are the children?"</p>
+<p>"Fanny's over at Carlie's, an' Archibald said he was goin' to
+the gymnasium befo' dinner. He's just crazy about gettin' as strong
+as the man on the first floor. He was punching a ball this mornin',
+and Archibald saw him. I never knew the boy to take such a sudden
+fancy."</p>
+<p>"When did he speak to him?" asked Gabriella, and her tone had a
+touch of asperity so unusual that Miss Polly exclaimed in
+astonishment: "For goodness sake, Gabriella, what has come over
+you? Do you feel any sort of palpitations? Shall I run after the
+harts-horn?"</p>
+<p>"No, I'm not ill, but I don't like Archibald to pick up
+acquaintances I know nothing about."</p>
+<p>"I reckon if you're goin' to sample all Archibald's
+acquaintances, you'll have a job on your hands. You ain't gone an'
+taken a dislike to Mr. O'Hara for nothin', have you?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, but I have to be careful about the children. Suppose he
+should begin speaking to Fanny?" She had been vividly aware of the
+man as he passed, and the sensation had provoked her. "If it wasn't
+for Alice, I shouldn't have given him another thought," she told
+herself savagely. "Imagine me at my age blushing because a strange
+man spoke to me in the street!"</p>
+<p>"You needn't worry about his admirin' Fanny," replied Miss
+Polly, in her matter-of-fact manner, while she lifted the green
+watering-pot. "He was on the steps when she set out for school this
+mornin', an' he didn't notice her any more than he did me. Fanny
+ain't the sort he takes notice of, I could see that in a
+minute."</p>
+<p>"Then he must be blind." There was a resentful sound in
+Gabriella's voice. "It embarrasses me when I get on a street car
+with her because the men stare so."</p>
+<p>"Well, he didn't stare. But it's a mighty good thing that all
+men haven't got the same kind of eyes, ain't it? What I could never
+make out was why men ever marry women who haven't got curly hair,
+an' yet they do it every day&mdash;they go right straight out an'
+do it with their wits about 'em."</p>
+<p>The front door opened suddenly, and the man came out again, and,
+descended the walk with the springy step Gabriella had noticed at
+their first meeting. Notwithstanding his size, he moved with the
+lightness and agility of a boy, and without looking at him she
+could see, as she bent over the flower-bed, that he had the look of
+exuberant vitality which accompanies perfect physical condition.
+Without meaning to, without knowing why she did it, she glanced up
+quickly and met his eyes.</p>
+<p>"So you are making a garden?" he remarked, and stopped beside
+the freshly turned flower-bed. Against the gray twilight the red of
+his hair was like a dark flame, and the vivid colour appeared to
+intensify the sanguine glow in his face, the steady gaze of his
+eyes, and the cheerful heartiness of his voice.</p>
+<p>"He is cyclonic," she said to herself. "Yes, that is the
+word&mdash;he is cyclonic&mdash;but he isn't a gentleman."</p>
+<p>"It's a pity to let the yard run to waste," she responded, with
+an imperiousness which took Miss Polly's breath away, though it
+left the irrepressible O'Hara still buoyantly gay and kind.</p>
+<p>"Now it takes a woman to think of that," he observed with an
+off-hand geniality which she felt was directed less toward herself
+than toward an impersonal universe. "I like to look at that old
+rose-bush when it is in bloom, but the idea"&mdash;(he pronounced
+it idee)&mdash;"of planting anything would never have occurred to
+me."</p>
+<p>Gabriella's lips closed firmly, while she sprinkled the earth
+with an air of patient finality which made Miss Polly think of Mrs.
+Carr on one of her neuralgic days.</p>
+<p>"What's that stringy looking grass over there?" pursued the man,
+undismayed by her manner.</p>
+<p>"Clove pinks." Nothing, she told herself indignantly, could
+persuade her to encourage the acquaintance of a man who
+mispronounced his words so outrageously.</p>
+<p>"And here?" He pointed to the flower-bed she was watering.</p>
+<p>"Mignonette and nasturtium seeds."</p>
+<p>"When will they come up?"</p>
+<p>"Very soon if they're watered."</p>
+<p>"And they'll bloom about July, I guess?"</p>
+<p>"They ought to bloom all summer. In the autumn, if we have room,
+we're going to plant some dahlias, and a row of hollyhocks against
+the house. By next summer the yard will look much better."</p>
+<p>"By George!" he exclaimed abruptly, and after a minute or two:
+"Do you know, I can remember the first time I ever saw a
+flower&mdash;or the first time I took notice of one, anyway. It was
+red&mdash;a red geranium. There was a whole cart of 'em, and that's
+why I noticed 'em, I expect. But a red geranium is a Jim-dandy
+flower, ain't it?"</p>
+<p>To this outburst Gabriella made no reply. Her will had hardened
+with the determination not to be drawn into conversation, and while
+he waited with his eager gray eyes&mdash;so like the alert, wistful
+eyes of a great dog&mdash;on her profile, she began carelessly
+plucking up spears of grass from the flower-bed.</p>
+<p>For a minute he waited expectantly; then, as she did not look
+up, he remarked, "So long!" in a voice of serene friendliness, and
+went on to the gate. He had actually said "So long" to her,
+Gabriella, and he had said it with a manner of established
+intimacy!</p>
+<p>"Well, what do you think of that?" she demanded scornfully of
+Miss Polly when he had disappeared up the street.</p>
+<p>"I reckon he don't know any better, honey. You don't learn much
+about manners in a mine, I 'spose, and when he ain't down in a
+mine, Mrs. Squires says he's building railroads across deserts. She
+says he ain't ever had anything, education or money, that he didn't
+pick up for himself, and you oughtn't to judge him as you do some
+others you've known. Anyway, she says he's made a big pile of
+money."</p>
+<p>"I believe you're taking up for him, Miss Polly. Has he
+bewitched you?"</p>
+<p>"I don't like to see you hard, Gabriella. You're almost always
+so tolerant. It ain't like you to sit in judgment."</p>
+<p>"I am not sitting in judgment, but I don't see why I'm obliged
+to be friendly with a strange man who says 'idee.' It would be bad
+for the children."</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Squires has known him for thirty years&mdash;he's
+forty-five now&mdash;and she says it's a miracle the way he's come
+up. He was born in a cellar."</p>
+<p>"I dare say he has a great deal of force, but you must admit
+that blood tells, Miss Polly."</p>
+<p>"I never said it didn't, Gabriella&mdash;only that there's much
+more credit to a man that comes up without it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'll admire him all you please," retorted Gabriella, "if
+you'll promise to keep him away from the children."</p>
+<p>Though she spoke sharply, the sharpness was directed not to Miss
+Polly, but to herself&mdash;to her own incomprehensible
+childishness. The man interested her; already she had thought of
+him daily since she first came to the house; already she had begun
+to wonder about him, and she realized that she should wonder still
+more because of what Miss Polly had told her. When he had
+approached her in the yard, she had been vaguely disturbed, vaguely
+thrilled by the strangeness and the mystery surrounding him; she
+had been subtly aware of his nearness before she heard his step,
+and turning, found his eyes fixed upon her. Her own weakness in not
+controlling her curiosity, in recurring, in spite of her determined
+resolve to that first meeting, in allowing a coarse, rough
+stranger&mdash;yes, a coarse, rough, uneducated stranger, she
+insisted desperately&mdash;to hold her attention for a
+minute&mdash;the incredible weakness of these things goaded her
+into a feeling of positive anger. For ten years there had been no
+men in her life, and now at thirty-seven, when she was almost
+middle-aged, she was beginning to feel curious about the history of
+the first good-looking man she encountered&mdash;about a mere
+robust, boisterous embodiment of masculinity. "What difference can
+it make to me who Alice is?" she demanded indignantly. "What
+possible difference?" She forced herself to think tenderly of
+Arthur; but during the last few months the image of Arthur had
+receded an immeasurable distance from her life. His remoteness and
+his unreality distressed her; but try as she would, she could not
+recall him from the gauzy fabric of dreams to the tangible
+substance of flesh.</p>
+<p>"It isn't that I care for myself," she said to Miss Polly
+abruptly, as if she were defending herself against an unspoken
+accusation. "I am a working woman, and a working woman can't afford
+to be snobbish&mdash;certainly a dressmaker can't&mdash;but I must
+look after my children. That is an imperative duty. I must see that
+they form friendships in their own class."</p>
+<p>But life, as she had already discovered, has a sardonic manner
+of its own in such crises. That night she planned carefully, lying
+awake in the darkness, the subterfuges and excuses by which she
+would keep Archibald away from O'Hara, and the very next afternoon
+when she came home from work she found confusion in the street, a
+fire engine at the corner, and, on the steps of her home, the boy
+clinging rapturously to the hand of the man.</p>
+<p>"You ought to have been here, mother," cried Archibald in tones
+of ecstatic excitement. "We had a fire down the street in that
+apartment house&mdash;and before the firemen came Mr. O'Hara went
+in and got out a woman and some children who had been overcome by
+smoke. He had to lower them from a fire-escape, and he got every
+one of them out before the engine could get here. I saw it all. I
+was on the corner and saw it all.</p>
+<p>"I hope Mr. O'Hara wasn't hurt," remarked Gabriella, but her
+voice was not enthusiastic.</p>
+<p>"To hear the kid run on," responded O'Hara, overpowered by
+embarrassment, "you'd think I'd really done something, wouldn't
+you? Well, it wasn't anything. It was as easy as&mdash;as eating.
+Now, I was caught down in a mine once in Arizona&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Tell me about it. Mother, ask him to tell you about it,"
+entreated Archibald. The boy was obviously consumed with curiosity
+and delight. Gabriella had never seen him so enthusiastic, so swept
+away by emotion. Already, she suspected, he had fallen a victim to
+the passion of hero worship, and O'Hara&mdash;the man who spoke of
+"idees"&mdash;was his hero! "I shall have to be careful," she
+thought. "I shall have to be very careful or Archibald will come
+under his influence."</p>
+<p>"Well, I guess I must be going along," remarked O'Hara, a little
+nervously, for he was evidently confused by her imperious manner.
+"A fellow is expecting me to dinner over at the club."</p>
+<p>"But I want to hear about the mine. Mother, make him tell us
+about the mine!" cried Archibald insistently.</p>
+<p>"I'll tell you another time, sonny. We'll get together some day
+when your mother don't want you, and we'll start off on a regular
+bat. How would you like that?"</p>
+<p>"When?" demanded the boy eagerly. His fear of losing O'Hara
+showed in the fervour with which he spoke, in the frantic grasp
+with which he still clung to his hand. It occurred to Gabriella
+suddenly that she ought to have thrown Archibald more in the
+companionship of men, that she had kept him too much with women,
+that 'she had smothered him in her love. This was the result of her
+selfish devotion&mdash;that he should turn from her to the first
+male creature that came into his life!</p>
+<p>Her heart was sore, but she said merely: "That is very kind of
+you, Mr. O'Hara, but I'm afraid I mustn't let my boy go off on a
+regular bat without me."</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, I may, mother. Say I may," interrupted Archibald with
+rebellious determination.</p>
+<p>"Well, we'll see about it when the time comes." She turned her
+head, meeting O'Hara's gaze, and for an instant they looked
+unflinchingly into each other's eyes. In her look there was
+surprise, indignation, and a suspicion of fear&mdash;why should he,
+a stranger, come between her and her son?&mdash;and in his steady
+gaze there was surprise, also, but it was mingled, not with
+indignation and fear, but with careless and tolerant amusement. She
+knew from his smile that he was perfectly indifferent to her
+resentment, that he was even momentarily entertained by it, and the
+knowledge enraged her. The glance he gave her was as impersonal as
+the glance he gave Miss Polly or the rose-bush or the street with
+its casual stream of pedestrians. It was the glance of a man who
+had lived deeply, and to whom living meant action and achievement
+rather than criticism or philosophy. He would not judge her, she
+understood, simply because his mind was not in the habit of
+judging. His interest in her was merely a part of his intense,
+zestful interest in life. She shared with Miss Polly and Archibald,
+and any chance object that attracted his attention for an instant,
+the redundant vitality of his inquiring spirit. "No wonder he has
+worked his way up with all that energy," she reflected. "No wonder
+he has made money." His face, with its clear ruddiness, was the
+face of a man who has breathed strong winds and tasted the sharp
+tang of sage and pine; and she noticed again that his deep gray
+eyes had the unwavering look of eyes that have watched wide
+horizons of sea or desert. There was no suggestion of the city
+about him, though his clothes were well cut, and she was quick to
+observe, followed the latest styles of Fifth Avenue. "Yes, he is
+good looking," she admitted reluctantly. "There is no question
+about that, and he has personality, too&mdash;of a kind." His hat
+was in his hand&mdash;a soft hat of greenish-gray felt&mdash;and
+her eye rested for a moment on his uncovered head with its thick
+waves of red hair, a little disordered as if a high wind had
+roughened them. "If he only had breeding or education, he might be
+really worth while," she added, almost approvingly.</p>
+<p>When he spoke again O'Hara ignored Gabriella, and turned his
+alert questioning glance on the little seamstress. Fanny had
+sauntered up the walk to join the group&mdash;Fanny in all the
+glory of her yellow curls, and her "debutante slouch "&mdash;and he
+bowed gravely to her without the faintest change of expression. If
+he admired Fanny's beauty and pitied Miss Polly's plainness, there
+was no hint of it in the indifferent look he turned from the girl
+to the old woman.</p>
+<p>"The next time you're planting things," he said earnestly, "I
+wish you'd set out a red geranium. I saw a cart of 'em go by in the
+street this morning and I had half a mind to buy a pot or two for
+the yard. If I get some, will you put 'em out?"</p>
+<p>"Why, of course, I will. I'll be real glad to," responded Miss
+Polly, agreeably flattered by his request. "Is there any special
+place you want me to plant them?"</p>
+<p>"Anywhere I can see 'em from the window. I'd like to look at 'em
+while I eat my breakfast. And while we are about it, wouldn't it be
+just as well to set out a whole bed of 'em?" he asked with a
+munificent gesture which included in one comprehensive sweep the
+weeds, the walk, the elm tree, the blossoming rose-bush, and the
+freshly turned flower-borders. The large free movement of his arm
+expressed a splendid scorn of small things, of little makeshifts,
+of subterfuges and evasions.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think it would cut up the yard too much to make
+another bed?" asked Gabriella, inspired by the whimsical demon of
+opposition. It was true that she had no particular fondness for red
+geraniums; but if Miss Polly had expressed, on her own account, a
+desire to plant the street with them, she would never have thought
+of objecting.</p>
+<p>"Well, the yard ain't much to brag of anyhow," replied Miss
+Polly with that careful penetration which never sees below the
+surface of things. "To tell the truth I've always had a sort of
+leanin' toward geraniums myself&mdash;especially rose geraniums. I
+don't know why on earth," she concluded with animated wonder, "I
+never thought of putting rose geraniums in that window box along
+with the sweet alyssum. They would have been the very things and
+they don't take so much watering."</p>
+<p>"That's a bargain, then," said O'Hara, with his ringing laugh
+which made Gabriella smile in spite of herself. Then, after shaking
+hands with each one of the group, he went down the walk and passed
+with his vigorous stride in the direction of Broadway.</p>
+<p>When the gate had closed, and his large figure had vanished in
+the distance, Gabriella said sternly: "Archibald, you must not lose
+your head over strangers. We know nothing on earth about Mr. O'Hara
+except that he lives in this house."</p>
+<p>"Oh, but, mother, he was splendid at the fire! You ought to have
+seen him holding a girl by one arm out of the window. He was as
+brave as a fireman, everybody said so, didn't they, Miss
+Polly?"</p>
+<p>"Men of that sort always have courage," observed Gabriella
+contemptuously, and despised herself for the remark. What was the
+matter with her this afternoon? Why did this man arouse in her the
+instinct of combativeness, the fever of opposition? Was it all
+because she suspected him of a vulgar intrigue with a shopgirl? And
+why had she decided so positively that Alice was vulgar? Certainly,
+she, a dressmaker, should be the last to condemn shopgirls as
+vulgar.</p>
+<p>"I declare, I can't begin to make you out, Gabriella," said Miss
+Polly uneasily. "I never heard you talk about folks bein' common
+before. It don't sound like you."</p>
+<p>"Well, he is common, you know," protested Gabriella, with a
+strange, almost tearful violence. "Why did he have to shake hands
+with us all&mdash;with each one of us, even Fanny, when he went
+away? We'd hardly spoken to him."</p>
+<p>"I don't know what's come over you," observed the seamstress
+gloomily. "I reckon I'm common, too, so I don't notice it. But I
+must say I like the way he spoke about geraniums. He showed a real
+nice feelin'."</p>
+<p>The words were hardly out of her mouth before Gabriella had
+caught her in her arms. "I know I'm horrid, dear Miss Polly," she
+said penitently, "but I don't like Mr. O'Hara."</p>
+<p>"Then I shouldn't see any more of him than I was obliged to,
+honey, and there ain't a bit of use in Archibald's goin' with him
+if you don't want him to."</p>
+<p>"I don't like to forbid him. Of course, I know nothing against
+the man&mdash;it is only a feeling."</p>
+<p>"Well, feelin's are mighty queer things sometimes," remarked
+Miss Polly, scoring a triumph which left the indignant Gabriella at
+her mercy; "and when I come to think of it; I don't recollect that
+yours have always been such good judges of folks."</p>
+<p>The geraniums arrived in a small cart the next morning, but
+O'Hara did not appear, and for several weeks, though Gabriella
+glanced suspiciously at the hatrack each morning when she passed
+through the hail, there was no sign of life in his rooms. Then one
+afternoon he reappeared as suddenly as he had vanished, and she
+found Archibald with him in the yard when she came home at six
+o'clock. That the boy would be her difficulty, she knew by
+instinct, for he had been seized by one of those unaccountable
+romantic fancies to which the young of the race are disposed.
+Though the sentiment was certainly far less dangerous than Fanny's
+passion for the, matin&eacute;e idol, since it revealed itself
+principally as a robust and wholly masculine ambition to follow in
+the footsteps of adventure, Gabriella fought it almost as fiercely
+as she had fought Fanny's incipient love affair.</p>
+<p>"He is making Archibald rough," she said to Miss Polly, after a
+fortnight of unavailing opposition to the new influence in
+Archibald's life. "Until we came here," she added despondently,
+"Archibald loved me better than anything in the world, and now he
+seems to think of nothing but this man."</p>
+<p>"It looks to me as if it was mighty good for the child, honey.
+You can't keep a boy tied to your apron-strings all the time.
+Archibald needs a father the same as other boys, and if he hasn't
+got one, he's either goin' to break loose or he's goin' to become a
+mollycoddle. You don't want to make a mollycoddle of him, do
+you?"</p>
+<p>"Of course not," answered Gabriella honestly, for, in spite of
+her strange fits of unreasonableness, she was still sensible enough
+in theory. "I've tried hard to keep him manly&mdash;not to spoil
+him, you know that as well as I do. And it isn't that I object to
+his making friends. I'd give anything in the world if he could know
+Arthur. If it had been Arthur," she went on gently, "I should have
+been glad to have him come first. I shouldn't have cared a bit if
+he had loved Arthur better than me."</p>
+<p>"You oughtn't to talk like that, Gabriella, for you know just as
+well as can be that Archibald don't love anybody better than he
+loves you. As far as I can make out though, Mr. O'Hara sets him a
+real good example. I don't see that he's doin' the child a particle
+of harm, and I don't believe you see it either. To be sure you
+don't think much of football, but it's a long ways better than
+loafin' round with nothin' to do, and this boy scout business that
+Archibald talks so much about sounds all right to me. Now, he never
+would have thought a thing about that except for Mr. O'Hara."</p>
+<p>"Yes, that's all right. I approve of that, but I can't help
+hating to see a stranger get so strong an influence over my son. It
+isn't fair of him."</p>
+<p>"Then why don't you tell him to stop it. I believe he'd be
+sensible about it, and if I was you, I'd have it every bit out with
+him."</p>
+<p>"If it doesn't stop, I'll find some way of showing him that I
+object to the friendship. But, after all, it may be only a fancy of
+Archibald's. Anyhow, I'll wait a while before I take any step."</p>
+<p>At the beginning of August Gabriella sent the children to the
+country with Miss Polly, and sailed, on a fast boat, for a brief
+visit to the great dress designers of Paris. Ever since Madame's
+age and infirmities had forced her to relinquish this annual trip,
+Gabriella had taken her place, and all through the year she looked
+forward to it as to the last of her youthful adventures. On her
+last visit, Billy and Patty had been in Switzerland; but this
+summer they met her at Cherbourg; and she spent several brilliant
+days with them before they flitted off again, and left her to the
+doubtful consideration of dressmakers and milliners. Patty, who
+appeared to grow younger and lovelier with each passing year, came
+to her room the evening before they parted, and asked her in a
+whisper if she had heard of George or Florrie in the ten years
+since their elopement?</p>
+<p>"Not a word&mdash;not a single word, darling. I haven't heard
+his name mentioned since I got my divorce."</p>
+<p>"You didn't know, then, that Florrie left him six months after
+they ran away?"</p>
+<p>"No, I didn't know. Does he ever write to you?"</p>
+<p>"Not to me, but mother hears from him every now and then when he
+wants money badly. Of course she doesn't have much to send him, but
+she gives him every penny she can spare. A year ago she had a
+letter from some doctor in New Jersey telling her that he was
+treating George for the drink habit, and that he needed to be kept
+somewhere for treatment for several months. We sent her the money
+she needed, Billy and I, but in her next letter she said that
+George had escaped from the hospital and that she hadn't heard of
+him since. That must have been about six months ago."</p>
+<p>"It's dreadful for his mother," observed Gabriella, with vague
+compassion, for she felt as if Patty were speaking of a stranger
+whose face she was incapable of visualizing in her memory. In the
+last ten years she had not only forgotten George, but she had
+forgotten as completely the Gabriella who had once loved him.
+Though it was still possible for her to revoke the hollow images of
+the past, she could not restore to these images even the remotest
+semblance of reality and passion. It was as if some nerve&mdash;the
+sentimental nerve&mdash;had atrophied. She could remember George as
+she remembered the house in Fifty-seventh Street or her
+wedding-gown which Miss Polly had made; she could say to herself,
+"I loved him when I married him," or, "It was in such a year that
+he left me"; but the empty phrases awoke no responsive echoes in
+her heart; and it would have been impossible to imagine a woman
+less crushed or permanently saddened by the wreck of her happiness.
+"I suppose it's hard work that keeps me from thinking about the
+past," she reflected while she watched Patty's beautiful face
+framed by the pale gold of her hair. "I suppose it's work that has
+driven everything else out of my thoughts."</p>
+<p>"Have you any idea what became of Florrie?" she asked, moved by
+a passing curiosity.</p>
+<p>"She left George for a very rich man she met in London. I
+believe he had a wife already, but things like that never stood in
+Florrie's way."</p>
+<p>"It's queer, isn't it, because she really has a kind heart."</p>
+<p>"Yes, she is kind-hearted when you don't get in her way, but she
+was born without any morality just as some people are born without
+any sense of smell or hearing. I know several women over here who
+are like that&mdash;American women, too&mdash;and, do you know,
+they are all surprisingly successful. Nobody seems to suspect their
+infirmity, least of all the men who become their victims."</p>
+<p>"I sometimes think," observed Gabriella cynically, "that men
+like women to be without feeling. It saves them so much
+trouble."</p>
+<p>The next day Patty fluttered off like a brilliant butterfly, and
+Gabriella began to suffer acute homesickness for the house in
+Twenty-third Street and her children. Not once during her stay in
+Paris did the thought of O'Hara enter her mind; and so completely
+had she ceased to worry about his friendship for Archibald that it
+was almost a shock to her when, after landing one September
+afternoon, she drove up to the gate and found the man and the boy
+standing together beside a flourishing border of red geraniums,
+which appeared almost to cover the yard.</p>
+<p>"Oh, look, Ben, there's mother!" cried Archibald; and turning
+quickly, the two came to meet her.</p>
+<p>"My darling, I thought you were still in the country," said
+Gabriella, kissing her son.</p>
+<p>"We've been here almost a week.. The place closed, so we decided
+to come back to town. It's much nicer here," replied Archibald
+eagerly. He looked sunburned and vigorous, and it seemed to
+Gabriella that he had grown prodigiously in six weeks.</p>
+<p>"Why, you look so much taller, Archibald!" she exclaimed,
+laughing with happiness, "or, perhaps, I've been thinking of you as
+a little boy." Then, while her manner grew formal, she held out her
+hand to O'Hara. "How do you do, Mr. O'Hara?"</p>
+<p>He was standing bareheaded in the faint sunshine, and while her
+eyes rested on his dark red hair, still moist and burnished from
+brushing, his tanned and glowing face, and on the tiny flecks of
+black in the clear gray of his eyes, she was startled by a
+sensation of strangeness and unreality as if she were looking into
+his face for the first time.</p>
+<p>"Oh, we're well. I've been playing with Archibald. Did you have
+a good crossing?"</p>
+<p>"It was smooth enough, but I got so impatient. I wanted to be
+with the children."</p>
+<p>"Well, I went once, and I was jolly glad to get back again.
+There was nothing to do over there but loaf and lie around."</p>
+<p>There would be nothing else for him, of course, she reflected;
+and she wondered vaguely if he had ever entered a picture gallery?
+What would Europe offer to a person possessing neither culture nor
+a passion for clothes?</p>
+<p>The driver had placed her bags inside the gate; and O'Hara took
+charge of them as if it were the most natural thing in the world to
+carry for a fellow tenant. Upstairs in the sitting-room he put his
+burden down, unfastened the straps, and commented upon the leather
+of a bag she had bought in Paris.</p>
+<p>"I'd like to have a grip like that myself. Is there anything
+else I can help about?"</p>
+<p>"No, thank you." She was embracing Fanny, and she did not glance
+at him as she responded: "You are very kind, but my trunks are
+arranged for."</p>
+<p>At this he went without a word, and Gabriella began a joyous
+account of her trip to the children.</p>
+<p>"Year after next, if you work hard with your French, you may
+both go with me. Then you'll be big enough to look after each other
+while I am with the dressmakers."</p>
+<p>"Oh, tell me about the dressmakers, mother. What did you bring
+me?" urged Fanny, prettily excited by the thought of her gifts. "I
+need dreadfully some dancing frocks. Carlie has a lovely one her
+mother has just bought for her."</p>
+<p>"I have all your autumn dresses, darling; everything you can
+possibly need at Miss Bradfordine's."</p>
+<p>Fanny's eager face grew suddenly fretful. "Am I really to go
+away to school, mother?"</p>
+<p>"Really, precious, both you and Archibald. Think of your poor
+lonely mother." Breaking off with a start she glanced inquiringly
+about the room, and turned a hurt look on Miss Polly. "Why, where
+is Archibald? I thought he was in the room."</p>
+<p>"I reckon he must have gone down after Mr. O'Hara. They had just
+got back from a ball game, and I 'spose they felt like talking
+about it. He'll be up again in a minute, because Mr. O'Hara goes
+out at six o'clock."</p>
+<p>"But I've just come home." Her lip trembled. "I should think
+Archibald would rather be with me."</p>
+<p>"Oh, he won't stay, and you'll have him all the evening.
+Archibald is just crazy about gettin' you back."</p>
+<p>Taking off her hat, a jaunty twist of black velvet from Paris,
+Gabriella went into her bedroom and changed to a gown of clear blue
+crape, which she took out of the new bag. When she came out again,
+with her arms filled with Fanny's gifts, there was a flush in her
+usually pale face, and her eyes were bright with determination.</p>
+<p>"I put these in my bag, Fanny, so you wouldn't have to wait for
+the trunks. Try on this little white silk."</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother, you look so sweet in that blue gown!"</p>
+<p>"I got it for almost nothing, dear, but the colour is lovely."
+Turning restlessly away, she walked to the window and stood looking
+over Miss Polly's window box down on the brilliant border of red
+geraniums.</p>
+<p>"Has Archibald come upstairs yet, Miss Polly?"</p>
+<p>"Not yet, but he'll be up directly. Don't you worry."</p>
+<p>For an instant Gabriella hesitated; then crossing the room with
+a resolute step, she turned, with her hand on the knob, and looked
+back at the startled face of the little seamstress, who was
+fastening Fanny's white gown.</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm going after him," she said sternly; "I am going
+straight downstairs to find him."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIIa" id="CHAPTER_VIIa"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<h3>READJUSTMENTS</h3>
+<p>For a minute Gabriella stood outside the door of what had once
+been the drawing-room of the house, while she listened attentively
+to the sound of animated voices within. Then suddenly Archibald's
+breezy laugh rang out into the hail, and raising her hand from the
+knob, she knocked softly on the white-painted panel of the
+door.</p>
+<p>"Come in!" called O'Hara's voice carelessly; and Gabriell
+entered and imperatively held out her hand to her son, who was
+standing by the window.</p>
+<p>"Come, Archibald, I want you," she said gravely. "You went off
+without seeing your gifts." She had invaded the sitting-room of a
+strange man, but her purpose was a righteous one, and there was no
+embarrassment in her manner.</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother, are they upstairs? I'll run up and see them!"
+cried, Archibald delightedly. "I thought they were all in the
+trunks."</p>
+<p>Darting past her in a flash, he bounded up the staircase, while
+Gabriella stood facing O'Hara, who had risen and thrown away his
+cigar at her entrance. The room was still fragrant with tobacco;
+there was a light cloud of smoke over the mignonette in the window
+box, and beyond it, she could see the dim foliage of the elm tree
+waving over the flagged walk to the gate. With an eye trained to
+recognize the value of details, she saw that the sitting-room was
+furnished with the same deplorable taste which had selected the
+golden-oak hatrack and the assortment of ornamental walking-sticks.
+The woodwork had been stained to match the oak of the barbarous
+writing-table, which held a distorted bronze lamp, with the base
+composed of a heavily draped feminine figure, a massive desk set,
+also of bronze, a pile of newspapers, a dictionary, and several
+dull-looking books with worn covers and dog's eared pages. She
+noticed that the chairs were all large and solid, with deep arms
+and backs upholstered in red leather, which looked as if it would
+never wear out, that the rug was good, and that, except for a few
+meretricious oil paintings on the greenish walls, the room was
+agreeably bare of decoration. After her first hesitating glance,
+she surmised that a certain expensive comfort was the end sought
+for and achieved, and that in the furnishing beauty had evidently
+been estimated in figures.</p>
+<p>"Mr. O'Hara," she began firmly, "I wish you would not take my
+son away from me."</p>
+<p>He did not lower his gaze, and she saw, after an instant in
+which he appeared merely surprised, a look of amusement creep into
+his expressive eyes. Within four walls, in his light summer
+clothes, with the gauzy drift of tobacco smoke over his head, he
+looked larger and more irrepressibly energetic than he had done out
+of doors.</p>
+<p>"I am sorry you feel that way," he returned very slowly after a
+pause. Already she had discovered that he had great difficulty with
+his words except when he was stirred by excitement into
+self-forgetfulness. At other times he seemed curiously
+inarticulate, and she saw now that, while she waited for his
+answer, he was groping about in his mind for a suitable phrase in
+which to repel her accusation.</p>
+<p>"I appreciate your interest in him," she resumed smoothly, "but
+he is with you too much. I do not know you. I know nothing in the
+world about you."</p>
+<p>"Well&mdash;" Again he hesitated as if over an impediment in his
+speech. Then, finding with an effort the words he needed, he went
+on more easily: "If there's anything you'd like to know, I guess
+you can ask me."</p>
+<p>She frowned slightly, and leaving the door moved resolutely to
+the writing-table, where she stopped with her hand on the pile of
+newspapers. Against the indeterminate colour of the walls her head,
+with its dark, silver-powdered hair, worn smooth and close after
+the Parisian fashion, showed as clear and fine as an etching. In
+her blue summer gown she looked almost girlish in spite of the
+imperious dignity of her carriage; and from her delicate head to
+her slender feet, she diffused an air of fashion which perplexed
+and embarrassed him, though he was unaware of the conscious art
+which produced it.</p>
+<p>"The only thing I'd like to know about you," she answered, "is
+why you have taken so sudden a fancy to my son?"</p>
+<p>At this he laughed outright, with a boyish zest which dispelled
+the oppressive formality of her manner. He was completely at his
+ease again, and while he ran his hand impatiently through his hair,
+he answered frankly:</p>
+<p>"Well, you see, when it comes to that, I didn't take any sudden
+fancy, as you call it&mdash;I didn't take any fancy at all&mdash;it
+was the other way about. The boy is a nice boy&mdash;a bully good
+boy, anybody can see that&mdash;and I like boys, that's all. When
+he began trotting round after me, we got to be chums in a way, but
+it would have been the same with any other boy who had come to the
+house&mdash;especially," he added with a clean blow given straight
+from the shoulder, "if he'd been a decent chap that a parcel of
+women were making into a muff."</p>
+<p>For a minute anger, righteous anger, kept her silent; then she
+responded with stateliness: "I suppose I have a right to decide how
+my son shall be brought up?"</p>
+<p>He met her stern gaze with a smile; and in the midst of her
+resentment she was distinctly aware of the impeccable honesty of
+his judgment. The peculiar breeziness she had always thought of as
+"Western" sounded in his voice as he answered:</p>
+<p>"By George, I'm not so sure that you have!"</p>
+<p>Before his earnestness she felt her anger melt slowly away. The
+basic reasonableness of her character&mdash;her passion to
+investigate experience, to examine facts, to search for
+truth&mdash;this temperamental attitude survived the superficial
+wave of indignation which had swept over her.</p>
+<p>"So you think I am making a mistake with Archibald?" she asked
+quietly; and growing tired of standing, she sank instinctively into
+one of the capacious leather-covered chairs by the table. "But the
+question is&mdash;are you able to judge?"</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm a man, and I hate to see a boy coddled. It's going to
+be devilish hard on the kid when he grows up."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps you're right"&mdash;her manner had grown
+softer&mdash;"and because I've thought of this, I am going to send
+him away to school this autumn&mdash;in a few weeks. Much as it
+will hurt me to part with them, I am going to send both of my
+children away from me. I have made the arrangements."</p>
+<p>Insensibly the note of triumph had crept into her voice. By the
+simple statement of her purpose she had vindicated her motherhood
+to this man. She stood clear now of his aspersions on her wisdom
+and her devotion.</p>
+<p>"I don't know much about girls," he replied, seating himself on
+the opposite side of the table, where the green light from the
+shaded lamp fell directly on his features. "I can't remember ever
+noticing one until I grew up, and then I was afraid to death of
+them, particularly when they were young&mdash;but I've been a boy,
+and I know all about boys. There isn't a blooming thing you could
+tell me about boys!" he concluded with animation.</p>
+<p>"And you think that all boys are alike?"</p>
+<p>"More or less under the skin. Of course some are washed and some
+are dirty&mdash;I was dirty&mdash;but they're all boys, every last
+one of them, and all boys are just kids. With the first money I
+made out West, I started a lodging-house for them&mdash;the dirty
+ones&mdash;down in the Bowery," he added. "They can get a wash and
+a supper and a night's lodging in a bed with real sheets any night
+in the year."</p>
+<p>She was suddenly interested. "Do you care for boys just because
+you were a boy yourself?" she asked.</p>
+<p>"Because I was such a God-forsaken little chap, I guess. You
+were never down in a cellar, I suppose, the kind of cellar people
+live in? Well, I was born in one, and my father had killed himself
+the week before because he was ill with consumption, and couldn't
+get work. He'd been a teamster, and he lost his job when he came
+down with pneumonia, and after they let him out of the hospital, he
+looked such a scarehead that nobody would employ him. After he
+died, my mother struggled on somehow, taking in washing or
+scrubbing floors&mdash;God knows how she managed it!&mdash;and by
+the time I was five, and precious big for my age, I was in the
+street selling papers. I used to say I was seven when anybody asked
+me, but I wasn't more than five; and I remember as plain as if it
+was yesterday, the way mother used to take me to a corner of
+Broadway, and put a bundle of papers in my arms, and how I used to
+hang on to the coppers when the bigger boys tried to get 'em away
+from me. Sometimes I'd get an extra dime or nickel, and then we'd
+have Irish stew or fried onions for supper. After my mother died,
+when I was about eight, I still kept on selling papers because I
+didn't know what else to do, but I didn't have any place to sleep
+then so I used to crawl into machine shops or areas (he said
+'aries') or warehouses, when the watchmen weren't looking. In
+summer I'd sometimes hide under a bush in the park, and the
+policeman would never see me until I slipped by him in the morning.
+There was one policeman I hated like the devil, and I used to swear
+that I'd get even with him if it took me all the rest of my life."
+For a moment he paused, brooding complacently. "I did get even with
+him, too," he added, "and it didn't take me more than twenty
+years."</p>
+<p>"You never forget anything?"</p>
+<p>"Forget?" he laughed shortly. "When you find a thing I forget,
+it'll be so small you'll have to put on spectacles to recognize
+it!"</p>
+<p>She nodded comprehendingly. "And after that?"</p>
+<p>"After that they caught me and sent me to school, and I learned
+to read and write and do sums&mdash;I always had a wonderful head
+for figures&mdash;but after school I went on selling papers so I'd
+have something to eat&mdash;-"</p>
+<p>The door burst open, and Archibald rushed in to show the evening
+clothes Gabriella had brought him from Paris.</p>
+<p>"They are jolly, mother! May I keep them on?"</p>
+<p>"If you like, dear, but they'll have to be altered a little. The
+coat doesn't quite fit across the shoulders."</p>
+<p>"You're a dandy, kid, a regular dandy," observed O'Hara, with
+humorous gravity.</p>
+<p>After a few moments Archibald rushed off again, and Gabriella
+made an uncertain movement to follow him. "I must go," she said,
+without rising, and added abruptly: "So you got on in spite of
+everything?"</p>
+<p>"Right you are!" He leaned back in his chair and regarded her
+with benevolent optimism. "You can always get on if the stuff is in
+you. I meant to get on, and a steam engine couldn't have kept me
+back. It's the gospel truth that I believe I came into the world
+meaning to get out of that cellar, and it was the same thing with
+areas and ash-bins. I knew all the time I wasn't going to keep
+grubbing a living out of an ash-bin. I was always growing, shooting
+up like one of those mullein stalks out there, and eating? Great
+Scott! I used to eat so much when I was a kid that mother starved
+herself near to death so as to give me a square meal. By the time I
+was twelve I had grown so fast that I got a job at cleaning the
+streets&mdash;my first job from the city. But I never went hungry.
+As far as I recollect I never went hungry except the time I beat my
+way out to Chicago&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Without moving, without lowering her eyes from his face,
+Gabriella listened, while she clasped and unclasped the hands in
+her lap. There is a personality that compels attention, and she
+realized for the first time that O'Hara possessed it. A new vision
+of life had opened suddenly before her, and she felt, with the
+illuminating intensity of a religious conversion, that the world
+she had been living in was merely a fiction. In spite of her
+experience she had really known nothing of life.</p>
+<p>"Yes, a lot of 'em went hungry, but I never did," he resumed in
+a tone of frank congratulation. "Sometimes, of course, I'd go
+without supper or breakfast, but that was nothing&mdash;that was
+not being really hungry, you know. I always managed, even when I
+was at school, to make enough to keep satisfied. What I minded
+most," he added musingly, "was not having a regular place to go
+home to at night, and that's why I started that lodging-house. When
+you've slept in holes and on benches, and under freight cars, and
+hidden away in machine shops, you know there's nothing on God's
+earth&mdash;not a blessed thing&mdash;that can take the place of a
+real sure enough bed with real sure enough sheets and pillow cases
+on it."</p>
+<p>"But how did you come out of it? How did you succeed? For you
+have succeeded beyond your dreams, haven't you?"</p>
+<p>"Beyond my dreams?" He threw back his big, bright head, laughing
+happily. "Did any man alive ever succeed beyond his dreams? Why, I
+used to dream of being President, and I guess I shan't be President
+this side of the Great Divide, shall I? But I made money, if that's
+what you mean. Why, I have a million to-day to every dollar I had
+when I was twenty. Do you mind my smoking? I can't talk unless I've
+got hold of a cigar."</p>
+<p>While he struck a match, she noticed with surprise how very neat
+and orderly he was about the ashes of his cigars, which lay in an
+exact gray heap in the massive bronze ash-tray. What a pity, she
+thought, moved by a feeling of compassion, that he had had no
+advantages!</p>
+<p>"I'll tell you how I got on," he pursued after a minute, leaning
+forward with the cigar in his hand&mdash;it was a good cigar, she
+knew from the smell of it. "Do you see this room?"&mdash;he glanced
+proudly about him&mdash;"do you know why I keep this place even
+when I am in the West?" She shook her head, and he went on with a
+kind of half-ashamed, whimsical tenderness: "Well, a man lived here
+once you never heard of&mdash;a common Irishman&mdash;just a common
+Irish politician&mdash;the Tammany sort, just the sort the
+newspapers are so down on. I guess he wasn't strong on civic
+morality as they call it, and the social conscience and all the
+other new-fashion catchwords, but he found me out there in the snow
+one night selling newspapers without any overcoat, and he brought
+me in and gave me one of his. He was a little fellow&mdash;not big
+as the Irish usually grow&mdash;and I could wear his clothes,
+though I wasn't thirteen at the time. The coat wasn't an old one,
+either," he explained with retrospective complacency; "no, sirree,
+he had just bought it, and he made me take it off after I'd tried
+it on and sit down at the table in that back room there&mdash;it's
+all just as he left it&mdash;and eat supper with him&mdash;the best
+supper I ever had in my life before or since, you may take my word
+for it. Then when I'd finished he gave me a dollar and told me to
+go out and rent a bed&mdash;" He broke off, glanced about the room
+with the pride of ownership, and added softly: "Who'd ever have
+thought on that night that this place would one day belong to
+me?"</p>
+<p>"Did you see him again?"</p>
+<p>"After that he never lost sight of me. He got me a room, he sent
+me to school&mdash;not that he thought much of education, the
+more's the pity&mdash;and when I was through with school he got me
+into the Mechanics' Institute, and gave me a job at engineering.
+But the job was too small for me, and so was New York&mdash;there
+ain't room enough here to get on without stepping on somebody's
+toes&mdash;and when I was twenty I set out to beat my way to
+Chicago, and went clean out to Arizona. That's a long
+story&mdash;I'll tell you that some day, for I've been everything
+on earth you can be in order to keep alive, and done pretty much
+everything you can do with two hands that will earn you a square
+meal. I've cut corn and ploughed fields, and greased wheels, and
+chopped wood, and mended machinery, and cleaned the snow away, and
+once out in some little town in Arizona, I even dug a grave because
+the sexton was down with pneumonia. I've been brakesman, and
+freightman, and, after that, freight agent. That was just before I
+struck it rich in Colorado. I was one of the first men at Bonanza
+City, and when I went there with the railroad&mdash;I was on the
+very first train that ever ran there&mdash;the whole town was just
+a row of miners' shacks near the foot of old Bonanza. It's the
+richest mineral streak in the State, and yet twenty-five years ago,
+before the C.A. &amp; F.W. tapped it, there wasn't even a saloon
+out there at Bonanza. City. When you wanted a drink&mdash;and that
+didn't worry me, for I haven't tasted anything but water since I
+was twenty-five&mdash;you had to go all the way to Olympia to get
+it; and what was worse, all the ore had to go to Olympia, too, on a
+little no account branch road to be shipped over the main line.
+Well, as soon as I discovered Bonanza City I said that had to
+change, and it did change. I guess I did as much to make that town
+as any man out there, and to-day I own about two thirds of it. I've
+got a house on Phoenix Avenue, and I gave the town a church and a
+theatre and the ground for a library. We've got one of the
+handsomest churches in the State," he proclaimed with his
+unconquerable optimism, "and we've just begun growing. Why, in ten
+years more Bonanza City will be in the race with Denver."</p>
+<p>"And what about your friend?" she asked, finding it difficult to
+become enthusiastic over the most progressive town in Colorado, a
+State which she always pictured imaginatively as a kind of rocky
+desert, inhabited by tribes of gregarious invalids, which one
+visited for the sake of the scenery or the climate, when one had
+exhausted the civilized excitements of Europe.</p>
+<p>"I am coming back to him," he responded with a manner of genial
+remonstrance. "You just give me time. But I'd honestly like you to
+see Bonanza City. Why, it would take your breath away if I told you
+it hadn't even begun to grow twenty years ago. You people in New
+York don't know what progress means. Why, out there in Bonanza City
+we do things while you're thinking about doing them. But to come
+back to Barney&mdash;that was his name, Barney
+McGoldrick&mdash;after I made my pile out of Bonanza, I used to
+strike here once in a while to see how he was getting along, and
+when he died I took these rooms just as he left 'em. There wasn't a
+chick or a child to come after him, but he had a string of
+pensioners as long as the C.A. &amp; F.W. His money&mdash;it must
+have been half a million&mdash;all went to charity, but I kept on
+in the rooms."</p>
+<p>"What kind of man was he?" she asked, sincerely interested.</p>
+<p>"What kind?" He pondered the question with deep puffs of his
+cigar. "Well, do you know, I don't believe, to save my life, I
+could tell you. The more you know of men, and of women, too, for
+they're all alike, the more you understand, somehow, that you can't
+judge unless you've been right in the other man's
+place&mdash;unless you know exactly what they've had to pull up
+against and how hard they have pulled. Now, if I was drawing my
+last breath, and you asked me what I thought of Barney McGoldrick,
+I'd be obliged to answer that he was the best man I ever knew,
+though there are others in this town, I guess, and the newspapers
+among 'em, who would tell you that he was&mdash;" He broke off
+abruptly, and she waited without speaking, until he solaced himself
+with his cigar, and went on less boisterously: "It's a downright
+shame, isn't it, that the same man can't manage to corner all the
+virtues. I can't explain how it is, but I've noticed that the
+virtues don't seem able to work along peaceably in one another's
+company, for if they did, I guess we'd have pure saints or pure
+sinners instead of the mixed lot we've got to make a world out of.
+I've seen a man who wouldn't have lied or stolen to save his wife
+from starving, and who was the first in the pew at church every
+Sunday, grind the flesh and blood out of his factory girls until
+they were driven into the streets, or crush the very life out of
+the little children he put to work in his mills. Yes, and I've seen
+a tombstone over him with 'I know that my Redeemer liveth' carved
+an inch deep in the marble. Well, Barney wasn't like that, but he
+had his weaknesses, and they were the kind people don't raise
+marble tombstones over. I never had a taste for politics myself,
+but it seems to be like any other weakness, and to drag a man a
+little lower down if it once gets too strong a hold on him. It's
+all right, of course, if you keep it in moderation, but there's
+precious few chaps, particularly if it's in their blood, and
+they're Irish, who can keep the taste under control. Barney was the
+most decent man to women I ever knew. He wouldn't have hurt one for
+a million dollars, in a factory or out of it, and he was faithful
+to his old wife up to the day of her death and long after. He
+grieved for her till he died, and I don't believe any woman ever
+asked his help without getting it. His private life was absolutely
+clean, but his public morality&mdash;well, I guess that wasn't
+exactly spotless. At any rate, they had an
+investigation&mdash;there was a committee of citizens appointed to
+sit in judgment on his record. The chairman was a pillar of the
+church and a public benefactor; he had led every political reform
+for a generation; and I happened to know that he kept two
+mistresses up somewhere in the Bronx, and his wife, who was old and
+ugly, wore herself to a shadow because he neglected her. Mark you,
+I'm not upholding Barney, but, good Lord! ain't it queer how easy
+men get off when they just sin against women and not against men or
+against the State?"</p>
+<p>"It's all queer." She rose from the leather chair, and held out
+her hand. "I'm glad I came in, Mr. O'Hara. Some day you must tell
+me the rest."</p>
+<p>"The rest?" His embarrassment had descended upon him, and he was
+awkwardly stammering for words, with her cool hand in his grasp. As
+long as his enthusiasm had lasted he had talked fluently and
+naturally, swept away from his self-consciousness; but with the
+return of the formal amenities he became as ill at ease and shy as
+a boy. "There ain't anything more except that we're building a
+railroad out there, and I'm going back to finish it next spring if
+I'm alive."</p>
+<p>The September breeze entered from the dim stretch of yard, under
+the waving elm boughs, and in an instant the room was filled with
+the fragrance of mignonette.</p>
+<p>"But you won't be if you never get your dinner," she retorted,
+as she smiled brilliantly. Then, turning quickly, she crossed the
+threshold, and went down the hall to the staircase.</p>
+<p>She was tremendously excited, and while she mounted the stairs
+she felt that she had not been so alive, so filled with energy
+since her girlhood in Richmond. It was as if a closed door into the
+world had been suddenly flung open, and she knew that she had
+passed beyond the narrow paths of convention into the sunny roads
+and broad fields of vision. In a moment of enlightenment she saw
+deeper and farther than she had ever dreamed of seeing before. "It
+teaches one not to judge," she thought, with a stab of
+self-reproach, "it teaches one not to judge others until one really
+knows." Twice before to-night, on the day when she resolved for the
+sake of Jane's children to go to work, and again on the June
+evening when George returned to her, she had felt this sudden
+quickening of life, this magical sense of the unexplored mystery
+and beauty of the world that surrounded her. But she had been very
+young then, and on that June evening she had been deeply in love.
+To-night, she assured herself, there was no touch of personal
+romance. In some inexplicable way the talk with O'Hara had renewed
+her broken connection with her Dream, and she felt closer in
+sympathy to Arthur than she had been able to feel for months. No,
+this awakening was utterly different from the awakening of love,
+for it shed its illumination not on a single person, but on the
+whole of humanity. O'Hara had moved her, not as a man, but as a
+force&mdash;a force as impersonal as the wind or the sea, which had
+swept her intellect away from its anchorage in the deeps of
+tradition. She had thought herself free, but she understood now
+that she had never really broken away&mdash;that in spite of her
+struggles to escape, the past had still held her. To-night it was
+more than an awakening, it was a conversion through which she was
+passing, and she knew she could never again believe as she had
+believed a few hours ago, that she could never judge again as
+unintelligently as she had judged yesterday. "So that is a man's
+world," and then with a rush of impulse: "What a mean little life I
+have been living&mdash;what a mean little life!" For she really
+knew nothing of life except dressmaking; she was familiar with no
+part of it except the way to Dinard's. She had been living a little
+life, with little standards, little creeds, little compromises. And
+yet, though the personality of O'Hara had enlarged her vision of
+the world, it had not altered her superficial view of the man. She
+still saw him outwardly at least without the glamour of
+romance&mdash;she still thought of him as boisterous, uneducated,
+slangy&mdash;but she was beginning almost unconsciously to
+distinguish between the faults of manner and the faults of
+character; she was beginning to be tolerant.</p>
+<p>From Fanny's open door a humming voice floated out to her, and
+going inside, she found the girl, in a new frock, practising a
+dance step before the mirror. "This is the lame duck, mother, but
+it's different from the one we danced last year."</p>
+<p>"Yes, dear, it's very pretty." Stopping before the
+dressing-table, Gabriella frowned on the photograph of a young man
+in a silver frame&mdash;a young man with a fascinating smile and
+inane features.</p>
+<p>"Fanny, where did you get this?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother, I didn't mean you to see it. I meant to put it
+away."</p>
+<p>"Where did you get it?"</p>
+<p>"He sent it to me. I wrote and asked him for it, and it has his
+autograph. Isn't he handsome? That's just the way he looked in
+'Stolen Sweets' last winter."</p>
+<p>"Well, he looks like a calf, I think," returned Gabriella
+severely. "I suppose you may keep it out until you get tired of it,
+but please try to be sensible, Fanny." Though she spoke jestingly,
+she was secretly disturbed by the discovery of the photograph. "If
+she were not pretty, it wouldn't matter," she thought, "but she is
+so pretty that almost any man might be tempted to begin a
+flirtation. Thank Heaven, she didn't take a fancy to Mr. O'Hara.
+That would have been a calamity." For, in spite of the fact that
+she had become personally reconciled to O'Hara, she was as firmly
+resolved as ever to keep Fanny out of his sight. "You know so many
+nice boys, dear," she resumed after a minute, "that I think you
+might be content to let actors alone."</p>
+<p>"But boys are so stupid, mother." Fanny's tone was withering in
+its disdain. "They are wrapped up in sports, and I despise
+sports."</p>
+<p>"Then you oughtn't to tease them as you do. You're too young to
+have fancies."</p>
+<p>"I am sixteen."</p>
+<p>"Well, that is much too young for anything of that sort. I like
+you to have boy friends, but I don't like you to be foolish. What
+has become of that attractive boy, Carlie's brother? He doesn't
+come here any more, and I'm afraid you've hurt his feelings."</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother," hummed Fanny to the music of the lame duck as she
+practised before the mirror, "how can you really hurt a man?"</p>
+<p>The next morning when Gabriella, in a Parisian gown of black
+taffeta and one of the absurdly small hats of the autumn, started
+for Dinard's, she found herself thinking, not of Fanny's
+flirtation, but of her long talk with O'Hara. She cast a friendly
+glance on the golden-oak hatrack as she passed&mdash;for O'Hara had
+risen in her regard since she had discovered that he had not
+selected the furniture on the first floor&mdash;and then stopping
+for a few moments on the front steps, she closed her eyes, and
+inhaled the fragrance of the mignonette in the window box. The yard
+was brilliant in the early sunshine; and at the gate she saw the
+wife of the caretaker, who had looked after the flowers in her
+absence. Detaining the woman by a gesture, she joined her in the
+street, and the two started together to walk the long blocks that
+stretched to Fifth Avenue.</p>
+<p>"You are going home early to-day, Mrs. Squires."</p>
+<p>"Yes, ma'am; it's Johnny's birthday and I promised to take him
+up to the Bronx. Mr. O'Hara had his breakfast at seven, and I got
+through earlier than usual. He is so tidy that there ain't much to
+do except to dust around a little."</p>
+<p>She was a neat, red-faced woman, in rusty mourning for a child
+she had lost in the early summer, and while she talked, Gabriella
+felt an irresistible impulse to question her about O'Hara. "She has
+known him for thirty years, and I can find out more from her than I
+could discover for myself in six months," she thought; but she only
+said indifferently:</p>
+<p>"You've worked at this house a long time, haven't you?"</p>
+<p>"For thirty years&mdash;ever since I came here at eighteen as
+housemaid to Mr. McGoldrick. My husband was coachman for Mr.
+McGoldrick, you know&mdash;he drove the prettiest pair of bays in
+New York&mdash;and that was how I met him. When we married, Mr.
+McGoldrick set us up, and John drove his carriage for him as long
+as he lived. I often wonder what the old gentleman would think of
+everybody having automobiles. They were just beginning to come into
+fashion when he died."</p>
+<p>"You knew Mr. O'Hara then?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, he was a great deal with Mr. McGoldrick. After he went
+West we didn't see much of him for a time&mdash;that was while he
+was making his money. Then he came back and brought his wife to a
+place here to be treated&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"His wife?"</p>
+<p>"Didn't you know? She died a few years ago, but before that he
+used to keep her with some doctor over on Long Island, and he went
+regularly to see her every Sunday afternoon as long as she
+lived."</p>
+<p>"What was the matter?"</p>
+<p>"Drugs. Drugs and drink, too, they said, though I never knew for
+certain about that. But they couldn't do anything with her. They
+tried all the cures anybody ever heard of, and she went back every
+time. No sooner would one thing fail, however, than Mr. O'Hara
+would hear of something or other over in Europe, and make them
+begin trying it. Finally for the last ten or twelve years she was
+quite out of her mind&mdash;clean crazy they said, and didn't know
+anybody. But he still went to see her every Sunday when he was
+staying in town, and he still made the doctors go on trying new
+things. He never gave up till the very last. Mr. McGoldrick used to
+say of him that he was the sort that would go on hoping in
+hell."</p>
+<p>"Who was she? Where did he meet her?"</p>
+<p>"God only knows. He never would say much about her even to Mr.
+McGoldrick, but John always stuck it out that she was never the
+right sort in the beginning, and that Mr. O'Hara got tangled up
+with her somewhere in a mining town out West, and couldn't get out.
+I've heard she was a chambermaid or a barmaid or something in a
+miners' hotel, but I don't know, and nobody else knows, for Mr.
+O'Hara never opened his mouth about her. All we know positive is
+that she must have been a drug fiend long before he ever married
+her, and that he stuck to her for better or for worse until she
+died and was buried. Some men are like that, you know, a few of
+'em. When a thing once belongs to 'em, no matter what it is or how
+little it's worth, they'll go through fire and water for the sake
+of it&mdash;and it makes no difference whether it's a woman or a
+railroad or a dog or a mine. They've got the sense of
+responsibility like a disease. You see, Mr. O'Hara is that sort,
+and you might as well try to turn a steam roller as to start to
+reason him out of a notion. It would have been as easy as talking
+for him to have got a divorce. Time and again Mr. McGoldrick used
+to go after him about it, and talk himself hoarse; but it didn't do
+any good, not a particle. Instead of getting free out there in the
+West where it was easy, he kept on lugging that crazy woman back
+and forth, trying to cure her long after everybody else had given
+up hope and was wishing that she was dead."</p>
+<p>"Well, I suppose he loved her."</p>
+<p>"No, ma'am, that's the funny part, but it didn't look like love
+to me&mdash;not like what men call love, anyway. If it had been
+love, it would have worn itself out long ago. Who on earth could
+love a crazy, yellow, shrieking, cursing creature like that? I saw
+her sometimes when he'd send me to take things down to her, and I
+tell you it wasn't love&mdash;not man's love, anyhow&mdash;that
+made him do what he did."</p>
+<p>"Then it must have been something finer even than love,"
+Gabriella acquiesced after a moment. "It's strange, when we come to
+think of it, how often we find spirituality in places where we'd
+never expect it to be."</p>
+<p>"I don't know that I'd call Mr. O'Hara spiritual exactly,"
+replied Mrs. Squires thoughtfully. "I don't believe he ever puts
+his foot inside a church, and I've heard him swear when he got
+ready till you'd expect the roof to drop in on you, but when you
+come to think of it," she concluded, "I guess there's a good deal
+of religion floating around outside of walls."</p>
+<p>At the next corner they parted, and as the caretaker stopped to
+shake hands with Gabriella and thank her for a birthday present for
+Johnny, she added nervously: "I hope I haven't said anything that I
+oughtn't to have said, Mrs. Carr. Mr. O'Hara has been as good as
+gold to me, and I shouldn't like him to hear I'd been talking about
+him."</p>
+<p>"He shan't hear, I promise you"; and while Mrs. Squires hurried,
+reassured, to her home in Sixth Avenue, Gabriella walked briskly
+with the crowd which was streaming along Twenty-third Street into
+Broadway.</p>
+<p>A week ago she would scarcely have noticed the people about her.
+For ten years she had gone every morning to her work through the
+streets, and she had felt herself to be as aloof from the masses as
+the soaring skyscraper at the corner of Broadway. The psychology of
+the crowd had not touched her; even when she walked with it, when
+she made a part of it, she had felt herself to be detached from its
+purposes.</p>
+<p>To-day, however, a change had come over her, and she was happy
+with a large and impersonal happiness which seemed to belong less
+to herself than to the throng which surged about her and gathered
+her in. Her little standards, her little creeds, had become a part
+of the larger standards and creeds of humanity. In Broadway, moving
+onward with the other workers who were returning to the day's work,
+she was aware of an invisible current of joy which flowed from the
+crowd into her thoughts and through her thoughts back again into
+the crowd. For the first time she was feeling and thinking in
+unison with the multitude.</p>
+<p>That night, when she sat alone with Miss Polly, she said to her
+suddenly:</p>
+<p>"I believe I was wrong to wish Archibald not to see anything of
+Mr. O'Hara. Yesterday we had a long talk, and I think he must have
+some very fine traits."</p>
+<p>"Maybe," replied Miss Polly, a little snappishly. "I never could
+see what set you so against him, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"Oh, he is dreadfully slangy, and, of course, he isn't educated.
+I suppose if I mentioned Hamlet to him, he'd think I was talking
+about some town in Oklahoma."</p>
+<p>"Well, I reckon he's been his own Hamlet," retorted Miss Polly;
+"and knowing about Hamlet don't make a man, anyhow. George knew all
+about Hamlet, but it didn't make him easy to live with."</p>
+<p>"Yes, that's just it. What did George's advantages do for him? I
+used to think it was love that mattered most," she said musingly
+after a pause, "and then, when love failed, I began to think it was
+culture. But I see now that it is something else. Do you ever
+wonder what the essential thing really is, Miss Polly?"</p>
+<p>"No, I never wonder," responded Miss Polly tartly, "but when you
+stew it down to the bones, I reckon it's just plain character."</p>
+<p>"Yes, if you can't have both culture and character, of course
+character is the more important. But think how much that man might
+have made of the university training that was wasted on George."
+While she spoke there came back to her in snatches a conversation
+she had had with an Englishman on the boat last summer, and she
+remembered that he had alluded to Judge Crowborough as "a man of
+the broadest culture." Surely the "broadest culture" must include
+character, and yet she could feel even now the casual and
+business-like clasp of the judge, she could see again the admiring
+gleam in his small, fishy eyes. "After all, I suppose it is a kind
+of spiritual consciousness that makes character," she said aloud,
+"and you can't train that into a man if he isn't born with it."</p>
+<p>"It seems to me that Mr. O'Hara has done mighty well, all things
+considered," pursued Miss Polly, and she inquired suspiciously:
+"Did Mrs. Squires ever tell you anything about his marriage?"</p>
+<p>"I met her this morning on my way to work, and she told me about
+it."</p>
+<p>"Well, what do you make of it? Don't it beat anything you ever
+heard?"</p>
+<p>"It does. There's not the slightest doubt of it. And, do you
+know," Gabriella went on hurriedly, "that story made a remarkable
+impression on me&mdash;I've been thinking about it ever since. It
+made me see everything differently, and I've even asked myself if I
+had enough patience with George. If I wasn't too hard and
+intolerant with him in the beginning?"</p>
+<p>"I shouldn't worry about that, honey, because I don't believe it
+would have made any difference if you'd been gentler. It's the
+stuff in a man, I reckon, that counts more than the way a woman
+handles him. You couldn't have saved George any more than that
+other woman could ruin the man downstairs."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps not." Rising from her chair, Gabriella drew the pins
+from the smooth, close coil of her hair. "But I see things so
+differently since I had that talk with Mr. O'Hara. I am glad to
+have him for a friend," she added generously, "but of course I
+still feel the same about Fanny. I hope he won't begin to notice
+Fanny."</p>
+<p>"Well, he won't. He ain't thinkin' about it. I declare,
+Gabriella," the little woman went on with a change of tone, "your
+head don't look much bigger than a pincushion with your hair fixed
+that way. It makes you seem mighty young, but there ain't many
+women that could stand it."</p>
+<p>"It's the fashion in Paris. I have to be smart. Do you suppose
+many people guess that I wear extreme styles," she added
+laughingly, "because they are so hard to sell?"</p>
+<p>"You certainly do look well in 'em. I never saw anybody with
+more natural style. Why, you can put on those slouchy things
+without a piece of corset and look as if you'd just stepped out of
+a fashion plate."</p>
+<p>"When you aren't pretty, you're obliged to be smart."</p>
+<p>"Well, of course you never had the small features and pink and
+white colouring that Jane had; but you always had a way of your own
+even as a girl, and you're handsomer now than you ever were in your
+life. If you were to ask Mr. O'Hara, I bet you he'd say you were a
+heap better lookin' than Fanny."</p>
+<p>A gasp broke from Gabriella, and she turned from the mirror to
+stare blankly at the seamstress. "Mr. O'Hara! Why, what in the
+world made you think of him?"</p>
+<p>But Miss Polly had grown suddenly impenetrable. "Oh, nothin',"
+she responded evasively; "I've just seen him look at you both when
+you were together."</p>
+<p>Gabriella laughed brightly. "Oh, he looks at everything. I never
+saw such eyes."</p>
+<p>There was the note of accomplishment, of success, in her voice,
+and she brushed her fine, soft hair with long, vigorous strokes
+which had in them something of this same quality of unwavering
+confidence. To look at her as she sat, relaxed yet dominant, before
+the glass, was to recognize that she was a woman who had achieved
+the purpose of her life, who had succeeded in whatever she had
+undertaken. Not a great purpose, perhaps&mdash;there were hours
+when her purpose seemed to her to be particularly trivial&mdash;but
+still, great or small, she had accomplished it. She was not only
+directing Dinard's now&mdash;she <i>was</i> Dinard's. Without her
+the business would collapse like a house of cards, and it was
+because she knew this, because Madame also knew this, that she had
+been able to perfect the arrangements she had planned that May
+afternoon after her depressing visit to Judge Crowborough. For she
+managed the house of Dinard's now by an arrangement which gave her
+one third of the profits; and in the last six months, since this
+scheme had gone into effect, the business had grown tremendously in
+certain directions. The millinery department, for instance, which
+Madame had once treated with such supercilious disdain, had become
+to-day the most fashionable hat shop in Fifth Avenue. The work was
+hard, but the returns were wonderful; and with a strange gloating,
+she told herself that she was making money&mdash;always more money
+for the children. "When Fanny finishes school year after next,
+we'll take a large apartment in Park Avenue, and spend every summer
+in Europe," she concluded.</p>
+<p>In the morning she rather expected to see O'Hara, but a month
+passed before she met him one evening in October, when she came
+home late from work. The autumn rains had come and gone, destroying
+the fugitive bloom of Miss Polly's flower-beds, and scattering the
+leaves of the elm tree in a moist, delicately tinted carpet over
+the grass. An hour ago the sun had set in a purple cloud, and
+beneath the electric lights, which shone through the fog with a wan
+and spectral glimmer, the dark outlines of the city assumed an
+ominous vagueness. There was no light in the house; and the
+deserted yard, silvered from frost and strewn with dead leaves,
+which lay in wind-drifts along the flagged walk, had the haunted
+aspect of a place where youth and happiness have passed so recently
+that the fragrance of them still lingers.</p>
+<p>"Archibald went off to school without telling you good-bye," she
+said in a friendly voice. "He was much disappointed."</p>
+<p>Stopping in the walk, he looked at her with unaffected
+surprise.</p>
+<p>"Why, I thought that was what you wanted!"</p>
+<p>She met this quite honestly. "Not after I talked to you."</p>
+<p>"What in thunder did I say to change your opinion of me?" The
+strong west wind blowing around him and lifting the roughened red
+hair from his forehead, appeared to lessen by contrast the breezy
+animation of his manner.</p>
+<p>"It wasn't anything you said," she answered simply. "I found out
+you were different from what I thought, that is all."</p>
+<p>"Then you must have thought something!" he laughed aloud.</p>
+<p>"I was afraid at first that you might have a bad influence over
+Archibald."</p>
+<p>"Oh, the kid!" His mirth was as irrepressible as his energy.</p>
+<p>"You see I have to be very careful," she went on gently. "I want
+to do my best by him."</p>
+<p>At this he turned on her with sudden earnestness. "You can't do
+your best by being too careful&mdash;take my word for it. If you
+want him to be a man, don't begin by making a mollycoddle of him.
+Let him rough it a bit, or it will be twice as hard for him when he
+grows up."</p>
+<p>"But I do&mdash;I do. I am sending him away from me. Isn't that
+right?"</p>
+<p>"You bet it is. Let him learn his own strength. I've lived among
+men ever since I was born, and I tell you, nine times out of ten,
+the boy who is tied to his mother's apron-strings, loses his grip
+when he is turned out into the world. At the first knock-down he
+goes under."</p>
+<p>Instinctively she flinched. If only he wouldn't!</p>
+<p>"After he leaves school of course he will go to the university,"
+she said.</p>
+<p>"That's right," he agreed emphatically, and pursued a little
+wistfully: "Now, that's what I was cheated out of, and there've
+been times when I'd have given my right arm to have been through
+college instead of having to keep my mouth shut and then run home
+and look up the meaning of things in an encyclop&aelig;dia. It's a
+handicap, not knowing things. Nobody who hasn't had to get along in
+spite of, it knows what a darned handicap it is!"</p>
+<p>"But you read, don't you?"</p>
+<p>"Not much. Never had time to form the habit. But I've read
+Shakespeare&mdash;at least I've read Julius C&aelig;sar six times,"
+he explained. "I had it in the desert once where there wasn't a
+newspaper for two months. And I've read the Kings, too&mdash;most
+of 'em."</p>
+<p>"But not Hamlet?" She was smiling as she looked from him into
+the street.</p>
+<p>He shook his head with a laugh. "Too much meandering in that. I
+don't like talk unless it is straight."</p>
+<p>Though he was upon the most distant terms of acquaintance with
+the English language, it occurred to her that he probably possessed
+a knowledge of men and things which no university training could
+have given him.</p>
+<p>"It is wonderful," she remarked, touched to sympathy by his
+confession, "that you should have succeeded."</p>
+<p>"Oh, any man could have done it&mdash;any man, that is, who
+loved a fight as much as I do. It was half luck and half bulldog
+grip, I suppose. When I once get my grip on a thing, I'll hold on
+no matter what happens. There ain't the power this side of Kingdom
+Come that could make me let go if I don't want to."</p>
+<p>She thought of his wife, of his losing fight against the craving
+for morphine, and she replied very gently: "If you hadn't been a
+good fighter, I suppose you would have been beaten long ago."</p>
+<p>"So long ago," he retorted with jovial humour, "that you
+wouldn't have known me."</p>
+<p>An impulse of curiosity urged her to an utterly irrelevant
+response. "I wonder if you have known many women?" She felt that
+she should like to hear his story from him, there in the deserted
+yard; but when he answered her, he revealed a personal reticence
+worthy of the aristocratic traditions of Mrs. Carr. "Oh, I haven't
+had time for them," he replied indifferently.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps there aren't so many in Bonanza City?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, there're plenty," he rejoined gaily, "if you take the
+trouble to look for them."</p>
+<p>"And you didn't?" They had entered the house, and she spoke
+merrily as she crossed to the staircase.</p>
+<p>"Well, the sort I found didn't take my fancy, you see!" he
+tossed back playfully from his door.</p>
+<p>Her foot was on the lowest step, when, hesitating with a
+birdlike movement, she looked at him over her right shoulder.</p>
+<p>"Well, that's a pity. A woman could have told you a good many
+things," she observed.</p>
+<p>"For instance?" He was still jesting.</p>
+<p>Poised for flight, she gazed back at him, challenging his
+eyes.</p>
+<p>"Oh, not to collect gold-headed walking-sticks, not to believe
+in golden-oak, and not to be so extravagantly&mdash;slangy."</p>
+<p>As she ran up the staircase, a burst of laughter followed her in
+the midst of which she distinguished the retort: "Well, I own to
+the slang, but I inherited the oak, and the sticks were all given
+me&mdash;by women."</p>
+<p>The temptation to fling back, "of a sort?" came to her; but she
+conquered it as she passed demurely into the sitting-room, where
+Miss Polly was reading the afternoon paper before an open fire. "I
+mustn't get too friendly," she told herself, reprovingly. "It is
+better to keep up a certain formality." And she determined that at
+the next meeting she would be dignified and aloof.</p>
+<p>But the next meeting did not occur until January, for O'Hara
+went West the following day, and for more than two months Miss
+Polly and Gabriella were alone in the house. Though she was working
+doubly hard at Dinard's, the loneliness of the winter evenings
+after the Christmas holidays were over became almost intolerable to
+Gabriella; and the bleak month of January stretched ahead of her in
+an interminable prospect of cold and gloom. For the past ten years
+the children had absorbed her life, after her working hours, so
+entirely that the parting from them had been an unbearable wrench,
+and had left her with an aching feeling as if an arm had been cut
+away. She had had little time to make friends; the streets of the
+city isolated her as completely as if they had been spaces of
+uninhabited wilderness; and, except for her casual remarks to Miss
+Polly, she had lived from day to day without speaking a word that
+was not directly concerned with the management or the sales of
+Dinard's. Since her divorce, obeying perhaps some inherited
+tradition, she had avoided men almost instinctively; and even if
+she had cared to make friends among them, her life was so narrow
+that it would have been almost impossible for her to do so. When
+she was not too tired, she still read as widely as she could; but
+at thirty-seven books had become but a poor substitute for the more
+robust human activities. As the theatres and the lecture rooms
+offered the only opportunities of relaxation and amusement, she
+went twice a week, accompanied by the little seamstress, who
+appeared to thrive on self-sacrifice, to see a play that was
+noticed in the papers, or to listen to explanatory descriptions of
+the scenery of South America or the grievances of the oppressed
+natives of Asia.</p>
+<p>"You mustn't let yourself mope, honey," urged Miss Polly, one
+snowy morning in January, when Gabriella was putting on a fur coat,
+cut in the latest fashion, which had been left on her hands after
+the mid-winter sales. "The children had to go sooner or later, and
+it's just as well it happened while you are young enough to get
+over it. A boy never stays at home anyway, and you know I always
+told you Fanny was the sort to marry before she is out of her
+teens."</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'm not moping, but of course I can't help missing them.
+The house seems so empty."</p>
+<p>"It's obliged to be empty with only us two women in it. I
+declare I got such a creepy feelin' about burglars last night that
+I kept wishin' Mr. O'Hara would hurry up and come home. Mrs.
+Squires says she was expectin' him all last week, but he didn't
+turn up, so she is kind of lookin' for him to-day."</p>
+<p>"Is she?" Gabriella's voice was charged with sincere
+thankfulness. Merely to know that there was a man on the first
+floor afforded a sense of security; and an occasional meeting with
+him would make, she was aware, a trivial diversion from the
+monotony of her existence. The loneliness of the winter had driven
+her like a storm-swept bird back to the enduring refuge of her
+Dream; but, after all, the flesh and blood presence of O'Hara could
+not seriously interfere with the tender and pensive visions her
+memory spun of the past. Every morning, standing beside her window
+and gazing on the bleak street and the bare elm boughs, she thought
+of Arthur and of her first love, with a pious and reverent
+mind&mdash;for they occupied in her day the hour and mood which her
+mother, belonging to a more orthodox generation, piously dedicated
+to "Daily Strength for Daily Need." But never for an instant would
+it have occurred to the granddaughter of that sanctified snob,
+Bartholomew Berkeley, who despised the lower orders and fraternized
+with the Deity in his pulpit every Sabbath, that the red-blooded
+and boisterous O'Hara&mdash;the man of force and slang&mdash;could
+by any accident usurp the sacred shrine where the consecrated
+relics of her first love reposed. Before the whirlwind of O'Hara's
+energy, she would congratulate herself that her Arthur, with the
+milder fluid of the Peytons in his veins, would never allow himself
+to be carried away by his impulses.</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm glad he's coming back, if it's only to protect us,"
+she said, while she fastened her fur coat. "I wonder what he has
+been doing out West all this time?"</p>
+<p>"Makin' money, I reckon. They say he makes so much he don't know
+what to do with it."</p>
+<p>"We could teach him, couldn't we? But he ought to marry and let
+his wife spend it for him. Only," she concluded carelessly, "I
+suppose he'd select some dizzy chorus girl who would bring him to
+ruin. Men of his kind always pick out chorus girls, don't
+they?"</p>
+<p>"I thought 'twas the other sort that did that," observed Miss
+Polly, fresh from the perusal of the Sunday newspapers; "Dukes and
+society men and the sons of millionaires."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps. Maybe they're all alike," and taking up her umbrella,
+Gabriella started bravely out into the storm.</p>
+<p>At six o'clock, when she struggled back along Twenty-third
+Street, the wind had changed, and the storm driving furiously down
+the long blocks caught her in a whirl of blinding snowflakes. In
+the swirling whiteness of the distance, the black outlines of the
+city appeared remote and shadowy, while the waning lights, which
+shone like dim moons at the crossing, revealed the ghostly figures
+of a few struggling pedestrians.</p>
+<p>The gate was open, and she had almost reached it, when the
+lurching form of a man, emerging suddenly from the storm, was flung
+against her with such violence that she fell back for support on
+the icy railing of the yard. Then, as the obscure figure, drawing
+away from her with a staggering motion, began fumbling blindly at
+the gate, she caught sight of a ghastly face, which looked as if it
+had been stricken by an incurable illness. The man wore no
+overcoat; a knitted muffler was wrapped tightly about his neck; and
+she saw that the hands fumbling at the gate were red and trembling
+from cold.</p>
+<p>Steadying herself against the fence, she drew her purse from her
+muff, and she had already taken out a piece of silver, when she
+heard her name called in a voice which sounded vaguely familiar,
+though it awoke no immediate associations in her mind.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella! My God! I was looking for you, Gabriella!"</p>
+<p>With the money still in her hand, she stooped to look into his
+face.</p>
+<p>"You don't know me. I'm George," he said in an angry voice as if
+he were about to burst into tears. "I'm George, but you don't know
+me."</p>
+<p>The storm drove him against her, and he clung weakly to her arm,
+crying softly in a terrified whimper like a child that is awaking
+from a horrible nightmare. Though she did not realize that he was
+dying, not of disease, but of drink, the thought shot through her
+mind: "So this is George. So this is what George has come
+to&mdash;George who took everything that he wanted!"</p>
+<p>"Where are you going?" she asked, for the shock had restored him
+to some poor semblance of sanity.</p>
+<p>"I was looking for you. I heard you lived down here, and I knew
+you'd take me in. I've been ill&mdash;I'm ill enough to die, and
+they turned me out of the hotel. There was a woman who stole
+everything I had. She stole it and ran off in the night, damn
+her!"</p>
+<p>He shivered violently while he spoke, and she saw a glassy look
+creep into his eyes and over his face, as if his features had been
+frozen in an instant of terror. Panic seized her lest he should die
+there in the street, and she grasped his arm almost roughly as if
+she would shake him back into life. As she supported him his teeth
+began to rattle, not as the teeth of the living chatter from fear,
+but as the teeth of a dead man might rattle when he is jolted in
+his coffin. For a minute she felt the madness of her panic pass
+from her pulses to her brain, and her terror of him turned her as
+cold as the sleet-covered iron railing against which she leaned. A
+cowardly impulse tempted her to desert him and run for her life, to
+seek shelter behind bolted doors, to leave him there alone to
+freeze to death at her gate.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, I'm afraid," he whined, clinging to her arm. "I'm
+afraid, Gabriella. You can't let go of me!"</p>
+<p>An unspeakable loathing swept over her; his very touch seemed
+contamination; and while she turned toward the gate, she knew that
+every fibre of her flesh, every quiver of her nerves, revolted
+against the thing she was doing. But something stronger than her
+flesh or her nerves&mdash;the vein of iron in her
+soul&mdash;decided the issue.</p>
+<p>"Come in with me, and I'll take care of you," she said. "There
+is the step. Don't stumble. Here, steady yourself with the
+umbrella. We are almost there now." Her voice was cold and hard;
+but the words were those she might have used to Archibald had she
+been leading him in out of the storm.</p>
+<p>Still whimpering and stumbling, George clung to her with his
+desperate clutch, while she dragged him up the short walk, which
+was deep in snow, to the six steps, which appeared to her to reach
+upward into eternity. As she approached the house, a light shone
+out suddenly in one of the windows and a sense of safety, of
+perfect security descended upon her, for she knew that it was the
+red glimmer of O'Hara's fire. With the sensation, she heard again
+her mother's voice speaking above the storm: "Gabriella, we'll send
+immediately for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn!" So, in the old days of
+her childhood, Cousin Jimmy had brought her this feeling of relief
+in the midst of distress.</p>
+<p>Opening the door with her latchkey, she dragged George into the
+hall, where her thankful eyes fell on O'Hara's overcoat, from which
+the water was, still dripping. For an instant she was tempted to
+call to him; then checking the impulse, she went on to the
+staircase, which she ascended with difficulty because George's legs
+seemed to give way when he tried to lift them to a step. At last,
+after what she felt to be an eternity, they reached the upper
+floor, and she pushed her burden into Archibald's room, where he
+fell like a log on the hearthrug. The sound of his fall shook the
+house, and when Miss Polly came running in, with a cry of alarm,
+Gabriella almost expected to see O'Hara behind her. But O'Hara did
+not come, and before the seamstress could recover from the
+palpitations the shock had produced, George was on his feet again,
+and was staring blankly, as if fascinated, at the reflection of the
+electric light in the mirror.</p>
+<p>"It's George," Gabriella explained in a harsh voice. "I found
+him in the street. He was looking for me, and I couldn't leave him
+to freeze. I think he's either drunk or ill. I don't know which it
+is, but it sounds like pneumonia."</p>
+<p>"God have mercy!" exclaimed Miss Polly, which was quite as lucid
+as she ever became in a crisis. Her face had turned blue, she was
+trembling with terror, and the violence of her palpitations almost
+exceeded the painful sounds in George's chest. "If there was only a
+man we could send for," she wailed hysterically. "Oh, Gabriella, if
+there was only a man!"</p>
+<p>"Well, there's the doctor," replied Gabriella shortly. "You'd
+better telephone for him at once. Get the nearest one. I think his
+name is McFarland."</p>
+<p>"And a nurse? You'll want a nurse, won't you?"</p>
+<p>"I'll want anything I can get, and I'll want it quickly. There,
+hurry, while I find a bathrobe of Archibald's. He's wet
+through&mdash;soaking wet. He must have been out all day in the
+storm."</p>
+<p>Miss Polly vanished into the dimness of the hall, and after a
+few minutes Gabriella heard her fluttering voice demanding a
+telephone number as if she were still supplicating the Deity.</p>
+<p>"Take off your wet clothes while I get you a drink and some hot
+blankets!" said Gabriella when she had found one of Archibald's
+bathrobes in the closet. It occurred to her that George was really
+incapable of undressing himself, but she felt that she would rather
+die than touch him again. The loathing which had overpowered her
+outside in the storm became stronger in the close air of the house.
+"I can't touch him. I don't care what happens I can't touch him,"
+she told herself, while she placed the flannel robe on the rug, and
+hurried back to the kitchen. Her whole body was benumbed and
+chilled, not from cold, but from disgust, yet her mind was almost
+unnaturally active, and she found herself thinking over and over
+again: "So this is the man I loved, this is the man I married
+instead of Arthur!"</p>
+<p>When she came back with a cup of broth and some hot blankets,
+she found George in the flannel gown of Archibald's, with his wet
+clothes on the floor at his feet, from which he had forgotten to
+remove his shoes. He drank the soup greedily, while Miss Polly
+lighted the wood-fire she had laid in the open grate.</p>
+<p>"The heat's comin' up all right in the radiator," she said, "but
+I thought a blaze might make him more comfortable."</p>
+<p>"Yes, it's better," replied Gabriella sternly, while she stooped
+to unlace George's boots. There was no compassion in her heart, and
+it seemed to her, while she struggled with the wet lacing, that the
+fumes of whiskey spread contagion and disease over the room. She
+was not only hard and bitter&mdash;she felt that she loathed him
+with unspeakable loathing.</p>
+<p>"I declare, Gabriella, I believe he has gone deranged!" Miss
+Polly cried out sharply, dropping the poker and starting to her
+feet in an erratic impulse of flight.</p>
+<p>With the flannel gown clutched tightly to his chest, where the
+dull rattling sounds went on unceasingly, George was staring in
+fascinated intensity at the reflection of the electric light in the
+mirror. Then suddenly, with a scream of terror, he lifted the poker
+Miss Polly had dropped, and flung it over Gabriella's head in the
+direction of the dressing-table. At the noise of breaking glass,
+Gabriella rose from her knees, and said in the hard, quiet voice
+she had used ever since the first shock of the meeting:</p>
+<p>"If you are afraid, lock yourself in your room, Miss Polly. I am
+going downstairs for Mr. O'Hara."</p>
+<p>Without waiting for a response, she ran out into the hall and
+down the staircase, while her eyes clung to the comforting glimmer
+of light under the drawing-room door. As her feet touched the
+lowest step, the door opened quickly, and O'Hara stood on the
+threshold.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIIIa" id="CHAPTER_VIIIa"></a>CHAPTER
+VIII</h2>
+<h3>THE TEST</h3>
+<p>"I knew something was wrong," he said, emerging, big and
+efficient, from the firelight, "and I was just coming up." Before
+she could answer she felt his warm grasp on her hands, and it
+seemed to her suddenly that it was not only her hands he enfolded,
+but her agonized and suffering mind.</p>
+<p>"There's a man up there&mdash;" she faltered helplessly. "I was
+once married to him long ago&mdash;oh, long ago. Just now I found
+him in the street and he seems to be out of his mind. We are
+frightened."</p>
+<p>But he seemed not to hear her, not to demand an explanation, not
+even to wait to discover what she wanted. Already his long stride
+was outstripping her on the staircase, and while she followed more
+slowly, pausing now and then to take breath, she realized
+thankfully that the situation had passed completely away from her
+power of command. As Miss Polly's strength to hers, so was her
+strength to O'Hara's.</p>
+<p>Faint, despairing moans issued from Archibald's room as she
+reached the landing; and going inside, she saw George wrestling
+feebly with O'Hara, who held him with one hand while with the other
+he waved authoritative directions to Miss Polly.</p>
+<p>"Get the bed ready for him, with plenty of hot blankets. He's
+about at the end of his rope now. It's a jag, but it's more than a
+jag, too. If I'm not mistaken he's in for a case of pneumonia."</p>
+<p>Miss Polly, hovering timidly at a safe distance, held out the
+blankets and the hot water bottles, while O'Hara carried George
+across the room to the bed, and then covered him warmly. When he
+turned to glance about his gaze fell on Gabriella, and he remarked
+bluntly: "You'd better get out. You aren't wanted."</p>
+<p>"But I am obliged to be here. It is my business, not yours," she
+replied, while a sensation of sickness passed over her.</p>
+<p>For a moment he regarded her stubbornly, "Well, I don't know
+whose business it was a minute ago," he rejoined, "but it's mine
+now. I am boss of this particular hell, and you're going to keep
+out of it. I guess I know more about D.T. than you and Miss Polly
+put together would know in a thousand years."</p>
+<p>She was very humble. In the sweetness of her relief, of her
+security, she would have submitted cheerfully not only to slang,
+but to downright profanity. It was one of those unforgettable
+instants when character, she understood, was more effective than
+culture. Even Arthur would have appeared at a disadvantage beside
+O'Hara at that moment.</p>
+<p>"I think I ought to help you," she insisted.</p>
+<p>"Well, I think you oughtn't. Out you go! I guess I know what I'm
+up against."</p>
+<p>Before she could protest, before she could even resist, he had
+pushed her out into the hail, and while she still hesitated there
+at the head of the staircase, the door opened far enough to allow
+the huddled figure of Miss Polly to creep through the crack. Then
+the key turned in the lock; and O'Hara's voice was heard pacifying
+George as he might have pacified a child or a lunatic. After a few
+minutes the shrieks stopped suddenly; the door was unlocked again
+for a minute, and there floated out the reassuring words:</p>
+<p>"Don't stand out there any longer. It's as right as right. I've
+got him buffaloed!"</p>
+<p>"What does he mean?" inquired Gabriella helplessly of the
+seamstress.</p>
+<p>"I don't know, but I reckon it's all right," responded Miss
+Polly. "He seems to know just what to do, and anyhow the doctor'll
+be here in a minute. It seems funny to give him whiskey, don't it,
+but that was the first thing Mr. O'Hara thought of."</p>
+<p>"I suppose his heart was weak. He looked as if he were dying,"
+answered Gabriella. "He asked for more whiskey, didn't he?"</p>
+<p>"Yes; I'm goin' right straight to get it. Oh, Gabriella, ain't a
+man a real solid comfort sometimes?"</p>
+<p>Without replying to this ejaculation, Gabriella went after the
+whiskey, and when she came back with the bottle in her hand, she
+found the doctor on the landing outside the locked door. He was a
+stranger to her, and she had scarcely begun her explanation when
+O'Hara called him into the room.</p>
+<p>"The sooner you take a look at him the better." Everything was
+taken out of her hands&mdash;everything, even her explanation of
+George's presence in her apartment.</p>
+<p>As there was nothing more for her to do, she went back to the
+sitting-room, where a fire burned brightly, and began to talk to
+Miss Polly.</p>
+<p>"I don't know what I should have done if he hadn't been here,"
+she said.</p>
+<p>"Who? Mr. O'Hara? Well, it certainly was providential, honey,
+when you come to think of it."</p>
+<p>The door of Archibald's room opened and shut, and the doctor
+came down the hall to the telephone. They heard him order medicines
+from a chemist near-by; and then, after a minute, he took up the
+receiver, and spoke to a nurse at the hospital. At first he gave
+merely the ordinary directions, but at the end of the conversation
+he said sharply in answer to a question: "No, there's no need of a
+restraining sheet. He's too far gone to be violent. It is only a
+matter of hours."</p>
+<p>His voice stopped, and Gabriella went out to him. "Will you tell
+me what you think, Doctor?" she asked.</p>
+<p>"Is he your husband?" He had a blank, secretive face, with light
+eyes, and a hard mouth&mdash;so different, she thought from the
+poetic face of Dr. French.</p>
+<p>"I divorced him ten years ago."</p>
+<p>He looked at her searchingly. "Well, he may last until morning,
+but it is doubtful. His heart has given out."</p>
+<p>"Is there anything I can do?"</p>
+<p>"No. Morphine is the only thing. We are going to try camphorated
+oil, but there is hardly a chance&mdash;not a chance." He turned to
+go back into the room, then stopped, and added in the same tone of
+professional stoicism: "The nurse will be here in half an hour, and
+I shall wait till she comes."</p>
+<p>When Gabriella went back to the sitting-room, Miss Polly was
+weeping. "I followed you and heard what he said. Oh, Gabriella,
+ain't life too awful!"</p>
+<p>"I'll be glad when the nurse comes," answered Gabriella with
+impatience. Emotionally she felt as if she had turned to stone, and
+she had little inclination to explore the trite and tangled paths
+of Miss Polly's philosophy.</p>
+<p>The nurse, a stout, blond woman in spectacles, arrived on the
+stroke of the half-hour, and after talking with her a few minutes,
+the doctor took up his bag and came to tell Gabriella that he would
+return about daybreak. "I've given instructions to the nurse, and
+Mr. O'Hara will sit up in case he is needed, but there is nothing
+to do except keep the patient perfectly quiet and give the
+hypodermics. It is too late to try anything else."</p>
+<p>"May I go in there?"</p>
+<p>"Well, you can't do any good, but you may go in if you'd
+rather."</p>
+<p>Then he went, as if glad of his release, and after Gabriella had
+prevailed upon Miss Folly to go to bed, she changed her street
+dress for a tea-gown, and threw herself on a couch before the fire
+in the sitting-room. An overpowering fatigue weighed her down; the
+yellow firelight had become an anodyne to her nerves; and after a
+few minutes in which she thought confusedly of O'Hara and Cousin
+Jimmy, she let herself fall asleep.</p>
+<p>When she awoke a man was replenishing the fire, and as she
+struggled drowsily back into consciousness, she realized that he
+was not Cousin Jimmy, but O'Hara, and that he was placing the lumps
+of coal very softly in the fear of awaking her.</p>
+<p>"Hallo, there!" he exclaimed when he turned with the scuttle
+still in his hand; "so you're awake, are you?"</p>
+<p>She started up. "I've been asleep!" she exclaimed in
+surprise.</p>
+<p>"You looked like a kid when I came in," he responded cheerfully,
+and she reflected that even the presence of death could not shadow
+his jubilant spirit. "I went back to the kitchen to make some
+coffee for the nurse and myself, and I thought you might like a
+cup. It's first-rate coffee, if I do say it. Two lumps and a little
+cream, I guess that's the way. I rummaged in the icebox, and found
+a bottle of cream hidden away at the back. That was right, wasn't
+it?"</p>
+<p>A strange, an almost uncanny feeling of reminiscence, of vague
+yet profound familiarity, was stealing over her. It all seemed to
+have happened before, somewhere, somehow&mdash;the slow awakening
+to the large dark form in the yellow firelight, O'Hara's sudden
+turning to look at her, his exuberance, his sanguine magnetism, and
+even the cup of coffee he made and brought to her side. She felt
+that it was the most natural thing in the world to awake and find
+him there and to drink his coffee.</p>
+<p>"It's good," she answered; "I had no dinner, and I am very
+hungry."</p>
+<p>"I thought you'd be. That's why I brought a snack with it." He
+was cutting a chicken sandwich on the tray he had placed under the
+green shaded light, and after a minute he brought it to her and
+held the cup while she ate. A nurse could not have been gentler
+about the little things she needed; yet she knew that he was rough,
+off-hand, careless&mdash;she could imagine that he might become
+almost brutal if he were crossed in his purpose. She had believed
+him to be so simple; but he was in reality, she saw, a mass of
+complexities, of actions and reactions, of intricacies and
+involutions of character.</p>
+<p>"I don't know what I should have done if you hadn't been here,"
+she said gratefully while she ate the sandwich and he sat beside
+her holding her cup. "But I'm so unused to being taken care of,"
+she added with a trembling little laugh, "that I don't quite know
+how to behave."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you would have got on all right," he rejoined carelessly;
+"but I'm glad all the same that I was here."</p>
+<p>She motioned toward the hall. "Has there been any change?"</p>
+<p>"No, there won't be until morning. He'll last that long, I
+think. We're giving him a hypodermic every four hours, but it
+really ain't any good, you know. It is merely professional." For a
+minute he was silent, watching her gravely; then recovering his
+casual manner, he added: "I shouldn't let it upset me if I were
+you. Things happen that way, and we've got to take them
+standing."</p>
+<p>She shook her head. "I'm not upset. I'm not feeling it in the
+least. Somehow, I can't even realize that I ever knew him. If you
+told me it was all a dream, I should believe you."</p>
+<p>"Well, you're a plucky sort. I could tell that the first minute
+I saw you."</p>
+<p>"It's not pluck. I don't feel things, that's all. I suppose I'm
+hard, but I can't help it."</p>
+<p>"Hard things come useful sometimes; they don't break."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I suppose if I'd been soft, I should have broken long
+ago," she replied almost bitterly.</p>
+<p>After putting the plate and cup aside, he sat down by the table,
+and gazed at her attentively for a long moment. "Well, you look as
+soft as a white rose anyhow," he remarked with a curiously
+impersonal air of criticism.</p>
+<p>A rosy glow flooded her face. It was so long since any man had
+commented upon her appearance that she felt painfully shy and
+displeased.</p>
+<p>"All the same I've had a hard life," she returned with
+passionate earnestness. "I married when I was twenty, and seven
+years later my husband left me for another woman."</p>
+<p>"The one in there?"</p>
+<p>She shuddered, "Yes, the one in there."</p>
+<p>"The darn fool!" he exclaimed briefly.</p>
+<p>"There was a divorce, and then I had my two children to support
+and educate. Because I had a natural talent for dressmaking, I
+turned to that, and in the end I succeeded. But for ten years I
+never heard a word of the man I married&mdash;until&mdash;I met him
+downstairs&mdash;in the street."</p>
+<p>"And you brought him in?"</p>
+<p>"What else could I do? He was dying."</p>
+<p>"Do you know what he was doing out there?"</p>
+<p>"He was looking for me, I think. He thought. I would take him
+in."</p>
+<p>"Well, it's strange how things work out," was his comment after
+a pause. "There's something in it somewhere that we can't see. It's
+impossible to reason it out or explain it, but life has a way of
+jerking you up at times and making you stand still and think. I
+know I'm putting it badly, but I can't talk&mdash;I never could.
+Words, don't mean much to me, and yet I know&mdash;I know&mdash;"
+He hesitated, and she watched his thought struggle obscurely for
+expression. "I know you can't slip away from things and be a
+quitter, no matter how hard you try. Life pulls you back again and
+again till you've learned to play the game squarely."</p>
+<p>He was gazing into the fire with a look that was strangely
+spiritual on his face, which was half in shadow, half in the
+transfiguring glow of the flames. For the second time she became
+acutely aware of the hidden subtleties beneath his apparent
+simplicity.</p>
+<p>"I've felt that myself often enough," he resumed presently in a
+low voice. "I've been pulled up by something inside of me when I
+was plunging ahead with the bit in my teeth, and it's been just
+exactly as if this something said: 'Go steady or you'll run amuck
+and bu'st up the whole blooming show.' You can't talk about it. It
+sounds like plain foolishness when you put it into words, but when
+it comes to you, no matter where you are, you have to stand still
+and listen."</p>
+<p>"And is it only when you are running amuck that you hear it?"
+she asked.</p>
+<p>"No, there've been other times&mdash;a few of them. Once or
+twice I've had it come to me up in the Rockies when there didn't
+seem more than a few feet between me and the sky, and then there
+was a time out on the prairie when I was lost and thought I'd never
+get to the end of those darned miles of blankness. Well, I've had a
+funny road to travel when I look back at it."</p>
+<p>"Tell me about some of the women you knew in the West." An
+insatiable curiosity to hear the truth about his marriage seized
+her; but no sooner had she yielded to it than she felt an impulsive
+regret. What right had she to pry into the hidden sanctities of his
+past?</p>
+<p>A frown contracted his forehead, but he said merely: "Oh, there
+wasn't much about that," and she felt curiously baffled and
+resentful. "I think I'll go and take a look in there," he added,
+rising and walking softly in the direction of the room at the end
+of the hall.</p>
+<p>He was gone so long that Gabriella, crushing down the revolt of
+her nerves, went to the door, and opening it very gently, looked
+cautiously into the room. The window was wide open to the night,
+where the snow was still falling, and beside the candlestand at the
+head of the bed the nurse was filling a hypodermic syringe from a
+teaspoon. By the open window O'Hara stood inhaling the frosty air;
+and Gabriella crossed the floor so silently that he did not notice
+her presence until he turned to watch the nurse give the
+injection.</p>
+<p>Then he said in a whisper: "You'd better go out. You can't do
+any good." But she made an impatient gesture of dissent, and
+stopping between the bed and the wall, waited while the nurse bared
+George's arm and inserted the point of the needle. He was lying so
+motionless that she thought at first that he was already dead; but
+presently he stirred faintly, a shiver ran through the thin arm on
+the sheet, and a low, half-strangled moan escaped from his lips.
+Had she come upon him in a hospital ward, she knew that she should
+not have recognized him. He was not the man she had once loved; he
+was not the father of her children; he was only a stranger who was
+dying in her house. She could feel nothing while she looked down at
+him. When she tried to remember her young love she could recall but
+a shadow. That, too, was dead; that, too, had not left even a
+memory.</p>
+<p>As she bent there above him she made an effort to remember what
+he had once been, to recall his face as she had first seen it, to
+revive the burning radiance of that summer when they had been
+lovers. But a gray veil of forgetfulness wrapped the past; and her
+mind, when she tried to bring back the emotions of seventeen years
+ago, became vacant. For so long she had stoically put the thought
+of that past out of her life, that when she returned to it now, she
+found that only ashes remained. Then a swift stab of pity pierced
+her heart like a blade, and she saw again, not George her lover,
+not George her husband, but the photograph Mrs. Fowler had shown
+her of the boy in velvet clothes with the wealth of curls over his
+lace collar. So it was that boy who lay dying like a stranger in
+the bed of his son!</p>
+<p>She turned hurriedly and went out without speaking, without
+looking back when she opened the door.</p>
+<p>"If one could only understand it," she said aloud as she entered
+the sitting-room; and then, with a start of surprise, she realized
+that O'Hara had followed her. "You walked so softly I didn't hear
+you," she explained.</p>
+<p>"The rugs are thick, and I have on slippers. My boots were
+soaking when I came in, and I'd just taken them off when you
+called."</p>
+<p>They sat down again in front of the fire; and while she stared
+silently at the flames, with her chin on her hand and her elbow on
+the arm of the chair, he burst out so unexpectedly that she caught
+her breath in a gasp:</p>
+<p>"You didn't know that I was married, too, did you?" His words,
+and even more than his words, his voice, filled with suppressed
+emotion, awoke her from her reverie in which she had been dreaming
+of Arthur.</p>
+<p>She smiled evasively, remembering her promise to Mrs.
+Squires.</p>
+<p>He hesitated again, and then spoke with an effort. "Well, it was
+hell!" he said grimly.</p>
+<p>"I know"&mdash;she was very gentle, full of understanding and
+sympathy&mdash;"but you went through it bravely."</p>
+<p>"I stuck to her." His hand clenched while he answered. Then,
+after a pause in which she watched him struggle against some savage
+instinct for secrecy, he added quietly: "If she were alive to-day,
+I'd be sticking to her still."</p>
+<p>"You must have loved her." It was all she could think of to say,
+and yet the words sounded trite and canting as soon as she had
+uttered them.</p>
+<p>Lifting his head quickly, he made a contemptuous gesture of
+dissent. "No, it wasn't that. I never loved her, except, perhaps,
+just at the first. But there's something that comes before love, I
+guess. I don't know what it is, but there's something. It may be
+just plain doggedness, but after I married her there wasn't
+anything on top this earth that could have made me give up and let
+go. As soon as I found what I was up against&mdash;it was
+morphine&mdash;I knew I'd either got to fight it out or be a
+quitter, and I've never been a quitter. Until she got so bad she
+had to be shut up I kept a home for her out there in Colorado, and
+I lived with her in hell as long as she wasn't too bad to be out of
+a hospital. Then I brought her on here and we found a private place
+down on Long Island where she stayed till she died&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"And you still saw her?"</p>
+<p>"Except when I was out West, and that's where I was most of the
+time, you know. My work was out there, and there's nothing like
+hell behind you to keep you running. I made piles of money those
+years. That's all I ever cared for about money&mdash;just making
+it. I'd fight the devil to get it, but after I've once got it, I'll
+give it to the first fool who comes begging. But the getting of it
+is great."</p>
+<p>"How long did it last?"</p>
+<p>"My marriage? Going on eighteen years. She was down on Long
+Island for the last ten of them."</p>
+<p>"Then you lived with her eight. Was she
+always&mdash;always-"</p>
+<p>"Took it before I ever married her, and I found it out in a
+month. She wasn't so much to blame as you might think," he pursued
+thoughtfully. "You see she had a tough time of it, and she was
+little and weak, and everything was against her. She came out West
+first to teach school, and then she got mixed up with some skunk of
+a man who pretended to marry her when he had a wife living in
+Chicago, and after that I guess she went on taking a dope just to
+keep up her spirits and ease the pain of some spinal trouble she'd
+had since she was a child. There was nothing bad in her&mdash;she
+was just weak&mdash;and I began to feel sorry for her, and so I did
+it. If I had it to do over again, I'm not so sure I'd act
+differently. She was a poor little creature that didn't have any
+man to look after her, and I was just muddling along anyway,
+thinking about money. Heaven knows what would have become of her if
+I hadn't happened along when I did."</p>
+<p>He had lifted his head toward the light, while he ran his hand
+through his hair, and again she saw the look, so like spiritual
+exaltation, transfigure his face. Before this man, who had sprung
+from poverty and dirt, who had struggled up by his own force,
+overcoming and triumphing, fighting and winning, fighting and
+holding, fighting and losing, but always fighting&mdash;before this
+man, who had been born in a cellar, she felt suddenly humbled.
+Without friends, without knowledge, except the bitter knowledge of
+the streets, he had fought his fight, and had kept untarnished a
+certain hardy standard of honour. Beside this tremendous
+achievement she weighed his roughness, his ignorance of books and
+of the superficial conventions, and she realized how little these
+things really mattered&mdash;how little any outside things mattered
+in the final judgment of life. She thought of George, dying a
+drunkard's death in the room at the end of the hail&mdash;of George
+whose way had been smoothed for him from birth, who had taken
+everything that he had wanted.</p>
+<p>"I wish there was something I could do for you&mdash;something
+to help you," she said impetuously. "But I never saw any one who
+seemed to need help so little."</p>
+<p>His face brightened, and she saw that her words had brought a
+touching wistfulness into his eyes.</p>
+<p>"Well, if you'd let me come and talk to you sometimes" he
+answered shyly. "There're a lot of things I'd like to talk to you
+about&mdash;things I don't know, things I do know, and things I
+half know."</p>
+<p>From the brilliant look she turned on him, he understood that he
+must have given her pleasure, and she saw the smile return to his
+face.</p>
+<p>"I'll tell you everything I know and welcome," she replied
+readily; "but that isn't much. Better than that, I'll read to
+you."</p>
+<p>"If you don't mind, I think I'd rather you'd just talk." Then he
+rose with one of his abrupt movements, "I'd better look in again
+now. The nurse might want something."</p>
+<p>"I feel that you oughtn't to stay up," urged Gabriella, rising
+as he turned away from her. "You have done all you can."</p>
+<p>His only response was an impatient negative gesture, and without
+looking at her, he crossed the room quickly and went out into the
+hall. Hardly a minute had passed, and she was still standing where
+he had left her, when he returned and said in a whisper:</p>
+<p>"He is going now&mdash;very quietly. Will you come?"</p>
+<p>She shook her head, crying out sharply: "No! no!" Then before
+something in his face her opposition melted swiftly away, and she
+added: "Yes, I'll come. He might like to have some one by him who
+knew him as he used to be."</p>
+<p>"After all, he got the worst of it, poor devil!" he answered
+gently as he opened the door.</p>
+<p>By a miracle of memory her resentment was swept out of her
+thoughts, and she was conscious of an infinite pity. In George's
+face, while she watched it, there flickered back for an instant the
+glory of that enchanted spring when she had first loved him. Of his
+brilliant promise, his ardent youth, there remained only this
+fading glimmer in the face of a man who was dying. And it seemed to
+her suddenly that she saw embodied in this wreck of youth and love
+all the inscrutable mystery not of death, but of life. Her tears
+fell quickly, and while they fell O'Hara's grasp enfolded her
+hand.</p>
+<p>"It's over now. The best thing that could happen to him has
+happened," he said, and the touch of his hand was like the touch of
+life itself, consoling, strengthening, restoring.</p>
+<p>In the days that followed it was as if the helpful spirit of
+Cousin Jimmy had returned to her in the unfamiliar character of
+O'Hara. The ghastly details of George's burial were not only taken
+out of her hands, she was hardly permitted to know even that they
+were necessary. All explanations were made, not by her, but by
+O'Hara; and when they returned together from the cemetery,
+Gabriella brought with her a feeling that she had been watching
+something that belonged to O'Hara laid in the earth. But when she
+tried to thank him, she found that he was apparently unaware that
+he had done anything deserving of gratitude.</p>
+<p>"Oh, that's nothing. Anybody would have done it," he remarked,
+and dismissed the subject forever.</p>
+<p>For a week after this she did not see him again; and then one
+Saturday afternoon, when she was leaving Dinard's, they met by
+chance and walked home together. It was the first time she had been
+in the street with him, and she was conscious of feeling absurdly
+young and girlish&mdash;she, the mother of a daughter old enough to
+have love affairs! A soft flush&mdash;the flush of
+youth&mdash;tinted her pale cheek; her step, which so often dragged
+wearily after the day's work, was as buoyant as Fanny's; and her
+low, beautiful laugh was as gay as if she were not burdened by
+innumerable anxieties. As they passed a shop window, her reflection
+flashed back at her, and she thought happily: "Yes, it is true, you
+are better looking at thirty-seven, Gabriella, than you were at
+twenty."</p>
+<p>"Shall we walk down?" asked O'Hara, and added: "So that was your
+shop? I am glad that I saw it. But what do you do there all
+day?"</p>
+<p>She laughed merrily. "Put in pins and take them out again.
+Design, direct, scold, and flatter. We are getting in the spring
+models now, and it's very exciting."</p>
+<p>He glanced down at her figure, noting, as if for the first time,
+the narrowness at the feet, the large loose waist, and the
+bunchiness around the hips.</p>
+<p>"Did you make that?" he inquired.</p>
+<p>"This coat? Oh, no; it came from Paris. It was left on my
+hands," she explained, "or I shouldn't be wearing it. I wear only
+what people won't buy, you know."</p>
+<p>"No, I didn't know," he returned abstractedly, and she observed
+humorously after a minute that he was not thinking of her because
+he was thinking so profoundly about her clothes. It was his way,
+she had discovered, to concentrate his mind intensely upon the
+object before him, no matter how trivial or insignificant it might
+appear. He seemed never to have learned how to divide either his
+interest or his attention.</p>
+<p>"If you could make what you wanted," he remarked, "I should
+think you'd make them more comfortable. Are you going to wear those
+hobble skirts this spring?"</p>
+<p>"They'll be narrow at the feet but very bunchy at the
+top&mdash;doesn't that sound delightful? I am making a white
+taffeta for Fanny that has five or six yards of perfectly good
+material puffed out in the most ridiculous way at the back over a
+petticoat of silver lace."</p>
+<p>Her spirits felt so light, so effervescent, that she wanted to
+jest, to laugh, to talk nonsense interminably; and after his first
+moments of bewilderment, when he appeared still unable to detach
+his mind from his business, he entered gaily and heartily into her
+mood. His perplexities once disposed of, he gave himself entirely
+to the enjoyment of the walk with her, and she noticed for the
+first time his boyish delight in the simplest details of life. With
+the simplicity of a man to whom large pleasures are unknown, he
+threw himself whole-heartedly into the momentary diversion of small
+ones. Every person in the crowd, she discovered, excited his
+interest, and his humour bubbled over at the most insignificant
+things&mdash;at the grimace of a newsboy who offered him a paper,
+at the absurd hat worn by a woman in a motor car, at the expression
+of disgusted solemnity on the face of a servant in livery, at the
+giggles of an over-dressed girl who hung on the arm of an anemic
+and exhausted admirer. Never before had she encountered such
+vitality, such careless, pure, and uncalculating joy of life. There
+was a tonic quality in his physical presence, and while she walked
+at his side down Fifth Avenue she felt as if she were swept onward
+by one of the health-giving, pine-scented winds of Colorado. And
+she told herself reassuringly that only a man who had lived
+decently could have kept himself so extraordinarily young and
+exuberant at forty-five.</p>
+<p>The shop windows, particularly those displaying men's shirtings,
+enchanted him; and he stopped a moment before each one, while she
+yielded as obligingly as she might have yielded to a fancy of
+Archibald's, though she was aware that her son would have scorned
+to look into a window.</p>
+<p>"It's so seldom I get out on the Avenue, that's why I like it, I
+suppose," he remarked while they were surveying a festive
+arrangement of pink madras.</p>
+<p>She smiled up at him, and her smile, gay as it was, held a touch
+of maternal solicitude. Notwithstanding his bigness and his success
+and his forty-five years, there was something appealingly boyish
+about him.</p>
+<p>"It would be so easy to get out, wouldn't it?" she asked as they
+walked on again.</p>
+<p>"Well, there ain't much fun when you are by yourself."</p>
+<p>"But you know plenty of people."</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, I know people enough in a business way, but that don't
+mean having friends, does it? Of course, I've men friends scattered
+everywhere," he added. "The West is full of 'em, but it's funny
+when you come to think of it&mdash;" He broke off, hesitated an
+instant, and then went on again: "It's funny, but I don't believe.
+I ever had a woman friend in my life&mdash;I mean a friend who
+wasn't just the wife of some man I knew in business."</p>
+<p>The confession touched her, and she answered impulsively: "Well,
+that's just what I want to be to you&mdash;a good friend."</p>
+<p>He laughed, but his eyes shone as he looked down on her. "If
+you'd only take the trouble."</p>
+<p>"It won't be any trouble&mdash;not a bit of it. After your
+goodness to me, how could I help being your friend?"</p>
+<p>Lifting her eyes she would have met his squarely while she
+spoke, but he was not looking at her&mdash;he appeared, indeed, to
+be looking almost obstinately away from her.</p>
+<p>"There wasn't anything in what I did," he responded in a barely
+audible voice, and she understood that he was embarrassed by her
+gratitude.</p>
+<p>"But there was something in it&mdash;there was a great deal in
+it," she insisted. It was so easy to be natural with a man, so easy
+to be candid and sincere when there was no question of sentiment,
+and, she thought almost gratefully of the elusive and mysterious
+Alice. The faintest suggestion of romance would have spoiled things
+in the beginning; but thanks to the hidden Alice, she might be as
+kind and frank as she pleased. Besides, she was nearly
+thirty-eight, and a woman of thirty-eight might certainly be
+trusted to make a friend of a man of forty-five.</p>
+<p>With this thought, over which the memory of Arthur brooded
+benevolently, in her mind, she said warmly: "It will make so much
+difference to me, too, having a real friend in New York."</p>
+<p>He turned to her with a start. "Do you mean that I could make a
+difference to you?"</p>
+<p>"The greatest difference, of course," she rejoined brightly,
+eager to convince him of his importance in her life. "I can't tell
+you&mdash;you would never understand how lonely I get at times, and
+now with the children away it is worse than ever&mdash;the
+loneliness, I mean, and the feeling that there isn't anybody one
+could turn to in trouble."</p>
+<p>For a minute he appeared to ponder this deeply. "Well, you could
+always come to me if you needed anything," he answered at last, and
+she felt intuitively that for some reason he was distrustful either
+of himself or of her. "I am not here very much of my time, but
+whenever I am, I am entirely at your service."</p>
+<p>"But that's only half of it." She was determined to reassure
+him. "A friendship can't be one-sided, can it? And it isn't fair
+when you give everything, that I should give nothing."</p>
+<p>His scruples surrendered immediately to her argument. "You give
+everything&mdash;you give happiness," he said&mdash;a strange
+speech certainly from the twilight lover of Alice. However, as she
+reasoned clearly after her first perplexity, men were often strange
+when one least expected or desired strangeness. At thirty-seven,
+whatever else life had denied her, she felt that it had granted her
+a complete understanding of men; and it was out of this complete
+understanding that she observed brightly after a minute:</p>
+<p>"Well, if you feel that way, we are obliged to be friends." At
+least she would prove by her frankness that she was not one of
+those foolish women who are always taking things seriously.</p>
+<p>"Yes, you give happiness. You scatter it, all over the place,"
+he went on, groping an instant after the right words.</p>
+<p>"Cousin Jimmy used to say," she laughed back, "that I had a
+sunny temper."</p>
+<p>"That's it&mdash;that's what I meant," he replied eagerly; and
+she was impressed again by his utter inability to make light
+conversation. When he was once started, when he had lost himself in
+his subject, she knew that he could speak both fluently and
+convincingly; but she realized that he simply couldn't talk unless
+he had something to say. In order to put him at his ease again, she
+remarked with pleasant firmness: "Do you know there is something
+about you that reminds me of my Cousin Jimmy. It gives me almost a
+cousinly feeling for you."</p>
+<p>She had the air of expecting him to be interested, but he met it
+with the rather vague interrogation: "Cousin Jimmy?"</p>
+<p>"The cousin who always came to our help when we were in trouble.
+We used to say that if the bread didn't rise, mother sent for
+Cousin Jimmy."</p>
+<p>Though he laughed readily enough, she could see that his
+attention was still wandering. "I never had a cousin," he returned
+after a pause, "or a relation of any sort, for that matter."</p>
+<p>His voice was curiously distant, and she was conscious of a
+slight shock, as if she had run against one of the hard places in
+his character. "Well, I've done my best," she thought impatiently.
+"If he doesn't want to be friends he needn't be." Then, with a
+change of manner, she observed flippantly: "Sometimes one's
+relatives are useful and sometimes they're not." Really, he was
+impossibly heavy except in a crisis; and one could scarcely be
+expected to produce crises in order to put him thoroughly at his
+ease.</p>
+<p>As he made no response to her trite remark, she, also, fell
+silent, while they turned into Twenty-third Street, and began the
+long walk to Ninth Avenue. Once or twice, glancing inquiringly into
+his face, which wore a preoccupied look, she wondered if he were
+thinking of Alice. Then, as the silence became suddenly oppressive,
+she ventured warily in the effort to dispel it: "I hope you are not
+disturbed about anything?"</p>
+<p>"Disturbed?" He turned to her with a start. "No, I was only
+wondering if you knew how much your friendship would mean to
+me."</p>
+<p>It was out at last, and confirmed once more in her knowledge of
+men, she retorted gaily: "How can I know if you won't take the
+trouble to tell me?" After all, she reflected cheerfully, the
+education she had derived from George and Judge Crowborough, though
+lacking in the higher branches, was fundamentally sound. All men
+were alike in one thing at least&mdash;they invariably disappointed
+one's expectations.</p>
+<p>"I've been trying to tell you for a quarter of an hour," he
+answered, "and I didn't know how to put it."</p>
+<p>"But at last you didn't have to put it at all," she said
+laughingly; "it simply put itself, didn't it?"</p>
+<p>"I am still wondering," he persisted gravely.</p>
+<p>"Wondering if I know?" She spoke in the sweetly practical tone
+of one who is firmly resolved not to permit any nonsense. "Yes, I
+do know&mdash;that is, I know there are ways in which I might be
+useful to you."</p>
+<p>"For instance?"</p>
+<p>"Well, there are some little&mdash;some very little things I
+might tell you if we were friends&mdash;real friends," she made
+this plain, "just as two men might be."</p>
+<p>"But the very last things two men would tell each other," he was
+laughing now, "are the little things&mdash;the things about slang
+and walking-sticks and oak furniture."</p>
+<p>So he hadn't forgotten! The recollection of her impertinence
+confused her, and she hastened to make light of it by protesting
+gaily: "I was only joking. Of course, you didn't take that
+seriously."</p>
+<p>"I don't know how much more seriously," he replied emphatically,
+"I could have taken it."</p>
+<p>"But you haven't thought of it since?"</p>
+<p>"What would you say if I told you I hadn't thought of anything
+else?"</p>
+<p>"Then I wish I hadn't said it." She was obviously worried by his
+admission. "It was horrid of me&mdash;perfectly horrid. I ought to
+have been ashamed of myself. I had no right to criticise you, and
+you have been so heavenly kind."</p>
+<p>"After that"&mdash;he appeared to be hammering the idea into her
+mind&mdash;"I was so grateful I'd have done almost anything. Do you
+know," he burst out with evident emotion, "that was the first
+criticism&mdash;I mean downright honest criticism&mdash;I've ever
+had in my life. Nobody&mdash;that is nobody who knew&mdash;ever
+thought enough of me before to tell me where I was wrong."</p>
+<p>It was all a pathetic mistake, she saw, but she saw also that it
+was impossible for her to explain it away. She could not tell him
+the ugly truth that she had been merely laughing at him when he had
+believed, in his beautiful simplicity, that she was speaking as a
+friend. Though she felt ashamed, humbled, remorseful, there was
+nothing that she could say now which would not hurt him more than
+the original misunderstanding had done.</p>
+<p>In her desire to atone as far as possible, she remarked
+recklessly: "I only wish I could be of some real help to you."</p>
+<p>"You can," he answered frankly. "You can let me come to see you
+sometimes before I go West again."</p>
+<p>"You are going back in the spring?"</p>
+<p>He laughed happily, drawing himself erect with a large, free
+movement as if he needed to stretch his limbs. "I can't stand more
+than six months of the East, and I've been here a year now, off and
+on. After a time I begin to want air. I want to breathe."</p>
+<p>"Yet you lived here once."</p>
+<p>"A sort of life, yes, but that don't count."</p>
+<p>"What does count with you, I wonder?" She was smiling up at him,
+and as they passed under a street light her eyes shone with a misty
+brightness through her veil of dotted net.</p>
+<p>For a minute he thought over her question. "I guess fighting
+does," he answered at last. "Getting on in spite of hard knocks,
+and smashing things that stand in your way. I like the feeling that
+comes after you've put through a big deal or got the better of the
+desert or the mountains. I got joy in Arizona out of my first
+silver mine; but I didn't get the joy exactly out of the silver. I
+don't suppose you understand."</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, I do. I understand perfectly. It's the pure spirit of
+adventure. Whenever we do a thing for the sake of the struggle, not
+for the thing itself, it's pure adventure, isn't it?"</p>
+<p>"Well, I like money," he said with the air of being entirely
+honest. "I'm not a romantic chap, don't think that about me. I care
+a lot about money, only after I've made it, somehow, I never know
+what to do with it. All I want for myself is a place to sleep and a
+bite to eat&mdash;I'm not over-particular what it is&mdash;and
+clothes to wear, good clothes, too&mdash;but I don't give a hang
+for motor cars except to go long distances in when there are no
+trains running."</p>
+<p>It was the commonplace problem, worked out in intricate detail,
+of the newly rich, of the uncultivated rich, of the rich whose
+strenuously active processes of enrichment had permanently closed
+all other highways to experience. Seventeen years ago the Gabriella
+of Hill Street would have had only disdain for the newly rich and
+their problems; but life, which had softened her judgment and
+modified her convictions, had completely reversed her inherited
+opinion of such a case as O'Hara's. Though he was as raw as unbaked
+brick, she was penetrating enough to discern that he was also as
+genuine; and, so radically had events altered her point of view,
+that at thirty-seven she found genuine rawness more appealing than
+superficial refinement. George had wearied her of the sham and the
+superficial, of gloss without depth, of manner without substance,
+of charm without character.</p>
+<p>"But there is so much that you might do to help," she said
+presently. "After all, money is power, isn't it?"</p>
+<p>"Misused power too often," he answered. "Of course, you can
+always build lodging-houses and tenements and hospitals; but when
+you come squarely down to facts, I've never in my life tried to
+help a man by giving him money that I haven't regretted it. Why,
+I've ruined men by helping to make their way too easy at the
+start."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps you're right," she admitted; "I don't know much about
+it, I confess; but I should have been spared a great deal of
+suffering if I had had something to start with when I was obliged
+to make my living."</p>
+<p>"That's different." His voice had grown gentle in an instant. "I
+can't think of your ever having had a hard time. You seem so
+strong, so successful, so happy."</p>
+<p>If she had answered straight from her heart, Gabriella would
+have retorted frankly: "A good deal of that is in the shape of my
+face and the way I dress," but instead of speaking sincerely, she
+remarked with impersonal cheerfulness: "Oh, well, happiness, like
+everything else, is mainly a habit, isn't it? I cultivated the
+habit of happiness at the most miserable time of my life, and I've
+never quite lost it."</p>
+<p>"But I don't like to think of your ever having worried," he
+protested.</p>
+<p>Of her ever having worried! Was he becoming dangerously
+sentimental or was it merely a random spark of his unquenchable
+Western chivalry?</p>
+<p>Though she told herself emphatically again that she was not
+falling in love with O'Hara, though she was perfectly faithful in
+her heart to the memory of Arthur, still she was vividly aware with
+every drop of her blood, with every beat of her pulses, of the man
+at her side. And through her magnetic sense of his nearness there
+flowed to her presently a deeper and clearer perception of the
+multitudinous movements of life which surrounded her&mdash;of the
+variable darkness out of which lights flashed and gigantic
+spectacular outlines loomed against a dim background of sky, of the
+vague shapes stirring, swarming, creating there in the darkness,
+and always of the pitiless, insatiable hunger from which the city
+had sprung. For the first time, flowing like a current from the
+mind of the man beside her, there came to her an understanding of
+her own share in the common progress of life&mdash;for the first
+time she felt herself to be not merely a woman who lived in a city,
+but an integral part of that city, one cell among closely packed
+millions of cells. Something of the responsibility she felt for her
+own children seemed to spread out and cover the city lying there in
+its dimness and mystery.</p>
+<p>"But I don't like to think of your ever having worried," he
+repeated.</p>
+<p>"Oh, it's over now," she returned, severely matter-of-fact. "It
+took me years to make my way, but I've made it at last, and I may
+settle down to a comfortable middle-age without the dread of the
+poorhouse to spur me into activity. My business is doing very well;
+our custom has doubled in the last two or three years."</p>
+<p>"But wasn't it a tough pull at one time?"</p>
+<p>"It was hard; but what isn't? Of course, when I was obliged to
+work from nine till six and then come home to cook the children's
+dinner and teach them their lessons, I used to be tired out by the
+end of the day&mdash;but that lasted only a few years: five or six
+at the most&mdash;and now I can afford to let Fanny wear imported
+gowns when she goes out to parties."</p>
+<p>Though she spoke gaily, making a jest of her struggle, she saw
+the gravity of his face deepen until his features looked almost
+wooden.</p>
+<p>"And through it all you kept something that so many other women
+seem to lose when they work for a living," he said. "You've kept
+your&mdash;your charm."</p>
+<p>Again she found herself on the point of exclaiming frankly:
+"heaven knows I've tried to!"&mdash;and again, checking herself,
+she proceeded cautiously: "I've never understood why charm should
+be merely a hothouse flower."</p>
+<p>"I suppose it does depend a good deal upon a sunny temper," he
+rejoined in his blindness.</p>
+<p>They had reached the gate, and stopping him when he would have
+entered, she said with the directness of a man: "So we're friends,
+and you're coming to see me?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I'm coming," he replied gravely. Then, standing beside the
+gate, he watched her while she went up the walk and opened the door
+with her key.</p>
+<p>Upstairs, with her knitting on her lap and her feet on the
+fender, Miss Polly looked up to observe: "You're late, Gabriella.
+You must have walked all the way."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I walked all the way. Mr. O'Hara joined me."</p>
+<p>"Where did you run across him?"</p>
+<p>"Just as I left the shop. He was walking down Fifth Avenue."</p>
+<p>"Do you reckon he was waitin' outside?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, he said he had been up to Fifty-ninth Street on
+business."</p>
+<p>"Well, the walk certainly did you good. You are bloomin' like a
+rose."</p>
+<p>"The air was delicious, and I really like talking to Mr. O'Hara.
+He is quite interesting after you get over the first impression,
+and he isn't nearly so ignorant about things as I imagined. He has
+thought a great deal even if he hasn't read very much. It's
+wonderful, isn't it, what the West can do with a man? Now, if he'd
+stayed in New York he would have been merely impossible, but
+because he has lived out of doors he has achieved a certain
+distinction. I can understand a woman falling in love with him just
+because of his force and his bigness. They are the qualities a
+woman likes most, I think."</p>
+<p>"He must have made a great deal of money."</p>
+<p>"Yes, he's rich, and that's a good thing. I like money
+tremendously, though I used to think that I didn't. I wonder if he
+had been poor if I should have liked him quite so much?" she asked
+herself honestly.</p>
+<p>"I don't 'spose you could ever&mdash;ever bring yourself to
+think of him, honey? It would be a mighty good thing in some
+ways."</p>
+<p>Gabriella, being in a candid mood, pondered the question without
+subterfuge or evasion. "Of course I've passed the sentimental age,"
+she answered. "If Mr. O'Hara had been poor, I suppose I should
+never have thought of him; but his money does make a difference. It
+stands for success, achievement, and ability, and I like all those
+qualities. Then he is rough in many ways, but he isn't a bit
+vulgar. He has genuine character. There is absolutely no pretence
+about him."</p>
+<p>"You could catch him in a minute," replied Miss Polly hopefully,
+animated by the inveterate match-making instinct of her class.</p>
+<p>Gabriella laughed merrily. "Oh, yes, I might capture him if I
+went questing for him. I am not a child. But put that out of your
+head forever, Miss Polly. I have given him clearly to understand
+that there must be no nonsense, though, for the matter of that, I
+doubt if he needed the warning. There is an Alice."</p>
+<p>"I reckon it would take more than an Alice to stand in the way
+if you wanted him," insisted the little seamstress, possessed by an
+obstinate conviction that fate could provide no happiness apart
+from marriage.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps. But you see I don't want him." Gabriella had become
+perfectly serious, and to Miss Polly's amazement a hint of
+petulance showed in her manner. "Everything of that kind was over
+for me long ago. I never think of love now, and if I did there
+wouldn't be but one&mdash;but one&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"I know, honey," agreed Miss Polly, suddenly softened, "and I'd
+give anything on earth if you and Arthur could come together
+again."</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't be any use. I made my choice, and I have had to
+abide by it. He could never forgive me&mdash;". She stopped as if
+she were choking, and Miss Polly said sympathetically:</p>
+<p>"Well, I wish he had a chance to, that's all. Why don't you run
+down to Richmond for a few days this spring to see your folks? Your
+ma and all would be so glad to see you, and it ain't as if you had
+the children to keep you back. The thing that worries me," she
+added with feeling, "is the thought of your spendin' the summer
+here without the children. If Archibald goes to camp from school
+and Fanny joins Jane at the White Sulphur Springs as soon as her
+school is out, you won't have them at all, will you?"</p>
+<p>"No, but they will be happy; that is the only thing that
+matters."</p>
+<p>"It seems all wrong to me. What do you get out of life,
+honey?"</p>
+<p>"What do any of us get out of it, dear little Miss Polly, except
+the joy of triumphing? It's overcoming that really matters, nothing
+else, and it is the same thing to you and to me that it is to the
+man downstairs. I am happy because in my little way I stood the
+test of struggle, and so are you, and so is Mr. O'Hara."</p>
+<p>"But you're young yet, and it ain't natural for you to live as
+you're doin'. Lots of women marry when they're older than you
+are."</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, if they want to&mdash;"</p>
+<p>For a minute the little seamstress rattled her newspaper while
+she looked at her without replying. Then, after folding the paper,
+and removing her spectacles, she asked grimly: "Can you look me in
+the eyes, Gabriella, and tell me that you ain't still hankerin'
+after Arthur?"</p>
+<p>The blush of a girl made the business-like Gabriella appear as
+young and as piquantly feminine as her daughter.</p>
+<p>"No, Miss Polly, I cannot," she answered with incomparable
+directness; "I have loved Arthur all my life."</p>
+<p>"That's just what I thought all along, and yet you went off and
+married somebody else." Excited by the unexpected confession, Miss
+Polly was quivering with sympathy.</p>
+<p>In that supreme instant of self-revelation Gabriella answered
+this accusation as if it had been uttered by her remorseful
+conscience. "But that wasn't love," she said slowly; "it was my
+youth craving experience; it was my youth reaching after the
+unknown, the untried, the undiscovered. We all go questing for
+adventure one way or another, I suppose, but it was not the
+reality."</p>
+<p>"I wonder what is," said Miss Polly in a whisper; "I wonder what
+is, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"That," replied Gabriella softly, "is what I am still trying to
+discover."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IXa" id="CHAPTER_IXa"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<h3>THE PAST</h3>
+<p>It was the morning of Gabriella's thirty-eighth birthday, and
+she was standing, with her hat on, before the window of her
+sitting-room, gazing with dreaming eyes at the young leaves on the
+elm tree. The day's work was ahead of her, but for a little while,
+standing there by the open window, she gave herself, with a sense
+of pleasure, of abandonment, to the rare luxury of regret. Out of
+her whole year it was the one day when, for a few hours, she
+permitted herself to think sadly of the past and the future, when
+she cherished in her heart something of the gentle melancholy of
+her mother's retrospective philosophy.</p>
+<p>In the street, beyond the narrow yard, where the grass lay like
+a veil, there was a curious deadening of sounds, as if the traffic
+had become suddenly muffled in the languorous softness of spring.
+Out of this imaginary stillness floated the sharp twittering of
+sparrows and the bright laugh of a child at play in one of the
+neighbouring yards. Above the grim outlines of the city the sky
+shone divinely clear and blue, flecked by a single cloud, soft as
+an eagle's feather, which drifted in a mist of light above the
+horizon. The city, beneath that azure sky, borrowed the transparent
+brightness of an object that is imprisoned in crystal. White magic
+had transformed it for an hour, and the street, the houses, the
+shining elm tree, and the distant frowning brows of the
+skyscrapers, all seemed as unreal as the vivid yet impalpable
+images in a dream. And into this world of crystal there drifted,
+like the essence of spring, the dreamy fragrance from the window
+box filled with white hyacinths.</p>
+<p>While she stood there Gabriella thought pensively of many
+things. She thought of the day's work before her, of the gown she
+was designing for Mrs. Pletheridge, of Fanny's latest lover, the
+brother of a schoolmate, of the clothes she should send the child
+to the White Sulphur Springs, of her mother, and of Jane's eldest
+daughter, Margaret; and then very slowly, with the scent of the
+hyacinths drowning all merely prosaic memories, she began to think
+hopelessly and tenderly of Arthur Peyton. She thought of him as he
+had looked on the day when she had told him of her engagement of
+the sympathetic expression in his eyes, and of his beautiful
+manner, which she had felt at the time she could never forget.
+Well, after eighteen years she had not forgotten it. Compared with
+Arthur, all other men seemed to her as unreal as shadows. "How
+could Miss Polly imagine that I'd think of Ben O'Hara after a love
+like that?" she reflected indignantly.</p>
+<p>And then, perhaps because for a shadow he was so solidly
+substantial, she became aware that O'Hara's image was trespassing
+upon the hallowed soil of her reverie. To be sure, she had seen a
+great deal of him since George's death, when he had been so
+wonderfully considerate and helpful. Scarcely a day had passed
+since then that he had not brightened by some reminder of his
+friendship. They had spent long evenings together; and
+occasionally, accompanied by the delighted Miss Polly, they had
+gone to dinner at a restaurant and later to a concert or a play.
+That he had been almost too kind it was impossible for her to deny;
+but she had tried her best to repay him&mdash;she had, when one
+came to the point, done as much as she could to remedy the defects
+of his education. At first she had given zest, sympathy, eagerness,
+to her self-appointed task of making him over; then, as the months
+went by, a sense of doubt, of discouragement, of approaching
+failure, had tempered her enthusiasm, and at last she had realized
+that her work, except in the merest details, had been ineffectual
+and futile. The differences, which she had regarded as superficial,
+were, in reality, fundamental. It was impossible to make him over
+because he was so completely himself. He stood quite definitely for
+certain tendencies in democracy, and by no ingenious manipulation
+could she twist him about until he presented the sham appearance of
+moving in the opposite direction. For the logic of her failure was
+perfectly simple&mdash;he couldn't see, however hard he tried, the
+things she wanted him to look at. The difficulty was far deeper
+than a mere matter of finish, or even of education&mdash;for it
+was, after all, not one of manner, but of material. Day by day she
+had realized more clearly that the problem confronting them was one
+which involved their different standards of living and their
+individual philosophies. The things which she regarded as essential
+were to him only the accidental variations of life. He had lived so
+long in touch with the basic realities&mdash;with vast spaces and
+the stark aspect of desert horizons, with droughts, and winds, and
+the unquenchable pangs of thirst and hunger, with the vital issues
+of birth and death in their most primitive forms&mdash;he had lived
+so long in touch with the simplest and most elemental forces of
+Nature, that his spirit, as well as his vision, had adjusted itself
+to a trackless and limitless field of view. No, what he was now he
+must remain, since to change him, except in trivial details, was
+out of her power.</p>
+<p>And of course he had his virtues&mdash;she would have been the
+last to deny him his virtues. Whenever she applied the touchstone
+of character, she realized how little alloy there was in the pure
+gold of his nature. He was truthful, he was generous, he was brave,
+kind, and tolerant; but his virtues, like his personality, were
+large, flamboyant, and without gradations of colour. Custom had not
+pruned their natural luxuriance, nor had tradition toned down the
+violence of their contrasts. They were experimental, not
+established virtues, as obviously the expression of the man himself
+as was his uncultivated preference for red geraniums. For he
+possessed, she admitted, a sincerity such as she had not believed
+compatible with human designs&mdash;certainly not with human
+achievement. According to the code of the sheltered half of her
+sex&mdash;according to the inflexible code of her mother and
+Jane&mdash;he was not a gentleman. He lacked breeding, he lacked
+taste, he lacked the necessary education of schools; but in other
+ways, in ways peculiarly his own, she was beginning dimly to
+realize that he possessed qualities immeasurably larger than any
+superficial lack in his nature. In balance, moderation,
+restraint&mdash;in all the gracious attributes with which Arthur
+was endowed in her memory, in all the attributes she had
+particularly esteemed in the past&mdash;she understood that O'Hara
+would undoubtedly fall below her inherited standards. But, failing
+in these things, he had been able to command her respect by the
+sheer force of his character. Though he had, as he had confessed to
+her, gone down into hell, she could not talk to him for an hour
+without recognizing that he had never lost a natural chivalry of
+mind beside which the cultivated chivalry of manner appeared as
+exotic as an orchid in a hothouse. Even Arthur, she was aware,
+would have lied to her for her own good; but she would have trusted
+O'Hara to speak the truth to her at any cost. In this, as well as
+in his practical efficiency, and his crude yet vital optimism, he
+embodied, she felt, the triumphs and the failures of American
+democracy&mdash;this democracy of ugly fact and of fine ideals, of
+crooked deeds and of straight feeling, of little codes and of large
+adventures, of puny lives and of heroic deaths&mdash;this democracy
+of the smoky present and the clear future. "If this is our raw
+material to-day," she thought hopefully, "what will the finished
+and signed product of to-morrow be?"</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, ain't these lovely?"</p>
+<p>Whirling out of the sunshine, she saw Miss Polly holding a
+rustic basket of primroses and cowslips. "Mr. O'Hara wants to know
+if he may speak to you for a minute before you go out?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, I'm not in a hurry this morning." Then Miss Polly
+disappeared and an instant later the vacant space in the doorway
+was filled exuberantly by O'Hara.</p>
+<p>"I wanted to be the first to wish you a happy birthday," he
+began, a little shyly, a little awkwardly, though his face was
+flushing with pleasure.</p>
+<p>"The flowers are wonderful!" For a minute, while she answered
+him, he seemed to be a part of the unreal intense brightness of the
+world outside&mdash;of that magic world where the elm tree and the
+grass and the sunny street were all imprisoned in crystal. He
+diffused a glowing consciousness of success, a sanguine faith in
+the inherent goodness of experience. For, as she had discovered
+long ago, O'Hara was one of those who stood not for the elimination
+of struggle, but for the complete acceptance of life. He had sprung
+out of ugliness, he had lived intimately with evil; and yet more
+than any one she had ever known, he seemed to her to radiate the
+simple, uncalculating joy of living. He was the strongest person
+she knew, as well as the happiest. He had never evaded facts, never
+feared a risk, never shirked an issue, never lacked the hardy,
+adventurous courage of battle. In his own words, life had never
+"found him a quitter."</p>
+<p>He stood in front of her now, fresh, smiling, robust, with his
+look of suddenly arrested energy, and the dark red of his hair,
+which was still moist from his bath, striking a vivid note against
+the cool grays and blues of the background. The sunshine, falling
+through the open window, warmed the ruddy tan of his face, and made
+his eyes like pools of clear light in which the jubilant spirit of
+the spring was reflected. "After all, it isn't what one does, it is
+what one is, that matters," she thought while she looked at him.
+"At the end, as Miss Polly said, it is character, not
+circumstances, that counts."</p>
+<p>"I've been all over New York this morning looking for that
+basket," he said. Though he had been so eager to make light of his
+services to her in her trouble, she was amused from time to time by
+a childlike vanity which prompted him to impress her with the value
+of small attentions; and this she was swift to recognize as the
+opposite of Arthur's delicacy. It was the only littleness she had
+observed in O'Hara so far&mdash;this reluctance to hide his smaller
+lights under a bushel&mdash;and in its place, it was amusing. Here
+was an obvious instance where nature unassisted by training
+appeared to fall short.</p>
+<p>"They couldn't be lovelier if you'd gone all over the world,"
+she responded sincerely.</p>
+<p>Before answering her he hesitated a moment, and she watched
+pityingly the struggle he was making toward an impossible
+self-expression. The thing he wanted to say, the thing struggling
+so pathetically in the inarticulateness of his feeling, would not,
+she knew, be uttered in words.</p>
+<p>"You are the first woman I ever wanted to send flowers to," he
+said presently; and added with abject infelicity: "It's strange,
+isn't it?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, it's strange," she assented pleasantly. Though his words
+were ineffectual, she was aware suddenly of a force before which
+she felt a vague impulse of flight. Now, if ever, she understood
+that she must keep their relations as superficial as she had always
+meant them to be&mdash;that she must cling with all her strength to
+the comfortable surface of appearances. "But you haven't had many
+women friends, have you?"</p>
+<p>"I've wanted to give other things," he went on hurriedly; "but
+not flowers. I never thought of flowers until I met you."</p>
+<p>"That's nice for me." She was growing nervous, and in her
+nervousness she precipitated the explosion by venturing rashly:
+"But there's Alice, too, isn't there, to like them?" Her voice was
+firm and friendly. Once for all she intended him to understand how
+aloof she stood from any sentimental advances.</p>
+<p>"Alice?" For an instant his response hung fire, enveloped in a
+fog of perplexity. Then, with an air of dispelling the cloud, he
+made a vigorous gesture of denial, and moved nearer to her with the
+swiftness and directness of a natural force. "Why, Alice was you!
+You were Alice all the time!" he exclaimed energetically.</p>
+<p>"You mean&mdash;" She checked herself in alarm, paralyzed the
+next instant by the tremendous, unexpected blow of her
+discovery.</p>
+<p>"So you thought there was somebody else!" The delight in his
+face kept her silent, amazed, incapable of explanation. His arm was
+still outstretched, as if he were brushing aside the last flimsy
+barrier between them, and his voice, with its unrestrained and
+radiant joy, stirred some faintly quivering echoes in the secret
+depths of her being. It was as if the jubilant spirit of spring had
+flowered suddenly in his look.</p>
+<p>"There wasn't anybody else." He came still nearer, and she stood
+there, startled, incredulous, powerless either to retreat or to
+prevent the inevitable instant that was approaching. "At least,
+there wasn't anybody I ever knew named Alice except a school
+teacher when I was a kid. She was good and she was pretty like you,
+and I used to dream about her after school, and every evening at
+dusk I would go out of my way to speak to her in Sixth Avenue. Once
+she told me that she'd wait for me to grow up and get rich so I
+could marry her, and after I went out to Arizona I used to think
+about her a lot. When I came on you suddenly, standing there in the
+dusk with your hands full of lilacs, it all came back to me because
+you, looked like her, with your dark hair and your tall
+slenderness. Then before I knew what I was, doing I called you by
+her name. I oughtn't to have done it," he finished ecstatically,
+"but I'm jolly glad now that I did."</p>
+<p>So he also, the man of action and of enterprise, he, the worker
+and the adventurer, so he also cultivated his garden of dreams!</p>
+<p>"I didn't know&mdash;I didn't know&mdash;" she found herself
+murmuring faintly in protest.</p>
+<p>"But you know now!" His voice rang out exultantly, and, though
+she felt that the thing she feared and dreaded was coming upon her,
+she still stood there without moving a step, without lifting a
+hand, mesmerized, enchanted, by the force of the man. "You know
+now," he repeated. "You know now, Gabriella, and you knew all
+along."</p>
+<p>It was true. In spite of her surprise, in spite of her
+shrinking, in spite of her evasion, she confessed it in her heart.
+She had known all the time. Something deep down in her, something
+secret and profound and clairvoyant, had discerned the truth from
+the beginning.</p>
+<p>"No! no!" she cried out sharply, for, mistaking her silence, he
+had stooped to her with the directness which impelled all his
+movements, which so easily brushed aside and discarded intervening
+encumbrances, and had kissed her on the lips.</p>
+<p>For an instant, in the merciless tenderness of his arms, her
+resistance melted from her. Beneath the crash of the storm she did
+not think, she did not struggle, she did not murmur. Her
+consciousness seemed suspended, and with her consciousness, her
+memory, her judgment, even her passionate unshaken loyalty to the
+love of her youth. Then, after the moment of weakness, of passive
+submission, it was as if her soul and body caught fire at a flash,
+and a quiver of anger ran through her, enkindling her glance and
+nerving her spirit.</p>
+<p>"But I do not love you! I never meant that I loved you!" she
+cried.</p>
+<p>At her words his arms dropped to his sides, and he stood as if
+turned to stone, with only his questioning eyes and the vivid red
+of his hair seeming alive. There was no need now for her to
+struggle. At her first movement to escape he had released her and
+drawn to a distance.</p>
+<p>"You don't love me?" he stammered. "Why, I saw it. I've seen it
+for weeks. I see it now in your face."</p>
+<p>"You see nothing&mdash;nothing." She denied it bitterly. "I
+liked you as a friend. I did not think of this. I never suspected
+it. I don't love you. I don't love you in the least."</p>
+<p>He was very still. The jubilant spirit of the spring had ebbed
+away from his look, and even in the height of her anger she was
+struck by the change in his face.</p>
+<p>"I don't believe you," he said gravely after a minute. "I don't
+believe you."</p>
+<p>"You must believe me. I don't love you. I have never thought of
+you except as a friend. I have loved another man all my life."</p>
+<p>Her voice rose accusingly, triumphantly, and so fervent was her
+look that she might have been repeating a creed. It was as if she
+hoped by convincing him to persuade her own rebellious heart of the
+truth she proclaimed.</p>
+<p>Now at last he understood. She had been lucid enough even for
+the crystalline lucidity of his thought.</p>
+<p>"I am sorry. I made a mistake," he said quietly, and after the
+exultant note of a few moments ago there was a dull level of
+flatness in his voice. "I am sorry. There don't seem to be anything
+else that I can say or do, but&mdash;but it wouldn't have happened
+if I had understood&mdash;" He paused, looked at her closely for a
+minute, and then added stubbornly, with an echo of the old
+confidence in his tone: "I still don't believe it."</p>
+<p>"It is true, nevertheless." She was trembling with indignation,
+and this indignation, in spite of her natural fairness, was not
+directed against herself, against her own blindness and folly.
+Though she knew that she was to blame, she was furious, not with
+herself, but with O'Hara. He had insulted her, and she resolved
+bitterly that she would never forgive him. Even now, whenever she
+was silent, she could still feel his kiss on her mouth, and the
+vividness of the sensation stung her into passionate anger. She was
+no longer the reasonable and competent Gabriella, who had so
+successfully "managed her life"; she was primitive woman in the
+grip of primitive anger; and balance, moderation, restraint, had
+flown from her soul. The very mystery of her feeling, its
+complexity, its suddenness, its remorselessness&mdash;these
+emotions worked together to deepen the sense of insult, of injury,
+with which she burned.</p>
+<p>"It is true, and you have no right to doubt it. You have no
+right." She caught her breath sharply, and then went on with
+inexcusable harshness: "Even if there hadn't been any one else, I
+should never&mdash;I could never in the world&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Her loss of self-control gave him an advantage, which he was
+either too generous or too stupid to perceive. "Well, forget all
+about it. I am going now," he answered quietly.</p>
+<p>While she watched him moving away from her, she was conscious of
+an inexplicable longing to stab him again more deeply before she
+lost him forever. It was intolerable to her that he should leave
+her while she was still indignant, that he should evade her just
+resentment by the natural cowardice of flight.</p>
+<p>"I can't forget it," she said; "how can you expect me to?"</p>
+<p>For an instant he seemed on the point of smiling. Then, turning,
+at the door, he walked back to where she was standing, and said
+gravely: "When I came in here it was to ask you to marry me, and,
+if it's the last word I ever speak, I thought you
+understood&mdash;that you knew how I felt. I was even fool enough
+to think you would be willing to marry me. That's all I can say. I
+haven't any other excuses."</p>
+<p>For the second time he went to the door, opened it, and then
+turning quickly, came back again. "I am not the sort to change, and
+I shan't change about this. You are a free woman, and if you ever
+feel that you made a mistake, if you ever want me or need me, you
+can just come to me. I shan't stop caring for you, and if you
+choose to come, I'll be waiting. I believed you were meant for me
+when I first saw you&mdash;and I believe it now. In spite of all
+you say, I am going to keep on believing it&mdash;"</p>
+<p>He went out, closing the door softly, and five minutes later,
+feeling extraordinarily young, she watched him pass through the
+gate, and walk as buoyantly as ever in the direction of Broadway.
+While she looked after him she wondered suddenly why novelists
+always dropped their heroines as soon as they passed twenty-seven?
+"If I'd been in a play, they'd have put me in the background,
+dressed in lavender, and made me look on and do fancywork," she
+thought humorously, "but this is real life, and I've just had a
+real love scene on my thirty-eighth birthday. He couldn't have been
+more romantic if I'd been Fanny," she mused with an agreeable
+complacency. "It's only in books and plays that people stop falling
+in love when they pass the twenties. I don't believe they ever stop
+in real life. I believe it goes on forever." And glancing at the
+glass, she added truthfully: "I want love more to-day than I wanted
+it when I was twenty&mdash;and so does Ben O'Hara."</p>
+<p>A sensation of stifling, as if her throat were closing together,
+oppressed her suddenly, and picking up her hand-bag, she ran
+downstairs and out of the house.</p>
+<p>By the time she reached Broadway her anger had ebbed, but the
+oppression, the feeling that she was being slowly smothered, was
+still in her throat and bosom. After all, seen in the sober light
+of reason, why had she been so indignant? There had been a
+misapprehension; he had thought that she was in love with him, and
+thinking so, he had kissed her. That was the case plainly stated;
+and what was there in this to send a burning, rush of anger to her
+heart? What was there in this that had made her turn and insult
+him? For the first time in her life she had lost her temper without
+cause, and had raged, she told herself sternly, like a fury. And
+beneath her rage she had been conscious always of some vague,
+incomprehensible disloyalty to Arthur&mdash;of a feeling of,
+humiliation, of self-reproach, which appeared ridiculous when she
+remembered that she had been kissed against her will and without
+warning. But, in spite of this, she knew intuitively, with a
+knowledge deeper than reason, that the glory of her Dream had paled
+in the moment when she lay in O'Hara's arms.</p>
+<p>A subtle change had come over the spirit of spring since she had
+left the elm tree and the emerald veil of the grass. It was no
+longer jubilant, but languorous, wistful, haunting, as if it
+eternally pursued, through the fugitive seasons, an immortal and
+ineffable beauty. The enchanted crystal had been shattered in an
+instant, and she saw life now, not imprisoned in magical sunshine,
+but gray, sordid, monotonous, as utterly hopeless as the faces
+thronging in Broadway. Yet not many months ago she had seen in
+these, same faces the inward hope, the joy in sadness, the gaiety
+in disappointment, which had brightened the world for her. Then she
+had been aware of an invisible current flowing from the crowd to
+herself; but to-day this shining current was broken or turned
+aside, and she felt detached, adrift, and distrustful of the
+future. That mental correspondence with the mood of the crowd, with
+the life of the city, which had come to her first on the brilliant
+morning in September, and then again when she walked home with
+O'Hara in the winter's dusk&mdash;which had released a new faculty
+in her soul, and had given her a fresh perception of human
+responsibilities&mdash;this had deserted her so utterly that she
+could barely remember its miraculous visitation. Then her personal
+life had seemed to become a part of the life of the street, of the
+sky, of the mysterious city outlined against the gray background of
+dusk. To-day she walked alone and without sympathy through the
+crowd. Her feet dragged, and she felt dully that she had lost her
+share in both the street and the sky. The very faces of the men and
+women around her&mdash;those lethargic foreign faces which crowded
+out the finer American type&mdash;awoke in her the sensation of
+hopeless revolt which one feels before the impending destruction of
+higher forms by masses of inert and conscienceless matter. She
+thought gloomily: "I have lost the vision&mdash;there is no hope
+either for me or for America except in the clear vision of the
+future." And while she spoke there passed over her the vague
+feeling of loss, of something missing, as if a precious possession
+had slipped from her grasp.</p>
+<p>Her morning's work was unusually trying, and at one o'clock,
+when she put on her hat before going out to lunch, she asked
+herself dejectedly: "What can be the matter with me? Before I go
+home I'll take a taxicab and drive up Riverside for an hour. If
+only the children were here, I should not feel so depressed." She
+remembered regretfully that Archibald and Fanny would be away all
+summer; and then from thinking of her children, she passed by
+almost insensible degrees of despondency to meditating pensively
+about Arthur Peyton. What a wreck, what an inconceivably stupid
+wreck she had made of her happiness!</p>
+<p>As she entered the outer showroom on her way to the street, she
+heard the voice of Miss Murphy attuned to a cooing pitch, and
+glancing around a little, painted cabinet, filled with useless
+ornaments, which stood in the centre of the floor, she beheld a
+dazzling head of reddish gold before one of the elaborately
+decorated French mirrors. While she advanced the red-gold waves,
+worn with extreme flatness over a forehead of pearly whiteness,
+were submerged for a minute in the smallest and roundest hat in the
+shop, and from a fashionable figure, reminding her vaguely of an
+ambulatory dressmaker's model, there issued a high, fluting note of
+delighted ejaculation.</p>
+<p>"This is just exactly what I've been looking all over New York
+for! Now, isn't it too funny for anything that I should have found
+it right here the very minute I came in?" As Gabriella's face
+flashed back from the mirror the fashionable figure sprang suddenly
+to life, and the voice, still fluting delightedly, exclaimed:</p>
+<p>"Why, Gabriella! Where on earth did you come from?"</p>
+<p>For a minute sheer amazement kept Gabriella clinging helplessly
+to the ridiculous cabinet, from the top of which an artificial
+rose-bush seemed to shower artificial pink petals down on her head.
+Then, recovering herself, with a sharp effort of will, she went
+forward a few steps beyond the shelter of the cabinet, and said
+composedly:</p>
+<p>"How do you do, Florrie? I did not recognize you at first."</p>
+<p>For it was Florrie herself, Florrie in the flesh, Florrie,
+glowing, sparkling, prosperous, victorious. Her figure, conforming
+to the latest mode, had lost its pinched protuberances, and was
+long, slender, sinuous in its perfection of line. Beneath the small
+round hat, her hair, glossy with brilliantine, was like melted gold
+in the large loose waves which revealed the rosy tips of her ears.
+She was thirty-nine, and she looked scarcely a day over
+twenty-five. The peach-blossom texture of her skin was as unlined
+by care or pain as if she had spent the last ten years immured in a
+convent; for in this case, at least, Gabriella realized while she
+looked at her, the retribution which awaits upon sinners had been
+tardy in its fulfilment.</p>
+<p>As she moved toward her, without noticing the friendly hand that
+Florrie held out, Gabriella was conscious of an ironical
+inclination to laugh. Though she felt no bitter personal resentment
+against Florrie&mdash;for, after all, Florrie had not been able to
+hurt her&mdash;there struggled in her bosom an indignation more
+profound, more moving, than any merely personal emotion could be.
+Her resentment was directed not against Florrie, but against some
+abstract destiny which had permitted Florrie to have her way
+without paying the price. For on the pinnacle of a destructive
+career, unsinged by the conflagration she had so carelessly
+started, Florrie was poised securely, crowned, triumphant,
+rejoicing. On her dazzling height, successful and happy, she was as
+far removed as one could imaginably be from the repentant Magdalen
+of tradition. The memory of George's face as it looked in death,
+floated before the austere mental vision of Gabriella, and she
+reflected grimly that tradition was not always the mirror of life.
+For in this one case at least, the man, not the woman, had been the
+victim of natural law, and Florrie, fool though she was, had shown
+herself at the hour of requital to be stronger than fate. By that
+instinctive wisdom, which is so much older, so much truer than
+civilization, she had triumphed over the ordination of life. In
+refusing to suffer she had blunted every weapon with which Nature
+might have punished her in the end. Not by virtue, since she had
+none, but by pure insensibility, she had escaped the wages of sin.
+She was a sensualist whose sensuality, hard, metallic, glittering,
+encased her like armour.</p>
+<p>At Gabriella's approach Miss Murphy fluttered off cooingly in
+the direction of a fresh customer, and only the festively garlanded
+French mirror witnessed the meeting of the two who had been
+schoolgirls together. Swift as an arrow there shot through
+Gabriella's mind, "I wonder what Ben O'Hara would think of her?"
+Then she checked the dangerous flight of her fancy, for she
+remembered that O'Hara's thoughts about anything no longer
+concerned her.</p>
+<p>"Are you buying a hat?" inquired Florrie curiously.</p>
+<p>"No, I belong here. I am Madame Dinard."</p>
+<p>"You don't mean it! I never should have believed it! The idea of
+your being a dressmaker. That's why you look so smart, I suppose.
+You're the smartest thing I've seen anywhere, but you look older,
+Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"Well, you don't." It was perfectly true. Except for the gaudy
+decorations and the twanging accents of the arrogant young women,
+Gabriella might have imagined herself in the last century
+atmosphere of Broad Street in the middle 'nineties.</p>
+<p>"I must tell you about the things I use." Florrie was always
+generous. "But, I declare if I'd known this place was yours, I'd
+have got my hats here ages ago. Of course I knew it was dreadfully
+swell, but I thought the prices were beyond anything."</p>
+<p>"They are," responded Gabriella with business-like brevity,
+while she glanced about for the flitting Miss Murphy.</p>
+<p>"Look here, Gabriella, I hope you don't bear me any malice,"
+Florrie burst out solicitously, for her frankness, like her
+sensuality, was elemental in its audacity. "You oughtn't to if you
+know what I saved you from," she proceeded convincingly. "Anyway,
+we were chums long before either of us ever thought about a man,
+and I didn't really do you a bit of harm. It wasn't as if you cared
+about George, was it?"</p>
+<p>"No, it wasn't as if I'd cared about him." Gabriella was
+answering the appeal as truthfully as if Florrie had been the most
+excellent of her sex. "You didn't harm me in any way&mdash;not in
+any way," she repeated with firmness.</p>
+<p>"That's just the way I told mother you'd look at it. I knew you
+were always so broad-minded even as a girl. Then there isn't any
+reason we shouldn't be friends just as we used to be."</p>
+<p>Gabriella shook her head, polite but implacable in her refusal.
+"It isn't what you did to me, Florrie," she answered gently, "it's
+what you are that I can't forgive. I can imagine that a good woman
+might do almost anything&mdash;might even run off with another
+woman's husband, but you aren't good. You wouldn't be good if you'd
+spent your life in a convent."</p>
+<p>A quick flush&mdash;the flush of temper&mdash;stained the pearly
+whiteness of Florrie's skin. "Oh, of course, if you don't want to,"
+she retorted, a little shrilly, though she tried to subdue her
+rebellious voice to the pitch of Fifth Avenue. "I only thought that
+being a working woman, you wouldn't have so very many friends, and
+you might get lonely. I had seats at the opera every night last
+winter, and time and again I'd have been glad to have given them to
+you. Then, too, I might have been able to bring you some custom. I
+know any number of rich women who don't think anything of paying a
+thousand dollars for a dress&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Her insolence was so evidently the result of anger that
+Gabriella, without interrupting the flow, waited courteously until
+she paused.</p>
+<p>"No, you cannot do anything for me, Florrie." Though Gabriella's
+voice was crisp and firm, her face looked suddenly older, and
+little lines, stamped by weariness and regret, appeared at the
+corners of her still brilliant eyes. "I don't wish you any harm,"
+she went on more softly. "If you were in trouble I'd do what I
+could for you, but somehow I don't seem able to forgive you for
+being what you are. Would you like to look at anything else?" she
+inquired in her professional tone. "Miss Murphy is waiting to show
+you some hats."</p>
+<p>Her cheeks were burning when she passed out of the ivory and
+gold door, saluted deferentially by the attendant in livery. "The
+effrontery!" she thought, "the barefaced effrontery!" and then, as
+her eyes fell on Florrie's trim little electric coup&eacute; beside
+the curb, she exclaimed mentally, recalling George's animated
+perplexity about the pearl necklace, "I wonder how in the world she
+does it?"</p>
+<p>The meeting with Florrie appeared to her, as she walked home
+that afternoon, to be the last touch needed to push her into a
+state of utter despondency. The oppressive languor of the day had
+exhausted her strength, and when she left Dinard's she felt too
+indifferent, too spiritless even for the drive in the Park. It was
+still light when she got out of the stage at Twenty-third Street,
+and while she strolled listlessly down the blocks on the West Side,
+she had again that curious sensation of smothering which had come
+to her after her talk with O'Hara.</p>
+<p>At the corner of Sixth Avenue a young Italian, with the face of
+a poet, was roasting peanuts in a little kerosene stove beside a
+flickering torch which enkindled the romantic youth in his eyes.
+Farther away some ragged children were dancing to the music of a
+hand-organ, which ground out a melancholy waltz; and from a tiny
+flower stall behind the stand of a bootblack there drifted the
+intense sweetness of hyacinths. An old negro, carrying a basket of
+clothes, passed her in the middle of the block, and she thought:
+"That might have been in Richmond&mdash;that and the hand-organ and
+the perfume of hyacinths." A vision of Hill Street floated before
+her&mdash;the long straight street, with the sudden drop of ragged
+hill at the end; the old houses, with crumbling porches and
+countless signs: "Boarders Wanted" in the windows between the
+patched curtains; the irregular rows of tulip poplar, elm, or
+sycamore trees throwing their crooked shadows over the
+cobblestones; the blades of grass sprouting along the edges of the
+brick pavement&mdash;the vision of Hill Street as she remembered it
+twenty years ago in her girlhood; and then the image of her
+mother's face gazing out beneath the creamy blossoms and the dark
+shining leaves of the old magnolia tree. "Everything must have
+changed, I'd hardly recognize it," she thought. "Nobody we know
+lives on that side now, mother says. Yes, it has been a long time."
+She sighed, and then a little laugh broke from her lips, as she
+remembered that Charley, who had recently been West on a business
+trip, had brought home the good news that Richmond was as
+progressive as Denver. "At least it seems so to Charley," Mrs. Carr
+had hastened to add, "but you know how proud Charley is of all our
+newness. He says there is not a street in the West that looks
+fresher or more beautiful than Monument Avenue, and I am sure that
+is a great comfort. Cousin Jimmy says it shows what the South can
+do when it tries."</p>
+<p>"I'd like to go back," mused Gabriella, walking more and more
+slowly. "I haven't been home for eighteen years, and I am
+thirty-eight to-day." With the fugitive sweetness of the hyacinths
+there rushed over her again the feeling that life was slipping,
+slipping, and that she was missing something infinitely precious,
+something infinitely desirable. It was the panic of fleeting youth,
+of youth unsatisfied, denied, and still insatiable.</p>
+<p>As she entered the gate she saw that O'Hara's windows were dark,
+and while a sigh of relief escaped her, she felt a swift
+contraction of her throat as if she had become suddenly paralyzed
+and was unable to swallow. "I hope he has gone," she said to
+herself in a whisper. "If he has gone, everything will be so much
+easier." But even to herself she could not explain what it was that
+would be made easier. Her relief was so vague that when she
+endeavoured to put it into words it seemed to dissolve and
+evaporate.</p>
+<p>Miss Polly was watering the flowers in the window box, and
+turning, with the green watering-pot in her hand, she stared at
+Gabriella in silence for a minute before she exclaimed anxiously:
+"Mercy on us, Gabriella, what on earth, is the matter?"</p>
+<p>"Nothing. I've had a hard day, and I'm tired."</p>
+<p>"Well, you lie right straight down as soon as you take off your
+hat. I declare you look ten years older than you did this
+morning."</p>
+<p>"I have seen Florrie for a minute."</p>
+<p>"I reckon that was enough to upset anybody. Did she say she was
+sorry?"</p>
+<p>"Sorry! She looked as if she had never been sorry for anything
+in her life. She was handsomer than ever&mdash;don't you remember
+how much you always admired her figure?&mdash;and she didn't look a
+day over twenty-five. I don't believe she has ever known what it is
+to feel a regret."</p>
+<p>"Well, you just wait, honey," responded Miss Polly consolingly,
+"you just wait. She'll be punished yet as sure as you're born."</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'm not waiting for that. I don't wish her to be punished.
+Why should I? She is what she is."</p>
+<p>"Do you s'pose she knows about George?"</p>
+<p>"I doubt it. She didn't speak of his death. She is quite capable
+of forgetting that she ever knew him, and if she does, think of
+him, it is probably as a man who betrayed her innocence. You may be
+sure she has twisted it all about until every shred of the blame
+rests on somebody else. Florrie isn't the only woman who is made
+like that, but I believe," she reasoned it out coolly, "that it is
+her way of keeping her youth."</p>
+<p>Miss Polly had put down the watering-pot, and she came presently
+with a bottle of camphor to the sofa where Gabriella was lying.
+"Are you sure you wouldn't like me to rub your head?" she inquired.
+"Dinner will be ready in a minute, but I shouldn't change my dress
+if I were you."</p>
+<p>Gabriella rose slowly to a sitting position, and then stood up
+while she pushed the camphor away. "I hate the smell of it," she
+answered; "it makes me think of one of Jane's attacks. And,
+besides, I don't need it. There is nothing in the world the matter
+with me." A moment later, to Miss Polly's unspeakable amazement,
+she sank down again, flung her arms over the back of the sofa, and
+burst into tears.</p>
+<p>"Well, I never!" ejaculated Miss Polly, rooted to the spot.
+"Well, I never!" In the ten years she had lived with Gabriella she
+had never seen her cry&mdash;not even after George's
+flight&mdash;and she felt as if the solid ground on which she stood
+had crumbled without warning, and left her insecurely balanced in
+space. "Something certainly must be wrong, for it ain't like you to
+give way. Are you real sure you ain't got a pain somewhere?"</p>
+<p>Shaking her head, and swallowing her sobs with an effort,
+Gabriella rose to her feet. "I'm just tired out, that's all," she
+said, strangely humble and deprecating.</p>
+<p>"You must have been working too hard. It ain't right." For a
+minute or two the little seamstress brooded anxiously; then guided
+by an infallible instinct, she added decisively: "It's been a long
+time since you've seen your ma, and she's gettin' right smart
+along. Why don't you run down home for a few days while the flowers
+are blooming?"</p>
+<p>A change passed over Gabriella's face, and drying her eyes, she
+looked down on Miss Polly with a lovely enigmatical smile.</p>
+<p>"I wonder if I might?" she said doubtfully.</p>
+<p>"There ain't any earthly reason why you shouldn't. To-morrow's
+Friday, and they can get along without you at Dinard's perfectly
+well till the first of the week."</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, they can get along. I was only wondering"&mdash;a
+faint breeze stole in through the window, wafting toward her the
+scent of wet flowers&mdash;"I was only wondering"&mdash;her eyes
+grew suddenly radiant, and lifting her arms, she made a gesture as
+of one escaping from bondage&mdash;"I was only wondering if I might
+go to-morrow," she said.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_Xa" id="CHAPTER_Xa"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<h3>THE DREAM AND THE REALITY</h3>
+<p>At the upper station a little group stood awaiting her, and as
+the train pulled slowly to the platform, Gabriella distinguished
+her mother's pallid face framed in the hanging crape of her veil;
+Jane, thin, anxious, an&aelig;mic, with her look of pinched
+sweetness; Chancy, florid, portly, and virtuously middle-aged, and
+their eldest daughter Margaret, a blooming, beautiful girl.
+Alighting, Gabriella was embraced by Mrs. Carr, who shed a few
+gentle tears on her shoulders.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, my child, I thought you would never come back to
+us," she lamented; "and now everything is so changed that you will
+hardly recognize it as home."</p>
+<p>"Well, if she can find a change that isn't for the better, I
+hope she'll point it out and let me make a note of it," boasted
+Charley, with hilarity. "I tell you what, Gabriella, my dear, we're
+becoming a number one city. Everything's new. We haven't left so
+much as an old brick lying around if we could help it. If you were
+to go back there to Hill Street, you'd scarcely know it for the
+hospitals and schools we've got there, and as for this part of the
+town&mdash;well, I reckon the apartment houses will fairly take
+your breath away. Apartment houses! Well, that's what I call
+progress&mdash;apartment houses and skyscrapers, and we've got
+them, too, down on Main Street. I'll show them to you to-morrow.
+Yes, by George, we're progressing so fast you can hardly see how we
+grow. Why, there wasn't a skyscraper or an apartment house in the
+city when you left here, and precious few hospitals. But
+now&mdash;well, I'll show you! We're the hospital city of the
+South, and more than that, we're becoming a metropolis. Yes, that's
+the word&mdash;we're becoming a metropolis. If you don't believe
+me, just watch as we go up Franklin Street to Monument Avenue. I
+suppose you thought of us still as a poor folksy little Southern
+city, with a lot of ground going to waste in gardens and green
+stuff. Well, you just wait till you see Monument Avenue. It's the
+handsomest boulevard south of Washington. It's all new, every brick
+of it. There's not a house the whole way up that isn't as fresh as
+paint, and the avenue is just as straight as if you'd drawn it with
+a ruler&mdash;"</p>
+<p>But the change in the city, Gabriella reflected while she
+embraced Jane, was as nothing compared to the incredible change in
+Charley himself. Middle-age had passed over him like some fattening
+and solidifying process. He was healthy, he was corpulent, he was
+prosperous, conventional, and commonplace. If Gabriella had been
+seeking, with Hogarthian humour, to portray the evils of torpid and
+self-satisfied respectability, she could scarcely have found a
+better picture of the condition than Charley presented. And the
+more Charley expanded, the more bloodless and wan Jane appeared at
+his side. Her small, flat face with its yellowish and unhealthy
+tinge, its light melancholy eyes, and its look of lifeless and
+inhuman sanctification, exhaled the dried fragrance of a pressed
+flower. So disheartening was her appearance to Gabriella that it
+was a relief to turn from her to the freshness of Margaret,
+handsome, athletic, with cheeks like roses and the natural grace of
+a young animal.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Aunt Gabriella, I hadn't any idea you were like this!"
+cried the girl with na&iuml;ve enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>"You thought of me as gray-haired and wearing a bonnet and
+mantle?"</p>
+<p>"No, not that, but I didn't dream you were so handsome. I
+thought mother was the beauty of the family. But what a wonderful
+dress you have on! Are they wearing all those flounces around the
+hips?"</p>
+<p>"There is no doubt about it, you are getting a lot better
+looking as you grow older," observed Charley, with genial
+pleasantry.</p>
+<p>"She keeps herself up. There is a great deal in that," remarked
+Jane, and the speech was so characteristic of her that Gabriella
+tossed back gaily:</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm not old, you know. I am only thirty-eight."</p>
+<p>"She married so young," said Mrs. Carr mournfully. "I hope none
+of your girls will marry young, Jane. Gabriella must be a warning
+to them and to clear little Fanny."</p>
+<p>"But you married young, mother, and so did I," replied Jane, a
+trifle tartly.</p>
+<p>For some incommunicable reason Jane's sweetness had become
+decidedly prickly. Charley's reformation had left her with the hurt
+and incredulous air of a missionary whose heathen have been
+converted under his eyes by a rival denomination: and obeying an
+entirely natural impulse, she appeared ever so slightly, and in the
+most refined manner possible to revenge herself on the other
+members of her family. Though she had of late devoted her attention
+to the Associated Charities and the Confederate Museum, neither of
+these worthy objects provided so agreeable an opportunity for the
+exercise of her benevolent instincts as did the presence of a
+wayward husband in the household. For there could be no question of
+the thoroughness of Charley's redemption. The very cut of his
+clothes, the very colour of his necktie, proclaimed a triumph, for
+the prohibition party.</p>
+<p>At last they were packed tightly in the touring car, and
+Charley, after imparting directions with the manner of a man who
+regards himself as the fount of wisdom, began expounding the noisy
+gospel of progress to Gabriella. Mrs. Carr, who had never been
+active, and was now over seventy, was visibly excited by the
+suddenness with which she had been whisked from the platform, and
+while they shot away from the station, she clutched her crape veil
+despairingly to the sides of her face, and fixed her blank and
+terrified stare on her son-in-law. After a whispered conference
+with Jane, Gabriella discovered that her mother was less afraid of
+an accident than she was of fresh air. "She's afraid of neuralgia,"
+whispered Jane, "but the doctor says the air can't possibly do her
+any harm."</p>
+<p>In Franklin Street the trees were in full leaf, and the charming
+vista through which Gabriella looked at the sunset, softened
+mercifully the impending symbols of the ironic Spirit of Progress.
+It was modern; it was progressive; yet there was the ancient
+lassitude of spring in the faint sunshine; and the women passing
+under the vivid green of the elms and maples moved with a flowing
+walk which one did not see in Fifth Avenue. On the porches, too,
+groups were assembled in chairs after the Southern fashion, while
+children, in white frocks and gay sashes, accompanied by negro
+nurses wheeling perambulators, made a spring pageant in the parks.
+Though the gardens had either disappeared or dwindled to mere
+emerald patches of grass, a few climbing roses, of modern
+varieties, lent brightness and fragrance to the solid, if
+undistinguished, architecture of the houses.</p>
+<p>"That's the finest apartment house in the city!" exclaimed
+Charley, with enthusiasm. "Looks pretty tall, doesn't it? But it's
+nothing to the height of some of the buildings downtown. As for
+changes&mdash;well, I hope Jane will take you on Broad Street
+to-morrow, and then you'll see what we're doing. Why, there's not a
+shop left there now where you used to deal. Brandywine's&mdash;you
+recollect old Brandywine &amp; Plummer's, don't you?&mdash;isn't
+there any longer. Got a new department store, with a restaurant and
+a basement in the very spot where it used to be. Look sharp now,
+we're coming to a hospital. That belongs to Dr. Browning. You don't
+remember Dr. Browning. After your day, I reckon. He's a young chap,
+but he's got his hospital like all the rest, and every bed
+filled&mdash;he told me so yesterday. But they've all got their
+hospitals. Darrow&mdash;you recollect Darrow who used to be old Dr.
+Walker's assistant&mdash;well, he's got his, too, just around the
+corner on the next street. They say he cuts up more people than any
+man in the South except Spendlow&mdash;".</p>
+<p>"I miss the old-fashioned flowers," said Gabriella to her mother
+in one of Charley's plethoric pauses. "The microphylla roses and
+snowballs."</p>
+<p>"Everybody is planting crimson ramblers and hydrangeas now,"
+responded Mrs. Carr, with something of her son-in-law's pride in
+the onward movement of her surroundings.</p>
+<p>"Here are the monuments!" cried Charley, who had treated each
+apartment house or hospital as if it were a bright, inestimable
+jewel in the city's crown. "You don't see many streets finer than
+this in New York, do you?"</p>
+<p>"It looks very pretty and attractive," answered Gabriella, as
+they swung dangerously round a statue, and then started in a race
+up the avenue, "but I miss the shrubs and the flowers."</p>
+<p>"Oh, there are flowers enough. You just wait till you get on a
+bit. We've got some urns filled with hydrangeas, that queer new
+sort between blue and pink. But what do you want with shrubs? All
+they're good for is to get in your way whenever you want to look
+out into the street. Mrs. Madison was telling me only yesterday
+that she cut down the lilac bushes in her front yard because they
+kept her from recognizing the people in motor cars. Look at that
+house now, that's one of the finest, in the city. Rushington built
+it&mdash;he made his money in fertilizers, and the one next with
+the green tiles belongs to Hanly, the tobacco trust fellow, you
+know, and this whopper on the next square is where Albertson lives.
+He made his pile out of railroad stocks&mdash;he's one of the
+banking firm of Albertson, Jacobstein, Moss &amp; Company. Awfully
+clever fellows, but too tricky for me, I give them a wide berth
+when I go out to do business&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But where are the old people&mdash;the people I used to
+know?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, they're scattered about everywhere, but they haven't got
+most of the money. A lot of 'em live up here, and a lot are down in
+Franklin Street in the same old houses."</p>
+<p>"Tell me about Cousin Jimmy."</p>
+<p>"He's up here, too. Pussy planned that red brick house with the
+green shutters next door to us. I reckon Jimmy is about as
+prosperous as is good for him, but he's getting on. He must be over
+seventy now. He has a son who is a chip of the old block, and his
+youngest daughter was the prettiest girl who ever came out here.
+Margaret will tell you about her."</p>
+<p>"And the Peytons?" Her voice trembled, and she looked hastily
+away from the keen eyes of Margaret.</p>
+<p>"They are still in the old home&mdash;at least Arthur lives
+there with his Cousin Nelly. You know Mrs Peyton died about nine or
+ten years ago?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I heard it."</p>
+<p>"She was getting on, but it was a great loss to Arthur. Somehow,
+I could never make up my mind about Arthur. He was bright enough as
+a young chap, and we used to think he would have a brilliant
+future; but when the time came, he never seemed to catch on. He
+wasn't progressive, and he has never amounted to much more than he
+did when he left college. What I say about him is that he had the
+wrong ideas&mdash;Yes, Jane, I mean exactly what I say, he had the
+wrong ideas. He doesn't know what he is driving at. No progress, no
+push, no punch in him."</p>
+<p>"Why, Charley," murmured Mrs. Carr reproachfully, while Jane,
+recovering her nagging manner with an accession of spirit,
+remonstrated feelingly: "Charley, you really must be more careful
+what you say."</p>
+<p>"Oh, fudge!" retorted Charley, with playful rudeness. "You see
+she's at it still, Gabriella," he pursued, winking audaciously. "If
+it isn't one thing, it's another, but she wouldn't be satisfied
+with perfection. Well, here we are. There are the hydrangeas. I
+hope you're pleased."</p>
+<p>"I declare, those waste papers have blown right back again on
+the grass, and I had them picked up the last thing before I left,"
+said Jane in a tone of annoyance.</p>
+<p>"Never mind the papers; Gabriella isn't looking for papers,"
+returned Charley, while he helped Mrs. Carr out of the motor and up
+the steps. "So here you are, mother, and the air didn't kill
+you."</p>
+<p>"I may have neuralgia to-morrow. You never can tell," replied
+Mrs. Carr. "I shouldn't worry about the papers, Jane. Nobody can
+help the way they blow about. I want Gabriella to see the children
+the first thing."</p>
+<p>As they entered the house Jane's children, a flock of five girls
+and two boys, fluttered up to be introduced, and among them
+Gabriella discovered the composed baby of Jane's tragic flight. It
+seemed an age ago, and she felt not thirty-eight, but a
+thousand.</p>
+<p>After dinner Charley, who had eaten immoderately, unfolded the
+evening paper under the electric lamp in the library, and dozed
+torpidly while the girls plied their aunt with innumerable
+questions about New York and the spring fashions. "It will be
+lovely to have Fanny with us at the White Sulphur. I know her
+clothes will be wonderful," they chirped happily, clustering
+eagerly about the sofa on which Gabriella was sitting. Jane's
+children, deriving from some hardy stock of an earlier generation,
+were handsome, vigorous, optimistic in blood and fibre, and so
+uncompromisingly modern that Gabriella wondered how Mrs. Carr, with
+her spiritual neuralgia and her perpetual mourning, had survived
+the unceasing currents of fresh air with which they surrounded
+her.</p>
+<p>"Yes, things have changed. It is the age," thought Gabriella;
+and presently, when Cousin Jimmy and Cousin Pussy came in to
+welcome her, she repeated: "Yes, it is the age. There is no
+escaping it."</p>
+<p>"Why, my dear child, you are looking splendidly," trilled Cousin
+Pussy, with her old delightful manner and her flattering vision so
+different from Florrie's. She was still trim, plump, and rosy,
+though her hair was now snow white and her pretty face was covered
+with cheerful wrinkles. "You're handsomer than you ever were in
+your life, and the dash of gray on your temples doesn't make you
+look, a day older&mdash;not a day. Some people turn gray so very
+young. I remember Cousin Becky Bollingbroke's hair was almost white
+by the time she was thirty-five. It runs like that in some
+families. But you look just as girlish as ever. It's wonderful,
+isn't it, Cousin Fanny, the way the women of this generation stay
+girls until they are fifty? I don't believe you'll ever look any
+older, Gabriella, than you do now. Of course, I suppose your
+business has something to do with it, but if I met you for the
+first time, it would never cross my mind that you were a day over
+twenty-five."</p>
+<p>"Well, well, so little Gabriella went to New York and became a
+dressmaker," observed Jimmy, who was seldom original, "and she's
+the same Gabriella, too. I always said, you know, that she was the
+sort you could count on."</p>
+<p>Age, though it had not entirely passed him by, had, on the
+whole, treated him with great gentleness. He was a remarkably
+handsome old man, with a distinguished and courtly presence, a head
+of wonderful white hair, which looked as if it had been powdered, a
+ruddy unwrinkled face, and the dark shining eyes of the adventurous
+youth he had never lost.</p>
+<p>"Of course, she couldn't have been a dressmaker here where
+everybody knows her," purred Cousin Pussy, with her arm about
+Gabriella, "but in New York it is different, and they tell me that
+even titled women are dressmakers in London."</p>
+<p>"Well, she has pluck," declared Cousin Jimmy, as he had declared
+eighteen years ago at the family council. "There's nothing like
+pluck when it comes to getting along in the world."</p>
+<p>Then they sat down in Jane's library, which, contained most of
+the things Gabriella associated with the old parlour in Hill
+Street, and Cousin Pussy asked if Gabriella had found many
+changes.</p>
+<p>"A great many. Everything, looks new to me except this room. The
+only thing I miss here is the horsehair sofa."</p>
+<p>"I keep that in the back hall," said Jane. "The town does look
+different up here, but the Peytons' house is just as you remember
+it&mdash;even the scarlet sage is in the garden. Miss Nelly plants
+it still every summer."</p>
+<p>A lovely light shone in Gabriella's eyes, and Cousin Pussy
+watched it tenderly, while a smile hovered about the corners of her
+shrewd though still pretty mouth.</p>
+<p>"It has been such a disappointment that Arthur hasn't done more
+in his profession," she said presently, "but, as I was saying to
+Mr. Wrenn only the other day, I have always felt that dear
+Gabriella was to blame for it."</p>
+<p>"The trouble with Arthur," observed Charley, awaking truculently
+from his doze, "is that he's got the wrong ideas. When a man has
+the wrong ideas in these days, he might as well go out and hang
+himself."</p>
+<p>"Well, I don't know that I'd call his ideas wrong exactly,"
+reasoned Cousin Jimmy, with the judicial manner befitting the best
+judge of tobacco in Virginia; "I shouldn't call them wrong, but
+they're out of date. They belong to the last century."</p>
+<p>"I always say that dear Arthur is a perfect gentleman of the old
+school," remonstrated Mrs. Carr, meekly obstinate. "There aren't
+many of them left now, so I tell myself regretfully whenever I see
+him."</p>
+<p>"And there'll be fewer than ever by the time you Suffragists get
+your rights," remarked Charley, with bitterness, while Mrs. Carr,
+incensed by the word, which she associated with various
+indelicacies, stared at him with an indignant expression.</p>
+<p>"Charley, be careful what you say," nagged Jane acridly from her
+corner. "Now that so many of our relatives have gone in for
+suffrage, you mustn't be intolerant."</p>
+<p>"I cannot help it, Jane. I shall never knowingly bow to one even
+if she is related to me," announced Mrs. Carr more assertively than
+Gabriella would have believed possible.</p>
+<p>"Well, for my part, Cousin Fanny, I can't feel that it hurts me
+to bow to anybody," said Pussy, with her unfailing kindness of
+heart. "Why, I even bowed to Florrie Spencer last winter. I wanted
+to cut her, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it when I met
+her face to face. I hope you don't mind, dear," she whispered to
+Gabriella. "I suppose I oughtn't to have mentioned her, but I
+forgot."</p>
+<p>"Oh, it doesn't matter in the least," responded Gabriella
+cheerfully. "I bowed to her myself the day before I left New
+York."</p>
+<p>Though she tried to be independent, to be advanced and resolute,
+she felt the last eighteen years receding slowly from her
+consciousness. The family point of view, the family soul, had
+enveloped her again, and, in spite of her experience and her
+success, she seemed inwardly as young and ignorant as on the
+evening when she broke her engagement to Arthur. The spirit of the
+place had defeated her individual endeavour. Except for the wall
+paper of pale gray, and the Persian rugs on the floor, Jane's
+library might have been the old front parlour in Hill Street, and
+it was as if the French mirror, the crystal candelabra, the
+rosewood bookcases, with their diamond-shaped panes lined with
+fluted magenta silk, the family portraits, the speckled engravings
+of the Burial of Latan&eacute; and of the groups of amiable
+children feeding chickens and fish&mdash;it was as if these
+inanimate objects exuded a spiritual anodyne which enfeebled the
+will. Across the hall, in the modern pink and gray drawing-room,
+the five girls were playing bridge with several young men whom
+Gabriella remembered as babies, and the sounds of their voices
+floated to her now and then as thinly as if they had come out of a
+phonograph. "There is nothing better than peace, after all," she
+thought, while her, eyes rested tenderly on the simple,
+affectionate face of Cousin Jimmy. "Goodness and peace, these
+things are really worth while."</p>
+<p>Then the telephone rang gently, and after a minute Margaret, who
+had gone to answer it, came in with a roguish smile on her lips.
+"Aunt Gabriella, Mr. Peyton wishes to come to-morrow at five," she
+said; and the roguish smile flitted from her lips to the lips of
+Cousin Pussy, and from Cousin Pussy to each sympathetic and
+watchful face in the group.</p>
+<p>"You may say what you please," argued Charley, still truculent,
+"the whole trouble with Arthur is that he has got the wrong
+ideas."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>At five o'clock the next day the family crowded into the touring
+car for an excursion, and left Gabriella in a deserted house to
+receive the lover of her girlhood. Before going Mrs. Carr had
+embraced her sentimentally; Charley had dropped one of his broad
+jokes on the subject of the reunion; Jane had murmured sweetly that
+there was no man on earth she admired as much as she did Arthur;
+and the girls had effusively complimented Gabriella on her
+appearance. Even Willy, the baby of eighteen years ago, had
+prophesied with hilarity that "Old Arthur Peyton wasn't coming for
+nothing." One and all they appeared to take her part in the romance
+for granted; and while she waited in the drawing-room, gazing
+through the interstices of Jane's new lace curtains into the
+avenue, where beyond the flying motor cars the grassy strip in the
+middle of the street was dappled with shadows, she wondered if she
+also were taking Arthur's devotion for granted. She had not seen
+him for eighteen years, and yet she was awaiting him as expectantly
+as if he were still her lover. Would his presence really quiet this
+strange new restlessness in her heart&mdash;this restlessness which
+had come to her so suddenly after her meeting with Florrie? Was it
+true that her youth was slipping from her before she had grasped
+all the happiness that life offered? Or was it only the stirring of
+the spring winds, of the young green against the blue sky, of the
+mating birds, of the roving, provocative scents of flowers, of the
+checkered light and shade on the grassy strip under the maples? Was
+it all these things, or was it none of them, that awoke this
+longing, so vague and yet so unquenchable, in her heart?</p>
+<p>A car stopped in the street outside, the bell rang, and she
+watched the figure of a trim mulatto maid flit through the hall to
+the door. An instant later Arthur's name was announced, and
+Gabriella, with her hands in his clasp, stood looking into his
+face. It had been eighteen years since they parted, and in those
+eighteen years she had carried his image like some sacred talisman
+in her breast.</p>
+<p>"How little you've changed, Gabriella," he said after a moment
+of silence in which she told herself that he was far better
+looking, far more distinguished than she had remembered him. "You
+are larger than you used to be, but your face is as girlish as
+ever."</p>
+<p>"And I have two children nearly grown," she replied with a
+trembling little laugh; "a daughter who is already thinking of the
+White Sulphur."</p>
+<p>They sat down in the pink chairs on the gray carpet, and leaned
+forward, looking into each other's faces as tenderly as they had
+done when they were lovers.</p>
+<p>"It's hard to believe it," he answered a little stiffly, in his
+dry and gentle voice, which held a curious note of finality, of
+failure. For the first time, while he spoke, she let her eyes rest
+frankly upon him, and there came to her, as she did so, a vivid
+realization of the emptiness and aimlessness of his life. He looked
+handsomer than ever; he looked stately and formal and impressive;
+but he looked old&mdash;though he was only forty-five&mdash;he
+looked old and ineffectual and acquiescent. The fighting strength,
+such as it was, had gone out of him, and the stamp of failure was
+on him, from his high, pale, intellectual forehead, where the fine
+brown hair had retreated to the crown of his head, to his narrow
+features, and his relaxed slender limbs, with their slow and
+indolent movements. He was one of those, she felt intuitively, who
+had stood aloof from the rewards as well as from the strains of the
+struggle, who had withered to the core, not from age, but from an
+inherent distrust of all effort, of all endeavour. For his
+immobility went deeper than any physical habit: it attacked, like
+an incurable malady, the very fibre and substance of his nature.
+With his intellect, his training, his traditions, she discerned,
+with a flash of insight, that he had failed because he lacked the
+essential faith in the future. He had lost, not because he had
+risked, but because he had hesitated, not because he had loved
+ease, but because he had feared effort. For fear of a misstep, he
+had not dared to go forward; from dread of pain, he had refused the
+opportunity of happiness. She knew now why he had never come to
+her, why he had let her slip from his grasp. All that was a part of
+his failure, of his distrust of life, of his profound negation of
+spirit.</p>
+<p>"Yes, it is hard," she assented; and there came over her like a
+sudden sense of discomfort, of physical hardship, the knowledge
+that, in the very beginning, she was trying to make conversation.
+Meeting his sympathetic smile&mdash;the smile that still delighted
+the impressionable hearts of old ladies&mdash;she told herself
+obstinately, with desperate determination, that she was not
+disappointed, that he was just as she had remembered him, dear and
+lovable and kind and conventional. When she recalled what he had
+been at twenty-seven, it appeared inevitable to her that at
+forty-five he should have settled a little more firmly into the
+mould of the past, that his opinions should have crystallized and
+imprisoned his mind immovably in the centre of them.</p>
+<p>She told him what she could about Archibald and
+Fanny&mdash;about her choice of schools, her maternal pride in
+Archibald's intellect and Fanny's appearance, her hopeful plans for
+the future&mdash;and he listened attentively, with his manner of
+slightly pompous consideration, while he passed one of his long
+narrow hands over his forehead. When she had finished her vivacious
+recital, he began to talk slowly and gravely about himself, with
+the tolerant and impersonal detachment of one who has reduced life
+to a gesture, a manner. "I wonder if he has ever really cared about
+anything&mdash;even about me?" she questioned, after a minute; but
+while the thought was still in her mind, he mentioned his mother's
+name, and it was impossible to doubt the sincerity of his sorrow
+and his tenderness. "I have seemed only half alive since I lost
+her," he said; and the words were like a searchlight which flashed
+over his character and illumined its obscurities. Did his whole
+attitude of immobility and negation result from the depth and the
+intensity of his feeling, from the exquisite reticence and
+sensitiveness of his soul?</p>
+<p>"I know, I know," she murmured in a voice of sympathy. After
+all, she was not disappointed in him. He was as tender, as
+chivalrous, as noble as she had believed him to be. The Dream was
+true; and yet in spite of its truthfulness, it seemed to evaporate
+slowly while she sat there in Jane's pink satin chair and looked
+out at the sunlight. Only the restlessness, the inappeasable
+longing in her heart had not changed. Looking across the hall into
+the library she could see the old French mirror reflecting the
+bronze candelabra, with crystal pendants, and the thought flitted
+into her brain: "It is all real. I am here, talking to Arthur. It
+is every bit true." But her words failed to convince her, and she
+had a curious sensation of vagueness and thinness, as if their low,
+gentle voices were issuing from shadows.</p>
+<p>"I should like to show you some of our improvements," he said
+presently, with a faintly perceptible ripple of animation. "I
+wonder if you would care to come out in my car? We might go up
+Monument Avenue into the country."</p>
+<p>The idea was delightful, she told him with convincing
+enthusiasm; and while she ran upstairs to put on her hat, he went
+out to the car, which was standing in front of the house. So
+preoccupied was he with his reflections, that when Gabriella
+appeared, he started almost as if he had forgotten that he was
+waiting for her.</p>
+<p>The air was as soft and fragrant as summer; the grassy strip
+under the young maples was diapered with sunlight, and an edge of
+rosy gold was tinting the far horizon. As they sped up the avenue
+Arthur pointed out the houses to her as possessively as Charley had
+done the afternoon before, and in the pride with which he told her
+the cost of them she recognized an admirable freedom from envy or
+bitterness. If, he had not achieved things, his attitude seemed to
+say, it was because he had never been in the race, because he had
+preferred to stand aside and enjoy the reposeful entertainment of
+the spectator.</p>
+<p>The avenue, which swept on indefinitely after the houses had
+stopped, dwindled at last to two straight and narrow walks binding
+the town to the country with bands of concrete. The pines had
+fallen in blackened ruins, and where Gabriella remembered thickets
+of wildflowers there were masses of red clay furrowed by cart
+wheels.</p>
+<p>"You see, we're developing all this property now," observed
+Arthur, in a gratified tone as they whirled past an old field
+intersected by a concrete walk which informed the curious that it
+was "Arlington Avenue." "Honeysuckle Lane has gone, too, and we're
+grading a street there now in front of the old Berkeley place."</p>
+<p>"The growth has been wonderful," said Gabriella, a little
+pensively; "but do you remember how lovely Honeysuckle Lane used to
+be? That's where we went for wild honeysuckle in the spring."</p>
+<p>"Oh, we'll find plenty of honeysuckle farther out. I gathered a
+big bunch of it for Cousin Nelly yesterday."</p>
+<p>For a while they sped on in silence. Arthur was intent on the
+wheel, and Gabriella could think of nothing to say to him that she
+had not said in Jane's drawing-room. When at last they left the
+desolation of improvement, and came out into the natural country,
+the sun was already low, and the forest of pines along the glowing,
+horizon was like an impending storm. Once Arthur stopped, and they
+got out to gather wild honeysuckle by the roadside; then with the
+sticky, heavily scented blossoms in her lap, they went on again
+toward the sunset, still silent, still separated by an impalpable
+barrier. "He is just what I thought he would be," she thought
+sadly. "He is just where I left him eighteen years ago, and yet it
+is different. In some inexplicable way it is different from what I
+expected." And she told herself that the fault was her
+own&mdash;that she had changed, hardened, and become hopelessly
+matter-of-fact&mdash;that she had lost her youth and her
+sentiment.</p>
+<p>Suddenly, as if the action had been forced upon him by the
+steady pressure of some deep conviction, some inner necessity,
+Arthur turned his face toward her, and asked gently: "Gabriella, do
+you ever think of the past?"</p>
+<p>Facing the rosy sunset, his features looked wan and colourless,
+and she noticed again that he seemed to have dried through and
+through, like some rare fruit that has lain wrapped in tissue paper
+too long.</p>
+<p>She looked at him with wistful and sombre eyes. Now that the
+desired moment had come, she felt only that she would have given
+her whole future to escape before it overtook her, to avoid the
+inevitable, crowning hour of her destiny.</p>
+<p>"I think of it very often," she answered truthfully, while she
+buried her face in the intoxicating bloom of the honeysuckle.</p>
+<p>"Do you remember my telling you once that I'd never give you
+up&mdash;that I'd never stop caring?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I remember&mdash;but, oh, Arthur, you mustn't&mdash;" She
+sat up with a start, gazing straight ahead into the rose and gold
+of the afterglow. From the deserted road, winding flat and
+dun-coloured in the soft light, she heard another voice&mdash;the
+strong and buoyant voice of O'Hara&mdash;saying: "I'm not the sort
+to change&mdash;" and then over again, "I'm not the sort to
+change&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"I suppose it's too late," Arthur went on, with his patient
+tenderness. "Things usually come too late for me or else I miss
+them altogether. That's been the way always&mdash;and now&mdash;"
+With his left hand he made a large, slow, commemorative
+gesture.</p>
+<p>"You're the best&mdash;the kindest&mdash;" An urgent desire
+moved her to stop him before he put into words the feeling she
+could see in his face. Though she knew that it was but the ghost of
+a feeling, the habit of a desire, which had become interwoven with
+his orderly and unchangeable custom of life, she realized
+nevertheless that its imaginary vividness might cause him great
+suffering. A vision of what might have been eighteen years
+ago&mdash;of their possible marriage&mdash;rose before her while
+she struggled for words. How could her energetic nature have borne
+with his philosophy of hesitation, her imperative affirmation of
+life with his denial of effort, her unconquered optimism with his
+deeply rooted mistrust of happiness?</p>
+<p>There was beauty in his face, in his ascetic and over-refined
+features, in his sympathetic smile and his cultured voice; but it
+was the beauty of resignation, of defeat nobly borne, of a spirit
+confirmed in the bitter sweetness of renouncement. "It would make
+an old woman of me to marry him," she thought, "an old, patient,
+resigned woman."</p>
+<p>"Most things have slipped by me," he resumed presently, while
+they raced down a long hill toward the black pines and the fading
+red of the afterglow. In a marshy pond near the roadside frogs were
+croaking, while from the darkening fields, encircled with webs of
+mist, there floated the mingled scents of freshly mown grass, of
+dewy flowers, of trodden weeds, of ploughed earth, of ancient
+mould&mdash;all the fugitive and immemorially suggestive odours of
+the country at twilight. And at the touch of these scents, some
+unforgotten longing seemed to stir in her brain as if it had slept
+there, covered by clustering memories, from another lifetime. She
+wanted something with an unbearable intensity; the vague and
+elusive yearning for happiness had become suddenly poignant and
+definite. In that instant she knew unerringly that she was in love
+not with a dream, but with a fact, that she was in love not with
+Arthur, but with O'Hara. For days, weeks, months, she had been
+blindly groping toward the knowledge; and now, in a flash of
+intuition, it had come to her like one of those discoveries of
+science, which baffle investigators for years, and then
+miraculously reveal themselves in a moment of insight. Her first
+antagonism, her injustice, her unreasonable resentments and
+suspicions, she recognized now, in the piercing light of this
+discovery, as the inexplicable disguises of love. And she was not
+old&mdash;she was not even middle-aged&mdash;she was as young as
+Fanny, as young as the eternal, ageless spirit of romance, of
+adventure. This was life in her pulses, in her brain, in her
+heart&mdash;life, not pale, not bitter sweet, but sparkling,
+glowing, bubbling like wine.</p>
+<p>At the foot of the long hill Arthur turned the car, and they
+flew back between the dim fields where the croaking of frogs
+sounded louder in the darkness. Ahead of them the lights of the car
+flitted like golden moths over the dust of the road, and in the
+sky, beyond the thin veil of mist, the stars were shining over the
+city. Spring, which possessed the earth, bloomed in Gabriella's
+heart with a wonderful colour, a wonderful fragrance. She was young
+again with the imperishable youth of magic, of enchantment. To
+love, to hope, to strive, this was both romance and adventure.</p>
+<p>"Is it too late, then, Gabriella?" asked Arthur, after a long
+silence, and in his voice there was the sound of suffering
+acquiescence.</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid it is, dear Arthur," she answered softly, and they
+did not speak again until the lights blazed over them, and they ran
+into Monument Avenue. After all, it was too late. What could she
+have added to the answer she had given him?</p>
+<p>When they reached the house, he did not come in with her, and
+tears stained her face while she went slowly up the steps, and
+stood beside Jane's hydrangeas with her hand on the bell. Then, as
+the door opened quickly, she saw her mother waiting, with an eager,
+expectant look, at the door of the library, and heard her excited
+voice murmur: "Well, dear?"</p>
+<p>"We had a lovely drive, mother. Arthur is just as I remembered
+him, except that he has grown so much older."</p>
+<p>A disappointed expression crossed Mrs. Carr's face. "Is that
+all?" she asked regretfully.</p>
+<p>Gabriella laughed happily. "That is all&mdash;only I found out
+exactly what I wanted to know."</p>
+<p>For the rest of the week she devoted herself to her mother with
+a solicitude which aroused in the brain of that melancholy lady
+serious apprehensions of a hastening decline; and when her visit
+was over, she packed her trunks, with girlish, delicious thrills of
+happiness, and started back to New York.</p>
+<p>"Do you really think I am failing so rapidly, Gabriella?" Mrs.
+Carr inquired anxiously while they waited for the train on the
+platform of the upper station.</p>
+<p>"Failing? Why, no, mother. You look splendidly," Gabriella
+assured her, a little surprised, a little startled. "Why should you
+ask me such a thing?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, nothing, dear. I had a fancy," murmured Mrs. Carr meekly;
+and then as the train rushed into view, she kissed her daughter
+reproachfully, and stood gazing after her until the last coach and
+the last white jacket of the dining-car attendants vanished in the
+smoky sunshine of the distance.</p>
+<p>Through the long day, lying back in her chair, with her eyes on
+the flying green landscape, Gabriella thought of the discovery she
+had made while she was driving with Arthur. The restlessness, the
+uncertainty, the vague yet poignant longing for an indefinite good,
+had passed out of her happy and exultant heart. In obedience to the
+law of her nature, which decreed that she should move swiftly and
+directly toward the end of her destiny, she was returning to O'Hara
+as resolutely, as unswervingly, as she had fled from him.</p>
+<p>"It's strange how little I've ever understood, how little I've
+ever known myself," she thought, staring vacantly at a severe
+spinster, with crimped hair and a soured expression, who sat before
+the opposite window. "I've gone on in the dark, making mistakes and
+discoveries from the very beginning, undoing and doing over again,
+creating illusions and then destroying them&mdash;always moving,
+always changing, always growing in new directions. A year ago I'd
+have laughed at the idea that I could love any man but
+Arthur&mdash;that of all men I could love Ben O'Hara; and to-day I
+know that he is the future for me&mdash;that he is the beginning
+again of my youth. A year ago I thought only how I might change
+him, how I might make him over, and now I realize that I shall
+never change him, that I shall never make him over, and that it
+doesn't really matter. It isn't the vital thing. The vital thing is
+character, and I wouldn't change that if I could. For the rest, I
+shall probably always wish him different in some ways, just as I
+wish myself different. I'd like to have him more like Arthur on the
+surface, just as I'd like to have myself more like Fanny. I'd like
+to give him Arthur's manner just as I'd like to give myself Fanny's
+complexion. But it isn't possible. He will always be what he is
+now, and, after all, it is what he is&mdash;it is not something
+else that I want&mdash;"</p>
+<p>With a glimmer of the clairvoyant insight which had come to her
+on the country road, she understood that O'Hara was for her an
+embodied symbol of life&mdash;that she must either take him or
+leave him completely and without reserve or evasion. He was not an
+ideal. In the love she felt for him there was none of the
+sentimental glamour of her passion for George. She saw his
+imperfections, but she saw that the man was bigger than any
+attributes, that his faults were as nothing compared to the
+abundance of his virtues, and that, perfect or imperfect, the
+tremendous fact remained that she loved him.</p>
+<p>In the opposite chair, the severe spinster had taken a strip of
+knitted silk out of her bag, and was working industriously on a
+man's necktie of blue and gray. From her intent and preoccupied
+look, from the nervous twitching of her thin lips, the close
+peering of her near-sighted eyes, through rimless glasses which she
+wore attached by a gold chain to her hair, she might have found in
+the act of knitting a supreme consolation for the inexorable
+denials of destiny. "I wonder if it satisfies her, just knitting?"
+thought Gabriella. "Has she submitted like Arthur to chance, to the
+way things happen when one no longer resists? Is she really
+contented merely to knit, or is she knitting as a condemned
+prisoner might knit while he is waiting for the scaffold?" And
+while she watched the patient fingers, she added: "One must either
+conquer or be conquered, and I will never be conquered."</p>
+<p>It was eight o'clock when she reached New York, and as she drove
+the short distance to West Twenty-third Street she began to wonder
+when she should see O'Hara, and what she should say to him. In the
+end she decided that she would wait for a chance meeting, that she
+would let it happen when it would without moving a step or lifting
+a hand. Before many days they would be obliged to meet in the yard
+or the hall, and some obscure, consecrated tradition of sex, some
+secret strain of her mother's ineradicable feminine instinct,
+opposed the direct and sensible way. "As soon as I meet
+him&mdash;and in the end I shall surely meet him&mdash;everything
+will be right," she thought, with her eyes on the streets where the
+spring multitude of children were swarming. And from this multitude
+of children, of young, ardent, and adventurous life, there seemed
+to emanate a colossal and irresistible will&mdash;the will to be,
+to live, to love, to create, and to conquer.</p>
+<p>The taxicab turned swiftly into Twenty-third Street, and while
+it stopped beside the pavement, she saw that Mrs. Squires was
+standing, with her arms on the gate, staring into the street. As
+Gabriella alighted, the woman came forward and said, with
+suppressed emotion, while she wiped her eyes on the back of her
+hand: "You came just a minute too late to say good-bye to Mr.
+O'Hara."</p>
+<p>"Good-bye? But where has he gone?"</p>
+<p>"He has gone to Washington to-night. To-morrow he is starting to
+the West."</p>
+<p>"When is he coming back? Did he tell you?"</p>
+<p>At this Mrs. Squires broke down. "He ain't ever coming back,
+that's what I'm crying for. He's given up his rooms, and his
+furniture all went to the auction yesterday. He says he's going to
+live out in Colorado or Wyoming for the rest of his life, and he
+didn't even tell me where I could write to him. It's a great loss
+to me, Mrs. Carr. I'd got used to him and his ways, and when you've
+once got used to a man, it ain't easy to give him up."</p>
+<p>She sobbed audibly as she finished; and it seemed to Gabriella
+that a lifetime of experience passed in the instant while she stood
+there, with her pulses drumming in her ears, her throat contracting
+until she struggled for breath, and the lights of the city swimming
+in a nebulous blur before her eyes. Yet in that instant, as in
+every crisis of her life, she turned instinctively to action, to
+movement, to exertion, however futile. While she walked across the
+pavement to the waiting cab, for the crowning and ultimate choice
+of her life, she abandoned forever the authority and guide of
+tradition. Tradition, she knew, bade her sit and wait on destiny
+until she withered, like Arthur, to the vital core of her nature;
+but something mightier than tradition, something which she shared
+with the swarming multitude of children in the streets&mdash;the
+will to live, to strive, and to conquer&mdash;this had risen
+superior to the empty rules of the past. With her hand on the door
+of the taxicab, she spoke rapidly to the driver: "Drive back to the
+station as fast as you can, there is not a minute to lose."</p>
+<p>When the cab started, she leaned forward, with her hands clasped
+on her knees, and her eyes on the street, where the children were
+playing. Because of the children, they drove very slowly, and once,
+when the traffic held them up for a few minutes, she felt an
+impulse to scream. Suppose she missed him, after all! Suppose she
+lost him in the station! Suppose she never saw him again! And
+beside this possibly it seemed to her that all the other suffering
+of her life&mdash;George's desertion, her humiliation, her struggle
+to make a living for her children, the loneliness of the long
+summers, her poverty and hunger and self-denial&mdash;that all
+these things were merely superficial annoyances. "If we don't go
+on, I shall die," she said aloud suddenly; "if we don't go on, I
+shall die," and when at last the cab started again, she heard the
+words like an undercurrent beneath the innumerable noises of the
+street, "If we don't go on, I shall die."</p>
+<p>The taxicab stopped; a porter ran forward to take her bag, and
+while she thrust the money into the driver's hand, she heard her
+voice coolly and calmly giving directions.</p>
+<p>"I must catch the next train to Washington."</p>
+<p>"Have you got your ticket, Miss?"</p>
+<p>She stared back at him blankly. Though she saw his lips moving,
+it was impossible for her to distinguish the words because she was
+still hearing in a muffled undercurrent the roar of the
+streets.</p>
+<p>"Have you got your ticket?" They were passing through the
+station now, and he explained hurriedly: "You can't go through the
+gate without a ticket."</p>
+<p>She drew out her purse, and panic seized her afresh while she
+waited before the window behind a bald-headed man who counted his
+change twice before he would move aside, and let her step into his
+place. Then, when the ticket was given to her, she turned and ran
+after the porter through the gate and down the steps to the
+platform. As she ran, her eyes wavered to the long platform, and
+the little groups gathered beside the waiting train, which seemed
+to shake like a moving black and white picture.</p>
+<p>"Suppose I miss him, after all! Suppose I never see him again!"
+she thought, and all that was young in her, all that was vital and
+alive, strained forward as her feet touched the platform. Except
+for several coloured porters and a woman holding a child by the
+hand, the place was deserted. Then a man stepped quickly out of one
+of the last coaches, and by his bigness and the red of his hair,
+she knew that it was O'Hara. At the first sight of him the panic
+died suddenly in her heart, and the old peace, the old sense of
+security and protection swept over her. Her face, which had been
+lowered, was lifted like a flower that revives, and her feet, which
+had stumbled, became the swift, flying feet of a girl. It was as if
+both her spirit and her body sprang toward him.</p>
+<p>At the sound of his name, he turned and stood motionless, as if
+hardly believing his vision.</p>
+<p>"I came back because I couldn't help it," she said.</p>
+<p>But he was always hard to convince, and he waited now, still
+transfixed, still incredulous.</p>
+<p>"I came back because I wanted you more than anything else," she
+added.</p>
+<p>"You came back to me?" he asked, slowly, as if doubting her.</p>
+<p>"I came back to you. I wanted you," she repeated, and her voice
+did not quaver, her eyes did not drop from his questioning gaze. It
+was all so simple at last; it was all as natural as the joyous
+beating of her heart.</p>
+<p>"And you'll marry me now&mdash;to-night?"</p>
+<p>It was the ultimate test, she knew, the test not only of her
+love for O'Hara, but of her strength, her firmness, her courage,
+and of her belief in life. The choice was hers that comes to all
+men and women sooner or later&mdash;the choice between action and
+inaction, between endeavour and relinquishment, between affirmation
+and denial, between adventure and deliberation, between youth and
+age. One thought only made her hesitate, and she almost whispered
+the words:</p>
+<p>"But the children?"</p>
+<p>He laughed softly. "Oh, the children are always there. We're not
+quitters," and in a graver tone, he asked for the second time:
+"Will you come with me now&mdash;to-night, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>At the repeated question she stretched out her hands, while she
+watched the light break on his face.</p>
+<p>"I'll come with you now&mdash;anywhere&mdash;toward the future,"
+she answered.</p>
+<p>THE END</p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14571 ***</div>
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Life and Gabriella, by Ellen Glasgow
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Life and Gabriella
+       The Story of a Woman's Courage
+
+Author: Ellen Glasgow
+
+Release Date: January 3, 2005 [EBook #14571]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND GABRIELLA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Rick Niles, Charlie Kirschner and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
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+
+</pre>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/001.jpg"><img src=
+"images/001.jpg" width="50%" alt="" title="" /></a></div>
+<div>
+<h1>LIFE AND<br />
+GABRIELLA</h1>
+</div>
+<h4>THE STORY OF A WOMAN'S COURAGE</h4>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>ELLEN GLASGOW</h2>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<img src="images/002.png" width="15%" alt="" title="" /></div>
+<div>
+<h4>FRONTISPIECE<br />
+BY<br />
+C. ALLAN GILBERT</h4>
+</div>
+<h5>GARDEN CITY -- NEW YORK</h5>
+<h4>DOUBLEDAY, PAGE &amp; COMPANY</h4>
+<h4>1916</h4>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<div class="center">
+<h3><a href="#BOOK_FIRST">BOOK FIRST&mdash;THE AGE OF
+FAITH</a></h3>
+<br />
+<table summary="">
+<tr>
+<td>CHAPTER</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_I">Presents a Shameless Heroine</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">3</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_II">Poor Jane</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">30</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_III">A Start in Life</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">61</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">Mirage</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">90</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_V">The New World</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">122</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">The Old Serpent</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">148</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">Motherhood</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">176</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<br />
+<h3><a href="#BOOK_SECOND">BOOK SECOND&mdash;THE AGE OF
+KNOWLEDGE</a></h3>
+<br />
+<table summary="">
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_Ia">I.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_Ia">Disenchantment.</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_Ia">211</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IIa">II.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_IIa">A Second Start in Life</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IIa">241</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IIIa">III.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_III">Work</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">274</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IVa">IV.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_IVa">The Dream and the Years</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IVa">300</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_Va">V.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_Va">Success</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_Va">331</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIa">VI.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VIa">Discoveries</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIa">368</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIIa">VII.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VIIa">Readjustments</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIIa">406</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIIIa">VIII.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VIIIa">The Test</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIIIa">444</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IXa">IX.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_IXa">The Past</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IXa">476</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_Xa">X.</a></td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_Xa">Dream and the Reality</a></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_Xa">501</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<br /></div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_FIRST" id="BOOK_FIRST"></a>BOOK FIRST</h2>
+<h3>THE AGE OF FAITH</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h3>PRESENTS A SHAMELESS HEROINE</h3>
+<p>After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock
+and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front
+parlour. On the window-sill, midway between the white curtains, a
+pot of blue hyacinths stood in a cracked china plate, and as the
+sunlight shone into the room, the scent of the blossoms floated to
+the corner where Gabriella was patiently pulling basting threads
+out of the hem of a skirt. For a minute her capable hands stopped
+at their work, and raising her smooth dark head she looked
+compassionately at her sister Jane, who was sitting, like a frozen
+image of martyrdom, in the middle of the long horsehair sofa. Three
+times within the last twelve months Jane had fled from her
+husband's roof to the protection of her widowed mother, a weak
+person of excellent ancestry, who could hardly have protected a
+sparrow had one taken refuge beneath her skirt. Twice before Mrs.
+Carr had wept over her daughter's woes and returned her, a sullen
+saint, to the arms of the discreetly repentant Charley; but to-day,
+while the four older children were bribed to good behaviour with
+bread and damson preserves in the pantry, and the baby was
+contentedly playing with his rubber ring in his mother's arms,
+Gabriella had passionately declared that "Jane must never, never go
+back!" Nothing so dreadful as this had ever happened before, for
+the repentant Charley had been discovered making love to his wife's
+dressmaker, a pretty French girl whom Jane had engaged for her
+spring sewing because she had more "style" than had fallen to the
+austerely virtuous lot of the Carr's regular seamstress, Miss Folly
+Hatch. "I might have known she was too pretty to be good," moaned
+Jane, while Mrs. Carr, in her willow rocking-chair by the window,
+wiped her reddened eyelids on the strip of cambric ruffling she was
+hemming.</p>
+<p>Unmoved among them the baby beat methodically on his mother's
+breast with his rubber ring, as indifferent to her sobs as to the
+intermittent tearful "coos" of his grandmother. He had a smooth
+bald head, fringed, like the head of a very old man, with pale
+silken hair that was almost white in the sunshine, and his eyes, as
+expressionless as marbles, stared over the pot of hyacinths at a
+sparrow perched against the deep blue sky on the red brick wall of
+the opposite house. From beneath his starched little skirt his
+feet, in pink crocheted shoes, protruded with a forlorn and
+helpless air as if they hardly belonged to him.</p>
+<p>"Oh, my poor child, what are we going to do?" asked Mrs. Carr in
+a resigned voice as she returned to her hemming.</p>
+<p>"There's nothing to do, mother," answered Jane, without lifting
+her eyes from the baby's head, without moving an inch out of the
+position she had dropped into when she entered the room. Then,
+after a sobbing pause, she defined in a classic formula her whole
+philosophy of life: "It wasn't my fault," she said.</p>
+<p>"But one can always do something if it's only to scream,"
+rejoined Gabriella with spirit.</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't scream," replied Jane, while the pale cast of
+resolution hardened her small flat features, "not&mdash;not if he
+killed me. My one comfort," she added pathetically, "is that only
+you and mother know how he treats me."</p>
+<p>Her pretty vacant face with its faded bloom resembled a pastel
+portrait in which the artist had forgotten to paint an expression.
+"Poor Jane Gracey," as she was generally called, had wasted the
+last ten years in a futile effort to hide the fact of an
+unfortunate marriage beneath an excessively cheerful manner. She
+talked continually because talking seemed to her the most
+successful way of "keeping up an appearance." Though everybody who
+knew her knew also that Charley Gracey neglected her shamefully,
+she spent twelve hours of the twenty-four pretending that she was
+perfectly happy. At nineteen she had been a belle and beauty of the
+willowy sort; but at thirty she had relapsed into one of the women
+whom men admire in theory and despise in reality. She had started
+with a natural tendency to clinging sweetness; as the years went on
+the sweetness, instead of growing fainter, had become almost
+cloying, while the clinging had hysterically tightened into a
+clutch. Charley Gracey, who had married her under the mistaken
+impression that her type was restful for a reforming rake, (not
+realizing that there is nothing so mentally disturbing as a fool)
+had been changed by marriage from a gay bird of the barnyard into a
+veritable hawk of the air. His behaviour was the scandal of the
+town, yet the greater his sins, the intenser grew Jane's sweetness,
+the more twining her hold. "Nobody will ever think of blaming you,
+darling," said Mrs. Carr consolingly. "You have behaved beautifully
+from the beginning. We all know what a perfect wife you have
+been."</p>
+<p>"I've tried to do my duty even if Charley failed in his,"
+replied the perfect wife, unfastening the hooks of her small
+heliotrope wrap trimmed with tarnished silver passementerie. Above
+her short flaxen "bang" she wore a crumpled purple hat ornamented
+with bunches of velvet pansies; and though it was two years old,
+and out of fashion at a period when fashions changed less rapidly,
+it lent an air of indecent festivity to her tearful face. Her youth
+was already gone, for her beauty had been of the fragile kind that
+breaks early, and her wan, aristocratic features had settled into
+the downward droop which comes to the faces of people who
+habitually "expect the worst."</p>
+<p>"I know, Jane, I know," murmured Mrs. Carr, dropping her thimble
+as she nervously tried to hasten her sewing. "But don't you think
+it would be a comfort, dear, to have the advice of a man about
+Charley? Won't you let me send Marthy for your Cousin Jimmy
+Wrenn?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother, I couldn't. It would kill me to have everybody know
+I'm unhappy!" wailed Jane, breaking down.</p>
+<p>"But everybody knows anyway, Jane," said Gabriella, sticking the
+point of her scissors into a strip of buckram, for she was
+stiffening the bottom of the skirt after the fashion of the middle
+'nineties.</p>
+<p>"Of course I'm foolishly sensitive," returned Jane, while she
+lifted the baby from her lap and placed him in a pile of cushions
+by the deep arm of the sofa, where he sat imperturbably gazing at
+the blue sky and the red wall from which the sparrow had flown.
+"You can never understand my feelings because you are so
+different."</p>
+<p>"Gabriella is not married," observed Mrs. Carr, with sentimental
+finality. "But I'm sure, Jane&mdash;I'm just as sure as I can be of
+anything that it wouldn't do a bit of harm to speak to Cousin Jimmy
+Wrenn. Men know so much more than women about such matters."</p>
+<p>In her effort to recover her thimble she dropped her spool of
+thread, which rolled under the sofa on which Jane was sitting, and
+while she waited for Gabriella to find it, she gazed pensively into
+the almost deserted street where the slender shadows of poplar
+trees slanted over the wet cobblestones. Though Mrs. Carr worked
+every instant of her time, except the few hours when she lay in bed
+trying to sleep, and the few minutes when she sat at the table
+trying to eat, nothing that she began was ever finished until
+Gabriella took it out of her hands. She did her best, for she was
+as conscientious in her way as poor Jane, yet through some tragic
+perversity of fate her best seemed always to fall short of the
+simplest requirements of life. Her face, like Jane's, was long and
+thin, with a pathetic droop at the corners of the mouth, a small
+bony nose, always slightly reddened at the tip, and faded blue eyes
+beneath an even row of little flat round curls which looked as if
+they were plastered on her forehead.</p>
+<p>Thirty-three years before, in the romantic and fiery 'sixties,
+she had married dashing young Gabriel Carr for no better reason
+apparently than that she was falling vaguely in love with love; and
+the marriage, which had been one of reckless passion on his side,
+had been for her scarcely more than the dreamer's hesitating
+compromise with reality. Passion, which she had been taught to
+regard as an unholy attribute implanted by the Creator, with
+inscrutable wisdom, in the nature of man, and left out of the
+nature of woman, had never troubled her gentle and affectionate
+soul; and not until the sudden death of her husband did she begin
+even remotely to fall in love with the man. But when he was once
+safely dead she worshipped his memory with an ardour which would
+have seemed to her indelicate had he been still alive. For sixteen
+years she had worn a crape veil on her bonnet, and she still went
+occasionally, after the morning service was over on Sunday, to
+place fresh flowers on his grave. Now that his "earthly nature,"
+against which she had struggled so earnestly while he was living,
+was no longer in need of the pious exorcisms with which she had
+treated its frequent manifestations, she remembered only the dark
+beauty of his face, his robust and vigorous youth, the tenderness
+and gallantry of his passion. For her daughters she had drawn an
+imaginary portrait of him which combined the pagan beauty of
+Antinous with the militant purity of Saint Paul; and this romantic
+blending of the heathen and the Presbyterian virtues had passed
+through her young imagination into the awakening soul of
+Gabriella.</p>
+<p>By the town at large Mrs. Carr's sorrow was alluded to as "a
+beautiful grief," yet so deeply rooted in her being was the
+instinct to twine, that for the first few years of her bereavement
+she had simply sat in her widow's weeds, with her rent paid by
+Cousin Jimmy Wrenn and her market bills settled monthly by Uncle
+Beverly Blair, and waited patiently for some man to come and
+support her.</p>
+<p>When no man came, and Uncle Beverly died of a stroke of apoplexy
+with his will unsigned, she had turned, with the wasted energy of
+the unfit and the incompetent, to solve the inexplicable problem of
+indigent ladyhood. And it was at this crucial instant that Becky
+Bollingbroke had put her awful question: "Have you made up your
+mind, Fanny, what you are going to do?" That was twelve years ago,
+but deep down in some secret cave of Fanny's being the ghastly echo
+of the words still reverberated through the emptiness and the
+silence.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think, darling," she pleaded now, as she had pleaded
+to Becky on that other dreadful occasion, "that we had better send
+immediately for Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"</p>
+<p>"I&mdash;I can't think," gasped Jane, "but you may if you want
+to, mother."</p>
+<p>"Send, Gabriella," said Mrs. Carr quickly, and she added
+tenderly, while Gabriella dropped her work and ran to the outside
+kitchen for Marthy, the coloured drudge, "you will feel so much
+better, Jane, after you have had his advice."</p>
+<p>Then at the sight of Jane's stricken face, which had turned blue
+as if from a sudden chill, she hurriedly opened the drawer of her
+sewing machine, and taking out a bottle of camphor she kept there,
+began tremulously rubbing her daughter's forehead. As she did so,
+she remembered, with the startling irrelevance of the
+intellectually untrained, the way Jane had looked in her veil and
+orange blossoms on the day of her wedding.</p>
+<p>"I wonder what on earth we have done to deserve our troubles?"
+she found herself thinking while she put the stopper back into the
+bottle and returned to her sewing.</p>
+<p>"Marthy has gone, mother," said Gabriella, with her cheerful air
+as she came back into the room, "and I shut the children in the
+laundry with Dolly who is doing the washing."</p>
+<p>"I hope they won't make themselves sick with preserves,"
+remarked Jane, with the first dart of energy she had shown.
+"Perhaps I'd better go and see. If Fanny eats too much we'll be up
+all night with her."</p>
+<p>"I told Dolly not to let them stuff," answered Gabriella, as she
+sat down by the window and threaded her needle. She was a tall,
+dark girl, slender and straight as a young poplar, with a face that
+was frank and pleasant rather than pretty, and sparkling brown eyes
+which turned golden and grew bright as swords when she was angry.
+Seen by the strong light of the window, her face showed sallow in
+tone, with a certain nobility about the bony structure beneath the
+soft girlish flesh, and a look of almost stern decision in the
+square chin and in the full rich curve of the mouth. Her hair,
+which was too fine and soft to show its thickness, drooped from its
+parting at the side in a dark wing over her forehead, where it
+shadowed her arched black eyebrows and the clear sweet gravity of
+her eyes. As she bent over her sewing the thin pure lines of her
+body had a look of arrested energy, of relaxed but exuberant
+vitality.</p>
+<p>"You won't go to the dance to-night, will you, Gabriella?"
+inquired Mrs. Carr nervously.</p>
+<p>"No, I'm not going," answered the girl regretfully, for she
+loved dancing, and her white organdie dress, trimmed with quillings
+of blue ribbon, lay upstairs on the bed. "I'll never dance again if
+only Jane won't go back to Charley. I'll work my fingers to the
+bone to help her take care of the children."</p>
+<p>"I'll never, never go back," chanted Jane with feverish
+passion.</p>
+<p>"But I thought Arthur Peyton was coming for you," said Mrs.
+Carr. "He will be so disappointed."</p>
+<p>"Oh, he'll understand&mdash;he'll have to," replied Gabriella
+carelessly.</p>
+<p>The sunshine faded slowly from the hyacinths on the window-sill,
+and drawing her crocheted cape of purple wool closer about her,
+Mrs. Carr moved a little nearer the fireplace. Outside the March
+wind was blowing with a melancholy sound up the long straight
+street, and rocking the glossy boughs of an old magnolia tree in
+the yard From the shining leaves of the tree a few drops of water
+fell on the brick pavement, where several joyous sparrows were
+drinking, and farther off, as bright as silver in the clear wind, a
+solitary church spire rose above the huddled roofs of the town.
+When the wind lulled, as it did now and then, a warm breath seemed
+to stir in the sunshine, which grew suddenly brighter, while a
+promise of spring floated like a faint provocative scent on the
+air. And this scent, so vague, so roving, that it was like the
+ghostly perfume of flowers, stole at last into the memory, and made
+the old dream of youth and the young grow restless at the call of
+Life, which sang to the music of flutes in the brain. But the wind,
+rising afresh, drove the spirit of spring from the street, and
+swept the broken leaves of the magnolia tree over the drenched
+grass to the green-painted iron urns on either side of the
+steps.</p>
+<p>The house, a small brick dwelling, set midway of an
+expressionless row and wearing on its front a look of desiccated
+gentility, stood in one of those forgotten streets where needy
+gentlewomen do "light housekeeping" in an obscure hinterland of
+respectability. Hill Street, which had once known fashion, and that
+only yesterday, as old ladies count, had sunk at last into a humble
+state of decay. Here and there the edges of porches had crumbled;
+grass was beginning to sprout by the curbstone; and the once
+comfortable homes had opened their doors to boarders or let their
+large, high-ceiled rooms to the impoverished relicts of Confederate
+soldiers. Only a few blocks away the stream of modern progress,
+sweeping along Broad Street, was rapidly changing the old Southern
+city into one of those bustling centres of activity which the press
+of the community agreed to describe as "a metropolis"; but this
+river of industrialism was spanned by no social bridge connecting
+Hill Street and its wistful relicts with the statelier dignities
+and the more ephemeral gaieties of the opposite side. To be really
+"in society" one must cross over, either for good and all, or in
+the dilapidated "hack" which carried Gabriella to the parties of
+her schoolmates in West Franklin Street.</p>
+<p>For in the middle 'nineties, before social life in Richmond had
+become both complicated and expensive, it was still possible for a
+girl in Gabriella's position&mdash;provided, of course, she came of
+a "good family"&mdash;to sew all day over the plain sewing of her
+relatives, and in the evening to reign as the acknowledged belle of
+a ball. "Society," it is true, did not reach any longer, except in
+the historic sense, to Hill Street; but the inhabitants of Hill
+Street, if they were young and energetic, not infrequently made
+triumphant excursions into "society." Though Gabriella was poor and
+sewed for her living, she had been, from the moment she left
+school, one of the most popular girls in town. To be sure, she was
+neither so pretty as Florrie Spencer nor so clever as Julia
+Caperton, but in the words of Julia's brother Algernon, she was
+"the sort you could count on." Even in her childhood it had become
+the habit of those about her to count on Gabriella. Without
+Gabriella, her mother was fond of saying, it would have been
+impossible to keep a roof over their heads.</p>
+<p>Twelve years before, when they had moved into the house in Hill
+Street, Mrs. Carr had accepted from Jimmy Wrenn the rent of the
+first floor and the outside kitchen, which was connected with the
+back porch by a winding brick walk, overgrown with wild violets,
+while the upper story was let to two elderly spinsters, bearing the
+lordly, though fallen, name of Peterborough. These spinsters, like
+Mrs. Carr, spent their lives in a beautiful and futile
+pretence&mdash;the pretence of keeping up an appearance. They also
+took in the plain sewing of their richer relatives, who lived in
+Franklin Street, and sent them little trays of sweet things as soon
+as the midday dinner was over on Sunday. Sometimes they would drop
+in to see Mrs. Carr just before supper was ready, and then they
+would pretend that they lived on tea and toast because they were
+naturally "light eaters," and that they sewed all day, not for the
+money, but because they liked to have "something to do with their
+hands" They were tall thin women in organdie caps and black alpaca
+dresses made with long basques which showed a greenish cast in the
+daylight. The walls of their rooms were covered with family
+portraits of the colonial period, and Mrs. Carr, who had parted
+with most of her treasures, often wondered how they had preserved
+so many proofs of a distinguished descent. Even her silver had
+gone&mdash;first the quaint old service with the Bolton crest,
+which had belonged to her mother; then, one by one, the forks and
+spoons; and, last of all, Gabriella's silver mug, which was
+carried, wrapped in a shawl, to the shop of old Mr. Camberwell. She
+was a woman who loved inanimate things with the passion which other
+women give only to children, and a thousand delicate fibres of
+sentiment knit her soul to the portraits on the wall, to the
+furniture with which she lived, to the silver and glass that had
+once belonged to her mother. When one after one these things went
+from her, she felt as if the very roots of her being were torn up
+from the warm familiar earth in which they had grown. "There's
+nothing left in the parlour that I shouldn't be ashamed to have
+your grandmother look at," she had once confessed to her
+daughters.</p>
+<p>Seen by the light of history, this parlour, in which so much of
+Gabriella's childhood was spent, was not without interest as an
+archaic survival of the fundamental errors of the mid-Victorian
+mind. The walls were covered with bottle-green paper on which
+endless processions of dwarfed blue peacocks marched relentlessly
+toward an embossed border&mdash;the result of an artistic frenzy of
+the early 'eighties. Neither Mrs. Carr nor Jimmy Wrenn, who paid
+the rent, had chosen this paper, but having been left on the
+dealer's hands, it had come under the eye of the landlord, who,
+since he did not have to live with it had secured it at a bargain.
+Too unused to remonstrance to make it effective, Mrs. Carr had
+suffered the offending decoration in meekness, while Jimmy, having
+a taste for embossment, honestly regarded the peacocks as
+"handsome." From the centre of the ceiling a massive gilt
+chandelier, elaborately festooned with damaged garlands, shed, when
+it was lighted, a dim and troubled gloom down on the threadbare
+Axminster carpet. Above the white marble mantelpiece, the old
+French mirror, one of the few good things left over from a public
+sale of Mrs. Carr's possessions, reflected a pair of bronze
+candelabra with crystal pendants, and a mahogany clock, which had
+kept excellent time for half a century and then had stopped
+suddenly one day while Marthy was cleaning. In the corner, between
+the door and the window, there was a rosewood bookcase, with the
+bare shelves hidden behind plaited magenta silk, and directly above
+it hung an engraving of a group of amiable children feeding fish in
+a pond. Across the room, over the walnut whatnot, a companion
+picture represented the same group of children scattering crumbs
+before a polite brood of chickens in a barnyard. Between the
+windows a third engraving immortalized the "Burial of
+Latan&eacute;" in the presence of several sad and resigned ladies
+in crinolines, while the sofa on which Jane sat was presided over
+by a Sully portrait of the beautiful Angelica Carr, wearing a white
+scarf on her head and holding a single rose in her hand. This
+portrait and a Saint Memin drawing of Mrs. Carr's grandfather, the
+Reverend Bartholomew Berkeley as a young man in a high stock, were
+the solitary existing relics of that consecrated past when Fanny
+Berkeley was "not brought up to do anything."</p>
+<p>To Mrs. Carr, whose mind was so constituted that any change in
+her surroundings produced a sensation of shock, the room was
+hallowed by the simple fact that she had lived in it for a number
+of years. That an object or a custom had existed in the past
+appeared to her to be an incontestible reason why it should
+continue to exist in the present. It was distressing to her to be
+obliged to move a picture or to alter the position of a piece of
+furniture, and she had worn one shape of bonnet and one style of
+hairdressing, slightly modified to suit the changing fashions, for
+almost twenty years. Her long pale face, her pensive blue eyes, and
+her look of anxious sweetness, made a touching picture of feminine
+incompetence; and yet it was from this pallid warmth, this gentle
+inefficiency of soul, that the buoyant spirit of Gabriella had
+sprung.</p>
+<p>For Gabriella was the incarnation of energy. From the moment of
+her birth when, in the words of her negro "mammy" she had looked
+"as peart as life," she had begun her battle against the enveloping
+twin powers of decay and inertia. To the intense secret
+mortification of her mother, who had prayed for a second waxlike
+infant after the fashion of poor Jane, she had been a notoriously
+ugly baby (almost as ugly as her Aunt Becky Bollingbroke who had
+never married), and as she grew up, this ugliness was barely
+redeemed by what Jane, in her vague way, described as "the
+something else in her face." According to Cousin Jimmy, who never
+recognized charm unless its manifestations were soft and purring,
+this "something else" was merely "a sunny temper"; and one of the
+constant afflictions of Gabriella's childhood was overhearing her
+mother remark to visitors: "No, she isn't so pretty as poor Jane,
+but, as Cousin Jimmy tells us, she is blessed with a sunny
+temper."</p>
+<p>"Give me that ruffle, mother, and I'll whip the lace on while
+we're waiting," she said now, laying aside the skirt of her Easter
+dress, and stretching out her hand for the strip of cambric in her
+mother's lap. But Mrs. Carr did not hear, for she was gazing, with
+the concentrated stare of Jane's baby, at a beautiful old lady who
+was walking slowly through the faint sunshine on the opposite
+pavement.</p>
+<p>"I wonder where Mrs. Peyton can be coming from in her best
+dress?" she remarked, forgetting Jane for an instant while her
+sense of tragedy yielded to the keener impulse of curiosity.</p>
+<p>"She never goes anywhere but to church or to the Old Ladies'
+home," replied Gabriella. "Arthur says she hasn't paid a call since
+her husband's death."</p>
+<p>"Well, I haven't made one, except of course to my relatives, for
+fifteen years," rejoined Mrs. Carr a trifle tartly. Then her manner
+lost its unusual asperity, and she added excitedly, "They're coming
+now, Jane. There's Cousin Jimmy and he's bringing Cousin Pussy and
+Uncle Meriweather!"</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother, I can't possibly see them! I feel as if it would
+kill me!" cried Jane in desperation.</p>
+<p>"Give her the camphor, mother," said Gabriella with grim humour
+as she went to open the door.</p>
+<p>"Brace yourself, my darling. They are coming," pleaded Mrs.
+Carr, as she slipped her arm under Jane's head. At the first hint
+of any excitement she invariably lost her presence of mind and
+became distracted; and Jane's hysterical outbursts never failed to
+convince her, though they usually left the more skeptical Gabriella
+unmoved. "Don't you think you would feel better if you lay back on
+the pillows?" she urged.</p>
+<p>Then the bell rang, and before Jane could swallow her sobs, her
+sister ushered in Jimmy and Pussy Wrenn, who were closely followed
+by the ponderous figure of Uncle Meriweather, a gouty but benign
+old gentleman, whose jet-black eyebrows and white imperial gave him
+a misleading military air.</p>
+<p>"Well, well, my dear, what's this I hear about Charley?"
+demanded Cousin Jimmy, whose sprightly manner was never sprightlier
+than in the hour of tragedy or the house of mourning. "What does he
+mean by letting you run away from him?"</p>
+<p>"I've done my duty by Charley. I've never, never failed in my
+duty!" wept Jane, breaking down on Pussy's tender bosom, and waking
+the sleeping baby.</p>
+<p>"We know, darling, we know," said Pussy, patting Jane's
+shoulder, while Jimmy drew a white silk handkerchief from his
+pocket, and hid his face under the pretence of blowing his
+nose.</p>
+<p>To see a woman cry never failed to wring a sympathetic tear from
+Jimmy. Though he was a man of hard common sense, possessed of an
+inflexible determination to make money, there was a soft spot
+inside of him which was reached only by the distress of one of the
+opposite sex. The suffering&mdash;particularly the financial
+suffering&mdash;of men left him unmoved. He could foreclose a
+mortgage or press a debt (as long as the debtor's wife or daughter
+did not appeal to him) as well as another; but the instant a skirt
+fluttered on the horizon that soft something inside of him
+appeared, as he expressed it, "to give way." Apart from their
+afflictions, he had an eye, he used to boast, for but one woman in
+the world, and she, thank God, was his wife. Handsome, portly,
+full-blooded, and slightly overfed, he had let Pussy twine him
+about her little finger ever since the afternoon when he had first
+seen her, small, trim, and with "a way with her," at the age of
+six.</p>
+<p>"Poor, poor child," said Pussy, cuddling Jane and the baby
+together against her sympathetic bosom. "Something must be done,
+Cousin Fanny. Something must be done, as Mr. Wrenn said on the way
+down, if it's only for the satisfaction of letting Charley know
+what we think of him."</p>
+<p>"We've got to put down our pride and take some step," declared
+Jimmy, wondering vaguely how he could have forgotten the spirited
+utterance his wife attributed to him. "I'm all for the authority of
+the husband, of course, and the sanctity of the home, and
+everything according to the Bible and all that&mdash;but, bless my
+soul, there's got to be a limit to what a woman is expected to
+stand. There're some things, and I know Uncle Meriweather will
+agree with me, that it isn't in human nature to put up with."</p>
+<p>"If I were forty years younger I'd call him out and give him a
+whipping he wouldn't forget in a jiffy," blustered Uncle
+Meriweather, feebly violent. "There's no way of defending a lady in
+these Godforsaken days. Why, I remember when I was a boy, my poor
+father&mdash;God bless him!&mdash;you recollect him, don't you
+Fanny?&mdash;never used a walking stick in his life and could read
+print without glasses at ninety&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Making love to the dressmaker," pursued Jimmy, whose righteous
+anger refused to be turned aside from its end.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think, Cousin Fanny," whispered Pussy, "that
+Gabriella had better leave the room?"</p>
+<p>"Gabriella? Why, how on earth can we spare her?" Mrs. Carr
+whispered back rather nervously. Then, beneath Pussy's compelling
+glance, she added timidly: "Hadn't you better go, darling, and see
+what the children are doing?"</p>
+<p>"They are playing in the laundry," replied Gabriella
+reassuringly. "I told Dolly not to let them go out of her
+sight."</p>
+<p>"She knows so much already for her age," murmured Mrs. Carr
+apologetically to Pussy.</p>
+<p>"I don't know what Mr. Wrenn will think of your staying, dear,"
+said Pussy, smiling archly at the girl. "Mr. Wrenn, I was just
+saying that I didn't know what you would think of Gabriella's
+staying in the room."</p>
+<p>Jimmy's large handsome face, with its look of perpetual
+innocence&mdash;the incorruptible innocence of a man who has never
+imagined anything&mdash;turned helplessly in the direction of his
+wife. All things relating to propriety came, he felt instinctively,
+within the natural sphere of woman, and to be forced, on the spur
+of the moment, to decide a delicate question of manners, awoke in
+him the dismay of one who sees his accustomed prop of authority
+beginning to crumble. Surely Pussy knew best about things like
+that! He would as soon have thought of interfering with her
+housekeeping as of instructing her in the details of ladylike
+conduct. And, indeed, he had not observed that Gabriella was in the
+room until his wife, for her own purpose, had adroitly presented
+the fact to his notice.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella in the room?" he repeated in perplexity. "Why, you'd
+better go, hadn't you, Gabriella? Oughtn't she to go, Pussy?"</p>
+<p>"Just as you think best, dear, but it seems to me&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Certainly she ought to go," said Uncle Meriweather decisively.
+"The less women and girls know about such matters, the better. I
+don't understand, Fanny, how you could possibly have consented to
+Gabriella's being present."</p>
+<p>"I didn't consent, Uncle Meriweather," protested poor Mrs. Carr,
+who could not bear the mildest rebuke without tears; "I only said
+to Pussy that Gabriella knew a great deal more already than she
+ought to, and I'm sure I'm not to blame for it. If I'd had my way
+she would have been just as sheltered as other girls."</p>
+<p>"Don't cry, mother, it isn't your fault," said Gabriella. "Uncle
+Meriweather, if you make mother cry I'll never forgive you. How can
+she help all these dreadful things going on?"</p>
+<p>She was sensible, she was composed, she was perfectly sweet
+about it; but, and this fact made Pussy gasp with dismay, she did
+not budge an inch from her position. With her clear grave eyes,
+which lost their sparkle when she grew serious, and her manner of
+eager sympathy, she appeared, indeed, to be the only one in the
+room who was capable of facing the situation with frankness. That
+she meant to face it to the end, Pussy could not doubt while she
+looked at her.</p>
+<p>"Oh, it doesn't matter about Gabriella. She knows everything,"
+said Jane, with the prickly sweetness of suffering virtue.</p>
+<p>"But she's a young girl&mdash;young girls oughtn't to hear such
+things," argued Uncle Meriweather, feeling helplessly that
+something was wrong with the universe, and that, since it was
+different from anything he had ever known in the past, he was
+unable to cope with it. Into his eyes, gentle and bloodshot above
+his fierce white moustache&mdash;the eyes of one who has never
+suffered the painful process of thinking things out, but has
+accepted his opinions as unquestioningly as he has accepted his
+religion or the cut of his clothes&mdash;there came the troubled
+look of one who is struggling against forces that he does not
+understand. For Gabriella was serious. There was not the slightest
+hope in the disturbed mind of Uncle Meriweather that she was
+anything but perfectly serious. Caprice, being a womanly quality,
+was not without a certain charm for him. He was quite used to it;
+he knew how to take it; he had been taught to recognize it from his
+childhood up. It was pretty, it was playful; and his mind, if so
+ponderous a vehicle could indulge in such activity, was fond of
+play. But after the first perplexed minute or two he had
+relinquished forever the hope that Gabriella was merely capricious.
+Clearly the girl knew what she was talking about; and this
+knowledge, so surprising in one of her age and sex, gave him a
+strange dreamy sense of having just awakened from sleep.</p>
+<p>"I must say I like girls to be girls, Fanny," he pursued
+testily; "I reckon I'm only an old fogy, but I like girls to be
+girls. When a woman loses her innocence, she loses her greatest
+charm in the eyes of a man&mdash;of the right sort of a man. Pluck
+the peach with the bloom on it, my poor father used to say. He
+didn't believe in all this new-fangled nonsense about the higher
+education of women&mdash;none of his daughters could do more I than
+read and write and spell after a fashion, and yet look what wives
+and mothers they made! Pokey married three times, and was the
+mother of fourteen children, nine of them sons. And are we any
+better off now than then, I ask? Whoever heard of a woman running
+away from her husband before the war, and now here is poor
+Jane&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But it isn't my fault, Uncle Meriweather!" cried Jane, in
+desperation at his obtuseness. "I've tried to be the best wife I
+could&mdash;ask Charley if I haven't. He neglected me long before I
+let any one know&mdash;even mother. I forgave him again and again,
+and I'd go on forgiving him forever if he would let me. I've told
+him over and over that I was going to be a faithful wife to him if
+he killed me."</p>
+<p>"Of course, my dear, I'm not meaning to reproach you," said
+Uncle Meriweather, overcome by the effect of his words. "We all
+know that you've stood as much as any woman could and keep her
+self-respect. It isn't possible, I suppose, for you to go on living
+with Charley?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, I couldn't bear a separation, not a legal one at any rate,"
+groaned Mrs. Carr. "Of course she must come away for a time, but
+nobody must hear of it or it would kill me. They are one in the
+sight of God, and my dear old father had such a horror of
+separations."</p>
+<p>"Well, I'd kick him out&mdash;I'd kick him out so quickly he
+wouldn't know it," declared Jimmy. "If a daughter of mine were
+married to that scamp, she'd never lay eyes on him except over my
+dead body. I reckon God would enjoy the sight of his getting his
+deserts."</p>
+<p>Deep down in Cousin Jimmy, deeper than sentiment, deeper than
+tradition, deeper even than the solid bedrock of common sense,
+there was the romantic essence of his soul, which hated baseness
+with a fiery hatred. His ruddy face, still boyish in spite of his
+fifty years, blanched slowly, and there came into his soft dark
+eyes the look he had worn at Malvern Hill under the fire of the
+enemy.</p>
+<p>At the sight Gabriella thrilled as she did when drums were
+beating and armies were marching. "Oh, Cousin Jimmy, don't let her
+go back!" she cried.</p>
+<p>"I can't go back to him now! I can never, never go back to him
+again!" intoned Jane with passionate energy.</p>
+<p>"No, God bless her, she shan't go back," declared Jimmy, as
+profoundly stirred as Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"But the children? What will become of the children?" demanded
+Mrs. Carr, not of Jimmy, but of the universe. Her helpless gaze,
+roving wildly from face to face, and resting nowhere, was like the
+gaze of a small animal caught in a trap. "If Jane separates the
+children from their father what will people think of her?" she
+asked, still vainly addressing Heaven.</p>
+<p>"As long as she is right it doesn't matter what people think,"
+retorted Gabriella; but her protest, unlike her mother's, was
+directed to the visible rather than to the invisible powers. The
+thought of Jane's children&mdash;of the innocent souls so unaware
+of the awful predicament in which they were placed that their
+bodies could be devouring bread and damson preserves in the
+laundry. The poignant thought of these children moved her more
+deeply than she had ever been moved before in her twenty years. A
+passion for self-sacrifice rushed through her with the piercing
+sweetness of religious ecstasy. Nothing like this had ever happened
+to her before&mdash;not when she was confirmed, not when she had
+stood at the head of her class, not when she had engaged herself to
+Arthur Peyton two years before. It was the pure flame of experience
+at its highest point that burned in her.</p>
+<p>"I will take care of the children," she said breathlessly. "I
+will give up my whole life to them. I will get a place in a store
+and work my fingers to the bone, if only Jane will never go
+back."</p>
+<p>For a moment there was silence; but while Gabriella waited for
+somebody to answer, she felt that it was a silence which had become
+vocal with inexpressible things. The traditions of Uncle
+Meriweather, the conventions of Mrs. Carr, the prejudices of Jimmy,
+and the weak impulses of Jane, all these filled the dusk through
+which the blank faces of her family stared back at her. Then, while
+she stood white and trembling with her resolve&mdash;with the
+passionate desire to give herself, body and soul, to Jane and to
+Jane's children&mdash;the voice of Experience spoke pleasantly, but
+firmly, through Cousin Pussy's lips, and it dealt with Gabriella's
+outburst as Experience usually deals with Youth.</p>
+<p>"You are a dear child, Gabriella," it said; "but how in the
+world could you help Jane by going into a store?"</p>
+<p>In the midst of the emotional scene, Cousin Pussy alone remained
+sweetly matter-of-fact. Though she was not without orderly
+sentiments, her character had long ago been swept of heroics, and
+from her arched gray hair, worn &agrave; la Pompadour, to her
+pretty foot in its small neat boot, she was a practical soul who
+had as little use for religious ecstasy as she had for downright
+infidelity. There seemed to her something positively unnatural in
+Gabriella's manner&mdash;a hint of that "sudden conversion" she
+associated with the lower classes or with the negroes.</p>
+<p>"You are a dear child," she repeated, biting her fresh lips;
+"but how will you help Jane by going into a store?"</p>
+<p>"I can trim hats," returned Gabriella stubbornly. "Mr.
+Brandywine will take me into his new millinery department, I know,
+for I said something to him about it the other day."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Gabriella, not in a store! It would kill mother!" cried
+Jane, with the prophetic wail of Cassandra.</p>
+<p>"Not in a store!" echoed Mrs. Carr; "you couldn't work in a
+store. If you want to work," she concluded feebly, "why can't you
+work just as well in your home?"</p>
+<p>"But it isn't the same thing, mother," explained Gabriella, with
+angelic patience. "Nobody will get me to make hats at home, and,
+besides, I've got to learn how to do it. I've got to learn business
+methods."</p>
+<p>"But not in a shop, my dear," protested Uncle Meriweather in the
+precise English of his youth.</p>
+<p>"Bless my heart!" chuckled Cousin Jimmy. "Business methods!
+You're as good as a show, Gabriella, and, by George! you've plenty
+of pluck. I like pluck in man or woman."</p>
+<p>"I shouldn't encourage her if I were you, Mr. Wrenn," said
+Cousin Pussy, almost forgetting to be indirect.</p>
+<p>"Well, of course, I don't approve of that store business,"
+replied Jimmy, deprecatingly, "but I can't help liking pluck when I
+see it. Look here, Gabriella, if you're bent on working, why don't
+you turn in and teach?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, let her teach by all means," agreed Uncle Meriweather,
+with genuine enthusiasm for the idea. "I've always regarded
+teaching as an occupation that ought to be restricted by law to
+needy ladies."</p>
+<p>"But I can't teach, I don't know enough, and, besides, I'd hate
+it," protested Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"I'm sure you might start a school for very little children,"
+said Mrs. Carr. "You don't have to know much, to teach them, and
+you write a very good hand."</p>
+<p>"What about plain sewing?" asked Pussy in her ready way.
+"Couldn't you learn to make those new waists all the girls are
+wearing?"</p>
+<p>"I haven't the patience to sew well. Look how hard mother works,
+making buttonholes with stitches so fine you can hardly see them,
+and yet she doesn't get enough to put bread into her mouth, and but
+for her relatives she'd have been in the poorhouse long ago. I'm
+tired of being on charity just because we are women. Now that Jane
+has come home for good I am simply obliged to find something to
+do."</p>
+<p>"I don't mind your wanting to work, dear, I think it's splendid
+of you," returned Pussy, "but I do feel that you ought to work in a
+ladylike way&mdash;a way that wouldn't interfere with your social
+position and your going to germans and having attention from young
+men and all that."</p>
+<p>"Why don't you make lampshades, Gabriella?" demanded Jane in an
+emphatic burst of inspiration. "Sophy Madison earns enough from
+lampshades to send her sister and herself to the White Sulphur
+Springs every summer."</p>
+<p>"Sophy makes all the lampshades that anybody wants, and,
+besides, she gets orders from the North&mdash;she told me so
+yesterday."</p>
+<p>"Gabriella crochets beautifully," remarked Mrs. Carr a little
+nervously because of the failure of her first suggestion. "The last
+time I went to see Miss Matoaca Chambers in the Old Ladies' Home,
+she told me she made quite a nice little sum for her church by
+crocheting mats."</p>
+<p>"And Gabriella can cook, too," rejoined Pussy, with exaggerated
+sprightliness, for she felt that Mrs. Carr's solution of the
+problem had not been entirely felicitous. "Why doesn't she try
+sending some of her angel food to the Woman's Exchange?"</p>
+<p>Jimmy, who had listened to this advice with the expression of
+tolerant amusement he always wore when women began to talk about
+the more serious affairs of life in his presence, made an honest,
+if vulgar, attempt to lighten the solemnity of the situation with a
+joke.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella isn't trying to earn church money. You're out gunning
+for a living, aren't you, Ella?" he inquired.</p>
+<p>"I'm sick of being dependent," repeated Gabriella, while her
+face grew stern. "Do you think if Jane had had enough money to live
+on that she would ever have stood Charley so long?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, I should, Gabriella. Marriage is sacred to me!"
+exclaimed Jane, whose perfect wifeliness atoned, even in the
+opinion of Jimmy, for any discrepancies in logic. "Nothing on earth
+could have induced me to leave him until&mdash;until this
+happened."</p>
+<p>The conviction that she had never at any moment since her
+marriage "failed in her duty to Charley" lent a touching sanctity
+to her expression, while the bitter lines around her mouth faded in
+the wan glow that flooded her face. Whatever her affliction,
+however intense her humiliation, Jane was supported always by the
+most comforting of beliefs&mdash;the belief that she had been
+absolutely right and Charley absolutely wrong through the ten
+disillusioning years of their married life. Never for an
+instant&mdash;never even in a nightmare&mdash;had she been visited
+by the disquieting suspicion that she was not entirely
+blameless.</p>
+<p>"Well, you've left him now anyway," said Gabriella, with the
+disarming candour which delighted Jimmy and perplexed Uncle
+Meriweather, "so somebody has got to help you take care of the
+children."</p>
+<p>"She shall never come to want as long as Pussy and I have a cent
+left," declared Cousin Jimmy, and his voice expressed what Mrs.
+Carr described afterward as "proper feeling."</p>
+<p>"And we'd really rather that you'd earn less and keep in your
+own station of life," said Pussy decisively.</p>
+<p>"If you mean that you'd rather I'd work buttonholes or crochet
+mats than go into a store and earn a salary, then I can't do it,"
+answered Gabriella, as resolute, though not so right-minded, as
+poor Jane. "I'd rather die than be dependent all my life, and I'm
+going to earn my living if I have to break rocks to do it."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h3>POOR JANE</h3>
+<p>Supper was over, and Gabriella, still in the dress she had worn
+all day, was picking up the children's clothes from the floor of
+her room. According to Mrs. Carr's hereditary habit in sorrow or
+sickness, Jane had been served in bed with tea and toast, while
+several small hard cots had been brought down from the attic and
+arranged in the available space in the two bedrooms. As Gabriella
+looked at the sleeping children, who had kicked the covering away,
+and lay with round rosy limbs gleaming in the lamplight, she
+remembered that Arthur Peyton was coming at nine o'clock to take
+her to Florrie's party, and she told herself with grim
+determination that she would never go to a party again. The
+Berkeley conscience, that vein of iron which lay beneath the
+outward softness and incompetence of her mother and sister, held
+her, in spite of her tempting youth, to the resolution she had
+made. She had told Jimmy that she meant to earn her living if she
+had to break rocks to do it, and Gabriella, like Pussy, came of a
+race that "did not easily change its mind."</p>
+<p>Turning to the bureau, she smoothed out the children's hair
+ribbons and pinned them, in two tight little blue and pink rolls,
+to the pincushion. Then taking up a broken comb, she ran it through
+the soft lock of hair that fell like a brown wing over her
+forehead. Her bright dark eyes, fringed in short thick lashes and
+set wide apart under arched eyebrows, gazed questioningly back at
+her from a row of german favours with which she had decorated the
+glass; and it was as if the face of youth, flickering with a
+flamelike glow and intensity, swam there for an instant in the dim
+greenish pool of the mirror. Beneath the charm of the face there
+was the character which one associates, not with youth, but with
+age and experience. Beneath the fine, clear lines of her head and
+limbs, the tall slenderness of her figure, the look of swiftness
+and of energy, which was almost birdlike in its grace and poise,
+there was a strength and vigour which suggested a gallant boy
+rather than the slighter and softer frame of a girl.</p>
+<p>While she stood there, Gabriella thought regretfully of all that
+it would mean to give up her half-dependent and wholly ladylike
+existence and go to work in a shop. Necessity not choice was
+driving her; and in spirit she looked back almost wistfully to the
+securely circumscribed lot of her grandmother. For there was little
+of the rebel in her temperament; and had she been free to choose,
+she would have instinctively selected, guided by generations of
+gregarious ancestors, the festive girlhood which Cousin Pussy had
+so ardently described. She wanted passionately all the things that
+other girls had, and her only quarrel, indeed, with the sheltered
+life was that she couldn't afford it. In the expressive phrase of
+Cousin Jimmy, the sheltered life "cost money," and to cost money
+was to be beyond the eager grasp of Gabriella.</p>
+<p>The door opened as if yielding under protest, and Marthy
+entered, still hurriedly tying the strings of the clean apron she
+had slipped on over her soiled one before answering the
+door-bell.</p>
+<p>"Yo' beau done come, Miss Ella. Ain't you gwine?"</p>
+<p>"No, I'm not going to the party, Marthy, but ask him to wait
+just a minute."</p>
+<p>"He's settin' over yonder in de parlour wid his overcoat
+on."</p>
+<p>"Well, ask him to take it off; I'll be there in a moment." She
+spoke as gravely as Marthy had done, yet in her face there was a
+light play of humour.</p>
+<p>Two years ago she would have thrilled with joy at the thought
+that Arthur was waiting for her; but in those two years since her
+engagement she had grown to look upon her first love as the
+gossamer, fairylike romance of a child. For months she had known
+that the engagement must be broken sooner or later; and she knew
+now, while she listened to Marthy's shuffling feet hastening to
+deliver her message, that she must break it to-night. In the dim
+pool of her mirror a face looked back at her that was not the face
+of Arthur Peyton; she saw it take form there as one sees a face
+grow gradually into life from the dimness of dreams. It was, she
+told herself to-night, the very face of her dream that she saw.</p>
+<p>"Well, I must get it over," she said with a sternness which gave
+her a passing resemblance to the Saint Memin portrait of the
+Reverend Bartholomew Berkeley; "I've got to get it over to-night,
+and whatever happens I've got to be honest." Then, with a last
+glance at the sleeping children, she lowered the gas, and went
+across the darkened hail, which smelt of pickles and bacon because
+one end of it was used as a storeroom.</p>
+<p>The parlour had been swept since the family council had
+deliberated there over Jane's destiny. The scraps of cambric had
+been gathered up from the threadbare arabesques in the carpet; the
+chairs had been placed at respectable distances apart; the gas-jets
+in the chandelier were flaming extravagantly under the damaged
+garlands; and the sewing machine had been wheeled into the
+obscurity of the hail, for it would have humiliated Gabriella's
+mother to think that her daughter received young men in a room
+which looked as if somebody had worked there.</p>
+<p>When Gabriella entered, Arthur Peyton was standing in front of
+the fireplace, gazing abstractedly at his reflection in the French
+mirror. Though his chestnut hair was carefully brushed, he had
+instinctively lifted his hand to smooth down an imaginary lock, and
+while he did this, he frowned slightly as if at a recollection that
+had ruffled his temper. His features were straight and very narrow,
+with the look of sensitiveness one associates with the
+thoroughbred, and the delicate texture of his skin emphasized this
+quality of high-breeding, which was the only thing that one
+remembered about him. In his light-gray eyes there was a
+sympathetic expression which invariably won the hearts of old
+ladies, and these old ladies were certain to say of him afterward,
+"such a gentleman, my dear&mdash;almost of the old school, you
+know, and we haven't many of them left in this hurrying age."</p>
+<p>He had done well, though not brilliantly, at college, for his
+mind, if unoriginal, had never given anybody, not even his mother,
+the least bit of trouble. For three years he had worked with
+admirable regularity in the office of his uncle, Carter Peyton, one
+of the most distinguished lawyers in the Virginia of his period,
+and it was generally felt that young Arthur Peyton would have "a
+brilliant future." For the present, however, he lived an uneventful
+life with his widowed mother in a charming old house, surrounded by
+a walled garden, in Franklin Street. Like the house, he was always
+in perfect order; and everything about him, from his loosely
+fitting clothes and his immaculate linen to his inherited
+conceptions of life, was arranged with such exquisite precision
+that it was impossible to improve it in any way. He knew exactly
+what he thought, and he knew also his reason, which was usually a
+precedent in law or custom, for thinking as he did. His opinions,
+which were both active and abundant, were all perfectly legitimate
+descendants of tradition, and the phrase "nobody ever heard of such
+a thing," was quite as convincing to him as to Mrs. Carr or to
+Cousin Jimmy Wrenn.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, aren't you going?" he asked reproachfully as the
+girl entered.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Arthur, we've had such a dreadful day! Poor Jane has left
+Charley for good and has come home, with all the children. We've
+been busy dividing them among us, and we're going to turn the
+dining-room into a nursery.</p>
+<p>"Left Charley? That's bad, isn't it?" asked Arthur
+doubtfully.</p>
+<p>"I feel so sorry for her, Arthur. It must be terrible to have
+love end like that."</p>
+<p>"But she isn't to blame. Everybody knows that she has forgiven
+him again and again."</p>
+<p>"Yes, everybody knows it," repeated Gabriella, as if she drew
+bitter comfort from the knowledge, "and she says now that she will
+never, never go back to him."</p>
+<p>For the first time a shadow appeared in Arthur's clear eyes.</p>
+<p>"Do you think she ought to make up her mind, darling, until she
+sees whether or not he will reform? After all, she is his
+wife."</p>
+<p>"That's what mother says, and yet I believe Charley is the only
+person on earth mother really hates. Now Cousin Jimmy and I will do
+everything we can to keep her away from him."</p>
+<p>"I think I shouldn't meddle if I were you, dearest. She'll
+probably go back to him in the end because of the children.</p>
+<p>"But I am going to help her take care of the children," replied
+Gabriella stanchly. "Of course, my life will be entirely different
+now, Arthur," she added gently. "Everything is altered for me, too,
+since yesterday. I have thought it all over for hours, and I am
+going to try to get a place in Brandywine's store."</p>
+<p>"In a store?" repeated Arthur slowly, and she saw the muscles of
+his mouth tighten and grow rigid.</p>
+<p>"Mother doesn't like the idea any more than you do, but what are
+we to come to if we go on in the old aimless way? One can't make a
+living out of plain sewing, and though, of course, Charley will be
+supposed to provide for his children, he isn't exactly the sort one
+can count on. Brandywine's, you see, is only a beginning. What I
+mean is that I am obliged to learn how to support myself."</p>
+<p>"But couldn't you work just as well in your home, darling?</p>
+<p>"People don't pay anything for home work. You must see what I
+mean, Arthur."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I see," he replied tenderly; but after a moment's thought,
+he went on again with the gentle obstinacy of a man whose thinking
+had all been done for him before he was born. "I wish, though, that
+you would try to hold out a little longer, working at home with
+your mother. In a year or two we shall be able to marry."</p>
+<p>"I couldn't," said Gabriella, shaking her head. "Don't urge me,
+Arthur."</p>
+<p>"If you would only consent to live with mother, we might marry
+now," he pursued, after a minute, as if he had not heard her.</p>
+<p>"But it wouldn't be fair to her, and how could I ask her to take
+mother and Jane and the children? No, I've thought it all out,
+dear, and I must go to work."</p>
+<p>"But I'll work for them, Gabriella. I'll do anything on earth
+rather than see you ordered about by old Brandywine."</p>
+<p>"He won't order me about," answered Gabriella cheerfully; "but
+mother feels just as you do. She says I am going out of my class
+because I won't stay at home and work buttonholes."</p>
+<p>"You couldn't go out of your class," replied Arthur, with an
+instinctive gallantry which even his distress could not overcome;
+"but I can't get used to the thought of it, darling&mdash;I simply
+can't. You're so sacred to me. There's something about the woman a
+man loves that's different from every other woman, and the bare
+idea of your working in a shop sickens me. I always think of you as
+apart from the workaday world. I always think of you as a star
+shining serenely above the sordid struggle&mdash;" Overwhelmed by
+the glowing train of his rhetoric, he broke down suddenly and
+caught passionately at the cool hand of Gabriella.</p>
+<p>As he looked at her slender finger, on which he had placed her
+engagement ring two years before, it seemed to him that the
+situation was becoming intolerable&mdash;that it was an affront not
+only to his ideal of Gabriella, as something essentially starlike
+and remote, but to that peculiar veneration for women which he
+always spoke and thought of as "Southern." His ideal woman was
+gentle, clinging, so perfectly a "lady" that she would have
+perished had she been put into a shop; and, though he was aware
+that Gabriella was a girl of much character and determination, his
+mind was so constructed that he was able, without difficulty, to
+think of her as corresponding to this exalted type of her sex. By
+the simple act of falling in love with her he had endowed her with
+every virtue except the ones that she actually possessed.</p>
+<p>"I know, I know," said Gabriella tenderly, for she saw that he
+suffered. Her training had been a hard one, though she had got it
+at home, and in a violent reaction from the sentimentality of her
+mother and Jane she had become suspicious of any language that
+sounded "flowery" to her sensitive ears. With her clear-sighted
+judgment, she knew perfectly well that by no stretch of mind or
+metaphor could she be supposed to resemble a star&mdash;that she
+was not shining, not remote, not even "ideal" in Arthur's delicate
+sense of the word. She had known the horrors of poverty, of that
+bitter genteel poverty which must keep up an appearance at any
+cost; and she could never forget the grim days, after the death of
+Uncle Beverly Blair, when they had shivered in fireless rooms and
+gone for weeks without butter on their bread. For the one strong
+quality in Mrs. Carr's character was the feeling she spoke of
+complacently, though modestly, as "proper pride"; and this proper
+pride, which was now resisting Gabriella's struggle for
+independence, had in the past resisted quite as stubbornly the
+thought of an appeal to the ready charity of her masculine
+relatives. To seek a man's advice had been from her girlhood the
+primal impulse of Mrs. Carr's nature; but, until Fate had starved
+her into sincerity, she had kept alive the ladylike fiction that
+she was in need of moral, not material, assistance.</p>
+<p>"Of course, if there were any other way, Arthur," said
+Gabriella, remembering the earlier battles with her mother, and
+eager to compromise when she could do so with dignity; "but how can
+I go on being dependent on Cousin Jimmy and Uncle Meriweather.
+Neither of them is rich, and Cousin Jimmy has a large family."</p>
+<p>Of course she was reasonable. The most disagreeable thing about
+Gabriella, Jane had once said, was her inveterate habit of being
+reasonable. But then Jane, who was of an exquisite sensibility,
+felt that Gabriella's reasonableness belonged to a distinctly lower
+order of intelligence. When all was said, Gabriella saw clearly
+because she had a practical mind, and a practical mind is usually
+engrossed with material matters.</p>
+<p>"I understand exactly how you feel, dear, but if only you could
+go on just as you are for a few years longer," said Arthur,
+sticking to his original idea with a tenacity which made it
+possible for him to argue for hours and yet remain exactly where he
+had started. Though they talked all night, though she convinced him
+according to all the laws and principles of logic, she knew that he
+would still think precisely what he had thought in the beginning,
+for his conviction was rooted, deeper than reason, in the
+unconquerable prejudices which had passed from the brain into the
+very blood of his race. He would probably say at the end: "I admit
+all that you tell me, Gabriella, but my sentiment is against it;"
+and this sentiment, overruling sense, would insist, with sublime
+obstinacy, that Gabriella must not work in a shop. It would ignore,
+after the exalted habit of sentiment, such merely sordid facts as
+poverty and starvation (who ever heard of a woman of good family
+starving in Virginia?), and, at last, if Gabriella were really in
+love with Arthur, it would triumph over her finer judgment and
+reduce her to submission. But while she watched him, in the very
+minute when, failing for words, he caught her in his arms, she said
+to herself, suddenly chilled and determined: "I must get it over
+to-night, and I've got to be honest." The scent of the hyacinths
+floated to her again, but it seemed to bring a cold wind, as if a
+draught had blown in through the closed slats of the shutters.</p>
+<p>"Everything has changed, Arthur," she said, "and I don't think I
+ought to go on being engaged." Then because her words sounded
+insincere, she added sternly: "Even if we could be
+married&mdash;and of course we can't be&mdash;I&mdash;I don't feel
+that I should want to marry. I am not sure that I love you enough
+to marry you."</p>
+<p>It was all so unromantic, so unemotional, so utterly different
+from the scene she had pictured when she imagined what "breaking
+her engagement" would be like. Then she had always thought of
+herself as dissolving in tears on the horsehair sofa, which had
+become sacred to the tragedy of poor Jane; but, to her surprise,
+she did not feel now the faintest inclination to cry. It ought to
+have been theatrical, but it wasn't&mdash;not even when she took
+off her engagement ring, as she had read in novels that girls did
+at the decisive instant, and laid it down on the table. When she
+remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but Arthur
+seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the fire
+in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray's Elegy
+and brought it back to Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"I'll never give you up," said Arthur stubbornly, and knowing
+his character, she felt that he had spoken the truth. He could not
+give her up even had he wished it, for, like a belief, she had
+passed from his brain into the fibre of his being. She had become a
+habit to him, and not love, but the inability to change, to cease
+thinking what he had always thought, to break a fixed manner of
+life, would keep him faithful to her in his heart.</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry&mdash;oh, I'm sorry," she murmured, longing to have
+it over and to return to Jane and the children. It occurred to her
+almost resentfully that love was not always an unmixed delight.</p>
+<p>"Is there any one else, Gabriella?" he asked with a sudden
+choking sound in his voice. "I have sometimes thought&mdash;in the
+last four or five months&mdash;that there might be&mdash;that you
+had changed&mdash;that&mdash;" He stopped abruptly, and she
+answered him with a beautiful frankness which would have horrified
+the imperishable, if desiccated, coquetry of her mother.</p>
+<p>"There is some one else and there isn't," she replied simply. "I
+mean I think of some one else very often&mdash;of some one who
+isn't in my life at all&mdash;from whom I never hear&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Is it George Fowler?"</p>
+<p>She bowed her head, and, though she did not blush, her eyes grew
+radiant.</p>
+<p>"And you have known him less than a year?"</p>
+<p>Again she bowed her head without speaking. What was there, after
+all, that she could say in justification of her behaviour?</p>
+<p>A groan escaped him, smothered into a gentle murmur of protest.
+"And I thought women were more constant than men!" he exclaimed
+with something of the baffled and helpless feeling which had
+overtaken Uncle Meriweather while he regarded Gabriella.</p>
+<p>The generalization was not without interest for Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"I thought so, too," she observed dispassionately. "I thought
+so, too, and that is why it was such a dreadful surprise to me when
+it happened. You yourself aren't more shocked and surprised than I
+was in the beginning," she added.</p>
+<p>"But you've got used to the thought, I suppose?"</p>
+<p>"Well, one has to, you see. What else is there to do? I always
+understood from mother"&mdash;she went on with the same eager
+interest, as if she were stumbling upon new and important
+intellectual discoveries&mdash;"I always understood that women
+never fell in love with men first&mdash;I mean until they had had
+positive proof that their love would be returned. But in this case
+that didn't seem to matter at all. Nothing mattered, and the more I
+fought against it and tried to be true to my engagement, the more I
+found myself being false. It's all very strange," she concluded,
+"but that is just how it happened."</p>
+<p>"And he knows nothing about it?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, no. I told him I was engaged to you, and then he went
+away."</p>
+<p>For an instant he was silent, and watching his face, so
+carefully guarded and controlled by habit that it had the curious
+blank look of a statue's, Gabriella could form no idea of the
+suppressed inarticulate suffering in his heart.</p>
+<p>"And if he came back would you marry him?" he asked.</p>
+<p>Before replying she sat for a minute gazing down on her folded
+hands and weighing each separate word of her answer.</p>
+<p>"I should try not to, Arthur," she said at last, "but&mdash;but
+I am not sure that I should be able to help it."</p>
+<p>When at last he had said "good-bye" rather grimly, and gone out
+of the door without looking back, she was conscious of an immense
+relief, of a feeling that she could breathe freely again after an
+age of oppression. There was a curious sense of unreality about the
+hour she had just passed through, as if it belonged not to actual
+life, but to a play she had been rehearsing. She had felt nothing.
+The breaking of her engagement had failed utterly to move her.</p>
+<p>After bolting the front door, she turned out the gas in the
+parlour, pushed back the lump of coal in the grate in the hope of
+saving it for the morrow, and went cautiously down the hall to her
+room. As she passed her mother's door, a glimmer of light along the
+threshold made her pause for a minute, and while she hesitated, an
+anxious voice floated out to her:</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, is that you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, Mother, do you want anything?"</p>
+<p>"Jane has one of her heart attacks. I put her to bed in my room
+because it is more comfortable than the dining-room. Don't you
+think you had better go back and wake Marthy?"</p>
+<p>"Is she ill? Let me come in," answered Gabriella, pushing open
+the door and brushing by Mrs. Carr, who stood, shrunken and
+shivering, in a gray flannel wrapper and felt slippers.</p>
+<p>Though Jane's attacks were familiar occurrences, they never
+failed to produce an immediate panic in the household. As a child
+of nine, Gabriella remembered being aroused in the middle of a
+bitter night, hastily wrapped in her mother's shawl and a blanket,
+and hurried up the staircase to Jane, who had broken her engagement
+to Charley the evening before. Jane, pale, angelic, palpitating,
+appeared to draw her last breath as they entered, while the old
+doctor supported her in his arms, and Marthy, in a frenzy of
+service, rattled the dead embers in the grate. It had all been
+horribly vivid, and when Jane had murmured Charley's name in a
+dying voice, they had stood, trembling and blue with cold, around
+her bed, waiting for the end. But the end had not come, and three
+months later Jane was married to Charley Gracey.</p>
+<p>After that scene, Gabriella had associated Jane's attacks with a
+freezing January night and a fireless grate (though the last but
+one had occurred in mid-August), and she was relieved now to find a
+fire burning in her mother's room and a kettle singing merrily on
+the fender. The elder children, with their flannel petticoats
+pinned over their thin little shoulders, were sitting straight and
+stiff on a box couch which had been turned into a bed, and their
+strange little faces looked wan and peaked in the firelight.</p>
+<p>Jane was really ill, Gabriella decided, after a glance at her
+sister. Nothing except acute suffering could have given her that
+ghastly pallor or made her eyes sink so far back in her head. She
+lay quite motionless on the far side of the big tester bed, staring
+straight up at the ceiling with an expression which terrified
+Gabriella, though she had seen it on her sister's face at least a
+dozen times before to-night.</p>
+<p>"Has Arthur gone?" asked Mrs. Carr in a voice that sounded as if
+she were running.</p>
+<p>"Yes. Did you want him, mother?"</p>
+<p>"I thought we might send him for the doctor and for Charley.
+Don't you think Charley ought to be told of her condition? She has
+asked for the children."</p>
+<p>"Have you given her the digitalis?"</p>
+<p>"I can't make her swallow it. There are the drops on the table
+by the bed. My hands tremble so I had to measure them three
+times."</p>
+<p>Taking the glass from the table, Gabriella bent over her sister
+and implored her to swallow the drops, but, without appearing to
+hear her voice, Jane still stared blankly upward, with the rigid,
+convulsed look of a woman who has been stricken with dumbness. Her
+flaxen hair, damp with camphor, which Mrs. Carr had wildly splashed
+on her forehead, clung flat and close to her head, while the only
+pulse in her body seemed to beat in irregular, spasmodic throbs in
+her throat.</p>
+<p>"Don't go, mother. I'll wake Marthy," cried Gabriella, for Mrs.
+Carr, inspired by the spirit of panic, was darting out of the door
+in her felt slippers. Then, while the children, crying
+distractedly, rushed to Jane's bedside, the girl ran out of the
+house and along the brick walk to the kitchen and the room above it
+where Marthy lived the little life she had apart from her work. In
+answer to Gabriella's call she emerged entirely dressed from the
+darkness; and at the news of Jane's illness she was seized with the
+spurious energy which visits her race in the moment of tragedy. She
+offered at once to run for the doctor, and suggested, without a
+hint from Gabriella, that she had better leave word, on her way
+home, for Marse Charley.</p>
+<p>"I knowed 'twuz comin' jez ez soon ez I lay eyes on 'er," she
+muttered, for she was an old family servant. "Dar ain' no use 'n
+tryin' ter come betweenst dem de good Lawd is done jine tergedder
+fur worse. A baid husban'! Hi! Dar ain't un 'oman erlive, I reckon,
+dat 'ouldn't ruther own a baid husban' den no husban' at all. You
+all is got to teck 'em de way dey's made, en dar's moughty few un
+um dat is made right."</p>
+<p>Still muttering, she stumbled down the walk and out of the gate,
+while Gabriella returned to her mother's room and hurried the
+weeping children into their shoes and stockings. Mrs. Carr, still
+in her flannel wrapper, with her little flat gray curls screwed up
+on pins for the night, and her thin ankles showing pathetically
+above her felt slippers, ran nervously to and fro with mustard
+plasters and bottles of hot water which she continually refilled
+from the kettle on the fender. Occasionally she paused long enough
+to hold the camphor to Jane's nose or to lift the quilt from the
+bottom of the bed and then put it carefully back in the very spot
+where it had lain before she had touched it. And because she was
+born to take two steps to every one that was necessary, because she
+could not accomplish the simplest act without a prodigious waste of
+energy and emotion, because she died twenty deaths over the
+slightest anxiety, and, most of all, because she was the last
+person on earth who ought to have been burdened with poverty and
+hard work and an unhappily married daughter&mdash;because of all
+these things Mrs. Carr wore herself to a shadow in the quarter of
+an hour they spent waiting for the doctor and Charley Gracey.</p>
+<p>Though she had brought Jane through at least a dozen "attacks,"
+she still lost her presence of mind as completely as on that
+January night when, utterly distraught, she had hurried Gabriella
+to the first death-bed scene of her sister; she still grew as
+forgetful of herself and her own feelings, and, in obedience to
+some profound law of her nature, she still as confidently "expected
+the worst." For Mrs. Carr's philosophy, like Jane's, was of that
+active but dreary sort that thrives best upon misery. Just as Jane,
+who had lost every illusion about Charley, went on loving him in
+spite of it, so Mrs. Carr, having lost her illusions about life,
+retained a kind of wistful fondness for the thing that had wounded
+her.</p>
+<p>The door-bell rang sharply, and Gabriella went to let in the
+doctor, a brisk, authoritative young man of the new school, who had
+learned everything there was to be known about medicine except the
+way to behave in a sickroom, and who abhorred a bedside manner as
+heartily as if it were calomel or castor oil. His name was Darrow,
+and he was the assistant of old Dr. Walker, Mrs. Carr's family
+physician, who never went out at night since he had passed his
+seventieth birthday. Gabriella, who liked him because he was not
+anecdotal and gave small doses of medicine, hastily led the way to
+her mother's room before she ran back to meet Charley Gracey at the
+door of the dark parlour.</p>
+<p>"You can't see her now. The doctor is with her," she whispered.
+"I'll make a light in here and you can wait."</p>
+<p>"Let me," said Charley, quite as pleasantly as if he were not a
+bad husband, while he found a match and struck it on the sole of
+his foot. Then, as the gas flared up, he exclaimed, with a low
+whistle, "By Jove, you're a sight, Gabriella!"</p>
+<p>"Well, it's your fault," replied Gabriella sharply, letting him
+see, as she told herself, exactly what she thought of him. "You've
+made Jane so ill we thought she was dying."</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry for that," he said, suddenly smitten with gravity.
+"Is she really so bad?"</p>
+<p>His charming freckled face, with its irrepressible humour, grew
+almost grotesquely solemn, while the habitual merriment faded
+slowly from his light-gray eyes, leaving them empty of expression.
+He was a short, rather thick-set man, not particularly
+good-looking, not particularly clever, but possessing a singular,
+if unaccountable, charm. Everybody liked Charley, though nobody
+respected him. He was a scamp, but a lovable scamp, while Jane,
+with the best intentions in the world, had managed to make every
+virtue unattractive. When people condemned him, they said that he
+was "utterly unprincipled"; when they softened in their judgment,
+they admitted that he had "the best heart in the world."</p>
+<p>"I suppose it isn't any worse than other attacks," answered
+Gabriella, "but you know what they are like."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I know," replied Charley. "Oh, Lord, don't I?"</p>
+<p>"She asked mother to send for you," continued Gabriella. "She
+wants you to know that she has forgiven you."</p>
+<p>"Has she?" said Charley, without elation. Turning away, he
+stared for a minute or two at the engraving of the children feeding
+fish in a pond; then, with his eyes still glued to the picture, he
+burst out passionately: "Gabriella, I'd hoped she wouldn't this
+time!"</p>
+<p>"If I were she," retorted Gabriella crushingly, "I would never
+speak to you again until the day of my death."</p>
+<p>"If she were you," rejoined Charley, with barefaced audacity,
+"I'd have been a good husband. Why, I was simply starving to be a
+good husband when I married Jane. It's my ideal in life. I'm all
+for the domestic thing by nature. I was tired&mdash;positively
+dog-tired of the other kind. I wanted a wife. I adored&mdash;I've
+always adored babies&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"If that is true," returned Gabriella sternly, for she was not
+disposed to soften to Charley, and in her heart she deeply resented
+what she called Jane's "weakness," "if that is true why do you
+behave so outrageously to Jane and the children? Why can't you be
+decent?"</p>
+<p>"I could," answered Charley, with engaging lucidity, "if she
+were less so. It's her infernal virtue I can't stand, Gabriella. No
+man could stand it without taking to drink."</p>
+<p>"But you knew she was that way. She was always trying to make
+people better. It is her mission. Why, I remember one winter night
+before you were married mother got me out of bed in the cold to
+come and hear Jane forgive you beautifully about something."</p>
+<p>"That was the first time, and it was very touching. I suppose
+the first time always is touching. Of course, I didn't know she
+meant to keep it up. No man could possibly have kept it up," said
+Charley, with bitterness, "but she married me to reform me, and it
+is the only thing she has really enjoyed about her marriage. She's
+a born reformer. I haven't eaten a thing I cared about, nor drank a
+drop I wanted, nor used a bad word I was fond of, since I married,
+without being nagged at about it. She loved me for my vices, and
+yet she hasn't let me keep a single one&mdash;not even the
+smallest&mdash;not even cigarettes. Nag! Good God! She's nagged me
+to perfection ever since the day of our wedding when she made me
+sign the pledge before she let me kiss her!"</p>
+<p>"Well, that doesn't make it any easier for us or for the
+children," replied Gabriella, without sympathy; "and if you don't
+think of Jane, you might at least think of your children."</p>
+<p>"Of course it's hard on the kids," admitted Charley ruefully.
+"But as for Jane&mdash;now, will you tell me what would become of
+Jane after she had reformed me? Why, she'd be bored to death. She'd
+be a martyr without any martyrdom. When she made me give up
+tobacco, she lost interest in everything for a week. She was like
+your Uncle Meriweather after the surrender. There wasn't anything
+left to fight about, and fighting was all he could do&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"I believe&mdash;I really believe you have been drinking,"
+interrupted Gabriella with cold disgust. "Suppose Jane were to
+die?"</p>
+<p>"She won't die. She'll be all right as soon as she has forgiven
+me."</p>
+<p>He was not only bad, she told herself, he was perfectly
+shameless. He appeared to have been born without the faintest sense
+of responsibility. And yet, while Gabriella listened to him, she
+realized that, in some ways, he might be a less trying companion
+than poor Jane. His candour was as simple, as unaffected, as the
+serene artlessness of a child. It was impossible not to believe in
+his sincerity. Though she "despised him," as she told herself,
+still she was obliged to admit that there was something to be said
+on his side. The harsh judgment of youth&mdash;of youth that never
+tries to understand, that never makes allowances&mdash;softened
+under the influence of Charley's reprehensible charm. Even badness,
+Gabriella conceded grudgingly, might be easier to live with in some
+circumstances than a too exalted self-righteousness.</p>
+<p>"If you'll bring Jane to that way of thinking," retorted
+Charley, with vulgar frankness, "I'll give you five hundred dollars
+down. If you'll thoroughly corrupt her mind and persuade her to
+neglect her duty to me, I'll make it a thousand."</p>
+<p>He was jesting! It was monstrous, with Jane lying ill in her
+mother's room; it was indecent; it was grossly immoral; but he was
+actually jesting! Not even scandal, not even the doctor's presence
+in the house, could suppress his incorrigible spirit of levity. "If
+I were Jane, I'd never speak to him," thought Gabriella, and the
+question flashed through her mind, "how in the world could she ever
+have loved him?" It was impossible for her to conceive of any
+situation when Charley could have made a girl fall in love with
+him. Though she had heard stories of his early conquests, she had
+never believed them. There were times when she almost liked him,
+but it was the kind of liking one gave to an inferior, not to an
+equal. She admitted his charm, but it was the charm of an
+irresponsible creature&mdash;the capricious attraction of a child
+or an animal. Her common sense, she told herself, would keep her
+from making a mistake such as Jane had made with her life; and,
+besides, she was utterly devoid of the missionary instinct which
+had lured Jane to destruction. "If I ever marry, it will be
+different from that," she thought passionately. "It will be utterly
+different!"</p>
+<p>The door of Mrs. Carr's room opened suddenly, Marthy's name was
+called in a high voice, and the doctor was heard saying
+reassuringly: "She is over the worst. There is no need to
+worry."</p>
+<p>"Don't send me in there alone, Gabriella," begged Charley
+piteously. "I'd rather face bullets than Jane in an attack." His
+bravado had deserted him, and he appeared positively craven. The
+stiffness seemed to have gone not only out of his character, but
+out of his clothes also. Even his collar had become limp with
+emotion.</p>
+<p>"Well, I don't care," answered Gabriella, "you've got to stand
+it. There's no use squirming when you've only yourself to blame."
+With a malicious pleasure, she watched the consternation in
+Charley's face, while the doctor's footsteps came rapidly down the
+hall and stopped at the threshold of the parlour.</p>
+<p>"You may go in, Mr. Gracey&mdash;your wife is asking for you;
+but be very careful not to say anything that might disturb her.
+Just keep her as quiet as you can for a few hours."</p>
+<p>Then the door in the distance opened again, and Mrs. Carr, in
+the hollow tones of destiny, called: "Gabriella, Jane is waiting to
+speak to her husband."</p>
+<p>"Come, Charley," ordered Gabriella, grimly, and a moment later
+she pushed him across her mother's threshold and turned back into
+the hall. "I hope she'll make him squirm," she said to herself,
+with relish. Nothing, she felt, except the certainty of Charley's
+squirming, could make up to her for the half-hour she had just
+spent with him.</p>
+<p>She was still standing there when Jane's medicine came from the
+druggist at the corner, and for a while she waited outside the
+door, fearing to lighten Charley's punishment by her entrance. The
+medicine had to be measured in drops, and she went into the
+dining-room, where the children were huddled together in an
+improvised bed, and diluted the mixture with water before she could
+persuade herself to go into her mother's room. Even then she
+hesitated until she remembered that the doctor had said Jane must
+take the first dose immediately. Not by her, if she could help it,
+should the divine wrath of the furies be appeased.</p>
+<p>But with the first touch of her hand on the knob, Charley's
+flippant voice greeted her with, "Won't you come in, Gabriella?"
+and swallowing her angry retort, she entered stiffly, with the
+glass held out straight before her. Charley, on his knees beside
+the bed, with his arm under his wife's pillow, stared up at his
+sister-in-law with the guilty look of a whipped terrier, while
+Jane, pallid, suffering, saintly, rested one thin blue-veined hand
+on his shoulder. Her face was the colour of the sheet, her eyes
+were unnaturally large and surrounded by violet circles; and her
+hair, drenched with camphor, spread over the pillow like the hair
+of a drowned woman. Never had she appeared so broken, so resigned,
+so ineffably spiritual; and Gabriella's solitary comfort was the
+thought that Jane's attack had conquered Charley as completely as
+it had conquered the rest of them.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, I've forgiven him," said Jane, with fainting
+sweetness, "and he wants you and mother to do so. He has promised
+to be good in the future."</p>
+<p>"Well, I shan't forgive him for keeping me up all night,"
+answered Gabriella resentfully, and she felt that even if it killed
+Jane, she could not keep back her reply. "I can't answer for
+mother, but I haven't forgiven him and I never shall." She felt her
+anger hardened to a rock inside of her, and it hurt her so that she
+put the glass hurriedly down on the table and ran out of the room.
+As she closed the door behind her she heard Jane saying gently:
+"Yes, I forgive you, Charley, but I can't help feeling that you
+don't love me as you ought to."</p>
+<p>An old cape of her mother's was lying on a chair in the hall,
+and, throwing it over her shoulders, Gabriella went out on the
+porch and stood breathing quickly in the cold air, with her hand
+pressed on her bosom, which rose and fell as if she had been
+running. She was not only furious, she was grossly affronted,
+though she had known from the beginning, she said to herself,
+exactly how it would end. She had never trusted Jane&mdash;no, not
+a minute; she had never really trusted her mother. Something had
+told her that Jane had never meant in her heart to leave Charley,
+that she was only making a scene, after the immemorial habit of
+women, before going back to him. And yet, though she had suspected
+this all along, she was as indignant as if she had been deceived by
+a conspiracy of the three of them. Her sense of decency was
+outraged. She despised Jane because she had no strength of
+character; but even while this thought was still in her mind, she
+admitted that Jane had had sufficient strength of character to
+upset the household, bring Charley to repentance, and emerge, faint
+but victorious, from the wreck of their peace. Yes, she despised
+Jane, though it was impossible to deny that Jane's methods were
+successful, since she had got what she wanted.</p>
+<p>The street was very quiet, for it was in the small gray hours
+between midnight and dawn, and a solitary policeman, strolling by
+on his beat, appeared as wan and spectral as the bare boughs of the
+poplar trees beneath which he moved. The wind was still blowing
+over the brow of the hill, and now and then it tossed a wisp of
+straw or a handful of dust on the porch where Gabriella was
+standing. As it swept onward it drove a flock of shadows, like
+black birds, up the open street into the clear space under the
+old-fashioned gas lamp at the corner. All the lights were out in
+the neighbouring houses, but from a boarding-house down the block
+there floated suddenly the gay snatch of a waltz played on a banjo
+with a broken string. Then the music stopped, the policeman passed,
+and Gabriella and the wind were alone in the street. Overhead the
+stars shone dimly through a web of mist; and it seemed to her that
+the sadness of the sky and the sadness of the earth had mingled
+there in the long straight street where the wind blew with a
+melancholy sound between rows of silent and darkened houses.</p>
+<p>A noise in the hall made her turn, and, looking up, she saw the
+gaunt figure of Miss Amelia Peterborough standing in the bend of
+the staircase. In her hand the old maid held a twisted candlestick
+of greenish brass, and the yellow flame of the candle cast a
+trembling, fantastic shadow on the wall at her back. Her head,
+shorn of the false "front" she wore in the day, appeared to have
+become all forehead and beaked nose; her eyes had dwindled to mere
+points of blackness; her mouth, sunken and drawn over toothless
+gums, was like the mouth of a witch. The wind, blowing in gusts
+through the open door, inflated her gray shawl and the skirt of her
+dressing-gown, while, with each flutter of her garments, the
+grotesque shadow on the white wall danced and gibbered behind her.
+And, as she gazed down on the girl, it was as if the end of life,
+with its pathos, its cruelties, its bitterness and its
+disillusionment, had stopped for a fleeting instant to look back at
+life in the pride and ignorance of its beginning.</p>
+<p>"There was so much moving about, I thought something might have
+happened," said Miss Amelia apologetically, while Gabriella,
+closing the door, shut the draught from the staircase.</p>
+<p>"Jane had one of her heart attacks," answered the girl. "I'm so
+sorry we waked you."</p>
+<p>But she was thinking while she spoke, "So that is old
+age&mdash;so that is what it means to be old?" There is a vague
+compassion in the thought, but it held no terror, for the decay of
+Miss Amelia seemed as utterly remote and detached from her own life
+as one of the past ages in history. The youth in her brain created
+a radiant illusion of immortality. By no stretch of imagination
+could she picture herself like the infirm and loveless creature
+before her. Yet she knew, without realizing it, that Miss Amelia
+had once been young, that she had once even been beautiful. There
+was a legend, fading now into tradition, that her lover had been
+killed in a duel, fought for her while she was still a girl, and
+that she had worn only white or black since that day&mdash;she who
+was now well over eighty. She had known love; a man had died for
+her; it was said that she had been a famous coquette in the
+'thirties; and now she stood there, grotesque and sexless, with her
+eyes empty of dreams and of memories, and her face as gray and
+sinister as the face of her shadow.</p>
+<p>"I hope she is better, poor child," she said, for, like the rest
+of Richmond, she believed Jane to be all saint and Charley all
+sinner. "If I can be of any help, be sure to let me know."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I'll let you know, thank you. I hope we didn't disturb
+Miss Jemima."</p>
+<p>The younger Miss Peterborough&mdash;called "the happy one" by
+Gabriella and Mrs. Carr because she was always cheerful, though, as
+far as any one could tell, she had nothing and had never had
+anything to be cheerful about&mdash;was named Jemima. A chronic
+invalid, from some obscure trouble which had not left her for
+twenty years, she was seldom free from pain, and yet Gabriella had
+never seen her (except at funerals, for which she entertained a
+perfectly healthy fondness as diversions free to the poor) without
+a smile on her face.</p>
+<p>"Sister Jemima doesn't wake easily. She is a sound sleeper and
+she's getting a little hard of hearing"; and lifting the
+candlestick to light her way, Miss Amelia turned back up the
+stairs, while the flame flitted like a golden moth into the
+dimness.</p>
+<p>"Poor old thing," thought Gabriella, imagining in her ignorance
+that she could understand the tragedy of Miss Amelia's life; "poor
+old thing, she must have had a terrible time."</p>
+<p>As she approached her mother's door, Charley came out, glanced
+at her sheepishly, and hurried to where his hat hung on the walnut
+hatrack in the front hall. Then, as if overcoming his first impulse
+to avoid her, he beckoned to her furtively, and said in a
+sepulchral whisper: "Gabriella, be very careful what you say to
+her."</p>
+<p>The audacity of it! This from Charley, the abandoned, the
+depraved, the unutterably abhorrent in her sight. Without replying,
+she turned indignantly away and opened her mother's door.</p>
+<p>Lying in the middle of the bed now, and slightly propped with
+pillows, Jane was sipping a second dose of medicine from a glass
+Mrs. Carr held to her lips.</p>
+<p>"I know you don't understand my forgiving him, Gabriella," she
+said very gently, "but some day, after you are married, you will
+realize that I do it from a sacred duty&mdash;from a sacred duty,"
+she repeated firmly, while the shining light of martyrdom illumined
+her features.</p>
+<p>"Well, it's none of my business," answered Gabriella crossly,
+"but the sooner you do it, I suppose the sooner you will have to do
+it again." If only for once Jane would be direct, if only she would
+be natural, if only she would speak the truth and not fiction.</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, dear, you don't understand him any better than you do
+me," said Jane as sweetly as ever in spite of Gabriella's
+deplorable loss of temper. "He is really dreadfully penitent, and
+he sees that he hasn't always treated me as he ought to have done.
+But you'll know what I mean when you marry, Gabriella. She'll
+understand me then, won't she, mother?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sometimes tempted to hope that Gabriella will never marry,"
+replied Mrs. Carr with the uncompromising bitterness of abject
+despair; "the Carrs all seem to marry so badly."</p>
+<p>In her normal mood she would never have uttered this heresy, for
+she belonged to a generation that regarded even a bad marriage as
+better for a woman than no marriage at all; but the night had worn
+her out, and one of her spells of neuralgia, which followed
+fatigue, was already beginning in her face. The purple crocheted
+"fascinator" she had caught up at the doctor's entrance was still
+on her head, and her long pale face, beneath the airy scallops,
+appeared frozen in an expression of incurable melancholy. For the
+rest she had been too frightened, too forgetful of herself and her
+own comfort even to put on her stockings, though Gabriella had
+begged her to do so. "Don't think about me. Attend to poor Jane,"
+she had repeated over and over.</p>
+<p>"Mother, go into my room and get into bed," commanded Gabriella,
+whose patience, never abundant, was ebbing low. "If you don't get
+some sleep your neuralgia won't be any better."</p>
+<p>"It isn't any better. I don't expect it to be any better."</p>
+<p>"Well, you must go to bed or it will get worse. I'll heat you a
+cup of milk and wrap you up in warm blankets."</p>
+<p>"Don't worry about me, dear. Think of poor Jane."</p>
+<p>"We've been thinking of Jane all night, and you need it now more
+than she does. I can tell by your eyes how you are suffering."</p>
+<p>In the first streak of dawn, which was beginning to glimmer
+faintly on the window-panes, Mrs. Carr looked as if she had
+withered overnight.</p>
+<p>"It's only my left temple," she said dully, "otherwise I am
+quite well. No, dear, I must rub Jane's forehead until she falls
+asleep. The doctor said it was important that we should keep her
+soothed."</p>
+<p>But it was a law of Gabriella's nature that she never knew when
+she was beaten. Failure aroused the sleeping forces within her, and
+when these forces were once liberated, the spasmodic efforts of
+Mrs. Carr and the indirect methods of Jane were alike powerless to
+oppose them. At such times a faint flush rose to her pale cheeks,
+her eyes shone with a burning darkness, while her mouth lost its
+fresh young red and grew hard in outline.</p>
+<p>"You must go to bed, mother," she repeated in a voice which Mrs.
+Carr would have obeyed had it issued from the wall or a piece of
+furniture.</p>
+<p>Fifteen minutes later Gabriella stood authoritatively beside the
+bed, while her mother, with a mustard plaster at the back of her
+neck, obediently sipped hot milk from a teacup. Mrs. Carr had
+surrendered to the conquering spirit of her daughter, but her
+surrender, which was unwilling and weakly defiant, gave out
+presently a last feeble flicker of resistance.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think, Gabriella, we might arrange to live with
+Jane?" she asked. "It would be a saving of expense for us both, and
+we might be so helpful about the children."</p>
+<p>"And about Charley, too, I suppose," suggested Gabriella
+maliciously.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Carr, having been born without a sense of humour, never
+understood the broadest joke unless it was illustrated; but even to
+her it became evident, after a moment's anxious thought, that
+Gabriella was teasing her.</p>
+<p>"You seem to forget that he is her husband," she replied, with a
+pathetic clutch at her dignity, which, owing perhaps to the purple
+"fascinator" and the mustard plaster, she failed completely to
+recapture. Then, as she finished the milk and handed back the empty
+cup to her daughter, she added wearily, for life, as she often said
+to herself of late, was becoming almost too much for her, and she
+was feeling worn out and old:</p>
+<p>"My one comfort, Gabriella, is the thought that Arthur Peyton
+loves you. There couldn't be anybody more unlike Charley."</p>
+<p>"There couldn't be," agreed Gabriella mildly, for she felt that
+another blow would prostrate her mother.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<h3>A START IN LIFE</h3>
+<p>In the late 'seventies and early 'eighties the most important
+shop in the town of Gabriella's birth was known to its patrons
+(chiefly ladies in long basques, tightly tied back skirts, and
+small eccentric bonnets) as Brandywine &amp; Plummer's drygoods
+store. At that period, when old Mrs. Carr, just completing her
+ninetieth year with a mind fixed upon heaven, would have dropped
+dead at the idea that her granddaughter should ever step out of her
+class, Gabriella's mother bought her dresses (grosgrain of the very
+best quality) from Major Brandywine. To be sure, even in those
+days, there were other shops in the city&mdash;for was not Broad
+Street already alluded to in the newspapers as "the shopping
+thoroughfare of the South?"&mdash;but, though they were as numerous
+as dandelions in June, these places were by no means patronized so
+widely by "the best people." Small shops, of course, carrying a
+single line of goods and supplying their particular products to an
+exacting and discriminating class, held their own even against the
+established reputation of Brandywine &amp; Plummer's. O'Connell's
+linen store, Twitlow's china store, Mrs. Tonk's doll store, and
+Green &amp; Brady's store for notions&mdash;all these were situated
+in Broad Street hardly a stone's throw from the Second Market. But
+none of these, excellent as they were, could bear comparison with
+the refined atmosphere, so different from the vulgar bustle of a
+modern department store, which enveloped one in the quiet gloom of
+Brandywine &amp; Plummer's. In the first place, one could be
+perfectly sure that one would be waited on by a lady&mdash;for
+Brandywine &amp; Plummer's, with a distinguished Confederate
+soldier at its head and front, provided an almost conventual
+shelter for distressed feminine gentility. There was, for instance,
+Miss Marye of the black silk counter, whose father had belonged to
+Stuart's cavalry and had fallen at Yellow Tavern; there was Miss
+Meason of the glove counter, and there was Mrs. Burwell Smith of
+the ribbon counter&mdash;for, though she had married beneath her,
+it was impossible to forget that she was a direct descendant of
+Colonel Micajah Burwell, of Crow's Nest Plantation.</p>
+<p>Then, if one happened to be in search of cotton goods, one would
+be almost certain to remark on the way home: "Miss Peters, who
+waited on me in Brandywine's this morning, has unmistakably the
+manner of a lady," or "that Mrs. Jones in Brandywine's must be
+related to the real Joneses, she has such a refined appearance."
+And, at last, in the middle 'nineties, after the opening of the new
+millinery department, which was reached by a short flight of steps,
+decorated at discreet intervals with baskets of pink paper roses,
+customers were beginning to ask: "May I speak to Miss Gabriella for
+a minute? I wish to speak to Miss Gabriella about the hat she is
+having trimmed for me."</p>
+<p>For here, also, because of what poor Jane called her "practical
+mind," the patrons of Brandywine &amp; Plummer's were learning that
+Gabriella was "the sort you could count on." As far as the actual
+work went, she could not, of course, hold a candle (this was Mr.
+Plummer's way of putting it) to Miss Kemp or Miss Treadway, who had
+a decided talent for trimming; but no customer in balloon sleeves
+and bell-shaped skirt was ever heard to remark of these young women
+as they remarked of Gabriella, "No, I don't want anybody else,
+please. She takes such an interest." To take an interest in other
+people might become quite as marketable an asset, Mr. Plummer was
+discovering, after fifty years of adherence to strictly business
+methods, as a gift for the needle; and, added to her engaging
+interest, Gabriella appeared to know by instinct exactly what a
+customer wanted.</p>
+<p>"I declare Miss Kemp had almost persuaded me to take that brown
+straw with the green velvet bandeau before I thought of asking
+Gabriella's advice," Mrs. Spencer was overheard saying to her
+daughter, as she paused, panting and breathless, at the head of the
+short flight of steps.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Gabriella always had taste; I'll ask her about mine,"
+Florrie tossed back gaily in the high fluting notes which expressed
+so perfectly the brilliant, if slightly metallic, quality of her
+personality.</p>
+<p>Beside her mother, a plump, bouncing person, with a noisy though
+imperfectly articulate habit of speech, and the prominent hips and
+bust which composed the "fine figure" of the period, Florrie seemed
+to float with all the elusive, magic loveliness of a sunbeam. From
+the shining nimbus of her hair to her small tripping feet she was
+the incarnation of girlhood&mdash;of that white and gold girlhood
+which has intoxicated the imagination of man. She shed the
+allurement of sex as unconsciously as a flower sheds its perfume.
+Though her eyes were softly veiled by her lashes, every male clerk
+in Brandywine &amp; Plummer's was dazzled by the deep blue light of
+her glances. In her red mouth, with its parted lips, in the pure
+rose and white of her flesh, in the rich curve of her bosom, which
+promised already the "fine figure" of her mother, youth and summer
+were calling as they called in the velvet softness of the June
+breeze. Innocent though she was, the powers of Life had selected
+her as a vehicle for their inscrutable ends.</p>
+<p>"Where is Miss Carr? I must speak to Miss Carr, please," she
+said to one of the shop girls who came up, eager to serve her.
+"Will you tell her that Miss Spencer is waiting to speak to
+her?"</p>
+<p>Responding to the girl's artless stare of admiration, she threw
+a friendly glance at her before she turned away to try on a
+monstrous white Leghorn hat decorated around the crown with a
+trellis of pink roses. Unless she happened to be in a particularly
+bad humour&mdash;and this was not often the case&mdash;Florrie was
+imperturbably amiable. She enjoyed flattery as a cat enjoys the
+firelight on its back, and while she purred happily in the pleasant
+warmth, she had something of the sleek and glossy look of a pretty
+kitten.</p>
+<p>"How does this look on me, mother?" she asked over her shoulder
+of Mrs. Spencer, who was babbling cheerfully in her loud tones to
+Miss Lancaster, the forewoman.</p>
+<p>Though some of the best blood in Virginia, profusely diluted
+with some of the worst, flowed comfortably in Mrs. Spencer's veins,
+it was impossible even for her relatives to deny that she could be
+at times decidedly vulgar. Having been a conspicuous belle and
+beauty of a bold and dashing type in her youth, she now devoted her
+middle-age to the enjoyment of those pleasures which she had
+formerly sacrificed to the preservation of her figure and her
+complexion. Though she still dyed her somewhat damaged hair, and
+strenuously pinched in her widening waist, she had ceased, since
+her fiftieth birthday, to forego the lesser comforts of the body.
+As she was a person of small imagination, and of no sentiment, it
+is probable that she was happier now than she had been in the days
+when she suffered the deprivations and enjoyed the triumphs of
+beauty.</p>
+<p>"What's that, Florrie?" she inquired shrilly. "No, I shouldn't
+get that if I were you. It doesn't flare enough. I'm crazy about a
+flare."</p>
+<p>"But I want a pink bandeau, mother," replied Florrie a little
+pettishly, as she patted her golden-red fringe. "I wonder where
+Gabriella is? Isn't she ever coming, Miss Lancaster?"</p>
+<p>"I thought I saw her when I came in," observed Mrs. Spencer,
+craning her handsome neck, which was running to fat, in the
+direction of the trimming room. "Florrie, just turn your head after
+a minute and look at the hat Patty Carrington is buying&mdash;pea
+green, and it makes her face look like a walnut. She hasn't the
+faintest idea how to dress. Do you think I ought to speak to her
+about it?"</p>
+<p>"No, let her alone," replied Florrie impatiently. "Is this any
+better than the Leghorn?"</p>
+<p>"Well, I must say I don't think there is much style about it,
+though, of course, with your hair, you can carry off anything.
+Isn't it odd how exactly she inherited my hair, Miss Lancaster? I
+remember her father used to say that he would have fallen in love
+with a gatepost if it had had golden-red hair."</p>
+<p>Miss Lancaster, a thin, erect woman of fifty, with impassive
+features, and iron-gray hair that looked as if it were rolled over
+wood, glanced resignedly from Mrs. Spencer's orange-coloured crimps
+to the imprisoned sunlight in Florrie's hair.</p>
+<p>"I'd know you were mother and daughter anywhere," she remarked
+in the noncommittal manner she had acquired in thirty years of
+independence; "and she is going to have your beautiful figure, too,
+Mrs. Spencer."</p>
+<p>"Well, I reckon I'll lose my figure now that I've stopped
+dieting," remarked the lively lady, casting an appreciative glance
+in the mirror. "Florrie tells me I wear my sleeves too large, but I
+think they make me look smaller."</p>
+<p>"They are wearing them very large in Paris," replied Miss
+Lancaster, as if she were reciting a verse out of a catalogue. She
+had, as she sometimes found occasion to remark, been "born tired,"
+and this temperamental weariness showed now in her handsome face,
+so wrinkled and dark around her bravely smiling eyes. Where she
+came from, or how she spent her time between the hour she left the
+shop and the hour she returned to it, the two women knew as little
+as they knew the intimate personal history of the Leghorn hat on
+the peg by the mirror. Beyond the fact that she played the part of
+a sympathetic chorus, they were without curiosity about her life.
+Their own personalities absorbed them, and for the time at least
+appeared to absorb Miss Lancaster.</p>
+<p>"I like the Leghorn hat," said Florrie decisively, as she tried
+it on for the third time, "but I'll wait till I ask Gabriella's
+opinion."</p>
+<p>"I hope she's getting on well here," said Mrs. Spencer, who
+found it impossible to concentrate on Florrie's hat. "Don't you
+think it was very brave of her to go to work, Miss Lancaster?"</p>
+<p>"I understood that she was obliged to," rejoined Miss Lancaster,
+with the weary amiability of her professional manner.</p>
+<p>"She might have married, I happen to know that," returned Mrs.
+Spencer. "Arthur Peyton has been in love with her ever since she
+was a child, and there was a young man from New York last winter
+who seemed crazy about her. Florrie, don't you think George Fowler
+was just crazy about Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sure I don't know, mother. He paid her a great deal of
+attention, but you never can tell about men."</p>
+<p>"Julia Caperton told me, and, of course, she's very intimate
+with George's sister, that he went back to New York because he
+heard that Gabriella was engaged to Arthur. Florrie, do you suppose
+she is really engaged to Arthur?"</p>
+<p>Thus appealed to, Florrie removed the Leghorn hat from her head,
+and answered abstractedly: "Jane thought so, but if she is engaged,
+I don't see why she should have started to work. I know Arthur
+would hate it."</p>
+<p>"But isn't he too poor to marry?" inquired Mrs. Spencer, whose
+curiosity was as robust as her constitution. "Haven't you always
+understood that the Peytons were poor, Miss Lancaster, in spite of
+the lovely house they live in?"</p>
+<p>Her large, good-humoured face, which had once been as delicate
+as a flower, but was now growing puffed and mottled under a
+plentiful layer of rice powder, became almost violently animated,
+while she adjusted her belt with a single effective jerk of her
+waist. Though Bessie Spencer was admitted to have one of the
+kindest hearts in the world, she was chiefly remarkable for her
+unhappy faculty of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. An
+inveterate, though benevolent, gossip, she would babble on for
+hours, reciting the private affairs of her relatives, her friends,
+and her neighbours. Everybody feared her, and yet everybody was
+assured that "she never meant any harm." The secrets of the town
+flowed through her mind as grist flows through a mill, and though
+she was entirely without malice, she contrived, in the most
+innocent manner, to do an incalculable amount of injury. Possessing
+a singularly active intelligence, and having reached middle-age
+without acquiring sufficient concentration to enjoy books, she
+directed a vigorous, if casual, understanding toward the human
+beings among whom she lived. She knew everything that it was
+possible to know about the people who lived in Franklin Street, and
+yet her mind was so constituted that she never by any chance knew
+it correctly. Though she was not old, she had already passed into a
+proverb. To receive any statement with the remark, "You have heard
+that from Bessie Spencer," was to cast doubt upon it.</p>
+<p>"You don't think I'm getting any stouter, do you, Miss
+Lancaster?" she inquired dubiously, with her hands on her hips and
+her eyes measuring the dimensions of her waist. "I'm making up my
+mind to try one of those B. and T. corsets that Mrs. Murray is
+wearing. She told me it reduced her waist at least three
+inches."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you aren't like Mrs. Murray&mdash;she didn't measure a
+fraction under thirty inches," replied Miss Lancaster, with her
+patient politeness. Then, after a pause, which Mrs. Spencer's
+nimble wit filled with a story about the amazing number of mint
+juleps Mrs. Murray was seen to drink at the White Sulphur Springs
+last summer, Florrie exclaimed eagerly:</p>
+<p>"Why, there is Gabriella! Won't you get her for us, Miss
+Lancaster?"</p>
+<p>Near one of the long windows, beyond which large greenish flies
+were buzzing around the branch of a mulberry tree in the alley,
+Gabriella was trying a purple hat on a prim-looking lady who
+regarded herself in the mirror with a furtive and deprecating air
+as if she were afraid of being unjustly blamed for her appearance.
+"I'm not sure&mdash;but I don't think it suits me exactly," she
+appeared to murmur in a strangled whisper, while she twisted her
+mouth, which held a jet-headed hatpin, into a quivering
+grimace.</p>
+<p>"She's waiting on Matty French," said Mrs. Spencer, and she
+added impulsively, "I wonder what it is that men see in Gabriella.
+You wouldn't call her really pretty, would you, Miss
+Lancaster?"</p>
+<p>"Well, not exactly pretty, but she has an interesting face. It
+is so full of life."</p>
+<p>"Can't you get her, mother?" asked Florrie; and Mrs. Spencer,
+always eager to oblige, rustled across the room and pounced
+vivaciously upon the prim lady and Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"We've been looking for you everywhere, Gabriella," she began,
+nodding agreeably to Miss French. "Florrie has tried on all the
+hats in the room, and she wants you to tell her if that white
+Leghorn is becoming. Good morning, Matty! That blue wing is so
+stylish. I think you are very sensible to wear colours and not to
+stick to black as Susie Chamberlain does. It makes her look as old
+as the hills, and I believe she does it just to depress people.
+Life is too short, as I said when I left off mourning, to be an ink
+blot wherever you go. And it doesn't mean that she grieves a bit
+more for her husband than anybody else does. Everybody knows they
+led a cat and dog's life together, and I've even heard, though I
+can't remember who told me, that she was on the point of getting a
+divorce when he died. Are you going? Well, I'm glad you decided on
+that blue hat. I don't believe you'll ever regret it. Good-bye. Be
+sure and come to see me soon. Gabriella, will you help Florrie
+about her hat now? I declare, I thought Matty would never get
+through with you. And, of course, we didn't want anybody but you to
+wait on us. We were just saying that you had the most beautiful
+taste, and it is so wise of you to go out to work and not sit down
+and sew at home in order to support your position. A position that
+can't support itself isn't much of a prop, my husband used to say.
+But I don't believe you'll stay here long, you sly piece. You'll be
+married before the year is up, mark my word. The men are all crazy
+about you, everybody knows that. Why, Florrie met George Fowler in
+the street this morning, and when he asked after you, his face
+turned as hot as fire, she said&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Gabriella's face, above her starched collar with its neat red
+tie, was slowly flooded with colour. Her brown eyes shone golden
+under her dark lashes, and Mrs. Spencer told herself that the girl
+looked almost pretty for a minute. "If she wasn't so sallow, she'd
+be really good looking."</p>
+<p>Happily unaware that her face had betrayed her, Gabriella slid
+back a glass door, took a hat out of the case, and answered
+indifferently, while she adjusted the ribbon bow on one side of the
+crown:</p>
+<p>"I didn't know Mr. Fowler had come back. I haven't seen him for
+ages."</p>
+<p>From her small, smooth head to her slender feet she had acquired
+in three months the composed efficiency of Miss Lancaster; and one
+might have imagined, as Mrs. Spencer remarked to Florrie
+afterwards, that "she had been born in a hat shop."</p>
+<p>But instead of the weary patience of Miss Lancaster, she brought
+to her work the brimming energy and the joyous self-confidence of
+youth. It was impossible to watch her and not realize that she had
+given both ability and the finer gift of personality to the selling
+of hats. Had she started life as a funeral director instead of a
+milliner, it is probable that she would have infused into the
+dreary business something of the living quality of genius.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Florrie hadn't seen him for ages either," chirped Mrs.
+Spencer, with her restless eyes on the hat in Gabriella's hand. "I
+don't know whether I ought to tell you or not, but you and Florrie
+are so intimate I suppose I might as well&mdash;Julia Caperton told
+Florrie that George came back because he heard in some way that you
+had broken your engagement to Arthur. Of course, as I told Julia
+afterwards, you hadn't mentioned a word of it to me, but I've got
+eyes and I can't help using them. I was obliged to see that George
+was simply out of his mind about you. It would be a splendid match,
+too, for they say his father has made quite a large fortune since
+he went to New York&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Mother!" interrupted Florrie sternly, over her shoulder, "you
+know Julia told you not to breathe a single word as coming from
+her. She is the bosom friend of George's sister."</p>
+<p>"But, Florrie, I haven't told a soul except Gabriella, and I
+know she wouldn't repeat a thing that I said to her."</p>
+<p>"Now, isn't that exactly like mother?" observed Florrie, with
+the casual disapprobation of youth. "She was on the point of
+telling Miss Lancaster all about it when I stopped her."</p>
+<p>"Why, Florrie, I didn't say a word except that men were crazy
+about Gabriella&mdash;you know I didn't. Of course, I talk a great
+deal," she pursued in an aggrieved, explanatory tone to Gabriella,
+"but I never repeat a word&mdash;not a single word that is told me
+in confidence. If Julia had asked me not to tell Gabriella what she
+said, I shouldn't have dreamed of doing so."</p>
+<p>"Oh, it doesn't matter in the least, Mrs. Spencer," said
+Gabriella hastily, "only there isn't a word of truth in it."</p>
+<p>The becoming flush was still in her cheeks, and she poised a hat
+over Florrie's head with a swift, flying grace which Mrs. Spencer
+had never noticed in her before. "I wonder if Gabriella can really
+care about George?" she thought quickly. "But if it is George she
+is in love with, why on earth did she start to work in a shop?"
+Then suddenly, following a flash of light, she reasoned it out to
+her complete satisfaction. "It must have been that she didn't know
+that George cared&mdash;that is why she is blushing so at this
+minute."</p>
+<p>An hour or so later, when Florrie and her mother had fluttered
+volubly downstairs, and the exhausted assistants were putting the
+hats away before closing the cases, Gabriella went into the
+dressing-room, where Miss Nash, a stout, pleasant-looking girl, was
+sitting in a broken chair, with her shoes off, her blue serge skirt
+rolled back from her knees, and her head bowed, over her crossed
+arms, on the window-sill.</p>
+<p>At Gabriella's entrance she glanced up, and remarked cheerfully:
+"My feet were killing me. I just had to take off my shoes."</p>
+<p>"They do get dreadfully tired," assented Gabriella in the tone
+of sympathetic intimacy she had caught from the other girls.</p>
+<p>Her naturally friendly spirit had refused to "hold aloof" from
+her companions, as her mother had begged her to do, and at the end
+of three months she had learned things about most of them which
+interested her profoundly. One supported an invalid father, another
+had a family of six little brothers and sisters to care for, and
+still another had lost her lover through a railroad accident only
+two days before her marriage. Several of them were extravagantly
+loud, one or two were inclined to be vulgar; but the others were
+quite as refined and gentle as the girls with whom she had grown
+up, and what impressed her about them all was their courageous and
+yet essentially light-hearted Southern spirit. To her surprise, she
+found an utter absence of jealousy among them. The elder women were
+invariably kind and helpful, and though she liked the girls, she
+soon discovered in herself a growing feeling of respect for these
+older women. They represented a different type, for the hardness
+she noticed in some of the younger girls was entirely lacking in
+the women of Miss Lancaster's generation. Many of them even her
+mother would have called well born, and one and all, they were
+almost painfully ladylike. With their thin, erect figures, their
+wan, colourless faces, their graying hair, and their sweet Southern
+voices, they imparted a delicate social air to the shop.</p>
+<p>Usually Gabriella stopped to talk to the girls who crowded in
+from the workroom, brushing shreds of silk or ribbon from their
+skirts, but to-day her mind wandered while she answered Miss Nash,
+and when, a minute later, Miss Lancaster spoke to her on her way
+out, and asked her to match the flowers for Florrie's hat, she was
+obliged to make an effort before she could recall her roving
+attention. She was thinking not of Florrie's hat, but of Mrs.
+Spencer's words, "He has come back because he heard that your
+engagement was broken." And at the first insurgent rise of emotion,
+she ceased to be the business woman and became merely an
+imaginative girl, dreaming of love.</p>
+<p>"They aren't quite the right shade, are they?" she asked with an
+uncertainty which was tactful rather than sincere, "or, perhaps,
+the ribbon might be darker?"</p>
+<p>Her eyes questioned Miss Lancaster, who moved a step nearer the
+window as she held the bolt of ribbon toward the daylight.</p>
+<p>"Well, we'd better look at it again in the morning. You are in a
+hurry, Miss Carr?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, I've all the time in the world," answered Gabriella,
+though she longed to be out with the June scents and her dreams,
+"but I am sure the ribbon ought to be a deeper blue to tone with
+the ragged robins."</p>
+<p>"You've a wonderful eye for colour, that's why I ask your
+advice," said the other, and a sudden friendliness shone in her
+tired eyes, for she had liked Gabriella from the beginning. That
+the girl possessed a genuine gift of taste, the elder woman had
+already discovered. For herself, Miss Lancaster had always hated
+the sight of hats, and had taken up the work merely because a place
+in Brandywine &amp; Plummer's had been offered her shortly after
+her father, a gallant fighter but a poor worker, had gone to end
+his kindly anecdotal days in the Home for Confederate Soldiers. She
+was a repressed, conscientious woman, who had never been younger
+than she was now at fifty, and who regarded youth, not with envy,
+but with admiring awe. For she, also, patient and uncomplaining
+creature, belonged to that world of decay and inertia from which
+Gabriella had revolted. It was a world where things happened to-day
+just as they happened yesterday, where no miracles had occurred
+since the miracles of Scripture, where people hated change, not
+because they were satisfied, but because they were incapable of
+imagination. Miss Lancaster, who had never wanted anything with
+passion, except to be a perfect lady, was proud of the fact that
+she had been twenty years in business without losing her "shrinking
+manner."</p>
+<p>"Yes, you have an eye for colour," she repeated gently; "if you
+could only learn to sew, you might command a most desirable
+position."</p>
+<p>"I despise sewing," replied Gabriella, with serene good-humour,
+"and I could never learn, even at school, anything that I despised.
+But I suppose I can always tell somebody else how it ought to be
+done."</p>
+<p>Then, because her work always interested her, she forgot the
+disturbing words Mrs. Spencer had spoken&mdash;she forgot even her
+impatience to feel the June air in her face. Her best gift, the
+power of mental control, enabled her to bring the needed discipline
+to her emotion; and when the moment of her release came, she found
+that the brief restlessness had passed from her mind. "There's no
+use letting myself get impatient," she thought; "I've got to stick
+to it, so it won't do a bit of good to begin wriggling."</p>
+<p>All the other girls had gone home before her, and on the
+sidewalk Miss Meason, of the glove counter, stood talking about the
+spring sales to Mr. Brandywine. As Gabriella passed them, in her
+white shirtwaist and dark belted skirt, they looked thoughtfully
+after her until her sailor hat, with the scarlet band, crossed
+Broad Street and disappeared on the opposite side.</p>
+<p>"She's a remarkable girl," observed Mr. Brandywine, with his
+paternal manner. "I hope she is beginning to feel at home with
+us."</p>
+<p>"I believe she'd feel at home anywhere," replied Miss Meason,
+"and she's obliged to get on. There's no doubt of it."</p>
+<p>"A pleasant face, too. Not exactly pretty, I suppose, but you
+would call it a pleasant face."</p>
+<p>"Oh, well, I'd call her pretty in her way," answered Miss
+Meason. "Her eyes are lovely, and she has a singularly bright
+expression. I always say that a bright expression makes up for
+anything."</p>
+<p>"Her mother was a beauty in her day," said Mr. Brandywine
+reminiscently; "she was the snow and roses sort, and her eldest
+daughter took after her, though she is a wreck now, poor lady."</p>
+<p>"That's Charley Gracey," remarked Miss Meason tartly, for she
+had the self-supporting woman's contempt for the rake. "Yes, she
+was lovely as a girl. I remember as well as if it were yesterday
+how happy she looked when I sold her her wedding gloves. She is a
+beautiful character, too, they say, but somehow Gabriella, even as
+a child, appealed to me more. She has three times the sense of her
+sister."</p>
+<p>Then they shook hands and parted, while Gabriella, tripping
+through the Second Market, was saying to herself: "There's not the
+least bit of sense in your thinking about him, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>In Hill Street, maple and poplar trees were in full leaf, and
+little flakes of sunshine, as soft as flowers, were scattered over
+the brick pavement. Beyond the housetops the sky was golden, and at
+the corner the rusty ironwork of an old balcony had turned to the
+colour of bronze. The burning light of the sunset blinded her eyes,
+while an intense sweetness came to her from the honeysuckle
+clambering over a low white porch; and this light and this
+sweetness possessed an ineffable quality. Life, which had been
+merely placid a few hours before, had become suddenly
+poignant&mdash;every instant was pregnant with happiness, every
+detail was piercingly vivid. Her whole being was flooded with a
+sensation of richness and wonder, as if she had awakened with
+surprise to a different world from the one she had closed her eyes
+on a minute before.</p>
+<p>As she crossed the street she saw her mother's head above a box
+of clove pinks in the window; and a little later the front door
+opened and Miss Polly Hatch, a small, indomitable spinster who
+sewed out by the day, walked rapidly between the iron urns and
+stopped under the creamy blossoms of the old magnolia tree in the
+yard.</p>
+<p>"It's too late for your ma to be workin', Gabriella. You'd
+better stop her."</p>
+<p>Pausing in the middle of the walk, she comfortably tucked under
+her arm an unwieldy bundle she carried, and added, with the
+shrewdness which was the result of a long and painful experience
+with human nature: "It's funny&mdash;ain't it?&mdash;how downright
+mulish your ma can be when she wants to?"</p>
+<p>"I can't do a thing on earth with her," answered Gabriella in
+distress. "You have more influence over her than I have, Miss
+Polly."</p>
+<p>Miss Polly, who had the composed and efficient bearing of a
+machine, shook her head discouragingly as she opened the gate and
+passed out.</p>
+<p>"I reckon she's set for good and all," she remarked
+emphatically, and went on her way.</p>
+<p>"Mother, it's time to stop sewing and think about supper,"
+called Gabriella gaily, as she ran into the room and bent to kiss
+her mother, who turned a flat, soft cheek in her direction, and
+remarked gloomily: "Gabriella, you've had a visitor."</p>
+<p>Not for worlds would Mrs. Carr have surrendered to the disarming
+cheerfulness of her daughter's manner; for since Gabriella had gone
+to work in a shop, her mother's countenance implied that she was
+piously resigned to disgrace as well as to poverty. It was
+inconceivable to her that any girl with Berkeley blood in her veins
+could be so utterly devoid of proper pride as Gabriella had proved
+herself to be; and the shock of this discovery had left a hurt look
+in her face. There were days when she hardly spoke to the girl,
+when refusing food, she opened her lips only to moisten her thread,
+when the slow tears seemed forever welling between her reddened
+eyelids. As they had just passed through one of these painful
+periods, Gabriella was surprised to find that, for the moment at
+least, her mother appeared to have forgotten her righteous
+resentment. Though it could hardly be said that Mrs. Carr spoke
+cheerfully&mdash;since cheerfulness was foreign to her
+nature&mdash;at least she had spoken. Of her own accord,
+unquestioned and unurged, she had volunteered a remark to her
+daughter; and Gabriella felt that, for a brief respite, the
+universe had ceased to be menacing.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, you have had a visitor," repeated Mrs. Carr, and it
+was clear that her sorrow (she never yielded to passion) had been
+overcome by a natural human eagerness to tell her news.</p>
+<p>"Not Cousin Jimmy?" asked the girl lightly.</p>
+<p>"No, you could never guess, if you guessed all night."</p>
+<p>"Not Charley Gracey surely? I wouldn't speak to him for the
+world."</p>
+<p>Though Jane had returned to Charley, and even Mrs. Carr, feeling
+in her heart that her younger daughter had dealt her the hardest
+blow, had been heard to say that she "pitied her son-in-law more
+than she censured him," Gabriella had not softened in her
+implacable judgment.</p>
+<p>"Of course it wasn't Charley. I shouldn't have mentioned it if
+it had been, because you are so bitter against him. But it was
+somebody you haven't seen for months. Do you remember Evelyn
+Randolph's son who paid you so much attention last winter?"</p>
+<p>"George Fowler! Has he been here?" asked Gabriella, and her
+voice quivered like a harp.</p>
+<p>"I told Marthy to say you were out. Of course I wasn't fit to
+see company, but he caught sight of me on his way to the gate and
+came back on the porch to speak to me. He remembered all about my
+having gone to school with his mother, and it seems she had told
+him about the time she was Queen of May and I maid of honour. I
+asked him how Evelyn stood living in New York, but he said she
+likes it better than his father does. Archie Fowler insists that he
+is coming back to Virginia to end his days. They seem to have
+plenty of money. I expect Archie has made a fortune up there or he
+wouldn't be satisfied to live out of Virginia."</p>
+<p>"Did George ask when I'd be at home?" inquired Gabriella.</p>
+<p>Though she knew that it was unwise to divert her mother's
+attention from the main narrative, her whole body ached with the
+longing to hear what George had said of her, and she felt that it
+was impossible to resist the temptation to question.</p>
+<p>"He said something about you as he was going away, but I can't
+remember whether he asked when you would be in or not." In spite of
+the fact that Mrs. Carr had the most tenacious memory for useless
+detail, she was never able to recall the significant points of an
+interview.</p>
+<p>"He didn't ask where I was?"</p>
+<p>The question was indiscreet, for it jerked Mrs. Carr's mind back
+with violence from its innocent ramble into the past, while it
+reminded her of Gabriella's present unladylike occupation. She shut
+her lips with soft but obstinate determination, and Gabriella,
+watching her closely, told herself that "wild horses couldn't drag
+another word out of her mother to-night." The girl longed to talk
+it over; but she might have tried as successfully to gossip with
+the angel on a marble tombstone. She wanted to hear what George had
+said, to ask how he was looking, and to wonder aloud why he had
+come back. She wanted to throw herself into her mother's arms and
+listen to all the little important things that filled the world for
+her. If only the aloof virtue in Mrs. Carr's face would relax into
+a human expression!</p>
+<p>Taking off her hat, Gabriella went into the bedroom, and then,
+coming back again after a short absence, remarked with forced
+gaiety: "I suppose he didn't have anything interesting to tell you,
+did he?"</p>
+<p>"No." Though the light had almost waned, Mrs. Carr broke off a
+fresh piece of thread and leaned nearer the window, while she tried
+to find the eye of the needle.</p>
+<p>"Let me thread your needle, mother. It is too late to work,
+anyway. You will ruin your eyesight."</p>
+<p>"I have never considered my eyesight, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"I know you haven't, and that's why you ought to begin."</p>
+<p>As it was really growing too dark to see, Mrs. Carr rolled the
+thread back on the spool, stuck the needle into the last
+buttonhole, and folding the infant's dress on which she was
+working, laid it away in her straw work-basket.</p>
+<p>"Will you light the gas, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"Don't work any more to-night, mother. It is almost supper
+time."</p>
+<p>Without replying, Mrs. Carr moved with her basket to a chair
+under the chandelier. Once seated there, she unfolded the dress,
+took the needle from the unfinished buttonhole, and tried again
+unsuccessfully to run the thread through the eye. Then, while
+Gabriella rushed to her aid, she removed her glasses and patiently
+polished them on a bit of chamois skin she kept in her basket.</p>
+<p>"Don't you feel as if you could eat a chop to-night,
+mother?"</p>
+<p>"I haven't been able to swallow a morsel all day,
+Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"I've saved you a little cream. Shall I make you a toddy?"</p>
+<p>"I don't want it. Drink it yourself, dear."</p>
+<p>After this there followed one of those pauses which fill not
+only the room, but the universe with a fury of sound. There were
+times when Gabriella felt that she could stand anything if only her
+mother would fly into a rage&mdash;when she positively envied
+Florrie Spencer because her plebeian parent scolded her at the top
+of her voice instead of maintaining a calm and ladylike reticence.
+But Mrs. Carr was one of those women who never, even in the most
+trying circumstances, cease to be patient, who never lose for an
+instant so much as the palest or the thinnest of the Christian
+virtues.</p>
+<p>Going into the bedroom, Gabriella changed from her shirtwaist
+into a gown of flowered muslin, with sleeves that looked small
+beside the balloon ones of the season, and a skirt which was
+shrunken and pale from many washings the summer before. She had
+worn the frock when she met George, and though it was old, she knew
+it was becoming, and she told herself joyfully that if she put it
+on to-night, "something must come of it." As she smoothed her hair
+by the dim gas-jet over the mirror, she saw again the face of
+George as it had first smiled down on her beneath the boughs of a
+mimosa tree in Mrs. Spencer's front garden. At the time, a year
+ago, she was engaged to Arthur&mdash;she had even called the placid
+preference she felt for him "being in love"&mdash;but while she
+talked to George she had found herself thinking, "I wonder how it
+would feel to be engaged to a man like this instead of to Arthur?"
+Then, since all Southern engagements of the period were secret, she
+had seen a good deal of George during the summer; and in the
+autumn, while she was still trying to make believe that it was
+merely a friendship, he had gone back to New York without saying
+good-bye. She had tried her best to stop thinking of him, and until
+this evening, she had never really let herself confess that she
+cared. But if she didn't care why was she so happy to-night? If she
+didn't care why was there such intoxicating sweetness in the
+thought of his return? If she didn't care why had she dressed
+herself so carefully in the flowered muslin he had once said that
+he liked? Her face, smiling back at her from the mirror, was
+suffused with a delicate glow&mdash;not pink, not white, but softly
+luminous as if a lamp, shining behind it, enkindled its expression.
+She had never seen herself so nearly pretty, and with this thought
+in her mind, she went back to her mother, who was still working
+buttonholes under the chandelier.</p>
+<p>"Marthy has brought the lamp, mother. Why don't you move over to
+the table?"</p>
+<p>"I can see perfectly, thank you, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"I hate to see you working. Let me finish those
+buttonholes."</p>
+<p>"I'd rather get through them myself, dear."</p>
+<p>"Have you seen Jane to-day?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Has Cousin Pussy been here?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Did you get out for a walk?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>The appalling silence again filled the room like a fog, and
+Gabriella, moving cautiously about in it, began straightening
+chairs and picking up shreds of cambric from the carpet. She felt
+suddenly that she could not endure the strain for another minute,
+and glancing at Mrs. Carr's bent head, where the thin hair was
+wound into a tight knot and held in place by a tortoise-shell comb
+with a carved top, she wondered how her mother could possibly keep
+it up day after day as she did? But, if she had only known it, this
+silence, which tried her nerves to the breaking point, was
+positively soothing to her mother. Mrs. Carr could keep it up not
+only for days and weeks, but, had it been necessary, she could have
+kept it up with equal success for half a lifetime. While she sat
+there, working buttonholes in a bad light, she thought quite as
+passionately as Gabriella, though her mental processes were
+different. She thought sadly, but firmly, with a pensive melancholy
+not untinged with pleasure, that "life was becoming almost too much
+for her." It seemed incredible to her that after all her struggles
+to keep up an appearance things should have turned out as they had;
+it seemed incredible that after all her sacrifices her children
+should not consider her more. "They have no consideration for me,"
+she reflected, while she took the finest stitch possible to the
+needle she held. "If Jane had considered me she would never have
+married Charley. If Gabriella had considered me, or anybody but
+herself, she would not have gone to work in a store." No, they had
+never considered her, they had never asked her advice before
+acting, though she had brought them into the world and had worked
+like a slave in order to keep them in that respected station of
+life in which they had been born. Then, her sorrow getting the
+better of her resolution, she turned her head and spoke:</p>
+<p>"I know you never tell me anything on purpose, Gabriella, but I
+think I have a right to know whether or not you have discarded
+Arthur for good."</p>
+<p>"I told you all about it, mother. I told you I found I was
+mistaken."</p>
+<p>"I suppose you never thought for a moment how much it would
+distress me? Though Lydia Peyton is so much older than I am, she
+was always my best friend&mdash;we often stayed in the room
+together when we were girls. I had set my heart on your marrying
+her son."</p>
+<p>"I know that, mother, and I am very sorry, but when it came to
+the point I couldn't marry him. You can't make yourself
+care&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"I should have thought that my wishes might influence you. I
+should never wish you to do anything that wasn't for your good,
+Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"Of course, mother, you've given up your life to us. I know
+that, and Jane knows it as well as I do. That's why I want to earn
+money enough to let you rest. I want you to stop work for good and
+be happy."</p>
+<p>"There are worse things than work," replied Mrs. Carr in a tone
+which implied that Gabriella had brought them upon her.</p>
+<p>After a pause, in which her needle flew mournfully, she added:
+"I hope for your own sake that you will marry some good man before
+you lose your attractions. Poor Becky Bollingbroke proved to me how
+unfortunate it is for a woman to remain unmarried."</p>
+<p>For an instant Gabriella looked at her mother without replying.
+She felt tempted&mdash;strongly tempted, she told herself&mdash;to
+say something cross. Then the sight of the bent gray head, of the
+bowed shoulders, of the knotted needle-pricked fingers, pierced her
+heart. Though she could not always agree with her mother, she loved
+her devotedly, and the thought that she must lose her some day had
+been the most terrible nightmare of her childhood.</p>
+<p>"Don't worry about me, mother, dear," she answered tenderly. "I
+can always take care of myself. I can manage my life, you know
+that, don't you?" Then she stopped quickly while her heart gave a
+single bound and lay quiet. She had heard the click of the gate,
+and a minute later, as Mrs. Carr gathered up her sewing, there was
+a ring at the bell.</p>
+<p>"It can't be a visitor before supper, can it, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"I think not, mother, but I shouldn't run away if I were
+you."</p>
+<p>"I'd better go. I don't feel dressed. Wait a minute, Marthy, and
+let me get out of the room before you open the door." She fled,
+clutching her work-basket, while Gabriella, turning to lower the
+flaming wick of the lamp, heard George's voice at the door and his
+footsteps crossing the hall.</p>
+<p>"I knew something would happen," she thought wildly, as she went
+forward to meet him.</p>
+<p>"I saw you pull down the shade as I was going by," he began
+rather lamely; and she hardly heard his words because of the divine
+tumult in her brain. Her heart sang; her pulses throbbed; every
+drop of her blood seemed to become suddenly alive with ecstasy.
+Under the tarnished garlands of the chandelier his face looked
+younger, gayer, more intensely vivid than it had looked in her
+dreams. It was the face of her dreams made real; but with what a
+difference! She saw his crisp brown hair brushed smoothly back from
+its parting, his blue eyes, with their gay and conquering look, the
+firm red brown of his cheek, and even the bluish shadow encircling
+his shaven mouth. In his eyes, which said enchanting things, she
+could not read the trivial and commonplace quality of his
+soul&mdash;for he was not only a man, he was romance, he was
+adventure, he was the radiant miracle of youth!</p>
+<p>"Florrie told me this morning that you had come back," she
+answered coldly, as she held out her hand.</p>
+<p>Her words seemed to come to her from a distance&mdash;from the
+next room, from the street outside, from the farthest
+star&mdash;but while she uttered them, she knew that her words
+meant nothing. She shed her joy as if it were fragrance; and her
+softness was like the magnolia-scented softness of the June night.
+Even her mother would not have known her, so greatly had she
+changed in a minute. Of the businesslike figure in the sailor hat
+and trim shirtwaist&mdash;of the Gabriella who had said, "I can
+manage my life"&mdash;there remained only an outline. The very feet
+of the capable woman had changed into the shrinking and timid feet
+of a lovesick girl. She was afraid to go forward, afraid to move,
+afraid to breathe lest she break the wonderful spell of the magic.
+Not only her basic common sense, but the very soul that shaped her
+body had become as light, as sweet, as formless as liquid
+honey.</p>
+<p>But of course, she knew nothing of this. She was innocent of
+deception; she was innocent even of any definite purpose to allure.
+The thought in her mind, if there were any thought, which is
+doubtful, was that she must be composed, she must be indifferent if
+it killed her.</p>
+<p>"I know I've come at an awkward hour, but I simply couldn't go
+by after I saw you."</p>
+<p>"Won't you stay?" she asked, trying in vain to shut out the
+ominous sound of Marthy bringing their scant supper. She
+remembered, with horror, that she had ordered only two chops, and a
+wave of rebellion swept over her because life always spoiled its
+divine instants.</p>
+<p>"No, I can't stay. I've an engagement for supper. I merely
+wanted to see you. You've no idea how I've wanted to see you."</p>
+<p>"Have you?" said Gabriella in so low a voice that he hardly
+heard her. Then, lifting her glowing eyes, she added softly, "I am
+glad that you wanted to."</p>
+<p>"There were times when I simply couldn't get you out of my
+mind," he responded, and went on almost joyously, with the romantic
+look which had first enchanted her imagination. "You see I believed
+that you were going to marry Arthur Peyton. Julia told me that your
+engagement was broken. That was why I came back. Didn't you guess
+it?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I guessed it," she answered simply, and all the softness,
+the sweetness, the beauty of her feeling passed into her voice.</p>
+<p>Then, in the very midst of her happiness, there occurred one of
+those sordid facts which appear to spring, like vultures, upon the
+ineffable moments. She heard the bell&mdash;the awful supper bell
+which her mother insisted upon having rung because her parents had
+had it rung for generations before her. As the horrible sound
+reverberated through the house, Gabriella felt that the noise
+passed through her ears, not into her brain, but into the very
+depths of her suffering soul.</p>
+<p>"There, I must go," said George, without embarrassment, for
+which she blessed him. From his manner, the supper bell might have
+made a delightful harmony instead of a hideous discord. "I'll see
+you to-morrow, if I may. May I, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>He smiled charmingly as he went, and looking after him, a minute
+later, over the clove pinks in the window-box, she saw him turn and
+gaze back at her from the opposite pavement.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<h3>MIRAGE</h3>
+<p>On a bright Sunday in October Mrs. Carr stopped on her way from
+church to tell Mrs. Peyton of Gabriella's engagement. A crape veil,
+slightly scented with camphor, hung from her bonnet, and in her
+gloved hands she carried a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums, for she
+intended to go on to Hollywood, where her husband was buried. The
+sermon had been unusually inspiring, and there was a pensive
+exaltation in her look as she laid her hand on the gate of the
+walled garden.</p>
+<p>"If it couldn't be Arthur&mdash;and of course my heart was set
+on her marrying Arthur&mdash;I suppose George is the one I should
+have chosen," she said to Mrs. Peyton with tender melancholy as she
+turned her soft, clammy cheek, which was never warm even in summer,
+to be kissed.</p>
+<p>There was nothing against George that she could advance even to
+Gabriella. He was well born, for his mother had been a Randolph; he
+was comfortably rich (at least his father was); he was
+good-looking; he was almost arrogantly healthy&mdash;yet because
+she was obliged to regret something, she found herself clinging
+fondly to the memory of Arthur. "If it could only have been
+Arthur," she repeated sadly, gazing through the French window of
+the drawing-room to the garden where beds of scarlet sage flaunted
+brilliantly in the sunshine.</p>
+<p>"I hope and pray that dear Gabriella will be happy," replied
+Mrs. Peyton, a beautiful old lady, with wonderful white hair under
+the widow's ruching in her bonnet. The exquisite simplicity of her
+soul was reflected in the rose-leaf delicacy of her skin, in her
+benignant and innocent smile, in the serene and joyous glance of
+her eyes. Never in her life had she thought evil of any one, and
+she did not mean to begin on the verge of the grave, with the hope
+of a peaceful eternity before her. If dear Gabriella had
+"discarded" dear Arthur, then she could only hope and pray that
+dear Gabriella would not live to regret it.</p>
+<p>"She will be married at once, I suppose?" she said, and beamed
+as happily as if Gabriella had not disappointed the dearest hope of
+her heart. "There is no need to wait, is there?"</p>
+<p>"They have decided on the 17th of November. I wanted you to know
+it first of all, Lydia, so I haven't mentioned it to a soul except
+to Cousin Jimmy Wrenn."</p>
+<p>"You will live with dear Jane, will you not? Poor child, what a
+blessing you will be to her."</p>
+<p>"No, I shall be with Jane only for a month or two until
+Gabriella and George have taken a house in New York. She wouldn't
+consent to be married so soon until I promised to live with them.
+But how on earth shall I ever manage to go so far away, Lydia? To
+think of being so far from Hollywood almost breaks my heart, and
+yet what can I do?"</p>
+<p>Mrs. Peyton's loving gaze enfolded not only her visitor, but the
+house and the dreamy garden where frost was already blighting the
+flowers.</p>
+<p>"I understand your feeling, of course, Fanny," she said, "but
+you must think of Gabriella. How different it will be for her if
+her mother is with her. I shall miss you every minute, but for the
+sake of that splendid child of yours, I must not allow myself to be
+sorry."</p>
+<p>If Mrs. Carr's features could have lost the fixed impression of
+a lifetime, they would have appeared almost cheerful while her old
+friend held her hand and gazed benignly upon her; but so relaxed
+had the muscles of her face become that, even when her spirits
+rose, her countenance did not alter, and the flicker of light in
+her smile only served to illumine its profound melancholy.</p>
+<p>"I try to think of Gabriella," she answered, "but I oughtn't to
+forget poor Jane. Whenever I remember her, I begin to reproach
+myself."</p>
+<p>"Don't reproach yourself, Fanny. There is nothing on earth for
+which you can justly be blamed. I am sure you have never considered
+your own wishes for a minute in your life. If ever a mother gave up
+everything for her children, you have done so, Fanny, and you
+needn't deny it. But tell me about Gabriella. How thankful you
+ought to be that she has given up that work in a store!"</p>
+<p>"If it had been God's will, I suppose I must have borne it,
+Lydia, but I felt as if it was killing me."</p>
+<p>"The dear child has a strong character," observed Mrs. Peyton,
+and it seemed to her, while she thought of Gabriella, that a strong
+character was a beautiful and wonderful thing.</p>
+<p>"You would hardly know Gabriella, she is so changed," replied
+Mrs. Carr. "I declare I sometimes think that I never saw a girl so
+wildly in love as she is. She positively worships George, and when
+I look at her, I remember Becky Bollingbroke's saying that a smart
+woman in love is worse than a silly one. She has that much more to
+get foolish with, poor Becky used to say.</p>
+<p>"How happy it must make you," murmured the other. "There is
+nothing in life I'd rather see than my Arthur happily married."</p>
+<p>"I always thought that he and Gabriella were made for each
+other, but one never can tell&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"That must be Gabriella now," said Mrs. Peyton as the bell rang.
+"Is she coming for you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, Cousin Jimmy was to bring her, and then drive me out to
+Hollywood. Isn't that Arthur's voice talking to her?"</p>
+<p>"Poor boy," whispered Mrs. Peyton, and then she rustled forward
+and enveloped Gabriella in a warm embrace. "My darling girl, your
+mother has just told me," she said.</p>
+<p>"And Gabriella has just told me," added Arthur at her elbow.
+Though there was a hurt look in his eyes, his manner was perfect.
+Years afterwards, whenever Gabriella thought of him, she remembered
+how perfect his manner was on that morning.</p>
+<p>"I wanted you to know first of all," said Gabriella.</p>
+<p>As the old lady looked at her with loving eyes, it seemed to her
+that the girl was softly glowing with happiness. She accepted joy
+as she accepted sorrow, with quietness, but there was a look in her
+face which made her appear, for the moment, transfigured. A
+radiance like that of a veiled flame shone in her eyes; the cool
+tones of her voice had grown richer and gentler; and at last, as
+Mrs. Peyton said to herself, Gabriella, the sensible and practical
+Gabriella, was sweet with the honeysuckle sweetness of Jane.</p>
+<p>"She must be over head and ears in love," she thought; and the
+next minute, "I wonder how it will end?"</p>
+<p>The question brought a pang to her kind old heart, which longed
+to make everybody, and particularly her boy Arthur, happy. Then,
+because her eyes were filling, she stroked the girl's arm gently,
+and said:</p>
+<p>"That's a pretty dress, my dear. I never saw you look
+better."</p>
+<p>"She's really getting pretty," remarked Mrs. Carr. "Cousin Jimmy
+was saying only yesterday that if Gabriella keeps it up, she'll be
+a better looking old lady than Jane."</p>
+<p>"Well, I think her a very pretty young one," replied Mrs.
+Peyton. "She hasn't such small features as Jane has, but there is
+more in her face. Now, I'm willing to wager that George thinks her
+a beauty."</p>
+<p>Gabriella laughed happily. "He hasn't the faintest idea what I
+look like, but he declares he won't be a bit disappointed if he
+finds out some day that I am ugly."</p>
+<p>The glow of youth, of hope, of love, gave to her expressive face
+an almost unearthly brightness. She seemed to draw to her all that
+was vital and alive in the dim old house, so filled with memories,
+and in the October pageantry of the garden. It was the day of her
+miracle, and against the splendour of the scarlet sage, she shone
+with an unforgettable radiance.</p>
+<p>When, a little later, Mrs. Carr, in Cousin Jimmy's buggy, with
+her bunch of chrysanthemums held rigidly in her lap, drove off at
+an amble to Hollywood, and Gabriella, turning to wave her hand, had
+vanished behind the corner of the gray wall, Mrs. Peyton said
+gently:</p>
+<p>"She looked very happy, dear boy. You and I must pray for her
+happiness."</p>
+<p>The beauty which all her life she had created through faith
+awoke in Arthur's suffering heart while she spoke to him. She
+demanded nobility of being, and it existed; she exacted generosity
+of nature, and it was there. By her mere presence, by the
+overflowing love in her heart, she not only banished jealousy and
+envy, but made the very idea of them unthinkable.</p>
+<p>"She is obliged to be happy. It is her nature," answered Arthur,
+for his disposition was hardly less perfect than his manner.</p>
+<p>Crossing Broad Street, which wore its look of Sabbath
+sleepiness, Gabriella hurried on to Hill Street, and saw George
+waiting for her between the two green-painted urns filled with the
+summer's fading bloom of portulaca.</p>
+<p>He was staring straight upward at one of the poplar trees, where
+a gray squirrel was playing among the branches, and for several
+minutes before he was aware of her presence, she watched him with
+her impassioned, yet not wholly uncritical, gaze. The sunlight
+sparkled in his eyes, which shone brightly blue against the red
+brown of his flesh; and between his smiling lips, which were thick
+and somewhat loosely moulded, she saw the gleaming whiteness of his
+teeth. She could not explain&mdash;she had never even tried to
+understand&mdash;why this face, which was not in the least a
+remarkable one, should so profoundly appeal to her. When George was
+absent, his look haunted her with the intensity of an
+hallucination; when at last she saw it again, she felt that nothing
+else in the world mattered to her, so supreme was the contentment
+that swept over her. Though she was more intelligent than Jane, not
+even Jane herself had surrendered so unconditionally to the primal
+force. At least Jane had made exactions, but so complete was the
+subjugation of Gabriella that she exacted nothing, not even a
+return of her love. To give was all she asked, and in the giving
+she bloomed into a beauty and fullness of nature which Jane's
+small, closed soul could never attain.</p>
+<p>"George!" she called, and went swiftly toward him.</p>
+<p>He turned, threw away the cigar in his hand, and held open the
+gate while she entered.</p>
+<p>"There's a jolly little beggar up in the poplar," he said; "I've
+been watching him for ten minutes."</p>
+<p>Then, as she passed before him into the parlour, he shut the
+door, and catching her in his arms, kissed the back of her
+neck.</p>
+<p>"Oh, George!" she murmured, and her voice was like music. Even
+to his short-sighted vision there was pathos at the heart of her
+happiness&mdash;the pathos of ignorance, Of innocence, of the
+reckless generosity of soul that spends its best for the pure joy
+of spending. With the instinctive miserliness of the man who
+realizes that passion to last must be hoarded, not scattered, he
+had drawn back almost unconsciously from the simple abandonment of
+her love. He wanted her because the deep discomfort of his nature
+could not be satisfied without her; but in possessing her he did
+not mean to give up anything else. Never for an instant had he
+deluded himself with the mystic ecstasies of Gabriella. The passion
+which had changed her whole being as if by a miracle, had altered
+neither his fundamental egoism nor his superficial philosophy. He
+loved her, he knew, as much as it was possible for him to love any
+woman; but he was still able to take a profound and healthy
+interest in his physical comfort. In one thing, however, they were
+passionately agreed, and that was that the aim and end of their
+marriage was to make George perfectly happy.</p>
+<p>"You are sweet enough to eat this morning," he said as he kissed
+her.</p>
+<p>"I told Mrs. Peyton that you didn't know whether I was pretty or
+ugly," she answered merrily.</p>
+<p>"It isn't beauty that takes a man, though women think so," he
+rejoined lightly, and yet as if he were imparting one of the basic
+facts of experience. "I don't know what it is&mdash;but it's
+something else, and you've got it, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>She looked at him with luminous eyes.</p>
+<p>"I've got you," she answered in a whisper; "that's
+all&mdash;nothing else on earth matters. I want nothing but
+love."</p>
+<p>"But you let me go away for six months. I could never understand
+that."</p>
+<p>"I had to, George. I couldn't be mean even for you, could
+I?"</p>
+<p>"Well, I don't know." His gaze dwelt on her moodily. "Sometimes
+I wonder if you haven't too much conscience in your body?"</p>
+<p>Careless as were his words, they brought stinging tears to her
+eyes. Her throat ached with the longing to pour out her love; but
+it seemed to her suddenly that a wall of personality had risen
+between them, and that she could only beat blindly against the
+impenetrable mass that divided them. She knew now that he could
+never understand, and yet the knowledge of this intensified rather
+than diminished her love. The mere physical attraction, which she
+had glorified into passion, was invested with the beauty and the
+mystery of an unattainable ideal.</p>
+<p>"I believe you are going to cry, darling. Don't be so serious,"
+he said, laughing.</p>
+<p>"But you know&mdash;tell me you know that I love you."</p>
+<p>"Of course I know it. Am I blind or a fool?"</p>
+<p>Then before the glowing worship in her face, he caught her in
+his arms, while he said over and over, "I love you! I love
+you!"</p>
+<p>He held her close, thrilling at her touch, seeking her warm lips
+with an eagerness which comforted her because she was too
+inexperienced to understand how ephemeral was its nature and its
+sweetness.</p>
+<p>"Promise to love me always, George, as you do now," she said,
+passionately trying to make the fugitive joy immortal.</p>
+<p>"If you'll tell me how to help it, I shall be grateful," he
+retorted as gaily as if her eyes had not filled with tears.</p>
+<p>"Swear it!"</p>
+<p>"I swear it. Now, are you satisfied?"</p>
+<p>"I don't believe it. I'll never believe that you love me as much
+as I love you. Nobody could."</p>
+<p>In his heart he agreed with her. That Gabriella loved him more
+than he loved her was a fact to which he was easily reconciled. He
+loved her quite as much as he could love anybody except himself and
+be comfortable, and if she demanded more, she merely proved herself
+to be an unreasonable person. Women did love more than men, he
+supposed, but what else were they here for? During the six months
+when he had thought that she belonged to another, she had, he told
+himself, almost driven him out of his mind; but possession once
+assured, he had speedily recovered his health and his sanity. Her
+worship flattered him, and in this flattery she had, perhaps, her
+strongest hold on his heart. Nothing in his engagement had pleased
+him more than the readiness with which she had given up her work at
+his request. He abhorred independence in a wife; and Gabriella's
+immediate and unresisting acquiescence in his desire appeared to
+him to establish the fact of her essential and inherent femininity.
+Had not all laws, as well as all religions, proclaimed that woman
+should be content to lay down not only her life but her very
+identity for love; and that Gabriella was womanly to the core of
+her nature, in spite of her work in Brandywine's millinery
+department, it was impossible to doubt while he kissed her. There
+were times, indeed, when the exaltation of Gabriella's womanliness
+seemed to have left her without a will of her own; when, in a
+divine submission to love, she appeared to exist only for the
+laudable purpose of making her lover happy.</p>
+<p>"I'd do anything on earth for you, Gabriella," said George
+suddenly. "I wonder if you would make a sacrifice for me if I asked
+it?" From his face as he looked down on her it was evident that he
+was not speaking from impulse, but that he had seized an opportune
+moment.</p>
+<p>"You know I would, George. I'd give up the whole world for you.
+I'd beg my bread with you by the roadside."</p>
+<p>"Well, it isn't so bad as that, darling&mdash;it's only about
+your mother coming to us so soon. I've had a letter from home, and
+it seems that father has had losses and can't help me out as he
+intended to do. He's always either losing or making piles of money,
+so don't bother your precious head about that. In six months he'll
+probably be making piles again, but, in the meantime, mother
+suggests that we should postpone taking a house, and come and live
+with her for a few months."</p>
+<p>"I'd rather live on your income, George, no matter how small it
+is. I'm an awfully good manager, and you'd be surprised to see how
+far I can make a little money go. Why can't we take an apartment
+somewhere in an inexpensive neighbourhood&mdash;one just big enough
+for mother and you and me?"</p>
+<p>"We couldn't live half so well in the first place, and, besides,
+I'd hate like the devil to see you working yourself to death and
+losing your looks. That's just exactly what Patty is doing. She was
+the family's greatest investment, you know. Everything we had for
+years was spent on her because she was such a ripping beauty, and
+mother set her heart on her marrying nothing less than a duke. So
+we sent her abroad to be educated and squandered a fortune on her
+clothes, and then, just as mother was gloating over her triumphs,
+the very day after the Duke of Toxbridge proposed to her, Patty
+walked out one morning and married Billy King at the Little Church
+Around the Corner. Billy, of course, hasn't a cent to his name
+except what he makes painting blue pictures, and that's precious
+little. They're up on the West Side now, living in four rooms with
+neighbours who fry onions at nine o'clock in the morning next door
+to them, and half the time Patty hasn't even a maid, I believe, and
+has to do her work with the help of a charwoman."</p>
+<p>"And is she happy?" There was eagerness in Gabriella's voice,
+for she was sure that she should love Patty.</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, Patty is happy, but mother isn't. It's rough on
+mother."</p>
+<p>"I think she ought to have told your mother before she
+married."</p>
+<p>"Well, Patty thought she could stand the fuss better after she'd
+done it than she could before. She said she needed the support of
+knowing they couldn't stop it. Cheeky, wasn't it?"</p>
+<p>"And is she really so beautiful?"</p>
+<p>"Ripping," said George; "simply ripping."</p>
+<p>"I know I shall love her. Is she dark or fair?"</p>
+<p>"I never thought about it, but she's a towering
+beauty&mdash;something between dark and fair, I suppose. She has
+golden hair, you know."</p>
+<p>His arm was around her, and lifting her earnest face to his,
+Gabriella began in her softest voice: "I shouldn't mind a bit
+living like that, George&mdash;honestly I shouldn't."</p>
+<p>"Yes, you would. It would be rotten."</p>
+<p>"I wish you would tell me just how much we shall have to live
+on, dear. Even if it is very, very little, it would be so much
+better not to expect anything from your father. If the worst comes
+to the worst, I can always go back to work, you know, and I feel as
+if I ought to help because you are so generous about wanting mother
+to live with us."</p>
+<p>He frowned slightly, while a dark flush rose to his forehead.
+Already Gabriella was learning how dangerously easy it was to
+irritate George. Serious discussions always appeared to disturb
+him, and at the first allusion to the responsibilities he had
+assumed, she could see the look of bored restlessness creep into
+his face. It was evidently abhorrent to him to hear her talk about
+business; but with her practical nature and her fundamental common
+sense it was impossible that she should be content to remain in a
+fool's paradise of financial mysteries. She had only the vaguest
+idea how he earned a living, and a still vaguer one of what that
+living represented. There was an impression in her mind that he
+worked in his father's office somewhere in Wall Street&mdash;he had
+once given her the number&mdash;and that he went "downtown" every
+morning after breakfast and did not get home to luncheon. Cousin
+Jimmy had once told her that George's father was a stockbroker, but
+this information conveyed little to her mind. The men she knew in
+Richmond were lawyers, doctors, clergymen, or engaged, like Cousin
+Jimmy, in the "tobacco business," and she supposed that "a
+stockbroker" must necessarily belong to a profession which was
+restricted to New York. The whole matter was hazy in her thoughts,
+but she hoped in time, by intelligent and tactful application, to
+overcome her ignorance as well as George's deeply rooted objection
+to her enlightenment.</p>
+<p>"Well, you see, my income is uncertain, Gabriella. It depends a
+good deal upon the stock market and the sort of stuff we've been
+buying. Look here, darling, don't, for heaven sake, get the
+business bee in your bonnet. A mannish woman is worse than poison,
+and the less you know about stocks the more attractive you will be.
+Mother has lived for thirty years with father, and she doesn't know
+any more how he makes his money than you do at this minute."</p>
+<p>This was as lucid, she suspected, as George was ever likely to
+be on the subject, and, since he was becoming visibly annoyed, she
+abandoned her fruitless search for information. After she was
+married there would be time and opportunity to find out all that
+she wanted to know; and even if he never told her anything
+more&mdash;well, she was quite accustomed to the masculine habit of
+never telling women anything more. Her mother and Jane were as
+ignorant of finance as they had been in their cradles; Cousin Pussy
+spoke of the "tobacco business" as if it were a sacred mystery
+superior to the delicate feminine faculties; and while Gabriella
+was engaged to Arthur, he had fallen into the habit of gently
+reminding her that she "knew nothing of law."</p>
+<p>"Very well, dearest, I shan't bother you," she said cheerfully,
+"only, of course, I couldn't possibly leave mother with Jane and
+Charley. She doesn't realize it, but she would be perfectly
+miserable."</p>
+<p>"She told me that leaving Richmond was like death to her."</p>
+<p>"That's only because she knows she's going," answered Gabriella,
+but her endeavour to explain her mother's habit of mind appeared to
+her to be so hopeless that she added unconvincingly: "You can't
+imagine how dependent she is on me. Jane doesn't know how to manage
+her at all, though they are so much alike."</p>
+<p>"Well, of course, if we live at home&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But you promised me we'd be to ourselves, George; you can't
+have forgotten it. We talked it over, every bit of it, and I told
+you in the beginning I couldn't leave mother."</p>
+<p>"If you loved me enough to marry me, I should think you'd be
+willing to give up your family for me." He spoke doggedly; it was
+his way to speak doggedly when he was driving a point.</p>
+<p>"It isn't that, dear, you know it isn't that."</p>
+<p>Taking a letter from his pocket, he drew a sheet of blue note
+paper, closely interlined, from the envelope, and handed it to
+her.</p>
+<p>"You can see for yourself how it is," he said in an aggrieved
+voice. By his tone he had managed to put her in the wrong as
+utterly as if she, not he, were trying to break her word. Yet she
+had told him in the very beginning that she could not leave her
+mother; she had refused to engage herself to him until he had
+offered Mrs. Carr a home with them. It had all been carefully
+arranged at the start, and now, within a month of their marriage,
+he had apparently forgotten that the matter was settled.</p>
+<p>Leaning forward until the light fell on the paper, she read with
+trembling lips:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">My Dear Son:<br />
+<br />
+Your letter was a blow to me because you had said nothing of
+Gabriella's plan to bring her mother to New York to live with her,
+and, of course, this makes it out of the question that you should
+come straight to us. Now that Patty has gone&mdash;poor child, I am
+afraid she will live to repent her rashness&mdash;your father and I
+had quite looked forward to having you young people in the house;
+but we haven't room, even if I could bring myself to face the
+prospect of a rival mother-in-law under the same roof with
+me&mdash;and frankly I can't. And your father has simply put his
+foot down on the idea. As you know he hasn't been very well of
+late&mdash;the doctor says he is threatened with diabetes&mdash;so
+my one thought is to spare him every useless anxiety. He sleeps
+very badly and doesn't seem able, even at night, to detach his mind
+from his business worries. If he hadn't had such a bad summer, he
+might have been able to help you start housekeeping, but there have
+been a great many failures in the last few months, and he says he
+is obliged to cut down all his expenses in order to tide over the
+depression in the market. We are trying to retrench in every
+possible way, and, for this reason, I fear we shall hardly be able
+to go down to your wedding. This is a terrible disappointment to us
+both, and your father is particularly distressed because he will
+not be able to add to your income this year. Of course, if you
+should change your mind and decide to come to us, we can get
+Patty's old room ready for you at once, and turn yours into a
+sitting-room. Think this over and let me know as soon as you
+possibly can.<br />
+<br />
+I see Patty occasionally. She is in high spirits, but looking a
+little thinner, I think. Billy has painted a portrait of Mrs.
+Pletheridge, but it isn't a bit flattering, and he wouldn't let her
+wear her pearls, so I'm afraid she won't buy it. I don't believe he
+will ever make anything of himself. What a waste when Patty might
+have been Duchess of Toxbridge. Though I am not a bit worldly, I
+can't help regretting all that she has lost.<br />
+<br />
+Your loving mother,<br />
+<br />
+EVELYN FOWLER.</div>
+<p>When she had folded the letter and given it back to him,
+Gabriella dropped her hands in her lap and sat gazing thoughtfully
+at the square of sunlight by the window.</p>
+<p>"If you cared as much as I do, you'd be willing to give up your
+family," he said suddenly, encouraged not only by her manner, which
+appeared yielding, but by his secret ineradicable conviction that
+her love was greater than his. Across the romantic screen of his
+features there flashed a swift change of expression, like the
+flicker of light on a coloured mask. If she could only have looked
+through the charming vacancy of his face, she would have been
+surprised to discover the directness and simplicity of his mental
+processes. He wanted his way, and he meant, provided it was humanly
+possible, to have whatever he wanted.</p>
+<p>"It isn't that, George. Love has nothing to do with it. It is a
+question of right."</p>
+<p>For a minute he surveyed her moodily; then, rising from her side
+on the sofa, he took two steps to the window and looked up at the
+boughs of the poplar tree. The gray squirrel was still there, and
+he watched it attentively while he pondered his answer. Yes, the
+whole trouble with Gabriella was too much conscience. This
+conscience of hers had got in his way before now, and he had
+suddenly an uneasy feeling, as if he had struck against the vein of
+iron which lay beneath the rich bloom of her passion. The thought
+of her opposition, of her secret hardness, bitterly angered him. He
+wanted her&mdash;no other woman could satisfy him&mdash;but he
+wanted her utterly different from what she was. He was seized with
+an indomitable desire to make her over, to change her entirely from
+that Gabriella with whom he had fallen in love. Of course, she was
+right as far as the mere facts of the case were concerned. He had
+promised that her mother should live with them; but he felt
+indignantly that it was an act of disloyalty for her to be right at
+his expense. She ought to have given in, and she ought to have
+given in gracefully, there was no question of that. When a woman
+loved a man as much as she loved him, it was unreasonable of her to
+let these innumerable little points of fact come between them; it
+was ungenerous of her to cling so stubbornly to her advantage. Her
+very quietness&mdash;that look of gentle obstinacy which refused
+either to fight back or to surrender&mdash;irritated him almost to
+desperation. His temper, always inflammable, suddenly burst out,
+and he felt that he wanted to shake her. He wanted, indeed, to do
+anything in the world except the sensible thing of walking out of
+the house and leaving her to reflection.</p>
+<p>"I should think your first duty would be to your husband," he
+said, while the streak of cruelty which was at the heart of his
+love showed like a livid mark on the surface of his nature. His
+mind was conscious of but a single thought while he stood there in
+the wind which fluttered the curtains and filled the room with the
+roving scents of October, and this was the bitter longing to make
+Gabriella over into the girl that he wanted her to become. Though
+it cost him her love, he felt that he must punish her for being
+herself.</p>
+<p>"Do you mean always to put your mother before me?" he asked
+passionately, after a minute.</p>
+<p>Still she did not answer, and in the deep, earnest eyes that she
+turned on him he saw not anger, not sorrow even, but wonder. As he
+stretched out his hand, it fell on Mrs. Carr's window box, where a
+rose geranium remained bright green in the midst of the withered
+stems of the clove pinks, and the scent of the leaves, as he
+crushed them between his fingers, evoked a swift memory of
+Gabriella in one of her soft moods, saying over and over, "I love
+you! Oh, I do love you!" At the image his temper changed as if by
+magic, and crossing the room, he bent down and kissed her with a
+fierceness that bruised her lips.</p>
+<p>"I adore you, Gabriella," he said.</p>
+<p>Though she had seen these sudden changes in him before, she had
+never grown wholly used to them. Her deeper nature, with its
+tranquil brightness, untroubled by passing storms, was unprepared
+for the shallow violence which swept over him, leaving no visible
+trace of its passage. No, she could not understand him&mdash;she
+could only hope that after they were married the blindness would
+pass from her love, and she would attain that completer knowledge
+for which she was striving so patiently. The transforming miracle
+of marriage, she trusted, would reveal this mystery, with so many
+others.</p>
+<p>"How can you hurt me so, George?" she asked with reproachful
+tenderness.</p>
+<p>"It's because you are so stubborn, darling. If you weren't so
+stubborn I shouldn't do it. Do you know you get almost mulish at
+times," he added, laughing, while she moved nearer and rubbed her
+cheek softly against his sleeve.</p>
+<p>"You frighten me," she whispered. "I was just beginning to
+believe that you really meant it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, lovers always quarrel. There's nothing in that."</p>
+<p>"But I hate to see you angry. It would almost kill me if it
+lasted longer than a minute. Never let it last, will you,
+George?"</p>
+<p>"Of course not, Goosey. It never has lasted, has it?"</p>
+<p>"Goosey" was one of his favourite names for her. He liked it
+because it gave him a merry feeling of superiority when he said it,
+and Gabriella liked it for perhaps the same reason. In the first
+ardour of her self-surrender she caught eagerly at any straw that
+she might cast on the flame of her passion.</p>
+<p>"And I'm not really stubborn, dear. Tell me that I'm not really
+stubborn."</p>
+<p>"You darling! I was only teasing you."</p>
+<p>"I'll do anything on earth for you that I can, George."</p>
+<p>"I know you will, dearest, and you don't honestly care more for
+your family, do you?"</p>
+<p>"I love you better than all the rest of the world put together.
+There are times when I think it must be wrong to love any man as
+much as I love you. My grandmother used to say that when you loved
+like that you 'tempted Providence.' Isn't it dreadful to believe
+that you could tempt Providence by loving?"</p>
+<p>He kissed her throat where a loosened strand of dark hair had
+fallen against the whiteness.</p>
+<p>"Will you do what I ask, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>So it was all to begin over again! He had not really given in,
+he had not really yielded even while he was kissing her. She closed
+her eyes, leaning her head on his shoulder. For a moment she felt
+as if a physical pain were pressing into her forehead.</p>
+<p>"Will you do it, Gabriella?" It was as if he put his soul into
+his voice, wooing her tenderly away from her better judgment. He
+was testing his power to dominate her; and never had she felt it so
+vividly, never had her will been so incapable of resisting him as
+at that instant. Moving slightly in his arms she looked at the
+clear red brown of his throat, at his sensitive mouth, with the
+faint dent in the lower lip, at his bright blue eyes, which had
+grown soft while he pleaded. His physical power over her was
+complete, and he knew it. Her flesh had become as soft as flowers
+in his arms, while her eyes, like dark flames, trembled and fell
+away from his look.</p>
+<p>"It isn't only the thing itself, darling, but I don't like you
+to refuse me. It hurts me that you won't do what I ask of you."</p>
+<p>"If it were anything else, George."</p>
+<p>"But it isn't anything else. It is just that I want you to
+myself&mdash;all to myself, after we are married."</p>
+<p>"Don't ask me, dearest. If you only knew how it makes me
+suffer."</p>
+<p>Her voice was a caress when she answered, but, as he told
+himself passionately, she had not yielded an inch. Once again he
+had run against the iron hidden under the bloom.</p>
+<p>"Then you refuse absolutely?" he asked, and though his voice
+quivered still, it was no longer from tenderness. He hated
+stubbornness, and, most of all, he hated it in the woman who was
+going to be his wife. A life of continual contradiction, he felt,
+would be intolerable. A strong will, which he had always admired in
+himself, became a positive failing in Gabriella. A woman's strength
+lay, after all, not in force of character, but in sweetness of
+nature. And yet how lovely she was! How soft, how sweet she looked
+as she gazed up at him with her radiant eyes. There was a
+fascination for him in her tall slenderness, in the graceful curve
+of her head, which drooped slightly like a dark flower on its stem.
+Everything about her charmed him, and yet he had never called her
+beautiful in his thoughts.</p>
+<p>"I told you how it was, dear, when you first asked me to marry
+you," she said, with infinite patience. "I told you that it wasn't
+fair to ask you to take mother, but that I couldn't possibly leave
+her alone in her old age. Jane's home is wretchedly
+unhappy&mdash;she can never tell when Charley is to be counted
+on&mdash;and it would kill mother to be dependent on Charley even
+if he were willing. I see your side, George, indeed, indeed, I do,
+but I can't&mdash;I simply can't act differently. I have always
+known it was my duty to look after mother&mdash;nothing can change
+that, not even love. She worked for us while we were little, and it
+is trouble that has made her what she is to-day. You must see that
+I am right, George; you can't possibly help it."</p>
+<p>But he couldn't see it. If the truth had been twice as evident,
+if Gabriella had been twice as reasonable, he could still have seen
+only his wishes.</p>
+<p>"I am only asking you to do what is best for us both,
+Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"But how can it be best for me to become an ungrateful child,
+George?"</p>
+<p>Neither of them wanted to quarrel, yet in a minute the barbed
+words were flying between them; in a minute they faced each other
+as coldly as if they had been strangers instead of adoring lovers.
+At the last, he looked at her an instant in silence while she sat
+perfectly motionless with her deep eyes changing to gold in the
+sunlight; then, turning on his heel, without a word, he left the
+house, and walked rapidly over the coloured leaves on the pavement.
+As he passed under the poplar tree the gray squirrel darted gaily
+along a bough over his head, but he did not look up, and a minute
+later Gabriella saw him cross the street and vanish beyond the
+pointed yew tree in the yard at the corner.</p>
+<p>"I wonder if this is the end?" she thought bitterly, and she
+knew that even if it were the end, that even if she died of it, she
+could never give way. Something stronger than herself&mdash;that
+vein of iron in her soul&mdash;would not bend, would not break
+though every fibre of her being struggled against it. All the
+happiness of her life vanished with George as he passed beyond the
+yew tree at the corner, yet she sat there with her hands still
+folded, her lips still firm, watching the tree long after its
+pointed dusk had hidden her lover's figure. Had she followed her
+desire as lightly as George followed his, she would have run after
+him as he disappeared, and bringing him back to the room he had
+left, dissolved in tears on his breast. She longed to do this, but
+the vein of iron held her firm in spite of herself. She could not
+move toward him, she could not even have put out her hand had he
+entered.</p>
+<p>The bell rang, and her blood drummed in her ears; but it was
+only Cousin Jimmy bringing Mrs. Carr back from the cemetery.
+Hearty, deep-chested, meticulously brushed and groomed, he wore his
+Sunday frock with an unnatural stiffness, as if he were still
+hearing Pussy's parting warning to be "careful about his clothes."
+His dark hair, trained for twenty years from a side parting, shone
+with the lustre of satin, and his shining eyes, so like the eyes of
+adventurous youth, wore their accustomed Sabbath look of veiled and
+ashamed sleepiness.</p>
+<p>"So you're going to take the old lady to New York with you,
+Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"I can't bear to think of it, Cousin Jimmy," remarked Mrs. Carr,
+while she adjusted her crape veil over the back of her chair. "I
+don't see how I can stand living in the North."</p>
+<p>"Well, what about our friend Charley? Do you think you could get
+on any better with Charley for a son-in-law?"</p>
+<p>"You oughtn't to joke about it, Cousin Jimmy. It is too serious
+for joking."</p>
+<p>"I beg your pardon, Cousin Fanny&mdash;but where is George,
+Gabriella? I thought he was to meet you here."</p>
+<p>"He had to go just before you came. Don't you think mother is
+looking well?"</p>
+<p>"As well as I ever saw her. I was telling her so as we drove
+back from Hollywood. All she needs is to leave off moping for a
+while and she'd lose ten years of her age. Why, I tell you if it
+were I, I'd jump at the chance to go to New York for a few years.
+If there wasn't a single thing there except the theatres, I'd jump
+at it. You can go to a different show every night of your life,
+Cousin Fanny."</p>
+<p>"I have never been inside of a theatre in my life. You ought to
+know me better than to think it," replied Mrs. Carr, while the
+corners of her mouth drooped. She had laid her bag of grosgrain
+silk on the table at her elbow, and untying the strings of her
+bonnet, she neatly rolled them into two tight little wads which she
+fastened with jet-headed pins.</p>
+<p>"You make her go, honey, when you get hold of her," said Jimmy
+to Gabriella in a sympathetic aside "What she needs is bracing
+up&mdash;I was saying so to Pussy only this morning. 'If you could
+just brace up Cousin Fanny, she'd be as well as you or I,' was what
+I said to her Now I don't believe there's a better place on earth
+to brace a body up than old New York. I remember I took my poor old
+father there just a month or two before his last illness, when he
+was getting over a spell of lumbago, and it worked on him like
+magic. We stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel&mdash;you must be sure
+to get a dinner at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Cousin Fanny&mdash;and
+went to a show every blessed night for a week. It made the old man
+young again, upon my word it did, and he was still talking about it
+when he came down with his last illness. Well, I must be going home
+to Pussy now. The boys and I went out squirrel hunting yesterday,
+and Pussy promised me Brunswick stew for dinner. Now, don't you
+forget to brace up, Cousin Fanny. That's all on earth you need. The
+world ain't such a bad place, after all, when you sit down and
+think right hard about it."</p>
+<p>He went out gaily, followed by Mrs. Carr's accusing eyes to the
+hatrack, where he stopped to take his glossy silk hat from a peg.
+Turning in the buggy as he drove off, he waved merrily back at them
+with the whip before he touched the fat flanks of his gray.</p>
+<p>"Cousin Jimmy means well, but he has a most unfortunate manner
+at times," observed Mrs. Carr.</p>
+<p>"What is the matter, Gabriella? Have you a headache?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, but the sunshine is so strong."</p>
+<p>"Then you'd better lower the shade. Why, what in the world has
+happened to my rose geranium? I was just going to pot it for the
+winter."</p>
+<p>"I'm sure it isn't hurt, mother. George broke the leaves when he
+was looking out of the window."</p>
+<p>"I thought he was going to stay for dinner. Did you make the
+jelly and syllabub?"</p>
+<p>"I made it, but he wouldn't stay."</p>
+<p>"Well, we'll send some upstairs to Miss Jemima. Do you know she
+had to have the doctor this morning? I met him as I was going out,
+and he said he was sorry to hear I was going to leave Richmond. I
+can't imagine where on earth he could have heard it, for I haven't
+mentioned it to a soul except Lydia Peyton. Yes, I believe I did
+speak of it to Bessie Spencer at the meeting of the Ladies' Aid
+Society the other day. Where are you going, Gabriella? Would you
+mind putting my bonnet in the bandbox?"</p>
+<p>No, Gabriella wouldn't mind, and taking the folds of crape in
+her arms, she went to get the green paper bandbox out of the
+closet. Though she had sacrificed her happiness for her mother, she
+felt that it would be impossible for her to listen with a smiling
+face to her innocent prattle.</p>
+<p>In the afternoon, when Mrs. Carr, with a small and inconspicuous
+basket in her hand, had set out on her Sunday visit to the Old
+Ladies' Home, and Marthy, attired in an apron with an embroidered
+bib, had taken the jelly and syllabub upstairs to Miss Jemima,
+Gabriella sat down in her mother's rocking-chair by the window, and
+tried desperately to be philosophical. The sound of the old maids
+from the floor above descending on their way to a funeral disturbed
+her for a minute, and she thought with an extraordinary clearness,
+"That is what my life will be if George never comes back. That is
+what it means to be old." And there was a morbid pleasure in
+pressing this thought, like a pointed weapon, into her heart. "That
+is all there will be for me&mdash;that will be my life," she went
+on after an instant of throbbing anguish. "I had no right to think
+of marriage with mother dependent on me, and the best thing for me
+to do is to start again with Mr. Brandywine. George was right in a
+way. Yes, it is hard on him, and I was wrong ever to think of
+it&mdash;ever to let him fall in love with me." The mere thought
+that George was right in a way gave her singular comfort, and while
+she dwelt on it, the discovery seemed to throw a vivid light on the
+cause of the quarrel. Of course, she had expected too much of him.
+It was natural that he should not want to be burdened with her
+family. What she had looked upon as selfishness was only the
+natural instinct of a man in love with a woman. He had said that he
+wanted her to himself, and to want her to himself appeared now to
+be the most reasonable desire in the world.</p>
+<p>Yes, she had acquitted George; but, in acquitting him, it was
+characteristic of her that she should not have yielded an inch of
+her ground. She drew comfort from declaring him innocent, but it
+was the tragic comfort of one who blesses while she renounces.
+George's blamelessness did not alter in the least her determination
+to cling to her mother.</p>
+<p>The afternoon wore on; the soft golden light on the pavement was
+dappled with shadows; and the wind, blowing over the iron urns in
+the yard, scattered the withered leaves of portulaca over the
+grass. Though the summer still lingered, and flowers were blooming
+behind the fences along the street, the faint violet haze of autumn
+was creeping slowly over the sunshine. Now and then an
+acquaintance, returning from afternoon service, looked up to bow to
+her, and while the daylight was still strong, Marthy, resplendent
+in Sunday raiment, came out of the little green gate at the side of
+the yard and passed, mincing, in the direction of the negro church.
+Then the door opened slowly, and the two old maids came in and
+stopped for a minute at the parlour door to see if Gabriella "had
+company."</p>
+<p>"Such a lovely evening, my dear"&mdash;they never used the word
+afternoon&mdash;"we went all the way to the cemetery. She was
+buried in her grandfather's lot, you know, in the old part up on
+the hill. It was a beautiful drive, but Amelia and I couldn't help
+thinking of the poor young thing all the time."</p>
+<p>It was Miss Jemima who had spoken, and her kind, plain face, all
+puffs and pleasant wrinkles, had not yet relaxed from the unnatural
+solemnity it had worn at the funeral. She was seldom grave, and
+never despondent, though to Gabriella she appeared to lead an
+unendurable life. Unlike Miss Amelia, she had not even a happy
+youth and a lover to look back upon; she had nothing, indeed,
+except her unfailing goodness and patience to support her.</p>
+<p>"I don't like to see you alone, honey," she said, untying the
+strings of her black silk bonnet, which fitted her cheerful
+features like a frame. "If the doctor hadn't told me to go to bed
+as soon as I came in, we'd sit a while with you for company."</p>
+<p>She felt that it was morbid and unnatural in Gabriella to sit
+alone in a dim room when there were so many young people out in the
+streets. "You mark my words, there's some reason back of
+Gabriella's moping all by herself," she remarked to Miss Amelia as
+she took off her "things" a few minutes later. "It wouldn't
+surprise me a bit to hear that she'd had a fuss with her
+sweetheart."</p>
+<p>"I declare, sister Jemima, you are too sentimental to live,"
+observed Miss Amelia as she filled the tea kettle on the fender
+"Anybody would think to hear you talk that there was nothing in
+life except making love."</p>
+<p>"Well, there isn't anything else so interesting when you're
+young. You used to think so yourself, sister Amelia."</p>
+<p>Standing gaunt and black, with the tea kettle held out stiffly
+before her, Miss Amelia turned her tragic face on her sister.</p>
+<p>"Well, I reckon you don't know much about it," she responded
+with the unconscious cruelty of age. Having been once the victim of
+a great passion, she had developed at last into an uncompromising
+realist, wholly devoid of sentimentality, while Miss Jemima,
+lacking experience, had enveloped the unknown in a rosy veil of
+illusion.</p>
+<p>"You don't have to know a thing to think about it, sister
+Amelia," replied the invalid timidly as she put on her flannel
+wrapper and fastened it with a safety pin at the throat.</p>
+<p>"Well, I reckon it's all right for a girl like Gabriella," said
+Miss Amelia crushingly, "but when you look back on it from my age,
+you'll know it isn't worth a row of pins in a life."</p>
+<p>And beside the window downstairs Gabriella was thinking
+passionately: "Shall I ever grow old? Is it possible that I shall
+ever grow old like that?"</p>
+<p>With the bare question, terror seized her&mdash;the terror of
+growing old without George, the terror of dying before she had
+known the full beauty of life. Looking ahead of her at the years
+empty of love, she saw them like a gray road, leaf strewn, wind
+swept, deserted, and herself creeping through them, as bent, as
+wrinkled, as disillusioned, as Miss Amelia. The very image of a
+life without love was intolerable to her since she had known
+George&mdash;for love meant George, and only George, in her
+thoughts. That she could ever be happy again, ever take a natural
+pleasure in life if she lost him, was unimaginable to her at the
+instant. She loved him, she had loved him from the first moment she
+saw him, she would never, though she lived a million years, love
+any one else. It was as absurd to think that she could love again
+as that a flower could bloom afresh when its petals were withered.
+No, without George there was only loveless old age&mdash;there was
+only the future of Miss Amelia before her. And she clung to this
+idea with a horror which Miss Amelia, who seldom reflected that she
+was loveless and by no means considered herself an object of pity,
+would have despised.</p>
+<p>"I have no right to marry George, and yet if I don't marry him I
+shall be miserable all my life," she told herself with a sensation
+of panic. It would be so long, the rest of her life, and without
+George it was as desolate as the gray road of her vision. All the
+beauties of the universe, all the miracles of hope, of youth, of
+spring; her health, her intellect, her capacity for work and for
+taking pleasure in little things&mdash;all these were as nothing to
+her if she lost George out of her life. "I oughtn't to marry him,"
+she repeated, "but if I don't marry him I shall be miserable every
+minute until I die."</p>
+<p>Then a terror more awful than any she had yet suffered clutched
+at her heart. Suppose he should never come back! Suppose he had
+really meant to leave her for good! Suppose he had ceased to love
+her since he went out of the house! The possibility was so
+agonizing that she rose blindly from her chair and turned from the
+window as if the quiet street, filled with the dreamy sunshine of
+October, had offered an appalling, an unbelievable sight to her
+eyes. If he had ceased to love her, she was helpless; and this
+sense of helplessness awoke a feeling of rage in her heart. If he
+did not come back, she could never go after him. She could only sit
+and wait until she grew as old and as ugly as Miss Amelia. While
+the minutes, which seemed hours, dragged away, she wept the
+bitterest tears of her life&mdash;tears not of wounded love, but of
+anger because she could do nothing but wait.</p>
+<p>While she wept the bell rang. When she did not answer it, it
+rang again, and after an interminable pause the footsteps of Miss
+Amelia were heard descending the stairs. Then the door opened and
+shut, the footsteps began their slow ascent of the stairs, and
+after an eternity of silence, she knew that George had entered the
+room.</p>
+<p>Wiping her eyes on the ruffle of the sofa pillow, she sat up and
+faced him, while her pride hardened again.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, I have come back."</p>
+<p>"I see you have," she answered coldly, and choked over a
+sob.</p>
+<p>"What are you crying about, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"I&mdash;I have a headache."</p>
+<p>"Have you thought about me at all to-day?"</p>
+<p>"A little."</p>
+<p>He laughed softly, the laugh of a conqueror.</p>
+<p>"I'm glad at least that I didn't give you the headache."</p>
+<p>"You didn't. I had it anyway."</p>
+<p>He was radiant, he was as fresh as the wind. Never in his life
+had he looked so gay, so handsome, so kind. His blue eyes were
+brimming with light. The mere fact of being alive appeared to fill
+him with ecstasy. And she loved him for his gaiety, for his
+lightness, for the ease with which he took for granted her
+unchangeable love. She longed with all her soul and body to prove
+this love by a surrender more complete than any she had made in the
+past. She longed to say: "I am yours to do with as you please, and
+nothing in the universe matters but you and my love for you." The
+very core of her nature longed to say this to him; but her
+indomitable pride, which even passion could not overcome, kept her
+sitting there in silence while she felt that her heart was bursting
+with happiness.</p>
+<p>"Have you thought it over, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>She nodded. To save her life, she felt, she could not utter a
+word without sobbing.</p>
+<p>"And you have absolutely and finally decided to have your
+way?"</p>
+<p>This time she shook her head, but the tears fell on her cheeks
+and she did not brush them away. From his voice she knew that she
+had triumphed, but there was no delight in the knowledge. She did
+not want to triumph; she wanted only to yield to him and to make
+him happy by yielding.</p>
+<p>"O George!" she cried suddenly, and held out her arms to
+him.</p>
+<p>As he looked down at her his expression changed suddenly to one
+of intense sadness. From his face, which had grown pale, he might
+have been contemplating the Eternal Verities, though, in reality,
+he was considering nothing more exalted than the dreary prospect of
+a lifetime spent in the society of Mrs. Carr.</p>
+<p>Then, as Gabriella enfolded him, he laughed softly. He had given
+in, but he knew in the very instant of his defeat that he should
+some day turn it to victory.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<h3>THE NEW WORLD</h3>
+<p>Gabriella stood in front of the station, ecstatically watching
+George while he struggled for a cab. In the pale beams of the early
+sunshine her face looked young, flushed, and expectant, as if she
+had just awakened from sleep, and her eyes, following her husband,
+were the happy eyes of a bride. She wore a new dress of blue
+broadcloth, passionately overtrimmed by Miss Polly Hatch; on her
+head a blue velvet toque from Brandywine's millinery department
+rested as lightly as a benediction; and her hands clasped Arthur's
+wedding present, a bag of alligator skin bearing her initials in
+gold. One blissful month ago she and George had been married, and
+now, on the reluctant return from a camp in the Adirondacks, they
+were confronting the disillusioning actuality of the New York
+streets at eight o'clock in the morning. While Gabriella waited,
+shivering a a little, for the air was sharp and her broadcloth
+dress was not warm, she amused herself planning a future which
+appeared to consist of inexhaustible happiness. And mingling with
+her dreams there were divine memories of the last month and of her
+marriage. After that one quarrel George, she told herself, had been
+"simply perfect." His manner to her mother had been beautiful; he
+had been as eager as Gabriella to obliterate all memory of the
+difference between them, though, of course, after his yielding that
+supreme point she had felt that she must give up everything
+else&mdash;and the giving up had been rapture. He had shown not the
+faintest disposition to crow over her when at last, after
+consulting Mrs. Carr, she had told him that her mother really
+preferred to stay with Jane until summer, though he had remarked
+with evident relief: "Then we'll put off looking for an apartment.
+It's easier to find one in the summer anyway, and in the meantime
+you can talk it over with mother."</p>
+<p>After this everything had gone so smoothly, so exquisitely, that
+it was more like a dream than like actual life when she looked back
+on it. She saw herself in the floating lace veil of her
+grandmother, holding white roses in her hand, and she saw George's
+face&mdash;the face of her dreams come true&mdash;looking at her
+out of a starry mist, while in the shining wilderness that
+surrounded them she heard an organ playing softly "The Voice That
+Breathed O'er Eden." Then the going away! The good-byes at the
+station in Richmond; her mother's face, pathetic and drawn against
+the folds of her crape veil; Cousin Jimmy, crimson and jovial;
+Florrie's violent waving as the train moved away; Miss Jemima, with
+her smiling, pain-tortured eyes, flinging a handful of rice; the
+last glimpse of them; the slowly vanishing streets, where the few
+pedestrians stopped to look after the cars; the park where she had
+played as a child; the brilliant flower-beds filled with an
+autumnal bloom of scarlet cannas; the white-aproned negro nurses
+and the gaily decorated perambulators; the clustering church spires
+against a sky of pure azure; the negro hovels, with frost-blighted
+sunflowers dropping brown seeds over the paling fences; the rosy
+haze of it all; and her heart saying over and over, "There is
+nothing but love in the world! There is nothing but love in the
+world!"</p>
+<p>"I've got a cab&mdash;the last one," said George, pushing his
+way through the crowd, and laying his hand on her arm with a
+possessive and authoritative touch. "Let me put you in, and then
+I'll speak to the driver."</p>
+<p>As he gave the address she watched him, still fascinated with
+the delicious strangeness of it all. It was like an adventure to
+have George whisk her so peremptorily into a cab, and then stand
+with his foot on the step while he curtly directed the driver.
+Nothing could surpass the romance&mdash;the supreme exciting
+romance of life. Every minute was an event; every act of George's
+was as thrilling as a moment in melodrama. And as they drove
+through the streets, over the pale bands of sunshine, she had a
+sense of lightness and wonder, as if she were driving in a world of
+magic toward ineffable happiness.</p>
+<p>"Isn't it strange to be here together, George?" she said. "I can
+hardly believe it." But in her heart she was thinking: "I shall
+never want anything but love in my life. If I have George I shall
+never want anything else." The bedraggled, slatternly figures of
+the women sweeping the pavements in the cross-street through which
+they were driving filled her with a fugitive sadness, so faint, so
+pale that it hardly dimmed the serene brightness of her mood. "I
+wish they were all as happy as I am," she thought; "and they might
+be if they only knew the secret of happiness. If they only knew
+that nothing in the world matters when one has love in one's
+heart."</p>
+<p>"You'll believe it soon enough when we turn into Fifth Avenue,"
+replied George, glancing with disgust out of the window. A month of
+intimacy had increased the power of his smile over her senses, and
+when he turned to her again after a minute, she felt something of
+the faint delicious tremor of their first meeting. Already she was
+beginning to discover that beyond his expressive eyes he had really
+very little of importance to express, that his prolonged silences
+covered poverty of ideas rather than abundance of feeling, that his
+limited vocabulary was due less to reticence than to the simple
+inarticulateness of the primitive mind. Through the golden glamour
+of her honeymoon there had loomed suddenly the discovery that
+George was not clever&mdash;but cleverness mattered so little, she
+told herself, as long as he loved her.</p>
+<p>"I hope your mother will like me," she said nervously after a
+minute.</p>
+<p>"I'll be sorry for her if she doesn't."</p>
+<p>"Do I look nice?"</p>
+<p>"Of course you do. I never saw you when you didn't."</p>
+<p>"I feel so dreadfully untidy. I never tried to dress in a
+sleeping-car before."</p>
+<p>"It did rock, didn't it?"</p>
+<p>"I'll never travel again at night if I can help it. There's a
+cinder in your eye; let me get it out for you." It thrilled her
+pleasantly to remove the cinder with the corner of her
+handkerchief, and to order him to sit still whenever the cab
+jolted. It was incredibly young, incredibly foolish, but it was all
+a part of the wonderful enchantment in which she moved. The cinder
+had made an agreeable episode, but when it had been removed there
+was nothing more for them to talk about. In four weeks of daily and
+hourly companionship they had said very easily, Gabriella had
+found, everything they had longed so passionately to say to each
+other. It was strange&mdash;it was positively astounding how soon
+they had talked themselves empty of ideas and fallen back upon
+repetition and ejaculation. Before her marriage she had thought
+that a lifetime would be too short to hold the full richness of
+their confidences; and yet now, after a month, though they still
+made love, they had ceased, almost with relief, to make
+conversation.</p>
+<p>After turning into Fifth Avenue they drove for ages between
+depressing examples in brownstone of an architecture which, like
+George, was trying rather vaguely to express nothing; and then
+rolling heavily into Fifty-seventh Street stopped presently before
+one of the solemn houses which stood, in the dignity of utter
+ugliness, midway of a long block. "They are all so alike I don't
+see how I shall ever know where I live," thought Gabriella. Then,
+as George helped her out of the cab, the door opened as if by
+magic, and beyond the solemn manservant she saw the short, stout
+figure of a lady in a tightly fitting morning gown of black silk.
+Hurrying up the steps, she was pressed against a large smooth bosom
+which yielded as little as if it had been upholstered in
+leather.</p>
+<p>"My dear daughter! my dear Gabriella!" exclaimed the lady in a
+charming voice; and looking down after the first kiss, Gabriella
+saw a handsome, slightly florid face, with the vivacious smile of a
+girl and a beautiful forehead under a stiffly crimped arch of gray
+hair which looked as hard and bright as silver.</p>
+<p>"I've been up since seven o'clock waiting for you. You must be
+famished. Come straight in to breakfast. Your father is already at
+the table, George. Poor man, he has to start downtown so dreadfully
+early."</p>
+<p>Bright, effusive, vivacious, and as emphatically Southern as if
+she had never left Franklin Street, Mrs. Fowler took off
+Gabriella's hat and coat, kissed her several times while she was
+doing so, and at last, still talking animatedly, led them into the
+dining-room.</p>
+<p>"Archibald, here they are," she said in a tone of unaffected
+delight, while a thin, serious-looking man, with anxious eyes,
+pale, aristocratic features, and skin that had a curious
+parchment-like texture, put down the <i>Times</i>, and came forward
+to meet them. Though he did not speak as he kissed her, Gabriella
+felt that there was sincere, if detached, friendliness in his
+little pat on her shoulder. He led her almost tenderly to her
+chair; and as soon as she was comfortably seated and supplied with
+rolls and bacon, resigned her contentedly to his wife and the
+butler. His manner of gentle abstraction, which Gabriella
+attributed first to something he had just read in the newspaper,
+she presently discovered to be his habitual attitude toward all the
+world except Wall Street. He ate his breakfast as if his attention
+were somewhere else; he spoke to his son and his daughter-in-law
+kindly, but as if he were not thinking about them; he treated his
+wife, whom he adored, as if he had not clearly perceived her. In
+the profound abstraction in which he lived every impression
+appeared to have become blurred except the tremendous impression of
+whirling forces; every detail seemed to have been obscured except
+the gigantic details of "Business." His manner was perfectly
+well-bred, but it was the manner of a man who moves through life
+rehearsing a part of which he barely remembers the words. From the
+first minute it was evident to Gabriella that her father-in-law
+adored his wife as an ideal, though he seemed scarcely aware of her
+as a person. He had given her his love, but his interests, his
+energies, his attention were elsewhere.</p>
+<p>"Is that the way George will treat me&mdash;as if I were only a
+dream woman?" thought Gabriella while she watched her father-in-law
+over the open sheet of the <i>Times</i>. Then, with her eyes on her
+husband, she realized that he was of his mother's blood, not his
+father's. Business could never absorb him. His restlessness, his
+instability, his love of pleasure, would prevent the sapping of his
+nature by one supreme interest.</p>
+<p>The table, like everything else in the room, was solid, heavy,
+and expensive. On the floor a heavy and expensive carpet, with a
+pattern in squares, stretched to the heavy and expensive moulding
+which bordered a heavy and expensive paper. Mrs. Fowler's taste,
+like Jimmy's (he was her third cousin), leaned apparently toward
+embossment, for behind a massive repouss&eacute; silver service she
+sat, as handsome and substantial as the room, with her face
+flushing in splotches from the heat of her coffee.</p>
+<p>Some twenty-odd years before the house had been furnished at
+great cost, according to the opulent taste of the early 'seventies,
+and, unchanged by severer and more frugal fashions, it remained a
+solid monument to the first great financial deal of Archibald
+Fowler. It was at the golden age, when, still young and energetic,
+luck had come to him in a day, that he had bought the brownstone
+house in Fifty-seventh Street, and his wife, also young and
+energetic, had gone out "to get whatever she liked." Trained in a
+simple school during the war, and brought up in the formal purity
+of high-ceiled rooms furnished in Chippendale and Sheraton, her
+natural tastes were, nevertheless, as ornate as the interiors of
+the New York shops. Though the blood of colonial heroes ran in her
+veins, she was still the child of her age, and her age prided
+itself upon being entirely modern in all things from religion to
+furniture.</p>
+<p>As she sat there behind the mammoth coffee urn, from which a
+spiral of steam floated, her handsome face irradiated the spirit of
+kindness. Because of her rather short figure, she appeared at her
+best when she was sitting, and now, with her large, tightly laced
+hips hidden beneath the table and her firm, jet-plastered bosom
+appearing above it, she presented a picture of calm and matronly
+beauty. Not once did she seem to think of herself or her own
+breakfast. Even while she buttered her toast and drank her steaming
+coffee, her bright blue eyes travelled unceasingly over the table,
+first to her husband's plate, then to Gabriella's, then to her
+son's. It was easy to see that she was the dominant and vital force
+in the household. She ruled Archibald, less indirectly perhaps, but
+quite as consistently as Cousin Pussy ruled Cousin Jimmy.</p>
+<p>"My dear, you must eat your breakfast," she said urgently to her
+daughter-in-law. "Archibald, let me give you your second cup of
+coffee. Remember what a trying day you have before you, and make a
+good breakfast. It is so hard to get him to eat," she explained to
+Gabriella; "I have to coax him to drink his two cups of coffee, for
+if he doesn't he is sure to come home with a headache."</p>
+<p>"Well, give me a cup, Evelyn," replied Mr. Fowler, in his gentle
+voice, yielding apparently to please her. In his youth he must have
+been very handsome, Gabriella thought; but now, though he still
+retained a certain distinction, he had the look of a man who has
+been drained of his vitality. What surprised her&mdash;for she had
+heard him described as "a hard man in business"&mdash;was the
+suggestion of the scholar in his appearance. With his narrow,
+carefully brushed head, his dreamy and rather wistful blue eyes
+behind gold-rimmed glasses, his stooping, slender shoulders, and
+his long, delicate hands covered with prominent veins, he ought to
+have been either a poet or a philosopher.</p>
+<p>"You must be happy with us, my dear," he had said to Gabriella,
+showing a minute later such gentle eagerness to return to a part of
+the newspaper which Gabriella had never read and did not
+understand, that his wife remarked pityingly: "Read your paper,
+Archibald, and don't let our chatter disturb you. There are a
+thousand things I want to say to the children."</p>
+<p>"Well, it's time for me to be going, Evelyn," Mr. Fowler
+responded, reluctantly folding the pages; "I'll look into this on
+the way down."</p>
+<p>"Remember, dear, that Judge Crowborough is coming to
+dinner."</p>
+<p>"I'll remember. Is there any one else?"</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Crowborough, of course, and Colonel Buffington, and one or
+two others. Nobody that you will care for except the judge and
+Patty and Billy."</p>
+<p>"I shan't forget, but I may be a little late getting home.
+Good-bye, my dear, until evening."</p>
+<p>Bending over her chair, he kissed her flushed cheek, while
+George remarked carelessly: "I'll see you later, father, when I've
+had a bath and a shave."</p>
+<p>After the gentle tones of Mr. Fowler, the vitality of George's
+voice sounded almost brutal, and he added just as carelessly when
+the front door had shut softly: "The old man looks seedy, doesn't
+he, mother?"</p>
+<p>A worried look brought out three startling lines in Mrs.
+Fowler's forehead, and Gabriella observed suddenly that there were
+tiny crow's feet around her blue eyes where the whites were flecked
+ever so faintly with yellow. Though she was well into the
+mid-fifties, her carefully preserved skin had kept the firmness and
+the texture of youth, and she still flushed easily and unbecomingly
+as she had done as a girl.</p>
+<p>"He hasn't been a bit well, George. I am very anxious about him.
+You know when he worries over his business, he doesn't eat his
+meals, and as soon as he stops eating he begins to have nervous
+dyspepsia. He has just had a bad attack; that's why he looks so run
+down and haggard."</p>
+<p>"Can't the doctor do anything for him?"</p>
+<p>"He gave him some drops, but it is so hard to get your father to
+take medicine. Rest is what he needs, and, of course, that is out
+of the question while things are so unsettled. You must help him
+all you can, my boy, and Gabriella and I will manage with each
+other's company."</p>
+<p>Her bright smile was still on her lips, but Gabriella noticed
+that she pushed her buttered roll away as if she were choking.</p>
+<p>In the early afternoon, when George had gone to join his father
+in the office, and Gabriella, seated at a little white and gold
+desk in the room which had been Patty's, was just finishing a
+letter to her mother, Mrs. Fowler came in, and pushing a
+chintz-covered chair close to the desk, sank into it and laid her
+small nervous hand on the arm of her daughter-in-law. She was
+wearing a velvet bonnet, with strings, and a street gown of black
+broadcloth, which fitted her like a glove and accentuated, after
+the fashion of the 'nineties, her small, compact waist and the deep
+substantial curves of her bosom and hips. Her eyes, behind the
+little veil of spotted tulle which reached to the tip of her nose,
+were bright and wistful, and though her colour was too high, a
+smile of troubled sweetness lent it a peculiar charm of
+expression.</p>
+<p>"How nice you look, my dear," she said, with her pleasant
+manner, which no anxiety, hardly any grief, could dispel. "Are you
+very busy, or may I talk to you a little while?"</p>
+<p>Drawing closer to her, Gabriella raised the plump little hand to
+her lips. Beneath the surface pleasantness of Mrs. Fowler's
+life&mdash;that pleasantness which wrapped her like a
+religion&mdash;she was beginning to discern a deep disquietude.</p>
+<p>"I want to talk to you, mamma," she said, and her manner was a
+caress.</p>
+<p>"You love George very much, dear?" asked Mrs. Fowler so suddenly
+that Gabriella looked at her startled.</p>
+<p>For a minute the girl could not speak. "Oh, yes; oh, yes," she
+answered presently, and choked over the words.</p>
+<p>"We wanted so much to go to your wedding&mdash;we were afraid
+you would think it strange that we stayed away, but Archibald had
+his attack just then, and on top of it he was terribly worried
+about his affairs. We have had a very hard year, and we feel so
+sorry, both of us, that we can't do more for your pleasure. As it
+is, we are cutting down our expenses in every way, and I have even
+decided to give up my carriage the first of next year.</p>
+<p>"I know, I know," said Gabriella, who had never had a carriage,
+and to whom the giving up of one seemed the smallest imaginable
+sacrifice. "We mustn't add to your cares," she went on after a
+minute. "Wouldn't it be better, really better, if we were to take
+an apartment at once instead of waiting until June?"</p>
+<p>"Until June?" repeated Mrs. Fowler vaguely, and she added
+quickly: "It is the greatest pleasure to have you here. Since Patty
+went I get so terribly lonely, and I don't think it would be at all
+wise for you to go to yourselves. George has hardly anything except
+what his father is able to give him, you know. The poor boy hasn't
+the least head for business."</p>
+<p>"But we shouldn't need much. I am sure I could manage just with
+what George makes&mdash;no matter how little it is."</p>
+<p>For an instant Mrs. Fowler looked at her thoughtfully.</p>
+<p>"You could, but George couldn't," she answered.</p>
+<p>"You mean he is extravagant?"</p>
+<p>"He has never had the slightest idea of the value of
+money&mdash;that is one of the things you must teach him. He is a
+dear boy, but he has never made a success of anything he has
+undertaken, and his father thinks he is too unpractical ever to do
+so. But you must try to get him to live within your means, my dear,
+or you will both be miserable. Try to keep him from borrowing."</p>
+<p>"But he refuses to talk to me about his work. It bores him,"
+said Gabriella; and her simple soul, trained to regard debt as a
+deeper disgrace than poverty, grew suddenly troubled. In her
+childhood they had gone without food rather than borrow, she
+remembered.</p>
+<p>"The matter with dear George," pursued Mrs. Fowler&mdash;and
+from the sweetness of her manner she might have been paying him a
+compliment&mdash;"is that he has never been steady. He doesn't
+stick at anything long enough to make it a success. If he were left
+to himself he would speculate wildly, and this is why his father is
+obliged to overlook all that he does in the office. It is just here
+that you can be of such wonderful help to him, Gabriella, by your
+influence. This is why I am telling you."</p>
+<p>But had she any influence over him? In spite of his passion for
+her had she ever turned him by so much as a hair's breadth from the
+direction of his impetuous desires? Once only she had withstood
+him&mdash;once only she had triumphed, and for that triumph she had
+paid by a complete surrender! She had been too glad to yield, too
+fearful of bringing a cloud over the sunny blue of his eyes.</p>
+<p>"I want to help him&mdash;I want you to tell me how I can help
+him," she said earnestly. "While we are with you this winter, you
+must teach me how to do it. Before we begin housekeeping in the
+summer, I want to learn all I possibly can about George's affairs.
+He won't talk to me about practical matters, so you must do
+it."</p>
+<p>"But where are you going, Gabriella? I thought you had decided
+to live with us?"</p>
+<p>"But didn't George tell you? Surely he must have told you. We
+are to take an apartment in June so my mother can come to us. I
+felt, of course, that I couldn't leave mother, and George
+understands. He was perfectly lovely about it."</p>
+<p>"I see, I see," murmured Mrs. Fowler, as if she were thinking of
+something else. "Well, that will all come right, dear, I hope."</p>
+<p>Rising abruptly, she began to draw on her gloves. "If you only
+knew how I long to make you happy," she said softly; "as happy as I
+have been with George's father."</p>
+<p>"They are so unlike," answered Gabriella, and the next day when
+she remembered the admission, she wondered how it had slipped from
+her.</p>
+<p>"Yes, they are unlike," agreed Mrs. Fowler. "George takes after
+me, and I am a frivolous person. But there doesn't live a better
+man than my husband," she added, glowing. "I've been his wife for
+thirty years, and in all that time I don't believe he has ever
+thought first of himself. Yes, it was thirty years ago that I drove
+through the streets with my bridal veil on, and felt so sorry for
+all the girls I saw who were not going to be married. To-day I feel
+exactly the same way&mdash;sorry for all the women who couldn't
+have Archibald for a husband. I've lived with him thirty years,
+I've borne him children, and I'm still sorry for all the other
+women&mdash;even for you, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"He seems so kind," said Gabriella; "I felt that about him, and
+it's the best thing, after all, isn't it?" It was the best thing,
+and yet she knew that George was not kind&mdash;that he was not
+even good-tempered.</p>
+<p>"Yes, it's the best thing, after all, in marriage," answered the
+older woman; "it's the thing that wears."</p>
+<p>"I have always wanted the best of life," rejoined Gabriella
+thoughtfully; and she went on gravely after a moment: "I couldn't
+love George any more than I do, but I wish that in some ways he
+would grow like his father."</p>
+<p>"The boy has a very sweet nature," replied George's mother, "and
+I hope marriage will steady him." It was a warning, Gabriella knew,
+and she wondered afterwards if her silent acquiescence in Mrs.
+Fowler's judgment had not been furtive disloyalty to George.</p>
+<p>"A great deal will depend on you, dear, for he is very much in
+love," resumed Mrs. Fowler when Gabriella did not speak, and she
+repeated very solemnly, "I hope marriage will steady him."</p>
+<p>In her heart Gabriella was hoping so, too, but all she said was,
+"I promise you that I will do all I can." She had given her word,
+and, looking into her eyes, Mrs. Fowler understood that her
+daughter-in-law was not one to give her word lightly. Gabriella
+would keep her promise. She would do her best, whatever
+happened.</p>
+<p>The older woman, with her life's history behind her, watched the
+girl for a minute in silence. There was so much that she longed to
+say, so much that could never be spoken even between women. She
+herself was an optimist, but her optimism had been wrung from the
+bitter core of experience. Her faith was firm, though it held few
+illusions, for, if she was an optimist, she was also a realist. She
+believed in life, not because it had satisfied her, but because she
+had had the wisdom to understand that the supreme failure had been,
+not life's, but her own. If she could only have lived it again and
+lived it differently from the beginning! If she could only have
+used her deeper wisdom not to regret the past, but to create the
+future! Much as she had loved her husband, she knew now that she
+had sacrificed him to the world. Much as she had loved her
+children, she would have sacrificed them, also, had it been
+possible. To the tin gods she had offered her soul&mdash;to the
+things that did not matter she had yielded up the only things that
+mattered at all. And she knew now that, in spite of her clearness
+of vision, the worldliness which had ruined her life was still
+bound up in all that was essential and endurable in her nature. She
+still wanted the illusions as passionately as if she believed in
+their reality; she still winced as sharply at the thought of
+Patty's marriage and of all that Patty had given up. In the case of
+George, she admitted that it was her fault&mdash;that she had
+spoiled him&mdash;but how could she have helped it? She remembered
+how he had looked as a child, with his round flushed face, his
+chestnut curls, and his eager, questioning eyes. He had been a
+beautiful child, more beautiful even than Patty, and because of his
+beauty she had been able to refuse him nothing. Then she thought of
+his boyhood, of his reckless extravagance at college; of the tales
+of his wildness to which she had shut her ears; of his debts, and
+still of his debts, which she had paid out of the housekeeping
+money because she was afraid to let his father know of them. Yes,
+George, in spite of his sweet nature, had given them a great deal
+of trouble, so much trouble that she had been quite reconciled to
+his marriage with any respectable girl. The memory of a chorus girl
+with whom he had once entangled himself still gave her a shiver at
+the heart when she recalled it. Money, always more money, had gone
+into that; and at last, just as she had grown hopeless of saving
+him, he had met this fine, sensible Gabriella, who looked so
+strong, so competent, and there had come an end to the disturbing
+stories which reached her at intervals. Surely it was proof of her
+son's inborn fineness that from the pink perfection of girlhood he
+should have chosen the capable Gabriella! At first she had
+regretted his choice, hoping, as the worldly and the unworldly
+alike hope for their sons, that the object of George's
+disinterested affection would prove to be wealthy. Then at the
+sight of Gabriella she had surrendered completely. The girl was
+fine all through, this she could see as soon as she looked at her.
+She liked her noble though not beautiful face, with the broad clear
+forehead from which the soft dark hair was brushed back so simply,
+and, most of all, she liked the charm and sympathy in her voice.
+George had chosen well, and if she could trust his choice, why
+could she not trust him to be true to it?</p>
+<p>"I wonder if you would like to put on your hat and come with
+me?" she asked, obeying an impulse. "I'm going to drive up to
+Patty's with some curtains for her bedroom."</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'd love to," replied Gabriella with eagerness, for she
+hated inaction, and it was impossible to spend a whole afternoon
+merely thinking about one's happiness. "It won't take me a minute
+to get ready."</p>
+<p>While she put on her hat and coat, Mrs. Fowler watched her
+thoughtfully, saying once: "It is quite cool, you'd better bring
+your furs, dear."</p>
+<p>When Gabriella answered frankly, "I haven't any, I never had any
+furs in my life," a tender expression crept into the rather hard
+blue eyes of her mother-in-law, and she said quickly: "Well, I've a
+set of white fox that I am too old to wear, and you shall have
+it."</p>
+<p>"But what of Patty?" asked Gabriella, for she had grown up
+thinking of other people and she couldn't break the habit of twenty
+years in a minute.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Patty has all the furs she'll need for years. We spent
+every penny we had on Patty before she married," answered Mrs.
+Fowler, but she was saying to herself: "Yes, the girl is the right
+wife for him. I am sure she is the right wife for him."</p>
+<p>The Park was brilliant with falling leaves, and as they drove
+beneath a perfect sky beside a lake which sparkled like sapphire,
+Gabriella, lifting her chin above the white furs, said rapturously,
+"Oh, I am so happy! Life is so beautiful!"</p>
+<p>A shadow stole into the eyes with which Mrs. Fowler was watching
+the passing carriages, and the fixed sweetness about her mouth
+melted into an expression of yearning. Tears veiled the faces of
+the women who spoke to her in passing, for she was thinking of her
+first drive in the Park with her husband, and though her marriage
+had been a happy one, she felt a strange longing as if she wanted
+to weep.</p>
+<p>"I never saw such wonderful horses," said Gabriella. "Cousin
+Jimmy would be wild about them;" and she added impetuously, "But
+the hats aren't in the least like the one I am wearing." A
+misgiving seized her as she realized that her dresses, copied by
+Miss Polly with ardent fidelity from a Paris fashion book, were all
+hopelessly wrong. She wondered if her green silk gown with the
+black velvet sleeves was different in style from the gowns the
+other women were wearing under their furs? Had sleeves of a
+different colour from the bodice, which Miss Polly considered the
+last touch of elegance, really gone out of fashion?</p>
+<p>The carriage passed out of the Park, and turning into one of the
+streets on the upper West Side stopped presently before a small
+dingy apartment house, where a dozen ragged children were playing
+leapfrog on the pavement.</p>
+<p>"Patty has the top floor&mdash;there's a studio." Drawing her
+skirts away from the children, for her generation feared contact
+with the lower classes, Mrs. Fowler walked briskly to the low brown
+steps, on which an ash can stood waiting for removal. Inside, where
+the hall smelled uninvitingly of stale cooking, they rang for the
+elevator under a dim yellow light which revealed a hundred secret
+lines in their faces.</p>
+<p>"I can't imagine how Patty puts up with the place," remarked
+Patty's mother dejectedly. "You wouldn't believe the trouble we
+went to to start her well. She was the acknowledged beauty of her
+winter&mdash;everybody was crazy about her looks&mdash;and the very
+week before she ran off with Billy she had a proposal from the Duke
+of Toxbridge. Of course, if I'd ever dreamed she had a fancy for
+Billy, I'd have kept him out of her sight instead of allowing him
+to paint her portrait whenever she had any time she could spare.
+But who on earth would have suspected it? Billy King, whom she had
+known all her life, as poor as a church mouse, and the kind of
+painter whose work will never 'take' if he lives to be a thousand!
+His portraits may be good art&mdash;I don't pretend to know
+anything about that&mdash;but I do know pictures of pretty women
+when I see them, and his women are frights, every last one of them.
+If you're thin, he paints your skeleton, and if you're fat, he
+makes you as square as a house, and, thin or fat, he always gives
+you a blue and yellow complexion. He wouldn't even make Patty
+white, though I implored him to do it&mdash;and he made her look
+exactly ten years older than her age."</p>
+<p>"I've never seen any portraits of living people&mdash;only of
+ancestors," said Gabriella, "and I am so much interested."</p>
+<p>"Well, you mustn't judge them by Billy's, my dear, even if he
+did get all those prizes in Paris. But I always said the French
+were queer, and if they hadn't been, they would never have raved so
+over the things Billy painted. Now, Augustus Featherfield's are
+really charming. One can tell to look at his portraits that he
+paints only ladies, and he gives them all the most perfectly lovely
+hair, whether they have it or not. Some day I'll take you to his
+studio and let you see for yourself."</p>
+<p>The elevator descended, creaking beneath the weight of a negro
+youth who seemed half asleep, and a little later, creaking more
+loudly, it bore them slowly upward to the top of the house.</p>
+<p>"I feel as if I were taking my life in my hands whenever I come
+here," observed Mrs. Fowler, in the tone of dispassionate
+resignation with which she always discussed Patty and the
+surroundings amid which Patty lived. Marching resolutely, though
+disapprovingly, down a long hall, she pressed a small bell at the
+side of a door, and stood, holding tightly to the bundle of
+curtains, while her expression of unnatural pleasantness grew
+almost painful in its determination. Here, also, they waited some
+time, and when at last the door was opened by an agitated maid,
+without an apron, and they were led into a long, queerly furnished
+studio, with a balcony from which they had a distant cloudless view
+of the river, Gabriella felt for a minute that she must have fallen
+into a dream. Long afterwards she learned that Billy's studio was
+charming, with its blurred Italian tapestries, which had faded to
+an exquisite tone, with its broken torsos of old marble, warming to
+deep ivory in the sunlight, with its ecstatic haloed saints praying
+against dim Tuscan landscapes, with its odd and unexpected seats of
+carved stone on which the cushions made strange splotches and pools
+of colour. At the time, seen through provincial eyes, it seemed
+merely "queer" to her; and queerer still appeared the undraped
+figures of women, all lean lines and violet shadows, which,
+unframed and unhung, filled the dusty corners.</p>
+<p>"The river is lovely, but it is so far away," she said, turning
+her abashed eyes from the nude figures, and thinking how terribly
+they would have shocked the innocence of Cousin Jimmy.</p>
+<p>"I always look at the river when I come here," responded Mrs.
+Fowler, and her tone implied that the river at least was perfectly
+proper. "A month ago the colours were wonderful."</p>
+<p>In the drive, which they could see from a corner view, a few old
+men, forgotten by time, warmed themselves in the sunlight. Far
+below, the river reflected the changeable blue of the sky, while
+the autumnal pageantry on the horizon was fading slowly, like a
+burned-out fire, to the colour of ashes.</p>
+<p>"Mother, dear, I'm so glad," said a gay voice in the doorway,
+and turning quickly, Gabriella stared with wide eyes at the vision
+of Patty&mdash;of Patty in some soft tea-gown, which borrowed its
+tone from the old tapestries on the wall, with her honey-coloured
+hair hanging over her shoulders, and her eyes as fresh as blue
+flowers in the ivory pallor of her face.</p>
+<p>"And this is Gabriella," she added, holding out her arms. "What
+a darling you are to come so soon, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>She was a tall girl, so tall that she stooped to kiss Gabriella,
+whose height measured exactly five feet and seven inches, and she
+was beautiful with the faultless beauty which is seen only once or
+twice in a generation, but which, seen once, is never forgotten.
+For Patty's beauty, as a poet once wrote of a dead woman, was the
+beauty of destiny, the beauty that changes history and turns men
+into angels or into beasts. Though Gabriella had seen lovely skins
+on Southern women&mdash;rose-leaf skins, magnolia skins,
+peach-blossom skins&mdash;she had seen nothing that resembled the
+exquisite colour and texture of Patty's face.</p>
+<p>"The curtains were finished, so I brought them," said Mrs.
+Fowler, pointing to the bundle. "I wanted Gabriella to see the
+Park. You are coming to-night without fail, aren't you, Patty?"</p>
+<p>"Without fail, even if we have to walk," answered Patty. "You
+can't imagine how much it costs to get about when one lives so far
+uptown. That's one reason we are anxious to move. Billy has been
+looking for a studio for weeks, and, do you know, he has really
+found one at last. Harry Allen is moving out of the Rubens
+Building, and we are going to take his studio on the top floor.
+We're awfully lucky, too, to get it, for it is the first vacancy
+there for years."</p>
+<p>"But it's over a stable, isn't it?" asked Mrs. Fowler. "How
+could you possibly live there? And the East Side way down there is
+just as bad as up here"</p>
+<p>"I believe there is a stable, but it won't bother us&mdash;we're
+too high," replied Patty.</p>
+<p>"Well, we can't stop; Gabriella hasn't unpacked her trunks,"
+returned Mrs. Fowler; "but be sure to come early, Patty. I want
+your father to see you."</p>
+<p>"I wish there wasn't going to be anybody else. I want to talk to
+my sister. Isn't it lovely to have a sister, and mamma was too
+selfish to give me one. Do you call her 'mamma,' too,
+Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"Of course she calls me 'mamma,'" answered Mrs. Fowler before
+Gabriella could speak, "and she is a much better daughter already
+than you ever were."</p>
+<p>"And a much better son, too, than George ever was?" asked Patty
+slyly.</p>
+<p>"We aren't talking about George. George has settled down," said
+Mrs. Fowler quickly, too quickly it occurred to Gabriella, who was
+eager to hear all that the daring Patty would say. "Don't you think
+those white furs look well on Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"She looks like the snow queen in them. Does it matter what I
+wear to-night? Who is coming?"</p>
+<p>"Nobody you will care about&mdash;only Judge and Mrs.
+Crowborough and Colonel Buffington."</p>
+<p>"That old bore of a colonel! And why do you have to ask the
+judge again so soon? He looks like a turkey gobbler, Gabriella, and
+he has so much money that it is impossible to judge him by the
+standards of other people, everybody says that&mdash;even
+Billy."</p>
+<p>"Hush, Patty. You mustn't corrupt Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"If the judge doesn't, I shan't, mamma."</p>
+<p>"Well, your father has the greatest respect for him, and as for
+asking him often to dinner, it isn't by any means so easy to get
+him as you think. I don't suppose there's another man in New York
+who is invited out so often and goes out so little."</p>
+<p>"Papa is a sweet innocent," observed Patty maliciously, "but if
+you can stand the judge, mamma, dear, I am sure I can, especially
+as I shan't have to sit by him. That honour will be reserved for
+poor Gabriella. I wish you didn't have to go, but you really must,
+I suppose?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, we must go. Come, Gabriella, or you won't have time to get
+into your trunks before dinner."</p>
+<p>On the drive home Mrs. Fowler was grimly silent, while the
+sweetness about her mouth ebbed slowly away, leaving the faintest
+quiver of the muscles. For the first time Gabriella saw George's
+mother look as she must look in her sleep, when the artificial
+cheerfulness of her expression faded into the profound
+unconsciousness which drowns not only happiness, but the very
+pretence of happiness. So here, also, was insincerity, here, also,
+was the striving, not for realities, but for appearances! In a
+different form she saw her mother's struggle again&mdash;that
+struggle, without beginning and without end, which moved always in
+a circle and led nowhere. Was there no sincerity, no reality even
+in love? Was George, too, only a shadow? And the visible sadness of
+the November afternoon, with its faint haze like the haze of a
+dream landscape, seemed a part of this invisible sadness which had
+sprung from nothing and which would change and pass away in a
+breath. "If things would only last," she thought, looking with
+wistful eyes on the gold and purple around her. "If things would
+only last, how wonderful life would be!"</p>
+<p>"To think that all Patty's beauty should have been thrown away,"
+said Mrs. Fowler suddenly.</p>
+<p>Though Gabriella had never seen Billy, she was inclined at the
+moment, in her mood of dissatisfaction with the universe, to
+sympathize with Mrs. Fowler's view of the matter. To her frugal
+mind, trained to economy of material, it seemed that Patty was
+altogether too much for a poor man&mdash;even though he could paint
+her in lean lines and violet shadows.</p>
+<p>Upstairs she found her trunks in her bedroom, and after she had
+unpacked her wedding-gown of white satin, removed the tissue paper
+stuffing from the sleeves, and shaken out the creases with gentle
+hands, she sat down and pondered deeply the problem of dressing for
+dinner. By removing the lace yoke, she might make the gown
+sufficiently indecorous for the fashion of the period, and her only
+evening dress, the white muslin she had worn to dances in Richmond,
+she reflected gloomily, would appear absurd in New York.</p>
+<p>"I wish I didn't look such a fright," she said aloud, as she
+ripped and sewed. Then, in a flash, her mind wandered from herself,
+and she thought: "I wonder why George didn't tell his mother that
+we are going to take an apartment? I wonder why he didn't tell her
+that mother is coming in June? When he comes I must ask him."</p>
+<p>Looking at the clock, she saw that it was after seven, and
+hurriedly taking the last few stitches, she laid the gown on the
+bed, bathed her face in cold water, and then, sitting down before
+her dressing-table, drew the pins from her hair. In some obscure
+way she felt herself a different person from the bride who had
+watched George so ecstatically at the station that morning. She
+could not tell how she had altered, and yet she felt perfectly
+conscious that an alteration had taken place in her soul&mdash;that
+she was not the same Gabriella&mdash;that life could never be again
+exactly as it had been before. Nothing and yet everything seemed to
+have happened to her in a day. Her face, gazing gravely back at her
+from the mirror, looked young and wistful, the face of one who,
+like a bird flying suddenly out of darkness against a lamp, is
+bewildered by the first shock of the light.</p>
+<p>When her hair was arranged in the simple way she had always worn
+it, she slipped her dress over her bare shoulders, and fastened it
+slowly&mdash;for Miss Polly had no patience with "back
+fastenings"&mdash;while she told herself again that George would
+not be satisfied. She knew that her gown was provincial, knew that
+she lacked the "dash" he admired in women; and from the first she
+had been mystified by a love which could, while still passionately
+desiring her, wish her different in so many ways. "I'd like him to
+be proud of me, but I suppose he never will be," she thought
+dejectedly, "and yet he fell in love with me just as I was, and he
+did not fall in love with any of the dashing women he knows," she
+added quickly, consoled by the reflection. "And of course in a few
+things I wish him different, too. I wish he wasn't so careless. He
+is so careless that I shall have to be twice as careful, I shall
+have to look after him all the time. Even to-night he has forgotten
+about the dinner, and he'll be obliged to dress in a hurry, which
+he hates."</p>
+<p>Glancing at the clock again, she saw that it was a quarter of
+eight, and still George had not come.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<h3>THE OLD SERPENT</h3>
+<p>At five minutes of eight o'clock he came in, with a lighted
+cigar in his mouth. For the first few days after her marriage there
+had been a pleasant excitement in the scent of George's cigars in
+her bedroom. Now, however, habit had dulled the excitement, and the
+smell of tobacco gave her a headache.</p>
+<p>"Oh, George, you are late!" she exclaimed, sinking the lesser
+into the greater offence after the habit of wives. As if he had all
+night instead of five minutes before him in which to dress, he
+stood in the centre of the room, blandly looking her over.</p>
+<p>"You're all right," he said after a pause. "I met a fellow at
+the club I hadn't seen for a year. He had been hunting big game in
+Africa, and he was telling me about it. By Jove, that is life!"</p>
+<p>They had been married but a month; it was their first day at
+home, and he could linger at the club to talk of big game while she
+waited for him. Flushed, excited, he stood there on the white
+bearskin rug midway between the bed and the wood-fire, while she
+felt his charm stealing like a drug over her senses. Though she had
+begun to realize the thinness of his mental qualities, she was
+still as completely in the power of his physical charm as she had
+been on the day of her wedding. In the flickering light of the fire
+he appeared to diffuse the glamour of romance, of adventure; and
+she felt that this single day in New York had left a vital
+impression upon him. It was as if he had become suddenly more
+alive, more inexplicable in his simplicity; and, though she had
+grasped vaguely the fact that his personality was composed of
+innumerable reactions, she had never really understood before how
+entirely he was the creature of his environment. It was as if the
+very essence of his soul floated there, a variable and fluid
+quantity, forever changing form and colour beneath the shallow
+ripples of his personality. She had seen him in many moods, but
+never in this one. Did he possess a deeper subtlety than she had
+imagined or was it the sincerity of his nature that defied
+analysis?</p>
+<p>"Did you enjoy yourself?" she asked cheerfully. Tell me about
+it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, it was rather jolly," he replied, and she knew that this
+was as much as she should ever get out of him. Beyond a few stock
+phrases, words hardly existed for him at all, or existed only in
+foreign languages, for, having been educated abroad, he spoke
+French and German fluently, if without felicity. Already his
+inarticulateness was like an encumbering veil between them&mdash;a
+veil in which she struggled as helplessly as a moth in a net. And
+only a month ago she had believed that the very immensity of his
+nature rendered him dumb.</p>
+<p>"Then you had better hurry, dear. Dinner is at eight, and you
+have only a minute."</p>
+<p>"You go down and tell them not to wait. I was detained downtown,
+but it won't take me a second to dress."</p>
+<p>As he passed under the electric light by the mirror, she saw his
+face with exaggerated distinctness, as if it were held under a
+microscope, and a heaviness, which she had never noticed before,
+marred the edge of his profile. If he hadn't been George, would she
+have said that he looked stupid at the moment? For a flashing
+instant of illumination she saw him with a vision that was not her
+own, but a stranger's, with a pitiless clearness unsoftened by any
+passion. Then the clearness faded rapidly before an impulse of
+tenderness, and she told herself that he was merely handsome, gay,
+and careless, as he had been on their honeymoon. If he would only
+talk to her, she felt that he would be perfect.</p>
+<p>"Yes, I'm going. Come as soon as you can," she said; and
+catching up her satin train, she descended the oak staircase to the
+drawing-room, where a fire was burning and the lights were shaded
+in crimson.</p>
+<p>Twenty minutes later, seated at the round table, which was
+bright with chrysanthemums in tall silver vases, she looked with a
+feeling of resentment at George's empty place. Why was he so
+careless? Time had for him, she realized, as little meaning as
+words had. Then, in the midst of her disquietude, she caught the
+serene blue eyes of George's mother fixed upon her. With her young
+face, her red lips, and her superb shoulders rising out of the rich
+black lace of her gown, Mrs. Fowler looked almost beautiful. Had
+Patty not been present, with her loveliness like a summer's day,
+her mother would have seemed hardly more than a girl; but who could
+shine while Patty, beside that long, lean man with the gray
+imperial, smiled with lips that were like a scarlet flower in her
+face?</p>
+<p>There were only four guests, but these four, as Mrs. Fowler had
+said, "counted for something." The long, lean man beside Patty was
+one Colonel Buffington, a Virginia lawyer, who had wandered North
+in search of food in the barren years after the war. As his mind
+was active in a patient accumulative fashion, he had become in time
+a musty storehouse of war anecdotes, and achieving but moderate
+success in his law practice, his chief distinction, perhaps, was as
+a professional Southerner. Combining a genial charm of manner with
+as sterile an intellect as it is possible to attain, he was
+generally regarded as a perfect example of "the old school," and
+this picturesque reputation made him desirable as a guest at club
+dinners as well as at the larger gatherings of the various Southern
+societies. His conversation, which was entirely anecdotal,
+consisted of an elaborate endless chain of more or less historical
+"stories." Social movements and the development of civilization
+interested him as little as did art or science&mdash;for which he
+entertained a chronic suspicion due to the indiscretions of Darwin.
+Change of any kind was repugnant to his deeper instincts, and of
+all changes the ones relating to the habits of women appeared to
+him to interfere most unwarrantably with the Creator's original
+plan. For the rest he had the heart of a child, would strip the
+clothes from his back to give to a friend, or even to an enemy, and
+possessed an infallible gift for making a dinner successful.</p>
+<p>On Colonel Buffington's right sat Mrs. Hamilton, a very pretty,
+very sprightly widow, with her hair coiled into the fashionable
+Psyche knot, and the short puffs of her sleeves emphasizing the
+hour-glass perfection of her figure. Next to Mrs. Hamilton there
+was Billy King, who wore a white flower in his buttonhole and
+looked like a soldier out of uniform, and beyond Billy sat Mrs.
+Crowborough, whom he was trying despairingly to entertain. She,
+renowned and estimable woman, was planning in her mind what she
+should say at a board meeting of one of her pet charities on the
+morrow, a charity which, like all of her favourite ones, concerned
+itself with the management and spiritual elevation of girl orphans.
+Tall, raw-boned, strung with jet, Mrs. Crowborough, who had been
+married for her money, looked as sympathetic as a moral principle
+or an organized charity. Unfortunately, for she was rather heavy in
+company, Judge Crowborough was obliged by custom to bring her to
+dinner; and she came willingly, inspired less by sociability than
+by the virtuous instinct which animated her being. Mr. Fowler had
+taken her in to dinner, and while she lent an inert attention to
+Billy's jests, he talked across Gabriella to Judge Crowborough, who
+was eating his soup with the complete absorption of a man to whom
+the smallest of his appetities is sacred. It was a grievance of
+Mrs. Fowler's that her husband would never, as she said, "pay any
+attention to women," and in order to feel assured of even so much
+as a cheerful noise at his end of the table, she was obliged to
+place within hearing distance of him somebody who could talk
+fluently, if not eloquently, of the stock market.</p>
+<p>To Gabriella's surprise, her father-in-law, who had appeared
+inert and listless at breakfast, became, in the stimulating
+presence of the judge, not only awake, but mildly animated. She had
+felt before the charm in his scholarly face, with its look of
+detached spirituality so strangely out of keeping with the calling
+he pursued; and she recognized now the quality of controlled force
+which had enabled him to hold his own in the financial whirlpool of
+his country. Had the girl known more of life, she would have
+understood that in the American business world there were hundreds
+of such men winning their way and leaving their mark at that moment
+of history&mdash;men whose natures were redeemed from grossness by
+the peculiar idealism they infused into their material battles. Of
+Scotch-Irish inheritance, the direct descendant of one Gregory
+Truesdale, who had died a martyr for Presbyterianism, Archibald
+Fowler was inspired by something of the austere devotion which had
+fortified his religious ancestor. Since his college days his
+private life had been irreproachable. Though he was a stronger
+character than his wife, he regarded her with almost superstitious
+reverence, and made no decision above Wall Street without
+consulting her. His heart, and as much of his time as he could
+spare from business, were hers, and she made the most of them.
+Women, as women, did not attract him, and he avoided them except at
+his own table, where custom constrained him to be polite. After a
+few courteous words to Mrs. Crowborough, he had turned with relief
+to her husband.</p>
+<p>"You've got a bright chap in your office, Stanley," he said;
+"that fellow Latham. I was talking to him this morning. He's from
+Colorado, isn't he?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, they're all from the West now," responded the
+judge&mdash;he had sat on the bench in his youth. "Ten years ago
+the bright ones were from the South, but you Southerners are
+outstripped to-day, and it's the men from the West who are doing
+it. There's a fundamental reason there, I suppose, if you go deep
+enough," he added, fingering the ends of his short gray moustache
+while he kept an eye on his champagne glass. "We've done with mere
+classifying and imitation, and we're waiting for a fresh explosion
+of raw energy. Now for pure constructive imagination the North and
+South don't hold a candle&mdash;they simply don't hold a
+candle&mdash;to the West. Mark my words, in twenty-five years
+there'll hardly be a big railroad man in the country who wasn't
+born in sight of the Rockies." Unlike Mr. Fowler, whose mind ran in
+a groove leading directly to business, the judge had a natural bent
+toward generalization, and when dining, preferred to discuss
+impersonal topics. He was a tall, florid man with an immense paunch
+flattened by artificial devices, and a vitality so excessive that
+it overflowed in numberless directions&mdash;in his hearty animal
+appetites, in his love of sports, in his delight in the theatre and
+literature, particularly in novels of the sentimental and romantic
+school, in his fondness for the lighter operas, and in his
+irrepressible admiration for pretty women. His face, large, ruddy,
+with a hooked nose, where the red was thickly veined with purple,
+and protruding lips over square yellow teeth that gripped like the
+teeth of a bulldog, aroused in Gabriella a quick repulsion which
+only the genial humour of his smile overcame. That he should have
+married his wife for her money was less amazing to the girl than
+that his wife should have married him for any reason whatsoever.
+Only a moral principle or a charitable institution, she felt, could
+have endured him and survived. But in spite of his repulsiveness he
+had evidently experienced the natural activities of humanity. He
+had taken a wife; he had begotten children; he had judged other
+men; he had dug into the bowels of the earth for mines, and had
+built railroads on its surface; he had made grass grow in deserts
+and had turned waste places into populous cities; he had read
+romances and heard music; he had attained a social position
+securely founded upon millions of dollars&mdash;and all these
+things he had achieved through his unconquerable colossal vitality.
+"I wonder why they put him by me," thought Gabriella. "I shall
+never get on with him."</p>
+<p>Then he turned to her and said bluntly, between two mouthfuls of
+lobster: "So you're George's wife! Handsome chap George, but he
+hasn't much head for business. He lacks the grip of the old man.
+Where's he to-night?"</p>
+<p>"He got home so late that he wasn't ready for dinner. He'll be
+down in a minute."</p>
+<p>"It's a bad habit. He oughtn't to be late. Now, I haven't been
+late for dinner for twenty years."</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid he doesn't pay much attention to time. I'll try to
+change him."</p>
+<p>"You won't. No woman alive ever changed a man's habits. All you
+can do is to hide them."</p>
+<p>That his blunt manner was an affectation, she was quick to
+discern. While he talked to her, he looked at her knowingly with
+his light fishy eyes, and by his look and his tone he seemed to
+establish an immediate intimacy between them&mdash;as if he and she
+were speaking a language which was foreign to the rest of the
+table. He appeared to be kind, she thought, and on his side he was
+thinking that she was a nice girl, with an attractive face and
+remarkable eyes. On the whole, he preferred brown eyes, though his
+wife's were the colour of slate. "Why the deuce did she marry that
+fool?" he questioned impatiently.</p>
+<p>Across the table Billy King was working hopelessly but valiantly
+to engage Mrs. Crowborough's attention. What a splendid figure he
+had, and how clean and fine was the modelling of his features! He
+was just the man a girl like Patty would fall in love with, and
+Gabriella no longer felt that. Patty's beauty was wasted. Once or
+twice she caught fleeting glances passing between them, and these
+glances, so winged with happiness, spoke unutterable and ecstatic
+things.</p>
+<p>A hush dropped suddenly on the table, and in this hush she heard
+the voice of Colonel Buffington telling a story in dialect. It was
+an immemorial anecdote of Cousin Jimmy's&mdash;she had heard him
+tell it a dozen times&mdash;and while she listened, it made her
+feel comfortably at home.</p>
+<p>"'Uncle Amos,' I said to him, 'we've been together thirty years,
+but we've got to part. You're a drunkard and a thief and a
+worthless darky all round, and you've lived on my place ever since
+the war without doing a lick of work for your keep. I've stood it
+as long as I can, but there's an end to human endurance. Yes, Amos,
+the time has come for us to part.'</p>
+<p>"Hi! Marse Beverly,' said the old rascal, 'whar you gwine?"</p>
+<p>"Capital!" ejaculated the judge softly. "Capital!" And he added
+for Gabriella's ear: "Buffington tells the best negro stories of
+any man I know. Ought to have heard him at the club the other
+night."</p>
+<p>Gabriella did not answer; Cousin Jimmy's story had made her
+think of Cousin Jimmy, with his soft heart and his dark shining
+eyes like the eyes of a good and gentle dog. Then she thought of
+her mother, and reminded herself that she must ask George when they
+were to begin the hunt for an apartment. He had said they were very
+hard to find when you wanted them.</p>
+<p>Another hush fell, and Colonel Buffington was just beginning a
+second story&mdash;one of Uncle Meriweather's this time&mdash;when
+George came in from the drawing-room, and after a murmured apology,
+took his seat between Patty and Mrs. Hamilton.</p>
+<p>"That's a handsome boy," said the judge in a husky whisper to
+Gabriella, "but he hasn't much to say for himself, has he?"</p>
+<p>His manner of playful intimacy conveyed the impression that the
+secret understanding between them did not include Gabriella's
+husband. George was an outsider, but this hideous old man, with his
+curious repelling suggestion of over-ripeness, as of fruit that is
+beginning to rot at the core, was the dominant personality in her
+mind at the moment. She wondered if he knew how repulsive he was,
+and while she wondered, the judge, unaware of his tragic plight,
+went on eating lobster with unimpaired relish. His importance,
+founded upon a more substantial basis than mere personal
+attraction, had risen superior not only to morality, but to the
+outward failings of the flesh. Had he been twice as repulsive, she
+realized that his millions would have commanded a respect denied to
+both beauty and virtue.</p>
+<p>"I wonder how any woman can stand him," mused Gabriella. Then,
+glancing across the table at Mrs. Crowborough, she realized
+something of the amazing insensibility of the more ethereal sex. No
+man, not even in the last extremity, could have loved a woman as
+ugly as Judge Crowborough was. The roughest man would have had
+sufficient esthetic sense to have been shocked into revolt; yet a
+woman, a refined and intelligent woman, had married the judge and
+survived it. She appeared now, not only expressionless and
+unrevolted, but filled with a healthy zest for social reforms and
+the spiritual welfare of girl orphans.</p>
+<p>"Well, I've learned something of life to-night," thought
+Gabriella while she watched her.</p>
+<p>Later in the evening, when she passed into the drawing-room,
+with Mrs. Crowborough, bleak, unbending, and trailing her chains of
+jet, she comforted herself again with the reflection that what she
+was "seeing" might not be particularly exciting, "but it was
+life."</p>
+<p>On a short, hard sofa near the fire, beside Fatty, who bloomed
+like a white rose under the red-shaded light, she listened to Mrs.
+Fowler's unflagging efforts to "get on" with the judge's wife.
+Never had the dauntless little woman revealed more surprising
+resourcefulness, never had she talked so vivaciously, never had she
+appeared so relentlessly pleasant. It was as if she said in the
+face of Mrs. Crowborough's insensibility, which was the
+insensibility not of mind, but of inanimate matter, "Whatever you
+do, you can't keep me from being sweet." And in this strained
+sweetness there was something touching, something wistful, a hint
+of inner weariness which showed now and then beneath the restless
+vivacity.</p>
+<p>"Isn't it funny," said Patty suddenly, "how much mamma cares
+about things that don't matter at all? You wouldn't believe it to
+look at her, but she is in her heart the most worldly one of the
+family. Father wouldn't give a tallow candle for anything that
+isn't real."</p>
+<p>A log broke in the centre, and fell, scattering a shower of
+golden embers over the hearth. Rising quickly, with one of her
+sprightly movements, Mrs. Fowler reached for a pair of small brass
+tongs and pushed the broken log back on the andirons. Then she
+threw some fresh wood on the flames, and resumed her seat with an
+animated gesture as if the incident had enlivened her.</p>
+<p>"Now they are talking about the everlasting Pletheridges,"
+whispered Patty. "I never understand how mother can take so much
+interest in those people just because they are rich."</p>
+<p>But to Gabriella it was more inconceivable still that her
+mother-in-law, with the bluest blood of Virginia in her veins,
+should regard with such artless reverence the social activities of
+the granddaughter of a tavern-keeper. In her native State an
+impoverished branch of Mrs. Fowler's family still lived on land
+which, tradition said, had been granted one of her ancestors by
+Charles the Second in recognition of distinguished services to that
+dubious monarch; yet she could long enviously for a closer
+acquaintance with the plutocratic descendant of an Irish
+tavern-keeper&mdash;an honest man, doubtless, who had laid the
+foundations of his fortune in a string of halfway houses stretching
+from New York to Chicago.</p>
+<p>"Yes, I dined with Mrs. Pletheridge once," she was saying in the
+tone in which her royalist ancestor might have acknowledged a
+command from his King.</p>
+<p>"It always makes me angry, I can't help it," pursued Patty. "If
+dear mamma had only some other weakness&mdash;cards or wine or
+clothes or anything else. It's queer, with all her pride, how
+little social backbone she has. Now to hear her talk, you would
+imagine that that vulgar snob, whose father kept hotels and married
+one of his chambermaids, had conferred an honour by inviting her to
+dinner. And the funniest part is that, for all her good breeding,
+and her family portraits, and her titled ancestors, mother hasn't
+half so much respect for the genuine New Yorkers&mdash;I mean the
+New Yorkers whose names really mean something&mdash;as she has for
+these mushroom plutocrats. She had set her heart on George marrying
+one of them, you know, but it's a jolly good thing he didn't."</p>
+<p>"That's the girl he told me about," said Gabriella. "Was he ever
+interested in her?"</p>
+<p>"Not for a minute. We're awfully contrary about our love
+affairs. We will marry for love&mdash;even mother did though she
+may have forgotten it. We never marry the people&mdash;" She
+clipped off the sentence, but Gabriella caught it up with a
+laugh:</p>
+<p>"I know," she said gaily, "you never marry the people your
+family pick out for you."</p>
+<p>"Well, of course, Billy went dreadfully hard with them&mdash;at
+least with mother. She wanted the Duke of Somewhere so very badly.
+But it was Billy or nobody for me. I'd have married Billy," she
+added while her beautiful face grew stern, "if I'd had to walk all
+the way across the world to him."</p>
+<p>"He looks as if he were worth it," admitted Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"He is, but that probably wasn't my reason for marrying him. One
+never knows why one marries, I suppose, unless one marries for
+money and then it is so beautifully simple. Now, you and George
+don't seem a bit alike, but it all happened on the spur of the
+moment, didn't it?"</p>
+<p>"It always seems that way when one looks back, doesn't it?"
+asked Gabriella. "But what I can't understand"&mdash;she brought it
+out with a frown&mdash;"is why marriage doesn't change one. I used
+to think I'd be different, but I'm not. And even love seems to
+leave people wanting everything else just as badly. Your mother has
+had a perfect love&mdash;she told me so&mdash;and yet it hasn't
+kept her from wanting all the other things in life, has it? I wish
+I could work it out," she finished, a little sadly, for she was
+thinking of her mother's cry on the night of Jane's attack: "I am
+tempted to hope Gabriella will never marry. The Carrs all marry so
+badly!" Why had those words come back to her to-night? She had not
+remembered them for months, she had even forgotten that she had
+heard them, and now they floated to her as clearly as if they had
+been spoken aloud.</p>
+<p>In a little while Billy came in, and when, after a few moments
+of spasmodic affability, Mrs. Crowborough rose and pleaded an early
+board meeting on the morrow, Gabriella watched Patty wrap her
+honey-coloured head in a white scarf and then stand, waiting for a
+cab, in the doorway. Happiness, with so many people an invisible
+attribute, encircled Patty like a garment of light. It crowned her
+white brow under the glory of her hair; it shone in her eyes; it
+rippled in her smile; it lingered in a beam of sunshine on her
+lips. With her arm in Billy's she looked back laughing from the
+steps, and it seemed to Gabriella that all the brightness of life
+was going with them into the darkness. Beside the curbstone an old
+cab horse, dazzled by the light from the door, turned his head
+slowly toward them; and the look in his eyes, wistful, questioning,
+expectant, seemed to say, "This is not life, but a miracle." And
+from his box the red-cheeked, wheezy Irish driver gazed down on
+Patty with the same wistfulness, the same questioning, the same
+expectancy.</p>
+<p>"I never see Patty go off in a cab that I don't feel she has
+thrown herself away," observed Mrs. Fowler, yawning, while she
+turned to the staircase. "Archibald, I hope you had a really good
+time with the judge. I must say it is like ploughing to talk to his
+wife."</p>
+<p>Upstairs in her room a little later Gabriella said to George:
+"Patty was telling me about the girl your mother wanted you to
+marry."</p>
+<p>He was pouring out a glass of water, and, absorbed in the act,
+he merely grunted for answer. It was his disagreeable habit to
+grunt when grunting saved effort.</p>
+<p>"I wish you'd talk to me, George. It is so annoying to be
+grunted at."</p>
+<p>"Well, what do you want?" he replied amiably enough. "Patty is a
+regular sieve, you know. Never tell her a secret."</p>
+<p>"Did you ever like that girl&mdash;really?"</p>
+<p>"The girl mother had in mind?" Having emptied the glass, he
+returned it to the tray and came over to her. "Yes, but if you want
+the truth, I preferred the girl in the chorus&mdash;the one the old
+lady got in a blue funk about, you know. She's still there, the
+last but one from the end, in the Golden Slipper. I'll take you to
+see it some night."</p>
+<p>"Men are strange," observed Gabriella, with philosophic
+detachment. "Now I couldn't feel the slightest interest in a man in
+comic opera. Did she really attract you?"</p>
+<p>"Um&mdash;humph," he was grunting again.</p>
+<p>"Wasn't she terribly common?"</p>
+<p>"Um&mdash;humph."</p>
+<p>"Wasn't she vulgar?"</p>
+<p>"Rather. They all are."</p>
+<p>"And fast?"</p>
+<p>"Regular streak of lightning."</p>
+<p>Then it was that Gabriella arrived at an understanding of
+masculine nature. "You never can tell what men will like," she
+concluded.</p>
+<p>While she spoke he winked at her from the mirror into which he
+was looking&mdash;mirrors always fascinated George and he could
+never keep away from them&mdash;and there was in his face the
+whimsical and appealing naughtiness of a child. Suddenly Gabriella
+felt that as far as character and experience counted, she was
+immeasurably older than George. Her superior common sense made her
+feel almost middle-aged when he was in one of his boyish moods. At
+the age of nine she had not been so utterly irresponsible as George
+was at twenty-six; as an infant in arms she had probably regarded
+the universe with a profounder philosophy. Though of course George
+was charming, he was without any sense of the deeper purpose of
+life. Like a child he must have what he wanted, and like a child he
+sulked when he was thwarted and grew angelic when his wishes were
+gratified. A single day had taught her that his father could not
+depend on him in business, that his mother could not trust him even
+to remember a dinner engagement. Gabriella loved him, she had
+chosen him, she told herself now, and she meant to abide by her
+choice; but she was not blind, she was not a fool, and she was
+deficient in the kind of loyalty which obliges one to lie even in
+the sanctity of one's own mind. She would be true to him, but she
+would be true with her eyes open, not shut.</p>
+<p>"George," she said presently, while she loosened her hair, "your
+father told me you didn't stay more than an hour in the office."
+The question, "What were you doing?" rose to her lips, but she
+strangled the words before they escaped her. Her mind was quick to
+grasp facts, and she had learned already something of a man's
+instinctive dislike to being made to give an account of
+himself.</p>
+<p>"You've been hearing too much gossip to-night," he rejoined
+gaily. "Take care what you listen to."</p>
+<p>"Don't joke, dear. I wish you would tell me things."</p>
+<p>"There isn't anything to tell, is there?"</p>
+<p>"Is your father very rich?"</p>
+<p>"Not very. Did you think you were marrying a millionaire?"</p>
+<p>"I never thought about it, but everybody at home thinks he has a
+great deal of money, and yet your mother talks as if she were
+poor."</p>
+<p>"Well, he made a pile of money in a big deal about ten years
+ago, and the papers had a lot about it. After that he lost it, or
+most of it, and the papers didn't tell. The fact is, he's always
+either making or losing, and now he's losing. That's why they
+wanted me to put off our marriage."</p>
+<p>"They wanted you to put it off?"</p>
+<p>"Mother did&mdash;the old man never interferes. She had got into
+her head, you see, that the only way for me to make a living was to
+marry one, so it was a little while before she could get used to
+the idea that I was going to marry because I wanted to, not because
+my family wanted me to. She was a brick though when she found out I
+was in earnest. Mother is true blue when you know how to take
+her."</p>
+<p>"But you never told me."</p>
+<p>"You bet I didn't. If I had, as likely as not, you would be
+Gabriella Mary Carr at this minute."</p>
+<p>Drawing gently out of his grasp, which had grown possessive, she
+stood looking at him with a smile in which tenderness and irony
+mingled; and the tenderness was her own, while the irony seemed to
+belong to the vision of an impersonal spectator of life. The smile
+fascinated him. He could not withdraw his gaze from it, and yet it
+had the disturbing effect of placing her at an emotional
+distance.</p>
+<p>"Your mother is very good to me," she said, "but I feel somehow
+as if I had taken an unfair advantage of her. And you hadn't even
+told her," she added, "that we are going to take an apartment in
+June."</p>
+<p>"Oh, that's all right&mdash;there's plenty of time," he
+responded irritably. "Only you mustn't make mountains out of
+molehills."</p>
+<p>Then, because she dreaded his anger, she gave up her point as
+she had given up many before. He was irresponsible, but he was hers
+and she loved him.</p>
+<p>"I am so sleepy," she said, stifling a yawn, "that I feel as if
+I could cry."</p>
+<p>Marriage, at the end of a month, had already disciplined the
+fearless directness of Gabriella. She had learned not to answer
+back when she knew she was right; she had learned to appear sweet
+when her inner spirit demanded a severe exterior; she had learned
+to hold her tongue when a veritable torrent of words rose to her
+lips. And these lessons, which George's temper and her own reason
+had taught her, remained with her in the future, long after she had
+forgotten George and the severity of her schooling.</p>
+<p>There were many things for her to learn, and the lessons of that
+first day and night stretched through the winter and well into the
+beginning of spring. Accompanying Mrs. Fowler on her busy rounds,
+she discovered that here also, as in the house in Hill Street, the
+chief end of life was to keep up an appearance; here also the
+supreme effort, the best energies, were devoted to a sham&mdash;to
+a thing which had no actual existence. Though Mrs. Fowler was rich
+beside Mrs. Carr, Gabriella soon found out that she was not nearly
+so rich as her neighbours were, not nearly so rich as her position
+in society exacted that she should be. She was still not rich
+enough to be spared the sordid, nerve-racking effort to make two
+ends meet without a visible break. Her small economies, to
+Gabriella's surprise, were as rigid as Mrs. Carr's; and though she
+lived in surroundings which appeared luxurious to the girl, there
+was almost as little ready money to spend as there had been in Mrs.
+Carr's household. Bills were made recklessly, and dinner parties
+were given at regular intervals; for Mrs. Fowler, who denied
+herself a hundred small comforts of living, who gave up cream in
+her coffee and bought her butter from a grocer below Washington
+Square, took quite as a matter of course the fact that she must, as
+she put it, "pay off social scores." Though they ate the simplest
+food in the market for six days of the week, on the seventh,
+hothouse flowers bloomed profusely in the lower rooms and champagne
+flowed abundantly into the delicate Venetian glasses on the round
+table. To be sure, Mrs. Fowler's gown may have been two seasons
+old, but it was covered with rare laces, which she had picked up
+during her summers abroad; and her pearls&mdash;the string was
+short, but really good, for she had matched it in
+Paris&mdash;shone, rich and costly, around her still beautiful
+neck. After one of these dinners the family lived on scraps and
+looked at fading flowers for days, while Mrs. Fowler, with the air
+of one who has done her duty, sat upstairs before the little French
+writing-desk in her room, and patiently added accounts from morning
+till night. A strained look would come into her plump, firm face,
+three little wrinkles would appear between her eyebrows, and her
+blue eyes, circled by faint shadows, would grow dark and anxious.
+Then, when at last the accounts were finished and the unpaid bills
+laid away in a pigeonhole, she would remark with animation:</p>
+<p>"I don't see how on earth I am ever to pay all these bills,"
+and, after changing her dress, set out to bring her butcher or her
+grocer to reason. On one of these days she took Gabriella (they
+went in the stage because she had given up her carriage) on a hunt
+for bargains in underwear, and, to the girl's astonishment, her
+mother-in-law, who presented so opulent an appearance on the
+surface, purchased for herself a supply of cheap and badly made
+chemises and nightgowns. As she grew to know Mrs. Fowler better,
+she found that the expenditures of that redoubtable woman, in spite
+of her naturally delicate tastes, were governed by one of the most
+elementary principles of economy. Through long habit she had
+acquired a perception as unerring as instinct, and this perception
+enabled her to tell exactly where extravagance was useful and where
+it failed in its effect. She had learned to perfection never to
+spend money on things that did not show a result. An appearance was
+what she strove for, and one's chemises and nightgowns, however
+exquisite in themselves, could not very well contribute to one's
+external appearance. "Of course I like good underclothes," she
+remarked cheerfully to her daughter-in-law, "but, after all, nobody
+sees them."</p>
+<p>This was so different from the poverty-stricken point of view of
+Gabriella's childhood, that the girl puzzled over it afterwards
+when she sat in her corner of the stage. Mrs. Carr had kept up an
+appearance, too, she reflected, but, like the old maids on the
+floor above, she had kept it up even to herself. Perhaps the
+difference lay in the immense gulf which divided the appearance of
+Hill Street from the appearance of the East Fifties. Mrs. Fowler
+was obliged by the public opinion she obeyed to appear affluent,
+while Mrs. Carr was merely constrained not to appear destitute. On
+the whole Gabriella felt that she preferred the safe middle
+distance between the two exacting standards of living.</p>
+<p>But, though she might disapprove of her mother-in-law's
+philosophy, there was no question about her fervent admiration for
+her disposition. It was Mrs. Fowler's habit to appear "sweet," and
+never once did Gabriella see her lose her temper, never once, no
+matter how hard the day or how exasperating the accounts, did she
+show so much as a passing hint of irritability. Her temper was so
+angelic that it was the more surprising George should not have
+inherited a trace of it.</p>
+<p>If George had not inherited his mother's nature, he revealed, as
+time went on, even less resemblance to the perfect reasonableness
+of his father's temperament. Ever since her first day in the house,
+Gabriella had been drawn to her father-in-law with an affection
+which his wife, for all her preoccupied kindness, had not inspired.
+She respected him for his calm strength, against which the
+boisterous moods of George reacted as harmlessly as the whims of a
+child, and she liked him for his unfailing courtesy, for his
+patience, for his gentleness, which made her feel that he was, in
+spite of the material nature of his occupation, the only member of
+the household who possessed even a glimmer of spirituality. All day
+long, and the greater part of the night, he thought about money,
+and yet he had escaped the spiritual corruption which the ceaseless
+pursuit of wealth had produced in the other rich men whom Gabriella
+met in his house. It was as if some subtle alchemy in his soul had
+transmuted the baser qualities into the pure gold of character; and
+sometimes the girl wondered if the fact that he worked not for
+himself but for others had preserved him from the grosser
+contamination of money. For he seemed to think of himself so
+little, that after three months in his house, Gabriella was still
+ignorant of his interests apart from his work, except, of course,
+his absorbing interest in the morning papers. From the time he got
+up at seven o'clock until he went to bed punctually on the stroke
+of ten, he appeared to order his life with the single purpose of
+giving as little trouble as was compatible with living at all. His
+tastes were the simplest; he drank only boiled water; he ate two
+eggs and a roll with his coffee at breakfast; he spent hardly a
+third as much on his clothes as George spent; and beyond an
+occasional visit to his club in the evening, he seemed to have
+absolutely no recreation. His life was in the stock market, and it
+was a life of almost monastic simplicity and self-sacrifice. If he
+had any pleasure, except the pleasure of providing his wife with
+the money for her dinner parties, which bored him excruciatingly,
+Gabriella had never discovered it. "He asks so little for himself
+that it is pathetic," she remarked to George one night, when Mr.
+Fowler had gone upstairs, carrying the evening papers to bed with
+him.</p>
+<p>"Oh, well, he gets what he asks for," retorted George
+indifferently, "and that's more than the rest of us can say."</p>
+<p>George was in a bad humour; he had been in a bad humour for
+weeks; and for this reason Gabriella had put off from day to day
+telling him that she expected a child in the autumn. All her
+efforts to soothe had merely exasperated him; and there were days
+when her presence worked him into a fit of nervous irritability.
+After four months of marriage prolonged boredom had replaced the
+passionate tenderness of their honeymoon. Why this should be so she
+was too well-balanced emotionally to understand. She saw only the
+outward evidences of change, of gradual disillusionment; and though
+at first she wept a little while she wondered, she ended by drying
+her tears and attributing his casual indifference and his explosive
+violence alike to some obscure disturbing condition of health.
+Every evening, except when there were guests, he spent at his club;
+he came to bed late, and his waking hour was filled with complaint
+about the number and the size of his bills. He treated these bills
+as if they had been gratuitous insults, as if they had leaped,
+without reason for being, out of a malign world to assail him. As
+yet Gabriella had bought nothing; and she dreaded the time when her
+clothes would wear out beyond the hope of repairing, and she should
+be obliged to add another bill to the growing pile under the silver
+paper weight on the little white and gold desk.</p>
+<p>But in the last few weeks even this anxiety had faded from her
+mind, for the miracle of life which stirred in her body had
+diffused its golden halo around every trivial incident of her
+existence. After days of physical wretchedness, which she had
+hidden from George, she sat one evening, utterly at peace, in front
+of the fire in the room which had been Patty's before her marriage.
+It was past midnight, and she was waiting for George to come home
+because she felt that she could not sleep until she had told him.
+In the morning he had been unusually gentle, and as he left the
+house, she had said to herself a little sternly that he must know
+about the child before the day was over. A secret consultation with
+her mother-in-law had strengthened her resolution. "Don't keep it
+from him another day, Gabriella," Mrs. Fowler had urged. "It will
+make such a difference. I shall never forget Archibald's joy when I
+told him George was coming. Men are like that about children, you
+know."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I'll tell him to-night," Gabriella had answered; and
+sitting now in the rocking-chair by the fire, she began to wonder
+if George would be exactly like other men about children.</p>
+<p>The house was very still, but even in its stillness it exhaled
+the nervous apprehension which she felt to be its living
+character&mdash;as if George's parents, sleeping two doors away,
+had dropped their guard for the night, and allowed their anxious
+thoughts the freedom of the halls until daybreak. And these
+thoughts, which had become like invisible presences to the girl,
+wandered up and down the dim staircase, where the lowered lights
+awaited George's return, invaded the drawing-room, filled with
+stuffy red velvet chairs, so like crouching human beings in the
+darkness, and even thronged about her threshold, ready to spring
+inside at the instant when George should open the door. While her
+fire burned brightly on the andirons, and rosy shadows danced on
+the white rug beside her bed, on the lace coverlet turned back for
+the night, on the deep pillows with their azure lining showing
+through the delicate linen of the slips, on her simple nightdress,
+in which the buttonholes were so beautifully worked by her
+mother,&mdash;while she looked at these things it was easy for her
+to shut out the apprehensions of yesterday. But these apprehensions
+would come with George and they would not go until George left her
+again. The house with its heavy late-Victorian furniture, its
+velvet carpets which muffled footsteps, its thick curtains which
+hid doorways, its red walls, its bevelled mirrors, its substantial
+and costly ornaments, its solid paintings in solid frames&mdash;the
+house and all that it contained diffused for Gabriella an
+inescapable atmosphere, and this atmosphere was like the one in
+which she had waited expectantly in her childhood for the roof to
+be sold over her head. Now, as then, she waited for something to
+happen, and this something was a fact of dread, a shape of terror,
+which must be ignored as long as its impending presence was not
+directly before one's eyes. But with the look she was familiar, for
+she had seen it in her mother's face as far back as she could
+remember. It was associated in her mind with the need of money,
+with scant food, with scant fires, with a brooding and sinister
+hush in the house. With the knowledge of these things in her mind
+how could she hope that George would be glad of the child that was
+coming to them in the autumn?</p>
+<p>And yet to Mrs. Fowler the news had appeared to bring no
+additional anxiety. She had seemed pleased rather than otherwise,
+mildly interested, animatedly sympathetic.</p>
+<p>"I am afraid it will be very expensive," Gabriella had reminded
+her a little timidly, feeling frankly apologetic when she thought
+of all the trouble she must bring to the harassed and over-burdened
+little woman.</p>
+<p>But into Mrs. Fowler's face there had come the look with which
+she was accustomed to receive the suggestion that her dinner
+parties were an extravagance. That economy which she practised so
+rigidly, which was so elastic to cover little pleasures and the
+minor comforts of life, broke like a cobweb when she tried to
+stretch it over larger needs and desires. The severity of her
+self-denial was directed entirely against the trivial and the
+unessential. With regard to the indispensable materials for
+happiness, she seemed to feel that she possessed an unquestionable
+right to enjoy them at any cost; and she had reassured Gabriella
+with an optimism which appeared perfectly genuine. After talking to
+her the girl had felt that she might allow herself to be happy if
+only George would change back into his old way.</p>
+<p>Four months ago, at the beginning of her marriage, she had told
+herself that she needed only the daily intimacy of life to make her
+understand him. Now, after living with him, she felt that she was
+growing to understand him less every hour&mdash;that the relation
+which ought to have brought them spiritually closer, had ended by
+thrusting them to an incalculable distance from each other. Of the
+nervous reactions which he had suffered she knew nothing. All she
+saw clearly was that the widening breach between them would soon
+become impassable unless it could be filled by their new love for
+the child. The power to hold him must slip from her hands to the
+child's, and she was more than ready, she was even eager, to
+relinquish it. In the last few months her feeling for George had
+altered, and, though she was hardly conscious of the change in
+herself, her love for him had become less passionate and more
+maternal. The tenderness was there, but the yearning, the delight
+in his mere physical presence was gone. Like every other emotion
+that she had felt in the past, her love for her husband had become
+absorbed in the passion, the longing, the delight with which she
+enfolded the thought of her child.</p>
+<p>"I wonder if mother felt like this about me," she would say to
+herself, and the wonder was like a cord drawing her back to her
+mother and to her own babyhood. Then George would become strangely
+vague, strangely remote in her thoughts; and her mother would seem
+nearer to her than everything except the child under her heart.</p>
+<p>But since her talk with Mrs. Fowler, who had shown her
+photographs of George as a baby, some in long clothes, some in his
+first short frock, with a woolly lamb in his hands, some in a
+velvet suit, with his lustrous curls falling over a lace collar,
+Gabriella had felt that she possessed a new understanding of her
+husband and of the imperative needs of his nature. The child
+quality in him, the eternal boy that he betrayed sometimes by
+accident, appeared to her now to be the salient attribute of his
+character. After all, because of this quality, which was at once
+his charm and his weakness, she could not judge him as harshly as
+she might judge another man, she could not demand of him the
+gravity and the restraint of his father, who had never been
+young.</p>
+<p>"I ought not to have kept it from him. His mother is right. She
+understands him better than I do," she thought, as she looked at
+the clock. "If I had told him sooner he might be with me now."</p>
+<p>Through the muffled stillness of the house the sound of the
+opening front door stole up to her, and she heard George come in
+and stop for a minute to take off his hat and coat in the lower
+hail. Then she heard his footsteps move to the staircase; and while
+she listened she had a curious intuitive sense that it was not
+George at all, but a stranger who was coming to her, and that this
+stranger walked like a very old man. She heard him reach the bend
+in the stairs, and without stopping to put out the light, pass on
+to her door, which was the first on the landing. As he reached the
+top of the stairs, he stumbled once; then she heard his hand on the
+knob and a fumbling sound as if the knob would not turn. The door
+seemed to take an eternity to open, and while she sprang up with
+the clutch of terror at her heart, she felt again the sharp,
+agonizing premonition that a stranger was approaching her.</p>
+<p>"George!" she called in a strangled voice, and waited, standing,
+for him to enter.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<h3>MOTHERHOOD</h3>
+<p>At noon the next day Mrs. Fowler came into Gabriella's room and
+found her sewing beside the window which looked on a gray expanse
+of sky and street, where a few snowflakes were falling.</p>
+<p>"Did you tell him, dear?" she asked, arranging a handful of red
+roses in a little alabaster vase on the desk.</p>
+<p>No, Gabriella had not told him. She felt now that she should
+never be able to tell him, but all she said was:</p>
+<p>"I didn't get a chance. How lovely those roses are."</p>
+<p>Mrs. Fowler set the vase where the gray light fell on it, and
+then turning with empty hands from the desk, asked gently:</p>
+<p>"Aren't you making a mistake, dear?" Her movements were like
+those of a character in a play who is made to fill in an awkward
+pause with some mechanical action.</p>
+<p>"I couldn't tell him last night," replied Gabriella; "he was
+sick all night."</p>
+<p>She was very pale, even her lips had lost their rich colour, and
+her eyes had a drawn and heavy look as if she had not slept.
+Without looking at her mother-in-law, she went on with her sewing,
+working buttonholes of exquisite fineness in a small white garment.
+In her lap there was a little wicker basket filled with spools of
+thread and odd bits of lace and cambric; and every now and then she
+stopped her work and gazed thoughtfully down on it as if she were
+trying to decide how she might use the jumble of scraps that it
+contained.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler suddenly, after she had watched
+her a moment, "did anything happen last night?"</p>
+<p>"Happen? No, what could have happened?"</p>
+<p>"At what time did George come in?"</p>
+<p>"About one o'clock. I sat up for him."</p>
+<p>"Was&mdash;was anything the matter with him? Was he in any way
+different?"</p>
+<p>"He was sick. He was sick all night." A look of disgust crossed
+her face while she stopped to wipe away a drop of blood from her
+finger. "I don't remember pricking my finger since I was a child,"
+she remarked.</p>
+<p>"You are keeping something from me," said Mrs. Fowler; and
+sitting down in the small chair by the desk, she leaned her elbow,
+in her full sleeve of violet cashmere, on the edge of the
+blotting-pad. She was wearing a morning gown made, as all her house
+gowns were made, after the princess style, and Gabriella could see
+the tight expanse of her bosom rising and falling under a garniture
+of purple and silver passementerie. Her hair, fresh from the
+crimping pins, rose in stiff ridges from her forehead, and her
+bright red lips were so badly chapped from cold that they cracked a
+little when she smiled. She looked as hard as granite though in
+reality her heart was breaking with pity.</p>
+<p>"I want to help you," she said, "and I can't if you keep things
+back."</p>
+<p>"I told you George was sick. I was up all night with him." Again
+a look of disgust, which she could not control, flickered and died
+in her face.</p>
+<p>"But you oughtn't to have let him keep you awake. You need all
+the sleep you can get. When he comes in late he must sleep in the
+spare room across the hall."</p>
+<p>"His things are all in here and he would come in to get them;
+that would wake me."</p>
+<p>For a moment Mrs. Fowler hesitated while the struggling breath
+grew more irregular under the passementerie on her bosom. The ripe
+colour faded from her cheeks and her lips looked blue in the harsh
+light from the window.</p>
+<p>"I think I'd better speak to George," she said. "He is spoiled
+and he always thinks first of his own comfort. I suppose it's the
+way we brought him up&mdash;but when he understands, he will be
+more considerate."</p>
+<p>For the first time Gabriella laid down her sewing and, leaning
+forward in her chair, fixed her eyes, with their look of deep
+stillness, of wistful expectancy, on the face of her
+mother-in-law.</p>
+<p>"Would you mind telling me if George was ever&mdash;ever wild
+about women?" she asked, and though her voice was very low and
+quiet, her words seemed to echo loudly through the hushed suspense
+in her brain. It was as if every piece of furniture, every vacant
+wall, every picture, and every pane of glass, repeated the
+sound.</p>
+<p>The pleasant smile on Mrs. Fowler's lips became suddenly
+painful. As if she were suffering a physical hurt, she put her
+handkerchief to her mouth while she answered:</p>
+<p>"He was once&mdash;but that was before he fell in love with you.
+We hoped that you would be able to steady him&mdash;that marriage
+would make him settle down."</p>
+<p>"Did he drink then?"</p>
+<p>"A little&mdash;not enough to make him show it. I never saw him
+really show it but once, and then he was dreadfully sick.
+Was&mdash;was he like that last night?"</p>
+<p>For a long minute, while she looked out of the window at the
+falling snowflakes, Gabriella did not reply. Then she spoke in a
+voice that was sternly accusing.</p>
+<p>"You ought to have told me. I ought to have known." Her own wild
+passion for George was forgotten. She felt only a sense of outrage,
+of wounded and stunned resentment, They had treated her as if she
+were a child or a fool. That she had been a fool she was not
+prepared to admit at the instant&mdash;and yet it was less than a
+year ago, that June night when she had watched George over the
+clove pinks while her heart melted with happiness. She had had her
+way, and she was already regretting her madness. "Is this what love
+comes to?" she asked herself bitterly as she watched the white
+flakes whirling out of the gray sky. "Is this what it all comes to
+in the end, or am I different from other women?"</p>
+<p>Moistening her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, Mrs. Fowler
+smiled bravely, though there were tears in her eyes. "Archibald
+wanted to, but I wouldn't let him," she replied; "I hoped that you
+would make everything different. He was so much in love with you. I
+thought you could do anything with him."</p>
+<p>Though her reasoning failed to convince Gabriella, it was
+sufficiently forcible to justify her in her own judgment, and with
+an easier conscience, she settled comfortably behind the
+impregnable defences of the maternal instinct. After all, she had
+only done what she believed to be best for her boy. She had not
+been selfish, she had not even been thoughtless, she had been
+merely a mother.</p>
+<p>"I wish you would tell me what really happened last night,
+Gabriella," she said, and her tone showed that she had recovered
+her shaken confidence in the righteousness of her cause.</p>
+<p>"I can't tell you," answered Gabriella. "What good would it do?
+George was disgusting, that was all." She spoke sternly, for no
+lingering tenderness softened the judgment of her youth and her
+injured pride. How could she possibly have tenderness for a man who
+had tired of her in four months, who had become so lost to common
+decency that he could let her see him revoltingly drunk? And she
+had held her head so high, she had so despised Jane for her
+weakness and folly! At the moment she knew that she was helpless,
+but deep down within her she felt that this helplessness would not
+last&mdash;that the wings of her soul were still strong, still
+free, still untouched by the shame her body had suffered. With a
+single effort she could break the net of passion, and escape into
+the wonderful world which surrounded her. Like Jane, she had been a
+fool, but, unlike Jane, she would not stay a fool always.</p>
+<p>"You seem so hard, Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler. "Is it because
+you are young? Young people never make allowances."</p>
+<p>The taste of bitterness rose to Gabriella's lips.</p>
+<p>"I suppose I am hard," she answered, "and I am going to stay so.
+There is safety in hardness."</p>
+<p>Remembering Jane, remembering the hereditary weakness of the
+Carrs, who had all married badly, she told herself that in hardness
+lay her solitary refuge from despair. After all, it was better to
+be hard than to break.</p>
+<p>"You can't judge George quite as you would other men," began
+George's mother, and she was aware after a minute that the maternal
+instinct had in this instance led her to defeat.</p>
+<p>"I am not judging other men," replied George's wife coldly; "I
+am judging George." Against men as men she had never even thought
+of cherishing a grievance. All her life she had looked to some man
+as to the saviour of the family fortunes, and her vision was still
+true enough to perceive that, as a human being, Archibald Fowler
+was finer and bigger than his wife, that Billy was finer and bigger
+than Patty. She had found men less the servants of mere instinct
+than she had found women, less the passive and unresisting vehicles
+of the elemental impulses. Then, too, they were so seldom the
+victims of life, and there was in her nature a fierce contempt for
+a victim. She despised people who submitted to circumstances, who
+resigned themselves to necessity, as if resignation were a virtue
+instead of a vice.</p>
+<p>"Well, you must try not to worry, dear; worry is so bad for you.
+I am so sorry it happened. You won't mind my speaking to George,
+will you?"</p>
+<p>Gabriella shook her head. "I don't care what you say to
+him."</p>
+<p>"Do you feel able to come down to lunch?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, perfectly. I am simply dying for a cup of tea, and
+afterwards I think I'll go out for a walk. One gets so stuffy and
+dull when one stays in the house."</p>
+<p>Her manner had changed as if by magic. In putting the thought of
+George out of her mind she seemed to have put aside her resentment
+and despondency.</p>
+<p>In the evening George came home, looking a little yellow, with a
+box of gardenias in his hand; but the scent of the flowers sickened
+Gabriella, and she put them out of the room while she dressed for
+dinner. The attention, instead of pleasing her, brought an ironic
+twist to her lips, though she thanked George quite as courteously
+as if he had been a stranger to her. At dinner when Mr. Fowler
+abruptly asked his son why he had not been to the office, she kept
+her eyes fixed on her plate, in which she seemed to see palely
+reflected the anxious pleasantness of her mother-in-law's smile. It
+hardly occurred to her to wonder where George had spent his day,
+though, when she met Mr. Fowler's kind and tired look, a pang shot
+through her heart. She was sorrier for George's father than she was
+for herself. He looked so lonely, yet so patient. He so obviously
+needed help, and no one appeared to notice it, not even his wife,
+who began planning a dinner party in the futile effort to come to
+George's assistance. It was by coming to George's assistance in
+every difficulty, Gabriella surmised, that his mother had made
+George what he was; and the girl saw in imagination an endless line
+of subterfuges, of pitiful excuses and feeble justifications, all
+hidden in the tortuous labyrinthine windings of the maternal
+instinct. She saw, with the relentless vision of a Hebrew prophet,
+the inevitable ruin of the love that does not submit to wisdom as
+its law.</p>
+<p>More than seven months afterwards, when she lay in her room with
+her child in the crook of her arm, she prayed passionately that
+some supreme Power would grant her the strength not of emotion, but
+of reason. All her life she had suffered from an unrestrained
+indulgence of the virtues&mdash;from love running to waste through
+excess, from the self-sacrifice that is capable of everything but
+self-discipline, from the intemperate devotion to duty that is as
+morbid as sin. Balance, moderation, restraint&mdash;these seemed to
+her, lying there with her child on her arm, to be the things most
+worth striving for. She saw her mother, worn to a shadow by the
+unnecessary deaths she had died, by the useless crucifixions she
+had endured; she saw Jane, haggard, wan, with her sweetness turning
+to bitterness because it was wasted; and again she found herself
+asking for balance, moderation, restraint. The child, a little
+girl, with George's eyes and hair like gauze, had liberated
+Gabriella from the last illusions of her girlhood.</p>
+<p>And yet, though Gabriella prayed for moderation, she found after
+a few months that motherhood was absorbing the full strength of her
+nature. George hardly existed for her; he came and went like the
+passing of a shadow, and she began gradually to sink her life into
+the life of her child. Not until the winter was she brought back to
+a sharp realization of her neglected duty to her mother; and this
+came with a letter from Mrs. Carr during the last week in January.
+Mrs. Carr was still living with Jane, and though she had accepted
+mildly Gabriella's reasons for postponing her coming to New York,
+she was beginning somewhat plaintively to question. She had made
+little effort to hide her disappointment at not being with her
+daughter when her grandchild was born, for, in spite of the fact
+that she had tragically assisted at the entrance of Jane's six
+children into the world, she still possessed an insatiable appetite
+for the perpetually recurring scenes of birth and death. Then only
+did her natural bent of mind appear to be justified by universal
+phenomena.</p>
+<p>And now on this morning in January, when Frances Evelyn, the
+baby, lay good and quiet in her crib, Gabriella read over again the
+disturbing letter she had just received from her mother.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>MY DEAR DAUGHTER:</p>
+<p>Jane wrote you that I had had a slight attack of pneumonia, so
+you understood why I was obliged to let so long a time go by
+without sending you a letter. Though I have been out of bed now for
+more than a fortnight, I still feel so weak and good for nothing
+that I am hardly equal to the exertion of writing. Then, too, I
+have had some trouble with my wrist&mdash;the right one&mdash;and
+this has made it really painful for me to hold a pen or even a
+fork. The doctor thinks it is a nervous affection and that it will
+pass away as soon as I get back my strength, and I am sure I hope
+and pray that it will. But sometimes I feel as if I should never
+get any stronger, and of course while my wrist is crippled I am
+unable to do any sewing. This has depressed me very much, for poor
+Jane has so many worries of her own that I dread being dependent on
+her, and Charley has not been at all well this winter, though
+kinder and more considerate than I have ever known him to be. He
+has his faults, but I have always felt that he was not entirely
+responsible and that we ought to pity rather than blame him. Women
+can never be too thankful that they are spared by a merciful
+Providence the temptations which seem to beset men. When we
+consider how much more sheltered our lives are, we ought to be
+lenient in our judgment, and I cannot help feeling that God meant
+us to be so when he gave us more spiritual natures than those of
+men. Dr. Preston gave a very instructive and impressive talk on
+that subject before the Ladies' Aid Society of our church the week
+before I was taken sick. Indeed, I am afraid I caught the cold that
+led to pneumonia sitting in Charley's pew, which gets a bad draught
+from the door of the Sunday-school room.</p>
+<p>I must apologize for this dull letter, as I haven't been able to
+get out even to market. Before I was taken ill I used to do all of
+Jane's marketing, and you know what a place the market is for
+meeting people and hearing all the latest news. There are, however,
+two things to tell you, and you'll never be able to guess them.
+First, poor Miss Amelia Peterborough is dead. She was stricken with
+paralysis a week ago when she was all alone in the house&mdash;Miss
+Jemima was at a funeral&mdash;and she never regained consciousness
+until the end, which came at three o'clock Sunday night. Poor Miss
+Jemima, I feel so sorry for her. She keeps up beautifully and is
+very pious and resigned. They say she will go into the Old Ladies'
+Home as soon as the arrangements can be made.</p>
+<p>The other piece of news is more cheerful, though, for my part,
+life seems so short and so uncertain that I can't see much
+cheerfulness anywhere. So many people are dying that you can't help
+wondering who will be next, and as Dr. Preston said when he called
+on me during my illness, our only substantial hope is in a blessed
+hereafter. My one regret will be leaving my children and
+grandchildren, and especially my precious little Frances Evelyn,
+whom I have never seen. I have no doubt that Mrs. Fowler was far
+more useful than I could have been at the time of your trial, but
+it was a great disappointment to me not to be able to receive the
+little darling into the world.</p>
+<p>But I had entirely forgotten that I started to tell you about
+Florrie Spencer's marriage to Algernon Caperton. Of course I
+couldn't go, but Jane says the wedding was lovely and that Florrie
+looked really beautiful. Bessie had on rose-coloured brocade. Did
+you ever hear of such a thing at her age? She was just as gay and
+flirtatious as a girl, Charley said, and she sent me some of the
+cake and a bottle of champagne, which, of course, I didn't touch.
+It is a pity she is so loud, for there isn't a kinder heart in the
+world. Florrie and Algernon are going to New York on their wedding
+trip. Isn't it exactly like Florrie to want to go to all the
+theatres? They send you word, by the way, that they are certainly
+coming to see you and the baby.</p>
+<p>And now that I have told all my news, I must write a little
+about myself, though I am afraid you will be upset by what I am
+obliged to tell you. I put it off as long as I could&mdash;for I do
+hate to worry you&mdash;but the doctor has just been to see me and
+he says I must go to Florida immediately to stay until the bad
+weather is over. I told him I couldn't possibly afford it&mdash;the
+trip would take a great deal of money&mdash;but he insisted that I
+should write and tell you exactly what he said. He said my lungs
+were very weak and that he ordered the change&mdash;you know they
+never seem to consider expense&mdash;and when he was leaving, he
+stopped in the hall to speak to Jane about it. Poor Jane, she is so
+worried that she has almost gone deranged over my health, but as
+far as I am concerned I feel that I would rather pass away than
+cause so much trouble and upset everybody. Jane, as you know,
+hasn't a cent to her name, and it is out of the question her asking
+Charley, because he has had a very bad winter financially. Even
+Cousin Jimmy stopped sending me the rent of the house since I moved
+to Jane's, and as for Uncle Meriweather, he has been obliged to
+give up his business and go to live with his niece in the country.
+So, much as I hate to ask you, my dear child, I feel that you would
+rather I did so&mdash;and that I ought to be perfectly frank about
+the situation, particularly since poor Jane feels so deeply her
+inability to help me. I am afraid I should need about four hundred
+dollars, as I have bought nothing to wear for years. Bessie Spencer
+has told me of a very reasonable place where I could board, and it
+is just possible that she will be going herself by the time I am
+ready. If for any reason you are unable to let me have the money,
+just destroy this letter and don't think about it again. I wouldn't
+cause you a moment's worry for anything in the world.</p>
+<p>With love to George and a dozen kisses for my precious little
+grandchild,</p>
+<p>Your devoted mother,<br />
+FANNY CARR.</p>
+<p>Did I remember to tell you that Miss Polly Hatch has gone to New
+York to look after her nephew's children? He lost his wife a few
+months ago, and was left with four little children, the youngest
+only a year old.</p>
+</div>
+<p>So her punishment had come! As Gabriella dropped the letter into
+her lap, and looked at little Frances, so good and happy in her
+crib, she felt that she was punished not only for her reckless
+marriage, but for all the subterfuge, all the deceit which had
+followed it. She had not told her mother the truth, for she, also,
+had been chiefly concerned with "keeping up an appearance." For the
+purpose of shielding George, who was blandly indifferent to her
+shielding, she had lied to her mother, if not in words, yet in an
+evasion of the truth, and the result was that her lies and her
+evasions had recoiled not on George's head, but on her own. For
+George wouldn't care. So little value did he place upon Mrs. Carr's
+good opinion, that he would not care even if Gabriella were to tell
+her the truth. And if she had only been honest! If she had only
+refused to lie because custom exacted that a wife should be willing
+to lie in defense of her husband. Some obscure strain of dogmatic
+piety struggled in the convulsed depths of her being, as if she had
+been suddenly brought up against the vein of iron in her
+soul&mdash;against the moral law, stripped bare of clustering
+delusions, which her ancestors had known and fought for as "the
+Berkeley conscience." The Berkeley conscience, bred for centuries
+on a militant faith, told her now that she was punished because she
+had lied to her mother.</p>
+<p>Then, as if this reversion to primitive theology had been merely
+an automatic reaction of certain nerve cells, she saw and condemned
+the childlike superstition. No, she was not punished so quickly;
+but she had been a fool, and she was paying the price of her
+incredible folly. How little, how pitifully little she knew of the
+world, after all! A year ago, on that horrible night, she had
+thought that her lesson was finished, but it was only beginning.
+Her immense, confiding ignorance would lead her into other abysses.
+And again, as on the morning after that night of revelation, she
+resolved passionately that she would not stay a fool
+always&mdash;that she would not become a victim of life.</p>
+<p>The empty bottle had slipped to one side of the crib, and little
+Frances lay smiling at the friendly universe, with her wet mouth
+wide open and her blue eyes, so like George's, sparkling with
+laughter. The down on her head, as fine and soft as spun silk, made
+tiny rings over her pink skull, which was as clear and delicate as
+an eggshell; and these golden rings filled Gabriella with a
+tenderness so poignant that it brought tears to her eyes. Whatever
+her mother may have thought about the world, it was perfectly
+obvious that Frances Evelyn considered her part in it remarkably
+jolly. To be a well baby in an amiable universe was her ideal of
+felicity.</p>
+<p>When George came up to luncheon, which he did sometimes now, he
+went straight to the nursery for a glimpse of his daughter. Ever
+since little Frances had lost her first hair and gained her golden
+down, he had taken an interest in the rapid stages of her
+development; and, though he never "wasted time," as he said, in the
+nursery, he liked to look in once a day and see whether or not she
+had changed in the night. On her side the baby treated her father
+as if he were an inexhaustible family joke, to be enjoyed not too
+seriously, but with a polite recognition of its humorous points. If
+she were sucking her bottle when he entered, she immediately
+stopped and laughed at him while the rubber nipple dropped from her
+toothless gums; if she awoke and discovered him at the side of her
+crib, she greeted him with subdued but inappeasable merriment; if
+he lifted her in his arms, her crocheted shoes could barely contain
+the kicks of her ecstatic feet. And because she was a jolly little
+beggar, George grew, after a time, to cherish a certain fondness
+for her. There was some use in a laughing baby, but he hated
+anything, child, woman, or animal, that cried.</p>
+<p>On this particular day the baby happened to be asleep when he
+entered, so, without stopping, he went into Gabriella's bedroom,
+where the perfume of roses mingled with the scent of the burning
+logs on the andirons.</p>
+<p>"That's a good fire," he observed, stopping on the hearth-rug.
+"I don't wonder you hate to go out."</p>
+<p>"Yes, the room was a little chilly, so I lit the fire for the
+baby's bath. I don't usually have one," replied Gabriella,
+explaining her apparent extravagance.</p>
+<p>"Has she been well?"</p>
+<p>"She is always well. I haven't had a day's anxiety about her
+since she was born."</p>
+<p>"But she isn't very old yet." Already little Frances was
+supplying conversational material to her parents.</p>
+<p>"I wish you would sit down, George," said Gabriella, with a
+change of tone. "I want to read you a part of a letter from
+mother."</p>
+<p>"Can't you tell me instead?"</p>
+<p>"If you'd rather. You know I never told mother why we couldn't
+have her to live with us. I never told her anything. I simply made
+excuses."</p>
+<p>"That was all right, wasn't it?" He was plainly nervous.</p>
+<p>"At the time I thought I couldn't do differently, but
+now&mdash;"</p>
+<p>She gave him the letter, and while he unfolded it awkwardly, she
+watched him anxiously and yet without interrupting his reading.
+Beyond the simple facts, she had told him nothing, and it was
+characteristic of her that she did not embellish these facts with
+picturesque phrases. She herself was so insensible to the appeal of
+rhetoric that she hardly thought of it as likely to influence
+anybody. Then, too, in moments of intense feeling she had always a
+sensation of dumbness.</p>
+<p>"I'm awfully sorry about her illness," he said, "but when you
+think of it, the best thing that could have happened to her was not
+to come to New York. This climate would have been the end of
+her."</p>
+<p>"Will you let me have the money, George? I will try to save in
+every way that I can. I've made all the baby's clothes, as it is,
+and I can easily make the few things I need, also. Since the baby
+came I have stopped calling with your mother."</p>
+<p>A flush rose to his face. "I know you've been a regular brick
+about money, Gabriella. I never saw a woman buy as little as you
+do, and you always manage to look well dressed."</p>
+<p>She smiled with faint irony. Her clothes were dowdy, for she had
+turned the broadcloth dress she had had at her marriage and was
+wearing it in the street; but if he thought her well dressed, it
+seemed hardly fair to undeceive him. Had she been any other woman,
+she reflected, he would probably have looked at her long enough to
+discover that she had grown decidedly shabby.</p>
+<p>Since the baby's birth, as she told him, she had stopped calling
+with her mother-in-law, and a black net dress, given her by Mrs.
+Fowler because it had grown too small in the waist, was still
+presentable enough for the family dinners. But she never worried
+about her appearance, and it was a relief to find that George was
+quite as indifferent on the subject as she was. In the days of
+their honeymoon he had been so particular that she had spent hours
+each day before the mirror.</p>
+<p>"Will you let me have the money, George?" she asked again. The
+form of the request had not changed, but there was a deeper note in
+her voice: the irony, which had been at first only a glancing edge
+to her smile, a subdued flash in her eyes, had passed now into her
+speech. George, looking sideways at the slightly austere charm of
+her profile, thought suddenly, "Gabriella is growing hard." He
+noticed, too, for the first time, that she looked older since the
+birth of the baby, that her bosom was fuller and that her figure,
+which had always been good, was now lovely in its long flowing
+lines. She was handsomer than she had been before her marriage, for
+her complexion had become clearer since she had lived in the North,
+and though she was still pale, her skin was losing its sallow
+tone.</p>
+<p>Yet, though he thought her more attractive than she had been as
+a girl, she had ceased to make the faintest appeal to his senses.
+There were times even when he wondered how she had ever appealed to
+him, for she had not been beautiful, and beauty had always seemed
+to him to be essential in the women with whom one fell in love.
+But, however it had happened, still it had happened, and she was
+now his wife and the mother of the adorable Frances Evelyn.</p>
+<p>"I'm awfully cut up about it, Gabriella," he said, "but honestly
+I am out of the money. I couldn't lay my hands on it just now to
+save my life."</p>
+<p>His excuses convinced him while he uttered them, but he had
+barely paused before Gabriella demolished them with a single blow
+of her merciless logic.</p>
+<p>"You were talking last night about buying a horse," she
+replied.</p>
+<p>He frowned resentfully, and she immediately regretted her words.
+By speaking the truth she had defeated her purpose.</p>
+<p>"It isn't as if I were buying a horse for pleasure," he answered
+doggedly; "I am dependent on exercise&mdash;you can see for
+yourself how I've gone off in the last two or three months. Of
+course if the horse were simply for enjoyment, like a carriage, it
+would be different. But mother has given up her carriage," he
+concluded triumphantly.</p>
+<p>He was a spendthrift, she realized, but he was a spendthrift
+with a streak of stinginess in his nature. Though he enjoyed
+gratifying his own desires, which were many, it pained him
+inexpressibly to witness extravagance on the part of others, and by
+a curious twist of the imagination, all money spent by Gabriella
+appeared to him to be an extravagance. To be sure, he had just told
+her that she was a brick about money, but that had been intended as
+a warning to virtue rather than as an encouragement to weakness.
+There was, to be sure, a vague understanding that she might make
+bills when they were unavoidable; but so in want of spending money
+had she been since her marriage, that several times she had been
+obliged to borrow car fare from her mother-in-law. When she had
+asked George for an allowance, however small, he had put her off
+with the permission to charge whatever she bought in the shops. As
+the bills apparently never lessened, and her conscience revolted
+from debt, she had gone without things she needed rather than
+accept the barren generosity of his promises. At Christmas her
+father-in-law had given her fifty dollars in gold, and with this
+she had bought presents for her mother and Jane and the
+servants.</p>
+<p>In the old days in Hill Street she had had little enough, but at
+least that little had really belonged to her; and since her
+marriage she had learned that when one is poor, it is better to
+live surrounded by want. To be poor in the midst of wealth&mdash;to
+be obliged to support a fictitious affluence on one's secret
+poverty&mdash;this was after all to know the supreme mortification
+of spirit. There were days when she almost prayed that the brooding
+suspense would assume a definite shape, that the blow would fall,
+the crash come, and ruin envelop them all. Any visible fact would
+be better than this impending horror of the imagination&mdash;this
+silent dread so much worse than any reality of failure&mdash;which
+encompassed them with the impalpable thickness and darkness of a
+cloud.</p>
+<p>"Then I can't help my mother even if it's a matter of life and
+death?" she asked.</p>
+<p>"I don't believe it's as bad as that, Gabriella. Ten chances to
+one the rest of the winter will be mild, and she would find Florida
+too depressing. You never can tell about doctors, you know. It's
+their business to make trouble. Now you mustn't let yourself
+worry&mdash;there's anxiety enough without that, heaven knows. Why,
+just look at father! He has lost almost all he ever had&mdash;he is
+simply staving off failure for I don't know how long, and yet from
+mother's manner who on earth would suspect that there is anything
+wrong? Now that's what I call pluck. By Jove&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Again her impetuous spirit&mdash;dangerous gift!&mdash;flashed
+out recklessly in defence of the truth.</p>
+<p>"Then why don't you try to help your father, George?" she asked.
+"He tells me that you rarely go down to the office." Her voice
+vibrated, but the stern lines of her mouth, which had lost its rich
+softness under the stress of her anger, hardly quivered.</p>
+<p>His frown darkened to a scowl. The calm disdain in her manner
+made him feel that he hated her, and he told himself stubbornly
+that if she had been gentler, if she had been more womanly, he
+would have done what she asked of him, forgetting in his rage that,
+if she had been these things, he would have found even less
+difficulty in refusing her.</p>
+<p>"You know as well as I do that I can't stand office work when
+I'm not fit," he returned sullenly. "It plays the devil with my
+nerves."</p>
+<p>Her case was hopeless. If it had not been so in the beginning,
+she had ruined it by her irrefutable arguments, and while he
+rambled on moodily, making excuses for his neglect of business, she
+sat silently planning ways by which she might get the money for her
+mother. To ask her father-in-law was, of course, out of the
+question; and Mrs. Fowler, beyond a miraculously extended credit,
+due probably to the shining bubble of her husband's financial
+security, was as penniless as Gabriella. Unless she could find
+something to sell there seemed little likelihood of securing four
+hundred dollars in a day. It was imperative, then, that she should
+find something to sell; and remembering her mother's tragic visits
+to old Mr. Camberwell, she ran hastily over her few personal
+possessions. As her wedding gifts had been entirely in the form of
+clothes&mdash;the donors doubtless surmising that the wife of a
+rich man's son would have other gifts in abundance&mdash;there
+remained only the trinkets George and George's parents had given
+her. All through luncheon, while Mrs. Fowler, with an assumed
+frivolity which Gabriella found more than usually depressing,
+rippled on over the warmed-over salmon, the girl mentally arranged
+and sorted in their cases a diamond brooch, an amethyst necklace, a
+bracelet set with pearls, and a topaz heart she occasionally wore
+on a gold chain, which she valued because it had belonged to her
+grandmother. Once she stopped, and lifting her hand, looked
+appraisingly at her engagement ring for an instant, while Mrs.
+Fowler, observing her long gaze, remarked caressingly:</p>
+<p>"I always thought it an unusually pretty stone, my dear. George
+knows a good deal about stones." Then, as if inspired by an
+impulse, she added quickly:</p>
+<p>"Wasn't George upstairs before lunch? I thought I heard his
+voice."</p>
+<p>"Yes, but he said he had an engagement at the club."</p>
+<p>"I wonder if he knows I have asked the Capertons to dinner
+to-night? You know I got Florrie's card the other day. She is here
+on her wedding journey, but even then she doesn't like to be quiet,
+for she is her mother all over again. I used to know Bessie very
+well. Kind hearted, but a little vulgar."</p>
+<p>"I didn't tell George. Perhaps you had better telephone
+him."</p>
+<p>"Oh, well, he usually comes up to dinner because of the baby.
+I've asked one or two people to meet Florrie, for I remember that
+Bessie's one idea of enjoyment was to be in a crowd. The
+Crowboroughs are coming and the Thorntons and the Blantons."</p>
+<p>"I'll be dressed in time," responded Gabriella, but she was
+thinking rapidly, "I can sell the diamond brooch and the bracelet
+and, if it is necessary, the amethyst necklace. The brooch must
+have cost at least three hundred dollars."</p>
+<p>The meal was finished in silence, for even Mrs. Fowler's
+cheerfulness would flag now and then without a spur; and Gabriella
+made no effort to keep up the strained conversation. As soon as
+they had risen from the table, she ran upstairs to dress for the
+street, and then, before going out, she sat down at her desk, and
+wrapped up the brooch and the bracelet in tissue paper. For a
+minute she gazed, undecided, at the amethyst necklace. Mr. Fowler
+had given it to her, and she hated to part with it. George's gifts
+meant nothing to her now, but she felt a singular fondness for the
+amethyst necklace.</p>
+<p>"I'd better take it with me," she thought; and wrapping it with
+the others, she put the package into her little bag, and went out
+of the room. It was her habit to stop for a last look at little
+Frances before she left the house, but to-day she hurried past the
+nursery, and ran downstairs and out of doors, where Mrs. Fowler was
+getting into a hansom with the assistance of Burrows, the English
+butler.</p>
+<p>"May I drop you somewhere, Gabriella?" inquired Mrs. Fowler,
+while Burrows arranged the parcels on the seat of the hansom. In
+the strong sunshine all the little lines which were imperceptible
+in the shadow of the house&mdash;lines of sleeplessness, of
+anxiety, of prolonged aching suspense&mdash;appeared to start out
+as if by magic in her face. And over this underlying network of
+anxious thoughts there dropped suddenly, like a veil, that look of
+artificial pleasantness. She would have died sooner than lift it
+before one of the servants.</p>
+<p>"No, thank you. I need the walk," answered Gabriella, stopping
+beside the hansom. "You will be tired if you do all those errands.
+May I help you?"</p>
+<p>"No, no, dear, take your walk. I am so glad the storm is over.
+It will be a lovely afternoon."</p>
+<p>Then the hansom drove off; Burrows, after a longing glance at
+the blue sky, slowly ascended the brownstone steps; and Gabriella,
+closing her furs at the throat, for the wind was high, hurried in
+the direction of Fifth Avenue.</p>
+<p>The streets were still white after the storm; piles of
+new-fallen snow lay in the gutters; and when Gabriella crossed
+Madison Avenue, the wind was so strong that it almost lifted her
+from the ground. Above the shining whiteness of the streets there
+was a sky of spring; and spring was blossoming in the little cart
+of a flower vendor, which had stopped to let the traffic pass at
+the corner. There were few people out of doors, and these few
+appeared remote and strangely unreal between the wintry earth and
+the April sky. Beside the gutters, where the street cleaners were
+already at work, wagons drawn by large, heavy horses moved slowly
+from crossing to crossing. At Forty-second Street the traffic was
+blocked by one of these wagons; and from the windows of the stage,
+which had stopped by the sidewalk, the eyes of the passengers
+stared with moody resignation at the hurrying pedestrians. And it
+seemed to Gabriella that these faces wore, one and all, the look of
+secret anxiety, the faint network of lines which she had seen in
+the face of her mother-in-law. "I wonder if I have it, too," she
+thought, pausing before a shop window. But her reflection flashed
+back at her from the glass, smooth, stern, unsmiling, as if her
+features had been sculptured in marble.</p>
+<p>Below Fortieth Street there was the shop of a jeweller she
+sometimes went to with Mrs. Fowler in that lady's despairing quest
+for suitable wedding presents at moderate prices; and something in
+the kindly, sympathetic face of the clerk who waited on them made
+Gabriella decide suddenly to trust him. As she unwrapped the tissue
+paper rather nervously, and keeping back the necklace, laid the
+brooch and the bracelet on the square of purple velvet he spread
+out on the counter, she raised her eyes to his with a look that was
+childlike in its appeal. Again she thought of the morning on which
+they had surreptitiously taken her silver mug, hidden in Mrs.
+Carr's gray and black shawl, to the shop of old Mr. Camberwell.</p>
+<p>"How much might I get for these? I have worn them only a few
+times. They do not suit me," she said.</p>
+<p>For a minute the clerk looked at her reflectively, but without
+curiosity; then lifting the trinkets from the square of velvet, he
+passed behind a green curtain into an adjoining room. After a short
+absence, in which she nervously examined an assortment of
+travelling clocks, he came back and told her that they would give
+her four hundred and fifty dollars for the two pieces.</p>
+<p>"The stones alone are worth that," he added, "and, of course,
+they will have to be reset before we can sell them."</p>
+<p>"May I have the check now?"</p>
+<p>"Shall we send it to you by mail?"</p>
+<p>"No, I must have it now. I want it this
+afternoon&mdash;immediately."</p>
+<p>He yielded, still with his reflective but incurious manner; and
+when she left the shop a quarter of an hour later the check was in
+her little bag beside the amethyst necklace. "I am glad I didn't
+have to sell the necklace," she thought. "Now I'll find a hotel and
+write to mother, and it will all be settled. It will all be
+settled," she repeated in a joyous tone; and this joyousness,
+overflowing her breast, showed in her eyes, in the little quivering
+smile on her lips, and in her light and buoyant step over the snow.
+A weight had been lifted from her heart, and she felt at peace with
+the world, at peace with the shivering passers-by, at peace even
+with George. The wind, hastening her walk, stung her face till it
+flushed through its pallor, and sent the warm blood bounding with
+happiness through her veins. Under the stainless blue of the sky,
+it seemed to her that the winter's earth was suddenly quickening
+with the seeds of the spring.</p>
+<p>In the Waldorf she found a corner which was deserted, except for
+an elderly man with a dried face and a girl in a green hat, who
+appeared to be writing to her lover; and sitting down at a little
+desk behind a lamp, she wrote to her mother without mentioning
+George, without explaining anything, without even making excuses
+for her failure to keep her promise. She knew now that George had
+never meant that her mother should live with them, that he had
+never meant that they should take an apartment, that he had lied to
+her, without compunction, from the beginning. She knew this as
+surely as she knew that he was faithless and selfish, as surely as
+she knew that he had ceased to love her and would never love her
+again. And this knowledge, which had once caused her such poignant
+agony, seemed now as detached and remote as any tragedy in ancient
+history. She was barely twenty-two, and her love story had already
+dwindled to an impersonal biographical interest in her mind.</p>
+<p>When she had finished her letter, she placed the check inside of
+it, and then sat for a minute pensively watching the girl in the
+green hat, whose face paled and reddened while she wrote to her
+lover.</p>
+<p>"It seems a hundred years ago since I felt like that," she
+thought, "and now it is all over." Then because melancholy had no
+part in her nature, and she was too practical to waste time in
+useless regrets, she rose quickly from the desk, and went out,
+while the exhilaration of her mood was still proof against the
+dangerous weakness of self-pity. "It's life I'm living, not a fairy
+tale," she told herself sternly as she posted the letter and left
+the hotel. "It's life I'm living, and life is hard, however you
+take it." For a few blocks she walked on briskly, thinking of the
+shop windows and of the brightness and gaiety of the crowd in Fifth
+Avenue; but in spite of her efforts, her thoughts fluttered back
+presently to herself and her own problems. "After all, you can't
+become a victim unless you give in," she said grimly; "and I'll die
+rather than become a victim."</p>
+<p>Her walk kept her out until five o'clock, and when she entered
+the house at that hour she found her mother-in-law in the front
+hall giving directions to Burrows. At sight of Gabriella she paused
+breathlessly, and said with undisguised nervousness:</p>
+<p>"A very queer-looking person who says she was sent by your
+mother has just come to see you, dear&mdash;a seamstress of some
+kind, I fancy. As she looked quite clean, I let her go upstairs to
+the nursery to wait for you. I hope you don't mind. She was so
+eager to see the baby."</p>
+<p>"Oh, it's Miss Polly!" cried Gabriella; and without stopping to
+explain, she ran upstairs and into the nursery, where little
+Frances was cooing with delight in Miss Polly's arms.</p>
+<p>The seamstress' small birdlike face, framed by the silk quilling
+of her old lady's bonnet, broke into a hundred cheerful wrinkles at
+the sight of Gabriella. Even the grotesqueness of her
+appearance&mdash;of her fantastic mantle trimmed with bugles, made
+from her best wrap in the 'seventies, of her full alpaca skirt,
+with its wide hem stiffened by buckram, of her black cotton gloves,
+and her enormous black broadcloth bag&mdash;even these things could
+not extinguish the pleasure Gabriella felt in the meeting. If Miss
+Polly was ridiculous at home, she was twice as ridiculous in New
+York, but somehow it did not seem to matter. The sight of her
+brought happy tears to the girl's eyes, and in the attempt to hide
+them, she buried her face in the warm, flower-scented neck of
+little Frances.</p>
+<p>"She's the peartest baby I ever saw," remarked Miss Polly with
+pride. "Wouldn't yo' ma dote on her?"</p>
+<p>"Wouldn't she? But how did you leave mother and Jane and the
+children? The baby must be a big boy now."</p>
+<p>"He's runnin' around all the time, and never out of mischief. I
+never saw such a child for mischief. I was tellin' yo' ma so last
+week. There's another baby on the way with Jane, you know."</p>
+<p>"How in the world will she take care of it? I suppose Charley is
+just the same?"</p>
+<p>"Well, if you ask me, Gabriella, I never was so dead set against
+Mr. Charley as the rest of you. I helped raise Jane from the time
+she was no higher than that&mdash;and I ain't sayin' nothin'
+against her except that Mr. Charley ain't half as bad to my mind as
+she makes him out. Some men respond to naggin' and some
+don't&mdash;that's what I said to her one day when she broke down
+and cried on my shoulder&mdash;and you've got to be mighty
+particular when you begin to nag that you're naggin' the right
+sort. But she won't listen, not she. 'If I don't tell Charley of
+his faults, who's goin' to?' she asks. You know Jane always did
+talk pretty free to me ever since she was a little girl. Well,
+there are some people that simply can't stand bein' told of their
+faults, and Mr. Charley is one of 'em. It ain't the kind of
+treatment that agrees with him, and if I'd been in Jane's place, I
+reckon I'd have found it out long ago. But it ain't her way to
+learn anything&mdash;you know that as well as I do. She's obliged
+to make the world over even if it drops to pieces in her
+hands."</p>
+<p>"She doesn't seem to have done much with Charley."</p>
+<p>"Well, you mark my words, Mr. Charley ain't bad, but he's full
+of natur', and Jane, is the kind of woman that's never happy unless
+she's gettin' the better of natur'. Whatever's natural is plum
+wrong, that's the way she looks at it; but mind you, I ain't sayin'
+she's all in the right. Naggin' ain't a virtue to my mind any mo'
+than drink is, but Jane, she can't see it that way, and there ain't
+a bit of use tryin' to make her. She's soft, but she's mulish, and
+the hardest thing on earth to push is a mule that looks soft."</p>
+<p>"It's such a pity, but I suppose nothing will change her. Tell
+me about mother."</p>
+<p>"Yo' ma looks downright po'ly. What with her sickness and her
+bother about Jane and the bad weather, she ain't managin' to keep
+as spry as I'd like to see her. From the stitch in her back she has
+most of the time it wouldn't surprise me any day to hear that she'd
+come down with kidney trouble, and she breathes so short that
+consumption has crossed my mind mo' than once when I was talkin' to
+her."</p>
+<p>Miss Polly, having, as she expressed it, "an eye for symptoms,"
+possessed an artistic rather than a scientific interest in disease;
+and the vivid realism of her descriptions had often, on her "sewing
+days" at home, reduced Gabriella to faintness, though Mrs. Carr,
+with her more delicate sensibilities, was able to listen with
+apparent enjoyment to the ghastly recitals. Not only had Miss Polly
+achieved in her youth a local fame as a "sick nurse," but, in the
+days when nursing was neither sanitary nor professional, she was
+often summoned hastily from her sewing machine to assist at a birth
+or a burial in one of the families for whom she worked. And happy
+always, as befits one whose life, stripped bare of ephemeral
+blessings, is centred upon the basic realities, she was never
+happier than when she put down her sewing, took off her spectacles,
+exchanged her apron for a mantle, and after carefully tying her
+bonnet strings, departed for a triumphant encounter with the
+Eternal Issues.</p>
+<p>"I am so anxious about mother," said Gabriella. "Did she tell
+you she was going to Florida?"</p>
+<p>"She cert'ny did. She was real full of it, and she talked a lot
+about you all up here&mdash;the baby and you and Mr. George. You
+know I ain't laid my eyes on Mr. George mo' than three times in my
+life. Well, I reckon I'd better be gettin' along back, or the
+children will miss me. I've got four children to do for now, and
+one of 'em ain't any bigger than Frances. It does seem
+funny&mdash;don't it, for an old maid to have her hands full of
+children? But, you know, I always did dote on children. There
+wouldn't be half so much fun in this world if it wan't for children
+and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under
+their skins. Yes, I can find my way back real easy. I always was
+good at finding my way about, and all I've got to do is to set out
+and walk in that direction till I come to a car over yonder by that
+high building, and as soon as I get on I'll ask the conductor to
+put me off right at my do'."</p>
+<p>When she had gone, Gabriella went back into the nursery, and
+stood looking down at little Frances, who had fallen asleep, with
+the smile of an angel on her face. "I wonder if I can be the least
+bit like Jane?" she said aloud while she watched the sleeping
+child.</p>
+<p>George did not come home to dinner; and the wonder was still in
+Gabriella's mind when she dressed herself in her black net gown,
+and went downstairs to meet Florrie, who looked younger and more
+brilliant than ever in a dress of white and silver brocade.
+Florrie's husband, a dreamy, quiet man,&mdash;the safe kind of man,
+Gabriella reflected, who inevitably marries a dangerous
+woman&mdash;regarded his noisy wife with a guileless admiration
+which was triumphantly surviving a complete submergence in the
+sparkling shallows of Florrie's personality. He was a man of sense
+and of breeding. He possessed the ordinary culture of a gentleman
+as well as the trained mind of a lawyer, yet he appeared impervious
+alike to the cheapness of Florrie's wit and the vulgarity of her
+taste. Her beauty had not only blinded him to her mental
+deficiencies; it had actually deluded him into a belief in her
+intelligence. He treated her slangy sallies as if they were an
+original species of humour; he accepted the sweeping comment of her
+ignorance as if it had been an inspired criticism of life. While
+she chattered, parrotlike, to the judge, who was obviously
+impressed by her appearance, Algernon listened to her ejaculatory
+conversation with a mixture of admiration and awe.</p>
+<p>"How do you think Florrie is looking?" he asked in a low tone of
+Gabriella, while his wife's laugh, high, shrill, penetrating in its
+dry soprano quality, fluted loudly on the opposite side of the
+table. Beside Patty's patrician loveliness, as serene and flawless
+as that of a marble goddess, Florrie appeared cheap, common, and
+merely pretty to Gabriella. The hard brilliancy of her surface was
+like a shining polish which would wear off with sleep and have to
+be replenished each morning; and while she watched her, Gabriella
+saw, in imagination, a vaguely ominous outline surrounding her
+which might have been the uncertain edge of her mother's shadow. In
+twenty-five years Florrie would be the image of her
+mother&mdash;protuberant hips, pinched waist, mottled complexion,
+and hopelessly tarnished hair; yet, with this awful prospect before
+him, Algernon could appear not only tolerant, but positively
+adoring. He had seen Bessie&mdash;he had known her for
+years&mdash;and he could marry her daughter!</p>
+<p>"I never saw her look handsomer," said Gabriella, "that white
+and silver gown is very becoming."</p>
+<p>"That's what I told her, but she wouldn't believe me. She
+thought it was too plain for her style. Your sister-in-law is
+something of Florrie's type, isn't she? Not quite so striking a
+figure, perhaps, but the same sort of colouring."</p>
+<p>Was it possible that for the first time in his life the simple
+Algernon was speaking in irony? Turning in her chair, she looked
+questioningly into his kind, grave face, so empty of humour, into
+his serious gray eyes, which followed each movement of his wife's
+with admiring attention. No, he was not ironic; he was perfectly
+solemn. It was a miracle&mdash;a miracle not of piety, but of
+passion&mdash;that she was witnessing.</p>
+<p>"Yes, Patty is lovely," she answered, thinking, as she reflected
+upon the eccentricities of love, how much too good he was for his
+wife.</p>
+<p>Across the table Florrie's voice was heard exclaiming: "Now, you
+don't mean it! Well, I'm just as flattered as I can be!" and
+Gabriella surmised that she was completing her conquest of the
+judge.</p>
+<p>"It's wonderful how well she gets on with everybody," observed
+Algernon. "She's never at a loss for a word, and I tell her if I
+had her ready wit, I'd be the greatest lawyer in Virginia to-day.
+Have you noticed the way she is managing Judge Crowborough?"</p>
+<p>"She always gets on well with men," acquiesced Gabriella, though
+without the enthusiasm of Algernon. "Do you remember what a belle
+she always was at the germans?" Though she was willing to admit
+that love was the ruling principle of life, it occurred to her that
+Algernon would be more amusing if he were less abundantly supplied
+with that virtue.</p>
+<p>They talked of nothing but Florrie until the women went into the
+drawing-room; and there, from the safe haven of a window, Gabriella
+listened to Florrie's ceaseless prattle about herself. She was as
+egotistical, as effervescent, as she had been as a schoolgirl; and
+it seemed to Gabriella that she was hardly a day older. Her eyes,
+of a grayish blue, like pale periwinkles, were as bold, as
+careless, as conquering in their glances; her hair was still as
+dazzling; her face, with its curious resemblance in shape to the
+face of a pretty cat, was still as frank, as na&iuml;ve, as
+confiding in its innocence. If she had changed at all, it was that,
+since her marriage to the silent Algernon, she had become even more
+talkative than she had been in her girlhood. Her vivacity was as
+disturbing as the incessant buzzing of a June beetle.</p>
+<p>"Well, you need never tell me again that you wouldn't rather
+live in New York, Gabriella," she fluted at parting, "because I
+shan't believe a single word of it. Why, we've been to the theatre
+every night for a fortnight, and we haven't seen half the good
+plays that are going on. Algy wanted to stay at Niagara
+Falls&mdash;you know we went to Niagara Falls first&mdash;but it
+was so deadly quiet I couldn't stand it. 'I don't care if I am
+married,' I said to Algy, 'what I want is the theatre.'"</p>
+<p>After she had gone, adoringly wrapped up by Algernon, Patty
+turned to her mother with a little malicious grimace:</p>
+<p>"I know it's horrid to say she's dreadful, mamma, but she really
+is."</p>
+<p>"Don't, Patty, it isn't kind, and, besides, she's a friend of
+Gabriella's. What I can't understand," she added, "is how Bessie
+ever came out of Virginia, yet there were always a few like her.
+You don't remember Pussy Prime, do you? Of course you don't, she
+died long before your day, but she was just that loud, boisterous
+kind, and all the men were in love with her."</p>
+<p>"Well, if I'm ever born again," remarked Gabriella, as she
+kissed Patty good-night, "I hope I'll be born a fat blonde. They
+always get taken care of."</p>
+<p>She ascended the stairs wearily to her room. Yes, she was barely
+twenty-two and love was over forever. "I couldn't hold a man six
+months," she thought dejectedly, "and yet Florrie, who is a fool
+and vulgar, will be adored all her life."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_SECOND" id="BOOK_SECOND"></a>BOOK SECOND</h2>
+<p>THE AGE OF KNOWLEDGE</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_Ia" id="CHAPTER_Ia"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h3>DISENCHANTMENT</h3>
+<p>In July Gabriella joined her mother in the mountains of
+Virginia, and when she returned in the autumn, she found that the
+character of her home had changed perceptibly during her absence.
+Brightness had followed gloom; the fog of suspense had dissolved,
+and the hazy sunshine of an ambiguous optimism flooded the house.
+What the change implied she could not immediately discover; but
+before the first day was over she surmised that the financial
+prospects of her father-in-law had improved since the spring. If
+she had had any doubt of his rising fortunes, the sight of the
+diminished pile of bills on Mrs. Fowler's desk would have quickly
+dispelled it.</p>
+<p>And even George had apparently altered for the better. His
+improved finances had sweetened his temper and cast the shining
+gloss of prosperity over his appearance; and, in a measure at
+least, time had revived in him the ardent, if fluctuating, emotions
+of the lover. For three months after her return, he evinced a
+fervent sentiment for Gabriella, which she, who was staunchly
+paying the price of her folly, received with an inner shrinking but
+an outward complaisance. Her feeling for George was quite
+dead&mdash;so dead that it was impossible for any artificial
+stimulus to revive it&mdash;but she had learned that marriage is
+founded upon a more substantial basis than the romantic emotions of
+either a wife or a husband. Though she had ceased to love George,
+she could still be amiable to him; and it occurred to her at times
+that if one had to choose between the two not necessarily
+inseparable qualities of love and amiability, George was not losing
+greatly by the exchange. When, however, at the end of three months,
+George's capricious symptoms disappeared as suddenly as they had
+come, and his attentions lapsed into casual expressions of a
+nonchalant kindness, she drew a breath of relief, and devoted her
+happiest days to the nursery. There at least she had found a stable
+refuge amid the turmoil of selfish human desires.</p>
+<p>In the house, which like George, began presently to show the
+gloss of prosperity, the winter brought a continuous flashing
+stream of gaiety, in which Mrs. Fowler darted joyously about like
+some bright hungry minnow beneath the iridescent ripples of a
+brook. There were new rugs, new curtains, new gowns, new bonnets;
+and Gabriella was led compliantly from dressmaker to milliner,
+until she lost in the process her look of shabbiness and developed
+into the fashionable curving figure of the period. She had always
+liked clothes; her taste was naturally good; and as she followed
+eagerly from shop to shop, she recalled the three months she had
+spent in Brandywine's millinery department, and the rudiments of a
+trade she had learned there. "I'd rather design my next gown
+myself," she said one day to Mrs. Fowler, while they were looking
+at French models in the establishment of Madame Dinard, who had
+been born an O'Grady. "I know I can do better than these, and
+besides I shan't meet duplicates of myself every time I go out."
+That night she dreamed of hats and gowns, and the next morning she
+drew pictures of them in coloured chalk. "It's the only talent I
+ever had," she remarked gaily to her mother-in-law, "and it is
+running to waste."</p>
+<p>Madame, who regarded the sketches with uncompromising disdain,
+showed great interest in the practical application of Gabriella's
+ideas to the dressing of Mrs. Fowler.</p>
+<p>"Yes, you have undoubtedly ideas," she said, discarding in her
+enthusiasm the accent she had spent twenty years in acquiring, "and
+there is nothing so rare in any department&mdash;in any walk of
+life&mdash;as ideas. You have style, too," she pursued admiringly,
+turning her eyes on Gabriella's figure in one of her Parisian
+models. "It is very rare&mdash;such chic. You wear your clothes
+with a grace."</p>
+<p>"That, also, is a marketable asset in a dressmaker," laughed
+Gabriella. "Do you know I ought to have been a dressmaker, Madame.
+Only I hate the very sight of a needle."</p>
+<p>"But I never sew! I haven't had a needle in my hand for twenty
+years&mdash;no, not for thirty," protested Madame.</p>
+<p>"Then I mustn't give up hope. If I ever have to earn my living,
+I'll come to you, Madame."</p>
+<p>Then Madame bowed and smiled and shrugged as if at a gracious
+jest, and Mrs. Fowler observed in her crisp, matter-of-fact manner:
+"Yes, my daughter has a genuine instinct for dress, and, as you
+say, that is very rare. She carries her clothes well, doesn't she?
+It's such a blessing to be tall&mdash;though my husband insists
+that the women who have ruled the world have always been small
+ones. But I do love a fine figure, and she looks so distinguished
+in that cherry-coloured cloth, doesn't she?"</p>
+<p>To all of which Madame agreed, as she bowed them out, with her
+ingratiating professional manner.</p>
+<p>"It's so lovely to have clothes," said Gabriella, sinking back
+in the victoria, "money is one of the best gifts of the gods, isn't
+it?"</p>
+<p>"It's hard to do without it," replied Mrs. Fowler, brisk and
+perfectly businesslike even in her generalizations. "I expect the
+worst suffering in the world comes from poverty."</p>
+<p>Then, after a thoughtful pause, she added with the practical air
+of one who scorns to be abstract: "But do you know I sometimes
+think Archibald and I'd both be happier if we had never made any
+money at all&mdash;I mean, of course, except just enough to live
+simply somewhere in the South. When once you begin, you can't stop,
+and I wish sometimes we had never begun." Above the narrow black
+velvet strings of her bonnet, her round florid face, from which the
+fine tracery of lines had vanished, assumed the intent and
+preoccupied expression which Gabriella associated with the pile of
+unpaid bills on the little French desk. "I believe Archibald feels
+that way, too," she concluded after a minute, while her firm and
+unemotional lips closed together over the words.</p>
+<p>"But you enjoy it so much when you have it."</p>
+<p>"That's just the trouble. You have to enjoy it as quickly as you
+can because you never know when you are going to lose every bit of
+it without warning. It's been that way ever since I
+married&mdash;rich one year, poor the next, or poor for two years
+and then rich for three. Life has been a seesaw with prosperity at
+one end of the plank and poverty at the other. Of course I know,"
+she pursued, with characteristic lucidity, "that you think me
+dreadfully extravagant, but we'd just as well spend it as lose it,
+and it's sure to be one thing or the other."</p>
+<p>"But couldn't you save something? Couldn't you put by something
+for the future?" Saving for the future was one of the habits of
+Gabriella's frugal past which still clung to her.</p>
+<p>"That would go, too. If we ever come to ruin&mdash;and heaven
+knows we've been on the brink of it before this&mdash;Archibald
+would not keep back a penny. That's his way, and that's one of the
+reasons I spend all we have&mdash;up to the very margin of his
+income."</p>
+<p>The logic of this was so confusing that Gabriella was obliged to
+stop and puzzle it out. At the end she could only admit that Mrs.
+Fowler's reasoning processes, which were by nature singularly lucid
+and exact, showed at times a remarkable subtlety&mdash;as if some
+extraneous hybrid faculty had been grafted on the simple parent
+stock of her mind.</p>
+<p>"I can't help feeling, though," resumed the practical little
+lady before Gabriella had reached the end of her analysis, "that
+I'd be a great deal happier at this minute if we'd been poor all
+our lives."</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't have suited George," observed George's wife with an
+inflection of irony.</p>
+<p>"He mightn't have liked it, but I believe it would have been a
+great deal better for him," replied Mrs. Fowler, while she bowed
+gravely to a woman in a passing victoria. "There are many things
+George can't be blamed for, and the way he was brought up is one of
+them. Of course, he's no good whatever as a business man&mdash;his
+father hardly ever sees him in the office&mdash;but it's useless to
+scold him about it, for it only exasperates him. But he might have
+been a sensible, steady boy, if he had been brought up in some
+small place in the South where there was nothing to tempt him."</p>
+<p>That there was any place in the South small enough not to afford
+temptation to George seemed improbable to Gabriella; but she felt
+that Mrs. Fowler's earnest belief, supported as it was by the
+unshakable prop of maternal feeling, hardly justified the effort
+she must make to dispel it; and she had still no answer ready when
+the carriage turned into Fifty-seventh Street, and stopped beside
+the pavement where little Frances&mdash;they had already begun to
+call her Fanny&mdash;sat in a perambulator. Flushed and smiling,
+with her red mouth gurgling delightedly, and a white wool lamb
+clasped in her arms, the adorable child was certainly worth any
+seesaw of destiny, any disillusioning experience of marriage.</p>
+<p>Before the beginning of the next winter Gabriella's second child
+was born&mdash;a brown, sturdy boy, who came into the world with a
+frowning forehead and crying lustily from rage (so the nurse said)
+not from fright. He was named Archibald after his grandfather, who
+developed immediately a passionate fondness for him. His eyes were
+brown like the eyes of the Carrs, though by the time he was two
+years old, he was discovered to be painfully near-sighted, a
+weakness which Mrs. Carr, when she heard of it, insisted he must
+have inherited from his father's side of the family. He was not
+nearly so beautiful a baby as little Fanny had been; but he was
+from the very beginning a child of much character, strong,
+mutinous, utterly uncompromising in his attitude toward life. When
+he was first put into shoes he fought with desperation, and
+surrendered at last, neither to persuasion nor to punishment, but
+to an exhaustion so profound that he slept for hours with his small
+protesting feet doubled under him and sobs of fury still bursting
+from his swollen lips. The next day the struggle began again, and
+Mrs. Fowler remarked sympathetically:</p>
+<p>"You'll never be able to break his will, Gabriella. He is
+unmanageable."</p>
+<p>"I don't want to break his will, mamma," replied Gabriella, for
+she belonged to a less Scriptural generation, "but he must be
+disciplined, if it kills me." Pale, gentle, resolute, she waited
+for Archibald to surrender. In the end she carried her point and
+won the adoring obedience of Archibald. There was a magnanimous
+strain in him even at that age, Gabriella used to say, and though
+he fought to the bitter end, he bore no malice after he was once
+soundly defeated.</p>
+<p>Long afterwards, when Gabriella looked back on the next few
+years of her life, she could remember nothing of them except the
+tremendous difference that the children had made. All the rest was
+blotted out, a drab blur of what Mrs. Fowler described with dignity
+as "social duties," moving always against the variable atmosphere
+of the house, which was gay or sombre, light or gloomy, according
+to the fluctuating financial conditions in Wall Street. There were
+extravagant winters and frugal winters; winters of large
+entertainments and winters of "women's luncheons"; but always the
+summers shimmered green and peaceful against the blue background of
+the Virginia mountains. The summers she loved even in memory; but
+of the winters she could recall but one glowing vision, and that
+was of Patty. Though she had lost George, she had gained Patty, and
+it was impossible to deny that Patty might be compensation for
+almost any lack.</p>
+<p>For the rest she made few friends, partly from reserve, partly
+from the shyness she always felt in the presence of strangers. It
+was difficult to establish fundamental relations at dinners or even
+at women's luncheons; social reforms were scarcely beginning to be
+fashionable; and apart from the reading which she did in order, as
+she said, "to keep her mind open," her life narrowed down gradually
+to a single vivid centre of activity. She lived in her children and
+in the few books she obtained from the library&mdash;(since the
+purchase of books, even in extravagant years, represented gross
+prodigality to Mrs. Fowler)&mdash;in Patty's friendship, and in the
+weekly gossiping letters she received from her mother.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Carr had long ago given up her plan to live with Gabriella
+and George; and a failure of circumstances, which fitted so
+perfectly into the general scheme of her philosophy, had done much
+to fortify the natural melancholy of her soul. Since even so gentle
+a pessimist was not devoid of a saving trace of spiritual
+arrogance, she found consoling balm in the thought that she had
+refrained from reminding Gabriella how very badly the Carrs had all
+married. There was, for example, poor Gabriel's brother Tom, whose
+wife had "gone deranged" six months after her wedding, and poor
+Gabriel's sister Johanna, who had died (it was common gossip) of a
+broken heart; and besides these instances, nobody could possibly
+maintain that Jane had not made a disastrous choice when she had
+persisted, against the urgent advice of her mother, in marrying
+Charley. Yes, the Carrs had all married badly, reflected Mrs. Carr,
+with the grief of a mother and the pride of a philosopher whose
+favourite theory has been substantially verified&mdash;every one of
+them, with, of course, the solitary exception of poor Gabriel
+himself.</p>
+<p>Her weekly letters, pious, gossipy, flowing, reached Gabriella
+regularly every Monday morning, and were read at breakfast while
+Mr. Fowler studied the financial columns of the newspaper, and his
+wife opened her invitations in the intervals between pouring out
+cups of coffee and inquiring solicitously if any one wanted cream
+and sugar.</p>
+<p>"What's the news?" George would sometimes ask carelessly; and
+Gabriella would glance down the pages covered with the formless
+characters of Mrs. Carr's fine Italian handwriting (the ladylike
+hand of the 'sixties), and read out carefully selected bits of
+provincial gossip, to which a cosmopolitan dash was usually
+contributed by the adventures, matrimonial or merely amorous, of
+Florrie Caperton. Hard, dashing, brilliant on the surface at least,
+a frank hedonist by inclination, if not by philosophy, Florrie had
+triumphantly smashed her way through the conventions and the
+traditions of centuries.</p>
+<p>"It's really dreadfully sad about Florrie," wrote Mrs. Carr. "I
+am so sorry for poor Bessie, who must feel it more than she lets
+any one see. While Algernon was alive we always hoped he would keep
+Florrie straight (you remember how everybody used to talk about her
+when she was a girl), but now he has been, dead only a year and a
+half, and she has already married again and gotten a divorce from
+her second husband. You know she ran away with a man named Tom
+Westcott&mdash;nobody ever heard of him, but she met him at the
+White Sulphur Springs, where he had something to do with the
+horses, I believe&mdash;and the marriage turned out very badly,
+though for my part I don't believe he was the least bit to blame.
+Florrie is so reckless that she would make any man unhappy, and two
+weeks after the wedding she was separated from him and was back
+here with Bessie, looking as well and pretty as I ever saw her. You
+know black was so becoming to her that she didn't take it off even
+when she eloped, and now after her divorce she always wears it,
+just as if she were still in mourning for poor Algernon. Nobody
+would believe, unless they had seen her in it, how very loud black
+can be. I used to think widows ought to wear it because it kept
+them from being noticed, but on Florrie it is the most conspicuous
+thing you ever imagined&mdash;as Cousin Jimmy says it simply makes
+her blaze, and you know how striking she always was anyway. I am
+sure I should think it would be embarrassing for her to go in the
+street in New York where nobody knows that she is really a
+lady&mdash;or at least that she was born a lady on her father's
+side&mdash;and this reminds me&mdash;(I declare I ramble on so I
+can never remember what I started to say)&mdash;but this reminds me
+that she has just been in to tell Jane that she is going to New
+York to take an apartment somewhere downtown; she told me the
+street and the number, but I have forgotten both of them. Jane says
+she looks more beautiful than ever after her last tragic experience
+(though she doesn't seem to think it tragic at all), but I was
+brought up to believe that a divorced woman, even if she is in the
+right, ought to live in a retired way and show that she feels her
+position. Now, I saw Florrie for a minute as she was going out and
+she ran on like a girl of sixteen&mdash;you would think from her
+talk that she is not a bit sensitive about the unfortunate
+situation she is in. She had on a huge bunch of violets, and Cousin
+Pussy tells me another man is paying her the most devoted
+attention. Please don't mention this to a soul&mdash;I hate so to
+spread gossip&mdash;but I felt that you ought to be prepared, for
+Florrie will certainly come to see you, and you must be kind and
+polite to her, though I do not think you ought ever to be intimate
+again. It is not as if she were merely unfortunate&mdash;many
+divorced women are that, and we sympathize with them because they
+show that they realize their position&mdash;but I cannot believe
+that Florrie is unfortunate if she allows another man to pay her
+such marked attention, and even accepts handsome presents from him.
+So do be careful, my child, and if you find yourself in an
+embarrassing situation, consult Mrs. Fowler and be guided by her
+advice."</p>
+<p>"Florrie Spencer is coming to New York," said Gabriella on the
+morning she received Mrs. Carr's letter. "You know she has just
+been divorced from her second husband&mdash;somebody she met at the
+White Sulphur Springs."</p>
+<p>George looked up interested, from his breakfast.</p>
+<p>"Florrie coming, is she?" he remarked. "Well, she's great fun. I
+wonder if she has her eye on anybody now?"</p>
+<p>"Not on you, I hope," observed his father, who joked mildly on
+the mornings when the news was good; "but she's a beautiful woman,
+and she'll doubtless be able to get whatever she has set either her
+heart or her eye on."</p>
+<p>"She'll marry again within six months," prophesied Mrs. Fowler,
+with an anxious glance in the direction of her husband's coffee
+cup. "Poor Algy, I always thought he was a hundred times too good
+for her," she added, while she abstractedly buttered her toast. It
+was one of their extravagant years, and the butter was
+delicious.</p>
+<p>"He adored her," said Gabriella. "I shall never forget the
+evening they spent here. He couldn't keep his eyes away from her.
+If she had been the most admirable character on earth he couldn't
+have loved her better."</p>
+<p>"As if a man ever loved a woman because of her character!"
+remarked Mrs. Fowler, from the security of her experience.</p>
+<p>Several months later Florrie arrived, gay, brilliant, and
+beautiful, with her waxlike complexion as unlined by care as if it
+had been on the face of a doll. Though she had lightened her
+mourning since Mrs. Carr had described her to Gabriella, she still
+wore black, and her flaring skirt, her inflexible collar, and her
+lace sleeves, narrow at the shoulder and full at the wrists,
+resembled a fashion plate. Perched at a daring angle above her
+wheaten-red pompadour, with its exaggerated Marcel wave, she wore a
+curiously distorted hat of black velvet, lavishly overtrimmed with
+ostrich feathers; and before this miracle of style, Gabriella
+became at once oppressively aware of her own lack of the quality
+which Florrie would have described as "dash." Already Florrie's
+figure was becoming slightly too protuberant for the style of the
+new century, and after kissing Gabriella effusively, she stood for
+a minute struggling for breath, in the attitude of her mother, with
+her hands pressed to the palpitating sides of her waist.</p>
+<p>"I told mother I was certainly coming to see you right
+straight," began Florrie, while, with her recovered breath, her
+figure curved as suddenly as if it were moved by a spring into the
+fashionable bend of the period. "I've been perfectly crazy to come,
+but between dressmakers and theatres and I don't know what else, I
+simply haven't had a minute in which I could sit down and breathe.
+Mother says I ought to be downright ashamed of myself for being so
+frivolous when I've just got out of such a scrape&mdash;did you
+ever hear before of anybody getting married for two weeks,
+Gabriella? But I know you never did&mdash;you needn't trouble to
+tell me so. Well, mother says I oughtn't to look so pleased, and I
+tell her there might be some sense in that if I'd stayed in the
+scrape, but if I haven't a right to look pleased at getting out,
+I'd like to know who has. It was all too funny for words, now,
+wasn't it? Of course, I shouldn't dream of talking to everybody
+like this&mdash;even if I am a big talker, I reckon I know when to
+hold my tongue and when not to&mdash;but I've always told you
+everything, Gabriella, and I don't mind the least bit in the world
+telling you about this. It always relieves my mind to talk to
+somebody I can trust, and I know I can trust you. Don't you
+remember the way I used to run in on rainy afternoons when you
+lived way over in Hill Street, and tell you all about Fred Dudley
+and Barbour Willis? And then I used to come and talk about poor
+Algy by the hour. Wasn't it too distressing about poor Algy? I
+don't believe I'll ever get over it if I live to be a hundred, and
+even if I do run on like this, it doesn't mean that my heart isn't
+broken&mdash;simply broken&mdash;because it is. Mother used to say,
+after father died, that you couldn't measure a widow's grief by the
+length of her veil; and that's just exactly the way I feel about
+Algy. I know you'll understand, Gabriella, because you always
+understand everything&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"He was so deeply in love with you," observed Gabriella
+sympathetically, while Florrie, diving amid the foam of her laces,
+brought out a tiny handkerchief, and delicately pecked at the
+corner of her eye, not near enough to redden the lid and not far
+enough away to disturb the rice powder on the side of her nose.</p>
+<p>"He was crazy about me to the very last, you never saw anything
+like it. Of course we weren't a bit alike, I don't mind telling you
+so, Gabriella, because I know you'll never repeat it. We weren't
+really congenial, for Algy was just wrapped up in his law books,
+and there were whole days together when he wouldn't open his mouth,
+but that didn't seem to make any difference because, as he used to
+say, one of us had to listen sometimes. But, you know, mother says
+a pair of opposites makes the happiest marriage, and after being
+married to Algy, I feel how true that is. I got into the habit of
+talking so much when I used to run on about nothing to cheer him
+up&mdash;he was always so grave and glum even as a boy, you
+remember&mdash;and during his last illness&mdash;you know he died
+of Bright's disease, poor darling, and it came on just like
+that!&mdash;he used to make me talk to him for hours and hours just
+to keep him from thinking. Well, well, that's all over now, and I
+don't care what anybody says, my heart's buried with Algy. I don't
+believe you were ever in love but once either, were you,
+Gabriella?" she inquired cheerfully.</p>
+<p>"Well, what about Mr. Westcott? Is that his name?" asked
+Gabriella, without malice. As a study Florrie had always interested
+her, for she regarded her less as an individual than as an awful
+example of the utter futility of moral maxims. Florrie was without
+intelligence, without feeling, without imagination, virtue,
+breeding, or good taste, yet possessing none of these qualities,
+she had by sheer beauty and "dash" achieved all the ends for which
+these qualities usually strive. Good humour she had as long as one
+did not get in her way; but, beyond this single redeeming grace,
+she was as empty of substance as a tinted shell filled with sea
+foam. If power and efficiency are the two supreme attributes of
+success, then by all the laws and principles of logic, Florrie
+ought to have been a failure. But she was not a failure. She was a
+fool whose incomparable foolishness had conferred not only
+prosperity, but happiness upon her. She shone, she scintillated,
+she diffused the glow of success. Though she was undeserving of
+admiration, she had been surfeited on it from her childhood; though
+she was devoid of the moral excellence which should command love,
+by a flashing glance or a waving curl, she could bring the most
+exalted love down from the heavens. There was no question that
+Algernon had really loved her to distraction, and Algernon was a
+man of sense, of breeding, of distinction. As for Florrie, she had,
+of course, as little capacity for loving as she had for
+thinking.</p>
+<p>"Tom Westcott! I declare, Gabriella, I am almost ashamed to tell
+you about him. You've never been to a Virginia summer resort, so
+you couldn't understand that there is something about a Virginia
+summer resort that just seems to make any man better than none at
+all. You get so bored, you know, that you'd flirt with a lamp-post
+if there wasn't anything human around; and when you haven't laid
+eyes on a real sure enough man for several months, it's surprising
+how easy it is to take up with the imitation ones. Of course, I
+don't mean that Tom wasn't all right as far as family and all that
+goes; but he was simply no earthly account&mdash;he was just mean
+all through, and as soon as I found it out, I packed right straight
+up and left him. After Algy I couldn't have stood one of that sort,
+and there was no sense in my trying to. Life is too short, I always
+say, for experiments. There's no use sticking to a bad job when you
+can get away from it. That's the trouble with so many women, you
+know; they try and try to stand the wrong man when they know all
+the time that it isn't a particle of use, and that they are just
+bringing wrinkles into their faces; and then by the time they give
+up, they're all worn out and it's too late to look about for
+another chance. Now, I've seen too much of that kind of thing, and
+so I thought two weeks weren't long enough to bring wrinkles in my
+face, but they were plenty long for me to find out whether or not I
+could stand any man on earth. So here I am in little old New York
+instead of being stuck away in some God-forsaken Virginia town,
+where there isn't even a theatre, darning stockings for a family of
+children. But there's no use talking about that&mdash;" And
+Florrie, who had been born a lady on her father's side, adjusted
+her pompadour under the high bandeau of her hat, and rose with a
+dashing air from the sofa.</p>
+<p>"I'd love to see the babies, darling," she said; "I'm just crazy
+about babies."</p>
+<p>"They are out in the Park. I'm so sorry. Perhaps they are coming
+in now, I hear the door-bell."</p>
+<p>But it was George instead of the children; and he entered
+presently with a moody look, which vanished quickly before the
+brilliant vision of Florrie.</p>
+<p>"I thought I heard you," he observed with the casual intimacy of
+an old playmate, "so I came in. Have you got fixed yet? What about
+the apartment? You'd better let me help you hunt for it?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'm not sure about the apartment. I may take a
+house&mdash;a teeny weeny one, you know," said Florrie, as she bent
+softly toward him, scented and blooming. If one didn't know there
+wasn't really a bit of harm in her, one would be puzzled just what
+to think of her, Gabriella reflected. Amid the perfect order of
+Gabriella's inner life, the controlled emotion, the serene
+efficiency, the balanced power, Florrie's noisy beauty produced a
+disturbing effect. She liked her because she had known her from
+childhood, and it was impossible to think any harm of a girl one
+had played with at school; but she could not deny that Florrie was
+vulgar. As a matter of fact, Florrie's mother had been vulgar
+before her, and the thin strain of refinement inherited from her
+father's stock had obviously been overborne by the torrential
+vulgarity of the maternal blood.</p>
+<p>"A house? Well, that's even better," replied George. "I've no
+use for apartments, have I, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>His effrontery was incredible! That he should joke about his
+broken promise before Florrie amazed Gabriella even after her
+disillusioning experience with him.</p>
+<p>"Then I'll get you to help me. Will you lend him to me,
+darling?" trilled Florrie piercingly from the door, where she stood
+in a striking pose which revealed her "fine figure" to the best
+advantage. The request was directed to Gabriella, but her blue eyes
+mocked a challenge to George while she spoke.</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'll give him," answered Gabriella pleasantly. There was no
+harm in it, she told herself innocently again; but it was a pity
+that Florrie, with her remarkable beauty, should be quite so ill
+bred.</p>
+<p>Five minutes later when George came back from putting Florrie
+into her hansom, he remarked carelessly:</p>
+<p>"She's got a figure all right."</p>
+<p>"Yes, she looks beautiful in black. No wonder she won't leave it
+off."</p>
+<p>"By Jove, to think it's little Florrie! Why, I don't believe
+there's a finer figure in New York. When she passed by the club
+yesterday the men were breaking their necks to look out of the
+window." Then, as if struck by a sudden suspicion, he added
+quickly: "Where did she get her money from? I thought Algy died
+rather hard up."</p>
+<p>"I never heard much about it. Mrs. Spencer must give her
+something."</p>
+<p>"I don't believe the old lady has a penny over three thousand a
+year, and that won't do in New York. This Westcott didn't have
+anything, did he?"</p>
+<p>"It never occurred to me to ask," replied Gabriella
+indifferently. What did it matter to George where Florrie got her
+money? But, then, George was always like that, and though he never
+made a penny himself, he was possessed of an insatiable curiosity
+about the amount and the sources of other people's incomes.</p>
+<p>"Well, it looks queer," he observed with intense interest after
+a prolonged pause. "That short pearl necklace she had on couldn't
+have cost a cent under ten thousand dollars."</p>
+<p>"It was lovely. I noticed how well the pearls matched," replied
+his wife. She was not in the least excited about the methods by
+which Florrie had obtained the necklace&mdash;all that was a part
+of the miraculous way she got everything she wanted in
+life&mdash;but she liked the pearls and she had envied Florrie
+while she looked at them.</p>
+<p>A deep furrow had appeared between George's eyebrows, and his
+mouth sagged suddenly at the corners, giving his face the ugly look
+Gabriella distrusted and dreaded. While she watched him she
+recalled vaguely that she had once thought the latent brutality in
+his face an expression of power. How young she had been when she
+married him! How inconceivably ignorant! Yet at twenty years she
+had imagined herself wise enough to judge a man. She had deluded
+herself with the sanctified fallacy that mere instinct would guide
+her aright&mdash;that her marriage would be protected from disaster
+by the infallible impulse which she had mistaken for love.</p>
+<p>"I wonder," said George with a suddenness that startled her out
+of her musing&mdash;"I wonder if it can be Winston Camp!"</p>
+<p>And Gabriella, who had forgotten Florrie, looked up to remark
+absentmindedly: "Winston Camp? You mean the man who dined here last
+winter and couldn't eat anything but nuts?"</p>
+<p>In the months that followed George did not mention Florrie
+again, and if he pursued his investigations into the obscure
+sources of her livelihood, his researches did not lead him back in
+the direction of Gabriella. But, from the day of Florrie's visit,
+it seemed to Gabriella, when she thought of it afterwards, his
+casual indifference began to develop into brutal neglect. Not that
+she regretted his affection, or even his politeness, not that she
+cared in the least what his manner was&mdash;this she made quite
+plain to herself&mdash;but her passion to see life clearly, to test
+experience, to weigh events, brought her almost breathlessly round
+again to the question, "What does it mean? Is there something
+hidden? Am I still the poor abject fool that Jane was or am I
+beginning really to be myself?"</p>
+<p>"You aren't looking well, Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler at
+breakfast one morning when George, as she confided afterwards to
+Patty, had behaved unspeakably to his wife before his father came
+down. "I want you to go about with me more, as you used to do
+before the children took up all your time."</p>
+<p>Gabriella had just crossed George's will about something&mdash;a
+mere trifle, something about calling on Florrie&mdash;and he had
+turned to her with a look of hatred in his eyes, a kind of nervous,
+excitable hatred which she had never seen until then. "Why does he
+look at me like that?" she had thought quite coldly; "and why
+should he have begun all of a sudden to hate me? Why should my
+words, my voice, my gestures even, exasperate him so profoundly? Of
+course he has stopped loving me, but why should that make him hate
+me? I stopped loving him, too, long ago, yet there is only
+indifference, not hate, in my heart."</p>
+<p>"You must go about with me more, dear," repeated Mrs. Fowler, in
+obedience to a vague but amiable instinct, which prompted her to
+shield George, to deceive Gabriella, to deny the truth of facts, to
+do anything on earth except acknowledge the actual situation in
+which she found herself. "Don't you think she ought to go about
+more, George?"</p>
+<p>"I don't care what she does," returned George brutally, while
+his blue eyes squinted in the old charming way from which all charm
+had departed. "I don't care&mdash;I don't care&mdash;" He checked
+himself, snapping his words in two with a virulent outburst of
+temper, and then, rising hurriedly, as his father entered the room,
+he left the table with his breakfast uneaten.</p>
+<p>"He's so nervous. I can't imagine what's the matter. I hope
+Burrows wasn't in the pantry. Did you say anything to hurt his
+feelings before you came down, Gabriella?" asked Mrs. Fowler,
+distractedly, with one eye on her daughter-in-law and the other on
+the pantry door, through which the discreet Burrows had disappeared
+at the opportune instant.</p>
+<p>"No, I haven't said anything that I can remember," answered
+Gabriella with calmness. It occurred to her that George's behaviour
+was hardly that of a man whose "feelings" had been wounded, but she
+made no audible record of her reflection; "and of course I'll go
+out with you if you want me to," she added, for she felt sincerely
+sorry for her mother-in-law, even though she had ruined George in
+his infancy. "I am going to the library to return a book, and we
+might pay some calls afterwards."</p>
+<p>"That's just what I was thinking," responded Mrs. Fowler,
+embarrassed, bewildered. Was it possible, she asked herself, that
+Gabriella had not noticed George's outrageous behaviour?</p>
+<p>But Gabriella did not "go about" with her mother-in-law that
+season, for a higher will than Mrs. Fowler's frustrated that lady's
+benevolent intentions. To a casual glance it would have seemed the
+merest accident which disturbed these felicitous plans, but such
+accidents, when Gabriella looked back on them afterwards, appeared
+to her to be woven into the very web and pattern of life. It was
+plainly incredible that her whole existence should be changed
+merely because Archibald was naughty, as incredible as the idea
+that Destiny should have used so small a medium for the
+accomplishment of its tragic designs.</p>
+<p>But Archibald had hardly reached the Park before he was brought
+home, resisting with all his strength, because he had given his
+shoes and stockings away; and the next ten minutes, while Gabriella
+gently reasoned with him on the pavement, were pregnant with
+consequences.</p>
+<p>"He's fierce, that's what he is," declared the nurse, who was
+Irish and militant. "He kicked me so I'm black and blue, ma'am, all
+over the shins, and every bit because I wouldn't let him pull off
+his shoes and socks and give 'em to a barefooted boy in the Park.
+You tell her, darlin'"&mdash;to Frances, who stood, bright-eyed and
+indignant, in her white fur coat and little fur cap which she wore
+drawn down tight over her curls&mdash;"you tell your mamma,
+darlin', you tell her how fierce and bold he was, and how he kicked
+me about the shins because I wouldn't let him take off his shoes
+and socks."</p>
+<p>"The poor boy wanted 'em! I won't wear 'em! I will give 'em to
+the poor boy!" screamed Archibald, furious, scowling, struggling in
+the restraining hold of his nurse. He was a robust, thick-set child
+of four years, with a thatch of dark-brown hair, and strange
+near-sighted brown eyes, behind spectacles which he had worn from
+the time he could walk.</p>
+<p>"What is it, Archibald? Tell me about it. Tell mother," pleaded
+Gabriella while he struggled desperately to escape from her tender
+grasp. "Who was the poor boy and where did you see him?"</p>
+<p>"He oughtn't to have been in the Park, ought he, mamma?"
+inquired Frances, who was guiltless of democratic tendencies.
+"Ragged people have no right to be in the Park, have they?"</p>
+<p>"Hush, darling, I want to hear what Archibald has to say. Tell
+me about him, Archibald. Shall you and I go out to look for
+him?"</p>
+<p>"If you do, he'll pull his shoes and socks right off again,"
+insisted Frances emphatically. "He had got one quite off and had
+given it to the boy before we saw him, and Nanny was obliged to go
+and take it back, and I had to hold Archibald while she put it on
+him. He screamed very loud and everybody stopped to ask what was
+the matter, and one old gentleman with a long beard, like Moses in
+the Bible, gave Archibald a little box of candy&mdash;he took it
+out of his pocket&mdash;but Archibald threw it away, and kept on
+hollerin' louder than ever&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"That's right, darlin', you tell her," urged nurse, a stout
+woman with a red face and three gold teeth in the front of her
+mouth.</p>
+<p>"I understand now. Don't tell any more, Fanny," said Gabriella.
+"Now, Archibald dear, will you stop crying and be good?"</p>
+<p>"Am," replied Archibald sullenly, twisting out of her hands.</p>
+<p>"Am what, darling?"</p>
+<p>"Am good."</p>
+<p>"Well, will you stop crying?"</p>
+<p>"Have."</p>
+<p>"Then what do you want? Shall we go back and look for the poor
+boy?"</p>
+<p>"Hadn't any shoes. Feet were red. Wanted to give him shoes,
+'cause I had plenty more at home. Nanny jerked him back. Hated
+Nanny. Hoped she would die. Hoped bears would eat her. Hoped tigers
+would eat her. Hoped lions would eat her. Hoped robins would cover
+her with leaves in the Park&mdash;"</p>
+<p>While he sobbed out his accusations against nurse, Gabriella,
+holding his hand tightly in hers, turned toward Fifth Avenue, and
+by the time he was pacified, they had walked several blocks
+together, with nurse and Fanny sedately bringing up the rear. Then,
+at last, having reasoned him alike out of his temper and his
+generosity, Gabriella retraced her steps, and entering the house
+with her latchkey, ran quickly up the stairs to the closed door of
+Mrs. Fowler's room. As she raised her hand to knock the sound of
+her own name reached her, and almost involuntarily she hesitated
+for an instant.</p>
+<p>"Yes, Gabriella is out. I saw her a minute ago on her way to the
+Park with the children."</p>
+<p>"Well, somebody ought to tell her, mother. I think it is
+perfectly outrageous to keep her in ignorance. Everybody is talking
+about it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Patty, you couldn't! How on earth could you tell her a
+thing like that?" wailed George's mother, and she went on with a
+plaintive sigh as Gabriella opened the door: "George was always so
+mad about beauty, and though Gabriella has a fine face, she isn't
+exactly&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Then, at the startling apparition of Gabriella, with her face
+paling slowly above her black furs and her large indignant eyes
+fixed on them both, Mrs. Fowler wavered and broke off with a
+pathetic clutch at the pleasantness which had entirely departed
+from her manner. "Why, Gabriella, I didn't know you had come in! I
+was just saying to Patty&mdash;" It was, as she said afterwards to
+her husband, exactly as if her mind had become suddenly blank. She
+couldn't to save her life think of a single word to add to her
+sentence, and all the time Gabriella was standing there, as white
+as a ghost, with her accusing eyes turning slowly from one to the
+other of them. "Somehow I just couldn't lie to her when she looked
+like that, and the truth seemed too dreadful," Mrs. Fowler added
+that night to Archibald. "Damn George!" was Mr. Fowler's fervent
+retort. "And it took me so by surprise I almost fainted, for I'd
+never in my life heard him swear before," his wife had commented
+later. "But aren't men strange? To think he knew how all the time
+and kept it to himself! I declare they are entirely too secretive
+for anything!"</p>
+<p>"I heard what you were saying when I knocked," began Gabriella,
+with perfect composure. "I don't quite know what it was about, but
+I think&mdash;I think&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"It was nothing, dear; Patty and I were gossiping," replied Mrs.
+Fowler, with an eagerness that was almost violent. "Oh, Patty, you
+wouldn't!"&mdash;for Patty had broken in, conquering and merciless,
+with the declaration: "If you don't tell Gabriella, mamma, I'm
+going to. It's outrageous, anyhow, I've always said so, the way
+people keep things from women. Gabriella has a right to know what
+everybody is saying."</p>
+<p>"Of course I've a right to know," rejoined Gabriella, with a
+firmness before which Mrs. Fowler felt herself gradually
+dissolving&mdash;"melting away" was the description she gave of her
+feeling. "If anybody has a right to know, I suppose I have. Of
+course, it's about George. I know that much, anyhow," she added
+quietly.</p>
+<p>"I don't believe it's half so bad as they say," protested Mrs.
+Fowler feverishly. "I don't believe he really keeps her. His father
+says he couldn't possibly do it on the allowance he gives him, and,
+you know, George doesn't make a cent himself&mdash;not a cent. He
+never supported himself in his life&mdash;"</p>
+<p>She paused breathlessly, with a bright and confident glance as
+if she had made a point&mdash;a minor one perhaps, but still a
+point&mdash;in George's favour. The jet fringe on her bosom, which
+had rattled furiously with her excited palpitations, became
+gradually quiet, and as she pressed her lips firmly with her
+handkerchief, which she had rolled into a ball, she appeared to be
+pressing her customary smile back into place.</p>
+<p>"It won't last, Gabriella," she began again very suddenly with
+renewed assurance. "These things never last, and I think Patty is
+quite wrong to insist upon telling you. Of course it is humiliating
+for a time, but&mdash;but"&mdash;she hesitated, and then brought
+out triumphantly&mdash;"he married very young, you know, and men
+aren't like women&mdash;there's no use pretending they are. Now
+when a woman loves a man&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But, you see, I don't love George," answered Gabriella, and her
+awful words seemed to reverberate through the horrified silence
+that surrounded her.</p>
+<p>"Not love him? O Gabriella! Of course, it's natural that you
+should feel angry and wounded, and that your pride should resent
+what looks like an affront to you; but you can't mean in your heart
+that you've got over caring. Women don't change so easily. Why,
+you're his wife&mdash;poor foolish boy that he is&mdash;and
+Florrie&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"So it's Florrie?" observed Gabriella, with a strangely
+dispassionate interest. It was queer, she reflected afterwards,
+that she had not felt the faintest curiosity about the woman.</p>
+<p>"I always suspected that there was something wrong about her,"
+pursued Mrs. Fowler, reassured by the knowledge that she was
+placing the blame where it belonged according to all the laws of
+custom and tradition. "I must say I never liked her manner and her
+way of dressing, and she made eyes at every man she was introduced
+to&mdash;even at Archibald&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Well, I didn't believe there was any real harm in her," said
+Gabriella, in a tone she might have used at one of her
+mother-in-law's luncheons. She was still standing near the door, in
+the very spot where she had paused at her entrance, with her head
+held high above the black fur at her throat, and one gloved hand
+playing with a bit of cord on the end of her muff. She could not
+possibly have taken it better. Bad as the situation was, it might
+have been a hundred times worse except for Gabriella's composure,
+thought Mrs. Fowler discreetly, adding with an inexplicable regret,
+that in her youth women were different. Yes, they had shown more
+feeling then, though they had behaved perhaps less well in a
+crisis. In spite of her gratitude&mdash;and she was sincerely
+grateful to her daughter-in-law for not making a scene&mdash;she
+became conscious presently that she was beginning to cherish an
+emotion not unlike resentment on George's account. That the
+discovery of George's faithlessness should be received so coolly by
+George's wife appeared almost an affront to him. Mrs. Fowler liked
+Gabriella, she was fond of her&mdash;and nobody could look in the
+girl's face and not see that she was a fine woman&mdash;but there
+were times, and this was one of them, when she thought her a little
+hard. Had Gabriella wept, had she raged, had she threatened
+Florrie's life or happiness, it might have been painful, but at
+least it would have been human; and above all things Mrs. Fowler
+felt that she liked women to be human.</p>
+<p>"Nothing that anybody says or does can excuse George," said
+Patty sternly. "He has behaved abominably, and if I were Gabriella,
+I'd simply wash my hands of him. I don't care if he is my brother,
+that doesn't make me blind, does it? If he were my husband," she
+concluded passionately, "I'd feel just the same way about it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you mustn't! Oh, Patty, hush, it's wicked! It's sinful!"
+moaned Mrs. Fowler, shutting her eyes, as if the sight of Patty's
+indignant loveliness gave her a headache. "Don't try to harden
+Gabriella's heart against him. Don't try to make her think she's
+really stopped loving him."</p>
+<p>Gabriella's answer to this outburst was a look which, as poor
+Mrs. Fowler said afterwards, "cut her to the heart." Backing weakly
+to a chair, the valiant little lady sat down suddenly, because she
+felt that her legs were giving way beneath the weight of her body.
+And, though she was unaware of its significance, her action was
+deeply symbolical of the failure of the old order to withstand the
+devastating advance of the new spirit. She felt vaguely that she
+wished women and things were both what they used to be; but this,
+since she had little imagination, was as far as she penetrated into
+the psychology of Gabriella's behaviour.</p>
+<p>"But, you see, you're making the mistake of thinking that I love
+George," said Gabriella, with a reasonableness which made Mrs.
+Fowler feel that she wanted to scream, "and I don't love
+him&mdash;I don't love him at all. I haven't loved him for a long
+time&mdash;not since the night I saw him drunk. How could I love a
+man I've seen drunk&mdash;disgustingly drunk&mdash;a man I couldn't
+respect? I'm not made that way, and I can't help it. Some women may
+be like that, but I'm not. I couldn't, even if I wanted to, love a
+man who has treated me as George has done. I don't see how any
+woman could&mdash;any woman with a particle of pride and
+self-respect. Of course I had to live with him after I married
+him," she finished abruptly. "Marriage isn't made for love. I used
+to think it was&mdash;but it isn't&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But, Gabriella, you don't mean&mdash;you can't&mdash;" Mrs.
+Fowler was really pitiable, for, after all, George was her son, and
+the ties of blood would not break so easily as the ties of
+marriage. In the depths of her humiliation she had almost convinced
+herself that she had never respected George, that she had never
+believed in him, forgetting the pride and adoration of her young
+motherhood. Whatever George did she could not change his relation
+to her&mdash;she could not shatter the one indissoluble bond that
+holds mankind together.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, you don't&mdash;you can't&mdash;" she repeated
+wildly.</p>
+<p>Then, as Gabriella turned quickly and left the room, a
+scene&mdash;she became conscious presently that she was beginning
+to cherish an emotion not unlike resentment on George's account.
+That the discovery of George's faithlessness should be received so
+coolly by George's wife appeared almost an affront to him. Mrs.
+Fowler liked Gabriella, she was fond of her&mdash;and nobody could
+look in the girl's face and not see that she was a fine
+woman&mdash;but there were times, and this was one of them, when
+she thought her a little hard. Had Gabriella wept, had she raged,
+had she threatened Florrie's life or happiness, it might have been
+painful, but at least it would have been human; and above all
+things Mrs. Fowler felt that she liked women to be human.</p>
+<p>"Nothing that anybody says or does can excuse George," said
+Patty sternly. "He has behaved abominably, and if I were Gabriella,
+I'd simply wash my hands of him. I don't care if he is my brother,
+that doesn't make me blind, does it? If he were my husband," she
+concluded passionately, "I'd feel just the same way about it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you mustn't! Oh, Patty, hush, it's wicked! It's sinful!"
+moaned Mrs. Fowler, shutting her eyes, as if the sight of Patty's
+indignant loveliness gave her a headache. "Don't try to harden
+Gabriella's heart against him. Don't try to make her think she's
+really stopped loving him."</p>
+<p>Gabriella's answer to this outburst was a look which, as poor
+Mrs. Fowler said afterwards, "cut her to the heart." Backing weakly
+to a chair, the valiant little lady sat down suddenly, because she
+felt that her legs were giving way beneath the weight of her body.
+And, though she was unaware of its significance, her action was
+deeply symbolical of the failure of the old order to withstand the
+devastating advance of the new spirit. She felt vaguely that she
+wished women and things were both what they used to be; but this,
+since she had little imagination, was as far as she penetrated into
+the psychology of Gabriella's behaviour.</p>
+<p>"But, you see, you're making the mistake of thinking that I love
+George," said Gabriella, with a reasonableness which made Mrs.
+Fowler feel that she wanted to scream, "and I don't love
+him&mdash;I don't love him at all. I haven't loved him for a long
+time&mdash;not since the night I saw him drunk. How could I love a
+man I've seen drunk&mdash;disgustingly drunk&mdash;a man I couldn't
+respect? I'm not made that way, and I can't help it. Some women may
+be like that, but I'm not. I couldn't, even if I wanted to, love a
+man who has treated me as George has done. I don't see how any
+woman could&mdash;any woman with a particle of pride and
+self-respect. Of course I had to live with him after I married
+him," she finished abruptly. "Marriage isn't made for love. I used
+to think it was&mdash;but it isn't&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But, Gabriella, you don't mean&mdash;you can't&mdash;" Mrs.
+Fowler was really pitiable, for, after all, George was her son, and
+the ties of blood would not break so easily as the ties of
+marriage. In the depths of her humiliation she had almost convinced
+herself that she had never respected George, that she had never
+believed in him, forgetting the pride and adoration of her young
+motherhood. Whatever George did she could not change his relation
+to her&mdash;she could not shatter the one indissoluble bond that
+holds mankind together.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, you don't&mdash;you can't&mdash;" she repeated
+wildly.</p>
+<p>Then, as Gabriella turned quickly and left the room, Mrs. Fowler
+rose stoically to her feet, adjusted her belt with a tremulous
+movement of her hands, and smiled bravely as she went to the mirror
+to put on her hat. Heartbroken and distraught of mind though she
+was, she submitted instinctively to the lifelong tyranny of
+appearances.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IIa" id="CHAPTER_IIa"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h3>A SECOND START IN LIFE</h3>
+<p>With deliberation Gabriella walked the length of the hall to her
+room, turned and locked the door after she had entered, and took
+off her hat and wraps and put them away in the closet. Her head was
+still carried high and her eyes were defiant and dark in the
+marble-like pallor of her face. Except for her burning eyes and the
+scarlet line of her tightly closed lips, she looked as still and as
+cold as a statue.</p>
+<p>"I'd rather die than have them know that it made any
+difference," she thought. "I'd rather die than have them know that
+I cared." Then sinking into a chair by the dressing-table, she laid
+her head on her arm and wept tears, not of wounded love, but of
+deep and passionate anger.</p>
+<p>She had spoiled her life! Because of her mad and headstrong
+folly, she had spoiled her life, and she was barely twenty-seven!
+Had she been the veriest fool she couldn't have done
+worse&mdash;she who had thought herself so sensible, so strong, so
+efficient! Jane couldn't have done worse, and yet she had always
+despised Jane for her weakness. But she had been as weak as Jane,
+she had been as unreasonable, she had been as incredibly
+sentimental and silly. And even in her folly she had irretrievably
+failed. She had made her choice, and yet she had not been able to
+keep the thing she had chosen. George had tired of her&mdash;here
+was the sharpest sting&mdash;a man had tired of her after a few
+months&mdash;had tired of her while she was still deeply in love
+with him. Her humiliation, while she sat there strangling her sobs,
+was so intense that it ran in little flames over her body. At the
+moment she was not angry with George, she was not even angry with
+Florrie. It was as if all the slumbering violence of her nature was
+aroused to a burning and relentless hatred of her own weakness.
+This emotion, which was so profound, so torrential, in its force
+that it seemed to shake the depths of her being, left room for no
+other feeling&mdash;for no other thought in her consciousness. She
+had but one life to live, and by her own fault, she had ruined it
+in its beginning.</p>
+<p>Then her mood changed, and she sat up, straight and stern, while
+she wiped her reddened eyelids with an impetuous and resolute
+gesture. No, she was not crushed; she would not allow herself even
+to be hurt. Her lot might be as sordid as Jane's, but she would
+make it different by the strength and the effectiveness of her
+resistance. She would never submit as Jane submitted; she would
+never become, through sheer inertia, a part of the ugliness that
+enveloped her. Thanks to the vein of iron in her soul she would
+never&mdash;no, not if she died fighting&mdash;become one of the
+victims of life.</p>
+<p>Going into the dressing-room, she bathed her eyes with cold
+water; and she was still drying them before the mirror when the
+children came in, flushed and blooming, with their hands in Miss
+Polly Hatch's. What splendid children they were, she thought,
+looking wistfully at their eager faces. Any father, any mother in
+the world, might be proud of them. Fanny, the elder, was like an
+angel in her white fur coat and pert little cap, with her short
+golden curls like bunches of yellow silk on her shoulders, and her
+blue eyes, as grave as a philosopher's, beaming softly under her
+thick jet-black lashes. She was not particularly bright; she was,
+for her age, an unconscionable snob; but no one could deny that she
+was as beautiful as an angel to look at.</p>
+<p>"Miss Polly wanted to kiss me, mamma, but I wouldn't," she said
+coolly as she examined a little bundle of sewing the seamstress had
+put down on the table. "I needn't kiss people if I don't want to,
+need I? Archibald doesn't like to kiss either. He's naughty about
+it sometimes when ladies ask him to. He doesn't like scratchin'.
+Isn't it funny to call kissing, 'scratchin'? He told me Miss Polly
+scratched him and he didn't like it. He is afraid of her because
+she is so ugly. Why are you ugly, Miss Polly? Couldn't you help it?
+Did God make you ugly just for fun? Why doesn't he make everybody
+pretty? I would if I were God. What is God's last name? Archibald
+says it is Walker. Is it Walker, mamma, and how does Archibald
+know? Who told him&mdash;"</p>
+<p>When at last she was suppressed and sent out of the room with
+the nurse, she went at a dancing step, turning to make faces at
+Archibald, who stood stolidly at his mother's knee, biting deep
+bites into a red apple Miss Polly had given him. He was not a
+handsome child, even Gabriella admitted that his spectacles spoiled
+his appearance; but he was remarkably intelligent for his four
+years, and he was so strong and sturdy that he had never had a
+day's illness in his life. His face was unusually thoughtful and
+expressive, and his eyes, in spite of the disfiguring glasses, were
+large, brown, and beautiful, with something of the luminous
+softness of Cousin Jimmy's. Though she could not remember her
+father, it pleased Gabriella to think that Archibald was like him,
+and Miss Polly declared, with conviction, that he was "already his
+living image." Of the two children, for some obscure reason which
+she could not define and which was probably rooted in instinct,
+Gabriella had the greater tenderness for her son; and though she
+denied this preference to herself, Mrs. Fowler and Miss Polly had
+both commented upon it. Even his temper, which was uncontrollable
+at times, endeared him to her, and the streak of savage in his
+nature seemed to awaken some dim ancestral memories in her
+brain.</p>
+<p>"Thank Miss Polly for the apple and run away to Fanny," said his
+mother, after she had held him pressed closely to her breast for a
+minute. While she did so, she felt, with profound sadness, that her
+whole universe had dwindled down to her children. Of all her
+happiness only her children remained to her.</p>
+<p>"Don't want to run," replied Archibald with beaming good humour.
+In his passion for brevity he eliminated pronouns whenever it was
+possible.</p>
+<p>"But Fanny is waiting for you."</p>
+<p>"Would rather stay with mother than go with Fanny and Mutton."
+That was another of his eccentricities. Just as he had insisted
+that God's "last name was Walker," so he had begun of his own
+accord, and for no visible reason, to call nurse "Mutton." He was
+always fitting names of his own invention to persons; and in his
+selection he was guided by a principle so obscure that Gabriella
+had never been able to discover its origin. Thus his grandmother
+from the first had been "Budd," and he had immediately started to
+call Miss Polly "Pang."</p>
+<p>"Don't you want to go back to the Park, Archibald? You must
+finish your walk."</p>
+<p>"Will the poor boy be there?" He never forgot anything. It was
+quite probable that he would inquire for "the poor boy" a year
+hence.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps. You might take him an apple and a penny."</p>
+<p>He stood gravely considering the plan, with one hand in his
+mother's and one on Miss Polly's knee.</p>
+<p>"I'll take Pang to nurse him," he said when he had decided
+against the suggestion of the apple and the penny. "He hasn't any
+nurse, and Fanny wouldn't like him to have hers. I'll take
+Pang."</p>
+<p>"But Pang isn't a nurse, dear. There, now, run to Fanny. Miss
+Polly lives so far away she can't stay very long."</p>
+<p>He went obediently, for he was usually amenable to his mother's
+commands, stopping only once at the door to ask if "Pang lived as
+far away as God and could she manage to get a message to Him about
+the poor boy needing shoes?"</p>
+<p>"I declare I can't make out that child to save my soul,"
+remarked Miss Polly as he shut the door carefully and ran down the
+hall to the nursery. "The more I study him the curiouser he seems
+to me. If he wan't so quick about some things you might think his
+wits were sort of addled&mdash;but they ain't, are they? Now,
+whatever do you reckon put the notion in his head to call me
+'Pang?"</p>
+<p>All the smiling, circular wrinkles in her face were working with
+amusement while her little black eyes twinkled like jet beads above
+the ruddy creases in her cheeks.</p>
+<p>"I can't imagine, for he must have made up the word for himself.
+But don't you think he is like father, Miss Polly? I love to hear
+you say so."</p>
+<p>"That child? Why, he's the very spit of yo' pa, Gabriella, and
+there ain't any two ideas about it. I thought so the very first
+time I ever saw him, and now that I come to think of it, it is
+exactly like yo' pa to be makin' up all kinds of foolish names out
+of nothin'. Yo' pa used to call me Poll Parrot, that he did."</p>
+<p>"Mother thinks Archibald is going to be very much like him. She
+saw him in the mountains last summer."</p>
+<p>"So she told me when I was down home. You ain't looking a bit
+well, Gabriella. You've got exactly the look Miss Letty Marshall
+had before she came down with heart complaint. The doctors were
+fussin' over her for weeks before they could find out what the
+trouble was, but I said all along it wan't nothin' in the world but
+a bruised heart, and sure enough that was just what they found out
+was the matter. You ain't had a feelin' of heart burn after you
+eat, have you? Sometimes it don't take you that way, though; you
+just begin to have palpitations when you go up and down stairs and
+then you start to wakin' up in the night with shortness of breath.
+That's the way my Aunt Lydy had it. You know I nursed her till she
+died, and I've seen her get right black in the face when she
+stooped to pick up a pin. It's her daughter Lydy that's waiting on
+old Mrs. Peyton now. You know Mrs. Peyton was feelin' kind of run
+down so her son Arthur&mdash;I call him Arthur to his face because
+I used to sew there when he wan't more'n knee high&mdash;well,
+Arthur said she'd have to have somebody to wait on her every minute
+and she thought she'd rather have Lydy than anybody else because
+Lydy was always so handy in a sickroom. That was six months ago,
+and Lydy's been stayin' on there ever since. She says there ain't
+anybody on earth like Mr. Arthur, and she never could make out why
+you didn't marry him. He ain't ever had an eye for anybody but you,
+and he's got yo' picture&mdash;the one in the white dress&mdash;on
+his bureau and he keeps a rose in a vase before it all the time.
+That ain't much like a man, but then there always was a heap of a
+girl in Arthur in little ways, wan't there?"</p>
+<p>"I wonder why I didn't marry him?" said Gabriella softly; and
+not until Miss Polly answered her, was she aware that she had
+spoken aloud. In her spiritual reaction from the grosser reality of
+passion, the delicacy and remoteness of Arthur's love borrowed the
+pious and mystic qualities of religious worship. She had seen the
+sordid and ugly sides of sex; and she felt now a profound disgust
+for the emotion which drew men and women together&mdash;for the
+light in the eyes, the touch of the lips, the clinging of the
+hands. Once she had idealized these things into love itself; now
+the very memory of them filled her with repulsion. She still wanted
+love, but a love so pure, so disembodied, so ethereal that it was
+liberated from the dominion of flesh. In the beginning, as a girl,
+she had accepted love as the supreme good, as the essential
+reality; now, utterly disillusioned, she asked herself: "What is
+there left in life? What is the thing that really counts, after
+all? What is the possession that makes all the striving worth while
+in the end? At twenty-seven love is over for me, and if love is
+over, what remains to fill the rest of my life? There must be
+something else&mdash;there must be a reality somewhere which is
+truer, which is profounder, than love." This, she knew, was the
+question which neither tradition nor custom could answer. Religion,
+perhaps, might have helped her; but it was characteristic of her
+generation that she should give religion hardly a thought as a
+possible solution of the problem of life. She wanted substance,
+facts, experience; she wanted to examine, to analyze, to discover;
+and it was just here that religion hopelessly failed her as a
+guide. Faith she had had in her cradle&mdash;faith in life, faith
+in love, faith in herself; and it was faith that had brought her to
+this bleak disenchantment of spirit. No, she wanted knowledge now,
+not faith; she wanted truth, not illusion.</p>
+<p>"Well, you never can tell about a thing like that," Miss Polly
+was saying in her sprightly way, quite as if she were discussing
+the pattern of a dress or the stitching of a seam. "It was feelin',
+I reckon, and feelin' is one of the things nobody can count on. But
+you did mighty well, even if you didn't marry Arthur. I saw Mr.
+George downtown yesterday, when I went around to Stern's to match
+the edging for a baby dress, and I thought to myself I'd seldom
+seen a handsomer piece of flesh than he was. He was walkin' along
+up Fifth Avenue with Florrie Spencer&mdash;I'll always call her
+Florrie Spencer I don't care how many times she marries&mdash;and
+everybody in the street turned right plumb round to look at 'em.
+She's prettier than she ever was, ain't she? And such a fit as her
+dress was! One of them trailin' black things that fit as tight as
+wax over the hips and flares out all round the feet. She was
+holdin' up her skirts to show her feet, I reckon, and her collar
+was so high behind her ears, she could hardly turn her head to look
+at Mr. George. But I never saw anybody with more style&mdash;no,
+not if it was that Mrs. Pletheridge who is everlastingly in the
+Sunday papers. I declare Florrie's waist didn't look much bigger
+round than the leg of that table&mdash;honestly it didn't&mdash;and
+her hat was perched on a bandeau so high that you could see the new
+sort of way she'd gone and had her hair crimped&mdash;they call it
+Marcellin' up here, don't they?"</p>
+<p>"Was she with George?" asked Gabriella indifferently.</p>
+<p>"They were goin' to some restaurant or another for tea, I
+reckon, and they certainly were a fine-lookin' pair. I wish you
+could have seen 'em. Not that you wouldn't have been a match for
+'em," she added consolingly. "You and Mr. George look mighty well
+when you're together. You're just on a level, and if you could
+manage to tighten yo' corset a little mite at the waist, and hold
+yo'self with that bend out at the back the way Florrie does, you'd
+have pretty near as fine a figure as she has. Ain't it funny," she
+added irrelevantly, "but I was just studyin' last night about the
+way yo' ma used to say that all yo' folks married badly. I reckon
+she got that idea along of yo' pa's kin. You don't recollect much
+about 'em, but one of yo' pa's brothers married a woman who went
+clean deranged inside of a year and tried to kill him. Then there
+was yo' Cousin Nelly Harrison&mdash;she married badly, or only
+middlin' well anyway. There certainly was a lot of 'em when you
+come to think&mdash;not countin' Jane and Mr. Charley, and I can't
+help what happens," she concluded sentimentally, "I ain't ever
+goin' back on Mr. Charley&mdash;not after the way he sent me two
+loads of coal the winter I was laid up with rheumatism and couldn't
+work. Well, it's about time for me to be goin', Gabriella. If you
+want me for anything, you just drop me a line to say so. William's
+children are gettin' so big, I can come out for the day 'most any
+time now, and if William's courtin' goes on all right, I reckon he
+won't be wantin' me much longer. He's been waitin' on a young woman
+right steady for more'n six months, and it wouldn't surprise me a
+bit if something was to come of it befo' summer."</p>
+<p>"Then you'd go South again, wouldn't you?" There was a wistful
+sound in Gabriella's voice as she put the question. Miss Polly was
+a tiresome person, but at least she was faithful, and long habit
+had established a bond of tolerance, if not of affection, between
+them. In the last few months Gabriella had grown to look upon her
+as the one living association with her childhood, and she was so
+lonely that she dreaded to sever the single tie with the past that
+still remained to her. "I believe she'd work her fingers to the
+bone for me, and, of course, she can't help being so garrulous,"
+she thought.</p>
+<p>"I reckon I will, if it comes to that, but I'd hate like
+anything to leave you and the children," answered Miss Polly. "I
+feel somehow as if I belonged up here with you all, and I've grown
+real fond of Archibald."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I'd hate to give you up," said Gabriella, as she let her
+go and turned back again into the room. Her brain had worked
+quickly while Miss Polly was talking, and the undercurrent of
+gossip had helped, rather than retarded, the clearness and rapidity
+of her thoughts. All her weakness, all her anger had passed. She
+saw the situation without exaggeration and without illusion, for
+she had made her decision in the few minutes between the entrance
+and the departure of the seamstress. The embittering memories of
+her life with George were submerged in the invigorating waves of
+energy that flooded her being. Her inert body responded to the
+miraculous restoration of her spirit; and, while she walked swiftly
+from the door to the window, she had a sensation of lightness and
+ease as if she had just awakened from a refreshing sleep. For seven
+years all the strength of her character had been drained by the
+supreme function of motherhood; but now her children had ceased to
+need the whole of her life, and she was free to belong at least in
+part to herself&mdash;free to enter unrestricted into the broader
+human activities. And, above all, she was free from George. She had
+escaped from the humiliating bondage of her marriage; for, since he
+had broken the tie between them, she realized with a strange, an
+almost unnatural, exhilaration, how little except duty&mdash;how
+little except the bare legal husk of the marriage
+contract&mdash;still held her to him. She had loved him once, but
+she loved him no longer, and she resolved passionately that she
+would not allow her life to be spoiled because of a single mistake.
+Seven years were lost out of her youth, it was true, but those
+years had given her her children, and so they were not wasted in
+spite of the mistakes she had made, of the shame she had suffered.
+Judged simply as a machine she was of greater value at twenty-seven
+than she had been at twenty, and a part of this value lay in her
+deeper knowledge of life. She had had her adventure, and she was
+cured forever of adventurous desires. Her imagination, as well as
+her body, was firmer, harder, more disciplined than it had been in
+her girlhood; and if her vision of the universe was less
+sympathetic, it was also less sentimental. The bluest eyes in the
+world, she told herself sternly, could not trouble her fancy
+to-day, nor could the wildest romance quicken her pulses.</p>
+<p>A wagon, filled with blue and white hyacinths, passed by in the
+street, and while she watched it, there flashed into her mind, with
+the swiftness of light, a memory of the evening when she had broken
+her engagement to Arthur. All her life he had loved her, and, but
+for an accident, she might have married him. If she had not seen
+George at Florrie's party&mdash;if she had not seen him under a
+yellow lantern, with the glow in his eyes, and a dreamy waltz
+floating from the arbour of roses at the end of the garden&mdash;if
+this had not happened, she would have married Arthur instead of
+George, and her whole life would have been different. Because of a
+single instant, because of a chance meeting, she had wrecked the
+happiness of three lives. Now, when the bloom had dropped from her
+love, it was impossible for her to gather the withered leaves and
+bare stems in her hands and find any fragrance about them; it was
+impossible for her to understand how or why she had followed so
+fleeting an impulse. People had told her that love lasted forever,
+yet she knew that her emotion for George was so utterly dead that
+there was no warmth left in the ashes. It had all been so vivid
+once, and now it was as dull and colourless as the dust drifting
+after the blue and white hyacinths.</p>
+<p>From the trail of dust and the fragrance of the hyacinths,
+Arthur's face floated up to her, grave, gentle, and thin-featured,
+with its look of detached culture, of nameless distinction. She
+recalled the colour of his eyes, as clear and cool as running
+water, his sensitive lips under the thin, brown moustache, and his
+slender, aristocratic hands, with their touch as soft and as tender
+as a woman's. "He had intellect&mdash;he had culture&mdash;I
+suppose these are the things that really matter," she thought, for
+George, she knew, possessed neither of these qualities. And, as she
+remembered Arthur, she was stirred, not by tenderness, but by a
+passionate gratitude. He had loved her, and by loving her, he had
+saved her pride from defeat. In the hour of her deepest
+humiliation, she found comfort in the knowledge of his bleeding
+heart, of his tragic and beautiful loyalty; for though she was
+strong enough to live without love, she was not strong enough to
+live with the thought that no man had ever loved her.</p>
+<p>For a few minutes she allowed her fancy to play with the
+comforting memory of Arthur's devotion&mdash;with the image of her
+photograph on his bureau and the single rose in the vase he kept
+always before it. "But for an accident I might have loved him," she
+said, and the thought of this love which might have been sent a
+wave of sweetness to her heart. "I might have loved him and been
+happy." The vision was so dangerously beautiful that she put it
+resolutely away from her, and told herself, with an effort to be
+philosophical, that there was no use whatever in regretting the
+past, and since love was over for her, she must set her mind to
+solve the problem of work. "I've got my life to live," she said
+with stoical calmness, "and however bad it is I've nobody to blame
+for it but myself."</p>
+<p>Then, because she had only one talent, however small, she
+changed her dress, and went out to ask for a position as designer,
+saleswoman, or milliner in the house of Dinard.</p>
+<p>The Irish woman, voluble, painted, powdered, bewigged, and with
+the remains of her handsome figure laced into a black satin gown,
+nodded her false golden locks and smiled an ambiguous smile when
+she heard the explanation of young Mrs. Fowler's afternoon
+call.</p>
+<p>"But, no, it ees impossible," she protested, forgetting her
+foreign shrug and preserving with difficulty the trace of an
+accent. Then, becoming suddenly natural as she realized that no
+immediate profit was to be derived from affectation, she added
+decisively, "you have no training, and I have quite as many
+salesladies as I need at this season. Not that you are not chic,"
+she hastened to conclude, "not that you would not in appearance be
+an adornment to any establishment."</p>
+<p>"I am willing to do anything," said Gabriella, pressing her
+point with characteristic tenacity. "I want to learn, you know, I
+want to learn everything I possibly can. You yourself told me that
+I had a natural gift for designing, and I am anxious to turn it to
+some account. I believe I can make a very good milliner, and I want
+to try."</p>
+<p>"But what would Madame Fowler, your mother-in-law, say to this?
+Surely no one would want to earn her living unless she was obliged
+to."</p>
+<p>For Madame had known life, as she often remarked, and the
+knowledge so patiently acquired had gone far to confirm her natural
+suspicion of human nature. She had got on, as she observed in
+confidential moments, by believing in nobody; and this skepticism,
+which was fundamental and rooted in principle, had inspired her
+behaviour not only to her patrons, but to her husband, her
+children, her domestic servants, her tradespeople, and the
+policeman at the corner. Thirty years ago she had suspected the
+entire masculine world of amorous designs upon her person; to-day,
+secretly numbering her years at sixty-two, and publicly
+acknowledging forty-five of them, she suspected the same world of
+equally active, if less romantic, intentions regarding her purse.
+And if she distrusted men, she both distrusted and despised women.
+She distrusted and despised them because they were poor workers,
+because they were idlers by nature, because they allowed themselves
+to be cheated, slighted, underpaid, underfed, and oppressed, and,
+most of all, she despised them because they were the victims of
+their own emotions. Love was all very well, she was accustomed to
+observe, as a pleasurable pursuit, but, as with any other pursuit,
+when it began to impair the appetite and to affect the quality and
+the quantity of one's work, then a serious person would at once
+contrive to get rid of the passion. And Madame prided herself with
+reason upon being a strictly serious person. She had been through
+the experience of love innumerable times; she had lost four
+husbands, and, as she pointed out with complacency, she was still
+living.</p>
+<p>In the dubious splendour of her showrooms, which were curtained
+and carpeted in velvet, and decorated with artificial rose-bushes
+flowering magnificently from white and gold jardini&egrave;res, six
+arrogant young women, in marvellously fitting gowns of black satin,
+strolled back and forth all day long, or stood gracefully, with the
+exaggerated curve of the period, awaiting possible customers.
+Though they were as human within as Madame Dinard&mdash;and beneath
+her make-up she was very human indeed&mdash;nothing so variable as
+an expression ever crossed the waxlike immobility of their faces;
+and while they trailed their black satin trains over the rich
+carpets, amid the lustrous piles of silks and velvets which covered
+the white and gold tables, they appeared to float through an
+atmosphere of eternal enchantment. Watching them, Gabriella
+wondered idly if they could ever unbend at the waist, if they could
+ever let down those elaborate and intricate piles of hair. Then she
+overheard the tallest and most arrogant of them remark, "I'm just
+crazy about him, but he's dead broke," and she realized that they
+also belonged to the unsatisfied world of humanity.</p>
+<p>Madame, who had slipped away to answer the telephone, came
+rustling back, and sank, wheezing, into a white and gilt chair,
+which was too small to contain the whole of her ample person.
+Though she had spoken quite sharply at the telephone, her voice was
+mellifluous when she attuned it to Gabriella.</p>
+<p>"That gown is perfect on you," she remarked in honied accents.
+"It was one of my best models last season, and as I said before,
+Madame, you are so fortunate as to wear your clothes with a grace."
+She was urbane, but she was anxious to be rid of her, this young
+Mrs. Fowler could see at a glance. "Your head is well set on your
+shoulders, and that is rare&mdash;very rare! It would surprise you
+to know how few women have heads that are well set on their
+shoulders. Yes, I understand. You wish to learn, but not to make a
+living. That is very good, for the only comfortable way for a woman
+to make her living is to marry one&mdash;a man is the only
+perfectly satisfactory means of livelihood. I tell this to my
+daughter, who wishes to go on the stage. If you are looking for
+pleasure, that is different, but when you talk of a
+living&mdash;well, there is but one way to insure it, and that is
+to marry a man who is able to provide it&mdash;either as allowance
+or as alimony. The best that a woman can do gives her only bread
+and meat&mdash;an existence, not a living. Only a man can provide
+one with the essential things&mdash;with clothes and jewels and
+carriages and trips to Europe. These are the important things in
+life, and what woman was ever able to procure these except from a
+man?"</p>
+<p>Her face, so thickly covered with rouge and liquid powder that
+it was as expressionless as a mask, turned its hollow eyes on a
+funeral which was slowly passing in the street; and though her
+creed was hardly the kind to fortify one's spiritual part against
+the contemplation of death, she surveyed the solemn procession as
+tranquilly as any devoted adherent of either religion or philosophy
+could have done. Not a shadow passed over her fantastic mockery of
+youth as she glanced back at her visitor.</p>
+<p>"But you have worked&mdash;you have supported yourself,"
+insisted Gabriella with firmness.</p>
+<p>"Myself and six children, to say nothing of three husbands. Yes,
+I supported three of my four husbands, but what did I get out of
+it?" replied Madame, shrugging her ample shoulders. "What was there
+in it for me? Since we are talking freely, I may say that I have
+worked hard all my life, and I got nothing out of it that I
+couldn't have got with much less trouble by a suitable marriage. Of
+course this is not for my girls to hear. I don't tell them this,
+but it is true nevertheless. Men should do the work of the world,
+and they should support women; that is how God intended it, that is
+according to both nature and religion; any priest will say as much
+to you." And she, who had defied both God and Nature, wagged her
+false golden head toward the funeral procession.</p>
+<p>"Yet you have been successful. You have built up a good
+business. The work has repaid you."</p>
+<p>"A woman's work!" She snapped her gouty fingers with a playful
+gesture. "Does a woman's work ever repay her? Think of the
+pleasures I have missed in my life&mdash;the excursions, the
+theatres, the shows. All these I might have had if I hadn't shut
+myself up every day until dark. And now you wish to do this! You
+with your youth, with your style, with your husband!"</p>
+<p>She protested, she pleaded, she reasoned, but in the end
+Gabriella won her point by the stubborn force of her will. Madame
+would take her for a few weeks, a few months, a few years, as long
+as she cared to stay and gave satisfaction. Madame would have her
+taught what she could learn, would discover by degrees the natural
+gifts and the amount of training already possessed by young Mrs.
+Fowler. Young Mrs. Fowler, on the other hand, must "stand around"
+when required in the showrooms (it was just here that Gabriella won
+her victory); she must assist at the ordering of gowns, at the
+selections, and while Madame's patrons were fitted, young Mrs.
+Fowler must be prepared to assume graceful attitudes in the
+background and to offer her suggestions with a persuasive air.
+Suggestions, even futile ones, offered in a charming voice from a
+distinguished figure in black satin had borne wonderful results in
+Madame's experience.</p>
+<p>"I began that way myself, Mrs. Fowler. You may not believe it,
+but I was once slenderer than you are&mdash;my waist measured only
+nineteen inches and my bust thirty-six&mdash;just the figure a man
+most admires. The result was, you see, that I have had four
+husbands, though it is true that I supported three of them, and it
+is always easy to marry if one provides the support. Men are like
+that. It is their nature. Yes, I began that way with little
+training, but much natural talent, and a head full of ideas. If one
+has ideas it is always possible to become a success, but they are
+rarer even than waists measuring nineteen inches. And I had charm,
+though you might not believe it now, for charm does not wear. But I
+made my way up from the bottom, first as errand girl, at the age of
+ten, and I made it, not by work, for I could never handle a needle,
+but by ideas. They were once plentiful, and now they are so
+scarce," she broke off with a sigh of resignation which seemed to
+accept every fact of experience except the fact of age. "It was a
+hard life, but it was life, after all. One is not put here to be
+contented, or one would dread death too much for the purpose of
+God." In spite of her uncompromising materialism, she was not
+without an ineradicable streak of superstition which she would
+probably have called piety.</p>
+<p>"I am ready to begin at once&mdash;to-morrow," said Gabriella,
+and she added without explanation, obeying, perhaps, an intuitive
+feeling that to explain a statement is to weaken it, "and I should
+like to be called by my maiden name while I am here&mdash;just Mrs.
+Carr, if you don't mind."</p>
+<p>To this request Madame agreed with effusion, if not with
+sincerity. For her own part she would have preferred to speak of
+her saleswoman as young Mrs. Fowler; but she reflected comfortably
+that many of her patrons would know young Mrs. Fowler by sight at
+least, and to the others she might conveniently drop a word or two
+in due season. To drop a word or two would provide entertainment
+throughout the length of a fitting; and, for the rest, the mystery
+of the situation had its charm for the romantic Irish strain in her
+blood. The prospect of securing both entertainment and mystery at
+the modest expenditure of fifteen dollars a week impressed her as
+very good business, for she combined in the superlative degree the
+opposite qualities of romance and economy. To be sure, except for
+the advertisement she afforded and the gossip she provided, young
+Mrs. Fowler might not prove to be worth even her modest salary; but
+there was, on the other hand, a remote possibility that she might
+turn out to be gifted, and Madame would then be able to use her
+inventiveness to some purpose before the gifted one discovered her
+value. In any case, Madame was at liberty to discharge her with a
+day's notice, and her salary would hardly be increased for three
+months even should she persist in her eccentricity and develop a
+positive talent for dressmaking. And if young Mrs. Fowler could do
+nothing else, Madame reflected as they parted, she could at least
+receive customers and display models with an imposing, even an
+aristocratic, demeanour.</p>
+<p>To receive Madame's customers and display Madame's models were
+the last occupations Gabriella would have chosen had she been able
+to penetrate Madame's frivolous wig to her busy brain and detect
+her prudent schemes for the future; but the girl was sick of her
+dependence on George's father, and, in the revolt of her pride, she
+would have accepted any honest work which would have enabled her to
+escape from the insecurity of her position. Of her competence to
+earn a living, of her ability to excel in any work that she
+undertook, of the sufficiency and soundness of her resources, she
+was as absolutely assured as she had been when she entered the
+millinery department of Brandywine &amp; Plummer. If Madame,
+starting penniless, had nevertheless contrived, through her native
+abilities, to support three husbands and six children, surely the
+capable and industrious Gabriella might assume smaller burdens with
+the certainty of moderate success. It was not, when one considered
+it, the life which one would have chosen, but who, since the world
+began, had ever lived exactly the life of his choice? Many women,
+she reflected stoically, were far worse off than she, since she
+started not only with a modicum of business experience (for surely
+the three months with Brandywine &amp; Plummer might weigh as that)
+but with a knowledge of the world and a social position which she
+had found to be fairly marketable. That Madame Dinard would have
+accepted an unknown and undistinguished applicant for work at a
+salary of fifteen dollars a week she did not for an instant
+imagine. This inadequate sum, she concluded with a touch of ironic
+humour, represented the exact value in open market of her marriage
+to George.</p>
+<p>In the front room, where a sparse mid-winter collection of hats
+ornamented the scattered stands, she stopped for a few minutes to
+inspect, with a critical eye, the dingy array. "I wonder what makes
+them buy so many they can't sell?" she said half aloud to the model
+at which she was gazing. "Nobody would wear these
+hats&mdash;certainly nobody who could afford to buy Parisian
+models. I could design far better hats than these, I myself, and if
+I were the head of the house I should never have accepted any of
+them, no matter who bought them. I suppose, after all, it's the
+fault of the buyer, but it's a waste&mdash;it's not economy."</p>
+<p>Lifting a green velvet toque trimmed with a skinny white ostrich
+feather from the peg before which she was standing, she surveyed
+the august French name emblazoned in gold on the lining.
+"Everything isn't good that comes from Paris," she thought, with a
+shrug which was worthy of Madame at her best. "Why, I wonder, can't
+Americans produce 'ideas' themselves? Why do we always have to
+depend on the things the French send over to us? Half the hats and
+gowns Madame has aren't really good, and yet she makes people pay
+tremendous prices for things she knows are bad and undistinguished.
+All that ought to be changed, and if I ever succeed, if I ever
+catch on, I am going to change it." An idea, a whole flock of
+ideas, came to her while she stood there with her rapt gaze on the
+green velvet toque, which nobody had bought, and which she knew
+would shortly be "marked down," august French name included, from
+forty to fifteen and from fifteen to five dollars. Her constructive
+imagination was at work recreating the business, and she saw it in
+fancy made over and made right from the bottom&mdash;she saw
+Madame's duplicity succeeded by something of Brandywine &amp;
+Plummer's inflexible honesty, and the flimsy base of the structure
+supplanted by a solid foundation of credit. For she had come often
+enough to Dinard's to discern the slipshod and unsystematic methods
+beneath the ornate and extravagant surface. Her naturally quick
+powers of observation had detected at a glance conditions of which
+the elder Mrs. Fowler was never aware. To sell gowns and hats at
+treble their actual value, to cajole her customers into buying what
+they did not want and what did not suit them, to give inferior
+goods, inferior workmanship, inferior style wherever they would be
+accepted, and to get always the most money for the least possible
+expenditure of ability, industry, and honesty&mdash;these were the
+fundamental principles, Gabriella had already discovered, beneath
+Madame's flourishing, but shallow-rooted, prosperity. Brandywine
+&amp; Plummer did not carry Parisian models; their shop was not
+fashionable in the way that the establishment of a New York
+dressmaker and milliner must be fashionable; but the standard of
+excellence in all things excepting style was far higher in the old
+Broad Street house in the middle 'nineties than it was at Madame
+Dinard's during the early years of the new century. Quality had
+been essential in every hat that went from Brandywine &amp;
+Plummer's millinery department; and Gabriella, deriving from a
+mother who worked only in fine linen, rejected instinctively the
+cheap, the tawdry, and the inferior. She had heard a customer
+complain one day of the quality of the velvet on a hat Madame had
+made to order; and pausing to look at the material as she went out,
+she had decided that the most prosperous house in New York could
+not survive many incidents of that deplorable sort. To be sure,
+such material would not have been supplied to Mrs. Pletheridge, or
+even to the elder Mrs. Fowler, who, though Southern, was always
+particular and very often severe; but here again, since this cheap
+hat had been sold at a high price, was a vital weakness in Madame's
+business philosophy.</p>
+<p>On the whole, there were many of Madame's methods which might be
+improved; and when Gabriella passed through the ivory and gold
+doorway into the street, she had convinced herself that she was
+pre&euml;minently designed by Nature to undertake the necessary
+work of improvement. The tawdriness she particularly
+disliked&mdash;the trashy gold and ivory of the decorations, the
+artificial rose-bushes from which the dust was never removed, the
+sumptuous velvet carpets which were not taken up in the summer.</p>
+<p>While she was crossing the street a man joined her; and glancing
+up as soon as she was clear of the traffic, she saw that it was
+Judge Crowborough. In the last seven years her dislike for him had
+gradually disappeared, and though she had never found him
+attractive, she had grown to accept the general estimate of his
+character and ability. A man so gifted ought not to be judged as
+severely as poorer or less actively intelligent mortals; and as
+long as other men did not judge him, she felt no inclination to
+usurp so unfeminine a prerogative. He had always been kind to her,
+and she understood now from his manner that he meant to be still
+kinder. It occurred to her at once that he knew of George's
+infatuation for Florrie, and that he was chivalrously extending to
+George's wife a sympathy which he would probably have withheld in
+such circumstances from his own. Had it been possible she would
+have liked to explain to him that in her case his sympathy was not
+needed; but she realized, with resentment, that one of her most
+galling burdens would be the wasted pity which her unfortunate
+situation would inspire in the friends of the family. Social
+conventions made it impossible for her to tell the world, including
+Judge Crowborough, that George's infidelity was a matter of slight
+importance to her, since it struck only at her pride, not at her
+heart. Her pride, it is true, had suffered sharply for an hour; but
+so superficial was the wound that the distraction of seeking work
+had been almost sufficient to heal it.</p>
+<p>"A most extraordinary day for January," remarked the judge as
+they reached a corner. "You hardly need your furs, the air is so
+mild."</p>
+<p>Overhead small, birdlike clouds drifted in flocks across a sky
+of changeable brightness, and the wind, blowing past the tray of a
+flower vendor at the corner, was faintly scented with violets. It
+was one of those rare days when happiness seems as natural as the
+wind or the sunlight, when the wildest dreams appear not too wild
+to come true in reality, when one hopes by instinct and believes,
+not with the reason, but with the blood. To Gabriella, forgetting
+her humiliation, it was a day when life for the sake of the mere
+act of living&mdash;when life, in spite of disappointment and loss
+and treachery and shame, was enough to set the heart bounding with
+happiness. For she was one of those who loved life, not for what it
+brought to her of pleasure, but for what it was in itself.</p>
+<p>"Yes, it is a lovely afternoon," she answered, and added
+impulsively: "It is good to be alive, isn't it?" She had forgotten
+George, but even if she had remembered him, it would have made
+little difference. For six years, not for a few hours, George had
+been lost to her; and in six years one has time to forget almost
+anything.</p>
+<p>The judge's answer to this was a look which penetrated like a
+flash of light into her brain. By this light she read all that he
+thought of her, and she saw that he was divided between admiration
+of her spirit and an uneasy suspicion of its perfect propriety.
+Tier offence, she knew, was that, being by all the logic of facts
+an unhappy wife, she should persist so stubbornly in denying the
+visible evidence of her unhappiness. Had her denial been merely a
+pretence, it would, according to his code, have appeared both
+natural and womanly; but the conviction that she was sincere, that
+she was not lying, that she was not even tragically "keeping up an
+appearance," increased the amazement and suspicion with which he
+had begun to regard her. He walked on thoughtfully at her side,
+fingering the end of his long yellowish-gray moustache, and bending
+his sleepy gaze on the pavement. When he was thinking, he always
+looked as if he were falling asleep, and he seldom made a remark,
+even to a woman, without thinking it over. Into his small
+steel-gray eyes, surrounded by purplish and wrinkled puffs of skin,
+there crept the cautious and secretive look he wore at directors'
+meetings, while a furtive smile flickered for an instant across his
+loose mouth under the drooping ends of his moustache. His ungainly
+body, with its curious suggestion of over-ripeness, of waning
+power, straightened suddenly as if in reaction from certain
+destructive processes within his soul. Though he was only just
+passing his prime, he had lived so rapidly that he bore already the
+marks of age in his face and figure.</p>
+<p>"Yes, it's good to be alive," he assented, for there was nothing
+in either his philosophy or his experience to contradict this
+simple statement. "I've always maintained, by the way, that
+happiness is the chief of the virtues."</p>
+<p>For an instant Gabriella looked at the sky; then turning her
+candid eyes to his, she answered: "Happiness and courage. I put
+courage first&mdash;before everything."</p>
+<p>Her gaze dropped, but not until she had seen his look change and
+the slightly cynical smile&mdash;the smile of one who has examined
+everything and believes in nothing&mdash;fade from his lips. She
+had touched some chord deep down within him of which he had long
+ago forgotten even the existence&mdash;some echoed harmony of what
+had been perhaps the living faith of his youth.</p>
+<p>"You're a gallant soul," he said briefly, and she wondered what
+it was that he knew, what it was that he was keeping back.</p>
+<p>At the corner where they parted, he stood for a few moments,
+holding her hand in his big, soft grasp while he looked down on
+her. The suspicion and the cynicism had gone from his face, and she
+understood all at once why people still trusted him, still liked
+him, notwithstanding his reputation, notwithstanding even his
+repulsiveness. He was all that&mdash;he was immoral, he was
+repulsive&mdash;but he was something else also&mdash;he was
+human.</p>
+<p>When she entered the house her first feeling was that the old
+atmosphere had returned, the old suspense, the old waiting, the old
+horror of impending calamity. A nervous dread made her hesitate to
+mount the steps, to go to her room, to inquire in a natural voice
+for the children. It was imaginary, of course, she assured herself,
+but it was very vivid as long as it lasted. Then she noticed that
+the usual order of the hall was disturbed, and when she rang,
+Burrows came, with a hurried, apologetic manner, after keeping her
+waiting. Mrs. Fowler's fur scarf hung on the massive oak post of
+the staircase; the cards in the little tray on the hail table were
+scattered about; and the petals of a yellow chrysanthemum were
+strewn over the carpet.</p>
+<p>Burrows, instead of explaining the confusion, appeared
+embarrassed when she questioned him, and spurred by a sharp
+foreboding, she ran up the stairs to her mother-in-law's
+sitting-room. At her entrance a trembling voice wailed in a tone of
+remonstrance:</p>
+<p>"Oh, Gabriella, have you been out?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I've been out. Mamma, what is the matter?"</p>
+<p>"I looked for you everywhere. Archibald has been here, but he
+has just gone out again. I have never seen him so deeply
+moved&mdash;so&mdash;so indignant&mdash;" Mrs. Fowler broke off,
+bit her lip nervously, and paused while she tried to swallow her
+sobs. Her hat lay on a chair at her side, and in her hands she held
+a pair of half-soiled white gloves, which she smoothed out on her
+knee, as if she were hardly aware of what she was doing. In her
+blue eyes, so like George's, there was an agonizing terror and
+suspense. Her usually florid face was pale to the lips; and this
+pallor appeared to accentuate the dark, faintly lined shadows
+beneath her eyes and the grayness of her rigidly waved hair.</p>
+<p>"Courage!" said Gabriella in a whisper to herself, and aloud she
+asked gently: "Dear mamma, what is it? Don't be afraid. I can bear
+it."</p>
+<p>"Archibald has ordered George out of the house. He&mdash;George,
+I mean&mdash;had given him his promise not to see Florrie again,
+and it seems that he&mdash;he broke it. There has been a dreadful
+scene. I never imagined that Archibald could be so angry. He was
+terrible&mdash;and he is ill anyway and in great trouble about his
+financial affairs. I have been worried to death about him for
+weeks. He says things are going so badly downtown that he can't
+stave off the crash any longer, and
+now&mdash;this&mdash;this&mdash;" She broke down utterly, burying
+her convulsed face in her hands, which even in the instant of
+horror and tragedy, Gabriella noticed, had been manicured since the
+morning. "George has gone&mdash;we think he has gone off with
+Florrie," she cried, "and he&mdash;he will never come back as long
+as Archibald lives."</p>
+<p>She was not thinking of Gabriella. True to the deepest instincts
+of her nature, she thought first of her son, then of her husband.
+It was not that she did not care for her daughter-in-law, did not
+sympathize; but the fact remained that Gabriella was only George's
+wife to her, while George was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone,
+soul of her soul. Though her choice was not deliberate, though it
+was unconscious and instinctive&mdash;nevertheless, she had chosen.
+At the crucial moment instinct had risen superior to reason, and
+she had chosen, not with her judgment, but with every quivering
+nerve and fibre of her being. Gabriella was right, but George was
+her son; and had it been possible to secure George's happiness by
+sacrificing the right to the wrong, she would have made that
+sacrifice without hesitation, without scruple, and without
+regret.</p>
+<p>"There's his father now," she whispered, lifting her disfigured
+face. "Oh, Gabriella, I believe it will kill me!"</p>
+<p>While Gabriella stood there waiting for George's father to
+enter, and listening to his slow, deliberate tread on the stairs,
+the heavy, laborious tread of a man who is uncertain of his
+strength, she remembered vividly, as if she were living it over
+again, the night she had waited by her fire to tell George that his
+first child was to be born. Many thoughts passed through her mind,
+and at last these thoughts resolved themselves into a multitude of
+crowding images&mdash;all distinct and vivid images of George's
+face. She saw his face as she had first seen and loved it, with its
+rich colouring, its blue-gray eyes, like wells of romance she had
+once thought, its look of poetry and emotion which had covered so
+much that was merely commonplace and gross. She saw him as he had
+looked at their marriage, as he had looked, bending over her after
+her first child was born, and then she saw him as he had parted
+from her that morning&mdash;flushed, sneering, a little coarsened,
+but still boyish, still charming. Well, it was all over now. It had
+been over so long that she had even ceased to regret it&mdash;for
+she was not by nature one of the women who could wear mourning for
+a lifetime.</p>
+<p>The door opened: Archibald Fowler came in very slowly; and the
+first sight of his face brought home to her with a shock the
+discovery that he was the one of them who had suffered most. He
+looked an old man; his gentle scholar's face had taken an ashen
+hue; and his eyes were the eyes of one who has only partially
+recovered from the blow that has prostrated him.</p>
+<p>"My dear child," he said; "my dear daughter," and laid his hand
+on her shoulder.</p>
+<p>She clung to him, feeling a passionate pity, not for herself,
+but for him. "You have too much to bear," she murmured caressingly.
+"You mustn't take it like this. You must try to get over it. For
+all our sakes you must try to get over it." The irony of it
+all&mdash;that she should be consoling her husband's father for her
+husband's desertion of her&mdash;did not appear to her until long
+afterwards. At the time she thought only that she&mdash;that
+somebody&mdash;must make the tragedy easier for him to bear.</p>
+<p>"Come and sit down, Archibald," said Mrs. Fowler pleadingly.
+"Let me give you a glass of sherry and a biscuit; you are too tired
+to talk."</p>
+<p>There was the old devotion in her manner, but there was also a
+new deference. For the first time in thirty years of marriage he
+had shown his strength to her, not his gentleness; for the first
+time he had opposed his will to hers in the cause of justice, and
+he had conquered her. In spite of her anguish, something of the
+romantic expectancy of her first love had returned to her heart and
+it showed in her softened voice, in her timid caresses, in her
+wistful eyes, which held a pathetic and startled brightness. He had
+triumphed in honour; and if her defeat had not involved George, she
+could almost have gloried in the completeness of her surrender.</p>
+<p>He sat down with the air of a man who is not entirely awake to
+his surroundings; and his wife, after ordering the sherry, hovered
+over him with the touching solicitude of one who is living for the
+moment in the shadow of memory. While he sipped the wine, he waited
+until Burrows' footsteps had passed down the staircase, and then
+said with his usual quietness:</p>
+<p>"There is something else, Evelyn, that I kept back. I couldn't
+tell you while you were so worried about George, but there is
+something else&mdash;"</p>
+<p>She caught the words from him eagerly, with a gesture almost of
+relief.</p>
+<p>"You mean it has come at last. I suspected it, and, oh,
+Archibald, I don't care&mdash;I don't care!"</p>
+<p>"There were several failures to-day in Wall Street, and&mdash;"
+He broke off as if he were too tired to go on, and added slowly
+after a moment: "I am too old to begin again. I'd like to go back
+home&mdash;to go back to the South for my old age. Yes, I'm
+old."</p>
+<p>But his wife was on her knees beside him, with her arms about
+his neck and her face hidden on his breast. "I don't care, I never
+cared," she said in a voice that was almost exultant. "We can be
+happy on so little&mdash;happier than we've ever been in our
+lives&mdash;just you and I to grow old together. We can go home to
+Virginia&mdash;to some small place and be happy. Happiness costs so
+little."</p>
+<p>Slipping away, Gabriella went into the hail, and passing her
+room, noiselessly pushed open the door of the nursery, where the
+children were sleeping. A night lamp was burning in one corner
+under a dark shade, and the nurse's knitting, a pile of white yarn,
+was lying on the table in the circle of green light, which was as
+soft as the glimmer of a glow-worm in a thicket. In their two
+little beds, separated by a strip of white rug, the children were
+sleeping quietly, with a wonderful freshness, like the dew of
+innocence, on their faces. Frances lay on her back, very straight
+and prim even in sleep, with the sheet folded neatly under her
+dimpled chin, her hands clasped on her breast, and her golden curls
+spread in perfect order over the lace-trimmed pillow. Her miniature
+features, framed in the dim gold of her hair, had the trite
+prettiness of an angel on a Christmas card; and beside her ethereal
+loveliness there was something gnome-like in the dark sturdiness of
+Archibald, who slept on his side, with his fists pressed tightly
+under the pillow, and the frown produced by near-sightedness still
+wrinkling his forehead. Though he was not beautiful, he showed
+already the promise of character in his face, and his personality,
+which was remarkably developed for a child of his age, possessed a
+singular charm. He was the kind of child people describe as "unlike
+other children." His temperament was made up of surprises, and this
+quality of unexpectedness inspired in his mother a devotion that
+was almost tragic in its intensity. Never had she loved the normal
+Frances Evelyn as she loved Archibald.</p>
+<p>As she looked down on them, sleeping so peacefully in the green
+light, a wave of sadness swept over her, and she thought of them
+suddenly as fatherless, impoverished, and unprotected, dependent on
+her untried labour for their lives and their happiness. Then,
+before the anxiety could take possession of her mind, she put it
+from her, and whispered, "Courage!" as she turned away and went out
+of the room.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IIIa" id="CHAPTER_IIIa"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<h3>WORK</h3>
+<p>They had planned the future so carefully that there was a
+pitiless irony in the next turn of the screw&mdash;for when they
+tried to awaken Archibald Fowler in the morning, he did not stir,
+and they realized presently, with the rebellious shock such
+tragedies always bring, that he had died in the night&mdash;that
+all that he had stood for, the more than thirty years of work and
+struggle, had collapsed in an hour. When the first grief, the first
+excitement, was over, and life began to flow quietly again in its
+familiar currents, it was discovered that the crash of his fortune
+had occurred on the day of his son's flight and disgrace, and that
+the two shocks, coming together, had killed him. While they sat in
+the darkened house, surrounded by the funereal smell of crape, the
+practical details of living seemed to matter so little that they
+scarcely gave them a thought. Not until weeks afterwards, when
+Patty and Billy had sailed for France, and Mrs. Fowler, shrouded in
+widow's weeds, had gone South to her old home, did Gabriella find
+strength to tear aside the veil of mourning and confront the sordid
+actuality. Then she found that the crash had buried everything
+under the ruins of Archibald Fowler's prosperity&mdash;that nothing
+remained except a bare pittance which would insure his widow only a
+scant living on the impoverished family acres. For the rest there
+was nothing, and she herself was as poor as she had been in Hill
+Street before her marriage.</p>
+<p>Walking back from the station after bidding her mother-in-law a
+tearful and tender good-bye, she tried despairingly to gather her
+scattered thoughts and summon all her failing resources; but in
+front of her plans there floated always the pathetic brightness of
+Mrs. Fowler's eyes gazing up at her from the heavy shadow of the
+crape veil she had lifted. So that was the end&mdash;a little love,
+a little hope, a little happiness, and then separation and death.
+Effort appeared not only futile, but fantastic, and yet effort, she
+knew, must be made if she were to ward off destitution. She must
+recover her cheerfulness, she must be strong, she must be
+confident. Alone, penniless, with two children to support, she
+could not afford to waste her time and her energy in useless
+regret. Whatever it cost her, she must keep alive her fighting
+courage and her belief in life. She had youth, health, strength,
+intelligence, resourcefulness on her side; and she told herself
+again that there were thousands of women living and fighting around
+her who were far worse off than she. "What others have done, I can
+do also, and do better," she murmured aloud as she walked rapidly
+back to Dinard's.</p>
+<p>In the long front room the crowded mid-winter sale was in
+progress, and the six arrogant young women, goaded into a fleeting
+semblance of activity, were displaying dilapidated "left over"
+millinery to a throng of unfashionable casual customers. Madame,
+herself, scorned these casual customers, but her scorn was as water
+unto wine compared with the burning disdain of the six arrogant
+young women. They sauntered to and fro with their satin trains
+trailing elegantly over the carpet, with their fashionable curves
+accentuated as much as it was possible for pride to accentuate
+them, with their condescending heads turning haughtily above the
+high points of their collars. As Gabriella entered she saw the
+tallest and the most scornful of them, whose name was Murphy,
+insolently posing in the green velvet toque before a jaded hunter
+of reduced millinery, who shook her plain, sensible head at the hat
+as if she wished it to understand that she heartily disapproved of
+it.</p>
+<p>Madame was not visible, but Gabriella found her a little later
+in the workroom, where she was volubly elucidating obscure points
+in business morality to the forewoman. Of all the women employed in
+the house, this particular forewoman was the only one who appeared
+to Gabriella to be without pretence or affectation. She was an
+honest, blunt, capable creature, with a face and figure which
+permanently debarred her from the showrooms, and a painstaking
+method of work. There was no haughtiness, no condescension, about
+her. She had the manner of one who, being without fortuitous aids
+to happiness, is willing to give good measure of ability and
+industry in return for the bare necessaries of existence. "She is
+the only genuine thing in the whole establishment," thought
+Gabriella while she watched her.</p>
+<p>If Miss Smith, the forewoman, had been in ignorance of the
+failure and death of Archibald Fowler, she would probably have read
+the announcement in Madame's face as she watched her welcome the
+wife of his son. There was nothing offensive, nothing unkind,
+nothing curt; but, in some subtle way, the difference was
+emphasized between the eccentric daughter-in-law of a millionaire
+and an inexperienced young woman who must work for her living. For
+the welcome revealed at once to the observant eyes of Miss Smith
+the significant detail that Madame's role had changed from the
+benefited to the benefactor. And, as if this were not enough for
+one morning's developments, it revealed also that Gabriella's
+fictitious value as a saleswoman was beginning to decline; for
+Madame was disposed to scorn the sort of sensational advertisement
+which the newspapers had devoted of late to the unfortunate
+Fowlers. At one moment there had been grave doubt in Madame's mind
+as to whether or not she should employ young Mrs. Fowler in her
+respectable house; then, after a brief hesitation, she had shrewdly
+decided that ideas were worth something even when lacking the
+support of social position and financial security. There were
+undoubtedly possibilities in Gabriella; and disgrace, Madame
+concluded cheerfully, could not take away either one's natural
+talent or one's aristocratic appearance. That the girl had
+distinction, even rare distinction, Madame admitted while she
+nodded approvingly at the severe black cloth gown with its collar
+and cuffs of fine white crape. The simple arrangement of her hair,
+which would have ruined many a pretty face, suited the ivory pallor
+of Gabriella's features. Mourning was becoming to her, Madame
+decided, and though she was not beautiful, she was unusually
+charming.</p>
+<p>"She has few good points except her figure, and yet the whole is
+decidedly picturesque," thought Madame as impersonally as if she
+were criticising a fashion plate. "Very young men would hardly care
+for her&mdash;for very young men demand fine complexions and
+straight noses&mdash;but with older men who like an air, who admire
+grace, she would be taking, and women, yes, women would undoubtedly
+find her imposing. But she is not the sort to have followers," she
+concluded complacently.</p>
+<p>"Shall I go to the workroom?" asked Gabriella in a businesslike
+voice when she had taken off her hat, "or do you wish me at the
+sale?"</p>
+<p>Her soul shrank from the showrooms, but she had determined
+courageously that she would not allow her soul to interfere with
+her material purpose, and her purpose was to learn all that she
+could and to make herself indispensable to Madame. Only by
+acquiring a thorough knowledge of the business and making herself
+indispensable could she hope to succeed. And success was not merely
+desirable to her; it was vital. It meant the difference between
+food and hunger for her children.</p>
+<p>"Miss Smith will find something for you to do this morning,"
+replied Madame, politely, but without enthusiasm. "If there is a
+rush later on in the millinery, I will send for you to help
+out."</p>
+<p>In the old days, when Dinard's was a small and exclusive house
+in one of the blocks just off Fifth Avenue, Madame would have
+scorned to combine the making of gowns and hats in a single
+establishment; but as she advanced in years and in worldly
+experience, she discovered that millinery drew the unwary passer-by
+even more successfully than dressmaking did. Then, too, hats were
+easy to handle; they sold for at least four or five times as much
+as they actually cost; and so, gradually, while she was still
+unaware of the disintegrating processes within, Madame's principles
+had crumbled before the temptation of increasing profits. A lapse
+of virtue, perhaps, but Madame, who had been born an O'Grady, was
+not the first to discover that one's virtuous principles are apt to
+modify with one's years. The time was when she had despised false
+hair, having a natural wealth of her own, and now, with a few thin
+gray strands hidden under her golden wig, she had become morally
+reconciled to necessity. "It is a hard world, and one lives as one
+must," was her favourite maxim.</p>
+<p>On the whole, however, having a philosophic bent of mind, she
+endeavoured to preserve, with rosy cheeks and golden hair, several
+other cheerful fictions of her youth. The chief of these, the
+artless delusion that, in spite of her obesity, her wig and her
+rouge, she still had power to charm the masculine eye, offered to
+her lively nature a more effective support than any virtuous
+principle could have supplied. A perennial, if ridiculous, coquetry
+sweetened her days and added sprightliness to the gay decline of
+her life. Being frankly material, she had confined her energies to
+the two unending pursuits of men and money, and having captured
+four husbands and acquired a comfortable bank account, she might
+have been content, had she been as discreet as she was provident,
+to rest on her substantial achievements. But the trouble with both
+men and money, when considered solely as rewards to enterprise, is
+that the quest of them is inexhaustible. One's income, however
+large, may reasonably become larger, and there is no limit to the
+number of husbands a prudent and fortunate woman may collect. And
+so age, which is, after all, a state of mind, not a term of years,
+was rendered harmless to Madame by her simple plan of refusing to
+acknowledge that it existed. This came of keeping one's head, she
+sometimes thought, though she never put her thought into
+words&mdash;this and all things else, including financial security
+and the perpetual pursuit of the elusive and lawless male. For at
+sixty-two she still felt young and she believed herself to be
+fascinating.</p>
+<p>But Gabriella, patiently stitching bias velvet bands on the brim
+of a straw hat for the early spring trade, felt that she was
+sustained neither by the pleasures of vanity nor by the sounder
+consolations of virtue. Her philosophy was quite as simple, if not
+so material, as Madame's. Human nature was divided between the
+victors and the victims, and the chief thing was not to let oneself
+become a victim. Her theory, like those of greater philosophers,
+was rooted not in reason, but in character, and she believed in
+life with all the sanguine richness of her blood. Of course it was
+a struggle, but she was one of those vital women who enjoy a
+struggle&mdash;who choose any aspect of life in preference to the
+condition of vegetative serenity. Unhappiness, which is so largely
+a point of view, an attitude of mind, had passed over her at a time
+when many women would have been consecrated to inconsolable misery.
+She was penniless, she was unloved, she was deserted by her
+husband, she had lost, in a few weeks, her friends, her home, and
+her family, and she faced the future alone, except for her
+dependent and helpless children&mdash;yet in spite of these things,
+though she was thoughtful, worried, and often anxious, she realized
+that deep down in her the essential core of her being was not
+unhappy. When she had tried and failed, and lost her health and her
+children&mdash;if such sorrows ever came to her, then there would
+be time enough for unhappiness. Now, she was only twenty-seven; the
+rich, wonderful world surrounded her; and this world, even if she
+put love out of her life, was brimming over with beauty. It was
+good to be alive; it was good to watch the crowd in the street, to
+see the sunlight on the pavement, to taste the air, to feel the
+murmurous currents of the city flow around her as she walked home
+in the twilight. It was good to earn her bread and to go back in
+the evening to the joyful shouts of two well and happy children.
+She saw it all as an adventure&mdash;the whole of life&mdash;and
+the imperative necessity was to keep to the last the ardent heart
+of the true adventurer. While she stitched with flying fingers,
+there passed before her the pale sad line of the victims&mdash;of
+those who had resigned themselves to unhappiness. She saw her
+mother, anxious, pensive, ineffectual, with her widow's veil, her
+drooping eyelids, and her look of mournful acquiescence, as of one
+who had grown old expecting the worst of life; she saw poor Jane,
+tragic, martyred, with the feeble virtue and the cloying sweetness
+of all the poor Janes of this world; and she saw Uncle Meriweather
+wearing his expression of worried and resentful helplessness, as if
+he had been swept onward against his will by forces which he did
+not understand. All these people were victims, and from these
+people she had sprung. Their blood was her blood; their traditions
+were her traditions; their religion was her religion; even their
+memories were her memories. But something else, which was not
+theirs, was in her nature, and this something else had been born in
+the instant when she revolted against them. Perhaps the fighting
+spirit of her father&mdash;of that father who had gone out like a
+flame in his youth had battled on her side when she had turned
+against the inertia and decay which had walled in her girlhood.</p>
+<p>In the afternoon Madame summoned her into the showrooms, and she
+assisted the exhausted young women at the sale of slightly damaged
+French hats to the unfashionable purchasers who preferred to pay
+reasonable prices. While she served them, which she did with a
+cheerfulness, an interest, and an amiability that distinguished her
+from the other saleswomen, she wondered how they could have so
+little common sense as to allow themselves to be deluded by the
+French labels on the soiled linings? She could have made a better
+hat in two hours than any one of those she sold at the reduced
+price of ten dollars; yet even the dingiest of them at last found a
+purchaser, and she saw the green velvet toque, which had been
+rejected by the sensible middle-aged woman in the morning, finally
+pass into the possession of a hard-featured spinster. What amazed
+her, for she had a natural talent for dress, was the infallible
+instinct which guided the vast majority of these customers to the
+selection of the inappropriate. A few of them had taste, or had
+learned from experience what they could not wear; but by far the
+larger number displayed an ignorance of the most elementary
+principles of dress which shocked and astonished Gabriella. The
+obese and middle-aged winged straight as a bird toward the
+coquettish in millinery; the lean and haggard intuitively yearned
+for the picturesque; the harsh and simple aspired to the severely
+smart. Yet beneath the vain misdirection of impulses there was some
+obscure principle of attraction which ruled the absurdity of the
+decisions. Each woman, Gabriella discovered after an attentive hour
+at the sale, was dressing not her actual substance, but some
+passionately cherished ideal of herself which she had stored in a
+remote and inaccessible chamber of her brain.</p>
+<p>In all of the tedious selections Gabriella assisted with the
+pleasant voice, the ready sympathy, and the quick understanding
+which had made her so popular when she had worked for the old shop
+in Broad Street. The truth was that human nature interested her
+even in its errors, and her pleasant manners were simply the
+outward manifestation of an unaffected benevolence.</p>
+<p>"I shouldn't mind going there if they were all like that one,"
+remarked a customer, who had bought three hats, in the hearing of
+Madame as she went out; "but some of them are so disagreeable you
+feel like slapping their faces. Once last winter I had that tall
+girl with red hair&mdash;the handsome, stuck-up one, you
+know&mdash;and I declare she was so downright impertinent that I
+got straight up and walked out without buying a thing. Then I was
+so angry that I went down to Paula's and paid seventy-five dollars
+for this hat I've got on. It was a dreadful price, of course, but
+you'll do anything when you're in a rage."</p>
+<p>"Do you know the name of this one? I'd like to remember it."</p>
+<p>"Yes, it's Carr. I asked for her card. C-a-r-r. I think she's a
+widow."</p>
+<p>From her retreat behind one of the velvet curtains Madame
+overheard this conversation, and a few minutes later she stopped
+Gabriella on her way out, and said amiably that it would not be
+necessary for her to leave the showroom to-morrow.</p>
+<p>"I believe you can do better there than in the workroom," she
+added, "and, after all, that is really very important&mdash;to tell
+people what they want. It is astounding how few of them have the
+slightest idea what they are looking for."</p>
+<p>"But I want to get that hat right. I left it unfinished, and I
+don't like to give up while it is wrong," replied Gabriella, not
+wholly pleased by the command.</p>
+<p>But Madame, of a flightier substance notwithstanding her
+business talents, waved aside the remark as insignificant and
+without bearing upon her immediate purpose.</p>
+<p>"I am going to try you with the gowns," she said resolutely; "I
+want to see if you catch on there as quickly as you did with the
+hats&mdash;I mean with the sale, of course, for your work, I'm
+sorry to say, has been rather poor so far. But I'll try you with
+the next customer who comes to place a large order. They are always
+so eager for new suggestions, and you have suggestions of a sort to
+make, I am sure. I can't quite tell," she concluded uncertainly,
+"whether or not your ideas have any practical value, but they sound
+well as you describe them, and to talk attractively helps; there is
+no doubt of that."</p>
+<p>It was closing time, and Miss Fisher, one of the skirt fitters,
+came up, in her black alpaca apron with a pair of scissors
+suspended by red tape from her waist, to ask Madame a question. As
+Mrs. Bydington had not kept her appointment, was it not impossible
+to send her gown home as they had promised?</p>
+<p>"Oh, it makes no difference," replied Madame blandly, for she
+was in a good humour. "She'll come back when she is ready. The next
+time she is here, by the way, I want her to see Mrs. Fowler&mdash;I
+mean Mrs. Carr. She has worn out every one else in the place, and
+yet she is never satisfied; but I'd like her to take that pink
+velvet from Gautier, because nobody else is likely to give the
+price." The day was over and Madame's blandness was convincing
+evidence of her satisfaction.</p>
+<p>As Gabriella passed through the last showroom, where the
+disorder of the sale was still visible, she saw Miss Murphy, the
+handsomest and the haughtiest of the young women, wearily returning
+the few rejected hats to the ivory-tinted cases.</p>
+<p>"You are glad it is over, I know," she remarked sympathetically,
+less from any active interest in Miss Murphy's state of feeling
+than from an impulsive desire to establish human relations with her
+fellow saleswoman. If Miss Murphy would have it so, she preferred
+to be friendly.</p>
+<p>"I am so tired I can hardly stand on my feet," replied Miss
+Murphy, piteously. Her pretty rose-leaf skin had faded to a dull
+pallor; there were heavy shadows under her eyes; her helmet of
+wheaten-red hair had slipped down over her forehead, and even her
+firmly corseted figure appeared to have grown limp and yielding.
+Without her offensive elegance she was merely a pathetic and rather
+silly young thing.</p>
+<p>"I'll help you," said Gabriella, taking up several hats from a
+chair. "The others have gone, haven't they?"</p>
+<p>"They got out before I'd finished waiting on that middle-aged
+frump who doesn't know what she wants any more than the policeman
+out there at the corner does. She's made me show her all we've got
+left, and after she'd tried them all on, she said they're too high,
+and she's going to think over them before she decides. She's still
+waiting for something, and my head's splitting so I can hardly see
+what I'm doing." With a final surrender of her arrogance, she grew
+suddenly confidential and childish. "I'm sick enough to die," she
+finished despairingly, "and I've got a friend coming to take me to
+the theatre at eight o'clock."</p>
+<p>"Well, run away. I'll attend to this. But I'd try to rest before
+I went out if I were you."</p>
+<p>"You're a perfect peach," responded Miss Murphy gratefully. "I
+said all along I didn't believe you were stuck up and
+snobbish."</p>
+<p>Then she ran out, and Gabriella, after surveying the customer
+for a minute, selected the most unpromising hat in the case, and
+presented it with a winning smile for the woman's inspection.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps something like this is what you are looking for?" she
+remarked politely, but firmly.</p>
+<p>The customer, an acidulous, sharp-featured, showily dressed
+person&mdash;the sort, Gabriella decided, who would enjoy haggling
+over a bargain&mdash;regarded the offered hat with a supercilious
+and guarded manner, the true manner of the haggler.</p>
+<p>"No, that is not bad," she observed dryly, "but I don't care to
+give more than ten dollars."</p>
+<p>"It was marked down from thirty," replied Gabriella, and her
+manner was as supercilious and as guarded as the other's. There
+were women, she had found, who were impressed only by insolence,
+and, when the need arose, she could be quite as insolent as Miss
+Murphy. Unlike Miss Murphy, however, she was able to distinguish
+between those you must encourage and those you must crush; and this
+ability to draw reasonable distinctions was, perhaps, her most
+valuable quality as a woman of business.</p>
+<p>"I don't care to pay more than ten dollars," reiterated the
+customer in a scolding voice. Rising from her chair, she fastened
+her furs, which were cheap and showy, with a defiant and jerky
+movement, and flounced out of the shop.</p>
+<p>That disposed of, Gabriella put on her coat, which she had taken
+off again for the occasion, and went out into the street, where the
+night had already fallen. After her long hours in the overheated
+air of the showrooms, she felt refreshed and invigorated by the
+cold wind, which stung her face as it blew singing over the
+crossings. Straight ahead through the grayish-violet mist the
+lights were blooming like flowers, and above them a few stars shone
+faintly over the obscure frowning outlines of the buildings. Fifth
+Avenue was thronged, and to her anxious mind there seemed to be
+hollowness and insincerity in the laughter of the crowd.</p>
+<p>At the house in East Fifty-seventh Street, from which she would
+be moving the next day, she found Judge Crowborough awaiting her in
+the dismantled drawing-room, where packing-cases of furniture and
+pictures lay scattered about in confusion. In the dreadful days
+after Archibald Fowler's death, the judge had been very kind, and
+she had turned to him instinctively as the one man in New York who
+was both able and willing to be of use to her. Though he had never
+attracted her, she had been obliged to admit that he possessed a
+power superior to superficial attractions.</p>
+<p>"I dropped in to ask what I might do for you now?" he remarked
+with the dignity of one who possesses an income of half a million
+dollars a year. "It's a pity you have to leave this house. I
+remember when Archibald bought it&mdash;somewhere back in the
+'seventies&mdash;but I suppose there's no help for it, is
+there?"</p>
+<p>"No, there's no help." She sat down on a packing-case, and he
+stood gazing benevolently down on her with his big, soft hands
+clasped on the head of his walking-stick and his overcoat on his
+arm. "I've rented three rooms in one of the apartments of the old
+Carolina over on the West Side near Columbus Avenue. The rest of
+the apartment is rented to art students, I believe, and we must all
+use the same kitchen and the same bath-tub," she added with a
+laugh. "Of course it isn't luxury, but we shan't mind very much as
+soon as we get used to it. I couldn't be much poorer than I was
+before my marriage."</p>
+<p>"But the children? You've got to have the children looked
+after."</p>
+<p>"I've been so fortunate about that," her voice was quite
+cheerful again. "There's a seamstress from my old home&mdash;Miss
+Polly Hatch&mdash;who has known me all my life, and she is coming
+to sleep in a little bed in my room until we can afford to rent an
+extra bedroom. As long as she has to work at home anyhow, she can
+very easily look after the children while I am away. They are good
+children, and as soon as they are big enough I'll have to send them
+to school&mdash;to the public school, I'm afraid." This, because of
+Fanny's violent opposition, was a delicate point with her. She felt
+that she should like to start the children at a private school, but
+it was clearly impossible.</p>
+<p>"The boy won't be big enough for a year or two, will he?" He was
+interested, she saw, and this unaffected interest in her small
+affairs moved her almost to tears.</p>
+<p>"I wanted him to go to kindergarten, but, of course, I cannot
+afford it. He is only four and a half, and I'm teaching him myself
+in the evenings. Already he can read very well in the first
+reader," she finished proudly.</p>
+<p>For a minute the judge stared moodily down on her. His sagging
+cheeks took a pale purplish flush, and he bit his lower lip with
+his large yellow teeth, which reminded Gabriella of the tusks of a
+beast of prey. Then he laid his overcoat and his stick carefully
+down on a packing-case, and held out his hand.</p>
+<p>"I'm going now, and there's one thing I want to ask
+you&mdash;have you any money?"</p>
+<p>It was out at last, and she looked up composedly, smiling a
+little roguishly at his embarrassment.</p>
+<p>"I have six hundred dollars in bank for a rainy day, and I am
+making exactly fifteen dollars a week."</p>
+<p>"But you can't live on it. Nobody could live on it even without
+two children to bring up."</p>
+<p>She shook her head. "Oh, Judge Crowborough, how little you rich
+men really know! I've got to live on it until I can do better, and
+I hope that will be very soon. If I am worth anything now, in three
+months I ought to be worth certainly as much as twenty-five dollars
+a week. In a little while&mdash;as soon as I've caught on to the
+business&mdash;I'm going to ask for a larger salary, and I think I
+shall get it. Twenty-five dollars a week won't go very far, but you
+don't know how little some people can live on even in New
+York."</p>
+<p>"As soon as the six hundred dollars go you'll be headed straight
+for starvation," he protested, sincerely worried.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps, but I doubt it."</p>
+<p>"How much do you have to pay for your rooms?"</p>
+<p>"Twenty-five dollars a month. It isn't much of a place, you see,
+as far as appearances go. Fortunately, I have a little furniture of
+my own which Mrs. Fowler had given me."</p>
+<p>His embarrassment had passed away, and he was smiling now at the
+recollection of it.</p>
+<p>"Well, you're a brick, little girl," he said, "and I like your
+spirit, but, after all, why can't you put your pride in your
+pocket, and let me lend you a few thousands? You needn't borrow
+much&mdash;not enough to keep a carriage&mdash;but you might at
+least take a little just to show you aren't proud&mdash;just to
+show you'll be friends. It seems a downright shame that I should
+have money to throw away, and you should be starting out to pinch
+and scrape on fifteen dollars a week. Fifteen dollars a week! Good
+Lord, what are we coming to?"</p>
+<p>She was not proud, and she wanted to be friends, but she shook
+her head obstinately, though she was still smiling. "Not
+now&mdash;not while I can help it&mdash;but if I ever get in
+trouble&mdash;in real trouble&mdash;I'll remember your offer. If
+the children fall ill or I lose my place, I'll come to you in a
+minute."</p>
+<p>"Honour bright? It's a promise?"</p>
+<p>"It's a promise."</p>
+<p>"And you'll let me keep an eye on you?"</p>
+<p>She laughed with the natural gaiety which he found so
+delightful. "You may keep two eyes on me if you will!"</p>
+<p>He had already reached the door when, turning suddenly, he said
+with heavy gravity: "You don't mind my asking what you're going to
+do about George, do you?</p>
+<p>"No, I don't mind. As soon as I can afford it, I shall get my
+freedom, but everything costs, you know, even justice."</p>
+<p>"I could help you there, couldn't I?"</p>
+<p>From the gratitude in her eyes he read her horror of the
+marriage which still bound her. "You could&mdash;and, oh, if you
+would, I'd never, never forget it," she answered.</p>
+<p>Then they parted, and he went out into the cold, with a strange
+warmth like the fire of youth at his heart, while she ran eagerly
+up the uncarpeted stairs to the nursery.</p>
+<p>The trunks were packed, the boxes were nailed down, and the two
+children were playing shipwreck while they ate a supper of bread
+and milk at a table made from the bare top of a packing-case.
+Several days before the nurse had left without warning, and Miss
+Polly sat now, in hat and mantle, on one of the little beds which
+would be taken down the next day and sent over to the apartment on
+the West Side.</p>
+<p>"I've been to the Carolina and unpacked the things that had
+come," she said at Gabriella's entrance. "Those rooms ain't so bad
+as New York rooms go; but it does seem funny, don't it, to cook in
+the same kitchen with a lot of strangers you never laid eyes on
+befo'? I br'iled some chops for the children right alongside of an
+old maid who had come all the way up from New Orleans to study
+music&mdash;imagine, at her age! Why, she couldn't be a day under
+fifty! And on the other side there was the mother of a girl who's
+at the art school, or whatever you call it, where they teach you
+paintin'. They are from somewhere up yonder in New England and
+their home folks had sent 'em a pumpkin pie. She gave me a slice of
+it, but I never did think much of pumpkin. It can't hold a candle
+to sweet potato pudding, and I wouldn't let the children touch it
+for fear it might set too heavy in the night. I ain't got much use
+for Yankee food, nohow."</p>
+<p>"I hope the place is perfectly sanitary," was Gabriella's
+anxious rejoinder. "The front room gets some sunshine in the
+afternoon, doesn't it?"</p>
+<p>"It's a horrid street. I don't want to live there," wailed
+Fanny, who had rebelled from the beginning against her fallen
+fortunes. "I got my white shoes dirty, and there were banana peels
+all about. A man has a fruit-stand in the bottom of our house.
+Don't let's go there to live, mother."</p>
+<p>"You'll have to wear black shoes now, darling, and you mustn't
+mind the fruit-stand. It will be a good place to buy oranges."</p>
+<p>"I like it," said Archibald stoutly. "I like to slide on banana
+peels, and I like the man. He has black eyes and a red handkerchief
+in his pocket. Will you buy me a red handkerchief, mamma? He has a
+boy, too. I saw him. He can skate on roller skates, and the boy has
+a dog and the dog has a black ear. May I have roller skates for my
+birthday, and a dog&mdash;a small one&mdash;and may I ask the boy
+up to play with me?"</p>
+<p>"But the boy is ugly and so is the dog. I hate ugly people,"
+complained Fanny.</p>
+<p>"I like ugly people," retorted Archibald, glowering, not from
+anger, but from earnestness. "Ugly people are nicer than pretty
+ones, aren't they, mamma? Pang is nicer than Fanny."</p>
+<p>He was always like that even as a baby, always on the side of
+the unfortunate, always fighting valiantly for the under dog. With
+his large head, his grotesque spectacles, and his pouting lips, he
+bore a curious resemblance to a brownie, yet when one observed him
+closely, one saw that there was a remarkable blending of strength
+and sweetness in his expression.</p>
+<p>The next day Miss Polly finished the moving, and at six o'clock
+Gabriella went home in the Harlem elevated train to the grim,
+weather-beaten apartment house on the upper West Side. The
+pavements, as Fanny had scornfully observed, were not particularly
+clean; the air, in spite of the sharp wind which blew from the
+river, had a curiously stagnant quality; and the rumble of the
+elevated road, at the opposite side of the house, reached her in a
+vibrating undercurrent which was punctuated now and then by the
+staccato cries of the street. The house, which had been built in a
+benighted and spacious period, stood now as an enduring refuge for
+the poor in purse but proud in spirit. A few studios on the roof
+were still occupied by artists, while the hospitable basement
+sheltered a vegetable market, a corner drug-store, a fruit-stand,
+and an Italian bootblack. Within the bleak walls, from which the
+stucco had peeled in splotches, the life of the city had ebbed and
+flowed for almost half a century, like some deep wreck-strewn
+current which bore the seeds of the future as well as the driftwood
+of the past on its bosom. One might never have set foot outside
+those gloomy doors and yet have seen the whole of life pass as in a
+vivid dream through the dim halls, lighted by flickering gas and
+carpeted in worn strips of brown carpet. And once inside the
+apartments one might have found, sometimes, cheerfulness, beauty of
+line and colour, and a certain spaciousness which the modern
+apartment house, with its rooms like closets, its startling
+electricity, and its more hygienic conditions of living, could not
+provide. It was because she could find space there that Gabriella,
+guided by Miss Polly, had rented the rooms.</p>
+<p>She passed the drug-store and the fruit-stand, entered the
+narrow hail, where a single gas-jet flickered dimly beside the door
+of the elevator, and after touching the bell, stood patiently
+waiting. After a time she rang again, and presently, with
+deliberate ease and geniality, the negro who worked the elevator
+descended slowly, with a newspaper in his hand, and opened the door
+for her.</p>
+<p>"Good evening, Robert," she said pleasantly, for he also was
+from Virginia, and the discovery of the bond between them had given
+Gabriella a feeling of confidence. Like Miss Folly, she had never
+become entirely accustomed to white servants.</p>
+<p>The ropes moved again, the elevator ascended perilously to the
+fifth floor, and Gabriella walked quickly along the hall, and
+slipped her latchkey into the keyhole of the last apartment. As the
+door opened, a woman in worn black came out and spoke to her in
+passing. She was the old maid of Miss Folly's narrative, and her
+face, ardent, haggard, with the famished look which comes from a
+starved soul, gazed back at Gabriella with a touching expression of
+admiration and envy. There were spots of vivid colour in her
+cheeks, and this brightness, combined with her gray hair, gave her
+a theatrical and artificial appearance.</p>
+<p>"I have been playing to your little boy, Mrs. Carr," she said
+with the manner which Miss Polly had described as "flighty." "He
+came into my room when he heard the piano, and it was a real
+pleasure to play for him."</p>
+<p>"You are very good," returned Gabriella, wondering vaguely who
+she was, for she was obviously the kind of woman people wondered
+about. "I hope Archibald didn't make himself troublesome."</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, I enjoyed him. My name is Danton. I am Miss Danton,"
+she added effusively, "and I'm so glad you have come into this
+apartment. My room is the one next to yours."</p>
+<p>Then she fluttered off, with her look of spiritual hunger, and
+Gabriella closed the door and went on to her rooms, which were at
+the opposite end of the hail from the kitchen. On the way she
+passed the pretty art student, who was coming from the bathroom,
+with a freshly powdered face and a pitcher of water in her hand,
+and again she was obliged to stop to hear news of the children.</p>
+<p>"I'm so glad to have your little girl here. I want to paint her.
+I'm just crazy about her face," said the girl, whose name she
+learned afterwards was Rosy Plover. Though she was undeniably
+pretty, and had just powdered her face with scented powder, she had
+a slovenly, unkempt appearance which Gabriella, from that moment,
+associated with art students. "If she'd only dress herself
+properly, she'd be a beauty," she thought, with the aversion of one
+who is an artist in clothes. She herself, after her long, hard day,
+was as neat and trim as she had been in the morning. Her severe
+black suit was worn with grace, and hung perfectly; her crape
+collar was immaculately fresh; her mourning veil fell in charming
+folds over her hat brim. "It's a pity some one can't tell her," she
+mused, as she smiled and hurried on to the doubtful seclusion of
+her own end of the apartment.</p>
+<p>With the opening of the door, the children fell rapturously into
+her arms, and while she took off her hat and coat, Miss Polly laid
+the table for supper in front of the ruddy glow of the fire. On the
+fender a plate of buttered toast was keeping warm, a delicious
+aroma of coffee scented the air, and a handful of red carnations
+made a cheerful bit of colour in the centre of the white
+tablecloth. It was a pleasant picture for a tired woman to gaze on,
+and the ruddy glow of the fire was reflected in Gabriella's heart
+while she enfolded her children. After a day in Madame's hothouse
+atmosphere, it was delightful to return to this little centre of
+peace and love, and to feel that its very existence depended upon
+the work of her brain and hands. The children, she realized, had
+never loved her so dearly. In better days, when she was rarely
+separated from them for more than a few hours at a time, they had
+seemed rather to take her care and her presence for granted; but
+now, after an absence of nine hours, she had become a delight and
+an enchantment, something to be looked forward to and longingly
+talked about through the whole afternoon.</p>
+<p>"Mother, you've been away forever," said Fanny, folding her veil
+for her and putting away her furs.</p>
+<p>"Are you going every day just like this for ever and ever?</p>
+<p>"Every day, darling, but I'm here every night. Shall I run back
+to the kitchen and broil the chops, Miss Polly?"</p>
+<p>But the chops were already broiled, for Miss Polly had finished
+her sewing early, and she had beaten up two tiny cups of custard
+for the children.</p>
+<p>"It's nicer than nursery suppers, isn't it, Fanny?" asked
+Archibald a little later while he ate his bread and milk from a
+blue bowl. "Mother, I like being poor. Let's stay poor always."</p>
+<p>A phrase of Mrs. Fowler's, "happiness costs so little," floated
+through Gabriella's mind as she poured Miss Folly's coffee out of
+the tin coffee pot. She was so tired that her body ached; her feet
+were smarting and throbbing from the long standing; and her eyes
+stung from the cold wind and the glare of the elevated train; but
+she knew that in spite of these discomforts she was not
+unhappy&mdash;that she was, indeed, far happier than she had been
+for the past six years in the hushed suspense of her
+father-in-law's house. When she had carried the supper things back
+to the sink in the kitchen, had taught the children their lessons,
+heard their prayers, and put them to bed, she repeated the words to
+herself while she sat sewing beside the lamp in front of the
+comforting glow of the fire, "After all, happiness costs so
+little."</p>
+<p>The next morning, and on every morning throughout the winter,
+she was up by six o'clock, and had taken in the baker's rolls and
+the bottle of milk from the outer door before Miss Polly or the
+children were stirring. Then, having dressed quickly, she ran back
+to the kitchen and made the coffee and boiled the eggs while the
+other lodgers were still sleeping. Sometimes the mother of one of
+the art students would join her over the gas range, but usually her
+neighbours slept late and then darted through the hall in kimonos,
+with tumbled hair, to a hurried breakfast at the kitchen table.</p>
+<p>Her life was so busy that there was little time for anxiety, and
+less for futile and painful dwelling upon the past. To get through
+the day as best she could, to start the children well and in a good
+humour, to make herself useful, if not indispensable, to Madame, to
+return with a mind clear and fresh enough to give Fanny and
+Archibald intelligent lessons, to sew on their clothes or her own
+until midnight, and then to drop into bed, with aching limbs and a
+peaceful brain, too tired even to dream&mdash;these things made the
+life that she looked forward to, week after week, month after
+month, year after year. It was a hard life, as Miss Polly often
+remarked, but hard or soft, her strength was equal to it, her
+health was good, her interest in her work and in her children never
+flagged for a minute. Only on soft spring days, coming home in the
+dusk, she would sometimes pass carts filled with hyacinths, and in
+a wave the memory of Arthur and of her first love would rush over
+her. Then she would see Arthur's face, gentle, protective, tender,
+as it had looked on that last evening, and for an instant her lost
+girlhood and her girlhood's dream would envelop her like the
+fragrance of flowers. At such moments she thought of this love as
+tenderly as a mother might have thought of the exquisite dead face
+of an infant who had lived only an hour. Though it was over, though
+it bore no part, with its elusive loveliness, in her practical
+plans for the future, this dream became gradually, as the years
+passed, the most radiant and vital thing in her life. Though it was
+so vague as to be without warmth, it was as vivid and as real as
+light. The knowledge that in the past she had known perfect love,
+even though in her blindness she had thrust it aside, was a balm
+which healed her wounds and gave her courage to go on, friendless
+and alone, into the loveless stretch of the future. There was
+hardly a minute of her day for the next three years which was not
+sweetened by this hyacinth-scented dream of the past, there was
+hardly an hour of her drudgery which was not ennobled and
+irradiated by the splendour of this love that she had lost.</p>
+<p>Of George&mdash;even of George as the father of her
+children&mdash;she rarely thought. He had dropped out of her life
+like any other mistake, like any other illusion, and she was too
+sanguine by nature, too buoyant, too full of happiness and of
+energy, to waste herself on either mistakes or illusions. During
+the months when she had waited for her freedom she had resolutely
+put the thought of him out of her mind, and when at last her
+divorce was granted, she dismissed the fact as completely as if it
+had not changed the entire course of her life. The past was over,
+and only that part of it should live which contributed sweetness
+and beauty to the present&mdash;only that part of it which she
+could use in the better and stronger structure of the future.
+Whatever living meant in the end, she told herself each morning as
+she started out to her work, it must mean, not resignation, not
+inertia, but endeavour, enterprise, and courage.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IVa" id="CHAPTER_IVa"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<h3>THE DREAM AND THE YEARS</h3>
+<p>In one of the small fitting-rooms, divided by red velvet
+curtains on gilt rods from the long showrooms of Madame Dinard, a
+nervous group, comprising the head skirt fitter, the head waist
+fitter, Miss Bellman, the head saleswoman, and Madame herself,
+stood disconsolately around the indignant figure of Mrs. Weederman
+Pletheridge, who, attired in one of Madame's costliest French
+models, was gesticulating excitedly in the centre of four standing
+mirrors. For three years Mrs. Pletheridge had lived in Paris, and
+her return to New York, and to the dressmaking establishments of
+Fifth Avenue, was an event which had shaken Dinard's, if not the
+fashionable street in which it stood, to its foundations.</p>
+<p>"I don't know what is the matter with it," she said fussily,
+"but it doesn't suit me, and yet it looked so well in the hand. I
+wonder if I could wear it if you were to take out some of this
+fulness, and change the set of the sleeves? The fashions this
+spring are perfectly hopeless."</p>
+<p>"Why, it suits you to perfection, Madame. Just a stitch or two
+like this&mdash;and this&mdash;and it will look as if it were
+designed for you by Worth. Is it not so, Miss Bellman? Don't you
+think it is wonderful on Madame?"</p>
+<p>Miss Bellman, having learned her part, agreed effusively, and
+then each of the fitters, as she was appealed to in turn,
+contributed an enraptured assent to the discussion. The price of
+the gown was a thousand dollars, and Mrs. Pletheridge's favourable
+decision was worth exactly that much in terms of money to Dinard's.
+As the season had been scarcely a brisk one, Madame was
+particularly anxious to have her more extreme models taken off her
+hands. "It was unpacked only yesterday," she lied suavely, "and no
+one else has had so much as a glimpse of it."</p>
+<p>"I can't imagine what is the matter with it," Mrs. Pletheridge
+sighed dejectedly, while she regarded her ample form with a
+resentful and critical gaze. As long as one had nothing else to
+worry about, Madame reflected without sympathy, one might find
+cause for positive distress in the fact that a gown appeared to
+better advantage in the hand than on one's person. The
+truth&mdash;and the truth, as sometimes happens, was the last thing
+Mrs. Pletheridge cared to admit&mdash;was that she had grown too
+stout to wear pronounced fashions.</p>
+<p>"Nothing could be more charming," insisted Madame with increased
+effusion, "but if you are in doubt, let us ask the opinion of Mrs.
+Carr. She has the true eye of the artist&mdash;a wonderful eye. I
+don't know whether you remember Mrs. Archibald Fowler or not?" she
+added as the skirt fitter sped in search of Gabriella; "this is her
+daughter-in-law. Her husband ran away with another woman about
+three years ago. It made a great sensation at the time, and his
+wife got a divorce from him afterwards. Ever since then she has
+been in my establishment."</p>
+<p>No, Mrs. Pletheridge did not remember Mrs. Fowler; but, having
+had a notorious amount of trouble with her own husbands, she was
+amiably disposed toward the unfortunate daughter-in-law of the lady
+she couldn't remember. Thirty years ago, as a pretty, vulgar,
+kind-hearted girl, she had captured with a glance the eldest son of
+the newly rich Pletheridge, who had, perhaps, inherited his
+grandfather's genial admiration for chambermaids; but, to-day,
+after a generation of self-indulgence, her prettiness had
+coarsened, her vulgarity had hardened, and her kind heart had
+withered, through lack of cultivation, to the size of a cherry.
+And, from having had everything she wanted for so long, she had at
+last reached that melancholy state of mind when she could think of
+nothing more to want.</p>
+<p>A brisk step crossed the room outside, the curtains were parted
+with a commanding movement, and Gabriella joined the anxious group
+surrounded by the four mirrors.</p>
+<p>"Did you send for me, Madame?" she asked, and waited, grave,
+attentive, and perfectly composed, with her hand, the small, strong
+hand of the Carrs, on the curtain. Her hair was brushed severely
+back from her candid forehead, and though her figure had grown
+somewhat heavier and less girlish in line, she still wore her plain
+black dress and white collar with an incomparable distinction.
+Through all the hardship and suffering of the last three years she
+had kept her look of bright intelligence, of radiant energy. In
+dress and manner she was the successful woman of business, but she
+was the woman of business with something added. Though she spoke in
+a matter-of-fact tone, her voice had a vibrating quality; though
+she wore only the plainest clothes, her grace, her good-breeding,
+her indefinable charm, softened the severity.</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Pletheridge is uncertain about this gown," explained
+Madame, "but I tell her that it suits her to perfection, as well as
+if it had been designed for her by Worth. Do you not agree with me,
+Mrs. Carr? You have, as I said to her, the true eye of the
+artist."</p>
+<p>Without changing her position or moving a step into the room,
+Gabriella attentively regarded the gown and the wearer. From the
+mirror Mrs. Pletheridge stared back at her ill-humouredly, with a
+spiteful gleam in her small black eyes between the carefully
+darkened lids.</p>
+<p>"I can't imagine what is the matter with it," she reiterated, as
+if she were repeating a sad refrain, and her manner was as insolent
+as Miss Murphy's had been to the casual customer.</p>
+<p>For an instant Gabriella returned her look with the steady gaze
+of one who, having achieved the full courage of living, has
+attained also a calm insensibility to the shafts of arrogance.
+Three years ago she would have flinched before Mrs. Pletheridge's
+disdain, but in those three years she had passed beyond the
+variegated tissue of appearances to the bare structure of
+life&mdash;she had worked and wept and starved and
+suffered&mdash;and to-day her soul was invulnerable against even
+more destructive weapons than the contempt of a plutocrat. Perhaps,
+too, though she assured herself that she was without snobbishness,
+there was a secret satisfaction in the knowledge that one of her
+ancestors had been a general under Washington while the early
+Pletheridges were planting potatoes in a peasant's patch in
+Ireland. Her dignity was more assured than Madame's; for she was
+perfectly aware of a fact to which Madame was blind, and this was,
+that, in spite of her position in the social columns of the
+newspapers and her multitudinous possessions, Mrs. Pletheridge was
+not, and could never be, a lady. While Gabriella stood there these
+thoughts flashed recklessly through her mind; yet she answered
+Madame's question as frankly and honestly as if the woman they were
+staring at with such intentness had not been the tragic vulgarian
+she was.</p>
+<p>"I think the gown doesn't suit her at all," she said quietly to
+Madame, who made a horrified face at her over the sumptuous
+shoulder of Mrs. Pletheridge. "There is too much of it, too much
+billowy lace everywhere." She did not add that the coral and silver
+brocade gave Mrs. Pletheridge a curious resemblance to an overblown
+prize hollyhock.</p>
+<p>Madame's horrified face changed, as if under a spell, to one of
+abject despair; and a menacing frown convulsed the puffy features
+of Mrs. Pletheridge, while she burst out of her gorgeous sheath
+with a petulant haste which expressed her inward perturbation
+better than words could have done. For a minute one could have
+heard a flower drop in the fitting-room; then the offended customer
+spoke, and her words, when she found them, were not lacking in
+either force or effectiveness. "No, there's no use trying on
+anything else, I have an appointment at Cambon's." Cambon was
+Dinard's hated and wholly incompetent rival; and until this
+illuminating instant Madame had never suspected that her particular
+Mrs. Pletheridge had ever entered the high white doors of Cambon's
+establishment.</p>
+<p>"But, surely, we have something else. There is a lovely Doucet
+model&mdash;in white and silver&mdash;"</p>
+<p>But no, Mrs. Pletheridge would have none of the lovely model.
+"Give me my skirt at once," she commanded haughtily, bending her
+opulent bosom and holding the lacy frills of her petticoat together
+while Agnes, the youngest and the gentlest of the assistants, knelt
+at her feet with her dress skirt held invitingly open on the floor.
+As she inserted the toe of her exquisitely shod foot into the
+opening, she remarked maliciously: "It is impossible to find decent
+clothes in New York&mdash;one might as well give up trying. Paris
+dressmakers send you only their failures." And, having crushed
+Madame to silence, she finished her dressing, fastened her black
+lace veil with a flying swallow in diamonds, flung her feather boa
+over her shoulders, and taking up her gold chain bag, studded with
+rubies, marched out of the establishment with all the pomp and
+impressiveness of a military parade.</p>
+<p>"I've lost her. She will never come back," moaned Madame, and
+burst into tears.</p>
+<p>"But she couldn't possibly have worn that gown. She would have
+found it out as soon as she got home," replied Gabriella
+reassuringly, though her heart was almost as heavy as Madame's.</p>
+<p>It was all her fault, of course, as Madame, recovering her voice
+as she lost her temper, began immediately to tell her. It was all
+her fault, and yet how could she have stood there and lied to the
+woman in cold blood because Madame expected it of her as a part of
+her work? That she had infuriated Madame and imperilled her
+position she realized perfectly; but, realizing this, she still
+felt that she could not have told Mrs. Pletheridge that the gown
+was becoming to her. "There are times when one has to be honest no
+matter what happens," she thought rebelliously, while she went back
+to the workroom. Had Madame discharged her on the spot she would
+not have been surprised, and it was with a sensation of relief that
+she presently saw the forewoman measuring a dose of aromatic
+spirits of ammonia, and heard that the crisis was passing. A little
+later, when she went into the showroom with a hat for Miss Bellman,
+she encountered Madame bonneted, cloaked, panting, with moist eyes
+and raddled cheeks, preparing to take a slow airing in a hansom. As
+she was assisted into the vehicle by Miss Murphy and the driver,
+Madame pressed her beringed hand to her forehead with a despairing
+gesture; then the driver cracked his whip, the horse started, and
+the hansom disappeared up Fifth Avenue.</p>
+<p>"What under the sun did you do to her?" inquired Miss Murphy,
+holding her wheaten-red pompadour down in the wind. "I declare I
+thought at first it was murder!"</p>
+<p>"I told her the truth, when she asked me, that was all."</p>
+<p>"Well, I never! Now what, in the name of goodness, possessed
+you?"</p>
+<p>"I had to. I don't see how I could have kept from it."</p>
+<p>"Good gracious! There're always ways, but what sort of truth was
+it? You see, it's been so long since I've met one," she explained
+airily, "that I don't even know what they're like."</p>
+<p>"It was about Mrs. Pletheridge's gown&mdash;the one she wanted
+her to buy, you know. I told her it didn't suit her. And it
+didn't&mdash;you know it didn't," she concluded emphatically.</p>
+<p>"Of course it didn't, but I don't see why you had to go and tell
+her."</p>
+<p>"She asked me. They both asked me, and if I'd lied she wouldn't
+have believed me. You can't fool people so outrageously, and I
+wouldn't if I could. It isn't honest, and it isn't good
+business."</p>
+<p>"Anything is good business that gets by," remarked Miss Murphy,
+who had a philosophy. "I must go indoors or this wind will blow all
+my puffs away."</p>
+<p>She departed breezily; and Gabriella, returning to the workroom,
+spent her afternoon patiently stitching flat garlands of flowers on
+the brim of a hat. When she left the house at six o'clock the April
+weather was so lovely that she decided to walk all the way home;
+and while she moved rapidly with the crowd in Fifth Avenue, she
+considered anxiously the possible disastrous results of Madame's
+anger. Between her and absolute want there stood only her salary,
+and she had deliberately&mdash;she realized now how deliberate her
+reply had been&mdash;undermined that thin and insecure protection.
+Though she was now earning as much as thirty dollars a week, an
+illness of a year ago, when she had been obliged to stop work for
+several months, had exhausted the remains of the modest nest egg
+with which she had started; and to lose her place, she knew, would
+mean either starvation or beggary. There was no one, with the
+exception of Cousin Jimmy, of whom she could beg, and to beg of him
+would be a tacit confession that she had failed as a breadwinner.
+In Mrs. Carr's last letter Charley had appeared in a new light as a
+reformed character, a devoted attendant at church, and an
+enthusiastic convert to the prohibition party; and Gabriella had
+gathered from her mother's pious rambling that, like other sinners
+who have outlived temptation, he was devoting his middle years to a
+violent crusade against the moderate indulgences of the abstemious.
+But Charley, she felt, was out of the question. She would die
+before she would stoop to ask help of a man she had despised as
+heartily as she had once despised Charley. She must sink or swim by
+her own strength, not by another's.</p>
+<p>"I wonder why I did it?" she asked herself again, and again she
+could not answer the question. She felt that she might have lied
+had it been merely a lie and not a test of courage before her; but
+she could not lie simply because she was afraid of speaking the
+truth. In every character there is one supreme vice or virtue which
+strikes the deepest root and blossoms most luxuriantly, and in the
+character of Gabriella this virtue was courage. At the crucial
+moments of life some primordial instinct prompted her to fight, not
+to yield. "I ought to have been evasive, I suppose," she thought
+regretfully. "But how could I have been?" There were instants, she
+had discovered, when wisdom surrendered to the more militant
+virtues.</p>
+<p>When she reached home she found Fanny, who was fretfully
+recovering from influenza, lying on the sofa in the living-room,
+with Miss Polly busily stitching at her side, while Archibald,
+excited by a strenuous afternoon with the son of the Italian fruit
+dealer, was kneeling before the window, making mysterious signs to
+a group of yellow-haired German children in the apartment house on
+the opposite side of the street. Both children were eagerly
+expecting their mother, and as soon as she entered they grew
+animated and cheerful.</p>
+<p>She kissed and cuddled them, and listened sympathetically to
+their excited stories of the day, and of Dr. French, who had been
+to see Fanny, and who had waited as long as he could.</p>
+<p>"He's going to take us for a drive to-morrow, mother, and we're
+to sit in the carriage while he goes in to pay his calls, and then
+he's to show us the river and we're to stop somewhere to have
+tea."</p>
+<p>"Did he stay long?" asked Gabriella of Miss Folly.</p>
+<p>"For more than an hour," replied Miss Folly, and commented
+shrewdly after a minute: "It looks to me as if there was more in
+that young man than you can see on the surface, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>A blush tinged Gabriella's cheek, but she shook her head almost
+indignantly. "Oh, there's nothing of that kind," she answered
+emphatically, and rose to take off her hat and prepare supper.</p>
+<p>Since her illness of a year ago, when she had summoned the
+strange young doctor who had once been the assistant of the
+Fowlers' family physician, she had grown to feel a certain
+dependence upon Dr. French as the only useful friend who was left
+to her. He was a thin, gray-eyed, fair-haired young man, who
+practised largely among the poor, from choice rather than from
+necessity, since Dr. Morton had given him an excellent start in
+life. His pale, ascetic face had attracted Gabriella from their
+first meeting; there was the flamelike enthusiasm of the visionary
+in his eyes; and he had, she thought, the most beautiful and
+sympathetic hands she had ever seen. Even Fanny, who was usually
+impervious to sensitive impressions, felt the charm of his touch
+when he stroked her forehead or placed his long, delicate fingers
+on her wrist. From that first visit he had been a source of comfort
+and strength to Gabriella; but of late she had felt moments of
+uneasiness when she was with him. Was it possible, she asked
+herself now, as she went back to the kitchen to stew the oysters
+Miss Polly had bought for supper, that the kindly doctor was
+misinterpreting the simple and unaffected nature of her friendship?
+For herself she felt that she had put the reality of love out of
+her life, and that if the emotion existed for her at all, it
+existed only as a dream and a regret. She enshrined the memory of
+Arthur in something of the sentimental worship which Mrs. Carr had
+consecrated to Gabriel after she had lost him. It was an exquisite
+consolation to her to feel that if things had been otherwise, she
+might have loved a man with the whole of her nature&mdash;with both
+body and spirit; there were even moments in the spring of the year,
+when, softened by the caressing air and the scent of hyacinths, she
+felt that she did so love a memory; but beyond this her feeling was
+as bodiless and ethereal as the vague image to which it was
+dedicated. And yet this gentle regret was all that she wanted of
+love.</p>
+<p>In the kitchen she found Miss Danton, the musical spinster,
+making her scant supper of tea and toast on the gas-range. Though
+the hectic flush still burned in Miss Danton's cheeks, the famished
+look in her eyes seemed to have devoured all the strength of her
+body, and she moved like one who has run to the point of exhaustion
+and is about to drop to the ground. Long ago Gabriella had heard
+her story, and she understood now that the yearning in her face was
+the yearning for life, which she had rejected in her youth, and
+which, in middle-age, had eluded her. As a young girl, aflame with
+temperament, she had sacrificed herself to a widowed father and a
+family of little brothers and sisters in a small town in the South.
+For thirty years she had fought down her dreams and her impulses;
+for thirty years she had cooked, washed, ironed, and sewed, until
+the children had all grown up and married, and her father, after a
+long illness, had died in her arms. On her fifty-second birthday
+her freedom had come&mdash;freedom not only from cares and
+responsibilities, but from love, from duty, from the constant daily
+thought that she was necessary to some one who depended on her. At
+fifty-three, with broken health and a few thousand dollars brought
+from the sale of the old home, she had come to New York to study
+music as she had dreamed of doing when she was young. And the
+tragedy of it was that she had a gift, she had temperament, she had
+genuine artistic feeling.</p>
+<p>"When I remember the way I used to cook for the children," she
+remarked while she measured a teaspoonful of green tea into a
+little Japanese tea-pot, "why, I'd think nothing of roasting a
+turkey when we had one at Christmas or Thanksgiving, and now, I
+declare, it seems too much trouble to do more than make a pot of
+tea. Sometimes I don't even take the trouble to toast my
+bread."</p>
+<p>"You ought to eat," replied Gabriella, briskly. "When one gets
+run down, one never looks at life fairly." True to her fundamental
+common sense, she had never underestimated the importance of food
+as a prop for philosophy.</p>
+<p>"I'd never eat if I could help it," rejoined Miss Danton, with
+the abhorrence of the aesthetic temperament for material details.
+"It's queer the thoughts I have sometimes," she added irrelevantly
+as she sat down before the kitchen table, and poured out a cup of
+tea. "I don't know what's come over me, but I'd give anything on
+earth&mdash;if it wasn't wicked I'd almost give my soul&mdash;to be
+your age and to be starting to live my life. I never had any life.
+It wasn't fair. I never had any," she repeated bitterly, dropping a
+lump of sugar into her cup.</p>
+<p>"Well, I've had my troubles, too," observed Gabriella, busily
+stirring the oysters.</p>
+<p>"You've had them and you'll have others. It doesn't
+matter&mdash;nothing really matters as long as you're young. It's
+all a part of the game, trouble and everything
+else&mdash;everything except old age and death. I'm getting
+old&mdash;I'm getting old, and I began too late, and that's the
+worst that can happen to a woman. Do you know I never had a love
+affair in my life," she pursued bitterly after a moment. "I never
+had love, or pleasure, or anything but work and duty&mdash;and now
+it's too late. It's too late for it all," she finished, rising to
+take her toast from the oven.</p>
+<p>"Poor thing, she exaggerates so dreadfully," thought Gabriella.
+"I believe it comes from drinking too much green tea"; and she
+resolved that she would never touch green tea as long as she lived.
+Like most women whose love had ended not in unfulfilment, but in
+satiety and bitterness, she was inclined to deny the supreme
+importance of the passion in the scheme of life. As a deserted wife
+and the mother of two children, she felt that she could live for
+years without the desire, without even the thought of romantic love
+in her mind. "I wonder why I, who have known and lost love, should
+be so much freer from that obsession than poor Miss Danton, who has
+never been loved in her life?" she asked herself while she carried
+the supper tray down the long hall and into the living-room.</p>
+<p>Some hours later, when the children were asleep, and Gabriella
+sat darning Archibald's stockings beside the kerosene lamp, she
+described to Miss Polly the scene with Madame and Mrs.
+Pletheridge.</p>
+<p>"I don't know how it will end. She may discharge me to-morrow,"
+she deliberated, as she cut off a length of black darning cotton,
+and bent over to thread her needle. "I wonder what I ought to
+do?"</p>
+<p>"Well, now, ain't that exactly like you, Gabriella," scolded
+Miss Polly; "but when you come to think of it," she conceded after
+a minute or two, "I reckon we're all made like that in the
+beginning. Why, I remember way back yonder in the 'seventies how I
+was always tryin' to persuade a woman with a skinny figure not to
+wear a cuirass basque and a woman with a stout figure not to put on
+a draped polonaise. I got to know better presently, and you will,
+too, before you've been at it much longer. They all think they can
+look like fashion plates&mdash;the skinniest and the stoutest
+alike&mdash;and there ain't a bit of use tryin' to undeceive 'em.
+The last thing a woman ever sees straight is her figure."</p>
+<p>"I can't help feeling," demurred Gabriella, forsaking the moral
+issue for the argument of mere expediency, "that honesty is good
+business."</p>
+<p>"Well, it ain't," retorted Miss Polly sharply. "It may be good
+religion and good behaviour, but there's one thing it certainly
+ain't, and that is good business. How many of these rich men we
+read about in the papers do you reckon spend their time settin'
+around and bein' honest? Mind you I ain't sayin' I'd lie or steal
+myself, Gabriella, but I'm poor, and what I'm sayin' is that when
+you feel that way about it, you're as likely to stay poor as
+not."</p>
+<p>But the next day, life, with one of those startling surprises
+which defy philosophy and make drama, confirmed the most illogical
+of Gabriella's assumptions. Madame, coming in late, with a blotched
+face and puffy eyelids, had dispatched her to the workroom, and she
+was sitting before one of the long tables, embroidering azure beads
+on a black collar, when Agnes darted through the door and jerked
+the needle out of her hand.</p>
+<p>"Madame is asking for you. Come as quick as you can!" she cried
+excitedly, and sped back again to the shelter of the artificial
+rose-bushes at the end of the hall.</p>
+<p>Rising hurriedly, and brushing the scraps of silk from her cloth
+skirt as she walked, Gabriella followed the sound of Madame's
+wheedling voice, and found herself, as she parted the curtains of a
+fitting-room, in the opulent presence of Mrs. Pletheridge.</p>
+<p>"Yes, as I told you, we trust implicitly to Mrs. Carr's eye. She
+has the true eye of the artist," Madame simpered fawningly as she
+entered. "Did you send for me?" asked Gabriella, business-like and
+alert on the threshold.</p>
+<p>"Good morning, Mrs. Carr! I told Madame Dinard that I wanted you
+to wait on me. I want some one who tells me the truth," explained
+Mrs. Pletheridge so graciously that Gabriella would hardly have
+recognized her. Something&mdash;sleep, pleasure, or pious
+meditation&mdash;had altered overnight not only her temper but even
+the fleshly vehicle of its uncertain manifestations. Her features
+appeared to have adjusted themselves to the size of her face, and
+she spoke quite affably, though still with her manner of addressing
+an inferior.</p>
+<p>"I want you to show me something that will really suit me," she
+said. "I think the grayish-green cloth from Blandin might be copied
+in silver, but I should like you to see it on me. I know you will
+tell me what you really think." Her voice faltered and deepened to
+a note of pathos.</p>
+<p>"Poor woman," thought Gabriella, "it must be hard for her to get
+people to tell her what they really think," and she added
+exultantly while she went for the gowns: "If I satisfy her now, I
+am saved with Madame!"</p>
+<p>When she returned, with the green cloth in one hand and a
+charming lavender cr&ecirc;pe tea-gown in the other, she approached
+Mrs. Pletheridge with the manner of intelligent sympathy, of serene
+and smiling competence, which had made her so valuable to Madame as
+a saleswoman. She had the air not only of seeking to please, but of
+knowing just how to go about the difficult matter of pleasing. With
+the eye of an artist in dress, she analyzed Mrs. Pletheridge's
+possibilities; and softening here and there her pronounced
+features, succeeded presently in producing a charming and
+harmonious whole. By the time a dozen gowns were tried on and their
+available points discussed and criticised in detail, Mrs.
+Pletheridge had given the largest order ever received by the house,
+and was throwing out enthusiastic hints of an even greater
+munificence in the future. She left at last in a thoroughly good
+humour not only with Dinard's, but with her own rejuvenated
+attractions; and Gabriella, exhausted but triumphant, watched Agnes
+gather up the French models from chairs and sofas and carry them
+back to the obscurity of the closets. In her heart there was both
+peace and rejoicing because her belief in life had been justified.
+In spite of Madame, in spite of Miss Polly, in spite of experience,
+the day had proved that it was, after all, "good business" to be
+honest. Though she was still in debt, though she was still
+compelled to scrimp and save over market bills, nevertheless she
+felt that her work had progressed beyond the experimental stages,
+and that her place at Dinard's was secured until some better
+opening appeared. For that morning at least she had made herself
+indispensable to Madame. For years, she knew, Madame had striven
+fawningly for the exclusive patronage of Mrs. Pletheridge, and she,
+Gabriella, had attained it, without loss of pride or self-respect,
+by a few words of honest and sensible criticism. She had applied
+her intelligence to the situation, and her intelligence had served
+Dinard's more successfully than Madame's duplicity had done.</p>
+<p>At home she found Dr. French, who had just brought the delighted
+children back from their drive. When she thanked him, she saw that
+there was a glow of pleasure in his rather delicate face, and that
+this glow lent an expression of ecstasy to his dark-gray
+eyes&mdash;the eyes of a mystic and a dreamer. "I wonder how he
+ever became a physician," she thought. "He is more like a
+priest&mdash;like a priest of the Middle Ages." But aloud she only
+said: "You have done them a world of good. Fanny has got some of
+her colour back already, and that means an appetite for
+supper."</p>
+<p>"We had tea," broke in Archibald, with enthusiasm, "but it was
+really milk, and we had cake, but it was really bread and butter."
+He looked so well and vigorous that Gabriella called the doctor's
+attention to the animation in his face. "If only he didn't have to
+wear glasses," she said. "I'm so afraid it will interfere with his
+love of sports. His ambition is to be captain of a football team
+and to write poetry."</p>
+<p>"It's a queer combination," responded the doctor, smiling his
+slightly whimsical smile. He was rather short, with an almost
+imperceptible limp, and he had, as he put it, "never gone in for
+sports." "There's so much else when one comes to think of it," he
+added, pausing, with his hat in his hand, at the door; "there are
+plenty of ways of having fun even without football." Then he turned
+away from the children, and said directly to Gabriella:</p>
+<p>"Will you come out with me to-morrow? It is Sunday."</p>
+<p>"And leave the children?" she asked a little blankly.</p>
+<p>"And leave the children!" He was laughing, but it occurred to
+her suddenly, for the first time, that her maternal raptures were
+beginning to bore him. For a year she had believed that his
+interest in her was mainly a professional interest in the children;
+and now she was confronted with the disturbing fact that he wanted
+to be rid of the children for a few hours at least, that he
+evidently saw in her something besides the overwhelming force of
+her motherhood.</p>
+<p>"But I never leave them on Sunday. It is the only day I have
+with them," she answered.</p>
+<p>"Don't go, mother! You mustn't go!" cried Fanny, and clung to
+her.</p>
+<p>"Oh, very well," returned Dr. French, dismissing the subject
+with irritation. "But you look pale, and I thought the air might do
+you good."</p>
+<p>He went away rather abruptly, while Gabriella stood looking at
+Miss Polly in regret and perplexity. "I hope I didn't hurt his
+feelings by declining," she said; and then, as the children raced
+into the nursery to take off their coats, she added slowly, "He
+couldn't expect me to go without them."</p>
+<p>"If you want to know what I think," replied Miss Polly flatly,
+"it is that he's just sick to death of the children. You've stuck
+them down his throat until he's had as much of them as he can
+swallow."</p>
+<p>For a moment Gabriella considered this ruefully.</p>
+<p>"You don't honestly believe that he's interested in me in that
+way?" she demanded in a horrified whisper.</p>
+<p>"I don't know but one way in which a man's ever interested in a
+woman," retorted Miss Polly. "It's either that way or it's none at
+all, as far as I can see. But if I was you, honey, I'd drop him a
+little encouragement now and then, just to keep up his spirits. Men
+ain't no mo' than flesh and blood, after all" and it's natural that
+he shouldn't be as crazy about the children as you are."</p>
+<p>"But why should I encourage him? Even if you are right, I
+couldn't marry him. I could never marry again."</p>
+<p>"I'd like to know why not, if you get a chance? You're free
+enough, ain't you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, it isn't that&mdash;but I couldn't."</p>
+<p>"You ain't hankerin' after George, are you, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"After George? No!" responded Gabriella with so sincere an
+accent that Miss Polly jumped.</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm glad you ain't," observed the seamstress soothingly
+as she stooped to pick up her sewing. "I shouldn't think he was
+worth hankerin' after, myself, but you've looked kind of peaked and
+thin this spring, so I've just been wonderin'."</p>
+<p>"I never loved George. It was madness, nothing else," returned
+Gabriella, and she really believed it.</p>
+<p>"Well, your thinkin' it madness now don't mean it wan't love ten
+years ago," commented Miss Polly, with the shrewdness of a detached
+and observant spinster.</p>
+<p>"I suppose you're right," admitted Gabriella thoughtfully.
+Though she had not mentioned Arthur, her mind was full of him, and
+she was perfectly convinced that she had loved him all her
+life&mdash;even during her brief period of "madness." It was a
+higher love, she felt, so much higher, indeed, that it had been too
+spiritual, too ethereal, to take root in the earthly soil from
+which her passion for George had sprung. But, if it were not love,
+why was it that every faint stirring of her emotions revived the
+memory so poignantly? Why was it that Miss Polly's sentimental
+interpretation of the doctor's interest evoked the image of
+Arthur?</p>
+<p>"No, I never think of George&mdash;never," she repeated, and her
+fine, pure features assumed an expression of sternness. "But I
+shan't marry again," she went on after a pause in which Miss
+Polly's sewing-machine buzzed cheerfully over its work. "I've had
+enough of marriage to last me for one lifetime."</p>
+<p>The machine stopped, and Miss Polly, snipping the thread as she
+came to the end of a seam, turned squarely to answer. "Don't you be
+too sure about that, honey. You may have had enough to last you for
+ten years or so, but wait till you've turned forty, and if the
+hankerin' for love don't catch you at forty, you may begin to
+expect it somewhere around fifty. Why, just look at that poor
+piano-playin' old maid in there. Wouldn't you think she'd have done
+with it? Well, she ain't&mdash;she ain't, and you ain't either, for
+that matter, I don't care how hard you argue!"</p>
+<p>"There are ten happy years ahead of me anyhow!" rejoined
+Gabriella, with a ringing laugh&mdash;the laugh, as Dr. French had
+once remarked, of a woman who is sound to the core. She had
+triumphed over the past, and was not afraid, she told herself
+valiantly, of the future.</p>
+<p>At the beginning of July the children went with Miss Polly to
+the country, and Gabriella, after seeing them off, turned back
+alone to begin a long summer of economy and drudgery. In order to
+keep Fanny and Archibald out of town she was obliged to deny
+herself every unnecessary comfort&mdash;luxuries she had given up
+long ago&mdash;and to stay at Dinard's, in Madame's place, through
+the worst weeks of the year, when the showroom was deserted except
+for an occasional stray Southerner, and even the six arrogant young
+women were away on vacations. Even if she had had the chance, the
+money for a trip would have been lacking, and to fill Madame's
+conspicuous place gave her, she realized, a certain importance and
+authority in the house. There was opportunity, in a small way, to
+work out some of her ideas of system and order, and there was
+sufficient time to think out a definite and practical plan for the
+future. Her aim from the first had been, not only to catch on, but
+to master the details of the business, and she knew that, in spite
+of Madame's sporadic attempts to keep her in her place, she was
+gradually making herself felt&mdash;she was slowly impressing her
+individual methods upon the establishment. Madame was no longer
+what she once was, and the business was showing it. She was getting
+old, she was growing tired, and her naturally careless methods of
+work were fastening upon her. In the last years she had offered
+less and less resistance to her tendency to let go, to leave loose
+ends ungathered, to allow opportunities to slip out of her grasp,
+to be inexact and unsystematic. There was urgent need of a strong
+hand at Dinard's, if the business was to be kept from running
+gradually downhill, and Gabriella became convinced, as the days
+passed, that hers was the only hand in the house strong enough to
+check the perilous descent to failure. Her plans were made, her
+scheme arranged, but, as Madame was both jealous and suspicious,
+she saw that she must move very cautiously.</p>
+<p>There were times&mdash;since this is history, not
+romance&mdash;when her spirits flagged and her strength failed her.
+The heat of the summer was intense, and the breathless days dragged
+on interminably into the breathless nights. When her work was over
+she would wait until the last of her fellow-workers had gone home,
+and then walk across to Sixth Avenue and take the Harlem elevated
+train for her deserted rooms, which appeared more desolate, more
+ugly than ever because the children were absent. In the lonely
+kitchen&mdash;for Miss Danton and the art students were all
+away&mdash;she would eat her supper of bread and tea, which she
+drank without cream because it was more economical; and then,
+lighting her lamp, she would sew or read until midnight. Sometimes,
+when it was too hot for the lamp, and she found it impossible to
+work by the flickering gas, she would sit by her window and look
+down on the panting humanity in the street below&mdash;on the small
+shopkeepers seated in chairs on the sidewalk, on the little son of
+the Italian fruiterer playing with his dog, on the three babies of
+the Jewish tobacco merchant, sprawling in the door of the tiny shop
+which was pressed like a sardine between a bakery and a dairy. She
+was alone in the apartment, and there were late afternoons when the
+grim emptiness of the rooms seemed haunted, when she shrank back in
+apprehensive foreboding as she turned her key in the lock, when the
+profound silence within preyed on her nerves like an obsession. On
+these days she dreaded to go down the long hail to the kitchen,
+where the fluttering clothes-lines on fire-escapes at the back of
+the next apartment house offered the only suggestion of human
+companionship in the unfriendly wilderness of the city. The sight
+of the children's toys, of Fanny's story books, of Archibald's
+roller skates, moved her to tears once or twice; and when this
+happened she caught herself up sharply and struggled with the
+vague, malignant demon of melancholy.</p>
+<p>"Whatever comes, I must not lose my courage," she told herself
+at such times. "If I lose my courage I shall have nothing
+left."</p>
+<p>Then she would put on her hat, and go down into the street,
+where the unwashed children swarmed like insects over the
+pavements, and the air was as hot and parched as the air of a
+desert. If the mother of the Jewish babies sat on her doorstep, she
+would stop for a little talk with her about the heat and the health
+of the children, and the increasing price of whatever one happened
+to buy in the market, or, perhaps, if the fruit stall still kept
+open, she would ask after the Italian's little boy, and stop to pat
+Archibald's friend, the white mongrel with the black ear. She had
+left her acquaintances when she left Fifty-seventh Street, and,
+with the exception of Judge Crowborough, who telephoned
+occasionally to inquire if she needed assistance, she was without
+friends in New York. Patty wrote often from Paris, but Billy was
+happy with his work, and they said nothing of returning to America.
+In the whole city, outside of Dinard's, she knew only Dr. French,
+and from him she had had no word or sign for several months.</p>
+<p>It was on one of these depressing evenings, while she was
+boiling an egg in the kitchen, that the ringing of the door-bell
+reverberated with an uncanny sound through the empty apartment.
+Spurred by an instinctive fear of a telegram, she ran to open the
+door, and found Dr. French standing in the dimly lighted hail, with
+the negro Robert grinning cheerfully at his back.</p>
+<p>"I am so glad," she said, "so glad," and her voice shook in
+spite of the effort she made.</p>
+<p>"I've been thinking about you all summer," he explained, "and
+the other day I passed you in the street as you were coming from
+work. You are not looking well. Is it the heat?"</p>
+<p>"No, it isn't the heat. I think it is the loneliness. You see it
+is so different not having the children to come back to in the
+afternoon, and when I get lonely I see things in false proportions.
+This apartment has been like a grave to me all summer."</p>
+<p>She led the way into the living-room, where her sewing, a blue
+cambric frock she was scalloping for Fanny, was lying on the chair
+by the window. "Things are all upset. I hope you won't mind," she
+added apologetically while she folded the dress and laid it aside,
+"but nothing seems to matter when I sit here all by myself."</p>
+<p>"What are you doing?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, I work all day. There is really very little to do except
+plan for the autumn, and I like that. Madame is in Paris, and I am
+in charge of the place."</p>
+<p>"And in the evenings?"</p>
+<p>She laughed with recovered spirit. "In the evening I sew and
+read and mope."</p>
+<p>"Well, we must change all that," he said, with a tenderness
+which brought tears to her eyes. "Why can't you come out with me
+somewhere to dinner?"</p>
+<p>Three years ago, when she was first separated from George, she
+would have evaded the suggestion; but to-night, at the end of the
+long summer, she caught eagerly at the small crumb of pleasure.</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'd love to! Only wait until I put out the stove and tidy
+my hair."</p>
+<p>"I want to see what you have to eat," he remarked in his
+whimsical tone, as he followed her back into the kitchen. "Only an
+egg!"</p>
+<p>"It is so hot. I wasn't hungry, but I am now," she replied
+gaily, her thin face flushing to beauty. After her loneliness there
+was a delight in being cared for, in being scolded. "But for the
+mistake I made this might happen to me always," she thought, and
+her mind went back to Arthur.</p>
+<p>When she came out of her room, wearing a fresh linen blouse,
+with her hair smoothly brushed, and her eyes sparkling with
+pleasure, he was gazing abstractedly down into the street, and she
+was obliged to speak twice to him before he heard her and turned.
+At last he broke away, almost with an effort, from his meditation,
+and when he looked at her she saw that there was the mystic gleam
+in his eyes&mdash;the light as of a star shining through
+clouds&mdash;which attracted her so strongly. The thought flashed
+through her vague impressions, "He loves me. I may win him by a
+smile, by a word, by a look," and, for a minute, she rested on the
+certainty with an ineffable sense of peace, of ease, of deep inward
+rejoicing. "Love is everything. There is nothing worth while except
+love," she thought; and love meant to her then, not passion, not
+even romance, but comfort, tenderness, and the companionship that
+sweetens the flat monotony of daily living. Then, beneath the
+beauty and sweetness of the vision, she felt the vein of iron in
+her soul as she had felt it whenever she struggled to escape the
+sterner issues of life. The face of Arthur rose in her memory,
+tender, wistful, protecting, and young with the eternal youth of
+desire. No, love was not for her again. Not for the second time
+would she betray the faith of her Dream.</p>
+<p>They dined at a little French restaurant, where the green-shaded
+lights, festooned with grape leaves, shed a romantic pallor over
+their faces, and the haunting refrains of an Italian love song
+stirred the buried ghosts in their hearts. The doctor made her
+drink a glass of champagne; and after her frugal meals and the
+weakening effect of the heat and the loneliness, the sparkle of the
+wine, mingling with the music and the lights, sent a sudden rush of
+joy through her veins. Her courage came back to her, not in slow
+drops, but in a radiant flood, which pervaded her being. After the
+lonely months there was delight in the clasp of a friend's hand, in
+the glance of a friend's eye, in the sound of a friend's voice
+speaking her name. Life appeared divinely precious at the instant;
+and by life she meant not happiness, not even fulfilment, but the
+very web, the very texture and pattern of experience.</p>
+<p>"You're better already," he said, with a solicitude that was
+more intoxicating than wine to her. "How I wish I'd known all
+summer that you were here. I might have done something to make you
+happy, and now I've missed my chance."</p>
+<p>"I don't think I've ever been so happy as I am to-night," she
+answered simply, and then after a pause she let fall word by word,
+"After all, it takes so little to make me happy."</p>
+<p>"One can tell that to look at you. You have the air of
+happiness. I noticed it the first moment I saw you. And yet you
+have not had an easy life. There must have been terrible hours for
+you in the past."</p>
+<p>"No, I haven't had an easy life, but I love it. I mean I love
+living."</p>
+<p>"I know, I understand," he said softly. "It is the true American
+spirit&mdash;optimism springing out of a struggle. Do you know you
+have always made me think of the American spirit at its
+best&mdash;of its unquenchable youth, its gallantry, its
+self-reliance&mdash;"</p>
+<p>They walked back slowly through the hot, close streets, and sat
+for an hour beside her window-sill on which a rose geranium was
+blooming in an earthen pot. Now and then a breeze entered warily,
+stealing the fragrance from the rose geranium, and rippling the
+dark, straying tendrils of Gabriella's hair. By the dim light she
+saw the wistful pallor of his face, and his blue eyes, with their
+exalted look, which moved her heart to an inexpressible
+tenderness.</p>
+<p>"You are so different from other physicians," she said in
+perplexity, "I can't think of you as one, no matter how hard I try.
+All the others I have known, even old Dr. Walker, were
+materialists."</p>
+<p>"Well, I got in some way. There are fools in every school, I
+suppose. But if it's any comfort to you, they've done their best to
+get rid of me. They don't like my theories." When he talked of his
+work he seemed all at once another man to her, and she discerned
+presently, while she listened to his earnest voice, that he was one
+of the men whose emotional natures are nourished by an abstract and
+impersonal passion&mdash;by the passion for science, for truth in
+its concrete form. After all, he was a mystic only in his eyes.
+Beneath his dreamer's face he was a scientist to the last drop of
+his blood, to the last fibre of his being. "He can't be hurt deeply
+through the heart," she thought; "only through the mind."</p>
+<p>"I've wondered about you all summer," he repeated presently,
+"and yet I kept away&mdash;partly, I suppose, because I was
+thinking too much of you."</p>
+<p>At his change of tone from the impersonal to the tender all the
+frozen self-pity in her heart seemed to melt suddenly, threatening
+in its overflow the very foundations of her philosophy. The
+temptation to yield utterly, to rest for a while not on her
+strength, but on his, assailed her with the swiftness and the
+violence of a spiritual revulsion. For an instant she surrendered
+to the uncontrollable force of this desire; then she drew quickly
+back while the world about her&mdash;the room, the window, the bare
+skeleton of the elevated road, the street, and even the rose
+geranium blooming on the sill&mdash;became as remote and impalpable
+as a phantom.</p>
+<p>"It has been a long summer," she heard herself saying from a
+distance in a thin and colourless voice.</p>
+<p>"And you suffered?"</p>
+<p>"Sometimes, but I'm interested in my work, and I've been
+thinking and planning all summer."</p>
+<p>For a moment he was silent, and though she did not look at him,
+she could feel his intense gaze on her face. The breeze, scented
+with rose geranium, touched her forehead like the healing and
+delicate stroke of his fingers.</p>
+<p>"You are still so young, so vital, not to have something else in
+your life," he went on presently in a voice so charged with feeling
+that her eyes filled while she listened to it.</p>
+<p>"I have had love, and I have my children."</p>
+<p>"But you will love again? You will marry again some day?"</p>
+<p>She shook her head, hearing, above the street cries and the
+muffled rumble of the elevated train, a voice that said: "I shall
+never give you up, Gabriella!" To her weakened nerves there
+appeared, with the vividness of an hallucination, the memory of
+Arthur as he had looked in her school-days when she had first loved
+him; and in this hallucination she saw him, not as he was in
+reality, but divinely glorified and enkindled by the light her
+imagination had created around him.</p>
+<p>"No, I shall never love again, I shall never love again," she
+answered at last, while a feeling of exultation surged through
+her.</p>
+<p>"You mean," his voice shook a little, "that your husband still
+holds you?"</p>
+<p>"My husband? No, I never think of my husband."</p>
+<p>"Is there some one else?"</p>
+<p>Before answering she looked up at him, and by his face she knew
+that her reply would cost her his friendship. She wanted his
+friendship&mdash;at the moment she felt that she would gladly give
+a year of her life for it. It meant companionship instead of
+loneliness, it meant plenty instead of famine. Yet only for an
+instant, only while she stopped to draw breath, did she hesitate.
+"Women must learn to be honourable," she found herself thinking
+suddenly with an extraordinary intensity.</p>
+<p>"Yes, there is some one else&mdash;there has always been some
+one else," she said, driven on by an impulsive desire for full
+confession, for absolute candour. "When I met George I was engaged
+to another man, and I have loved that man all my life."</p>
+<p>She had confessed all, she told herself; and the remarkable part
+was that she really believed her confession&mdash;she was honestly
+convinced that she had spoken only the truth. Her soul, like the
+soul of Cousin Jimmy, sheltered a romantic strain which demanded
+that one supreme illusion should endure amid a world of
+disillusionment. Because she was obliged to believe in something or
+die, she had built her imperishable Dream on the flame-swept ruins
+of her happiness.</p>
+<p>"He must be a big man if he can fill a life like yours," said
+Dr. French.</p>
+<p>"I don't know why I told you," she faltered; "I have never told
+any one else. It is my secret."</p>
+<p>"Well, it is safe with me. Don't be afraid."</p>
+<p>For the few minutes before he rose to go they talked
+indifferently of other things. She had lost him, she knew, and
+while she held his hand at parting, she felt a sharp regret for
+what was passing out of her life&mdash;for the one chance of love,
+of peace, of a tranquil and commonplace happiness. But beneath the
+regret there was a hidden spring of joy in her heart. At the
+instant of trial she had found strength to be true to her
+Dream.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_Va" id="CHAPTER_Va"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<h3>SUCCESS</h3>
+<p>"I declare you're real pretty to-night, honey," remarked Miss
+Polly from the floor, where she knelt pinning up the hem of a black
+serge skirt she was making for Gabriella. "Some days you're
+downright plain, and then you flame out just like a lamp. Nobody
+would ever think to look at you that you'd be thirty-seven years
+old to-morrow." For it was the evening before Gabriella's birthday,
+and she was at the end of her thirty-sixth year.</p>
+<p>"I feel young," she answered brightly, "and I feel happy. The
+children are well, and I've had all the success I could ask. Some
+day I'm going to own Madame's business, Miss Polly."</p>
+<p>"I reckon she's gettin' mighty old, ain't she?"</p>
+<p>"She gave up the work years ago, and I believe she'd be glad to
+sell out to me to-morrow if I had the money.</p>
+<p>"I wish you had. It would be nice for you to be at the head, now
+wouldn't it?" rejoined Miss Polly, speaking with difficulty through
+a mouthful of pins.</p>
+<p>"Yes, I wish I had, but I've thought and thought, and I don't
+see how I could borrow enough. I've sometimes thought of asking
+Judge Crowborough to invest some money in the business. It would be
+investing, the returns are so good."</p>
+<p>"He'd do it in a minute, I expect. He always set a lot of store
+by you, didn't he?"</p>
+<p>"He used to, but somehow I hate to ask favours."</p>
+<p>"You were always a heap too proud. Don't you remember how you'd
+never eat the other children's cake when you were a child unless
+you had some of your own to offer 'em?"</p>
+<p>Gabriella laughed. "No, I don't remember, but it sounds like me.
+I was horrid."</p>
+<p>"There was always a hard streak somewhere down in you, and you
+don't mind my sayin' that you ain't gettin' any softer, Gabriella.
+There are times now when your mouth gets a set look like your Aunt
+Becky Bollingbroke's. You don't recollect her, I 'spose, but she
+never married."</p>
+<p>"Well, I married," Gabriella flippantly reminded her; "so it
+can't be that."</p>
+<p>Though the hard work of the last ten years had left its visible
+mark upon her, and she looked a little older, a little tired, a
+little worn, experience had added a rare spiritual beauty to her
+face, and she was far handsomer than she had been at twenty. The
+rich sprinkling of silver in the heavy waves of hair over her ears
+framed the firm pale oval of her face with a poetic and mysterious
+darkness, and gave depth and softness to her brilliant eyes. For
+the struggle, which had stolen her first freshness and left faintly
+perceptible lines in her expressive face, had not robbed her of the
+eyes and the heart of a girl.</p>
+<p>"I don't count George, somehow," retorted Miss Polly. "That
+wan't like marryin' a real man, you know, and, when all's said and
+done, a lone woman gets mighty hard and dried up."</p>
+<p>"But I can't marry when there's nobody to marry me," laughed
+Gabriella. "I haven't seen a man for seven years except in the
+street or occasionally in the shop. Men have either passed me by
+without seeing me or they have wanted to sell me something."</p>
+<p>At the sound of the children's voices she slipped out of the
+serge skirt, and began hurriedly fastening the old black silk gown
+she wore at dinner. Through all the years of toil and self-denial
+she had preserved a certain formality of living, a gracious ease of
+manner, which she kept for the evenings with her children. Cares
+were thrust away then, to be taken up again as soon as Fanny and
+Archibald were in bed, and no matter how hard the day had been, she
+was always cheerful, always gay and light-hearted for the dinner
+hour by the fireside. Not often had she been too poor to buy a
+handful of flowers for the table, and never once, except during her
+illness, had she come home too tired to change to the black silk
+gown, which she had turned and made from bishop sleeves to small
+ones, and from "dropped" shoulders to high ones, for the last six
+or seven years. The damask on the table was darned and mended, but
+it was always spotlessly fresh. In winter the fire was made up
+brightly in the evenings; in summer the room was deliciously
+scented with rose geranium and heliotrope from the box in the
+window. For ten years she had not had a holiday; she had worked
+harder than a man, harder than any servant, for she had worked from
+dawn until midnight; but into her hard life she had instilled a
+quality of soul which had enabled her to endure the strain without
+breaking. "No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the
+way you take it," she had said to herself in the beginning; and
+remembering always that courage is one of the eternal virtues, she
+had disciplined her mind as well as her body to firmness and
+elasticity of fibre. "Nobody, except myself, is ever going to make
+me happy," she would repeat over and over again when the day was
+wearying and the work heavy. "I want to be happy. I have a right to
+be happy, but it depends on myself."</p>
+<p>This indestructible belief in her "right to happiness" supported
+her through the hardest hours of her life, and diffused an
+invigorating atmosphere not only in her home, but even in her long
+working hours at Dinard's. The children grew and strengthened in
+its bracing air; Miss Polly quickly responded to it; the women in
+the workroom breathed it in as if it were the secret of health, and
+even Madame showed occasional signs that she was not entirely
+impervious to its vital and joyous influence. It was not always
+easy for Gabriella to keep the light in her eyes and the faith in
+her heart. There were days when both seemed to fail her, when, with
+aching body and depressed mind, she felt that she could not look
+beyond the immediate suffering minute, when she told herself
+despairingly that she had lost everything in losing her courage.
+But bad days passed as irrevocably as good ones; and left her, when
+they were over, with her strong soul unshaken, and her philosophy
+of happiness still undestroyed. Like other human beings, she found
+that her moods were largely controlled by her physical health.</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother dear, I went down to meet you, and I missed you by
+just five minutes," said Fanny, kissing her cheek. "I wanted you to
+go with me to look at the house in London Terrace. Miss Polly and I
+are crazy about it."</p>
+<p>"I know," said Gabriella tenderly, while she feasted her eyes on
+her daughter.</p>
+<p>The old apartment house in which they had spent the last ten
+years would be torn down in the summer, and Fanny and Miss Folly
+had devoted the past week to an exhaustive hunt for a home.</p>
+<p>"Then you'll look at it to-morrow, won't you, mother?" urged
+Fanny. "We can get the upper rooms and they are larger than these.
+There is a little yard in front, with an elm tree and a rose-bush,
+and plenty of space for flowers."</p>
+<p>"I can't recall the house exactly," said Gabriella thoughtfully.
+"It must be in a row, isn't it? I have a vague recollection of some
+old houses, with fronts of stuccoed pilasters, and rather nice
+yards. But West Twenty-third Street is too far away, dear. I don't
+like the neighbourhood. Wouldn't you rather be in Park Avenue?" Her
+ignorance of New York, though she had lived there seventeen years,
+amazed Fanny, who was a true child of the city.</p>
+<p>"Carlie Herndon lives in that row, mother"&mdash;Carlie Herndon,
+the daughter of a distinguished and unpopular novelist, was Fanny's
+best friend for the moment&mdash;"and I could always go out with
+her in the evening."</p>
+<p>"It isn't the location I should have liked, Fanny," said
+Gabriella, weakly yielding, as she always yielded to her daughter;
+"but if you really fancy the house, I'll try to look at it on my
+way home to-morrow. One has to be very careful about the plumbing
+in these old houses. I insist upon good plumbing. After that, you
+may have what you want."</p>
+<p>"Oh, it has brand new bathrooms, Mrs. Mallon told me so, and
+she's lived there until a year ago. And if you had only seen the
+new apartments we looked at, mother, nothing on the East Side that
+would have held us under twenty-five hundred a year, and even at
+that the bedrooms were no bigger than closets, and you'd have to
+have electric light all day in the bathroom. We searched
+everywhere, didn't we, Miss Polly?"</p>
+<p>"West Twenty-third Street is mighty far out of the way, honey,"
+observed Miss Polly cautiously.</p>
+<p>"Oh, but I'd have Carlie, and she's my best friend," persisted
+Fanny, with caressing obstinacy.</p>
+<p>"Well, we'll see, precious," said Gabriella, while she assured
+herself that if Fanny cost her every penny she had, at least the
+child was worth what she spent on her. To a superficial observer,
+Fanny would probably have appeared merely an attractive girl, of
+Jane's willowy type, with something of Jane's trite prettiness of
+feature; but to Gabriella, who suffered from a maternal obliquity
+of vision, she seemed both brilliant and beautiful. Of course she
+was selfish, but this selfishness, as long as it was clothed in her
+youth and loveliness, was as inoffensive as the playfulness of a
+kitten. Her face was round and shallow, with exquisite colouring
+which veiled the flatness and lack of character in her features.
+Above her azure eyes her hair, which was not plentiful, but fine
+and soft, and as yellow as ripe corn, broke in a shining mist over
+her forehead. All her life, by being what she was, she had got,
+without effort, everything that she wanted. She had got dolls when
+she wanted dolls; she had got Miss Ludwell's expensive school when
+she wanted an expensive private school; she would get the house in
+West Twenty-third Street to-morrow, and when she began to want
+love, she would get it as easily and as undeservedly as she got
+everything else. She was very expensive, but, like the flowers on
+the table and the spotless damask and the lace in Gabriella's
+sleeves, she was one of her mother's luxuries to be paid for by
+additional hours of work and thought.</p>
+<p>"Wasn't Archibald with you?" inquired Gabriella, while she
+pushed the chairs into place and tidied the room.</p>
+<p>"He stopped at the library. There's his ring now. I'll open the
+door."</p>
+<p>She ran out, and Gabriella, with the tablecloth in her hand,
+stood waiting for Archibald to enter. In her eager expectancy, in
+the wistful brightness of her eyes, in the tender quivering of her
+lips, she was like a girl who is awaiting a lover. Every evening,
+after her day's work, she greeted her son with the same passionate
+tenderness. Never had it lessened, never, even when she was most
+discouraged, had she failed to summon her strength and her
+sweetness for this beatific end to the day. For Archibald was more
+than a son to her. As he grew older their characters became more
+perfectly adjusted, and the rare bond of a deep mental sympathy
+held them together. Fanny loved her as a spoiled child loves the
+dispenser of its happiness; but in Archibald's devotion there was
+something of the worship of a man for an ideal.</p>
+<p>Flushed and hungry, the boy came in, and after kissing her
+hurriedly, ran off to wash his face and hands before dinner. When
+he came back the table was laid, with a bunch of lilacs in a cut
+glass vase over the darned spot in the tablecloth, and Miss Polly
+was bringing in the old-fashioned soup tureen, which had belonged
+to Gabriella's maternal grandmother.</p>
+<p>"If you don't sit right straight down everything will be cold,"
+said Miss Polly severely, for this was her customary manner of
+announcing dinner. Every night for ten years she had threatened
+them with a cold dinner while she served them a hot one.</p>
+<p>With a child on either side of her, Gabriella sat down, and
+ladled the soup out of the old china tureen. It was her consecrated
+hour&mdash;the single hour of her toiling day that she dedicated to
+personal happiness; and because it was her hour, her life had
+gradually centred about it as if it were the divine point of her
+universe&mdash;the pivot upon which her whole world revolved.
+Nothing harsh, nothing sordid, nothing sad, ever touched the sacred
+precincts of her twilight hour with her children.</p>
+<p>"I can beat any boy at school running, mother," said Archibald,
+watching his plate of soup hungrily as it travelled toward him. "If
+my eyes won't let me be captain of a football team, I'm going to
+become the champion runner in America. I bet I can, if I try."</p>
+<p>"I shouldn't wonder, dear. It's good for you, too. I never saw
+you look better."</p>
+<p>He was a tall, thin boy, with a muscular figure, and thick brown
+hair, which was always rumpled. Through his ugly spectacles his
+eyes showed large, dark, and as beautifully soft as a girl's. His
+mind was remarkably keen and active, and there was in his carriage
+something of Gabriella's capable and commanding air, as if, like
+her, he embodied those qualities which compel acknowledgment.
+Though she had never admitted it even to herself, he was her
+favourite child.</p>
+<p>When dinner was over she had the children to herself&mdash;to
+the gracious, unhurried self she gave them&mdash;until ten o'clock.
+Then their books were put away, and after she had kissed them
+good-night, and tucked the covers about them, she came back to the
+living-room, and sat down to her sewing with Miss Polly. The ease
+and cheerfulness dropped from her at the approach of midnight, and
+while the two women bent over their needles they talked of their
+anxieties, and planned innumerable and intricate ways of
+economy.</p>
+<p>"Fanny's school costs so much, and, of course, she must have
+clothes. All the other girls dress so expensively."</p>
+<p>"You spend three times as much on her as you do on
+Archibald."</p>
+<p>"I know," her voice melted to the mother note, "but Archibald is
+different. He is a man, and he will make his way in the world.
+Then, too, his expenses will be trebled next year when he goes off
+to school, and after that, of course, will come college. I don't
+believe anything or anybody can keep Archibald back," she went on
+proudly. "Do you know he talks already of going to work in a
+shipping office in order to help me?"</p>
+<p>"It's a pity about his eyes."</p>
+<p>"There's nothing wrong except near-sightedness, but he'll have
+to wear glasses all his life."</p>
+<p>For a minute Miss Polly stitched almost furiously, while her
+small weatherbeaten face, with its grotesque features, was visited
+by an illumination that softened and ennobled its ugliness. From
+living entirely in the lives of others, she had attained the
+spiritual serenity and detachment of a saint as well as the saint's
+immunity from the intenser personal forms of suffering. Long habit
+had accustomed her to think of herself only in connection with
+somebody's need of her, and beyond this she hardly appeared as an
+individual existence even in her own secret reflections. As far as
+it is possible to achieve absolute unselfishness in a world planned
+upon egoistic principles Miss Polly had achieved it; and the result
+was that she was almost perfectly happy.</p>
+<p>"Fanny seems right set on goin' down to Twenty-third Street,
+don't she?" she inquired, after an interval of musing.</p>
+<p>"It's all because Carlie lives in the row, and by next year,
+after we've had all the trouble of moving, she'll find another
+bosom friend and want to go to Park Avenue."</p>
+<p>"It's a real comfortable sort of house, more like Richmond than
+New York, and I reckon we could get flowers to grow there just
+about as well as they did in Hill Street."</p>
+<p>"I don't like having those O'Haras on the lower floor. If they
+are loud and common, it might be very disagreeable."</p>
+<p>"There ain't but one, a man, and he's hardly ever there, the
+caretaker's wife told me. She said he was almost always in the
+West, and anyway his lease is up next year, and he thinks he'll
+give up his rooms. She says he has made piles of money in mines
+somewhere out West, and he only keeps those rooms because they used
+to belong to a man who picked him out of the street when he was a
+little boy selling newspapers. That caretaker's wife seems to be a
+mighty kind-hearted creature, but she talks as if she was never
+goin' to stop."</p>
+<p>"I think I could afford to take an apartment in Park Avenue,"
+returned Gabriella, dismissing the name of O'Hara; "but, of course,
+I want to save as much as I can in order to invest in the business.
+If it wasn't for that, I could stop scraping and pinching. I can't
+bear, though, to think of leaving nothing for the children when I
+die."</p>
+<p>"Go away from here, honey. The idea of your talkin' about dyin'!
+You look healthier than you ever did in your life, only you're
+gettin' that set look again about your mouth."</p>
+<p>"I wonder if I'm growing hard," said Gabriella, stopping to
+glance in the mirror. "I suppose that's the problem of life for the
+working woman&mdash;not to grow hard." In some ways, she realized,
+Miss Polly was right. She was a handsome woman, as Madame
+occasionally informed her; but she was no longer shrinking, she was
+no longer alluringly feminine. To dress smartly for Dinard's was a
+part of her work, and she had grown quite indifferent to having men
+turn and stare after her in the street or when she entered a
+restaurant. But the men who stared never spoke to her as they did
+to Fanny when she was alone. They regarded her admiringly, but she
+aroused neither disrespect nor the protective instinct in their
+minds. Only when she smiled her face grew as young as her eyes, and
+with the powdering of silver on her hair, gave her a look of
+radiance and charm; but at other times, when she was grave or
+preoccupied with the management of Dinard's, the "set look" that
+Miss Polly dreaded hardened her mouth.</p>
+<p>"I wish you could go easier now for a while," resumed the little
+seamstress, after a pause which she had filled with vague
+speculations about Gabriella's sentimental prospects. "I just hate
+like anything to see you wearing yourself out. Of course I'd like
+you to own part of the business, and I can't help thinkin' that the
+judge could get you the money as easy as not. It ain't as if you
+couldn't pay him the interest regular, is it?" she pursued with the
+financial helplessness of a woman who has never thought in terms of
+figures. "You couldn't be doin' any better, could you? There ain't
+anybody can run the business as well as you do, I don't care who
+'tis."</p>
+<p>"I sometimes think," returned Gabriella deliberately, while she
+draped a lace bertha on a white silk frock she was making for
+Fanny, "that I will try to borrow the money."</p>
+<p>"It couldn't hurt, could it?"</p>
+<p>"No, I don't suppose it could hurt."</p>
+<p>Her eyes were on the lace, which she was adjusting over the
+shoulder, and Miss Polly followed her gaze with a look which was
+not entirely approving.</p>
+<p>"There ain't a bit of sense in your wearin' yourself out over
+that child," said the seamstress presently, with so sharp an accent
+that Gabriella glanced up quickly from her work. "It was just the
+way Mrs. Spencer started Florrie, and it ain't right."</p>
+<p>"Florrie!" exclaimed Gabriella, startled, and she added slowly,
+"I wonder what has become of her? I haven't thought of her for
+years."</p>
+<p>"It was a mean trick she played you, Gabriella. I'd never have
+believed it of Florrie if I hadn't been there to see it with my own
+eyes."</p>
+<p>"Yes, it was mean," assented Gabriella, but there was no anger
+in her voice. She had left the past so far behind her that its
+disappointments and its cruelties had become as dim and shadowy to
+her imagination as if they had been phantoms of the mind instead of
+actual events through which she had lived.</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm glad she didn't spoil your life for you, honey."</p>
+<p>"No, she didn't spoil my life. Don't I look happy? And Madame
+told me to-day that my figure was distinguished. Now, when a
+woman's life is spoiled her figure and her complexion are the first
+things to show it."</p>
+<p>"Of course you ain't gettin' slouchy, I don't mean anything like
+that. But I hate to see you workin' your fingers to the bone and
+bringin' lines around your eyes when you ought to be taken care of.
+I don't hold with women workin' unless they're obliged to."</p>
+<p>"But I'm obliged to. How on earth could I take care of the
+children if I didn't work?"</p>
+<p>For a minute there was an austere silence while Miss Polly
+reflected grimly that Gabriella Mary&mdash;she thought of her as
+"Gabriella Mary" in moments of disapprobation"&mdash;was gettin'
+almost as set as her ma."</p>
+<p>"You could marry," she said flatly at last, stopping to press
+down the hem she had turned with the blunted nail of her thumb. "Of
+course your ma would be dead against it, but there ain't any reason
+in the world why you shouldn't go back home and marry Arthur
+Peyton, as you ought to have done seventeen years ago."</p>
+<p>Though Gabriella laughed in reply, there was no merriment in the
+sound, and a look of sadness crept into the eyes she turned away
+from the sharp gaze of the little seamstress.</p>
+<p>"You've forgotten that I haven't seen him for seventeen years,"
+she answered.</p>
+<p>"That don't make any difference in his sort, and you know it. He
+ain't ever married anybody else, and he ain't goin' to. The
+faithfulness that ought to be spread over the whole sex gets stored
+up in a few, and he's one of 'em."</p>
+<p>"He has never written to me. No, he must have got over it,"
+responded Gabriella, with an impassioned emphasis, "and, besides,
+even if he cared, I don't want to marry again. My children are
+enough for me."</p>
+<p>"It won't look that way next year when both the children are
+away at school, and when they once break away from your apron
+strings they're the sort that will go the way they want to and look
+out for their own happiness. You won't have much of Archibald while
+he's at school and college, and Fanny will marry befo' she's twenty
+just as sure as you live. Why, she's already got her head full of
+beaux. Have you noticed that picture of an actor she keeps on her
+bureau?"</p>
+<p>"Yes" admitted Gabriella anxiously, "I've noticed it, but when I
+asked her about it, she only laughed."</p>
+<p>After this the conversation dropped, and the two women put away
+their work for the might; but hours later, while Miss Polly lay in
+her hard little bed wondering if it would be possible to "fix"
+things between Gabriella and Arthur, the stern heroine of her
+romance wept a few tender tears on her pillow.</p>
+<p>In the morning, with the tears still ready to spring at a touch,
+Gabriella read a letter from her mother, which he had found, beside
+the baker's rolls, at the door.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p><i>Richmond, Thursday</i>.</p>
+<p>DEAR CHILD:</p>
+<p>As the others are all out to-night, and I have finished the mat
+I was crocheting, I thought I would send you a letter to reach you
+on your birthday instead of the telegram from the family. I am so
+thankful to hear that you keep well and happy and that Fanny has
+quite recovered from her cold. It was thoughtful of you to send the
+check, and I shall find it very useful, though Jane refuses to let
+me pay any board since Charley has inherited such a large income
+from his brother Tom. I sent you all the papers about the dreadful
+accident on the River road in which poor Tom and his wife were
+killed, but you haven't heard yet that Tom left his new house in
+Monument Avenue&mdash;they had only just moved into it&mdash;and
+almost all of his property to Charley. Of course, this will make a
+great difference in our manner of living; but just now none of us
+can think of anything except poor Tom and Gertrude, to whom we were
+all so deeply attached. No amount of money could in any way soften
+the blow of their loss, and the accident has given me such a horror
+of automobiles, though both Charley and Jane tell me this is very
+foolish.</p>
+<p>To turn to more cheerful subjects, I can't begin to tell you how
+much the last photograph of Fanny has been admired. She is such a
+lovely girl, almost as pretty, we think, as Jane used to be when
+she first grew up, and I'm sure there could be no higher praise
+than that. You pleased me by saying that Archibald is like his
+grandfather, even if he isn't so handsome, and that he has a strong
+character. Good looks aren't nearly so important in a man as they
+are in a woman, and, you know, I don't think that men are as
+handsome to-day as they used to be when I was a girl. They have
+lost something&mdash;I can't make out just what it is.</p>
+<p>Charley and Jane are at the Prohibition meeting. It is the first
+time they have gone anywhere since the accident, but we all felt
+that Tom and Gertrude would have wanted them to go for the sake of
+the cause. I don't suppose you, would recognize Charley now if you
+were to meet him. He is entirely changed, and I believe our new
+minister is the reason for it, though Jane likes to think that her
+influence reclaimed him. But, you remember, neither you nor I ever
+thought that Jane went about reforming Charley in the right way;
+and even now, though I wouldn't hurt dear Jane's feelings for
+anything in the world, I am afraid she nags Charley and the
+children too much. Of course, she means it for the best. No one
+could look at the dear child without realizing what a beautiful
+character she is.</p>
+<p>But the change in Charley is really remarkable, and he won't
+allow a drop of alcohol to come into the house&mdash;not even as
+medicine. I can't help feeling sorry for poor old Uncle
+Meriweather, who despises grape juice and misses his mint julep
+when he comes to dine on Sunday; but Charley forbids Jane to make
+him a julep; and I suppose he is right since he says it is a matter
+of principle. Even Jane, however, thinks dear Charley is going a
+little too far when he refuses to let me have the sherry and egg
+the doctor ordered. However, I tell Jane that, since Charley feels
+so strongly about my taking it, she must not try to persuade him
+against his convictions. Dr. Darrow doesn't know that I stopped the
+sherry when Charley found out I was buying it. Perhaps the plain
+eggs will do me quite as much good. Anyhow, I wouldn't let my
+health stand in the way of Charley's salvation.</p>
+<p>Margaret has gone out to a concert, and you would never guess
+who came to take her. I said to her when she was starting, "Well,
+I'm going to sit straight down and write your Aunt Gabriella that
+you've gone out with her old sweetheart." But doesn't it make you
+realize how time flies when you think of Arthur Peyton's paying
+attention to Jane's daughter? Of course, it isn't anything
+serious&mdash;everybody knows that he has never recovered from his
+feeling for you&mdash;but last winter he took Margaret to two
+germans and to any number of plays. I believe Jane would be really
+pleased if he were to take a fancy to Margaret, but I don't think
+there is the faintest chance of it, for his Cousin Lizzie told me
+last winter that she couldn't mention your name in his presence.
+She says his faithfulness is perfectly beautiful, and she ought to
+know for she has lived with him ever since his mother's death. Of
+course, he has never accomplished very much in his profession.
+Chancy says all the men downtown look upon him as a failure; but,
+then, he is such a perfect gentleman, and, as I tell Charley and
+Jane, one can't have everything. How different your life would have
+been, my dear daughter, if you had listened to the prayers of your
+mother, and married a gentle Christian character like Arthur
+Peyton.</p>
+<p>But I mustn't let my thoughts run away with me. Of course, even
+if your heart had not been broken, it would be impossible for you
+to think of another man as long as your husband is living. No pure
+woman could do that, and when people tell me about divorced women
+who remarry, I always maintain that they are not what my mother and
+I would call "pure women." I would rather think of you nursing your
+broken heart forever in solitude than that you should put such a
+blot upon your character and the name of the Carrs. Of course, you
+were right to divorce George after he forsook you for
+Florrie&mdash;even his mother tells everybody that you were
+right&mdash;but the thought of a second marriage would, I know, be
+intolerable to your refined and sensitive nature. After all, he is
+still your husband in the sight of God, and I said this to Miss
+Lizzie Peyton when we were talking of Arthur.</p>
+<p>It is almost eleven o'clock, and I must stop and undress. Kiss
+the dear children, and remember me kindly to Miss Polly.</p>
+<p>Your loving MOTHER.</p>
+</div>
+<p>As she refolded the letter Gabriella stood for an instant with
+her dreaming gaze on the delicate Italian handwriting on the
+envelope.</p>
+<p>"It's amazing how wide the gulf is between the generations," she
+thought, not without humour. "I believe mother thinks of George
+oftener than I do, and I'd marry Arthur to-morrow if he wanted me
+to&mdash;except for the children."</p>
+<p>Then, as Archibald rushed into the room, she caught him in her
+arms, and held him hungrily to her bosom.</p>
+<p>"My darling, you want to keep your mother, don't you?"</p>
+<p>"I jolly well do. What's the trouble, mother? I believe it's all
+that sitting up over Fanny's old dresses. Why don't you make
+something pretty for yourself?"</p>
+<p>"She has to have things, and you love me just as well without
+them, don't you?"</p>
+<p>"But I want you to have them, too. I like you to look pretty,
+and you are pretty."</p>
+<p>"Then I can look pretty in plain clothes, can't I?"</p>
+<p>"I tell you what I am going to do," he hesitated a minute,
+knitting his heavy brows over his spectacles, which looked so odd
+on a boy. "Next summer when school is over I'm going to work and
+make some money so you can have a velvet dress in the
+autumn&mdash;a black velvet dress with lace on it&mdash;lots of
+lace&mdash;and a hat with feathers."</p>
+<p>"You foolish boy!" laughed Gabriella. "Do you think for an
+instant I'd let you?" Her voice was gay, but when he had broken
+away from her clasp, and was racing along the hail for his school
+books, she turned aside to wipe the tears from her eyes.</p>
+<p>"It's wrong, but I love, him more than I love Fanny," she said.
+"I love him more than all the rest of the world.".</p>
+<p>An hour later, sitting beside an Italian labourer in an elevated
+train, she tried hard to keep her mind on the day's work and on the
+morning paper, which she held open before her&mdash;for in adopting
+a business life she had adopted instinctively a man's businesslike
+habits. A subtle distinction divided her from the over-dressed
+shopgirls around her as completely as her sex separated her from
+the portly masculine breadwinner in the opposite seat. Her tailored
+suit of black serge, with its immaculate white collar and cuffs,
+had an air of charming simplicity, and the cameolike outline of her
+features against the luminous background of the window-pane was the
+aristocratic racial outline of the Carrs. In the whirlpool of
+modern business she still preserved the finer attributes which
+Nature had bred in her race. The bitter sweetness of the mother's
+inheritance, grafted on the hardy stock of the Carr character, had
+flavoured without weakening the daughter's spirit, and, though few
+of the men in the train glanced in the direction of Gabriella, the
+few who noticed her in her corner surmised by intuition that she
+possessed not only the manner, but the heart of a lady. She was not
+particularly handsome, not particularly young, and her charm was
+scarcely the kind to flash like a lantern before the eye of the
+beholder. To the portly breadwinner she was probably a nice-looking
+American business woman, nothing more; to the Italian labourer she
+was, doubtless, a lady with a pleasant face, who would be polite if
+you asked her a question; and to the other passengers she must have
+appeared merely a woman reading her newspaper on her way down to
+work. Her primal qualities of force, restraint, and capability were
+the last things these superficial observers would have thought of;
+and yet it was by these qualities that she must succeed or fail in
+her struggle for life.</p>
+<p>When she reached Dinard's she found Miss Smith, the only woman
+in Madame's employ who was ever punctual, ill-humouredly poking the
+spring hats out of the cases. Miss Smith, who excelled in the
+cardinal virtues, manifested at times a few of those minor
+frailties by which the cardinal virtues are not infrequently
+attended. Her one pronounced fault was a bad temper, and on this
+particular morning that fault was conspicuous. As she carried the
+hats from the cases to the window, which she was decorating with
+the festive millinery of the spring, she looked as if she were
+resisting an impulse to throw Madame's choicest confections at the
+jovial figure of the traffic policeman. Gabriella, who was used to
+what she called the "peculiarities" of the forewoman, said "good
+morning" with her bright amiability, and hurried back to the dim
+regions where she changed from her street suit to the picturesque
+French gown which she wore in the showroom. When she came out again
+Miss Smith had finished ornamenting the white pegs in the window,
+and was vigorously upbraiding a messenger boy who had delivered a
+parcel at the wrong door.</p>
+<p>"You are always so prompt," remarked Gabriella cheerfully, as
+she arranged the hats in the front room. Her rule of business
+conduct was simple, and consisted chiefly of the precept that
+whatever happened she must keep her temper. Never once, never even
+in Madame's most trying moments, had she permitted herself to
+appear angry, and her strict adherence to this resolution had
+established her in an enviable position of authority. Obeying
+unconsciously some inherited strain of prudence in her nature, she
+had sacrificed her temper on the solid altar of business
+expediency.</p>
+<p>"Somebody has to be on time, I guess," replied Miss Smith
+snappishly. "I'd like to know who would be here if I wasn't?"</p>
+<p>She was a thin, soured, ugly little woman, with an extraordinary
+capacity for work, and an excess of nervous vitality bordering on
+hysteria. Gabriella, who knew something of her story, was aware of
+the self-sacrificing goodness of her private life, and secure in
+her own unclouded cheerfulness, could afford to smile tolerantly at
+the waspish sting.</p>
+<p>"It's a pity we can't get more system here," she observed, for
+Miss Smith, she knew, was no tale-bearer. "The waste of time and
+misdirected energy are appalling. The business would be worth three
+times as much to anybody who could give her whole attention to it,
+but, as Madame is forever telling us, her health keeps her from
+really overlooking things."</p>
+<p>"I wonder why she doesn't sell out?" asked Miss Smith, suddenly
+good-humoured and interested. "There's a lot in it for the right
+person, and it isn't in nature that she can hold on much longer. If
+I could find the money, I'd buy it and cut down expenses until I
+made a big profit. It would be easy enough." Then she added, while
+she slammed the ivory-tinted door of a case: "I wish you could run
+the house, Mrs. Carr. You are so pleasant to work with. Nothing
+ever seems to depress you."</p>
+<p>"It would be nice, wouldn't it?" responded Gabriella promptly,
+and as she said the words, she decided that she would try to borrow
+the money from Judge Crowborough. For three months she had been
+struggling to bring herself to the point of asking his
+help&mdash;or at least his advice&mdash;and now, in a flash,
+without argument or discussion, she had settled the question. "It's
+a simple business proposition&mdash;a promising investment," she
+thought. "I'll ask him to get the money for me at a fair
+interest&mdash;to get me enough anyhow to give me control of the
+business. The worst he can do is to refuse," she concluded, with a
+kind of forlorn optimism; "at least he can't kill me."</p>
+<p>Making a hurried excuse, she went back to the telephone, and
+calling up the judge, asked for an appointment in his office at
+five o'clock. From his surprised response she inferred his
+curiosity, and from his hearty acquiescence, she gathered that his
+surprise was not an unpleasant one. "At five o'clock, then. It is
+so good of you. There is a little matter of business. Yes, I know
+how kind you are, and of course your advice is invaluable. I can't
+think of anybody else on earth I can ask. Oh, thank you. Yes, at
+five o'clock. I shan't be late and I promise to keep you but a
+minute. Good-bye. What? Oh, yes, I'll come straight from
+Dinard's."</p>
+<p>His voice, eager and friendly over the telephone, had given her
+confidence, and when she went back to the showroom, where the
+saleswomen were assembling, she was already planning the
+interview.</p>
+<p>At eleven o'clock Madame, who never arrived earlier, was seen
+descending from a hansom, and a few minutes later she waddled,
+wheezing, asthmatic, and infirm of joints, through the ivory and
+gold doorway. Like some fantastically garlanded Oriental goddess of
+death, her rouged and powdered face nodded grotesquely beneath the
+flowery wreath on her hat. The indestructible youth of her spirit,
+struggling valiantly against the inert weight of the flesh, had
+squeezed her enormous figure into the curveless stays of the
+period, and had painted into some ghastly semblance of health the
+wrinkled skin of her cheeks. For underneath the decaying mockery of
+Madame's body, the indomitable soul of Madame still fought the
+everlasting battle of mind against matter, of the immaterial
+against the material elements.</p>
+<p>"There was no use my trying to get here any sooner," she began
+in an apologetic tone when she was face to face with Gabriella
+behind the red velvet curtains of her private office. "My asthma
+was so bad all night, I had to doze sitting up, and I didn't get
+any sound sleep until daybreak. If I don't begin to mend before
+long I'll have to give up, that's all there is to it. There ain't
+any use my trying to hold on much longer. I'm too sick to think
+about fighting, and sometimes I don't care what becomes of the
+business. I want to go to some high place in Europe where I can get
+my breath, and I'm going to stay there, I don't care what happens.
+There ain't any use my trying to hold on," she repeated
+disconsolately.</p>
+<p>Gabriella's opportunity had come, and she grasped it with the
+quickness of judgment which had enabled her to achieve her moderate
+success.</p>
+<p>"I believe I could carry on this business," she said, and her
+quiet assurance impressed Madame's turbulent temper. With a brief
+return of her mental alertness, the old woman studied her
+carefully.</p>
+<p>"I don't want any responsibility. I want to be rid of the whole
+thing," she said after a pause.</p>
+<p>Gabriella nodded comprehendingly. "I believe I could carry it on
+successfully," she repeated. "Your customers like me. I think I
+understand how the business ought to be run. I have been here ten
+years, and I feel perfectly confident that I could make it
+successful."</p>
+<p>"I've had offers&mdash;good offers," observed Madame warily, for
+she was incapable of liberating herself at the age of seventy-two
+from the lifelong suspicion that some one was taking advantage of
+her, that something was being got from her for nothing, "and, of
+course, I was only joking about having to stop work," she added, "I
+am retiring from choice, not from necessity."</p>
+<p>"I understand," agreed Gabriella quietly.</p>
+<p>"But I should like you to have the name," pursued Madame "A
+little money would be necessary, of course&mdash;perhaps you might
+buy a half interest&mdash;that would be simple. You could make a
+big success of it with your social position and your wealthy
+acquaintances. Surely you can find some one who is ready to make
+such a splendid investment?"</p>
+<p>"Perhaps," admitted Gabriella, as quietly as before. Unlike
+Madame, who, being an incurable idealist, had won her victories not
+by accepting but by evading facts, Gabriella was frankly skeptical
+about the practical value of either her social position or her
+wealthy acquaintances. Neither possession impressed her at the
+moment as marketable, except in the vivid imagination of Madame,
+and her social position, at least, was constructed of a very thin
+and unsubstantial fabric. Guided by the prudent streak in her
+character, she rested her hope not upon incorporeal possessions,
+but upon the solid bodies of her patrons that must be clothed. Her
+imposing acquaintances would avail her scarcely more, she
+suspected, than would the noble ghost of that ancestor who was a
+general in the Revolution. What she relied on was the certainty
+that she knew her work, and that Madame's customers from the
+greatest to the least, from Mrs. Pletheridge to poor Miss Peterson,
+who bought only one good gown a year, admitted the thoroughness of
+her knowledge. She had got on by learning all that there was to
+learn about the details of the work, and she stood now, secure and
+unassailable, on the foundation of her achievement. In ten years
+she had fulfilled her resolution&mdash;she had made herself
+indispensable. By patience, by hard work, by self-control, by
+ceaseless thought, and by innumerable sacrifices, she had made
+herself indispensable; and the result was that, as Madame weakened,
+she had grown steadily stronger. Without her Dinard's would have
+dropped long ago to the position of a second-rate house, and she
+was aware that Madame understood this quite as clearly as she did.
+For whatever Madame's executive ability may have been in the past,
+it had dwindled now to the capricious endeavours of a chronic
+invalid&mdash;of an aging invalid, notwithstanding her desperate
+struggle for youth. Half as much energy as Madame had spent
+resisting Nature might have won for her a sanctified memory had it
+been directed toward the practice of piety, or a tablet of
+imperishable granite had it been devoted to as tireless a pursuit
+of art or science. To her battle against age she had brought the
+ambition of a conqueror and the devotion of a martyr; and at the
+last, even to-day, there was a superb defiance in her refusal to
+acknowledge defeat, in her demand that her surrender should be
+regarded as a capitulation.</p>
+<p>"In a day or two I hope to be able to discuss my plan with you,"
+said Gabriella, and she could not keep the softness of pity out of
+her voice. So this was what life came to, after all? For an instant
+she felt the overwhelming discouragement which is the portion of
+those who approach life not through vision, but through outward
+events, who seek a solution not in the deeper consciousness of the
+spirit, but in the changing surface of experience. Then, even
+before her glance had left Madame's golden head, her natural
+optimism regained control of her mind, and she told herself stoutly
+that if this was Madame's present, then it followed logically that
+Madame must have had a past, and that past must have been an
+agreeable one. It was inconceivable that she should defy the laws
+of God for the sake of a prolongation of tragedy.</p>
+<p>"It is a splendid investment," croaked the old woman in the
+midst of Gabriella's painful reflections. "The house was never more
+flourishing."</p>
+<p>The ruling principle which decreed that Gabriella should keep
+her temper had disciplined her not less thoroughly in the habit of
+holding her tongue. The house was in a flourishing condition; but
+she remembered how fragile and thinly rooted had been its showy
+prosperity, when she had entered it; and had she cared to confound
+Madame utterly, she might have reminded her of that unwritten
+history of the past ten years in which the secret episode of Mrs.
+Pletheridge occurred. For Gabriella was not inclined to underrate
+her own efficiency, and her confidence was supported by the
+knowledge that if she left Dinard's the most fashionable of
+Madame's clientele would follow her.</p>
+<p>"You'll never have such another opportunity&mdash;not if you
+live to be a hundred. At your age I should have jumped at the
+idea," persisted Madame.</p>
+<p>"So should I," responded Gabriella merrily, "if I were sure of
+landing on my feet."</p>
+<p>"You'll always land on your feet&mdash;you're that sort. You've
+got push, and it's push that counts most in business. A woman may
+have all the brains in the world, but without push she might as
+well give up the struggle. That was what brought me up in spite of
+four husbands and six children," pursued Madame, while she took out
+a small flask from one of the drawers of her desk and measured out,
+as she remarked in parenthesis, "a little stimulant." "Yes, I had a
+great success in my line, and if I could only have kept clear of
+men, I might have saved a fortune to retire on in my old age. But I
+had a natural taste for men, and they were the ruin of me. As soon
+as I lost one husband and managed to get on a bit, another would
+come, and I couldn't resist him. I never could resist marriage;
+that was the undoing of me as a woman of business."</p>
+<p>"Four husbands, and yet you were remarkably successful,"
+observed Gabriella, because it was the only thing with a cheerful
+sound she could think of to utter, and an intermittent cheerful
+sound was all that Madame required from a listener when she was
+under the enlivening influence of brandy.</p>
+<p>"But think what I might have done with my talent if I had
+remained a widow, as you have done. It was my misfortune to attract
+men whether I wanted to or not," wheezed Madame, wiping her eyes;
+"some women are like that."</p>
+<p>"So I have heard," murmured Gabriella, seeing that Madame paused
+for the note of encouragement.</p>
+<p>"I don't suppose that has been your trouble, for there's a
+stand-offishness about you that puts men at a distance, and they
+don't like to be put at a distance. Then, though your figure is
+very fine for showing off models, it isn't exactly the kind that
+men lean to. If you'd fatten up it might be different, but that
+would spoil you for the clothes, and that, after all, is more
+important. It's strange, isn't it?" she croaked, with an alcoholic
+chuckle, "how partial men are to full figures even after they have
+gone out of fashion?"</p>
+<p>And with this wonder still ringing in her ears, Gabriella turned
+away, to attend a customer, who demanded, in cool defiance of man
+and nature, to be transformed into a straight silhouette.</p>
+<p>Gabriella had not seen Judge Crowborough for several years, and
+her first impression, when she entered his office at five o'clock,
+was one of surprise at his ugliness. Though he had changed but
+little since their first meeting at Mrs. Fowler's dinner, the years
+had softened her memory of his appearance, and she had skilfully
+persuaded herself that one should not judge a man by a repelling
+exterior, which, after all, might cover a great deal of goodness.
+After George's flight and Archibald Fowler's death he had been very
+kind to her. "I don't know what I should have done without him at
+that time," she thought now, as she stood with his big, soft hand
+clasping hers and his admiring fishy eyes on her face. "No, it is
+impossible to judge by appearances, and all men think well of him,
+all men respect him," she concluded, feeling suddenly
+reassured.</p>
+<p>"It's been a long time&mdash;it must be nearly' three
+years&mdash;since I saw you," he remarked, with flattering
+geniality, "and you look younger than ever."</p>
+<p>"Hard work keeps me young, then. I work very hard." Her charming
+smile flashed like an edge of light on her lips, and lent glow and
+fervor to her pale face beneath the silver-brightened cloud of her
+hair. She read his admiration in the bold gaze he fastened upon
+her, and though she was without coquetry, she was conscious that
+her vanity was agreeably soothed.</p>
+<p>"What is it? Dressmaking?" He was obviously interested.</p>
+<p>"Yes&mdash;dresses and hats. Hats are rather my specialty. I
+manage things now almost entirely at Dinard's. Have you ever heard
+of the house?"</p>
+<p>He nodded. "I remember. That's where you went after Archibald
+died, wasn't it?" His memory amazed her. What a mind for trifles he
+had! What a wonderful man he was for his years!</p>
+<p>"Yes, I've been there ever since. I've done well as things go,
+but, of course, it has been hard. It has been a hard life."</p>
+<p>"And you never came to me. I wanted to help you. I'd have done
+anything I could to make it easier for you, but you were so proud.
+You'd have got on twice as well if you had given up your
+pride."</p>
+<p>The telephone rang, and while he answered it, she watched his
+broad, slouching back, his swelling paunch overflowing now above
+the stays he wore to reduce it, the coarsened flesh of his neck,
+bulging above the edge of his collar, and the shining, baldness on
+the top of his head, which gave an appearance of commanding
+intellect to his empurpled forehead. How hideous he was, how
+revolting, and yet what a power! A face like his on a woman would
+have condemned her to isolation and misery, but, so far as one
+could judge, it had scarcely interfered with his happiness. His
+mental force had risen superior to his face, to his paunch, to his
+whole repulsive appearance. Greater than Madame because of his sex,
+he had achieved a triumph over the corporeal mass of his body which
+she, fortified and abetted by a hundred cosmetics and
+manipulations, could never attain. Where Madame relied on futile
+artificial aids in her battle against decay, he hurled the
+tremendous power of his personality, and ugliness became at once as
+insignificant as immorality in his life. "One can't judge him by
+the standards of other men," thought Gabriella, using a remembered
+phrase of Fifty-seventh Street.</p>
+<p>Judge Crowborough was still talking earnestly into the
+telephone, and she gathered vaguely that his earnestness related to
+a donation he had promised his church. "Raise two hundred thousand,
+and I'll double it," he said abruptly, and hung up the receiver.
+"We want a new organ&mdash;something really fine, you know," he
+observed casually as he turned back to Gabriella. "We are
+moving&mdash;everything is moving up, and the church has to keep
+step with the age. You can't keep progress out of religion any more
+than you can out of business&mdash;not that I'm in favour of
+modernism or any of that stuff&mdash;but we've got to keep moving."
+He spoke with conviction, and there was no doubt that he sincerely
+believed himself to be an important factor in the religious
+movement of his country. Then his tone changed to one of intimate
+friendliness and he asked: "Have you heard any music this winter?
+If I'd only known about you, I'd have sent you tickets to the
+opera."</p>
+<p>"The children go sometimes," she answered. That he should
+imagine her buying opera tickets for herself, with the children
+needing every penny she made, seemed to her ridiculous; but rich
+men were always like that, she reflected a little scornfully.</p>
+<p>"If I'd only remembered about you," he murmured, and turning
+heavily in his chair, he added authoritatively: "Now tell me about
+it. Tell me the whole thing straight through. I am going to help
+you."</p>
+<p>She told him rapidly, and while she talked a sense of perfect
+peace and security enveloped her. It was so long since she had been
+able to ask advice of a man; it was so long since anybody bigger
+and stronger than she had undertaken to adjust her perplexities.
+The past returned to her as a dream, and she felt again that
+absolute reliance on the masculine ability to control events, to
+ease burdens, to remove difficulties, which had visited her in her
+childhood when Cousin Jimmy appeared in the front parlour in Hill
+Street. "It's wonderful how men manage things," she thought. "It's
+wonderful being a man. Everything is so simple for men."</p>
+<p>"Well, don't worry a minute longer. It's all as easy as&mdash;as
+possible," observed the great man serenely when she had finished.
+"From what you tell me it looks as if it were a pretty good
+investment to begin with, and there are plenty of people around
+looking for ways to invest money. I'm looking for ways myself, when
+it comes to that," he proclaimed, with a paternal smile as he sank
+back on the luxurious leather cushions of his chair.</p>
+<p>"You are so good," she responded gratefully, "so good"; and she
+was speaking sincerely.</p>
+<p>With his casual gaze, which seemed to turn inward, fixed on the
+ceiling above her head, he invited her confidence by a few
+perfectly chosen expressions of comprehension and sympathy. The
+acuteness and activity of his mental processes delighted her while
+he questioned her. After the slovenly methods of Madame, after the
+loose reasoning and the muddled thinking of all the women she met
+in the course of her work, there was a positive pleasure in
+following the exactness and inflexibility of his logic. His
+reasoning was orderly, neat, elastic, without loose ends or tangled
+skeins to unravel, and she felt again, while she listened to him,
+the confidence which had come to her as soon as she entered his
+office. He was efficiency incarnate, and from her childhood up she
+had respected efficiency. In an hour, in less time than it had
+taken her to tell her story, he had lifted the weight from her
+shoulders, had mastered the details of Madame's intricate problems,
+and had outlined the terms by which Gabriella could accept the old
+woman's offer without placing herself under financial obligations.
+Her pride, he had discerned at a glance, shrank from obligation,
+and he was as alert to save her pride as he was to make a good
+bargain with Madame.</p>
+<p>"It's a good thing. It's good business. Don't think I'm losing
+for a minute," he said as she rose to go, and she felt that some
+secret delicacy, the last feeling she would have attributed to him,
+was prompting his words.</p>
+<p>"I can't tell you what a relief it is to talk to you," she said,
+holding out her hand while she hesitated between the desk and the
+door. "I can't even begin to tell you how grateful I am. I haven't
+had any one to advise me since I left Richmond, and it is such a
+comfort"</p>
+<p>"Well, I'll give you the best advice in my power. I'll give you
+the very best," he replied as frankly as if he were discussing his
+gift to the church. "What's more, I'll think it over a bit while
+I'm at the Hot Springs, and talk to you about it when I come back.
+I suppose I can always get you on the telephone, can't I?"</p>
+<p>His manner was still casual and business-like, and it did not
+change by so much as a shade when he moved a step nearer and put
+his arm about her waist. If he had taken down his hat or lighted a
+cigar, he would probably have performed either action with the same
+air of automatic efficiency; and she realized, in the very instant
+of her amazement, that his manner was merely an authoritative
+expression of his power. What astonished her most in the incident,
+after all, was not the judge's share in it, but the vividness and
+coolness of her own mental impressions. She was not frightened, she
+was not even disturbed, she was merely disgusted. Never before had
+she understood so clearly the immeasurable distance that divided
+the Gabriella of seventeen years ago from the Gabriella who
+released herself calmly from the appalling clasp of the casual and
+business-like old man. To the Gabriella who had loved George such
+an episode would have appeared as an inconceivable horror. Now,
+with her worldly wisdom and her bitter knowledge of love, she found
+herself regarding the situation with sardonic humour. The
+stupendous, the incredible vanity of man!&mdash;she reflected
+disdainfully. Was there ever a man too ugly, too repulsive, or too
+old to delude himself with the belief that he might still become
+the object of passion?</p>
+<p>"Now you've spoiled it," she said shortly, but without
+embarrassment. "Now you've spoiled it." She put the case to him
+plainly, the Gabriella who would have blushed and trembled and wept
+seventeen years ago.</p>
+<p>"But I meant nothing," he said, genuinely disturbed. "I assure
+you I am truly sorry if I have offended you. It was nothing&mdash;a
+mere matter of&mdash;" the word "habit," she knew, hovered on his
+lips, though he did not utter it, and broke off inconclusively.</p>
+<p>So there had not been even the excuse of emotion about it. He
+had embraced her as instinctively, as methodically, as he might
+have switched on the electric light over his desk. Here again she
+was brought to a stop before an overwhelming realization of the
+fundamental differences between man and woman. To think of woman
+behaving like that merely because it had become a matter of
+habit!</p>
+<p>"I always liked you, you know," he said abruptly, with a sincere
+emphasis.</p>
+<p>"Well, there are different ways of liking," she rejoined coldly,
+"and I happen not to care for this way."</p>
+<p>"If you don't like it, I'll never do it again," he promised,
+almost humbly. "I'll be a good friend to you, honestly I will. I'll
+treat you as if you were&mdash;you were&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"A gentleman," finished Gabriella, and smiled in spite of
+herself. After all, what was the use of resenting the facts of
+life? What was the use of reproaching the mud that spattered over
+one's clothes?</p>
+<p>"Well, that's a bargain. I'll treat you as a gentleman." There
+was a fine quality about the man; she could not deny it.</p>
+<p>"I'll forgive you then and forget it." It was the tolerant
+Gabriella who spoke&mdash;the Gabriella of disillusioning
+experience and a clear vision of life&mdash;not the impassioned
+idealist of the 'nineties. When all was said, you had to take men
+and things as you found them. That was philosophy, and that was
+also "good business." It was foolish to apply romantic theories to
+the positive actuality.</p>
+<p>"Well, you <i>are</i> a gentleman," exclaimed the judge, with
+facetiousness. "That's why I always liked you, I suppose. You're
+straight and you're honest and there's no nonsense about you."</p>
+<p>If he had only known! She thought of the romantic girl of the
+'nineties, of her buoyant optimism, her childlike ignorance, her
+violent certainties, and of her triumphant, "I can manage my life!"
+If he had only known how she had "muddled things" at the beginning,
+would he have said that she had "no nonsense about her?"</p>
+<p>In the subway, a little later, clinging to a dirty strap, with a
+blackened mechanic in the seat before her, a box of tools at her
+feet, and a garlic-scented charwoman jolting against her shoulder,
+she was overcome by a sudden cloud of despondency. Her courage, her
+hopefulness, her philosophy, seemed to melt like frost in her
+thoughts, leaving behind only a sodden sense of loss, of emptiness,
+of defeat. "I've had a mean life," she said to herself resentfully.
+"I've had a mean life. What has ever happened to me that was worth
+while? What have I ever had except hard work and disappointment? I
+am thirty-seven years old. My youth is going, and I have nothing to
+show for it but ten years of dressmaking. The best of my life is
+over, and when I look back on it, it is only a blank." It was as if
+the interview with the great man she had just left had completed
+the desolating retrospect of a lifetime. Was there nothing but
+disenchantment ahead of her? Was life merely the dropping of
+illusion after illusion, the falling of petals at the first touch
+from a flower that is beginning to fade? "Yes, nothing has ever
+happened to me that was worth while," she repeated, forgetting her
+children for the moment. Then, because the heavy air stifled her,
+she left the car and turned into West Twenty-third Street where the
+lights were coming out softly in the spring twilight. Though it was
+too late to go over the house Fanny wanted, it occurred to her that
+she might look at the outside of it before she took the Harlem
+elevated train at one of the West Side stations. The walk would do
+her good and perhaps blow away the disquieting recollections of her
+encounter with Judge Crowborough. Not until her mood changed, she
+determined, would she go back to the children.</p>
+<p>At the corner she bought a bunch of lilacs because a man held
+them out to her temptingly when she approached, and as she buried
+her face in the blossoms, she said resolutely: "No, I haven't had a
+mean life. It can't be mean unless I think it so, and I
+won't&mdash;I won't. After all, it isn't the kind of life you have,
+but the way you think about it that matters."</p>
+<p>The air was deliciously mild; streaks of pale gold lingered
+above the grim outlines of the buildings; and the wild, sweet
+spirit of spring fluttered like an imprisoned creature in the gray
+streets of the city. It was May again, and the pipes of Pan were
+fluting the ancient songs in the ancient racial fields of the
+memory. There was a spring softness in the fleecy white of the
+clouds, in the flowing gold of the sunset, in the languorous kiss
+of the breeze, in the gentle rippling waves of the dust on the
+pavement. For years she had been so tranquil, and now suddenly, at
+the flitting touch of the spirit of spring, she knew that youth was
+slipping, slipping, and that with youth, went romance, enchantment,
+adventure. It was slipping from her, and she had never really held
+it. She had had only the second-rate; she had missed the best
+always&mdash;the best of life, the best of love, the best of
+endeavour and achievement. She had missed the finer reality. From
+somewhere, from the past or the present, from the dream or the
+actuality, her young illusions and her young longings rushed over
+her, driven by the fragrance of the lilacs, which was stinging her
+blood into revolt. Only an instant the revolt lasted, but in that
+instant of vision nothing mattered in life except romance,
+enchantment, adventure.</p>
+<p>"Yes, I've missed life," she thought, and the regret was still
+in her mind when one of those miracles which in our ignorance we
+call accidents occurred. Out of the lilac-scented twilight, out of
+the wild, sweet spirit of spring, a voice said in her ear, "Alice,
+you waited!"</p>
+<p>Turning quickly, she had a vivid impression of height, breadth,
+bigness, of roughened dark red hair, of gray eyes so clean that
+they looked 'as if they had been washed by the sea. Then the voice
+spoke again: "I beg your pardon. It was a mistake." And the next
+instant she was alone in the street.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIa" id="CHAPTER_VIa"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<h3>DISCOVERIES</h3>
+<p>"Who is Alice?" she wondered on her way home, "and for whom was
+she waiting?" A shopgirl perhaps, and he was, probably&mdash;not a
+clerk in a shop&mdash;he looked more like a mechanic&mdash;but
+hardly a gentleman. Not, at any rate, what her mother or Jane would
+call a gentleman&mdash;not the kind of gentleman that George was,
+or Charley Gracey, for instance. He was doubtless devoid of those
+noble traditions by and through which, her mother had always told
+her, a gentleman was made out of a man&mdash;the traditions which
+had created Arthur and Cousin Jimmy as surely as they had created
+George and Charley. "I wonder what tradition really amounts to?"
+she thought, while she stood on the rear platform of a Harlem
+train, grasping the handle of the door as the car swung round a
+curve. "All my life, I have been getting farther away from
+it&mdash;a woman has to, I suppose, when she works&mdash;and if I
+get away from it myself how can I honestly hold to it for men, who,
+according to mother, can't be gentlemen without it?" Then reverting
+to her first question, she resumed musingly: "Who <i>is</i> Alice?
+It would be rather amusing to be Alice for one evening, and to find
+out what it means to be loved by a man like that, even if he isn't
+a gentleman. He was, I think, the cleanest creature I ever saw, and
+it wasn't just the cleanness of soap and water&mdash;it went deeper
+than that. It was the cleanness of the winds and the sea&mdash;as
+if his eyes had been washed by the sea. I wonder who Alice is? A
+common little shopgirl probably from Sixth Avenue, with padded hair
+and painted lips, and smelling of cheap powder. That's just the
+kind of girl to fascinate a big, strong, simple creature like that
+Yes, of course, Alice is cheap and tawdry and vulgar, with no
+substance to her mind." She tried to think of Arthur, but her
+mental image of him had become as thin and unsubstantial as a
+shadow.</p>
+<p>When she reached the apartment, Fanny rushed into her arms, and
+inquired breathlessly if she had taken the house?</p>
+<p>"We went down again to look at it, mother, and we like it even
+better than ever. It will be so lovely to live next door to Carlie.
+We can tango every evening, and Carlie knows a lot of boys who come
+in to dance because the floor is so good."</p>
+<p>Her cheeks flushed while she talked, and, for the moment, she
+lost entirely her resemblance to Jane, who was never animated,
+though she made a perpetual murmurous sound. Unlike Jane, Fanny was
+vivacious, pert, and, for her years, extraordinarily sophisticated.
+Already she dressed with extreme smartness; already she was
+thinking of men as of possible lovers; and already she was
+beginning, in her mother's phrase, "to manage her life." Her trite
+little face, in its mist of golden hair, which she took hours to
+arrange, still reminded one of the insipid angel on a Christmas
+card; but in spite of the engaging innocence of her look, she was
+prodigiously experienced in the beguiling arts of her sex. Almost
+from the cradle she had had "a way" with men; and her "way" was as
+far superior in finesse to the simple coquetry of Cousin Pussy as
+the worldliness of Broadway was superior to the worldliness of Hill
+Street. From her yellow hair, which she wore very low over her
+forehead and ears, to her silk stockings of the gray called "London
+smoke," which showed coquettishly below her "hobble" skirt, and
+above the flashing silver buckles on her little pointed shoes of;
+patent leather, Fanny was as uncompromisingly modern in her
+appearance as she was in her tastes or her philosophy. Her mind,
+which was small and trite like her face, was of a curiously
+speculative bent, though its speculations were directed mainly
+toward the by-paths of knowledge which Gabriella, in her busy life,
+had had neither the time nor the inclination to explore. For Fanny
+was frankly interested in vice with the cool and dispassionate
+interest of the inquiring spectator. She was perfectly aware of the
+social evil; and unknown to Gabriella she had investigated, through
+the ample medium of the theatre and fiction, every dramatic phase
+of the traffic in white slaves. Her coolness never deserted her,
+for she was as temperamental as a fish, and, for all the sunny
+white and gold of her surface, she had the shallow restlessness of
+a meadow brook. At twelve years of age she had devoted herself to
+music and had planned an operatic career; at fourteen, she had
+turned to literature, and was writing a novel; and a year later,
+encouraged by her practical mother, she had plunged into the
+movement for woman suffrage, and had marched, in a white dress and
+carrying a purple banner, through an admiring crowd in Fifth
+Avenue. To-day, after a variable period, when she had dabbled in
+kindergarten, wood engraving, the tango, and settlement work, she
+was studying for the stage, and had fallen in love with a
+matin&eacute;e idol. Gabriella, who had welcomed the wood engraving
+and the kindergartening and had been sympathetically, though
+impersonally, aware of the suffrage movement, just as she had been
+aware many years before of the Spanish War, was deeply disturbed by
+her daughter's recent effervescence of emotion.</p>
+<p>"I suppose she'll get over it. She gets over everything," she
+had said to Miss Polly, drawing painful comfort from the
+shallowness and insincerity of Fanny's nature, "but something
+dreadful might happen while she is in one of her moods."</p>
+<p>"Not with Fanny," Miss Polly had replied reassuringly. "Fanny
+knows more already than you and I put together, and she's got about
+as much red blood as a lemon. She ain't the sort that things happen
+to, so don't you begin to worry about her. She's got mighty little
+sense, that's the gospel truth, but the little she's got has been
+sharpened down to a p'int."</p>
+<p>"I can't help feeling that she hasn't been well brought up. I
+did what I could, but she needed more time and care than I could
+give her. It wasn't, of course, as if I'd chosen to neglect her. I
+have been obliged to work or she would have starved."</p>
+<p>"Oh, well, I wouldn't bother about that. It's like wishing
+chickens back in the shell after they're hatched&mdash;there ain't
+a particle of use in it. If you ask me what I think&mdash;then, I'd
+say that Fanny would be just exactly what she is if you'd raised
+her down yonder in Virginia. Her father's in her as well as you,
+and it seems to me that she grows more like him every day that she
+lives. Now, Archibald is your child, anybody can tell that at a
+glance. It's queer, ain't it how the boys almost always seem to
+take after the mother?"</p>
+<p>"But Charley has a splendid daughter. Think of his
+Margaret."</p>
+<p>"Of course, there ain't any rule that works out every time; but
+you know, I'll always take up for Mr. Charley if it's with the last
+breath I draw. It ain't always the woman that gets the worst of
+marriage, though to hear some people talk you'd think it was
+nothin' but turkey and plum puddin' for men. But it ain't, I don't
+care who says so, and if anybody but a saint could have married
+Jane without takin' to drink, I'd like to have seen him try it,
+that's all."</p>
+<p>That was three weeks ago, and to-night, while Fanny rattled on
+about the house in West Twenty-third Street, her mother watched her
+with a tolerant affection in which there was neither admiration nor
+pride. She was not deluded about Fanny's character, though the
+maternal mote in her eye obscured her critical vision of her
+appearance. But, notwithstanding the fact that she thought Fanny
+beautiful, she was clearly aware that the girl had never been,
+since she left the cradle, anything but a source of anxiety; and
+for the last week or two Gabriella had been more than usually
+worried about her infatuation for the matin&eacute;e idol. In spite
+of Miss Polly's assurances that Fanny was too calculating for rash
+adventures, Gabriella had spent several sleepless nights over the
+remote possibility of an entanglement, and her anxiety was
+heightened by the fact that the child told her nothing. They were
+so different that there was little real sympathy between them, and
+confidences from daughter to mother must spring, she knew, from
+fulness of sympathy. "I wonder if she ever realizes how hard I have
+worked for her?" she thought. "How completely I've given up my
+life?" And there rose in her thoughts the wish that her children
+could have stayed children forever. "As long as they were little,
+they filled my life, but as soon as they get big enough for other
+things, they break away from me&mdash;even Archibald will change
+when he goes away to school, next year, and I shall never have him
+again as he is now." At the very time, she knew, when she needed
+them most&mdash;when middle-age was approaching&mdash;her children
+were failing her not only as companions, but as a supreme and vital
+reason for living. If they could have stayed babies, she felt that
+she should have been satisfied to go on forever with nothing else
+in her life; but in a little while they would grow up and begin to
+lead their own intense personal lives, while she, having outlived
+her usefulness, would be left with only her work, with only
+dressmaking and millinery for a life interest. "Something is wrong
+with me," she thought sternly; "the visit to the judge must have
+upset me. I don't usually have such wretched thoughts in the
+evening."</p>
+<p>"Did you bring me your school report, darling?" she asked.</p>
+<p>Yes, Fanny had brought it, and she drew it forth reluctantly
+from the pages of a novel. It was impossible to make her study. She
+was as incapable of application as a butterfly. "I thought you were
+going to do better this month, Fanny," said Gabriella
+reproachfully.</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother dear, I want to leave school. I hate it! Please let
+me begin to study for the stage. You know you always said the study
+of Shakespeare was improving."</p>
+<p>They were in the midst of the argument when Archibald came in,
+and he showed little sympathy with Fanny's dramatic ambition.</p>
+<p>"The stage? Nonsense! What you want is to get safely married,"
+he remarked scornfully, and Gabriella agreed with him. There was no
+doubt in her mind that for some women, and Fanny promised to be one
+of these, marriage was the only safeguard. Then she looked at
+Archibald, strong, sturdy, self-reliant, and clever; and she
+realized, with a pang, that some day he also would marry&mdash;that
+she must lose him as well as Fanny.</p>
+<p>"I've had a letter from Pelham Forest, dear," she
+said&mdash;Pelham Forest was a school in Virginia&mdash;"and I am
+making up my mind to let you go there next autumn."</p>
+<p>"And then to the University of Virginia where Grandfather
+went?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, and then to the University of Virginia."</p>
+<p>Though she tried to speak lightly, the thought of the coming
+separation brought a pang to her heart.</p>
+<p>"Well, I'd rather work," said Archibald stoutly. "I don't want
+to go away to school. I'd a long sight rather start in with a
+railroad or a steamship company and make my way up."</p>
+<p>"But, darling, I couldn't bear that. You must have an education.
+It's what I've worked for from the beginning, and when you've
+finished at the university, I want to send you abroad to study. If
+only Fanny would go to college, too, I'd be so happy."</p>
+<p>"Don't you waste any money on Fanny's education," retorted
+Archibald, "because it isn't worth it. What we ought to do is to
+get to work and let you take a rest. The first money I make, I'm
+going to spend on giving you pretty clothes and a rest."</p>
+<p>"I don't want to rest, dear," replied Gabriella, with a laugh.
+"I'm not an old lady yet, you silly boy." How ridiculous it was
+that he always spoke of her work as if it were a hardship&mdash;a
+burden from which she must be released at the first opportunity.
+That was so like Cousin Jimmy, a survival, she supposed, from the
+tradition of the South. Unlike Fanny, whose horizon was bounded by
+her personal inclinations, Archibald seemed never to think of
+himself, never to put either his comfort or his career before his
+love for his mother. To attempt to shape Fanny's character was like
+working in tissue paper, but there was stout substance in
+Archibald. Gabriella had tried hard&mdash;she told herself over and
+over again that she had tried as hard as she could&mdash;with both
+of her children; and with one of them at least she felt that she
+had succeeded. There was, she knew, the making of a splendid man in
+her son; and his very ugliness, which had been so noticeable when
+he was a child, was developing now into attractiveness. For it was
+the ugliness of strength, not of weakness, and there was no trace
+in his nature of the self-indulgence which had ruined his
+father.</p>
+<p>"But I don't want to go to college, mother dear," protested
+Fanny, who always addressed Gabriella as "dear" when she was about
+to become intractable; "I want to go on the stage."</p>
+<p>"You are not to see another play, except when I take you, for a
+whole year. Remember what I tell you, Fanny!" replied Gabriella
+sternly. Not Mrs. Carr herself, not Cousin Becky Bollingbroke, of
+sanctified memory, could have regarded an actress's career with
+greater horror than did the advanced and independent Gabriella. Any
+career, indeed, appeared to her to be out of the question for Fanny
+(a girl who couldn't even get on a street car without being spoken
+to), and of all careers the one the stage afforded was certainly
+the last she would have selected for her daughter.</p>
+<p>"I'll remember," responded Fanny coolly, and Gabriella knew in
+her heart that the girl would disobey her at the first opportunity.
+It was impossible to chaperon her every minute, and Fanny,
+unchaperoned, was, in the realistic phrase of her brother, "looking
+for trouble."</p>
+<p>"I'll send her to boarding-school next year," Gabriella
+determined; and she reflected gloomily that with Fanny and,
+Archibald both away, she might as well be a bachelor woman.</p>
+<p>"Well, children, you're both going away next winter," she said
+positively. "I can't look after you, Fanny, and make your living at
+the same time, so I shall send you to boarding-school. What do you
+say to Miss Bradfordine's?"</p>
+<p>"That's up on the Hudson, mother. I don't want to go out of New
+York." Fanny was genuinely alarmed at last.</p>
+<p>"The farther away from New York the better, my daughter."</p>
+<p>"What will you do here all alone with Miss Polly?</p>
+<p>"Oh, we'll do very well," answered Gabriella with cheerful
+promptness; "you need not worry about me."</p>
+<p>"If I'm good this summer, will you change your mind,
+mother?"</p>
+<p>"Try being good, and see." Though Gabriella spoke sweetly, it
+was with the obstinate sweetness of Mrs. Carr. One thing she had
+resolved firmly in the last quarter of an hour: Fanny should go
+away to boarding-school next September.</p>
+<p>"Ain't you goin' to walk in the suffrage parade this year,
+Fanny?" inquired Miss Polly, who always thought it necessary to
+interrupt an argument between Gabriella and her daughter.</p>
+<p>"I haven't anything to wear," replied Fanny pettishly. Her brief
+interest in "votes for women" had evaporated with the entrance of
+the matin&eacute;e idol into her life.</p>
+<p>"There's a lovely white gown just in from Paris I'll get for
+you," said Gabriella pleasantly. She was tired, for she had had a
+trying day; but long ago, when her children were babies, she had
+determined that she would never permit herself to speak sharply to
+them. In Fanny's most exasperating humours, Gabriella tried to
+remember her own youthful mistakes, tried to be lenient to George's
+faults which she recognized in the girl's character.</p>
+<p>"As if anybody needed to be dressed up to march!" exclaimed
+Archibald scornfully, and he added: "She's always acting, isn't
+she, mother?"</p>
+<p>"Hush, dear, you mustn't tease your sister," Gabriella
+admonished the boy, though her voice when she spoke to him was
+attuned to a deeper and softer note.</p>
+<p>"If you make me go to boarding-school next year, I don't care
+whether you take the rooms in Twenty-third Street or not," said
+Fanny sullenly, for, in spite of her fickle temperament, there was
+a remarkable tenacity in her thwarted inclinations.</p>
+<p>"Very well. I'll look at the house and decide to-morrow." As the
+servant came in to lay the table, Gabriella dismissed the subject
+of Fanny's school, and opened the book&mdash;it chanced to be a
+volume of Browning&mdash;which she was reading aloud to the
+children.</p>
+<p>"I am really worried about Fanny," she said to Miss Folly at
+midnight, while she lingered in the living-room before going to
+bed. "I honestly don't know what to make of her, and I feel,
+somehow, that she is one of my failures."</p>
+<p>"Well, you can't expect everything to go the way you want it.
+Did you see the judge?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I saw him, but it was no use." Her visit to Judge
+Crowborough appeared to her perturbed mind as a piece of headstrong
+and extravagant folly, and she dismissed it from her thoughts as
+she had dismissed heavier burdens in the past. "Men simply won't
+treat Women in business as they treat men, and I don't see unless
+human nature changes, how it is to be helped. But what about the
+house in Twenty-third Street? Do you think I ought to look at
+it?"</p>
+<p>"It was the most homelike place we saw, by a long way. There
+ain't many places in New York where you can have a flower-bed in
+the front yard."</p>
+<p>"Do you think Fanny will be happy there? A year before this
+stage mania seized her, you know, she was wild to move to Park
+Avenue."</p>
+<p>"Well, you know I've got a suspicion," Miss Folly dropped her
+voice to a whisper. "Of course it ain't nothin' but a suspicion,
+for she never opens her mouth about it to me, but I've got a right
+smart suspicion that that young actor she is so crazy about lives
+somewhere down there in that neighbourhood, and she thinks she
+could watch him go by in the street. I don't believe, you know,
+that she's ever so much as spoken to him in her life."</p>
+<p>"It's impossible!" exclaimed Gabriella, for this revelation of
+Miss Polly's discernment was astonishing to her; "but if that's the
+case," she added gravely, "I oughtn't to think of moving into the
+house."</p>
+<p>"Oh, well, I don't know that he's anywhere very near, and
+Fanny's goin' to be at boarding-school for a year or two and away
+with Jane at the White Sulphur in the summers. She won't be there
+much anyhow, will she?"</p>
+<p>"Not much, but how I shall miss her&mdash;and, of course, if I
+miss her, I'll miss Archibald even more, because he gives me no
+anxiety. It's odd," she finished abruptly, "but I've been depressed
+all day. I suppose my birthday has something to do with it."</p>
+<p>"You ain't often like that, Gabriella. I never saw anybody keep
+in better spirits than you do."</p>
+<p>"I'm happy, but the spring makes me restless. I feel as if I'd
+missed something I ought to have had."</p>
+<p>"All of us feel that way at times, I reckon, but it don't last,
+and we settle down comfortably after a while to doin' without what
+we haven't got. And you've been mighty successful, honey. You've
+succeeded in everything you undertook except marriage."</p>
+<p>"Yes, except my marriage."</p>
+<p>"Well, I reckon things happen and you can't do 'em over again,"
+observed the little seamstress, with the natural fatalism of the
+"poor white" of the South.</p>
+<p>As she undressed and got into bed, Gabriella told herself
+cheerfully that there was, indeed, no need to worry over things
+that you couldn't change after they happened. From the open window
+a shaft of light fell on her mirror, and while she watched it, she
+tried to convince her rebellious imagination that she was perfectly
+satisfied, that life had given her all that she had ever desired.
+"I have more than most women anyhow," she insisted, weakening a
+little. "I've accomplished what I undertook, and by the time I'm
+fifty, if things go well, I may become a rich woman. I'll be able
+to give Fanny everything that she wants, and if she hasn't married,
+we can go abroad every summer, and Archibald can join us in
+Switzerland or the Tyrol. About Archibald, at least, I can feel
+perfectly easy. He is the kind of boy to succeed. He is strong, he
+hasn't a weakness, and I am sure there isn't a brighter boy in the
+world." Around the shaft of light in the mirror a stream of sparks,
+like tiny comets, began to form and quiver back and forth as if
+they were flying. "It's a pity the judge can't help me, but it
+wouldn't do. I'd never forget what happened to-day, and you can
+never tell when trouble like that is coming. I'll either make
+Madame give me half the profits for managing the business or I'll
+go to Blakeley &amp; Grymn at a salary of ten thousand a year. She
+won't let me go, of course, because she knows I'd take two thirds
+of her customers with the. Then I'll invest all I can save in the
+business until finally I am able to buy it entirely&mdash;" An
+elevated train passed the corner, and while the rumble died slowly
+in the distance, she found herself thinking of Arthur. "How
+different my life might have been if I had only stayed true to him.
+That's the happiest lot that could fall to a woman, to be loved by
+a man as faithful and tender as Arthur." For a few minutes she lay,
+without thought, watching the lights quiver and dance in the
+mirror, and listening to the faint rumble of the elevated train far
+up the street. Then, just as she was falling asleep, a question
+flashed out of the flickering lights into her mind, and she started
+awake again. "I wonder who Alice is?" she said aloud to the
+night.</p>
+<p>Several weeks, later, at the end of a busy day, Gabriella stood
+in front of the house in London Terrace, watching her furniture as
+it passed across the pavement and up the flagged walk into the
+hail. The yard was neglected and overgrown with dandelions and
+wire-grass; but an old rose-bush by the steps was in full bloom,
+and already Miss Polly was surveying the tangled weeds with the eye
+of a destroyer.</p>
+<p>"I declare I'm just hungerin' for flowers," she said wistfully,
+following the dining-room table as far as the foot of the steps
+where Gabriella stood. "The very first thing in the morning before
+I get breakfast, I'm goin' to sow some mignonette and nasturtium
+seeds in that border along the wall, and fix some window boxes with
+clove pinks and sweet alyssum in 'em like your ma used to have in
+summer. I reckon that's why I was so set on this place from the
+first. It looks more like Richmond in old times than it does like
+New York."</p>
+<p>Beyond the grass and weeds, over which Gabriella was gazing, the
+street was so quiet for the moment that it might have been one of
+those forgotten squares in Richmond (she had never called them
+blocks) where needy gentlewomen still practised "light
+housekeeping" in the social twilight of the last century. Now and
+then a tired man or woman slouched by from work; once a newsboy
+stopped at the gate to shout the name of his paper in belligerent
+accents; and a few wagons or a clanging car passed rapidly in the
+direction of Broadway. From the corner of Ninth Avenue the elevated
+road, which seemed to her at times the only permanent thing in her
+surroundings, still roared and rumbled its disturbing undercurrent
+in her life.</p>
+<p>"I think we shall be quite comfortable here," she said, watching
+the last piece of furniture pass through the door. "Where are the
+children?" The air had the rich softness of summer, and the roving
+fragrance from the old garden rose-bush by the steps awakened a
+strange homesickness in her heart&mdash;that mysterious
+homesickness which the spring gives us for places we have never
+seen.</p>
+<p>"The children are upstairs fixing their rooms," replied Miss.
+Polly, stooping to pluck up a weed by the roots. "I reckon I'd
+better go and tell Minnie to begin gettin' dinner, hadn't I?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I'll come in presently. I hate to leave the air and the
+roses."</p>
+<p>"I wish we had the whole house, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"It would be ever so much nicer, because I'm afraid the man on
+the first floor is dreadfully common. I don't like the look of that
+golden-oak hatrack in the hail."</p>
+<p>"Well, men never did have much taste. Think of the things your
+Cousin Jimmy would admire if Miss Pussy didn't tell him not to. Do
+you recollect that paper in your parlour at home? Now Mr. Jimmy
+thought that paper downright handsome. I've heard him say so."</p>
+<p>"It was dreadful, but, do you know, I designed a gown last
+winter in peacock blue like that paper, and it was a tremendous
+success. Poor mother, I wish she could have seen it&mdash;peacock
+blue with an embossed border."</p>
+<p>"You may laugh about it now, but I don't believe your mother
+minded it much. People in old times didn't let things get on their
+nerves the way they do to-day."</p>
+<p>She went indoors to attend to the dinner table; and as Gabriella
+turned back to the steps, she heard the gate slam and a man's voice
+exclaim heartily: "I'll see you about it to-morrow." Then a figure
+came rapidly up the walk&mdash;a large, free figure, with a buoyant
+swing, which awoke a trivial and fleeting association in her
+memory. Without noticing her, the man stooped for an instant beside
+the rose-bush, plucked a bud, and held it to his nostrils as he
+turned to the steps. His voice, singing a snatch of ragtime which
+she recognized without recalling the name of it, rang out, gay and
+powerful, as he approached her.</p>
+<p>"I've seen him somewhere. Who can he be?" she thought, and then
+swiftly, as in a blaze of light, she remembered the May afternoon
+in West Twenty-third Street, and "Alice," whom she had wondered
+about and forgotten. She had again a vivid impression of bigness,
+of freshness, and of gray eyes that, reminded her vaguely of the
+colour of a storm on the sea.</p>
+<p>"Good evening!" he remarked with impersonal friendliness as he
+passed her; and from the quality of his voice she inferred, as she
+had done on that May afternoon, that he was without culture,
+probably without education.</p>
+<p>He went inside; the door of his front room opened and shut, and
+after a minute or two the snatch of ragtime floated merrily through
+his window. If there was anything on earth she disliked, she
+reflected impatiently, it was a comic song.</p>
+<p>"He isn't a gentleman. I was right, he is common," she thought
+disdainfully, as she went indoors and ascended the stairs. "And he
+may make it very disagreeable for us if he insists on bringing
+common people into the houses" There was a vague impression in her
+mind that the males of the lower classes were invariably noisy.</p>
+<p>"I saw the man on the first floor as I came up," she remarked to
+Miss Folly. "I hope he isn't going to be an annoyance."</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Squires says he's never in evenings. He gets all his meals
+out except breakfast, and she fixes that for him. She told me he
+was hardly ever here unless he was eatin' or sleepin', so I don't
+reckon he'll bother us?"</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm glad of that, because he isn't the kind of person I'd
+like the children to see anything of. You can tell that he is quite
+common."</p>
+<p>"What does he look like? Is he rough?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, he is good looking enough&mdash;a fine animal. I
+suppose he's handsome in a way, and he was dressed very carefully,
+but, of course, he isn't a gentleman." For the second time this
+stranger had made her feel that she had missed something in life,
+and she felt almost that she hated him.</p>
+<p>"Oh, well, I don't reckon it will hurt us to pass him in the
+hall," replied Miss Polly soothingly, "as long as he don't bring in
+any diseases."</p>
+<p>The next day they settled comfortably in the upper rooms and, as
+far as sound or movement went, the floor below might have been
+tenanted by the dead. When she went out Gabriella passed the
+dreadful hatrack of golden-oak in the lower hail; and after a day
+or two she noticed that it held a collection of soft felt hats, two
+overcoats of good cut and material, and an assortment of
+gold-headed walking-sticks, which appeared never to be used. Though
+she tried to ignore the presence of the hatrack, there was an
+aggressive masculinity about it which revived in her the almost
+forgotten feeling of having "a man in the house." The mere
+existence of a man&mdash;of an unknown man&mdash;on the first
+floor, altered the character not only of the lower hail, but of the
+entire house; it was, she felt instinctively, a different place
+from a house occupied by women alone. She had seen so little of men
+in the last ten years that she had almost forgotten their
+distinguishing characteristics, and the scent of tobacco stealing
+through the closed door of the front room downstairs came as a
+fresh surprise when she passed Out in the morning. "I suppose I'm
+getting old maidish," she thought. "That comes of leading a
+one-sided life. Yes, I am getting into a groove." And she
+determined that she would go out more in the evenings and try to
+take an interest in the theatre and the new dances. But even while
+she was in the act of resolving, she realized that when her hard
+day's work was over, and she came home at six o'clock, she was too
+tired; too utterly worn out, for anything except dinner and bed.
+There was still the cheerful hour with the children (that she had
+kept up in the busiest seasons); but when the question of going out
+was discussed at dinner, she usually ended by sending the children
+to a lecture or a harmless play with Miss Polly. "When you work as
+hard as I do, there isn't much else for you in life," she concluded
+regretfully, and there swept over her, as on that May afternoon, a
+sense of failure, of dissatisfaction, of disappointment. Youth was
+slipping, slipping, and she had missed something.</p>
+<p>At such moments she thought sadly of her life, of its
+possibilities and its significance. It ought in the nature of
+things, she felt, to mean so much more than it had meant; it ought
+to have been so much more vital, so much more satisfying and
+complete. As it was, she could remember of it only scattered ends,
+frayed places, useless beginnings, and broken promises. With how
+many beliefs had she started, and now not one of them remained with
+her&mdash;well, hardly one of them! The dropping of illusion after
+illusion&mdash;that was what the years had brought to her as they
+passed; for she saw that she had always been growing farther and
+farther away from tradition, from accepted opinions, from the
+dogmas and the ideals of the ages. The experience and the wisdom of
+others had failed her at the very beginning.</p>
+<p>At the end of the week, when she and Miss Polly were watering
+seeds in the yard one afternoon at sunset, the man from the first
+floor came leisurely up the walk, and removing a big black cigar
+from his mouth, wished them "good evening" as he passed.</p>
+<p>"Good evening," responded Gabriella coolly. She had resolved
+that there should be no interchange of unnecessary civilities
+between the first floor and the upper storeys. "One can never tell
+how far men of that class will presume," she thought sternly.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think he's good lookin', honey?" inquired Miss Polly
+in a whisper when O'Hara had entered the house with his latchkey
+and closed the door after him.</p>
+<p>"Is he? I didn't look at him."</p>
+<p>"You wouldn't think he'd ever had a day's sickness in his life.
+I reckon he's as big as your Cousin Micajah Berkeley was. You don't
+recollect, him, do you?"</p>
+<p>"He died before I was born. Are those wisps of gray green, in
+the border, pinks, Miss Polly?"</p>
+<p>"Clove pinks like your ma used to raise. It ain't the right time
+to set 'em out, but I sent all the way down to Richmond for 'em.
+I'm goin' to get a microphylla rose, too, in the fall. Do you
+reckon it would grow up North, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"Well, we might try, anyhow. Where are the children?"</p>
+<p>"Fanny's over at Carlie's, an' Archibald said he was goin' to
+the gymnasium befo' dinner. He's just crazy about gettin' as strong
+as the man on the first floor. He was punching a ball this mornin',
+and Archibald saw him. I never knew the boy to take such a sudden
+fancy."</p>
+<p>"When did he speak to him?" asked Gabriella, and her tone had a
+touch of asperity so unusual that Miss Polly exclaimed in
+astonishment: "For goodness sake, Gabriella, what has come over
+you? Do you feel any sort of palpitations? Shall I run after the
+harts-horn?"</p>
+<p>"No, I'm not ill, but I don't like Archibald to pick up
+acquaintances I know nothing about."</p>
+<p>"I reckon if you're goin' to sample all Archibald's
+acquaintances, you'll have a job on your hands. You ain't gone an'
+taken a dislike to Mr. O'Hara for nothin', have you?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, but I have to be careful about the children. Suppose he
+should begin speaking to Fanny?" She had been vividly aware of the
+man as he passed, and the sensation had provoked her. "If it wasn't
+for Alice, I shouldn't have given him another thought," she told
+herself savagely. "Imagine me at my age blushing because a strange
+man spoke to me in the street!"</p>
+<p>"You needn't worry about his admirin' Fanny," replied Miss
+Polly, in her matter-of-fact manner, while she lifted the green
+watering-pot. "He was on the steps when she set out for school this
+mornin', an' he didn't notice her any more than he did me. Fanny
+ain't the sort he takes notice of, I could see that in a
+minute."</p>
+<p>"Then he must be blind." There was a resentful sound in
+Gabriella's voice. "It embarrasses me when I get on a street car
+with her because the men stare so."</p>
+<p>"Well, he didn't stare. But it's a mighty good thing that all
+men haven't got the same kind of eyes, ain't it? What I could never
+make out was why men ever marry women who haven't got curly hair,
+an' yet they do it every day&mdash;they go right straight out an'
+do it with their wits about 'em."</p>
+<p>The front door opened suddenly, and the man came out again, and,
+descended the walk with the springy step Gabriella had noticed at
+their first meeting. Notwithstanding his size, he moved with the
+lightness and agility of a boy, and without looking at him she
+could see, as she bent over the flower-bed, that he had the look of
+exuberant vitality which accompanies perfect physical condition.
+Without meaning to, without knowing why she did it, she glanced up
+quickly and met his eyes.</p>
+<p>"So you are making a garden?" he remarked, and stopped beside
+the freshly turned flower-bed. Against the gray twilight the red of
+his hair was like a dark flame, and the vivid colour appeared to
+intensify the sanguine glow in his face, the steady gaze of his
+eyes, and the cheerful heartiness of his voice.</p>
+<p>"He is cyclonic," she said to herself. "Yes, that is the
+word&mdash;he is cyclonic&mdash;but he isn't a gentleman."</p>
+<p>"It's a pity to let the yard run to waste," she responded, with
+an imperiousness which took Miss Polly's breath away, though it
+left the irrepressible O'Hara still buoyantly gay and kind.</p>
+<p>"Now it takes a woman to think of that," he observed with an
+off-hand geniality which she felt was directed less toward herself
+than toward an impersonal universe. "I like to look at that old
+rose-bush when it is in bloom, but the idea"&mdash;(he pronounced
+it idee)&mdash;"of planting anything would never have occurred to
+me."</p>
+<p>Gabriella's lips closed firmly, while she sprinkled the earth
+with an air of patient finality which made Miss Polly think of Mrs.
+Carr on one of her neuralgic days.</p>
+<p>"What's that stringy looking grass over there?" pursued the man,
+undismayed by her manner.</p>
+<p>"Clove pinks." Nothing, she told herself indignantly, could
+persuade her to encourage the acquaintance of a man who
+mispronounced his words so outrageously.</p>
+<p>"And here?" He pointed to the flower-bed she was watering.</p>
+<p>"Mignonette and nasturtium seeds."</p>
+<p>"When will they come up?"</p>
+<p>"Very soon if they're watered."</p>
+<p>"And they'll bloom about July, I guess?"</p>
+<p>"They ought to bloom all summer. In the autumn, if we have room,
+we're going to plant some dahlias, and a row of hollyhocks against
+the house. By next summer the yard will look much better."</p>
+<p>"By George!" he exclaimed abruptly, and after a minute or two:
+"Do you know, I can remember the first time I ever saw a
+flower&mdash;or the first time I took notice of one, anyway. It was
+red&mdash;a red geranium. There was a whole cart of 'em, and that's
+why I noticed 'em, I expect. But a red geranium is a Jim-dandy
+flower, ain't it?"</p>
+<p>To this outburst Gabriella made no reply. Her will had hardened
+with the determination not to be drawn into conversation, and while
+he waited with his eager gray eyes&mdash;so like the alert, wistful
+eyes of a great dog&mdash;on her profile, she began carelessly
+plucking up spears of grass from the flower-bed.</p>
+<p>For a minute he waited expectantly; then, as she did not look
+up, he remarked, "So long!" in a voice of serene friendliness, and
+went on to the gate. He had actually said "So long" to her,
+Gabriella, and he had said it with a manner of established
+intimacy!</p>
+<p>"Well, what do you think of that?" she demanded scornfully of
+Miss Polly when he had disappeared up the street.</p>
+<p>"I reckon he don't know any better, honey. You don't learn much
+about manners in a mine, I 'spose, and when he ain't down in a
+mine, Mrs. Squires says he's building railroads across deserts. She
+says he ain't ever had anything, education or money, that he didn't
+pick up for himself, and you oughtn't to judge him as you do some
+others you've known. Anyway, she says he's made a big pile of
+money."</p>
+<p>"I believe you're taking up for him, Miss Polly. Has he
+bewitched you?"</p>
+<p>"I don't like to see you hard, Gabriella. You're almost always
+so tolerant. It ain't like you to sit in judgment."</p>
+<p>"I am not sitting in judgment, but I don't see why I'm obliged
+to be friendly with a strange man who says 'idee.' It would be bad
+for the children."</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Squires has known him for thirty years&mdash;he's
+forty-five now&mdash;and she says it's a miracle the way he's come
+up. He was born in a cellar."</p>
+<p>"I dare say he has a great deal of force, but you must admit
+that blood tells, Miss Polly."</p>
+<p>"I never said it didn't, Gabriella&mdash;only that there's much
+more credit to a man that comes up without it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'll admire him all you please," retorted Gabriella, "if
+you'll promise to keep him away from the children."</p>
+<p>Though she spoke sharply, the sharpness was directed not to Miss
+Polly, but to herself&mdash;to her own incomprehensible
+childishness. The man interested her; already she had thought of
+him daily since she first came to the house; already she had begun
+to wonder about him, and she realized that she should wonder still
+more because of what Miss Polly had told her. When he had
+approached her in the yard, she had been vaguely disturbed, vaguely
+thrilled by the strangeness and the mystery surrounding him; she
+had been subtly aware of his nearness before she heard his step,
+and turning, found his eyes fixed upon her. Her own weakness in not
+controlling her curiosity, in recurring, in spite of her determined
+resolve to that first meeting, in allowing a coarse, rough
+stranger&mdash;yes, a coarse, rough, uneducated stranger, she
+insisted desperately&mdash;to hold her attention for a
+minute&mdash;the incredible weakness of these things goaded her
+into a feeling of positive anger. For ten years there had been no
+men in her life, and now at thirty-seven, when she was almost
+middle-aged, she was beginning to feel curious about the history of
+the first good-looking man she encountered&mdash;about a mere
+robust, boisterous embodiment of masculinity. "What difference can
+it make to me who Alice is?" she demanded indignantly. "What
+possible difference?" She forced herself to think tenderly of
+Arthur; but during the last few months the image of Arthur had
+receded an immeasurable distance from her life. His remoteness and
+his unreality distressed her; but try as she would, she could not
+recall him from the gauzy fabric of dreams to the tangible
+substance of flesh.</p>
+<p>"It isn't that I care for myself," she said to Miss Polly
+abruptly, as if she were defending herself against an unspoken
+accusation. "I am a working woman, and a working woman can't afford
+to be snobbish&mdash;certainly a dressmaker can't&mdash;but I must
+look after my children. That is an imperative duty. I must see that
+they form friendships in their own class."</p>
+<p>But life, as she had already discovered, has a sardonic manner
+of its own in such crises. That night she planned carefully, lying
+awake in the darkness, the subterfuges and excuses by which she
+would keep Archibald away from O'Hara, and the very next afternoon
+when she came home from work she found confusion in the street, a
+fire engine at the corner, and, on the steps of her home, the boy
+clinging rapturously to the hand of the man.</p>
+<p>"You ought to have been here, mother," cried Archibald in tones
+of ecstatic excitement. "We had a fire down the street in that
+apartment house&mdash;and before the firemen came Mr. O'Hara went
+in and got out a woman and some children who had been overcome by
+smoke. He had to lower them from a fire-escape, and he got every
+one of them out before the engine could get here. I saw it all. I
+was on the corner and saw it all.</p>
+<p>"I hope Mr. O'Hara wasn't hurt," remarked Gabriella, but her
+voice was not enthusiastic.</p>
+<p>"To hear the kid run on," responded O'Hara, overpowered by
+embarrassment, "you'd think I'd really done something, wouldn't
+you? Well, it wasn't anything. It was as easy as&mdash;as eating.
+Now, I was caught down in a mine once in Arizona&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Tell me about it. Mother, ask him to tell you about it,"
+entreated Archibald. The boy was obviously consumed with curiosity
+and delight. Gabriella had never seen him so enthusiastic, so swept
+away by emotion. Already, she suspected, he had fallen a victim to
+the passion of hero worship, and O'Hara&mdash;the man who spoke of
+"idees"&mdash;was his hero! "I shall have to be careful," she
+thought. "I shall have to be very careful or Archibald will come
+under his influence."</p>
+<p>"Well, I guess I must be going along," remarked O'Hara, a little
+nervously, for he was evidently confused by her imperious manner.
+"A fellow is expecting me to dinner over at the club."</p>
+<p>"But I want to hear about the mine. Mother, make him tell us
+about the mine!" cried Archibald insistently.</p>
+<p>"I'll tell you another time, sonny. We'll get together some day
+when your mother don't want you, and we'll start off on a regular
+bat. How would you like that?"</p>
+<p>"When?" demanded the boy eagerly. His fear of losing O'Hara
+showed in the fervour with which he spoke, in the frantic grasp
+with which he still clung to his hand. It occurred to Gabriella
+suddenly that she ought to have thrown Archibald more in the
+companionship of men, that she had kept him too much with women,
+that 'she had smothered him in her love. This was the result of her
+selfish devotion&mdash;that he should turn from her to the first
+male creature that came into his life!</p>
+<p>Her heart was sore, but she said merely: "That is very kind of
+you, Mr. O'Hara, but I'm afraid I mustn't let my boy go off on a
+regular bat without me."</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, I may, mother. Say I may," interrupted Archibald with
+rebellious determination.</p>
+<p>"Well, we'll see about it when the time comes." She turned her
+head, meeting O'Hara's gaze, and for an instant they looked
+unflinchingly into each other's eyes. In her look there was
+surprise, indignation, and a suspicion of fear&mdash;why should he,
+a stranger, come between her and her son?&mdash;and in his steady
+gaze there was surprise, also, but it was mingled, not with
+indignation and fear, but with careless and tolerant amusement. She
+knew from his smile that he was perfectly indifferent to her
+resentment, that he was even momentarily entertained by it, and the
+knowledge enraged her. The glance he gave her was as impersonal as
+the glance he gave Miss Polly or the rose-bush or the street with
+its casual stream of pedestrians. It was the glance of a man who
+had lived deeply, and to whom living meant action and achievement
+rather than criticism or philosophy. He would not judge her, she
+understood, simply because his mind was not in the habit of
+judging. His interest in her was merely a part of his intense,
+zestful interest in life. She shared with Miss Polly and Archibald,
+and any chance object that attracted his attention for an instant,
+the redundant vitality of his inquiring spirit. "No wonder he has
+worked his way up with all that energy," she reflected. "No wonder
+he has made money." His face, with its clear ruddiness, was the
+face of a man who has breathed strong winds and tasted the sharp
+tang of sage and pine; and she noticed again that his deep gray
+eyes had the unwavering look of eyes that have watched wide
+horizons of sea or desert. There was no suggestion of the city
+about him, though his clothes were well cut, and she was quick to
+observe, followed the latest styles of Fifth Avenue. "Yes, he is
+good looking," she admitted reluctantly. "There is no question
+about that, and he has personality, too&mdash;of a kind." His hat
+was in his hand&mdash;a soft hat of greenish-gray felt&mdash;and
+her eye rested for a moment on his uncovered head with its thick
+waves of red hair, a little disordered as if a high wind had
+roughened them. "If he only had breeding or education, he might be
+really worth while," she added, almost approvingly.</p>
+<p>When he spoke again O'Hara ignored Gabriella, and turned his
+alert questioning glance on the little seamstress. Fanny had
+sauntered up the walk to join the group&mdash;Fanny in all the
+glory of her yellow curls, and her "debutante slouch "&mdash;and he
+bowed gravely to her without the faintest change of expression. If
+he admired Fanny's beauty and pitied Miss Polly's plainness, there
+was no hint of it in the indifferent look he turned from the girl
+to the old woman.</p>
+<p>"The next time you're planting things," he said earnestly, "I
+wish you'd set out a red geranium. I saw a cart of 'em go by in the
+street this morning and I had half a mind to buy a pot or two for
+the yard. If I get some, will you put 'em out?"</p>
+<p>"Why, of course, I will. I'll be real glad to," responded Miss
+Polly, agreeably flattered by his request. "Is there any special
+place you want me to plant them?"</p>
+<p>"Anywhere I can see 'em from the window. I'd like to look at 'em
+while I eat my breakfast. And while we are about it, wouldn't it be
+just as well to set out a whole bed of 'em?" he asked with a
+munificent gesture which included in one comprehensive sweep the
+weeds, the walk, the elm tree, the blossoming rose-bush, and the
+freshly turned flower-borders. The large free movement of his arm
+expressed a splendid scorn of small things, of little makeshifts,
+of subterfuges and evasions.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think it would cut up the yard too much to make
+another bed?" asked Gabriella, inspired by the whimsical demon of
+opposition. It was true that she had no particular fondness for red
+geraniums; but if Miss Polly had expressed, on her own account, a
+desire to plant the street with them, she would never have thought
+of objecting.</p>
+<p>"Well, the yard ain't much to brag of anyhow," replied Miss
+Polly with that careful penetration which never sees below the
+surface of things. "To tell the truth I've always had a sort of
+leanin' toward geraniums myself&mdash;especially rose geraniums. I
+don't know why on earth," she concluded with animated wonder, "I
+never thought of putting rose geraniums in that window box along
+with the sweet alyssum. They would have been the very things and
+they don't take so much watering."</p>
+<p>"That's a bargain, then," said O'Hara, with his ringing laugh
+which made Gabriella smile in spite of herself. Then, after shaking
+hands with each one of the group, he went down the walk and passed
+with his vigorous stride in the direction of Broadway.</p>
+<p>When the gate had closed, and his large figure had vanished in
+the distance, Gabriella said sternly: "Archibald, you must not lose
+your head over strangers. We know nothing on earth about Mr. O'Hara
+except that he lives in this house."</p>
+<p>"Oh, but, mother, he was splendid at the fire! You ought to have
+seen him holding a girl by one arm out of the window. He was as
+brave as a fireman, everybody said so, didn't they, Miss
+Polly?"</p>
+<p>"Men of that sort always have courage," observed Gabriella
+contemptuously, and despised herself for the remark. What was the
+matter with her this afternoon? Why did this man arouse in her the
+instinct of combativeness, the fever of opposition? Was it all
+because she suspected him of a vulgar intrigue with a shopgirl? And
+why had she decided so positively that Alice was vulgar? Certainly,
+she, a dressmaker, should be the last to condemn shopgirls as
+vulgar.</p>
+<p>"I declare, I can't begin to make you out, Gabriella," said Miss
+Polly uneasily. "I never heard you talk about folks bein' common
+before. It don't sound like you."</p>
+<p>"Well, he is common, you know," protested Gabriella, with a
+strange, almost tearful violence. "Why did he have to shake hands
+with us all&mdash;with each one of us, even Fanny, when he went
+away? We'd hardly spoken to him."</p>
+<p>"I don't know what's come over you," observed the seamstress
+gloomily. "I reckon I'm common, too, so I don't notice it. But I
+must say I like the way he spoke about geraniums. He showed a real
+nice feelin'."</p>
+<p>The words were hardly out of her mouth before Gabriella had
+caught her in her arms. "I know I'm horrid, dear Miss Polly," she
+said penitently, "but I don't like Mr. O'Hara."</p>
+<p>"Then I shouldn't see any more of him than I was obliged to,
+honey, and there ain't a bit of use in Archibald's goin' with him
+if you don't want him to."</p>
+<p>"I don't like to forbid him. Of course, I know nothing against
+the man&mdash;it is only a feeling."</p>
+<p>"Well, feelin's are mighty queer things sometimes," remarked
+Miss Polly, scoring a triumph which left the indignant Gabriella at
+her mercy; "and when I come to think of it; I don't recollect that
+yours have always been such good judges of folks."</p>
+<p>The geraniums arrived in a small cart the next morning, but
+O'Hara did not appear, and for several weeks, though Gabriella
+glanced suspiciously at the hatrack each morning when she passed
+through the hail, there was no sign of life in his rooms. Then one
+afternoon he reappeared as suddenly as he had vanished, and she
+found Archibald with him in the yard when she came home at six
+o'clock. That the boy would be her difficulty, she knew by
+instinct, for he had been seized by one of those unaccountable
+romantic fancies to which the young of the race are disposed.
+Though the sentiment was certainly far less dangerous than Fanny's
+passion for the, matin&eacute;e idol, since it revealed itself
+principally as a robust and wholly masculine ambition to follow in
+the footsteps of adventure, Gabriella fought it almost as fiercely
+as she had fought Fanny's incipient love affair.</p>
+<p>"He is making Archibald rough," she said to Miss Polly, after a
+fortnight of unavailing opposition to the new influence in
+Archibald's life. "Until we came here," she added despondently,
+"Archibald loved me better than anything in the world, and now he
+seems to think of nothing but this man."</p>
+<p>"It looks to me as if it was mighty good for the child, honey.
+You can't keep a boy tied to your apron-strings all the time.
+Archibald needs a father the same as other boys, and if he hasn't
+got one, he's either goin' to break loose or he's goin' to become a
+mollycoddle. You don't want to make a mollycoddle of him, do
+you?"</p>
+<p>"Of course not," answered Gabriella honestly, for, in spite of
+her strange fits of unreasonableness, she was still sensible enough
+in theory. "I've tried hard to keep him manly&mdash;not to spoil
+him, you know that as well as I do. And it isn't that I object to
+his making friends. I'd give anything in the world if he could know
+Arthur. If it had been Arthur," she went on gently, "I should have
+been glad to have him come first. I shouldn't have cared a bit if
+he had loved Arthur better than me."</p>
+<p>"You oughtn't to talk like that, Gabriella, for you know just as
+well as can be that Archibald don't love anybody better than he
+loves you. As far as I can make out though, Mr. O'Hara sets him a
+real good example. I don't see that he's doin' the child a particle
+of harm, and I don't believe you see it either. To be sure you
+don't think much of football, but it's a long ways better than
+loafin' round with nothin' to do, and this boy scout business that
+Archibald talks so much about sounds all right to me. Now, he never
+would have thought a thing about that except for Mr. O'Hara."</p>
+<p>"Yes, that's all right. I approve of that, but I can't help
+hating to see a stranger get so strong an influence over my son. It
+isn't fair of him."</p>
+<p>"Then why don't you tell him to stop it. I believe he'd be
+sensible about it, and if I was you, I'd have it every bit out with
+him."</p>
+<p>"If it doesn't stop, I'll find some way of showing him that I
+object to the friendship. But, after all, it may be only a fancy of
+Archibald's. Anyhow, I'll wait a while before I take any step."</p>
+<p>At the beginning of August Gabriella sent the children to the
+country with Miss Polly, and sailed, on a fast boat, for a brief
+visit to the great dress designers of Paris. Ever since Madame's
+age and infirmities had forced her to relinquish this annual trip,
+Gabriella had taken her place, and all through the year she looked
+forward to it as to the last of her youthful adventures. On her
+last visit, Billy and Patty had been in Switzerland; but this
+summer they met her at Cherbourg; and she spent several brilliant
+days with them before they flitted off again, and left her to the
+doubtful consideration of dressmakers and milliners. Patty, who
+appeared to grow younger and lovelier with each passing year, came
+to her room the evening before they parted, and asked her in a
+whisper if she had heard of George or Florrie in the ten years
+since their elopement?</p>
+<p>"Not a word&mdash;not a single word, darling. I haven't heard
+his name mentioned since I got my divorce."</p>
+<p>"You didn't know, then, that Florrie left him six months after
+they ran away?"</p>
+<p>"No, I didn't know. Does he ever write to you?"</p>
+<p>"Not to me, but mother hears from him every now and then when he
+wants money badly. Of course she doesn't have much to send him, but
+she gives him every penny she can spare. A year ago she had a
+letter from some doctor in New Jersey telling her that he was
+treating George for the drink habit, and that he needed to be kept
+somewhere for treatment for several months. We sent her the money
+she needed, Billy and I, but in her next letter she said that
+George had escaped from the hospital and that she hadn't heard of
+him since. That must have been about six months ago."</p>
+<p>"It's dreadful for his mother," observed Gabriella, with vague
+compassion, for she felt as if Patty were speaking of a stranger
+whose face she was incapable of visualizing in her memory. In the
+last ten years she had not only forgotten George, but she had
+forgotten as completely the Gabriella who had once loved him.
+Though it was still possible for her to revoke the hollow images of
+the past, she could not restore to these images even the remotest
+semblance of reality and passion. It was as if some nerve&mdash;the
+sentimental nerve&mdash;had atrophied. She could remember George as
+she remembered the house in Fifty-seventh Street or her
+wedding-gown which Miss Polly had made; she could say to herself,
+"I loved him when I married him," or, "It was in such a year that
+he left me"; but the empty phrases awoke no responsive echoes in
+her heart; and it would have been impossible to imagine a woman
+less crushed or permanently saddened by the wreck of her happiness.
+"I suppose it's hard work that keeps me from thinking about the
+past," she reflected while she watched Patty's beautiful face
+framed by the pale gold of her hair. "I suppose it's work that has
+driven everything else out of my thoughts."</p>
+<p>"Have you any idea what became of Florrie?" she asked, moved by
+a passing curiosity.</p>
+<p>"She left George for a very rich man she met in London. I
+believe he had a wife already, but things like that never stood in
+Florrie's way."</p>
+<p>"It's queer, isn't it, because she really has a kind heart."</p>
+<p>"Yes, she is kind-hearted when you don't get in her way, but she
+was born without any morality just as some people are born without
+any sense of smell or hearing. I know several women over here who
+are like that&mdash;American women, too&mdash;and, do you know,
+they are all surprisingly successful. Nobody seems to suspect their
+infirmity, least of all the men who become their victims."</p>
+<p>"I sometimes think," observed Gabriella cynically, "that men
+like women to be without feeling. It saves them so much
+trouble."</p>
+<p>The next day Patty fluttered off like a brilliant butterfly, and
+Gabriella began to suffer acute homesickness for the house in
+Twenty-third Street and her children. Not once during her stay in
+Paris did the thought of O'Hara enter her mind; and so completely
+had she ceased to worry about his friendship for Archibald that it
+was almost a shock to her when, after landing one September
+afternoon, she drove up to the gate and found the man and the boy
+standing together beside a flourishing border of red geraniums,
+which appeared almost to cover the yard.</p>
+<p>"Oh, look, Ben, there's mother!" cried Archibald; and turning
+quickly, the two came to meet her.</p>
+<p>"My darling, I thought you were still in the country," said
+Gabriella, kissing her son.</p>
+<p>"We've been here almost a week.. The place closed, so we decided
+to come back to town. It's much nicer here," replied Archibald
+eagerly. He looked sunburned and vigorous, and it seemed to
+Gabriella that he had grown prodigiously in six weeks.</p>
+<p>"Why, you look so much taller, Archibald!" she exclaimed,
+laughing with happiness, "or, perhaps, I've been thinking of you as
+a little boy." Then, while her manner grew formal, she held out her
+hand to O'Hara. "How do you do, Mr. O'Hara?"</p>
+<p>He was standing bareheaded in the faint sunshine, and while her
+eyes rested on his dark red hair, still moist and burnished from
+brushing, his tanned and glowing face, and on the tiny flecks of
+black in the clear gray of his eyes, she was startled by a
+sensation of strangeness and unreality as if she were looking into
+his face for the first time.</p>
+<p>"Oh, we're well. I've been playing with Archibald. Did you have
+a good crossing?"</p>
+<p>"It was smooth enough, but I got so impatient. I wanted to be
+with the children."</p>
+<p>"Well, I went once, and I was jolly glad to get back again.
+There was nothing to do over there but loaf and lie around."</p>
+<p>There would be nothing else for him, of course, she reflected;
+and she wondered vaguely if he had ever entered a picture gallery?
+What would Europe offer to a person possessing neither culture nor
+a passion for clothes?</p>
+<p>The driver had placed her bags inside the gate; and O'Hara took
+charge of them as if it were the most natural thing in the world to
+carry for a fellow tenant. Upstairs in the sitting-room he put his
+burden down, unfastened the straps, and commented upon the leather
+of a bag she had bought in Paris.</p>
+<p>"I'd like to have a grip like that myself. Is there anything
+else I can help about?"</p>
+<p>"No, thank you." She was embracing Fanny, and she did not glance
+at him as she responded: "You are very kind, but my trunks are
+arranged for."</p>
+<p>At this he went without a word, and Gabriella began a joyous
+account of her trip to the children.</p>
+<p>"Year after next, if you work hard with your French, you may
+both go with me. Then you'll be big enough to look after each other
+while I am with the dressmakers."</p>
+<p>"Oh, tell me about the dressmakers, mother. What did you bring
+me?" urged Fanny, prettily excited by the thought of her gifts. "I
+need dreadfully some dancing frocks. Carlie has a lovely one her
+mother has just bought for her."</p>
+<p>"I have all your autumn dresses, darling; everything you can
+possibly need at Miss Bradfordine's."</p>
+<p>Fanny's eager face grew suddenly fretful. "Am I really to go
+away to school, mother?"</p>
+<p>"Really, precious, both you and Archibald. Think of your poor
+lonely mother." Breaking off with a start she glanced inquiringly
+about the room, and turned a hurt look on Miss Polly. "Why, where
+is Archibald? I thought he was in the room."</p>
+<p>"I reckon he must have gone down after Mr. O'Hara. They had just
+got back from a ball game, and I 'spose they felt like talking
+about it. He'll be up again in a minute, because Mr. O'Hara goes
+out at six o'clock."</p>
+<p>"But I've just come home." Her lip trembled. "I should think
+Archibald would rather be with me."</p>
+<p>"Oh, he won't stay, and you'll have him all the evening.
+Archibald is just crazy about gettin' you back."</p>
+<p>Taking off her hat, a jaunty twist of black velvet from Paris,
+Gabriella went into her bedroom and changed to a gown of clear blue
+crape, which she took out of the new bag. When she came out again,
+with her arms filled with Fanny's gifts, there was a flush in her
+usually pale face, and her eyes were bright with determination.</p>
+<p>"I put these in my bag, Fanny, so you wouldn't have to wait for
+the trunks. Try on this little white silk."</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother, you look so sweet in that blue gown!"</p>
+<p>"I got it for almost nothing, dear, but the colour is lovely."
+Turning restlessly away, she walked to the window and stood looking
+over Miss Polly's window box down on the brilliant border of red
+geraniums.</p>
+<p>"Has Archibald come upstairs yet, Miss Polly?"</p>
+<p>"Not yet, but he'll be up directly. Don't you worry."</p>
+<p>For an instant Gabriella hesitated; then crossing the room with
+a resolute step, she turned, with her hand on the knob, and looked
+back at the startled face of the little seamstress, who was
+fastening Fanny's white gown.</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm going after him," she said sternly; "I am going
+straight downstairs to find him."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIIa" id="CHAPTER_VIIa"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<h3>READJUSTMENTS</h3>
+<p>For a minute Gabriella stood outside the door of what had once
+been the drawing-room of the house, while she listened attentively
+to the sound of animated voices within. Then suddenly Archibald's
+breezy laugh rang out into the hail, and raising her hand from the
+knob, she knocked softly on the white-painted panel of the
+door.</p>
+<p>"Come in!" called O'Hara's voice carelessly; and Gabriell
+entered and imperatively held out her hand to her son, who was
+standing by the window.</p>
+<p>"Come, Archibald, I want you," she said gravely. "You went off
+without seeing your gifts." She had invaded the sitting-room of a
+strange man, but her purpose was a righteous one, and there was no
+embarrassment in her manner.</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother, are they upstairs? I'll run up and see them!"
+cried, Archibald delightedly. "I thought they were all in the
+trunks."</p>
+<p>Darting past her in a flash, he bounded up the staircase, while
+Gabriella stood facing O'Hara, who had risen and thrown away his
+cigar at her entrance. The room was still fragrant with tobacco;
+there was a light cloud of smoke over the mignonette in the window
+box, and beyond it, she could see the dim foliage of the elm tree
+waving over the flagged walk to the gate. With an eye trained to
+recognize the value of details, she saw that the sitting-room was
+furnished with the same deplorable taste which had selected the
+golden-oak hatrack and the assortment of ornamental walking-sticks.
+The woodwork had been stained to match the oak of the barbarous
+writing-table, which held a distorted bronze lamp, with the base
+composed of a heavily draped feminine figure, a massive desk set,
+also of bronze, a pile of newspapers, a dictionary, and several
+dull-looking books with worn covers and dog's eared pages. She
+noticed that the chairs were all large and solid, with deep arms
+and backs upholstered in red leather, which looked as if it would
+never wear out, that the rug was good, and that, except for a few
+meretricious oil paintings on the greenish walls, the room was
+agreeably bare of decoration. After her first hesitating glance,
+she surmised that a certain expensive comfort was the end sought
+for and achieved, and that in the furnishing beauty had evidently
+been estimated in figures.</p>
+<p>"Mr. O'Hara," she began firmly, "I wish you would not take my
+son away from me."</p>
+<p>He did not lower his gaze, and she saw, after an instant in
+which he appeared merely surprised, a look of amusement creep into
+his expressive eyes. Within four walls, in his light summer
+clothes, with the gauzy drift of tobacco smoke over his head, he
+looked larger and more irrepressibly energetic than he had done out
+of doors.</p>
+<p>"I am sorry you feel that way," he returned very slowly after a
+pause. Already she had discovered that he had great difficulty with
+his words except when he was stirred by excitement into
+self-forgetfulness. At other times he seemed curiously
+inarticulate, and she saw now that, while she waited for his
+answer, he was groping about in his mind for a suitable phrase in
+which to repel her accusation.</p>
+<p>"I appreciate your interest in him," she resumed smoothly, "but
+he is with you too much. I do not know you. I know nothing in the
+world about you."</p>
+<p>"Well&mdash;" Again he hesitated as if over an impediment in his
+speech. Then, finding with an effort the words he needed, he went
+on more easily: "If there's anything you'd like to know, I guess
+you can ask me."</p>
+<p>She frowned slightly, and leaving the door moved resolutely to
+the writing-table, where she stopped with her hand on the pile of
+newspapers. Against the indeterminate colour of the walls her head,
+with its dark, silver-powdered hair, worn smooth and close after
+the Parisian fashion, showed as clear and fine as an etching. In
+her blue summer gown she looked almost girlish in spite of the
+imperious dignity of her carriage; and from her delicate head to
+her slender feet, she diffused an air of fashion which perplexed
+and embarrassed him, though he was unaware of the conscious art
+which produced it.</p>
+<p>"The only thing I'd like to know about you," she answered, "is
+why you have taken so sudden a fancy to my son?"</p>
+<p>At this he laughed outright, with a boyish zest which dispelled
+the oppressive formality of her manner. He was completely at his
+ease again, and while he ran his hand impatiently through his hair,
+he answered frankly:</p>
+<p>"Well, you see, when it comes to that, I didn't take any sudden
+fancy, as you call it&mdash;I didn't take any fancy at all&mdash;it
+was the other way about. The boy is a nice boy&mdash;a bully good
+boy, anybody can see that&mdash;and I like boys, that's all. When
+he began trotting round after me, we got to be chums in a way, but
+it would have been the same with any other boy who had come to the
+house&mdash;especially," he added with a clean blow given straight
+from the shoulder, "if he'd been a decent chap that a parcel of
+women were making into a muff."</p>
+<p>For a minute anger, righteous anger, kept her silent; then she
+responded with stateliness: "I suppose I have a right to decide how
+my son shall be brought up?"</p>
+<p>He met her stern gaze with a smile; and in the midst of her
+resentment she was distinctly aware of the impeccable honesty of
+his judgment. The peculiar breeziness she had always thought of as
+"Western" sounded in his voice as he answered:</p>
+<p>"By George, I'm not so sure that you have!"</p>
+<p>Before his earnestness she felt her anger melt slowly away. The
+basic reasonableness of her character&mdash;her passion to
+investigate experience, to examine facts, to search for
+truth&mdash;this temperamental attitude survived the superficial
+wave of indignation which had swept over her.</p>
+<p>"So you think I am making a mistake with Archibald?" she asked
+quietly; and growing tired of standing, she sank instinctively into
+one of the capacious leather-covered chairs by the table. "But the
+question is&mdash;are you able to judge?"</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm a man, and I hate to see a boy coddled. It's going to
+be devilish hard on the kid when he grows up."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps you're right"&mdash;her manner had grown
+softer&mdash;"and because I've thought of this, I am going to send
+him away to school this autumn&mdash;in a few weeks. Much as it
+will hurt me to part with them, I am going to send both of my
+children away from me. I have made the arrangements."</p>
+<p>Insensibly the note of triumph had crept into her voice. By the
+simple statement of her purpose she had vindicated her motherhood
+to this man. She stood clear now of his aspersions on her wisdom
+and her devotion.</p>
+<p>"I don't know much about girls," he replied, seating himself on
+the opposite side of the table, where the green light from the
+shaded lamp fell directly on his features. "I can't remember ever
+noticing one until I grew up, and then I was afraid to death of
+them, particularly when they were young&mdash;but I've been a boy,
+and I know all about boys. There isn't a blooming thing you could
+tell me about boys!" he concluded with animation.</p>
+<p>"And you think that all boys are alike?"</p>
+<p>"More or less under the skin. Of course some are washed and some
+are dirty&mdash;I was dirty&mdash;but they're all boys, every last
+one of them, and all boys are just kids. With the first money I
+made out West, I started a lodging-house for them&mdash;the dirty
+ones&mdash;down in the Bowery," he added. "They can get a wash and
+a supper and a night's lodging in a bed with real sheets any night
+in the year."</p>
+<p>She was suddenly interested. "Do you care for boys just because
+you were a boy yourself?" she asked.</p>
+<p>"Because I was such a God-forsaken little chap, I guess. You
+were never down in a cellar, I suppose, the kind of cellar people
+live in? Well, I was born in one, and my father had killed himself
+the week before because he was ill with consumption, and couldn't
+get work. He'd been a teamster, and he lost his job when he came
+down with pneumonia, and after they let him out of the hospital, he
+looked such a scarehead that nobody would employ him. After he
+died, my mother struggled on somehow, taking in washing or
+scrubbing floors&mdash;God knows how she managed it!&mdash;and by
+the time I was five, and precious big for my age, I was in the
+street selling papers. I used to say I was seven when anybody asked
+me, but I wasn't more than five; and I remember as plain as if it
+was yesterday, the way mother used to take me to a corner of
+Broadway, and put a bundle of papers in my arms, and how I used to
+hang on to the coppers when the bigger boys tried to get 'em away
+from me. Sometimes I'd get an extra dime or nickel, and then we'd
+have Irish stew or fried onions for supper. After my mother died,
+when I was about eight, I still kept on selling papers because I
+didn't know what else to do, but I didn't have any place to sleep
+then so I used to crawl into machine shops or areas (he said
+'aries') or warehouses, when the watchmen weren't looking. In
+summer I'd sometimes hide under a bush in the park, and the
+policeman would never see me until I slipped by him in the morning.
+There was one policeman I hated like the devil, and I used to swear
+that I'd get even with him if it took me all the rest of my life."
+For a moment he paused, brooding complacently. "I did get even with
+him, too," he added, "and it didn't take me more than twenty
+years."</p>
+<p>"You never forget anything?"</p>
+<p>"Forget?" he laughed shortly. "When you find a thing I forget,
+it'll be so small you'll have to put on spectacles to recognize
+it!"</p>
+<p>She nodded comprehendingly. "And after that?"</p>
+<p>"After that they caught me and sent me to school, and I learned
+to read and write and do sums&mdash;I always had a wonderful head
+for figures&mdash;but after school I went on selling papers so I'd
+have something to eat&mdash;-"</p>
+<p>The door burst open, and Archibald rushed in to show the evening
+clothes Gabriella had brought him from Paris.</p>
+<p>"They are jolly, mother! May I keep them on?"</p>
+<p>"If you like, dear, but they'll have to be altered a little. The
+coat doesn't quite fit across the shoulders."</p>
+<p>"You're a dandy, kid, a regular dandy," observed O'Hara, with
+humorous gravity.</p>
+<p>After a few moments Archibald rushed off again, and Gabriella
+made an uncertain movement to follow him. "I must go," she said,
+without rising, and added abruptly: "So you got on in spite of
+everything?"</p>
+<p>"Right you are!" He leaned back in his chair and regarded her
+with benevolent optimism. "You can always get on if the stuff is in
+you. I meant to get on, and a steam engine couldn't have kept me
+back. It's the gospel truth that I believe I came into the world
+meaning to get out of that cellar, and it was the same thing with
+areas and ash-bins. I knew all the time I wasn't going to keep
+grubbing a living out of an ash-bin. I was always growing, shooting
+up like one of those mullein stalks out there, and eating? Great
+Scott! I used to eat so much when I was a kid that mother starved
+herself near to death so as to give me a square meal. By the time I
+was twelve I had grown so fast that I got a job at cleaning the
+streets&mdash;my first job from the city. But I never went hungry.
+As far as I recollect I never went hungry except the time I beat my
+way out to Chicago&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Without moving, without lowering her eyes from his face,
+Gabriella listened, while she clasped and unclasped the hands in
+her lap. There is a personality that compels attention, and she
+realized for the first time that O'Hara possessed it. A new vision
+of life had opened suddenly before her, and she felt, with the
+illuminating intensity of a religious conversion, that the world
+she had been living in was merely a fiction. In spite of her
+experience she had really known nothing of life.</p>
+<p>"Yes, a lot of 'em went hungry, but I never did," he resumed in
+a tone of frank congratulation. "Sometimes, of course, I'd go
+without supper or breakfast, but that was nothing&mdash;that was
+not being really hungry, you know. I always managed, even when I
+was at school, to make enough to keep satisfied. What I minded
+most," he added musingly, "was not having a regular place to go
+home to at night, and that's why I started that lodging-house. When
+you've slept in holes and on benches, and under freight cars, and
+hidden away in machine shops, you know there's nothing on God's
+earth&mdash;not a blessed thing&mdash;that can take the place of a
+real sure enough bed with real sure enough sheets and pillow cases
+on it."</p>
+<p>"But how did you come out of it? How did you succeed? For you
+have succeeded beyond your dreams, haven't you?"</p>
+<p>"Beyond my dreams?" He threw back his big, bright head, laughing
+happily. "Did any man alive ever succeed beyond his dreams? Why, I
+used to dream of being President, and I guess I shan't be President
+this side of the Great Divide, shall I? But I made money, if that's
+what you mean. Why, I have a million to-day to every dollar I had
+when I was twenty. Do you mind my smoking? I can't talk unless I've
+got hold of a cigar."</p>
+<p>While he struck a match, she noticed with surprise how very neat
+and orderly he was about the ashes of his cigars, which lay in an
+exact gray heap in the massive bronze ash-tray. What a pity, she
+thought, moved by a feeling of compassion, that he had had no
+advantages!</p>
+<p>"I'll tell you how I got on," he pursued after a minute, leaning
+forward with the cigar in his hand&mdash;it was a good cigar, she
+knew from the smell of it. "Do you see this room?"&mdash;he glanced
+proudly about him&mdash;"do you know why I keep this place even
+when I am in the West?" She shook her head, and he went on with a
+kind of half-ashamed, whimsical tenderness: "Well, a man lived here
+once you never heard of&mdash;a common Irishman&mdash;just a common
+Irish politician&mdash;the Tammany sort, just the sort the
+newspapers are so down on. I guess he wasn't strong on civic
+morality as they call it, and the social conscience and all the
+other new-fashion catchwords, but he found me out there in the snow
+one night selling newspapers without any overcoat, and he brought
+me in and gave me one of his. He was a little fellow&mdash;not big
+as the Irish usually grow&mdash;and I could wear his clothes,
+though I wasn't thirteen at the time. The coat wasn't an old one,
+either," he explained with retrospective complacency; "no, sirree,
+he had just bought it, and he made me take it off after I'd tried
+it on and sit down at the table in that back room there&mdash;it's
+all just as he left it&mdash;and eat supper with him&mdash;the best
+supper I ever had in my life before or since, you may take my word
+for it. Then when I'd finished he gave me a dollar and told me to
+go out and rent a bed&mdash;" He broke off, glanced about the room
+with the pride of ownership, and added softly: "Who'd ever have
+thought on that night that this place would one day belong to
+me?"</p>
+<p>"Did you see him again?"</p>
+<p>"After that he never lost sight of me. He got me a room, he sent
+me to school&mdash;not that he thought much of education, the
+more's the pity&mdash;and when I was through with school he got me
+into the Mechanics' Institute, and gave me a job at engineering.
+But the job was too small for me, and so was New York&mdash;there
+ain't room enough here to get on without stepping on somebody's
+toes&mdash;and when I was twenty I set out to beat my way to
+Chicago, and went clean out to Arizona. That's a long
+story&mdash;I'll tell you that some day, for I've been everything
+on earth you can be in order to keep alive, and done pretty much
+everything you can do with two hands that will earn you a square
+meal. I've cut corn and ploughed fields, and greased wheels, and
+chopped wood, and mended machinery, and cleaned the snow away, and
+once out in some little town in Arizona, I even dug a grave because
+the sexton was down with pneumonia. I've been brakesman, and
+freightman, and, after that, freight agent. That was just before I
+struck it rich in Colorado. I was one of the first men at Bonanza
+City, and when I went there with the railroad&mdash;I was on the
+very first train that ever ran there&mdash;the whole town was just
+a row of miners' shacks near the foot of old Bonanza. It's the
+richest mineral streak in the State, and yet twenty-five years ago,
+before the C.A. &amp; F.W. tapped it, there wasn't even a saloon
+out there at Bonanza. City. When you wanted a drink&mdash;and that
+didn't worry me, for I haven't tasted anything but water since I
+was twenty-five&mdash;you had to go all the way to Olympia to get
+it; and what was worse, all the ore had to go to Olympia, too, on a
+little no account branch road to be shipped over the main line.
+Well, as soon as I discovered Bonanza City I said that had to
+change, and it did change. I guess I did as much to make that town
+as any man out there, and to-day I own about two thirds of it. I've
+got a house on Phoenix Avenue, and I gave the town a church and a
+theatre and the ground for a library. We've got one of the
+handsomest churches in the State," he proclaimed with his
+unconquerable optimism, "and we've just begun growing. Why, in ten
+years more Bonanza City will be in the race with Denver."</p>
+<p>"And what about your friend?" she asked, finding it difficult to
+become enthusiastic over the most progressive town in Colorado, a
+State which she always pictured imaginatively as a kind of rocky
+desert, inhabited by tribes of gregarious invalids, which one
+visited for the sake of the scenery or the climate, when one had
+exhausted the civilized excitements of Europe.</p>
+<p>"I am coming back to him," he responded with a manner of genial
+remonstrance. "You just give me time. But I'd honestly like you to
+see Bonanza City. Why, it would take your breath away if I told you
+it hadn't even begun to grow twenty years ago. You people in New
+York don't know what progress means. Why, out there in Bonanza City
+we do things while you're thinking about doing them. But to come
+back to Barney&mdash;that was his name, Barney
+McGoldrick&mdash;after I made my pile out of Bonanza, I used to
+strike here once in a while to see how he was getting along, and
+when he died I took these rooms just as he left 'em. There wasn't a
+chick or a child to come after him, but he had a string of
+pensioners as long as the C.A. &amp; F.W. His money&mdash;it must
+have been half a million&mdash;all went to charity, but I kept on
+in the rooms."</p>
+<p>"What kind of man was he?" she asked, sincerely interested.</p>
+<p>"What kind?" He pondered the question with deep puffs of his
+cigar. "Well, do you know, I don't believe, to save my life, I
+could tell you. The more you know of men, and of women, too, for
+they're all alike, the more you understand, somehow, that you can't
+judge unless you've been right in the other man's
+place&mdash;unless you know exactly what they've had to pull up
+against and how hard they have pulled. Now, if I was drawing my
+last breath, and you asked me what I thought of Barney McGoldrick,
+I'd be obliged to answer that he was the best man I ever knew,
+though there are others in this town, I guess, and the newspapers
+among 'em, who would tell you that he was&mdash;" He broke off
+abruptly, and she waited without speaking, until he solaced himself
+with his cigar, and went on less boisterously: "It's a downright
+shame, isn't it, that the same man can't manage to corner all the
+virtues. I can't explain how it is, but I've noticed that the
+virtues don't seem able to work along peaceably in one another's
+company, for if they did, I guess we'd have pure saints or pure
+sinners instead of the mixed lot we've got to make a world out of.
+I've seen a man who wouldn't have lied or stolen to save his wife
+from starving, and who was the first in the pew at church every
+Sunday, grind the flesh and blood out of his factory girls until
+they were driven into the streets, or crush the very life out of
+the little children he put to work in his mills. Yes, and I've seen
+a tombstone over him with 'I know that my Redeemer liveth' carved
+an inch deep in the marble. Well, Barney wasn't like that, but he
+had his weaknesses, and they were the kind people don't raise
+marble tombstones over. I never had a taste for politics myself,
+but it seems to be like any other weakness, and to drag a man a
+little lower down if it once gets too strong a hold on him. It's
+all right, of course, if you keep it in moderation, but there's
+precious few chaps, particularly if it's in their blood, and
+they're Irish, who can keep the taste under control. Barney was the
+most decent man to women I ever knew. He wouldn't have hurt one for
+a million dollars, in a factory or out of it, and he was faithful
+to his old wife up to the day of her death and long after. He
+grieved for her till he died, and I don't believe any woman ever
+asked his help without getting it. His private life was absolutely
+clean, but his public morality&mdash;well, I guess that wasn't
+exactly spotless. At any rate, they had an
+investigation&mdash;there was a committee of citizens appointed to
+sit in judgment on his record. The chairman was a pillar of the
+church and a public benefactor; he had led every political reform
+for a generation; and I happened to know that he kept two
+mistresses up somewhere in the Bronx, and his wife, who was old and
+ugly, wore herself to a shadow because he neglected her. Mark you,
+I'm not upholding Barney, but, good Lord! ain't it queer how easy
+men get off when they just sin against women and not against men or
+against the State?"</p>
+<p>"It's all queer." She rose from the leather chair, and held out
+her hand. "I'm glad I came in, Mr. O'Hara. Some day you must tell
+me the rest."</p>
+<p>"The rest?" His embarrassment had descended upon him, and he was
+awkwardly stammering for words, with her cool hand in his grasp. As
+long as his enthusiasm had lasted he had talked fluently and
+naturally, swept away from his self-consciousness; but with the
+return of the formal amenities he became as ill at ease and shy as
+a boy. "There ain't anything more except that we're building a
+railroad out there, and I'm going back to finish it next spring if
+I'm alive."</p>
+<p>The September breeze entered from the dim stretch of yard, under
+the waving elm boughs, and in an instant the room was filled with
+the fragrance of mignonette.</p>
+<p>"But you won't be if you never get your dinner," she retorted,
+as she smiled brilliantly. Then, turning quickly, she crossed the
+threshold, and went down the hall to the staircase.</p>
+<p>She was tremendously excited, and while she mounted the stairs
+she felt that she had not been so alive, so filled with energy
+since her girlhood in Richmond. It was as if a closed door into the
+world had been suddenly flung open, and she knew that she had
+passed beyond the narrow paths of convention into the sunny roads
+and broad fields of vision. In a moment of enlightenment she saw
+deeper and farther than she had ever dreamed of seeing before. "It
+teaches one not to judge," she thought, with a stab of
+self-reproach, "it teaches one not to judge others until one really
+knows." Twice before to-night, on the day when she resolved for the
+sake of Jane's children to go to work, and again on the June
+evening when George returned to her, she had felt this sudden
+quickening of life, this magical sense of the unexplored mystery
+and beauty of the world that surrounded her. But she had been very
+young then, and on that June evening she had been deeply in love.
+To-night, she assured herself, there was no touch of personal
+romance. In some inexplicable way the talk with O'Hara had renewed
+her broken connection with her Dream, and she felt closer in
+sympathy to Arthur than she had been able to feel for months. No,
+this awakening was utterly different from the awakening of love,
+for it shed its illumination not on a single person, but on the
+whole of humanity. O'Hara had moved her, not as a man, but as a
+force&mdash;a force as impersonal as the wind or the sea, which had
+swept her intellect away from its anchorage in the deeps of
+tradition. She had thought herself free, but she understood now
+that she had never really broken away&mdash;that in spite of her
+struggles to escape, the past had still held her. To-night it was
+more than an awakening, it was a conversion through which she was
+passing, and she knew she could never again believe as she had
+believed a few hours ago, that she could never judge again as
+unintelligently as she had judged yesterday. "So that is a man's
+world," and then with a rush of impulse: "What a mean little life I
+have been living&mdash;what a mean little life!" For she really
+knew nothing of life except dressmaking; she was familiar with no
+part of it except the way to Dinard's. She had been living a little
+life, with little standards, little creeds, little compromises. And
+yet, though the personality of O'Hara had enlarged her vision of
+the world, it had not altered her superficial view of the man. She
+still saw him outwardly at least without the glamour of
+romance&mdash;she still thought of him as boisterous, uneducated,
+slangy&mdash;but she was beginning almost unconsciously to
+distinguish between the faults of manner and the faults of
+character; she was beginning to be tolerant.</p>
+<p>From Fanny's open door a humming voice floated out to her, and
+going inside, she found the girl, in a new frock, practising a
+dance step before the mirror. "This is the lame duck, mother, but
+it's different from the one we danced last year."</p>
+<p>"Yes, dear, it's very pretty." Stopping before the
+dressing-table, Gabriella frowned on the photograph of a young man
+in a silver frame&mdash;a young man with a fascinating smile and
+inane features.</p>
+<p>"Fanny, where did you get this?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother, I didn't mean you to see it. I meant to put it
+away."</p>
+<p>"Where did you get it?"</p>
+<p>"He sent it to me. I wrote and asked him for it, and it has his
+autograph. Isn't he handsome? That's just the way he looked in
+'Stolen Sweets' last winter."</p>
+<p>"Well, he looks like a calf, I think," returned Gabriella
+severely. "I suppose you may keep it out until you get tired of it,
+but please try to be sensible, Fanny." Though she spoke jestingly,
+she was secretly disturbed by the discovery of the photograph. "If
+she were not pretty, it wouldn't matter," she thought, "but she is
+so pretty that almost any man might be tempted to begin a
+flirtation. Thank Heaven, she didn't take a fancy to Mr. O'Hara.
+That would have been a calamity." For, in spite of the fact that
+she had become personally reconciled to O'Hara, she was as firmly
+resolved as ever to keep Fanny out of his sight. "You know so many
+nice boys, dear," she resumed after a minute, "that I think you
+might be content to let actors alone."</p>
+<p>"But boys are so stupid, mother." Fanny's tone was withering in
+its disdain. "They are wrapped up in sports, and I despise
+sports."</p>
+<p>"Then you oughtn't to tease them as you do. You're too young to
+have fancies."</p>
+<p>"I am sixteen."</p>
+<p>"Well, that is much too young for anything of that sort. I like
+you to have boy friends, but I don't like you to be foolish. What
+has become of that attractive boy, Carlie's brother? He doesn't
+come here any more, and I'm afraid you've hurt his feelings."</p>
+<p>"Oh, mother," hummed Fanny to the music of the lame duck as she
+practised before the mirror, "how can you really hurt a man?"</p>
+<p>The next morning when Gabriella, in a Parisian gown of black
+taffeta and one of the absurdly small hats of the autumn, started
+for Dinard's, she found herself thinking, not of Fanny's
+flirtation, but of her long talk with O'Hara. She cast a friendly
+glance on the golden-oak hatrack as she passed&mdash;for O'Hara had
+risen in her regard since she had discovered that he had not
+selected the furniture on the first floor&mdash;and then stopping
+for a few moments on the front steps, she closed her eyes, and
+inhaled the fragrance of the mignonette in the window box. The yard
+was brilliant in the early sunshine; and at the gate she saw the
+wife of the caretaker, who had looked after the flowers in her
+absence. Detaining the woman by a gesture, she joined her in the
+street, and the two started together to walk the long blocks that
+stretched to Fifth Avenue.</p>
+<p>"You are going home early to-day, Mrs. Squires."</p>
+<p>"Yes, ma'am; it's Johnny's birthday and I promised to take him
+up to the Bronx. Mr. O'Hara had his breakfast at seven, and I got
+through earlier than usual. He is so tidy that there ain't much to
+do except to dust around a little."</p>
+<p>She was a neat, red-faced woman, in rusty mourning for a child
+she had lost in the early summer, and while she talked, Gabriella
+felt an irresistible impulse to question her about O'Hara. "She has
+known him for thirty years, and I can find out more from her than I
+could discover for myself in six months," she thought; but she only
+said indifferently:</p>
+<p>"You've worked at this house a long time, haven't you?"</p>
+<p>"For thirty years&mdash;ever since I came here at eighteen as
+housemaid to Mr. McGoldrick. My husband was coachman for Mr.
+McGoldrick, you know&mdash;he drove the prettiest pair of bays in
+New York&mdash;and that was how I met him. When we married, Mr.
+McGoldrick set us up, and John drove his carriage for him as long
+as he lived. I often wonder what the old gentleman would think of
+everybody having automobiles. They were just beginning to come into
+fashion when he died."</p>
+<p>"You knew Mr. O'Hara then?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, he was a great deal with Mr. McGoldrick. After he went
+West we didn't see much of him for a time&mdash;that was while he
+was making his money. Then he came back and brought his wife to a
+place here to be treated&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"His wife?"</p>
+<p>"Didn't you know? She died a few years ago, but before that he
+used to keep her with some doctor over on Long Island, and he went
+regularly to see her every Sunday afternoon as long as she
+lived."</p>
+<p>"What was the matter?"</p>
+<p>"Drugs. Drugs and drink, too, they said, though I never knew for
+certain about that. But they couldn't do anything with her. They
+tried all the cures anybody ever heard of, and she went back every
+time. No sooner would one thing fail, however, than Mr. O'Hara
+would hear of something or other over in Europe, and make them
+begin trying it. Finally for the last ten or twelve years she was
+quite out of her mind&mdash;clean crazy they said, and didn't know
+anybody. But he still went to see her every Sunday when he was
+staying in town, and he still made the doctors go on trying new
+things. He never gave up till the very last. Mr. McGoldrick used to
+say of him that he was the sort that would go on hoping in
+hell."</p>
+<p>"Who was she? Where did he meet her?"</p>
+<p>"God only knows. He never would say much about her even to Mr.
+McGoldrick, but John always stuck it out that she was never the
+right sort in the beginning, and that Mr. O'Hara got tangled up
+with her somewhere in a mining town out West, and couldn't get out.
+I've heard she was a chambermaid or a barmaid or something in a
+miners' hotel, but I don't know, and nobody else knows, for Mr.
+O'Hara never opened his mouth about her. All we know positive is
+that she must have been a drug fiend long before he ever married
+her, and that he stuck to her for better or for worse until she
+died and was buried. Some men are like that, you know, a few of
+'em. When a thing once belongs to 'em, no matter what it is or how
+little it's worth, they'll go through fire and water for the sake
+of it&mdash;and it makes no difference whether it's a woman or a
+railroad or a dog or a mine. They've got the sense of
+responsibility like a disease. You see, Mr. O'Hara is that sort,
+and you might as well try to turn a steam roller as to start to
+reason him out of a notion. It would have been as easy as talking
+for him to have got a divorce. Time and again Mr. McGoldrick used
+to go after him about it, and talk himself hoarse; but it didn't do
+any good, not a particle. Instead of getting free out there in the
+West where it was easy, he kept on lugging that crazy woman back
+and forth, trying to cure her long after everybody else had given
+up hope and was wishing that she was dead."</p>
+<p>"Well, I suppose he loved her."</p>
+<p>"No, ma'am, that's the funny part, but it didn't look like love
+to me&mdash;not like what men call love, anyway. If it had been
+love, it would have worn itself out long ago. Who on earth could
+love a crazy, yellow, shrieking, cursing creature like that? I saw
+her sometimes when he'd send me to take things down to her, and I
+tell you it wasn't love&mdash;not man's love, anyhow&mdash;that
+made him do what he did."</p>
+<p>"Then it must have been something finer even than love,"
+Gabriella acquiesced after a moment. "It's strange, when we come to
+think of it, how often we find spirituality in places where we'd
+never expect it to be."</p>
+<p>"I don't know that I'd call Mr. O'Hara spiritual exactly,"
+replied Mrs. Squires thoughtfully. "I don't believe he ever puts
+his foot inside a church, and I've heard him swear when he got
+ready till you'd expect the roof to drop in on you, but when you
+come to think of it," she concluded, "I guess there's a good deal
+of religion floating around outside of walls."</p>
+<p>At the next corner they parted, and as the caretaker stopped to
+shake hands with Gabriella and thank her for a birthday present for
+Johnny, she added nervously: "I hope I haven't said anything that I
+oughtn't to have said, Mrs. Carr. Mr. O'Hara has been as good as
+gold to me, and I shouldn't like him to hear I'd been talking about
+him."</p>
+<p>"He shan't hear, I promise you"; and while Mrs. Squires hurried,
+reassured, to her home in Sixth Avenue, Gabriella walked briskly
+with the crowd which was streaming along Twenty-third Street into
+Broadway.</p>
+<p>A week ago she would scarcely have noticed the people about her.
+For ten years she had gone every morning to her work through the
+streets, and she had felt herself to be as aloof from the masses as
+the soaring skyscraper at the corner of Broadway. The psychology of
+the crowd had not touched her; even when she walked with it, when
+she made a part of it, she had felt herself to be detached from its
+purposes.</p>
+<p>To-day, however, a change had come over her, and she was happy
+with a large and impersonal happiness which seemed to belong less
+to herself than to the throng which surged about her and gathered
+her in. Her little standards, her little creeds, had become a part
+of the larger standards and creeds of humanity. In Broadway, moving
+onward with the other workers who were returning to the day's work,
+she was aware of an invisible current of joy which flowed from the
+crowd into her thoughts and through her thoughts back again into
+the crowd. For the first time she was feeling and thinking in
+unison with the multitude.</p>
+<p>That night, when she sat alone with Miss Polly, she said to her
+suddenly:</p>
+<p>"I believe I was wrong to wish Archibald not to see anything of
+Mr. O'Hara. Yesterday we had a long talk, and I think he must have
+some very fine traits."</p>
+<p>"Maybe," replied Miss Polly, a little snappishly. "I never could
+see what set you so against him, Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"Oh, he is dreadfully slangy, and, of course, he isn't educated.
+I suppose if I mentioned Hamlet to him, he'd think I was talking
+about some town in Oklahoma."</p>
+<p>"Well, I reckon he's been his own Hamlet," retorted Miss Polly;
+"and knowing about Hamlet don't make a man, anyhow. George knew all
+about Hamlet, but it didn't make him easy to live with."</p>
+<p>"Yes, that's just it. What did George's advantages do for him? I
+used to think it was love that mattered most," she said musingly
+after a pause, "and then, when love failed, I began to think it was
+culture. But I see now that it is something else. Do you ever
+wonder what the essential thing really is, Miss Polly?"</p>
+<p>"No, I never wonder," responded Miss Polly tartly, "but when you
+stew it down to the bones, I reckon it's just plain character."</p>
+<p>"Yes, if you can't have both culture and character, of course
+character is the more important. But think how much that man might
+have made of the university training that was wasted on George."
+While she spoke there came back to her in snatches a conversation
+she had had with an Englishman on the boat last summer, and she
+remembered that he had alluded to Judge Crowborough as "a man of
+the broadest culture." Surely the "broadest culture" must include
+character, and yet she could feel even now the casual and
+business-like clasp of the judge, she could see again the admiring
+gleam in his small, fishy eyes. "After all, I suppose it is a kind
+of spiritual consciousness that makes character," she said aloud,
+"and you can't train that into a man if he isn't born with it."</p>
+<p>"It seems to me that Mr. O'Hara has done mighty well, all things
+considered," pursued Miss Polly, and she inquired suspiciously:
+"Did Mrs. Squires ever tell you anything about his marriage?"</p>
+<p>"I met her this morning on my way to work, and she told me about
+it."</p>
+<p>"Well, what do you make of it? Don't it beat anything you ever
+heard?"</p>
+<p>"It does. There's not the slightest doubt of it. And, do you
+know," Gabriella went on hurriedly, "that story made a remarkable
+impression on me&mdash;I've been thinking about it ever since. It
+made me see everything differently, and I've even asked myself if I
+had enough patience with George. If I wasn't too hard and
+intolerant with him in the beginning?"</p>
+<p>"I shouldn't worry about that, honey, because I don't believe it
+would have made any difference if you'd been gentler. It's the
+stuff in a man, I reckon, that counts more than the way a woman
+handles him. You couldn't have saved George any more than that
+other woman could ruin the man downstairs."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps not." Rising from her chair, Gabriella drew the pins
+from the smooth, close coil of her hair. "But I see things so
+differently since I had that talk with Mr. O'Hara. I am glad to
+have him for a friend," she added generously, "but of course I
+still feel the same about Fanny. I hope he won't begin to notice
+Fanny."</p>
+<p>"Well, he won't. He ain't thinkin' about it. I declare,
+Gabriella," the little woman went on with a change of tone, "your
+head don't look much bigger than a pincushion with your hair fixed
+that way. It makes you seem mighty young, but there ain't many
+women that could stand it."</p>
+<p>"It's the fashion in Paris. I have to be smart. Do you suppose
+many people guess that I wear extreme styles," she added
+laughingly, "because they are so hard to sell?"</p>
+<p>"You certainly do look well in 'em. I never saw anybody with
+more natural style. Why, you can put on those slouchy things
+without a piece of corset and look as if you'd just stepped out of
+a fashion plate."</p>
+<p>"When you aren't pretty, you're obliged to be smart."</p>
+<p>"Well, of course you never had the small features and pink and
+white colouring that Jane had; but you always had a way of your own
+even as a girl, and you're handsomer now than you ever were in your
+life. If you were to ask Mr. O'Hara, I bet you he'd say you were a
+heap better lookin' than Fanny."</p>
+<p>A gasp broke from Gabriella, and she turned from the mirror to
+stare blankly at the seamstress. "Mr. O'Hara! Why, what in the
+world made you think of him?"</p>
+<p>But Miss Polly had grown suddenly impenetrable. "Oh, nothin',"
+she responded evasively; "I've just seen him look at you both when
+you were together."</p>
+<p>Gabriella laughed brightly. "Oh, he looks at everything. I never
+saw such eyes."</p>
+<p>There was the note of accomplishment, of success, in her voice,
+and she brushed her fine, soft hair with long, vigorous strokes
+which had in them something of this same quality of unwavering
+confidence. To look at her as she sat, relaxed yet dominant, before
+the glass, was to recognize that she was a woman who had achieved
+the purpose of her life, who had succeeded in whatever she had
+undertaken. Not a great purpose, perhaps&mdash;there were hours
+when her purpose seemed to her to be particularly trivial&mdash;but
+still, great or small, she had accomplished it. She was not only
+directing Dinard's now&mdash;she <i>was</i> Dinard's. Without her
+the business would collapse like a house of cards, and it was
+because she knew this, because Madame also knew this, that she had
+been able to perfect the arrangements she had planned that May
+afternoon after her depressing visit to Judge Crowborough. For she
+managed the house of Dinard's now by an arrangement which gave her
+one third of the profits; and in the last six months, since this
+scheme had gone into effect, the business had grown tremendously in
+certain directions. The millinery department, for instance, which
+Madame had once treated with such supercilious disdain, had become
+to-day the most fashionable hat shop in Fifth Avenue. The work was
+hard, but the returns were wonderful; and with a strange gloating,
+she told herself that she was making money&mdash;always more money
+for the children. "When Fanny finishes school year after next,
+we'll take a large apartment in Park Avenue, and spend every summer
+in Europe," she concluded.</p>
+<p>In the morning she rather expected to see O'Hara, but a month
+passed before she met him one evening in October, when she came
+home late from work. The autumn rains had come and gone, destroying
+the fugitive bloom of Miss Polly's flower-beds, and scattering the
+leaves of the elm tree in a moist, delicately tinted carpet over
+the grass. An hour ago the sun had set in a purple cloud, and
+beneath the electric lights, which shone through the fog with a wan
+and spectral glimmer, the dark outlines of the city assumed an
+ominous vagueness. There was no light in the house; and the
+deserted yard, silvered from frost and strewn with dead leaves,
+which lay in wind-drifts along the flagged walk, had the haunted
+aspect of a place where youth and happiness have passed so recently
+that the fragrance of them still lingers.</p>
+<p>"Archibald went off to school without telling you good-bye," she
+said in a friendly voice. "He was much disappointed."</p>
+<p>Stopping in the walk, he looked at her with unaffected
+surprise.</p>
+<p>"Why, I thought that was what you wanted!"</p>
+<p>She met this quite honestly. "Not after I talked to you."</p>
+<p>"What in thunder did I say to change your opinion of me?" The
+strong west wind blowing around him and lifting the roughened red
+hair from his forehead, appeared to lessen by contrast the breezy
+animation of his manner.</p>
+<p>"It wasn't anything you said," she answered simply. "I found out
+you were different from what I thought, that is all."</p>
+<p>"Then you must have thought something!" he laughed aloud.</p>
+<p>"I was afraid at first that you might have a bad influence over
+Archibald."</p>
+<p>"Oh, the kid!" His mirth was as irrepressible as his energy.</p>
+<p>"You see I have to be very careful," she went on gently. "I want
+to do my best by him."</p>
+<p>At this he turned on her with sudden earnestness. "You can't do
+your best by being too careful&mdash;take my word for it. If you
+want him to be a man, don't begin by making a mollycoddle of him.
+Let him rough it a bit, or it will be twice as hard for him when he
+grows up."</p>
+<p>"But I do&mdash;I do. I am sending him away from me. Isn't that
+right?"</p>
+<p>"You bet it is. Let him learn his own strength. I've lived among
+men ever since I was born, and I tell you, nine times out of ten,
+the boy who is tied to his mother's apron-strings, loses his grip
+when he is turned out into the world. At the first knock-down he
+goes under."</p>
+<p>Instinctively she flinched. If only he wouldn't!</p>
+<p>"After he leaves school of course he will go to the university,"
+she said.</p>
+<p>"That's right," he agreed emphatically, and pursued a little
+wistfully: "Now, that's what I was cheated out of, and there've
+been times when I'd have given my right arm to have been through
+college instead of having to keep my mouth shut and then run home
+and look up the meaning of things in an encyclop&aelig;dia. It's a
+handicap, not knowing things. Nobody who hasn't had to get along in
+spite of, it knows what a darned handicap it is!"</p>
+<p>"But you read, don't you?"</p>
+<p>"Not much. Never had time to form the habit. But I've read
+Shakespeare&mdash;at least I've read Julius C&aelig;sar six times,"
+he explained. "I had it in the desert once where there wasn't a
+newspaper for two months. And I've read the Kings, too&mdash;most
+of 'em."</p>
+<p>"But not Hamlet?" She was smiling as she looked from him into
+the street.</p>
+<p>He shook his head with a laugh. "Too much meandering in that. I
+don't like talk unless it is straight."</p>
+<p>Though he was upon the most distant terms of acquaintance with
+the English language, it occurred to her that he probably possessed
+a knowledge of men and things which no university training could
+have given him.</p>
+<p>"It is wonderful," she remarked, touched to sympathy by his
+confession, "that you should have succeeded."</p>
+<p>"Oh, any man could have done it&mdash;any man, that is, who
+loved a fight as much as I do. It was half luck and half bulldog
+grip, I suppose. When I once get my grip on a thing, I'll hold on
+no matter what happens. There ain't the power this side of Kingdom
+Come that could make me let go if I don't want to."</p>
+<p>She thought of his wife, of his losing fight against the craving
+for morphine, and she replied very gently: "If you hadn't been a
+good fighter, I suppose you would have been beaten long ago."</p>
+<p>"So long ago," he retorted with jovial humour, "that you
+wouldn't have known me."</p>
+<p>An impulse of curiosity urged her to an utterly irrelevant
+response. "I wonder if you have known many women?" She felt that
+she should like to hear his story from him, there in the deserted
+yard; but when he answered her, he revealed a personal reticence
+worthy of the aristocratic traditions of Mrs. Carr. "Oh, I haven't
+had time for them," he replied indifferently.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps there aren't so many in Bonanza City?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, there're plenty," he rejoined gaily, "if you take the
+trouble to look for them."</p>
+<p>"And you didn't?" They had entered the house, and she spoke
+merrily as she crossed to the staircase.</p>
+<p>"Well, the sort I found didn't take my fancy, you see!" he
+tossed back playfully from his door.</p>
+<p>Her foot was on the lowest step, when, hesitating with a
+birdlike movement, she looked at him over her right shoulder.</p>
+<p>"Well, that's a pity. A woman could have told you a good many
+things," she observed.</p>
+<p>"For instance?" He was still jesting.</p>
+<p>Poised for flight, she gazed back at him, challenging his
+eyes.</p>
+<p>"Oh, not to collect gold-headed walking-sticks, not to believe
+in golden-oak, and not to be so extravagantly&mdash;slangy."</p>
+<p>As she ran up the staircase, a burst of laughter followed her in
+the midst of which she distinguished the retort: "Well, I own to
+the slang, but I inherited the oak, and the sticks were all given
+me&mdash;by women."</p>
+<p>The temptation to fling back, "of a sort?" came to her; but she
+conquered it as she passed demurely into the sitting-room, where
+Miss Polly was reading the afternoon paper before an open fire. "I
+mustn't get too friendly," she told herself, reprovingly. "It is
+better to keep up a certain formality." And she determined that at
+the next meeting she would be dignified and aloof.</p>
+<p>But the next meeting did not occur until January, for O'Hara
+went West the following day, and for more than two months Miss
+Polly and Gabriella were alone in the house. Though she was working
+doubly hard at Dinard's, the loneliness of the winter evenings
+after the Christmas holidays were over became almost intolerable to
+Gabriella; and the bleak month of January stretched ahead of her in
+an interminable prospect of cold and gloom. For the past ten years
+the children had absorbed her life, after her working hours, so
+entirely that the parting from them had been an unbearable wrench,
+and had left her with an aching feeling as if an arm had been cut
+away. She had had little time to make friends; the streets of the
+city isolated her as completely as if they had been spaces of
+uninhabited wilderness; and, except for her casual remarks to Miss
+Polly, she had lived from day to day without speaking a word that
+was not directly concerned with the management or the sales of
+Dinard's. Since her divorce, obeying perhaps some inherited
+tradition, she had avoided men almost instinctively; and even if
+she had cared to make friends among them, her life was so narrow
+that it would have been almost impossible for her to do so. When
+she was not too tired, she still read as widely as she could; but
+at thirty-seven books had become but a poor substitute for the more
+robust human activities. As the theatres and the lecture rooms
+offered the only opportunities of relaxation and amusement, she
+went twice a week, accompanied by the little seamstress, who
+appeared to thrive on self-sacrifice, to see a play that was
+noticed in the papers, or to listen to explanatory descriptions of
+the scenery of South America or the grievances of the oppressed
+natives of Asia.</p>
+<p>"You mustn't let yourself mope, honey," urged Miss Polly, one
+snowy morning in January, when Gabriella was putting on a fur coat,
+cut in the latest fashion, which had been left on her hands after
+the mid-winter sales. "The children had to go sooner or later, and
+it's just as well it happened while you are young enough to get
+over it. A boy never stays at home anyway, and you know I always
+told you Fanny was the sort to marry before she is out of her
+teens."</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'm not moping, but of course I can't help missing them.
+The house seems so empty."</p>
+<p>"It's obliged to be empty with only us two women in it. I
+declare I got such a creepy feelin' about burglars last night that
+I kept wishin' Mr. O'Hara would hurry up and come home. Mrs.
+Squires says she was expectin' him all last week, but he didn't
+turn up, so she is kind of lookin' for him to-day."</p>
+<p>"Is she?" Gabriella's voice was charged with sincere
+thankfulness. Merely to know that there was a man on the first
+floor afforded a sense of security; and an occasional meeting with
+him would make, she was aware, a trivial diversion from the
+monotony of her existence. The loneliness of the winter had driven
+her like a storm-swept bird back to the enduring refuge of her
+Dream; but, after all, the flesh and blood presence of O'Hara could
+not seriously interfere with the tender and pensive visions her
+memory spun of the past. Every morning, standing beside her window
+and gazing on the bleak street and the bare elm boughs, she thought
+of Arthur and of her first love, with a pious and reverent
+mind&mdash;for they occupied in her day the hour and mood which her
+mother, belonging to a more orthodox generation, piously dedicated
+to "Daily Strength for Daily Need." But never for an instant would
+it have occurred to the granddaughter of that sanctified snob,
+Bartholomew Berkeley, who despised the lower orders and fraternized
+with the Deity in his pulpit every Sabbath, that the red-blooded
+and boisterous O'Hara&mdash;the man of force and slang&mdash;could
+by any accident usurp the sacred shrine where the consecrated
+relics of her first love reposed. Before the whirlwind of O'Hara's
+energy, she would congratulate herself that her Arthur, with the
+milder fluid of the Peytons in his veins, would never allow himself
+to be carried away by his impulses.</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm glad he's coming back, if it's only to protect us,"
+she said, while she fastened her fur coat. "I wonder what he has
+been doing out West all this time?"</p>
+<p>"Makin' money, I reckon. They say he makes so much he don't know
+what to do with it."</p>
+<p>"We could teach him, couldn't we? But he ought to marry and let
+his wife spend it for him. Only," she concluded carelessly, "I
+suppose he'd select some dizzy chorus girl who would bring him to
+ruin. Men of his kind always pick out chorus girls, don't
+they?"</p>
+<p>"I thought 'twas the other sort that did that," observed Miss
+Polly, fresh from the perusal of the Sunday newspapers; "Dukes and
+society men and the sons of millionaires."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps. Maybe they're all alike," and taking up her umbrella,
+Gabriella started bravely out into the storm.</p>
+<p>At six o'clock, when she struggled back along Twenty-third
+Street, the wind had changed, and the storm driving furiously down
+the long blocks caught her in a whirl of blinding snowflakes. In
+the swirling whiteness of the distance, the black outlines of the
+city appeared remote and shadowy, while the waning lights, which
+shone like dim moons at the crossing, revealed the ghostly figures
+of a few struggling pedestrians.</p>
+<p>The gate was open, and she had almost reached it, when the
+lurching form of a man, emerging suddenly from the storm, was flung
+against her with such violence that she fell back for support on
+the icy railing of the yard. Then, as the obscure figure, drawing
+away from her with a staggering motion, began fumbling blindly at
+the gate, she caught sight of a ghastly face, which looked as if it
+had been stricken by an incurable illness. The man wore no
+overcoat; a knitted muffler was wrapped tightly about his neck; and
+she saw that the hands fumbling at the gate were red and trembling
+from cold.</p>
+<p>Steadying herself against the fence, she drew her purse from her
+muff, and she had already taken out a piece of silver, when she
+heard her name called in a voice which sounded vaguely familiar,
+though it awoke no immediate associations in her mind.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella! My God! I was looking for you, Gabriella!"</p>
+<p>With the money still in her hand, she stooped to look into his
+face.</p>
+<p>"You don't know me. I'm George," he said in an angry voice as if
+he were about to burst into tears. "I'm George, but you don't know
+me."</p>
+<p>The storm drove him against her, and he clung weakly to her arm,
+crying softly in a terrified whimper like a child that is awaking
+from a horrible nightmare. Though she did not realize that he was
+dying, not of disease, but of drink, the thought shot through her
+mind: "So this is George. So this is what George has come
+to&mdash;George who took everything that he wanted!"</p>
+<p>"Where are you going?" she asked, for the shock had restored him
+to some poor semblance of sanity.</p>
+<p>"I was looking for you. I heard you lived down here, and I knew
+you'd take me in. I've been ill&mdash;I'm ill enough to die, and
+they turned me out of the hotel. There was a woman who stole
+everything I had. She stole it and ran off in the night, damn
+her!"</p>
+<p>He shivered violently while he spoke, and she saw a glassy look
+creep into his eyes and over his face, as if his features had been
+frozen in an instant of terror. Panic seized her lest he should die
+there in the street, and she grasped his arm almost roughly as if
+she would shake him back into life. As she supported him his teeth
+began to rattle, not as the teeth of the living chatter from fear,
+but as the teeth of a dead man might rattle when he is jolted in
+his coffin. For a minute she felt the madness of her panic pass
+from her pulses to her brain, and her terror of him turned her as
+cold as the sleet-covered iron railing against which she leaned. A
+cowardly impulse tempted her to desert him and run for her life, to
+seek shelter behind bolted doors, to leave him there alone to
+freeze to death at her gate.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, I'm afraid," he whined, clinging to her arm. "I'm
+afraid, Gabriella. You can't let go of me!"</p>
+<p>An unspeakable loathing swept over her; his very touch seemed
+contamination; and while she turned toward the gate, she knew that
+every fibre of her flesh, every quiver of her nerves, revolted
+against the thing she was doing. But something stronger than her
+flesh or her nerves&mdash;the vein of iron in her
+soul&mdash;decided the issue.</p>
+<p>"Come in with me, and I'll take care of you," she said. "There
+is the step. Don't stumble. Here, steady yourself with the
+umbrella. We are almost there now." Her voice was cold and hard;
+but the words were those she might have used to Archibald had she
+been leading him in out of the storm.</p>
+<p>Still whimpering and stumbling, George clung to her with his
+desperate clutch, while she dragged him up the short walk, which
+was deep in snow, to the six steps, which appeared to her to reach
+upward into eternity. As she approached the house, a light shone
+out suddenly in one of the windows and a sense of safety, of
+perfect security descended upon her, for she knew that it was the
+red glimmer of O'Hara's fire. With the sensation, she heard again
+her mother's voice speaking above the storm: "Gabriella, we'll send
+immediately for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn!" So, in the old days of
+her childhood, Cousin Jimmy had brought her this feeling of relief
+in the midst of distress.</p>
+<p>Opening the door with her latchkey, she dragged George into the
+hall, where her thankful eyes fell on O'Hara's overcoat, from which
+the water was, still dripping. For an instant she was tempted to
+call to him; then checking the impulse, she went on to the
+staircase, which she ascended with difficulty because George's legs
+seemed to give way when he tried to lift them to a step. At last,
+after what she felt to be an eternity, they reached the upper
+floor, and she pushed her burden into Archibald's room, where he
+fell like a log on the hearthrug. The sound of his fall shook the
+house, and when Miss Polly came running in, with a cry of alarm,
+Gabriella almost expected to see O'Hara behind her. But O'Hara did
+not come, and before the seamstress could recover from the
+palpitations the shock had produced, George was on his feet again,
+and was staring blankly, as if fascinated, at the reflection of the
+electric light in the mirror.</p>
+<p>"It's George," Gabriella explained in a harsh voice. "I found
+him in the street. He was looking for me, and I couldn't leave him
+to freeze. I think he's either drunk or ill. I don't know which it
+is, but it sounds like pneumonia."</p>
+<p>"God have mercy!" exclaimed Miss Polly, which was quite as lucid
+as she ever became in a crisis. Her face had turned blue, she was
+trembling with terror, and the violence of her palpitations almost
+exceeded the painful sounds in George's chest. "If there was only a
+man we could send for," she wailed hysterically. "Oh, Gabriella, if
+there was only a man!"</p>
+<p>"Well, there's the doctor," replied Gabriella shortly. "You'd
+better telephone for him at once. Get the nearest one. I think his
+name is McFarland."</p>
+<p>"And a nurse? You'll want a nurse, won't you?"</p>
+<p>"I'll want anything I can get, and I'll want it quickly. There,
+hurry, while I find a bathrobe of Archibald's. He's wet
+through&mdash;soaking wet. He must have been out all day in the
+storm."</p>
+<p>Miss Polly vanished into the dimness of the hall, and after a
+few minutes Gabriella heard her fluttering voice demanding a
+telephone number as if she were still supplicating the Deity.</p>
+<p>"Take off your wet clothes while I get you a drink and some hot
+blankets!" said Gabriella when she had found one of Archibald's
+bathrobes in the closet. It occurred to her that George was really
+incapable of undressing himself, but she felt that she would rather
+die than touch him again. The loathing which had overpowered her
+outside in the storm became stronger in the close air of the house.
+"I can't touch him. I don't care what happens I can't touch him,"
+she told herself, while she placed the flannel robe on the rug, and
+hurried back to the kitchen. Her whole body was benumbed and
+chilled, not from cold, but from disgust, yet her mind was almost
+unnaturally active, and she found herself thinking over and over
+again: "So this is the man I loved, this is the man I married
+instead of Arthur!"</p>
+<p>When she came back with a cup of broth and some hot blankets,
+she found George in the flannel gown of Archibald's, with his wet
+clothes on the floor at his feet, from which he had forgotten to
+remove his shoes. He drank the soup greedily, while Miss Polly
+lighted the wood-fire she had laid in the open grate.</p>
+<p>"The heat's comin' up all right in the radiator," she said, "but
+I thought a blaze might make him more comfortable."</p>
+<p>"Yes, it's better," replied Gabriella sternly, while she stooped
+to unlace George's boots. There was no compassion in her heart, and
+it seemed to her, while she struggled with the wet lacing, that the
+fumes of whiskey spread contagion and disease over the room. She
+was not only hard and bitter&mdash;she felt that she loathed him
+with unspeakable loathing.</p>
+<p>"I declare, Gabriella, I believe he has gone deranged!" Miss
+Polly cried out sharply, dropping the poker and starting to her
+feet in an erratic impulse of flight.</p>
+<p>With the flannel gown clutched tightly to his chest, where the
+dull rattling sounds went on unceasingly, George was staring in
+fascinated intensity at the reflection of the electric light in the
+mirror. Then suddenly, with a scream of terror, he lifted the poker
+Miss Polly had dropped, and flung it over Gabriella's head in the
+direction of the dressing-table. At the noise of breaking glass,
+Gabriella rose from her knees, and said in the hard, quiet voice
+she had used ever since the first shock of the meeting:</p>
+<p>"If you are afraid, lock yourself in your room, Miss Polly. I am
+going downstairs for Mr. O'Hara."</p>
+<p>Without waiting for a response, she ran out into the hall and
+down the staircase, while her eyes clung to the comforting glimmer
+of light under the drawing-room door. As her feet touched the
+lowest step, the door opened quickly, and O'Hara stood on the
+threshold.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIIIa" id="CHAPTER_VIIIa"></a>CHAPTER
+VIII</h2>
+<h3>THE TEST</h3>
+<p>"I knew something was wrong," he said, emerging, big and
+efficient, from the firelight, "and I was just coming up." Before
+she could answer she felt his warm grasp on her hands, and it
+seemed to her suddenly that it was not only her hands he enfolded,
+but her agonized and suffering mind.</p>
+<p>"There's a man up there&mdash;" she faltered helplessly. "I was
+once married to him long ago&mdash;oh, long ago. Just now I found
+him in the street and he seems to be out of his mind. We are
+frightened."</p>
+<p>But he seemed not to hear her, not to demand an explanation, not
+even to wait to discover what she wanted. Already his long stride
+was outstripping her on the staircase, and while she followed more
+slowly, pausing now and then to take breath, she realized
+thankfully that the situation had passed completely away from her
+power of command. As Miss Polly's strength to hers, so was her
+strength to O'Hara's.</p>
+<p>Faint, despairing moans issued from Archibald's room as she
+reached the landing; and going inside, she saw George wrestling
+feebly with O'Hara, who held him with one hand while with the other
+he waved authoritative directions to Miss Polly.</p>
+<p>"Get the bed ready for him, with plenty of hot blankets. He's
+about at the end of his rope now. It's a jag, but it's more than a
+jag, too. If I'm not mistaken he's in for a case of pneumonia."</p>
+<p>Miss Polly, hovering timidly at a safe distance, held out the
+blankets and the hot water bottles, while O'Hara carried George
+across the room to the bed, and then covered him warmly. When he
+turned to glance about his gaze fell on Gabriella, and he remarked
+bluntly: "You'd better get out. You aren't wanted."</p>
+<p>"But I am obliged to be here. It is my business, not yours," she
+replied, while a sensation of sickness passed over her.</p>
+<p>For a moment he regarded her stubbornly, "Well, I don't know
+whose business it was a minute ago," he rejoined, "but it's mine
+now. I am boss of this particular hell, and you're going to keep
+out of it. I guess I know more about D.T. than you and Miss Polly
+put together would know in a thousand years."</p>
+<p>She was very humble. In the sweetness of her relief, of her
+security, she would have submitted cheerfully not only to slang,
+but to downright profanity. It was one of those unforgettable
+instants when character, she understood, was more effective than
+culture. Even Arthur would have appeared at a disadvantage beside
+O'Hara at that moment.</p>
+<p>"I think I ought to help you," she insisted.</p>
+<p>"Well, I think you oughtn't. Out you go! I guess I know what I'm
+up against."</p>
+<p>Before she could protest, before she could even resist, he had
+pushed her out into the hail, and while she still hesitated there
+at the head of the staircase, the door opened far enough to allow
+the huddled figure of Miss Polly to creep through the crack. Then
+the key turned in the lock; and O'Hara's voice was heard pacifying
+George as he might have pacified a child or a lunatic. After a few
+minutes the shrieks stopped suddenly; the door was unlocked again
+for a minute, and there floated out the reassuring words:</p>
+<p>"Don't stand out there any longer. It's as right as right. I've
+got him buffaloed!"</p>
+<p>"What does he mean?" inquired Gabriella helplessly of the
+seamstress.</p>
+<p>"I don't know, but I reckon it's all right," responded Miss
+Polly. "He seems to know just what to do, and anyhow the doctor'll
+be here in a minute. It seems funny to give him whiskey, don't it,
+but that was the first thing Mr. O'Hara thought of."</p>
+<p>"I suppose his heart was weak. He looked as if he were dying,"
+answered Gabriella. "He asked for more whiskey, didn't he?"</p>
+<p>"Yes; I'm goin' right straight to get it. Oh, Gabriella, ain't a
+man a real solid comfort sometimes?"</p>
+<p>Without replying to this ejaculation, Gabriella went after the
+whiskey, and when she came back with the bottle in her hand, she
+found the doctor on the landing outside the locked door. He was a
+stranger to her, and she had scarcely begun her explanation when
+O'Hara called him into the room.</p>
+<p>"The sooner you take a look at him the better." Everything was
+taken out of her hands&mdash;everything, even her explanation of
+George's presence in her apartment.</p>
+<p>As there was nothing more for her to do, she went back to the
+sitting-room, where a fire burned brightly, and began to talk to
+Miss Polly.</p>
+<p>"I don't know what I should have done if he hadn't been here,"
+she said.</p>
+<p>"Who? Mr. O'Hara? Well, it certainly was providential, honey,
+when you come to think of it."</p>
+<p>The door of Archibald's room opened and shut, and the doctor
+came down the hall to the telephone. They heard him order medicines
+from a chemist near-by; and then, after a minute, he took up the
+receiver, and spoke to a nurse at the hospital. At first he gave
+merely the ordinary directions, but at the end of the conversation
+he said sharply in answer to a question: "No, there's no need of a
+restraining sheet. He's too far gone to be violent. It is only a
+matter of hours."</p>
+<p>His voice stopped, and Gabriella went out to him. "Will you tell
+me what you think, Doctor?" she asked.</p>
+<p>"Is he your husband?" He had a blank, secretive face, with light
+eyes, and a hard mouth&mdash;so different, she thought from the
+poetic face of Dr. French.</p>
+<p>"I divorced him ten years ago."</p>
+<p>He looked at her searchingly. "Well, he may last until morning,
+but it is doubtful. His heart has given out."</p>
+<p>"Is there anything I can do?"</p>
+<p>"No. Morphine is the only thing. We are going to try camphorated
+oil, but there is hardly a chance&mdash;not a chance." He turned to
+go back into the room, then stopped, and added in the same tone of
+professional stoicism: "The nurse will be here in half an hour, and
+I shall wait till she comes."</p>
+<p>When Gabriella went back to the sitting-room, Miss Polly was
+weeping. "I followed you and heard what he said. Oh, Gabriella,
+ain't life too awful!"</p>
+<p>"I'll be glad when the nurse comes," answered Gabriella with
+impatience. Emotionally she felt as if she had turned to stone, and
+she had little inclination to explore the trite and tangled paths
+of Miss Polly's philosophy.</p>
+<p>The nurse, a stout, blond woman in spectacles, arrived on the
+stroke of the half-hour, and after talking with her a few minutes,
+the doctor took up his bag and came to tell Gabriella that he would
+return about daybreak. "I've given instructions to the nurse, and
+Mr. O'Hara will sit up in case he is needed, but there is nothing
+to do except keep the patient perfectly quiet and give the
+hypodermics. It is too late to try anything else."</p>
+<p>"May I go in there?"</p>
+<p>"Well, you can't do any good, but you may go in if you'd
+rather."</p>
+<p>Then he went, as if glad of his release, and after Gabriella had
+prevailed upon Miss Folly to go to bed, she changed her street
+dress for a tea-gown, and threw herself on a couch before the fire
+in the sitting-room. An overpowering fatigue weighed her down; the
+yellow firelight had become an anodyne to her nerves; and after a
+few minutes in which she thought confusedly of O'Hara and Cousin
+Jimmy, she let herself fall asleep.</p>
+<p>When she awoke a man was replenishing the fire, and as she
+struggled drowsily back into consciousness, she realized that he
+was not Cousin Jimmy, but O'Hara, and that he was placing the lumps
+of coal very softly in the fear of awaking her.</p>
+<p>"Hallo, there!" he exclaimed when he turned with the scuttle
+still in his hand; "so you're awake, are you?"</p>
+<p>She started up. "I've been asleep!" she exclaimed in
+surprise.</p>
+<p>"You looked like a kid when I came in," he responded cheerfully,
+and she reflected that even the presence of death could not shadow
+his jubilant spirit. "I went back to the kitchen to make some
+coffee for the nurse and myself, and I thought you might like a
+cup. It's first-rate coffee, if I do say it. Two lumps and a little
+cream, I guess that's the way. I rummaged in the icebox, and found
+a bottle of cream hidden away at the back. That was right, wasn't
+it?"</p>
+<p>A strange, an almost uncanny feeling of reminiscence, of vague
+yet profound familiarity, was stealing over her. It all seemed to
+have happened before, somewhere, somehow&mdash;the slow awakening
+to the large dark form in the yellow firelight, O'Hara's sudden
+turning to look at her, his exuberance, his sanguine magnetism, and
+even the cup of coffee he made and brought to her side. She felt
+that it was the most natural thing in the world to awake and find
+him there and to drink his coffee.</p>
+<p>"It's good," she answered; "I had no dinner, and I am very
+hungry."</p>
+<p>"I thought you'd be. That's why I brought a snack with it." He
+was cutting a chicken sandwich on the tray he had placed under the
+green shaded light, and after a minute he brought it to her and
+held the cup while she ate. A nurse could not have been gentler
+about the little things she needed; yet she knew that he was rough,
+off-hand, careless&mdash;she could imagine that he might become
+almost brutal if he were crossed in his purpose. She had believed
+him to be so simple; but he was in reality, she saw, a mass of
+complexities, of actions and reactions, of intricacies and
+involutions of character.</p>
+<p>"I don't know what I should have done if you hadn't been here,"
+she said gratefully while she ate the sandwich and he sat beside
+her holding her cup. "But I'm so unused to being taken care of,"
+she added with a trembling little laugh, "that I don't quite know
+how to behave."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you would have got on all right," he rejoined carelessly;
+"but I'm glad all the same that I was here."</p>
+<p>She motioned toward the hall. "Has there been any change?"</p>
+<p>"No, there won't be until morning. He'll last that long, I
+think. We're giving him a hypodermic every four hours, but it
+really ain't any good, you know. It is merely professional." For a
+minute he was silent, watching her gravely; then recovering his
+casual manner, he added: "I shouldn't let it upset me if I were
+you. Things happen that way, and we've got to take them
+standing."</p>
+<p>She shook her head. "I'm not upset. I'm not feeling it in the
+least. Somehow, I can't even realize that I ever knew him. If you
+told me it was all a dream, I should believe you."</p>
+<p>"Well, you're a plucky sort. I could tell that the first minute
+I saw you."</p>
+<p>"It's not pluck. I don't feel things, that's all. I suppose I'm
+hard, but I can't help it."</p>
+<p>"Hard things come useful sometimes; they don't break."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I suppose if I'd been soft, I should have broken long
+ago," she replied almost bitterly.</p>
+<p>After putting the plate and cup aside, he sat down by the table,
+and gazed at her attentively for a long moment. "Well, you look as
+soft as a white rose anyhow," he remarked with a curiously
+impersonal air of criticism.</p>
+<p>A rosy glow flooded her face. It was so long since any man had
+commented upon her appearance that she felt painfully shy and
+displeased.</p>
+<p>"All the same I've had a hard life," she returned with
+passionate earnestness. "I married when I was twenty, and seven
+years later my husband left me for another woman."</p>
+<p>"The one in there?"</p>
+<p>She shuddered, "Yes, the one in there."</p>
+<p>"The darn fool!" he exclaimed briefly.</p>
+<p>"There was a divorce, and then I had my two children to support
+and educate. Because I had a natural talent for dressmaking, I
+turned to that, and in the end I succeeded. But for ten years I
+never heard a word of the man I married&mdash;until&mdash;I met him
+downstairs&mdash;in the street."</p>
+<p>"And you brought him in?"</p>
+<p>"What else could I do? He was dying."</p>
+<p>"Do you know what he was doing out there?"</p>
+<p>"He was looking for me, I think. He thought. I would take him
+in."</p>
+<p>"Well, it's strange how things work out," was his comment after
+a pause. "There's something in it somewhere that we can't see. It's
+impossible to reason it out or explain it, but life has a way of
+jerking you up at times and making you stand still and think. I
+know I'm putting it badly, but I can't talk&mdash;I never could.
+Words, don't mean much to me, and yet I know&mdash;I know&mdash;"
+He hesitated, and she watched his thought struggle obscurely for
+expression. "I know you can't slip away from things and be a
+quitter, no matter how hard you try. Life pulls you back again and
+again till you've learned to play the game squarely."</p>
+<p>He was gazing into the fire with a look that was strangely
+spiritual on his face, which was half in shadow, half in the
+transfiguring glow of the flames. For the second time she became
+acutely aware of the hidden subtleties beneath his apparent
+simplicity.</p>
+<p>"I've felt that myself often enough," he resumed presently in a
+low voice. "I've been pulled up by something inside of me when I
+was plunging ahead with the bit in my teeth, and it's been just
+exactly as if this something said: 'Go steady or you'll run amuck
+and bu'st up the whole blooming show.' You can't talk about it. It
+sounds like plain foolishness when you put it into words, but when
+it comes to you, no matter where you are, you have to stand still
+and listen."</p>
+<p>"And is it only when you are running amuck that you hear it?"
+she asked.</p>
+<p>"No, there've been other times&mdash;a few of them. Once or
+twice I've had it come to me up in the Rockies when there didn't
+seem more than a few feet between me and the sky, and then there
+was a time out on the prairie when I was lost and thought I'd never
+get to the end of those darned miles of blankness. Well, I've had a
+funny road to travel when I look back at it."</p>
+<p>"Tell me about some of the women you knew in the West." An
+insatiable curiosity to hear the truth about his marriage seized
+her; but no sooner had she yielded to it than she felt an impulsive
+regret. What right had she to pry into the hidden sanctities of his
+past?</p>
+<p>A frown contracted his forehead, but he said merely: "Oh, there
+wasn't much about that," and she felt curiously baffled and
+resentful. "I think I'll go and take a look in there," he added,
+rising and walking softly in the direction of the room at the end
+of the hall.</p>
+<p>He was gone so long that Gabriella, crushing down the revolt of
+her nerves, went to the door, and opening it very gently, looked
+cautiously into the room. The window was wide open to the night,
+where the snow was still falling, and beside the candlestand at the
+head of the bed the nurse was filling a hypodermic syringe from a
+teaspoon. By the open window O'Hara stood inhaling the frosty air;
+and Gabriella crossed the floor so silently that he did not notice
+her presence until he turned to watch the nurse give the
+injection.</p>
+<p>Then he said in a whisper: "You'd better go out. You can't do
+any good." But she made an impatient gesture of dissent, and
+stopping between the bed and the wall, waited while the nurse bared
+George's arm and inserted the point of the needle. He was lying so
+motionless that she thought at first that he was already dead; but
+presently he stirred faintly, a shiver ran through the thin arm on
+the sheet, and a low, half-strangled moan escaped from his lips.
+Had she come upon him in a hospital ward, she knew that she should
+not have recognized him. He was not the man she had once loved; he
+was not the father of her children; he was only a stranger who was
+dying in her house. She could feel nothing while she looked down at
+him. When she tried to remember her young love she could recall but
+a shadow. That, too, was dead; that, too, had not left even a
+memory.</p>
+<p>As she bent there above him she made an effort to remember what
+he had once been, to recall his face as she had first seen it, to
+revive the burning radiance of that summer when they had been
+lovers. But a gray veil of forgetfulness wrapped the past; and her
+mind, when she tried to bring back the emotions of seventeen years
+ago, became vacant. For so long she had stoically put the thought
+of that past out of her life, that when she returned to it now, she
+found that only ashes remained. Then a swift stab of pity pierced
+her heart like a blade, and she saw again, not George her lover,
+not George her husband, but the photograph Mrs. Fowler had shown
+her of the boy in velvet clothes with the wealth of curls over his
+lace collar. So it was that boy who lay dying like a stranger in
+the bed of his son!</p>
+<p>She turned hurriedly and went out without speaking, without
+looking back when she opened the door.</p>
+<p>"If one could only understand it," she said aloud as she entered
+the sitting-room; and then, with a start of surprise, she realized
+that O'Hara had followed her. "You walked so softly I didn't hear
+you," she explained.</p>
+<p>"The rugs are thick, and I have on slippers. My boots were
+soaking when I came in, and I'd just taken them off when you
+called."</p>
+<p>They sat down again in front of the fire; and while she stared
+silently at the flames, with her chin on her hand and her elbow on
+the arm of the chair, he burst out so unexpectedly that she caught
+her breath in a gasp:</p>
+<p>"You didn't know that I was married, too, did you?" His words,
+and even more than his words, his voice, filled with suppressed
+emotion, awoke her from her reverie in which she had been dreaming
+of Arthur.</p>
+<p>She smiled evasively, remembering her promise to Mrs.
+Squires.</p>
+<p>He hesitated again, and then spoke with an effort. "Well, it was
+hell!" he said grimly.</p>
+<p>"I know"&mdash;she was very gentle, full of understanding and
+sympathy&mdash;"but you went through it bravely."</p>
+<p>"I stuck to her." His hand clenched while he answered. Then,
+after a pause in which she watched him struggle against some savage
+instinct for secrecy, he added quietly: "If she were alive to-day,
+I'd be sticking to her still."</p>
+<p>"You must have loved her." It was all she could think of to say,
+and yet the words sounded trite and canting as soon as she had
+uttered them.</p>
+<p>Lifting his head quickly, he made a contemptuous gesture of
+dissent. "No, it wasn't that. I never loved her, except, perhaps,
+just at the first. But there's something that comes before love, I
+guess. I don't know what it is, but there's something. It may be
+just plain doggedness, but after I married her there wasn't
+anything on top this earth that could have made me give up and let
+go. As soon as I found what I was up against&mdash;it was
+morphine&mdash;I knew I'd either got to fight it out or be a
+quitter, and I've never been a quitter. Until she got so bad she
+had to be shut up I kept a home for her out there in Colorado, and
+I lived with her in hell as long as she wasn't too bad to be out of
+a hospital. Then I brought her on here and we found a private place
+down on Long Island where she stayed till she died&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"And you still saw her?"</p>
+<p>"Except when I was out West, and that's where I was most of the
+time, you know. My work was out there, and there's nothing like
+hell behind you to keep you running. I made piles of money those
+years. That's all I ever cared for about money&mdash;just making
+it. I'd fight the devil to get it, but after I've once got it, I'll
+give it to the first fool who comes begging. But the getting of it
+is great."</p>
+<p>"How long did it last?"</p>
+<p>"My marriage? Going on eighteen years. She was down on Long
+Island for the last ten of them."</p>
+<p>"Then you lived with her eight. Was she
+always&mdash;always-"</p>
+<p>"Took it before I ever married her, and I found it out in a
+month. She wasn't so much to blame as you might think," he pursued
+thoughtfully. "You see she had a tough time of it, and she was
+little and weak, and everything was against her. She came out West
+first to teach school, and then she got mixed up with some skunk of
+a man who pretended to marry her when he had a wife living in
+Chicago, and after that I guess she went on taking a dope just to
+keep up her spirits and ease the pain of some spinal trouble she'd
+had since she was a child. There was nothing bad in her&mdash;she
+was just weak&mdash;and I began to feel sorry for her, and so I did
+it. If I had it to do over again, I'm not so sure I'd act
+differently. She was a poor little creature that didn't have any
+man to look after her, and I was just muddling along anyway,
+thinking about money. Heaven knows what would have become of her if
+I hadn't happened along when I did."</p>
+<p>He had lifted his head toward the light, while he ran his hand
+through his hair, and again she saw the look, so like spiritual
+exaltation, transfigure his face. Before this man, who had sprung
+from poverty and dirt, who had struggled up by his own force,
+overcoming and triumphing, fighting and winning, fighting and
+holding, fighting and losing, but always fighting&mdash;before this
+man, who had been born in a cellar, she felt suddenly humbled.
+Without friends, without knowledge, except the bitter knowledge of
+the streets, he had fought his fight, and had kept untarnished a
+certain hardy standard of honour. Beside this tremendous
+achievement she weighed his roughness, his ignorance of books and
+of the superficial conventions, and she realized how little these
+things really mattered&mdash;how little any outside things mattered
+in the final judgment of life. She thought of George, dying a
+drunkard's death in the room at the end of the hail&mdash;of George
+whose way had been smoothed for him from birth, who had taken
+everything that he had wanted.</p>
+<p>"I wish there was something I could do for you&mdash;something
+to help you," she said impetuously. "But I never saw any one who
+seemed to need help so little."</p>
+<p>His face brightened, and she saw that her words had brought a
+touching wistfulness into his eyes.</p>
+<p>"Well, if you'd let me come and talk to you sometimes" he
+answered shyly. "There're a lot of things I'd like to talk to you
+about&mdash;things I don't know, things I do know, and things I
+half know."</p>
+<p>From the brilliant look she turned on him, he understood that he
+must have given her pleasure, and she saw the smile return to his
+face.</p>
+<p>"I'll tell you everything I know and welcome," she replied
+readily; "but that isn't much. Better than that, I'll read to
+you."</p>
+<p>"If you don't mind, I think I'd rather you'd just talk." Then he
+rose with one of his abrupt movements, "I'd better look in again
+now. The nurse might want something."</p>
+<p>"I feel that you oughtn't to stay up," urged Gabriella, rising
+as he turned away from her. "You have done all you can."</p>
+<p>His only response was an impatient negative gesture, and without
+looking at her, he crossed the room quickly and went out into the
+hall. Hardly a minute had passed, and she was still standing where
+he had left her, when he returned and said in a whisper:</p>
+<p>"He is going now&mdash;very quietly. Will you come?"</p>
+<p>She shook her head, crying out sharply: "No! no!" Then before
+something in his face her opposition melted swiftly away, and she
+added: "Yes, I'll come. He might like to have some one by him who
+knew him as he used to be."</p>
+<p>"After all, he got the worst of it, poor devil!" he answered
+gently as he opened the door.</p>
+<p>By a miracle of memory her resentment was swept out of her
+thoughts, and she was conscious of an infinite pity. In George's
+face, while she watched it, there flickered back for an instant the
+glory of that enchanted spring when she had first loved him. Of his
+brilliant promise, his ardent youth, there remained only this
+fading glimmer in the face of a man who was dying. And it seemed to
+her suddenly that she saw embodied in this wreck of youth and love
+all the inscrutable mystery not of death, but of life. Her tears
+fell quickly, and while they fell O'Hara's grasp enfolded her
+hand.</p>
+<p>"It's over now. The best thing that could happen to him has
+happened," he said, and the touch of his hand was like the touch of
+life itself, consoling, strengthening, restoring.</p>
+<p>In the days that followed it was as if the helpful spirit of
+Cousin Jimmy had returned to her in the unfamiliar character of
+O'Hara. The ghastly details of George's burial were not only taken
+out of her hands, she was hardly permitted to know even that they
+were necessary. All explanations were made, not by her, but by
+O'Hara; and when they returned together from the cemetery,
+Gabriella brought with her a feeling that she had been watching
+something that belonged to O'Hara laid in the earth. But when she
+tried to thank him, she found that he was apparently unaware that
+he had done anything deserving of gratitude.</p>
+<p>"Oh, that's nothing. Anybody would have done it," he remarked,
+and dismissed the subject forever.</p>
+<p>For a week after this she did not see him again; and then one
+Saturday afternoon, when she was leaving Dinard's, they met by
+chance and walked home together. It was the first time she had been
+in the street with him, and she was conscious of feeling absurdly
+young and girlish&mdash;she, the mother of a daughter old enough to
+have love affairs! A soft flush&mdash;the flush of
+youth&mdash;tinted her pale cheek; her step, which so often dragged
+wearily after the day's work, was as buoyant as Fanny's; and her
+low, beautiful laugh was as gay as if she were not burdened by
+innumerable anxieties. As they passed a shop window, her reflection
+flashed back at her, and she thought happily: "Yes, it is true, you
+are better looking at thirty-seven, Gabriella, than you were at
+twenty."</p>
+<p>"Shall we walk down?" asked O'Hara, and added: "So that was your
+shop? I am glad that I saw it. But what do you do there all
+day?"</p>
+<p>She laughed merrily. "Put in pins and take them out again.
+Design, direct, scold, and flatter. We are getting in the spring
+models now, and it's very exciting."</p>
+<p>He glanced down at her figure, noting, as if for the first time,
+the narrowness at the feet, the large loose waist, and the
+bunchiness around the hips.</p>
+<p>"Did you make that?" he inquired.</p>
+<p>"This coat? Oh, no; it came from Paris. It was left on my
+hands," she explained, "or I shouldn't be wearing it. I wear only
+what people won't buy, you know."</p>
+<p>"No, I didn't know," he returned abstractedly, and she observed
+humorously after a minute that he was not thinking of her because
+he was thinking so profoundly about her clothes. It was his way,
+she had discovered, to concentrate his mind intensely upon the
+object before him, no matter how trivial or insignificant it might
+appear. He seemed never to have learned how to divide either his
+interest or his attention.</p>
+<p>"If you could make what you wanted," he remarked, "I should
+think you'd make them more comfortable. Are you going to wear those
+hobble skirts this spring?"</p>
+<p>"They'll be narrow at the feet but very bunchy at the
+top&mdash;doesn't that sound delightful? I am making a white
+taffeta for Fanny that has five or six yards of perfectly good
+material puffed out in the most ridiculous way at the back over a
+petticoat of silver lace."</p>
+<p>Her spirits felt so light, so effervescent, that she wanted to
+jest, to laugh, to talk nonsense interminably; and after his first
+moments of bewilderment, when he appeared still unable to detach
+his mind from his business, he entered gaily and heartily into her
+mood. His perplexities once disposed of, he gave himself entirely
+to the enjoyment of the walk with her, and she noticed for the
+first time his boyish delight in the simplest details of life. With
+the simplicity of a man to whom large pleasures are unknown, he
+threw himself whole-heartedly into the momentary diversion of small
+ones. Every person in the crowd, she discovered, excited his
+interest, and his humour bubbled over at the most insignificant
+things&mdash;at the grimace of a newsboy who offered him a paper,
+at the absurd hat worn by a woman in a motor car, at the expression
+of disgusted solemnity on the face of a servant in livery, at the
+giggles of an over-dressed girl who hung on the arm of an anemic
+and exhausted admirer. Never before had she encountered such
+vitality, such careless, pure, and uncalculating joy of life. There
+was a tonic quality in his physical presence, and while she walked
+at his side down Fifth Avenue she felt as if she were swept onward
+by one of the health-giving, pine-scented winds of Colorado. And
+she told herself reassuringly that only a man who had lived
+decently could have kept himself so extraordinarily young and
+exuberant at forty-five.</p>
+<p>The shop windows, particularly those displaying men's shirtings,
+enchanted him; and he stopped a moment before each one, while she
+yielded as obligingly as she might have yielded to a fancy of
+Archibald's, though she was aware that her son would have scorned
+to look into a window.</p>
+<p>"It's so seldom I get out on the Avenue, that's why I like it, I
+suppose," he remarked while they were surveying a festive
+arrangement of pink madras.</p>
+<p>She smiled up at him, and her smile, gay as it was, held a touch
+of maternal solicitude. Notwithstanding his bigness and his success
+and his forty-five years, there was something appealingly boyish
+about him.</p>
+<p>"It would be so easy to get out, wouldn't it?" she asked as they
+walked on again.</p>
+<p>"Well, there ain't much fun when you are by yourself."</p>
+<p>"But you know plenty of people."</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, I know people enough in a business way, but that don't
+mean having friends, does it? Of course, I've men friends scattered
+everywhere," he added. "The West is full of 'em, but it's funny
+when you come to think of it&mdash;" He broke off, hesitated an
+instant, and then went on again: "It's funny, but I don't believe.
+I ever had a woman friend in my life&mdash;I mean a friend who
+wasn't just the wife of some man I knew in business."</p>
+<p>The confession touched her, and she answered impulsively: "Well,
+that's just what I want to be to you&mdash;a good friend."</p>
+<p>He laughed, but his eyes shone as he looked down on her. "If
+you'd only take the trouble."</p>
+<p>"It won't be any trouble&mdash;not a bit of it. After your
+goodness to me, how could I help being your friend?"</p>
+<p>Lifting her eyes she would have met his squarely while she
+spoke, but he was not looking at her&mdash;he appeared, indeed, to
+be looking almost obstinately away from her.</p>
+<p>"There wasn't anything in what I did," he responded in a barely
+audible voice, and she understood that he was embarrassed by her
+gratitude.</p>
+<p>"But there was something in it&mdash;there was a great deal in
+it," she insisted. It was so easy to be natural with a man, so easy
+to be candid and sincere when there was no question of sentiment,
+and, she thought almost gratefully of the elusive and mysterious
+Alice. The faintest suggestion of romance would have spoiled things
+in the beginning; but thanks to the hidden Alice, she might be as
+kind and frank as she pleased. Besides, she was nearly
+thirty-eight, and a woman of thirty-eight might certainly be
+trusted to make a friend of a man of forty-five.</p>
+<p>With this thought, over which the memory of Arthur brooded
+benevolently, in her mind, she said warmly: "It will make so much
+difference to me, too, having a real friend in New York."</p>
+<p>He turned to her with a start. "Do you mean that I could make a
+difference to you?"</p>
+<p>"The greatest difference, of course," she rejoined brightly,
+eager to convince him of his importance in her life. "I can't tell
+you&mdash;you would never understand how lonely I get at times, and
+now with the children away it is worse than ever&mdash;the
+loneliness, I mean, and the feeling that there isn't anybody one
+could turn to in trouble."</p>
+<p>For a minute he appeared to ponder this deeply. "Well, you could
+always come to me if you needed anything," he answered at last, and
+she felt intuitively that for some reason he was distrustful either
+of himself or of her. "I am not here very much of my time, but
+whenever I am, I am entirely at your service."</p>
+<p>"But that's only half of it." She was determined to reassure
+him. "A friendship can't be one-sided, can it? And it isn't fair
+when you give everything, that I should give nothing."</p>
+<p>His scruples surrendered immediately to her argument. "You give
+everything&mdash;you give happiness," he said&mdash;a strange
+speech certainly from the twilight lover of Alice. However, as she
+reasoned clearly after her first perplexity, men were often strange
+when one least expected or desired strangeness. At thirty-seven,
+whatever else life had denied her, she felt that it had granted her
+a complete understanding of men; and it was out of this complete
+understanding that she observed brightly after a minute:</p>
+<p>"Well, if you feel that way, we are obliged to be friends." At
+least she would prove by her frankness that she was not one of
+those foolish women who are always taking things seriously.</p>
+<p>"Yes, you give happiness. You scatter it, all over the place,"
+he went on, groping an instant after the right words.</p>
+<p>"Cousin Jimmy used to say," she laughed back, "that I had a
+sunny temper."</p>
+<p>"That's it&mdash;that's what I meant," he replied eagerly; and
+she was impressed again by his utter inability to make light
+conversation. When he was once started, when he had lost himself in
+his subject, she knew that he could speak both fluently and
+convincingly; but she realized that he simply couldn't talk unless
+he had something to say. In order to put him at his ease again, she
+remarked with pleasant firmness: "Do you know there is something
+about you that reminds me of my Cousin Jimmy. It gives me almost a
+cousinly feeling for you."</p>
+<p>She had the air of expecting him to be interested, but he met it
+with the rather vague interrogation: "Cousin Jimmy?"</p>
+<p>"The cousin who always came to our help when we were in trouble.
+We used to say that if the bread didn't rise, mother sent for
+Cousin Jimmy."</p>
+<p>Though he laughed readily enough, she could see that his
+attention was still wandering. "I never had a cousin," he returned
+after a pause, "or a relation of any sort, for that matter."</p>
+<p>His voice was curiously distant, and she was conscious of a
+slight shock, as if she had run against one of the hard places in
+his character. "Well, I've done my best," she thought impatiently.
+"If he doesn't want to be friends he needn't be." Then, with a
+change of manner, she observed flippantly: "Sometimes one's
+relatives are useful and sometimes they're not." Really, he was
+impossibly heavy except in a crisis; and one could scarcely be
+expected to produce crises in order to put him thoroughly at his
+ease.</p>
+<p>As he made no response to her trite remark, she, also, fell
+silent, while they turned into Twenty-third Street, and began the
+long walk to Ninth Avenue. Once or twice, glancing inquiringly into
+his face, which wore a preoccupied look, she wondered if he were
+thinking of Alice. Then, as the silence became suddenly oppressive,
+she ventured warily in the effort to dispel it: "I hope you are not
+disturbed about anything?"</p>
+<p>"Disturbed?" He turned to her with a start. "No, I was only
+wondering if you knew how much your friendship would mean to
+me."</p>
+<p>It was out at last, and confirmed once more in her knowledge of
+men, she retorted gaily: "How can I know if you won't take the
+trouble to tell me?" After all, she reflected cheerfully, the
+education she had derived from George and Judge Crowborough, though
+lacking in the higher branches, was fundamentally sound. All men
+were alike in one thing at least&mdash;they invariably disappointed
+one's expectations.</p>
+<p>"I've been trying to tell you for a quarter of an hour," he
+answered, "and I didn't know how to put it."</p>
+<p>"But at last you didn't have to put it at all," she said
+laughingly; "it simply put itself, didn't it?"</p>
+<p>"I am still wondering," he persisted gravely.</p>
+<p>"Wondering if I know?" She spoke in the sweetly practical tone
+of one who is firmly resolved not to permit any nonsense. "Yes, I
+do know&mdash;that is, I know there are ways in which I might be
+useful to you."</p>
+<p>"For instance?"</p>
+<p>"Well, there are some little&mdash;some very little things I
+might tell you if we were friends&mdash;real friends," she made
+this plain, "just as two men might be."</p>
+<p>"But the very last things two men would tell each other," he was
+laughing now, "are the little things&mdash;the things about slang
+and walking-sticks and oak furniture."</p>
+<p>So he hadn't forgotten! The recollection of her impertinence
+confused her, and she hastened to make light of it by protesting
+gaily: "I was only joking. Of course, you didn't take that
+seriously."</p>
+<p>"I don't know how much more seriously," he replied emphatically,
+"I could have taken it."</p>
+<p>"But you haven't thought of it since?"</p>
+<p>"What would you say if I told you I hadn't thought of anything
+else?"</p>
+<p>"Then I wish I hadn't said it." She was obviously worried by his
+admission. "It was horrid of me&mdash;perfectly horrid. I ought to
+have been ashamed of myself. I had no right to criticise you, and
+you have been so heavenly kind."</p>
+<p>"After that"&mdash;he appeared to be hammering the idea into her
+mind&mdash;"I was so grateful I'd have done almost anything. Do you
+know," he burst out with evident emotion, "that was the first
+criticism&mdash;I mean downright honest criticism&mdash;I've ever
+had in my life. Nobody&mdash;that is nobody who knew&mdash;ever
+thought enough of me before to tell me where I was wrong."</p>
+<p>It was all a pathetic mistake, she saw, but she saw also that it
+was impossible for her to explain it away. She could not tell him
+the ugly truth that she had been merely laughing at him when he had
+believed, in his beautiful simplicity, that she was speaking as a
+friend. Though she felt ashamed, humbled, remorseful, there was
+nothing that she could say now which would not hurt him more than
+the original misunderstanding had done.</p>
+<p>In her desire to atone as far as possible, she remarked
+recklessly: "I only wish I could be of some real help to you."</p>
+<p>"You can," he answered frankly. "You can let me come to see you
+sometimes before I go West again."</p>
+<p>"You are going back in the spring?"</p>
+<p>He laughed happily, drawing himself erect with a large, free
+movement as if he needed to stretch his limbs. "I can't stand more
+than six months of the East, and I've been here a year now, off and
+on. After a time I begin to want air. I want to breathe."</p>
+<p>"Yet you lived here once."</p>
+<p>"A sort of life, yes, but that don't count."</p>
+<p>"What does count with you, I wonder?" She was smiling up at him,
+and as they passed under a street light her eyes shone with a misty
+brightness through her veil of dotted net.</p>
+<p>For a minute he thought over her question. "I guess fighting
+does," he answered at last. "Getting on in spite of hard knocks,
+and smashing things that stand in your way. I like the feeling that
+comes after you've put through a big deal or got the better of the
+desert or the mountains. I got joy in Arizona out of my first
+silver mine; but I didn't get the joy exactly out of the silver. I
+don't suppose you understand."</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, I do. I understand perfectly. It's the pure spirit of
+adventure. Whenever we do a thing for the sake of the struggle, not
+for the thing itself, it's pure adventure, isn't it?"</p>
+<p>"Well, I like money," he said with the air of being entirely
+honest. "I'm not a romantic chap, don't think that about me. I care
+a lot about money, only after I've made it, somehow, I never know
+what to do with it. All I want for myself is a place to sleep and a
+bite to eat&mdash;I'm not over-particular what it is&mdash;and
+clothes to wear, good clothes, too&mdash;but I don't give a hang
+for motor cars except to go long distances in when there are no
+trains running."</p>
+<p>It was the commonplace problem, worked out in intricate detail,
+of the newly rich, of the uncultivated rich, of the rich whose
+strenuously active processes of enrichment had permanently closed
+all other highways to experience. Seventeen years ago the Gabriella
+of Hill Street would have had only disdain for the newly rich and
+their problems; but life, which had softened her judgment and
+modified her convictions, had completely reversed her inherited
+opinion of such a case as O'Hara's. Though he was as raw as unbaked
+brick, she was penetrating enough to discern that he was also as
+genuine; and, so radically had events altered her point of view,
+that at thirty-seven she found genuine rawness more appealing than
+superficial refinement. George had wearied her of the sham and the
+superficial, of gloss without depth, of manner without substance,
+of charm without character.</p>
+<p>"But there is so much that you might do to help," she said
+presently. "After all, money is power, isn't it?"</p>
+<p>"Misused power too often," he answered. "Of course, you can
+always build lodging-houses and tenements and hospitals; but when
+you come squarely down to facts, I've never in my life tried to
+help a man by giving him money that I haven't regretted it. Why,
+I've ruined men by helping to make their way too easy at the
+start."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps you're right," she admitted; "I don't know much about
+it, I confess; but I should have been spared a great deal of
+suffering if I had had something to start with when I was obliged
+to make my living."</p>
+<p>"That's different." His voice had grown gentle in an instant. "I
+can't think of your ever having had a hard time. You seem so
+strong, so successful, so happy."</p>
+<p>If she had answered straight from her heart, Gabriella would
+have retorted frankly: "A good deal of that is in the shape of my
+face and the way I dress," but instead of speaking sincerely, she
+remarked with impersonal cheerfulness: "Oh, well, happiness, like
+everything else, is mainly a habit, isn't it? I cultivated the
+habit of happiness at the most miserable time of my life, and I've
+never quite lost it."</p>
+<p>"But I don't like to think of your ever having worried," he
+protested.</p>
+<p>Of her ever having worried! Was he becoming dangerously
+sentimental or was it merely a random spark of his unquenchable
+Western chivalry?</p>
+<p>Though she told herself emphatically again that she was not
+falling in love with O'Hara, though she was perfectly faithful in
+her heart to the memory of Arthur, still she was vividly aware with
+every drop of her blood, with every beat of her pulses, of the man
+at her side. And through her magnetic sense of his nearness there
+flowed to her presently a deeper and clearer perception of the
+multitudinous movements of life which surrounded her&mdash;of the
+variable darkness out of which lights flashed and gigantic
+spectacular outlines loomed against a dim background of sky, of the
+vague shapes stirring, swarming, creating there in the darkness,
+and always of the pitiless, insatiable hunger from which the city
+had sprung. For the first time, flowing like a current from the
+mind of the man beside her, there came to her an understanding of
+her own share in the common progress of life&mdash;for the first
+time she felt herself to be not merely a woman who lived in a city,
+but an integral part of that city, one cell among closely packed
+millions of cells. Something of the responsibility she felt for her
+own children seemed to spread out and cover the city lying there in
+its dimness and mystery.</p>
+<p>"But I don't like to think of your ever having worried," he
+repeated.</p>
+<p>"Oh, it's over now," she returned, severely matter-of-fact. "It
+took me years to make my way, but I've made it at last, and I may
+settle down to a comfortable middle-age without the dread of the
+poorhouse to spur me into activity. My business is doing very well;
+our custom has doubled in the last two or three years."</p>
+<p>"But wasn't it a tough pull at one time?"</p>
+<p>"It was hard; but what isn't? Of course, when I was obliged to
+work from nine till six and then come home to cook the children's
+dinner and teach them their lessons, I used to be tired out by the
+end of the day&mdash;but that lasted only a few years: five or six
+at the most&mdash;and now I can afford to let Fanny wear imported
+gowns when she goes out to parties."</p>
+<p>Though she spoke gaily, making a jest of her struggle, she saw
+the gravity of his face deepen until his features looked almost
+wooden.</p>
+<p>"And through it all you kept something that so many other women
+seem to lose when they work for a living," he said. "You've kept
+your&mdash;your charm."</p>
+<p>Again she found herself on the point of exclaiming frankly:
+"heaven knows I've tried to!"&mdash;and again, checking herself,
+she proceeded cautiously: "I've never understood why charm should
+be merely a hothouse flower."</p>
+<p>"I suppose it does depend a good deal upon a sunny temper," he
+rejoined in his blindness.</p>
+<p>They had reached the gate, and stopping him when he would have
+entered, she said with the directness of a man: "So we're friends,
+and you're coming to see me?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I'm coming," he replied gravely. Then, standing beside the
+gate, he watched her while she went up the walk and opened the door
+with her key.</p>
+<p>Upstairs, with her knitting on her lap and her feet on the
+fender, Miss Polly looked up to observe: "You're late, Gabriella.
+You must have walked all the way."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I walked all the way. Mr. O'Hara joined me."</p>
+<p>"Where did you run across him?"</p>
+<p>"Just as I left the shop. He was walking down Fifth Avenue."</p>
+<p>"Do you reckon he was waitin' outside?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, he said he had been up to Fifty-ninth Street on
+business."</p>
+<p>"Well, the walk certainly did you good. You are bloomin' like a
+rose."</p>
+<p>"The air was delicious, and I really like talking to Mr. O'Hara.
+He is quite interesting after you get over the first impression,
+and he isn't nearly so ignorant about things as I imagined. He has
+thought a great deal even if he hasn't read very much. It's
+wonderful, isn't it, what the West can do with a man? Now, if he'd
+stayed in New York he would have been merely impossible, but
+because he has lived out of doors he has achieved a certain
+distinction. I can understand a woman falling in love with him just
+because of his force and his bigness. They are the qualities a
+woman likes most, I think."</p>
+<p>"He must have made a great deal of money."</p>
+<p>"Yes, he's rich, and that's a good thing. I like money
+tremendously, though I used to think that I didn't. I wonder if he
+had been poor if I should have liked him quite so much?" she asked
+herself honestly.</p>
+<p>"I don't 'spose you could ever&mdash;ever bring yourself to
+think of him, honey? It would be a mighty good thing in some
+ways."</p>
+<p>Gabriella, being in a candid mood, pondered the question without
+subterfuge or evasion. "Of course I've passed the sentimental age,"
+she answered. "If Mr. O'Hara had been poor, I suppose I should
+never have thought of him; but his money does make a difference. It
+stands for success, achievement, and ability, and I like all those
+qualities. Then he is rough in many ways, but he isn't a bit
+vulgar. He has genuine character. There is absolutely no pretence
+about him."</p>
+<p>"You could catch him in a minute," replied Miss Polly hopefully,
+animated by the inveterate match-making instinct of her class.</p>
+<p>Gabriella laughed merrily. "Oh, yes, I might capture him if I
+went questing for him. I am not a child. But put that out of your
+head forever, Miss Polly. I have given him clearly to understand
+that there must be no nonsense, though, for the matter of that, I
+doubt if he needed the warning. There is an Alice."</p>
+<p>"I reckon it would take more than an Alice to stand in the way
+if you wanted him," insisted the little seamstress, possessed by an
+obstinate conviction that fate could provide no happiness apart
+from marriage.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps. But you see I don't want him." Gabriella had become
+perfectly serious, and to Miss Polly's amazement a hint of
+petulance showed in her manner. "Everything of that kind was over
+for me long ago. I never think of love now, and if I did there
+wouldn't be but one&mdash;but one&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"I know, honey," agreed Miss Polly, suddenly softened, "and I'd
+give anything on earth if you and Arthur could come together
+again."</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't be any use. I made my choice, and I have had to
+abide by it. He could never forgive me&mdash;". She stopped as if
+she were choking, and Miss Polly said sympathetically:</p>
+<p>"Well, I wish he had a chance to, that's all. Why don't you run
+down to Richmond for a few days this spring to see your folks? Your
+ma and all would be so glad to see you, and it ain't as if you had
+the children to keep you back. The thing that worries me," she
+added with feeling, "is the thought of your spendin' the summer
+here without the children. If Archibald goes to camp from school
+and Fanny joins Jane at the White Sulphur Springs as soon as her
+school is out, you won't have them at all, will you?"</p>
+<p>"No, but they will be happy; that is the only thing that
+matters."</p>
+<p>"It seems all wrong to me. What do you get out of life,
+honey?"</p>
+<p>"What do any of us get out of it, dear little Miss Polly, except
+the joy of triumphing? It's overcoming that really matters, nothing
+else, and it is the same thing to you and to me that it is to the
+man downstairs. I am happy because in my little way I stood the
+test of struggle, and so are you, and so is Mr. O'Hara."</p>
+<p>"But you're young yet, and it ain't natural for you to live as
+you're doin'. Lots of women marry when they're older than you
+are."</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, if they want to&mdash;"</p>
+<p>For a minute the little seamstress rattled her newspaper while
+she looked at her without replying. Then, after folding the paper,
+and removing her spectacles, she asked grimly: "Can you look me in
+the eyes, Gabriella, and tell me that you ain't still hankerin'
+after Arthur?"</p>
+<p>The blush of a girl made the business-like Gabriella appear as
+young and as piquantly feminine as her daughter.</p>
+<p>"No, Miss Polly, I cannot," she answered with incomparable
+directness; "I have loved Arthur all my life."</p>
+<p>"That's just what I thought all along, and yet you went off and
+married somebody else." Excited by the unexpected confession, Miss
+Polly was quivering with sympathy.</p>
+<p>In that supreme instant of self-revelation Gabriella answered
+this accusation as if it had been uttered by her remorseful
+conscience. "But that wasn't love," she said slowly; "it was my
+youth craving experience; it was my youth reaching after the
+unknown, the untried, the undiscovered. We all go questing for
+adventure one way or another, I suppose, but it was not the
+reality."</p>
+<p>"I wonder what is," said Miss Polly in a whisper; "I wonder what
+is, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>"That," replied Gabriella softly, "is what I am still trying to
+discover."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IXa" id="CHAPTER_IXa"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<h3>THE PAST</h3>
+<p>It was the morning of Gabriella's thirty-eighth birthday, and
+she was standing, with her hat on, before the window of her
+sitting-room, gazing with dreaming eyes at the young leaves on the
+elm tree. The day's work was ahead of her, but for a little while,
+standing there by the open window, she gave herself, with a sense
+of pleasure, of abandonment, to the rare luxury of regret. Out of
+her whole year it was the one day when, for a few hours, she
+permitted herself to think sadly of the past and the future, when
+she cherished in her heart something of the gentle melancholy of
+her mother's retrospective philosophy.</p>
+<p>In the street, beyond the narrow yard, where the grass lay like
+a veil, there was a curious deadening of sounds, as if the traffic
+had become suddenly muffled in the languorous softness of spring.
+Out of this imaginary stillness floated the sharp twittering of
+sparrows and the bright laugh of a child at play in one of the
+neighbouring yards. Above the grim outlines of the city the sky
+shone divinely clear and blue, flecked by a single cloud, soft as
+an eagle's feather, which drifted in a mist of light above the
+horizon. The city, beneath that azure sky, borrowed the transparent
+brightness of an object that is imprisoned in crystal. White magic
+had transformed it for an hour, and the street, the houses, the
+shining elm tree, and the distant frowning brows of the
+skyscrapers, all seemed as unreal as the vivid yet impalpable
+images in a dream. And into this world of crystal there drifted,
+like the essence of spring, the dreamy fragrance from the window
+box filled with white hyacinths.</p>
+<p>While she stood there Gabriella thought pensively of many
+things. She thought of the day's work before her, of the gown she
+was designing for Mrs. Pletheridge, of Fanny's latest lover, the
+brother of a schoolmate, of the clothes she should send the child
+to the White Sulphur Springs, of her mother, and of Jane's eldest
+daughter, Margaret; and then very slowly, with the scent of the
+hyacinths drowning all merely prosaic memories, she began to think
+hopelessly and tenderly of Arthur Peyton. She thought of him as he
+had looked on the day when she had told him of her engagement of
+the sympathetic expression in his eyes, and of his beautiful
+manner, which she had felt at the time she could never forget.
+Well, after eighteen years she had not forgotten it. Compared with
+Arthur, all other men seemed to her as unreal as shadows. "How
+could Miss Polly imagine that I'd think of Ben O'Hara after a love
+like that?" she reflected indignantly.</p>
+<p>And then, perhaps because for a shadow he was so solidly
+substantial, she became aware that O'Hara's image was trespassing
+upon the hallowed soil of her reverie. To be sure, she had seen a
+great deal of him since George's death, when he had been so
+wonderfully considerate and helpful. Scarcely a day had passed
+since then that he had not brightened by some reminder of his
+friendship. They had spent long evenings together; and
+occasionally, accompanied by the delighted Miss Polly, they had
+gone to dinner at a restaurant and later to a concert or a play.
+That he had been almost too kind it was impossible for her to deny;
+but she had tried her best to repay him&mdash;she had, when one
+came to the point, done as much as she could to remedy the defects
+of his education. At first she had given zest, sympathy, eagerness,
+to her self-appointed task of making him over; then, as the months
+went by, a sense of doubt, of discouragement, of approaching
+failure, had tempered her enthusiasm, and at last she had realized
+that her work, except in the merest details, had been ineffectual
+and futile. The differences, which she had regarded as superficial,
+were, in reality, fundamental. It was impossible to make him over
+because he was so completely himself. He stood quite definitely for
+certain tendencies in democracy, and by no ingenious manipulation
+could she twist him about until he presented the sham appearance of
+moving in the opposite direction. For the logic of her failure was
+perfectly simple&mdash;he couldn't see, however hard he tried, the
+things she wanted him to look at. The difficulty was far deeper
+than a mere matter of finish, or even of education&mdash;for it
+was, after all, not one of manner, but of material. Day by day she
+had realized more clearly that the problem confronting them was one
+which involved their different standards of living and their
+individual philosophies. The things which she regarded as essential
+were to him only the accidental variations of life. He had lived so
+long in touch with the basic realities&mdash;with vast spaces and
+the stark aspect of desert horizons, with droughts, and winds, and
+the unquenchable pangs of thirst and hunger, with the vital issues
+of birth and death in their most primitive forms&mdash;he had lived
+so long in touch with the simplest and most elemental forces of
+Nature, that his spirit, as well as his vision, had adjusted itself
+to a trackless and limitless field of view. No, what he was now he
+must remain, since to change him, except in trivial details, was
+out of her power.</p>
+<p>And of course he had his virtues&mdash;she would have been the
+last to deny him his virtues. Whenever she applied the touchstone
+of character, she realized how little alloy there was in the pure
+gold of his nature. He was truthful, he was generous, he was brave,
+kind, and tolerant; but his virtues, like his personality, were
+large, flamboyant, and without gradations of colour. Custom had not
+pruned their natural luxuriance, nor had tradition toned down the
+violence of their contrasts. They were experimental, not
+established virtues, as obviously the expression of the man himself
+as was his uncultivated preference for red geraniums. For he
+possessed, she admitted, a sincerity such as she had not believed
+compatible with human designs&mdash;certainly not with human
+achievement. According to the code of the sheltered half of her
+sex&mdash;according to the inflexible code of her mother and
+Jane&mdash;he was not a gentleman. He lacked breeding, he lacked
+taste, he lacked the necessary education of schools; but in other
+ways, in ways peculiarly his own, she was beginning dimly to
+realize that he possessed qualities immeasurably larger than any
+superficial lack in his nature. In balance, moderation,
+restraint&mdash;in all the gracious attributes with which Arthur
+was endowed in her memory, in all the attributes she had
+particularly esteemed in the past&mdash;she understood that O'Hara
+would undoubtedly fall below her inherited standards. But, failing
+in these things, he had been able to command her respect by the
+sheer force of his character. Though he had, as he had confessed to
+her, gone down into hell, she could not talk to him for an hour
+without recognizing that he had never lost a natural chivalry of
+mind beside which the cultivated chivalry of manner appeared as
+exotic as an orchid in a hothouse. Even Arthur, she was aware,
+would have lied to her for her own good; but she would have trusted
+O'Hara to speak the truth to her at any cost. In this, as well as
+in his practical efficiency, and his crude yet vital optimism, he
+embodied, she felt, the triumphs and the failures of American
+democracy&mdash;this democracy of ugly fact and of fine ideals, of
+crooked deeds and of straight feeling, of little codes and of large
+adventures, of puny lives and of heroic deaths&mdash;this democracy
+of the smoky present and the clear future. "If this is our raw
+material to-day," she thought hopefully, "what will the finished
+and signed product of to-morrow be?"</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, ain't these lovely?"</p>
+<p>Whirling out of the sunshine, she saw Miss Polly holding a
+rustic basket of primroses and cowslips. "Mr. O'Hara wants to know
+if he may speak to you for a minute before you go out?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, I'm not in a hurry this morning." Then Miss Polly
+disappeared and an instant later the vacant space in the doorway
+was filled exuberantly by O'Hara.</p>
+<p>"I wanted to be the first to wish you a happy birthday," he
+began, a little shyly, a little awkwardly, though his face was
+flushing with pleasure.</p>
+<p>"The flowers are wonderful!" For a minute, while she answered
+him, he seemed to be a part of the unreal intense brightness of the
+world outside&mdash;of that magic world where the elm tree and the
+grass and the sunny street were all imprisoned in crystal. He
+diffused a glowing consciousness of success, a sanguine faith in
+the inherent goodness of experience. For, as she had discovered
+long ago, O'Hara was one of those who stood not for the elimination
+of struggle, but for the complete acceptance of life. He had sprung
+out of ugliness, he had lived intimately with evil; and yet more
+than any one she had ever known, he seemed to her to radiate the
+simple, uncalculating joy of living. He was the strongest person
+she knew, as well as the happiest. He had never evaded facts, never
+feared a risk, never shirked an issue, never lacked the hardy,
+adventurous courage of battle. In his own words, life had never
+"found him a quitter."</p>
+<p>He stood in front of her now, fresh, smiling, robust, with his
+look of suddenly arrested energy, and the dark red of his hair,
+which was still moist from his bath, striking a vivid note against
+the cool grays and blues of the background. The sunshine, falling
+through the open window, warmed the ruddy tan of his face, and made
+his eyes like pools of clear light in which the jubilant spirit of
+the spring was reflected. "After all, it isn't what one does, it is
+what one is, that matters," she thought while she looked at him.
+"At the end, as Miss Polly said, it is character, not
+circumstances, that counts."</p>
+<p>"I've been all over New York this morning looking for that
+basket," he said. Though he had been so eager to make light of his
+services to her in her trouble, she was amused from time to time by
+a childlike vanity which prompted him to impress her with the value
+of small attentions; and this she was swift to recognize as the
+opposite of Arthur's delicacy. It was the only littleness she had
+observed in O'Hara so far&mdash;this reluctance to hide his smaller
+lights under a bushel&mdash;and in its place, it was amusing. Here
+was an obvious instance where nature unassisted by training
+appeared to fall short.</p>
+<p>"They couldn't be lovelier if you'd gone all over the world,"
+she responded sincerely.</p>
+<p>Before answering her he hesitated a moment, and she watched
+pityingly the struggle he was making toward an impossible
+self-expression. The thing he wanted to say, the thing struggling
+so pathetically in the inarticulateness of his feeling, would not,
+she knew, be uttered in words.</p>
+<p>"You are the first woman I ever wanted to send flowers to," he
+said presently; and added with abject infelicity: "It's strange,
+isn't it?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, it's strange," she assented pleasantly. Though his words
+were ineffectual, she was aware suddenly of a force before which
+she felt a vague impulse of flight. Now, if ever, she understood
+that she must keep their relations as superficial as she had always
+meant them to be&mdash;that she must cling with all her strength to
+the comfortable surface of appearances. "But you haven't had many
+women friends, have you?"</p>
+<p>"I've wanted to give other things," he went on hurriedly; "but
+not flowers. I never thought of flowers until I met you."</p>
+<p>"That's nice for me." She was growing nervous, and in her
+nervousness she precipitated the explosion by venturing rashly:
+"But there's Alice, too, isn't there, to like them?" Her voice was
+firm and friendly. Once for all she intended him to understand how
+aloof she stood from any sentimental advances.</p>
+<p>"Alice?" For an instant his response hung fire, enveloped in a
+fog of perplexity. Then, with an air of dispelling the cloud, he
+made a vigorous gesture of denial, and moved nearer to her with the
+swiftness and directness of a natural force. "Why, Alice was you!
+You were Alice all the time!" he exclaimed energetically.</p>
+<p>"You mean&mdash;" She checked herself in alarm, paralyzed the
+next instant by the tremendous, unexpected blow of her
+discovery.</p>
+<p>"So you thought there was somebody else!" The delight in his
+face kept her silent, amazed, incapable of explanation. His arm was
+still outstretched, as if he were brushing aside the last flimsy
+barrier between them, and his voice, with its unrestrained and
+radiant joy, stirred some faintly quivering echoes in the secret
+depths of her being. It was as if the jubilant spirit of spring had
+flowered suddenly in his look.</p>
+<p>"There wasn't anybody else." He came still nearer, and she stood
+there, startled, incredulous, powerless either to retreat or to
+prevent the inevitable instant that was approaching. "At least,
+there wasn't anybody I ever knew named Alice except a school
+teacher when I was a kid. She was good and she was pretty like you,
+and I used to dream about her after school, and every evening at
+dusk I would go out of my way to speak to her in Sixth Avenue. Once
+she told me that she'd wait for me to grow up and get rich so I
+could marry her, and after I went out to Arizona I used to think
+about her a lot. When I came on you suddenly, standing there in the
+dusk with your hands full of lilacs, it all came back to me because
+you, looked like her, with your dark hair and your tall
+slenderness. Then before I knew what I was, doing I called you by
+her name. I oughtn't to have done it," he finished ecstatically,
+"but I'm jolly glad now that I did."</p>
+<p>So he also, the man of action and of enterprise, he, the worker
+and the adventurer, so he also cultivated his garden of dreams!</p>
+<p>"I didn't know&mdash;I didn't know&mdash;" she found herself
+murmuring faintly in protest.</p>
+<p>"But you know now!" His voice rang out exultantly, and, though
+she felt that the thing she feared and dreaded was coming upon her,
+she still stood there without moving a step, without lifting a
+hand, mesmerized, enchanted, by the force of the man. "You know
+now," he repeated. "You know now, Gabriella, and you knew all
+along."</p>
+<p>It was true. In spite of her surprise, in spite of her
+shrinking, in spite of her evasion, she confessed it in her heart.
+She had known all the time. Something deep down in her, something
+secret and profound and clairvoyant, had discerned the truth from
+the beginning.</p>
+<p>"No! no!" she cried out sharply, for, mistaking her silence, he
+had stooped to her with the directness which impelled all his
+movements, which so easily brushed aside and discarded intervening
+encumbrances, and had kissed her on the lips.</p>
+<p>For an instant, in the merciless tenderness of his arms, her
+resistance melted from her. Beneath the crash of the storm she did
+not think, she did not struggle, she did not murmur. Her
+consciousness seemed suspended, and with her consciousness, her
+memory, her judgment, even her passionate unshaken loyalty to the
+love of her youth. Then, after the moment of weakness, of passive
+submission, it was as if her soul and body caught fire at a flash,
+and a quiver of anger ran through her, enkindling her glance and
+nerving her spirit.</p>
+<p>"But I do not love you! I never meant that I loved you!" she
+cried.</p>
+<p>At her words his arms dropped to his sides, and he stood as if
+turned to stone, with only his questioning eyes and the vivid red
+of his hair seeming alive. There was no need now for her to
+struggle. At her first movement to escape he had released her and
+drawn to a distance.</p>
+<p>"You don't love me?" he stammered. "Why, I saw it. I've seen it
+for weeks. I see it now in your face."</p>
+<p>"You see nothing&mdash;nothing." She denied it bitterly. "I
+liked you as a friend. I did not think of this. I never suspected
+it. I don't love you. I don't love you in the least."</p>
+<p>He was very still. The jubilant spirit of the spring had ebbed
+away from his look, and even in the height of her anger she was
+struck by the change in his face.</p>
+<p>"I don't believe you," he said gravely after a minute. "I don't
+believe you."</p>
+<p>"You must believe me. I don't love you. I have never thought of
+you except as a friend. I have loved another man all my life."</p>
+<p>Her voice rose accusingly, triumphantly, and so fervent was her
+look that she might have been repeating a creed. It was as if she
+hoped by convincing him to persuade her own rebellious heart of the
+truth she proclaimed.</p>
+<p>Now at last he understood. She had been lucid enough even for
+the crystalline lucidity of his thought.</p>
+<p>"I am sorry. I made a mistake," he said quietly, and after the
+exultant note of a few moments ago there was a dull level of
+flatness in his voice. "I am sorry. There don't seem to be anything
+else that I can say or do, but&mdash;but it wouldn't have happened
+if I had understood&mdash;" He paused, looked at her closely for a
+minute, and then added stubbornly, with an echo of the old
+confidence in his tone: "I still don't believe it."</p>
+<p>"It is true, nevertheless." She was trembling with indignation,
+and this indignation, in spite of her natural fairness, was not
+directed against herself, against her own blindness and folly.
+Though she knew that she was to blame, she was furious, not with
+herself, but with O'Hara. He had insulted her, and she resolved
+bitterly that she would never forgive him. Even now, whenever she
+was silent, she could still feel his kiss on her mouth, and the
+vividness of the sensation stung her into passionate anger. She was
+no longer the reasonable and competent Gabriella, who had so
+successfully "managed her life"; she was primitive woman in the
+grip of primitive anger; and balance, moderation, restraint, had
+flown from her soul. The very mystery of her feeling, its
+complexity, its suddenness, its remorselessness&mdash;these
+emotions worked together to deepen the sense of insult, of injury,
+with which she burned.</p>
+<p>"It is true, and you have no right to doubt it. You have no
+right." She caught her breath sharply, and then went on with
+inexcusable harshness: "Even if there hadn't been any one else, I
+should never&mdash;I could never in the world&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Her loss of self-control gave him an advantage, which he was
+either too generous or too stupid to perceive. "Well, forget all
+about it. I am going now," he answered quietly.</p>
+<p>While she watched him moving away from her, she was conscious of
+an inexplicable longing to stab him again more deeply before she
+lost him forever. It was intolerable to her that he should leave
+her while she was still indignant, that he should evade her just
+resentment by the natural cowardice of flight.</p>
+<p>"I can't forget it," she said; "how can you expect me to?"</p>
+<p>For an instant he seemed on the point of smiling. Then, turning,
+at the door, he walked back to where she was standing, and said
+gravely: "When I came in here it was to ask you to marry me, and,
+if it's the last word I ever speak, I thought you
+understood&mdash;that you knew how I felt. I was even fool enough
+to think you would be willing to marry me. That's all I can say. I
+haven't any other excuses."</p>
+<p>For the second time he went to the door, opened it, and then
+turning quickly, came back again. "I am not the sort to change, and
+I shan't change about this. You are a free woman, and if you ever
+feel that you made a mistake, if you ever want me or need me, you
+can just come to me. I shan't stop caring for you, and if you
+choose to come, I'll be waiting. I believed you were meant for me
+when I first saw you&mdash;and I believe it now. In spite of all
+you say, I am going to keep on believing it&mdash;"</p>
+<p>He went out, closing the door softly, and five minutes later,
+feeling extraordinarily young, she watched him pass through the
+gate, and walk as buoyantly as ever in the direction of Broadway.
+While she looked after him she wondered suddenly why novelists
+always dropped their heroines as soon as they passed twenty-seven?
+"If I'd been in a play, they'd have put me in the background,
+dressed in lavender, and made me look on and do fancywork," she
+thought humorously, "but this is real life, and I've just had a
+real love scene on my thirty-eighth birthday. He couldn't have been
+more romantic if I'd been Fanny," she mused with an agreeable
+complacency. "It's only in books and plays that people stop falling
+in love when they pass the twenties. I don't believe they ever stop
+in real life. I believe it goes on forever." And glancing at the
+glass, she added truthfully: "I want love more to-day than I wanted
+it when I was twenty&mdash;and so does Ben O'Hara."</p>
+<p>A sensation of stifling, as if her throat were closing together,
+oppressed her suddenly, and picking up her hand-bag, she ran
+downstairs and out of the house.</p>
+<p>By the time she reached Broadway her anger had ebbed, but the
+oppression, the feeling that she was being slowly smothered, was
+still in her throat and bosom. After all, seen in the sober light
+of reason, why had she been so indignant? There had been a
+misapprehension; he had thought that she was in love with him, and
+thinking so, he had kissed her. That was the case plainly stated;
+and what was there in this to send a burning, rush of anger to her
+heart? What was there in this that had made her turn and insult
+him? For the first time in her life she had lost her temper without
+cause, and had raged, she told herself sternly, like a fury. And
+beneath her rage she had been conscious always of some vague,
+incomprehensible disloyalty to Arthur&mdash;of a feeling of,
+humiliation, of self-reproach, which appeared ridiculous when she
+remembered that she had been kissed against her will and without
+warning. But, in spite of this, she knew intuitively, with a
+knowledge deeper than reason, that the glory of her Dream had paled
+in the moment when she lay in O'Hara's arms.</p>
+<p>A subtle change had come over the spirit of spring since she had
+left the elm tree and the emerald veil of the grass. It was no
+longer jubilant, but languorous, wistful, haunting, as if it
+eternally pursued, through the fugitive seasons, an immortal and
+ineffable beauty. The enchanted crystal had been shattered in an
+instant, and she saw life now, not imprisoned in magical sunshine,
+but gray, sordid, monotonous, as utterly hopeless as the faces
+thronging in Broadway. Yet not many months ago she had seen in
+these, same faces the inward hope, the joy in sadness, the gaiety
+in disappointment, which had brightened the world for her. Then she
+had been aware of an invisible current flowing from the crowd to
+herself; but to-day this shining current was broken or turned
+aside, and she felt detached, adrift, and distrustful of the
+future. That mental correspondence with the mood of the crowd, with
+the life of the city, which had come to her first on the brilliant
+morning in September, and then again when she walked home with
+O'Hara in the winter's dusk&mdash;which had released a new faculty
+in her soul, and had given her a fresh perception of human
+responsibilities&mdash;this had deserted her so utterly that she
+could barely remember its miraculous visitation. Then her personal
+life had seemed to become a part of the life of the street, of the
+sky, of the mysterious city outlined against the gray background of
+dusk. To-day she walked alone and without sympathy through the
+crowd. Her feet dragged, and she felt dully that she had lost her
+share in both the street and the sky. The very faces of the men and
+women around her&mdash;those lethargic foreign faces which crowded
+out the finer American type&mdash;awoke in her the sensation of
+hopeless revolt which one feels before the impending destruction of
+higher forms by masses of inert and conscienceless matter. She
+thought gloomily: "I have lost the vision&mdash;there is no hope
+either for me or for America except in the clear vision of the
+future." And while she spoke there passed over her the vague
+feeling of loss, of something missing, as if a precious possession
+had slipped from her grasp.</p>
+<p>Her morning's work was unusually trying, and at one o'clock,
+when she put on her hat before going out to lunch, she asked
+herself dejectedly: "What can be the matter with me? Before I go
+home I'll take a taxicab and drive up Riverside for an hour. If
+only the children were here, I should not feel so depressed." She
+remembered regretfully that Archibald and Fanny would be away all
+summer; and then from thinking of her children, she passed by
+almost insensible degrees of despondency to meditating pensively
+about Arthur Peyton. What a wreck, what an inconceivably stupid
+wreck she had made of her happiness!</p>
+<p>As she entered the outer showroom on her way to the street, she
+heard the voice of Miss Murphy attuned to a cooing pitch, and
+glancing around a little, painted cabinet, filled with useless
+ornaments, which stood in the centre of the floor, she beheld a
+dazzling head of reddish gold before one of the elaborately
+decorated French mirrors. While she advanced the red-gold waves,
+worn with extreme flatness over a forehead of pearly whiteness,
+were submerged for a minute in the smallest and roundest hat in the
+shop, and from a fashionable figure, reminding her vaguely of an
+ambulatory dressmaker's model, there issued a high, fluting note of
+delighted ejaculation.</p>
+<p>"This is just exactly what I've been looking all over New York
+for! Now, isn't it too funny for anything that I should have found
+it right here the very minute I came in?" As Gabriella's face
+flashed back from the mirror the fashionable figure sprang suddenly
+to life, and the voice, still fluting delightedly, exclaimed:</p>
+<p>"Why, Gabriella! Where on earth did you come from?"</p>
+<p>For a minute sheer amazement kept Gabriella clinging helplessly
+to the ridiculous cabinet, from the top of which an artificial
+rose-bush seemed to shower artificial pink petals down on her head.
+Then, recovering herself, with a sharp effort of will, she went
+forward a few steps beyond the shelter of the cabinet, and said
+composedly:</p>
+<p>"How do you do, Florrie? I did not recognize you at first."</p>
+<p>For it was Florrie herself, Florrie in the flesh, Florrie,
+glowing, sparkling, prosperous, victorious. Her figure, conforming
+to the latest mode, had lost its pinched protuberances, and was
+long, slender, sinuous in its perfection of line. Beneath the small
+round hat, her hair, glossy with brilliantine, was like melted gold
+in the large loose waves which revealed the rosy tips of her ears.
+She was thirty-nine, and she looked scarcely a day over
+twenty-five. The peach-blossom texture of her skin was as unlined
+by care or pain as if she had spent the last ten years immured in a
+convent; for in this case, at least, Gabriella realized while she
+looked at her, the retribution which awaits upon sinners had been
+tardy in its fulfilment.</p>
+<p>As she moved toward her, without noticing the friendly hand that
+Florrie held out, Gabriella was conscious of an ironical
+inclination to laugh. Though she felt no bitter personal resentment
+against Florrie&mdash;for, after all, Florrie had not been able to
+hurt her&mdash;there struggled in her bosom an indignation more
+profound, more moving, than any merely personal emotion could be.
+Her resentment was directed not against Florrie, but against some
+abstract destiny which had permitted Florrie to have her way
+without paying the price. For on the pinnacle of a destructive
+career, unsinged by the conflagration she had so carelessly
+started, Florrie was poised securely, crowned, triumphant,
+rejoicing. On her dazzling height, successful and happy, she was as
+far removed as one could imaginably be from the repentant Magdalen
+of tradition. The memory of George's face as it looked in death,
+floated before the austere mental vision of Gabriella, and she
+reflected grimly that tradition was not always the mirror of life.
+For in this one case at least, the man, not the woman, had been the
+victim of natural law, and Florrie, fool though she was, had shown
+herself at the hour of requital to be stronger than fate. By that
+instinctive wisdom, which is so much older, so much truer than
+civilization, she had triumphed over the ordination of life. In
+refusing to suffer she had blunted every weapon with which Nature
+might have punished her in the end. Not by virtue, since she had
+none, but by pure insensibility, she had escaped the wages of sin.
+She was a sensualist whose sensuality, hard, metallic, glittering,
+encased her like armour.</p>
+<p>At Gabriella's approach Miss Murphy fluttered off cooingly in
+the direction of a fresh customer, and only the festively garlanded
+French mirror witnessed the meeting of the two who had been
+schoolgirls together. Swift as an arrow there shot through
+Gabriella's mind, "I wonder what Ben O'Hara would think of her?"
+Then she checked the dangerous flight of her fancy, for she
+remembered that O'Hara's thoughts about anything no longer
+concerned her.</p>
+<p>"Are you buying a hat?" inquired Florrie curiously.</p>
+<p>"No, I belong here. I am Madame Dinard."</p>
+<p>"You don't mean it! I never should have believed it! The idea of
+your being a dressmaker. That's why you look so smart, I suppose.
+You're the smartest thing I've seen anywhere, but you look older,
+Gabriella."</p>
+<p>"Well, you don't." It was perfectly true. Except for the gaudy
+decorations and the twanging accents of the arrogant young women,
+Gabriella might have imagined herself in the last century
+atmosphere of Broad Street in the middle 'nineties.</p>
+<p>"I must tell you about the things I use." Florrie was always
+generous. "But, I declare if I'd known this place was yours, I'd
+have got my hats here ages ago. Of course I knew it was dreadfully
+swell, but I thought the prices were beyond anything."</p>
+<p>"They are," responded Gabriella with business-like brevity,
+while she glanced about for the flitting Miss Murphy.</p>
+<p>"Look here, Gabriella, I hope you don't bear me any malice,"
+Florrie burst out solicitously, for her frankness, like her
+sensuality, was elemental in its audacity. "You oughtn't to if you
+know what I saved you from," she proceeded convincingly. "Anyway,
+we were chums long before either of us ever thought about a man,
+and I didn't really do you a bit of harm. It wasn't as if you cared
+about George, was it?"</p>
+<p>"No, it wasn't as if I'd cared about him." Gabriella was
+answering the appeal as truthfully as if Florrie had been the most
+excellent of her sex. "You didn't harm me in any way&mdash;not in
+any way," she repeated with firmness.</p>
+<p>"That's just the way I told mother you'd look at it. I knew you
+were always so broad-minded even as a girl. Then there isn't any
+reason we shouldn't be friends just as we used to be."</p>
+<p>Gabriella shook her head, polite but implacable in her refusal.
+"It isn't what you did to me, Florrie," she answered gently, "it's
+what you are that I can't forgive. I can imagine that a good woman
+might do almost anything&mdash;might even run off with another
+woman's husband, but you aren't good. You wouldn't be good if you'd
+spent your life in a convent."</p>
+<p>A quick flush&mdash;the flush of temper&mdash;stained the pearly
+whiteness of Florrie's skin. "Oh, of course, if you don't want to,"
+she retorted, a little shrilly, though she tried to subdue her
+rebellious voice to the pitch of Fifth Avenue. "I only thought that
+being a working woman, you wouldn't have so very many friends, and
+you might get lonely. I had seats at the opera every night last
+winter, and time and again I'd have been glad to have given them to
+you. Then, too, I might have been able to bring you some custom. I
+know any number of rich women who don't think anything of paying a
+thousand dollars for a dress&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Her insolence was so evidently the result of anger that
+Gabriella, without interrupting the flow, waited courteously until
+she paused.</p>
+<p>"No, you cannot do anything for me, Florrie." Though Gabriella's
+voice was crisp and firm, her face looked suddenly older, and
+little lines, stamped by weariness and regret, appeared at the
+corners of her still brilliant eyes. "I don't wish you any harm,"
+she went on more softly. "If you were in trouble I'd do what I
+could for you, but somehow I don't seem able to forgive you for
+being what you are. Would you like to look at anything else?" she
+inquired in her professional tone. "Miss Murphy is waiting to show
+you some hats."</p>
+<p>Her cheeks were burning when she passed out of the ivory and
+gold door, saluted deferentially by the attendant in livery. "The
+effrontery!" she thought, "the barefaced effrontery!" and then, as
+her eyes fell on Florrie's trim little electric coup&eacute; beside
+the curb, she exclaimed mentally, recalling George's animated
+perplexity about the pearl necklace, "I wonder how in the world she
+does it?"</p>
+<p>The meeting with Florrie appeared to her, as she walked home
+that afternoon, to be the last touch needed to push her into a
+state of utter despondency. The oppressive languor of the day had
+exhausted her strength, and when she left Dinard's she felt too
+indifferent, too spiritless even for the drive in the Park. It was
+still light when she got out of the stage at Twenty-third Street,
+and while she strolled listlessly down the blocks on the West Side,
+she had again that curious sensation of smothering which had come
+to her after her talk with O'Hara.</p>
+<p>At the corner of Sixth Avenue a young Italian, with the face of
+a poet, was roasting peanuts in a little kerosene stove beside a
+flickering torch which enkindled the romantic youth in his eyes.
+Farther away some ragged children were dancing to the music of a
+hand-organ, which ground out a melancholy waltz; and from a tiny
+flower stall behind the stand of a bootblack there drifted the
+intense sweetness of hyacinths. An old negro, carrying a basket of
+clothes, passed her in the middle of the block, and she thought:
+"That might have been in Richmond&mdash;that and the hand-organ and
+the perfume of hyacinths." A vision of Hill Street floated before
+her&mdash;the long straight street, with the sudden drop of ragged
+hill at the end; the old houses, with crumbling porches and
+countless signs: "Boarders Wanted" in the windows between the
+patched curtains; the irregular rows of tulip poplar, elm, or
+sycamore trees throwing their crooked shadows over the
+cobblestones; the blades of grass sprouting along the edges of the
+brick pavement&mdash;the vision of Hill Street as she remembered it
+twenty years ago in her girlhood; and then the image of her
+mother's face gazing out beneath the creamy blossoms and the dark
+shining leaves of the old magnolia tree. "Everything must have
+changed, I'd hardly recognize it," she thought. "Nobody we know
+lives on that side now, mother says. Yes, it has been a long time."
+She sighed, and then a little laugh broke from her lips, as she
+remembered that Charley, who had recently been West on a business
+trip, had brought home the good news that Richmond was as
+progressive as Denver. "At least it seems so to Charley," Mrs. Carr
+had hastened to add, "but you know how proud Charley is of all our
+newness. He says there is not a street in the West that looks
+fresher or more beautiful than Monument Avenue, and I am sure that
+is a great comfort. Cousin Jimmy says it shows what the South can
+do when it tries."</p>
+<p>"I'd like to go back," mused Gabriella, walking more and more
+slowly. "I haven't been home for eighteen years, and I am
+thirty-eight to-day." With the fugitive sweetness of the hyacinths
+there rushed over her again the feeling that life was slipping,
+slipping, and that she was missing something infinitely precious,
+something infinitely desirable. It was the panic of fleeting youth,
+of youth unsatisfied, denied, and still insatiable.</p>
+<p>As she entered the gate she saw that O'Hara's windows were dark,
+and while a sigh of relief escaped her, she felt a swift
+contraction of her throat as if she had become suddenly paralyzed
+and was unable to swallow. "I hope he has gone," she said to
+herself in a whisper. "If he has gone, everything will be so much
+easier." But even to herself she could not explain what it was that
+would be made easier. Her relief was so vague that when she
+endeavoured to put it into words it seemed to dissolve and
+evaporate.</p>
+<p>Miss Polly was watering the flowers in the window box, and
+turning, with the green watering-pot in her hand, she stared at
+Gabriella in silence for a minute before she exclaimed anxiously:
+"Mercy on us, Gabriella, what on earth, is the matter?"</p>
+<p>"Nothing. I've had a hard day, and I'm tired."</p>
+<p>"Well, you lie right straight down as soon as you take off your
+hat. I declare you look ten years older than you did this
+morning."</p>
+<p>"I have seen Florrie for a minute."</p>
+<p>"I reckon that was enough to upset anybody. Did she say she was
+sorry?"</p>
+<p>"Sorry! She looked as if she had never been sorry for anything
+in her life. She was handsomer than ever&mdash;don't you remember
+how much you always admired her figure?&mdash;and she didn't look a
+day over twenty-five. I don't believe she has ever known what it is
+to feel a regret."</p>
+<p>"Well, you just wait, honey," responded Miss Polly consolingly,
+"you just wait. She'll be punished yet as sure as you're born."</p>
+<p>"Oh, I'm not waiting for that. I don't wish her to be punished.
+Why should I? She is what she is."</p>
+<p>"Do you s'pose she knows about George?"</p>
+<p>"I doubt it. She didn't speak of his death. She is quite capable
+of forgetting that she ever knew him, and if she does, think of
+him, it is probably as a man who betrayed her innocence. You may be
+sure she has twisted it all about until every shred of the blame
+rests on somebody else. Florrie isn't the only woman who is made
+like that, but I believe," she reasoned it out coolly, "that it is
+her way of keeping her youth."</p>
+<p>Miss Polly had put down the watering-pot, and she came presently
+with a bottle of camphor to the sofa where Gabriella was lying.
+"Are you sure you wouldn't like me to rub your head?" she inquired.
+"Dinner will be ready in a minute, but I shouldn't change my dress
+if I were you."</p>
+<p>Gabriella rose slowly to a sitting position, and then stood up
+while she pushed the camphor away. "I hate the smell of it," she
+answered; "it makes me think of one of Jane's attacks. And,
+besides, I don't need it. There is nothing in the world the matter
+with me." A moment later, to Miss Polly's unspeakable amazement,
+she sank down again, flung her arms over the back of the sofa, and
+burst into tears.</p>
+<p>"Well, I never!" ejaculated Miss Polly, rooted to the spot.
+"Well, I never!" In the ten years she had lived with Gabriella she
+had never seen her cry&mdash;not even after George's
+flight&mdash;and she felt as if the solid ground on which she stood
+had crumbled without warning, and left her insecurely balanced in
+space. "Something certainly must be wrong, for it ain't like you to
+give way. Are you real sure you ain't got a pain somewhere?"</p>
+<p>Shaking her head, and swallowing her sobs with an effort,
+Gabriella rose to her feet. "I'm just tired out, that's all," she
+said, strangely humble and deprecating.</p>
+<p>"You must have been working too hard. It ain't right." For a
+minute or two the little seamstress brooded anxiously; then guided
+by an infallible instinct, she added decisively: "It's been a long
+time since you've seen your ma, and she's gettin' right smart
+along. Why don't you run down home for a few days while the flowers
+are blooming?"</p>
+<p>A change passed over Gabriella's face, and drying her eyes, she
+looked down on Miss Polly with a lovely enigmatical smile.</p>
+<p>"I wonder if I might?" she said doubtfully.</p>
+<p>"There ain't any earthly reason why you shouldn't. To-morrow's
+Friday, and they can get along without you at Dinard's perfectly
+well till the first of the week."</p>
+<p>"Oh, yes, they can get along. I was only wondering"&mdash;a
+faint breeze stole in through the window, wafting toward her the
+scent of wet flowers&mdash;"I was only wondering"&mdash;her eyes
+grew suddenly radiant, and lifting her arms, she made a gesture as
+of one escaping from bondage&mdash;"I was only wondering if I might
+go to-morrow," she said.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_Xa" id="CHAPTER_Xa"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<h3>THE DREAM AND THE REALITY</h3>
+<p>At the upper station a little group stood awaiting her, and as
+the train pulled slowly to the platform, Gabriella distinguished
+her mother's pallid face framed in the hanging crape of her veil;
+Jane, thin, anxious, an&aelig;mic, with her look of pinched
+sweetness; Chancy, florid, portly, and virtuously middle-aged, and
+their eldest daughter Margaret, a blooming, beautiful girl.
+Alighting, Gabriella was embraced by Mrs. Carr, who shed a few
+gentle tears on her shoulders.</p>
+<p>"Gabriella, my child, I thought you would never come back to
+us," she lamented; "and now everything is so changed that you will
+hardly recognize it as home."</p>
+<p>"Well, if she can find a change that isn't for the better, I
+hope she'll point it out and let me make a note of it," boasted
+Charley, with hilarity. "I tell you what, Gabriella, my dear, we're
+becoming a number one city. Everything's new. We haven't left so
+much as an old brick lying around if we could help it. If you were
+to go back there to Hill Street, you'd scarcely know it for the
+hospitals and schools we've got there, and as for this part of the
+town&mdash;well, I reckon the apartment houses will fairly take
+your breath away. Apartment houses! Well, that's what I call
+progress&mdash;apartment houses and skyscrapers, and we've got
+them, too, down on Main Street. I'll show them to you to-morrow.
+Yes, by George, we're progressing so fast you can hardly see how we
+grow. Why, there wasn't a skyscraper or an apartment house in the
+city when you left here, and precious few hospitals. But
+now&mdash;well, I'll show you! We're the hospital city of the
+South, and more than that, we're becoming a metropolis. Yes, that's
+the word&mdash;we're becoming a metropolis. If you don't believe
+me, just watch as we go up Franklin Street to Monument Avenue. I
+suppose you thought of us still as a poor folksy little Southern
+city, with a lot of ground going to waste in gardens and green
+stuff. Well, you just wait till you see Monument Avenue. It's the
+handsomest boulevard south of Washington. It's all new, every brick
+of it. There's not a house the whole way up that isn't as fresh as
+paint, and the avenue is just as straight as if you'd drawn it with
+a ruler&mdash;"</p>
+<p>But the change in the city, Gabriella reflected while she
+embraced Jane, was as nothing compared to the incredible change in
+Charley himself. Middle-age had passed over him like some fattening
+and solidifying process. He was healthy, he was corpulent, he was
+prosperous, conventional, and commonplace. If Gabriella had been
+seeking, with Hogarthian humour, to portray the evils of torpid and
+self-satisfied respectability, she could scarcely have found a
+better picture of the condition than Charley presented. And the
+more Charley expanded, the more bloodless and wan Jane appeared at
+his side. Her small, flat face with its yellowish and unhealthy
+tinge, its light melancholy eyes, and its look of lifeless and
+inhuman sanctification, exhaled the dried fragrance of a pressed
+flower. So disheartening was her appearance to Gabriella that it
+was a relief to turn from her to the freshness of Margaret,
+handsome, athletic, with cheeks like roses and the natural grace of
+a young animal.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Aunt Gabriella, I hadn't any idea you were like this!"
+cried the girl with na&iuml;ve enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>"You thought of me as gray-haired and wearing a bonnet and
+mantle?"</p>
+<p>"No, not that, but I didn't dream you were so handsome. I
+thought mother was the beauty of the family. But what a wonderful
+dress you have on! Are they wearing all those flounces around the
+hips?"</p>
+<p>"There is no doubt about it, you are getting a lot better
+looking as you grow older," observed Charley, with genial
+pleasantry.</p>
+<p>"She keeps herself up. There is a great deal in that," remarked
+Jane, and the speech was so characteristic of her that Gabriella
+tossed back gaily:</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm not old, you know. I am only thirty-eight."</p>
+<p>"She married so young," said Mrs. Carr mournfully. "I hope none
+of your girls will marry young, Jane. Gabriella must be a warning
+to them and to clear little Fanny."</p>
+<p>"But you married young, mother, and so did I," replied Jane, a
+trifle tartly.</p>
+<p>For some incommunicable reason Jane's sweetness had become
+decidedly prickly. Charley's reformation had left her with the hurt
+and incredulous air of a missionary whose heathen have been
+converted under his eyes by a rival denomination: and obeying an
+entirely natural impulse, she appeared ever so slightly, and in the
+most refined manner possible to revenge herself on the other
+members of her family. Though she had of late devoted her attention
+to the Associated Charities and the Confederate Museum, neither of
+these worthy objects provided so agreeable an opportunity for the
+exercise of her benevolent instincts as did the presence of a
+wayward husband in the household. For there could be no question of
+the thoroughness of Charley's redemption. The very cut of his
+clothes, the very colour of his necktie, proclaimed a triumph, for
+the prohibition party.</p>
+<p>At last they were packed tightly in the touring car, and
+Charley, after imparting directions with the manner of a man who
+regards himself as the fount of wisdom, began expounding the noisy
+gospel of progress to Gabriella. Mrs. Carr, who had never been
+active, and was now over seventy, was visibly excited by the
+suddenness with which she had been whisked from the platform, and
+while they shot away from the station, she clutched her crape veil
+despairingly to the sides of her face, and fixed her blank and
+terrified stare on her son-in-law. After a whispered conference
+with Jane, Gabriella discovered that her mother was less afraid of
+an accident than she was of fresh air. "She's afraid of neuralgia,"
+whispered Jane, "but the doctor says the air can't possibly do her
+any harm."</p>
+<p>In Franklin Street the trees were in full leaf, and the charming
+vista through which Gabriella looked at the sunset, softened
+mercifully the impending symbols of the ironic Spirit of Progress.
+It was modern; it was progressive; yet there was the ancient
+lassitude of spring in the faint sunshine; and the women passing
+under the vivid green of the elms and maples moved with a flowing
+walk which one did not see in Fifth Avenue. On the porches, too,
+groups were assembled in chairs after the Southern fashion, while
+children, in white frocks and gay sashes, accompanied by negro
+nurses wheeling perambulators, made a spring pageant in the parks.
+Though the gardens had either disappeared or dwindled to mere
+emerald patches of grass, a few climbing roses, of modern
+varieties, lent brightness and fragrance to the solid, if
+undistinguished, architecture of the houses.</p>
+<p>"That's the finest apartment house in the city!" exclaimed
+Charley, with enthusiasm. "Looks pretty tall, doesn't it? But it's
+nothing to the height of some of the buildings downtown. As for
+changes&mdash;well, I hope Jane will take you on Broad Street
+to-morrow, and then you'll see what we're doing. Why, there's not a
+shop left there now where you used to deal. Brandywine's&mdash;you
+recollect old Brandywine &amp; Plummer's, don't you?&mdash;isn't
+there any longer. Got a new department store, with a restaurant and
+a basement in the very spot where it used to be. Look sharp now,
+we're coming to a hospital. That belongs to Dr. Browning. You don't
+remember Dr. Browning. After your day, I reckon. He's a young chap,
+but he's got his hospital like all the rest, and every bed
+filled&mdash;he told me so yesterday. But they've all got their
+hospitals. Darrow&mdash;you recollect Darrow who used to be old Dr.
+Walker's assistant&mdash;well, he's got his, too, just around the
+corner on the next street. They say he cuts up more people than any
+man in the South except Spendlow&mdash;".</p>
+<p>"I miss the old-fashioned flowers," said Gabriella to her mother
+in one of Charley's plethoric pauses. "The microphylla roses and
+snowballs."</p>
+<p>"Everybody is planting crimson ramblers and hydrangeas now,"
+responded Mrs. Carr, with something of her son-in-law's pride in
+the onward movement of her surroundings.</p>
+<p>"Here are the monuments!" cried Charley, who had treated each
+apartment house or hospital as if it were a bright, inestimable
+jewel in the city's crown. "You don't see many streets finer than
+this in New York, do you?"</p>
+<p>"It looks very pretty and attractive," answered Gabriella, as
+they swung dangerously round a statue, and then started in a race
+up the avenue, "but I miss the shrubs and the flowers."</p>
+<p>"Oh, there are flowers enough. You just wait till you get on a
+bit. We've got some urns filled with hydrangeas, that queer new
+sort between blue and pink. But what do you want with shrubs? All
+they're good for is to get in your way whenever you want to look
+out into the street. Mrs. Madison was telling me only yesterday
+that she cut down the lilac bushes in her front yard because they
+kept her from recognizing the people in motor cars. Look at that
+house now, that's one of the finest, in the city. Rushington built
+it&mdash;he made his money in fertilizers, and the one next with
+the green tiles belongs to Hanly, the tobacco trust fellow, you
+know, and this whopper on the next square is where Albertson lives.
+He made his pile out of railroad stocks&mdash;he's one of the
+banking firm of Albertson, Jacobstein, Moss &amp; Company. Awfully
+clever fellows, but too tricky for me, I give them a wide berth
+when I go out to do business&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But where are the old people&mdash;the people I used to
+know?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, they're scattered about everywhere, but they haven't got
+most of the money. A lot of 'em live up here, and a lot are down in
+Franklin Street in the same old houses."</p>
+<p>"Tell me about Cousin Jimmy."</p>
+<p>"He's up here, too. Pussy planned that red brick house with the
+green shutters next door to us. I reckon Jimmy is about as
+prosperous as is good for him, but he's getting on. He must be over
+seventy now. He has a son who is a chip of the old block, and his
+youngest daughter was the prettiest girl who ever came out here.
+Margaret will tell you about her."</p>
+<p>"And the Peytons?" Her voice trembled, and she looked hastily
+away from the keen eyes of Margaret.</p>
+<p>"They are still in the old home&mdash;at least Arthur lives
+there with his Cousin Nelly. You know Mrs Peyton died about nine or
+ten years ago?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I heard it."</p>
+<p>"She was getting on, but it was a great loss to Arthur. Somehow,
+I could never make up my mind about Arthur. He was bright enough as
+a young chap, and we used to think he would have a brilliant
+future; but when the time came, he never seemed to catch on. He
+wasn't progressive, and he has never amounted to much more than he
+did when he left college. What I say about him is that he had the
+wrong ideas&mdash;Yes, Jane, I mean exactly what I say, he had the
+wrong ideas. He doesn't know what he is driving at. No progress, no
+push, no punch in him."</p>
+<p>"Why, Charley," murmured Mrs. Carr reproachfully, while Jane,
+recovering her nagging manner with an accession of spirit,
+remonstrated feelingly: "Charley, you really must be more careful
+what you say."</p>
+<p>"Oh, fudge!" retorted Charley, with playful rudeness. "You see
+she's at it still, Gabriella," he pursued, winking audaciously. "If
+it isn't one thing, it's another, but she wouldn't be satisfied
+with perfection. Well, here we are. There are the hydrangeas. I
+hope you're pleased."</p>
+<p>"I declare, those waste papers have blown right back again on
+the grass, and I had them picked up the last thing before I left,"
+said Jane in a tone of annoyance.</p>
+<p>"Never mind the papers; Gabriella isn't looking for papers,"
+returned Charley, while he helped Mrs. Carr out of the motor and up
+the steps. "So here you are, mother, and the air didn't kill
+you."</p>
+<p>"I may have neuralgia to-morrow. You never can tell," replied
+Mrs. Carr. "I shouldn't worry about the papers, Jane. Nobody can
+help the way they blow about. I want Gabriella to see the children
+the first thing."</p>
+<p>As they entered the house Jane's children, a flock of five girls
+and two boys, fluttered up to be introduced, and among them
+Gabriella discovered the composed baby of Jane's tragic flight. It
+seemed an age ago, and she felt not thirty-eight, but a
+thousand.</p>
+<p>After dinner Charley, who had eaten immoderately, unfolded the
+evening paper under the electric lamp in the library, and dozed
+torpidly while the girls plied their aunt with innumerable
+questions about New York and the spring fashions. "It will be
+lovely to have Fanny with us at the White Sulphur. I know her
+clothes will be wonderful," they chirped happily, clustering
+eagerly about the sofa on which Gabriella was sitting. Jane's
+children, deriving from some hardy stock of an earlier generation,
+were handsome, vigorous, optimistic in blood and fibre, and so
+uncompromisingly modern that Gabriella wondered how Mrs. Carr, with
+her spiritual neuralgia and her perpetual mourning, had survived
+the unceasing currents of fresh air with which they surrounded
+her.</p>
+<p>"Yes, things have changed. It is the age," thought Gabriella;
+and presently, when Cousin Jimmy and Cousin Pussy came in to
+welcome her, she repeated: "Yes, it is the age. There is no
+escaping it."</p>
+<p>"Why, my dear child, you are looking splendidly," trilled Cousin
+Pussy, with her old delightful manner and her flattering vision so
+different from Florrie's. She was still trim, plump, and rosy,
+though her hair was now snow white and her pretty face was covered
+with cheerful wrinkles. "You're handsomer than you ever were in
+your life, and the dash of gray on your temples doesn't make you
+look, a day older&mdash;not a day. Some people turn gray so very
+young. I remember Cousin Becky Bollingbroke's hair was almost white
+by the time she was thirty-five. It runs like that in some
+families. But you look just as girlish as ever. It's wonderful,
+isn't it, Cousin Fanny, the way the women of this generation stay
+girls until they are fifty? I don't believe you'll ever look any
+older, Gabriella, than you do now. Of course, I suppose your
+business has something to do with it, but if I met you for the
+first time, it would never cross my mind that you were a day over
+twenty-five."</p>
+<p>"Well, well, so little Gabriella went to New York and became a
+dressmaker," observed Jimmy, who was seldom original, "and she's
+the same Gabriella, too. I always said, you know, that she was the
+sort you could count on."</p>
+<p>Age, though it had not entirely passed him by, had, on the
+whole, treated him with great gentleness. He was a remarkably
+handsome old man, with a distinguished and courtly presence, a head
+of wonderful white hair, which looked as if it had been powdered, a
+ruddy unwrinkled face, and the dark shining eyes of the adventurous
+youth he had never lost.</p>
+<p>"Of course, she couldn't have been a dressmaker here where
+everybody knows her," purred Cousin Pussy, with her arm about
+Gabriella, "but in New York it is different, and they tell me that
+even titled women are dressmakers in London."</p>
+<p>"Well, she has pluck," declared Cousin Jimmy, as he had declared
+eighteen years ago at the family council. "There's nothing like
+pluck when it comes to getting along in the world."</p>
+<p>Then they sat down in Jane's library, which, contained most of
+the things Gabriella associated with the old parlour in Hill
+Street, and Cousin Pussy asked if Gabriella had found many
+changes.</p>
+<p>"A great many. Everything, looks new to me except this room. The
+only thing I miss here is the horsehair sofa."</p>
+<p>"I keep that in the back hall," said Jane. "The town does look
+different up here, but the Peytons' house is just as you remember
+it&mdash;even the scarlet sage is in the garden. Miss Nelly plants
+it still every summer."</p>
+<p>A lovely light shone in Gabriella's eyes, and Cousin Pussy
+watched it tenderly, while a smile hovered about the corners of her
+shrewd though still pretty mouth.</p>
+<p>"It has been such a disappointment that Arthur hasn't done more
+in his profession," she said presently, "but, as I was saying to
+Mr. Wrenn only the other day, I have always felt that dear
+Gabriella was to blame for it."</p>
+<p>"The trouble with Arthur," observed Charley, awaking truculently
+from his doze, "is that he's got the wrong ideas. When a man has
+the wrong ideas in these days, he might as well go out and hang
+himself."</p>
+<p>"Well, I don't know that I'd call his ideas wrong exactly,"
+reasoned Cousin Jimmy, with the judicial manner befitting the best
+judge of tobacco in Virginia; "I shouldn't call them wrong, but
+they're out of date. They belong to the last century."</p>
+<p>"I always say that dear Arthur is a perfect gentleman of the old
+school," remonstrated Mrs. Carr, meekly obstinate. "There aren't
+many of them left now, so I tell myself regretfully whenever I see
+him."</p>
+<p>"And there'll be fewer than ever by the time you Suffragists get
+your rights," remarked Charley, with bitterness, while Mrs. Carr,
+incensed by the word, which she associated with various
+indelicacies, stared at him with an indignant expression.</p>
+<p>"Charley, be careful what you say," nagged Jane acridly from her
+corner. "Now that so many of our relatives have gone in for
+suffrage, you mustn't be intolerant."</p>
+<p>"I cannot help it, Jane. I shall never knowingly bow to one even
+if she is related to me," announced Mrs. Carr more assertively than
+Gabriella would have believed possible.</p>
+<p>"Well, for my part, Cousin Fanny, I can't feel that it hurts me
+to bow to anybody," said Pussy, with her unfailing kindness of
+heart. "Why, I even bowed to Florrie Spencer last winter. I wanted
+to cut her, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it when I met
+her face to face. I hope you don't mind, dear," she whispered to
+Gabriella. "I suppose I oughtn't to have mentioned her, but I
+forgot."</p>
+<p>"Oh, it doesn't matter in the least," responded Gabriella
+cheerfully. "I bowed to her myself the day before I left New
+York."</p>
+<p>Though she tried to be independent, to be advanced and resolute,
+she felt the last eighteen years receding slowly from her
+consciousness. The family point of view, the family soul, had
+enveloped her again, and, in spite of her experience and her
+success, she seemed inwardly as young and ignorant as on the
+evening when she broke her engagement to Arthur. The spirit of the
+place had defeated her individual endeavour. Except for the wall
+paper of pale gray, and the Persian rugs on the floor, Jane's
+library might have been the old front parlour in Hill Street, and
+it was as if the French mirror, the crystal candelabra, the
+rosewood bookcases, with their diamond-shaped panes lined with
+fluted magenta silk, the family portraits, the speckled engravings
+of the Burial of Latan&eacute; and of the groups of amiable
+children feeding chickens and fish&mdash;it was as if these
+inanimate objects exuded a spiritual anodyne which enfeebled the
+will. Across the hall, in the modern pink and gray drawing-room,
+the five girls were playing bridge with several young men whom
+Gabriella remembered as babies, and the sounds of their voices
+floated to her now and then as thinly as if they had come out of a
+phonograph. "There is nothing better than peace, after all," she
+thought, while her, eyes rested tenderly on the simple,
+affectionate face of Cousin Jimmy. "Goodness and peace, these
+things are really worth while."</p>
+<p>Then the telephone rang gently, and after a minute Margaret, who
+had gone to answer it, came in with a roguish smile on her lips.
+"Aunt Gabriella, Mr. Peyton wishes to come to-morrow at five," she
+said; and the roguish smile flitted from her lips to the lips of
+Cousin Pussy, and from Cousin Pussy to each sympathetic and
+watchful face in the group.</p>
+<p>"You may say what you please," argued Charley, still truculent,
+"the whole trouble with Arthur is that he has got the wrong
+ideas."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>At five o'clock the next day the family crowded into the touring
+car for an excursion, and left Gabriella in a deserted house to
+receive the lover of her girlhood. Before going Mrs. Carr had
+embraced her sentimentally; Charley had dropped one of his broad
+jokes on the subject of the reunion; Jane had murmured sweetly that
+there was no man on earth she admired as much as she did Arthur;
+and the girls had effusively complimented Gabriella on her
+appearance. Even Willy, the baby of eighteen years ago, had
+prophesied with hilarity that "Old Arthur Peyton wasn't coming for
+nothing." One and all they appeared to take her part in the romance
+for granted; and while she waited in the drawing-room, gazing
+through the interstices of Jane's new lace curtains into the
+avenue, where beyond the flying motor cars the grassy strip in the
+middle of the street was dappled with shadows, she wondered if she
+also were taking Arthur's devotion for granted. She had not seen
+him for eighteen years, and yet she was awaiting him as expectantly
+as if he were still her lover. Would his presence really quiet this
+strange new restlessness in her heart&mdash;this restlessness which
+had come to her so suddenly after her meeting with Florrie? Was it
+true that her youth was slipping from her before she had grasped
+all the happiness that life offered? Or was it only the stirring of
+the spring winds, of the young green against the blue sky, of the
+mating birds, of the roving, provocative scents of flowers, of the
+checkered light and shade on the grassy strip under the maples? Was
+it all these things, or was it none of them, that awoke this
+longing, so vague and yet so unquenchable, in her heart?</p>
+<p>A car stopped in the street outside, the bell rang, and she
+watched the figure of a trim mulatto maid flit through the hall to
+the door. An instant later Arthur's name was announced, and
+Gabriella, with her hands in his clasp, stood looking into his
+face. It had been eighteen years since they parted, and in those
+eighteen years she had carried his image like some sacred talisman
+in her breast.</p>
+<p>"How little you've changed, Gabriella," he said after a moment
+of silence in which she told herself that he was far better
+looking, far more distinguished than she had remembered him. "You
+are larger than you used to be, but your face is as girlish as
+ever."</p>
+<p>"And I have two children nearly grown," she replied with a
+trembling little laugh; "a daughter who is already thinking of the
+White Sulphur."</p>
+<p>They sat down in the pink chairs on the gray carpet, and leaned
+forward, looking into each other's faces as tenderly as they had
+done when they were lovers.</p>
+<p>"It's hard to believe it," he answered a little stiffly, in his
+dry and gentle voice, which held a curious note of finality, of
+failure. For the first time, while he spoke, she let her eyes rest
+frankly upon him, and there came to her, as she did so, a vivid
+realization of the emptiness and aimlessness of his life. He looked
+handsomer than ever; he looked stately and formal and impressive;
+but he looked old&mdash;though he was only forty-five&mdash;he
+looked old and ineffectual and acquiescent. The fighting strength,
+such as it was, had gone out of him, and the stamp of failure was
+on him, from his high, pale, intellectual forehead, where the fine
+brown hair had retreated to the crown of his head, to his narrow
+features, and his relaxed slender limbs, with their slow and
+indolent movements. He was one of those, she felt intuitively, who
+had stood aloof from the rewards as well as from the strains of the
+struggle, who had withered to the core, not from age, but from an
+inherent distrust of all effort, of all endeavour. For his
+immobility went deeper than any physical habit: it attacked, like
+an incurable malady, the very fibre and substance of his nature.
+With his intellect, his training, his traditions, she discerned,
+with a flash of insight, that he had failed because he lacked the
+essential faith in the future. He had lost, not because he had
+risked, but because he had hesitated, not because he had loved
+ease, but because he had feared effort. For fear of a misstep, he
+had not dared to go forward; from dread of pain, he had refused the
+opportunity of happiness. She knew now why he had never come to
+her, why he had let her slip from his grasp. All that was a part of
+his failure, of his distrust of life, of his profound negation of
+spirit.</p>
+<p>"Yes, it is hard," she assented; and there came over her like a
+sudden sense of discomfort, of physical hardship, the knowledge
+that, in the very beginning, she was trying to make conversation.
+Meeting his sympathetic smile&mdash;the smile that still delighted
+the impressionable hearts of old ladies&mdash;she told herself
+obstinately, with desperate determination, that she was not
+disappointed, that he was just as she had remembered him, dear and
+lovable and kind and conventional. When she recalled what he had
+been at twenty-seven, it appeared inevitable to her that at
+forty-five he should have settled a little more firmly into the
+mould of the past, that his opinions should have crystallized and
+imprisoned his mind immovably in the centre of them.</p>
+<p>She told him what she could about Archibald and
+Fanny&mdash;about her choice of schools, her maternal pride in
+Archibald's intellect and Fanny's appearance, her hopeful plans for
+the future&mdash;and he listened attentively, with his manner of
+slightly pompous consideration, while he passed one of his long
+narrow hands over his forehead. When she had finished her vivacious
+recital, he began to talk slowly and gravely about himself, with
+the tolerant and impersonal detachment of one who has reduced life
+to a gesture, a manner. "I wonder if he has ever really cared about
+anything&mdash;even about me?" she questioned, after a minute; but
+while the thought was still in her mind, he mentioned his mother's
+name, and it was impossible to doubt the sincerity of his sorrow
+and his tenderness. "I have seemed only half alive since I lost
+her," he said; and the words were like a searchlight which flashed
+over his character and illumined its obscurities. Did his whole
+attitude of immobility and negation result from the depth and the
+intensity of his feeling, from the exquisite reticence and
+sensitiveness of his soul?</p>
+<p>"I know, I know," she murmured in a voice of sympathy. After
+all, she was not disappointed in him. He was as tender, as
+chivalrous, as noble as she had believed him to be. The Dream was
+true; and yet in spite of its truthfulness, it seemed to evaporate
+slowly while she sat there in Jane's pink satin chair and looked
+out at the sunlight. Only the restlessness, the inappeasable
+longing in her heart had not changed. Looking across the hall into
+the library she could see the old French mirror reflecting the
+bronze candelabra, with crystal pendants, and the thought flitted
+into her brain: "It is all real. I am here, talking to Arthur. It
+is every bit true." But her words failed to convince her, and she
+had a curious sensation of vagueness and thinness, as if their low,
+gentle voices were issuing from shadows.</p>
+<p>"I should like to show you some of our improvements," he said
+presently, with a faintly perceptible ripple of animation. "I
+wonder if you would care to come out in my car? We might go up
+Monument Avenue into the country."</p>
+<p>The idea was delightful, she told him with convincing
+enthusiasm; and while she ran upstairs to put on her hat, he went
+out to the car, which was standing in front of the house. So
+preoccupied was he with his reflections, that when Gabriella
+appeared, he started almost as if he had forgotten that he was
+waiting for her.</p>
+<p>The air was as soft and fragrant as summer; the grassy strip
+under the young maples was diapered with sunlight, and an edge of
+rosy gold was tinting the far horizon. As they sped up the avenue
+Arthur pointed out the houses to her as possessively as Charley had
+done the afternoon before, and in the pride with which he told her
+the cost of them she recognized an admirable freedom from envy or
+bitterness. If, he had not achieved things, his attitude seemed to
+say, it was because he had never been in the race, because he had
+preferred to stand aside and enjoy the reposeful entertainment of
+the spectator.</p>
+<p>The avenue, which swept on indefinitely after the houses had
+stopped, dwindled at last to two straight and narrow walks binding
+the town to the country with bands of concrete. The pines had
+fallen in blackened ruins, and where Gabriella remembered thickets
+of wildflowers there were masses of red clay furrowed by cart
+wheels.</p>
+<p>"You see, we're developing all this property now," observed
+Arthur, in a gratified tone as they whirled past an old field
+intersected by a concrete walk which informed the curious that it
+was "Arlington Avenue." "Honeysuckle Lane has gone, too, and we're
+grading a street there now in front of the old Berkeley place."</p>
+<p>"The growth has been wonderful," said Gabriella, a little
+pensively; "but do you remember how lovely Honeysuckle Lane used to
+be? That's where we went for wild honeysuckle in the spring."</p>
+<p>"Oh, we'll find plenty of honeysuckle farther out. I gathered a
+big bunch of it for Cousin Nelly yesterday."</p>
+<p>For a while they sped on in silence. Arthur was intent on the
+wheel, and Gabriella could think of nothing to say to him that she
+had not said in Jane's drawing-room. When at last they left the
+desolation of improvement, and came out into the natural country,
+the sun was already low, and the forest of pines along the glowing,
+horizon was like an impending storm. Once Arthur stopped, and they
+got out to gather wild honeysuckle by the roadside; then with the
+sticky, heavily scented blossoms in her lap, they went on again
+toward the sunset, still silent, still separated by an impalpable
+barrier. "He is just what I thought he would be," she thought
+sadly. "He is just where I left him eighteen years ago, and yet it
+is different. In some inexplicable way it is different from what I
+expected." And she told herself that the fault was her
+own&mdash;that she had changed, hardened, and become hopelessly
+matter-of-fact&mdash;that she had lost her youth and her
+sentiment.</p>
+<p>Suddenly, as if the action had been forced upon him by the
+steady pressure of some deep conviction, some inner necessity,
+Arthur turned his face toward her, and asked gently: "Gabriella, do
+you ever think of the past?"</p>
+<p>Facing the rosy sunset, his features looked wan and colourless,
+and she noticed again that he seemed to have dried through and
+through, like some rare fruit that has lain wrapped in tissue paper
+too long.</p>
+<p>She looked at him with wistful and sombre eyes. Now that the
+desired moment had come, she felt only that she would have given
+her whole future to escape before it overtook her, to avoid the
+inevitable, crowning hour of her destiny.</p>
+<p>"I think of it very often," she answered truthfully, while she
+buried her face in the intoxicating bloom of the honeysuckle.</p>
+<p>"Do you remember my telling you once that I'd never give you
+up&mdash;that I'd never stop caring?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I remember&mdash;but, oh, Arthur, you mustn't&mdash;" She
+sat up with a start, gazing straight ahead into the rose and gold
+of the afterglow. From the deserted road, winding flat and
+dun-coloured in the soft light, she heard another voice&mdash;the
+strong and buoyant voice of O'Hara&mdash;saying: "I'm not the sort
+to change&mdash;" and then over again, "I'm not the sort to
+change&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"I suppose it's too late," Arthur went on, with his patient
+tenderness. "Things usually come too late for me or else I miss
+them altogether. That's been the way always&mdash;and now&mdash;"
+With his left hand he made a large, slow, commemorative
+gesture.</p>
+<p>"You're the best&mdash;the kindest&mdash;" An urgent desire
+moved her to stop him before he put into words the feeling she
+could see in his face. Though she knew that it was but the ghost of
+a feeling, the habit of a desire, which had become interwoven with
+his orderly and unchangeable custom of life, she realized
+nevertheless that its imaginary vividness might cause him great
+suffering. A vision of what might have been eighteen years
+ago&mdash;of their possible marriage&mdash;rose before her while
+she struggled for words. How could her energetic nature have borne
+with his philosophy of hesitation, her imperative affirmation of
+life with his denial of effort, her unconquered optimism with his
+deeply rooted mistrust of happiness?</p>
+<p>There was beauty in his face, in his ascetic and over-refined
+features, in his sympathetic smile and his cultured voice; but it
+was the beauty of resignation, of defeat nobly borne, of a spirit
+confirmed in the bitter sweetness of renouncement. "It would make
+an old woman of me to marry him," she thought, "an old, patient,
+resigned woman."</p>
+<p>"Most things have slipped by me," he resumed presently, while
+they raced down a long hill toward the black pines and the fading
+red of the afterglow. In a marshy pond near the roadside frogs were
+croaking, while from the darkening fields, encircled with webs of
+mist, there floated the mingled scents of freshly mown grass, of
+dewy flowers, of trodden weeds, of ploughed earth, of ancient
+mould&mdash;all the fugitive and immemorially suggestive odours of
+the country at twilight. And at the touch of these scents, some
+unforgotten longing seemed to stir in her brain as if it had slept
+there, covered by clustering memories, from another lifetime. She
+wanted something with an unbearable intensity; the vague and
+elusive yearning for happiness had become suddenly poignant and
+definite. In that instant she knew unerringly that she was in love
+not with a dream, but with a fact, that she was in love not with
+Arthur, but with O'Hara. For days, weeks, months, she had been
+blindly groping toward the knowledge; and now, in a flash of
+intuition, it had come to her like one of those discoveries of
+science, which baffle investigators for years, and then
+miraculously reveal themselves in a moment of insight. Her first
+antagonism, her injustice, her unreasonable resentments and
+suspicions, she recognized now, in the piercing light of this
+discovery, as the inexplicable disguises of love. And she was not
+old&mdash;she was not even middle-aged&mdash;she was as young as
+Fanny, as young as the eternal, ageless spirit of romance, of
+adventure. This was life in her pulses, in her brain, in her
+heart&mdash;life, not pale, not bitter sweet, but sparkling,
+glowing, bubbling like wine.</p>
+<p>At the foot of the long hill Arthur turned the car, and they
+flew back between the dim fields where the croaking of frogs
+sounded louder in the darkness. Ahead of them the lights of the car
+flitted like golden moths over the dust of the road, and in the
+sky, beyond the thin veil of mist, the stars were shining over the
+city. Spring, which possessed the earth, bloomed in Gabriella's
+heart with a wonderful colour, a wonderful fragrance. She was young
+again with the imperishable youth of magic, of enchantment. To
+love, to hope, to strive, this was both romance and adventure.</p>
+<p>"Is it too late, then, Gabriella?" asked Arthur, after a long
+silence, and in his voice there was the sound of suffering
+acquiescence.</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid it is, dear Arthur," she answered softly, and they
+did not speak again until the lights blazed over them, and they ran
+into Monument Avenue. After all, it was too late. What could she
+have added to the answer she had given him?</p>
+<p>When they reached the house, he did not come in with her, and
+tears stained her face while she went slowly up the steps, and
+stood beside Jane's hydrangeas with her hand on the bell. Then, as
+the door opened quickly, she saw her mother waiting, with an eager,
+expectant look, at the door of the library, and heard her excited
+voice murmur: "Well, dear?"</p>
+<p>"We had a lovely drive, mother. Arthur is just as I remembered
+him, except that he has grown so much older."</p>
+<p>A disappointed expression crossed Mrs. Carr's face. "Is that
+all?" she asked regretfully.</p>
+<p>Gabriella laughed happily. "That is all&mdash;only I found out
+exactly what I wanted to know."</p>
+<p>For the rest of the week she devoted herself to her mother with
+a solicitude which aroused in the brain of that melancholy lady
+serious apprehensions of a hastening decline; and when her visit
+was over, she packed her trunks, with girlish, delicious thrills of
+happiness, and started back to New York.</p>
+<p>"Do you really think I am failing so rapidly, Gabriella?" Mrs.
+Carr inquired anxiously while they waited for the train on the
+platform of the upper station.</p>
+<p>"Failing? Why, no, mother. You look splendidly," Gabriella
+assured her, a little surprised, a little startled. "Why should you
+ask me such a thing?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, nothing, dear. I had a fancy," murmured Mrs. Carr meekly;
+and then as the train rushed into view, she kissed her daughter
+reproachfully, and stood gazing after her until the last coach and
+the last white jacket of the dining-car attendants vanished in the
+smoky sunshine of the distance.</p>
+<p>Through the long day, lying back in her chair, with her eyes on
+the flying green landscape, Gabriella thought of the discovery she
+had made while she was driving with Arthur. The restlessness, the
+uncertainty, the vague yet poignant longing for an indefinite good,
+had passed out of her happy and exultant heart. In obedience to the
+law of her nature, which decreed that she should move swiftly and
+directly toward the end of her destiny, she was returning to O'Hara
+as resolutely, as unswervingly, as she had fled from him.</p>
+<p>"It's strange how little I've ever understood, how little I've
+ever known myself," she thought, staring vacantly at a severe
+spinster, with crimped hair and a soured expression, who sat before
+the opposite window. "I've gone on in the dark, making mistakes and
+discoveries from the very beginning, undoing and doing over again,
+creating illusions and then destroying them&mdash;always moving,
+always changing, always growing in new directions. A year ago I'd
+have laughed at the idea that I could love any man but
+Arthur&mdash;that of all men I could love Ben O'Hara; and to-day I
+know that he is the future for me&mdash;that he is the beginning
+again of my youth. A year ago I thought only how I might change
+him, how I might make him over, and now I realize that I shall
+never change him, that I shall never make him over, and that it
+doesn't really matter. It isn't the vital thing. The vital thing is
+character, and I wouldn't change that if I could. For the rest, I
+shall probably always wish him different in some ways, just as I
+wish myself different. I'd like to have him more like Arthur on the
+surface, just as I'd like to have myself more like Fanny. I'd like
+to give him Arthur's manner just as I'd like to give myself Fanny's
+complexion. But it isn't possible. He will always be what he is
+now, and, after all, it is what he is&mdash;it is not something
+else that I want&mdash;"</p>
+<p>With a glimmer of the clairvoyant insight which had come to her
+on the country road, she understood that O'Hara was for her an
+embodied symbol of life&mdash;that she must either take him or
+leave him completely and without reserve or evasion. He was not an
+ideal. In the love she felt for him there was none of the
+sentimental glamour of her passion for George. She saw his
+imperfections, but she saw that the man was bigger than any
+attributes, that his faults were as nothing compared to the
+abundance of his virtues, and that, perfect or imperfect, the
+tremendous fact remained that she loved him.</p>
+<p>In the opposite chair, the severe spinster had taken a strip of
+knitted silk out of her bag, and was working industriously on a
+man's necktie of blue and gray. From her intent and preoccupied
+look, from the nervous twitching of her thin lips, the close
+peering of her near-sighted eyes, through rimless glasses which she
+wore attached by a gold chain to her hair, she might have found in
+the act of knitting a supreme consolation for the inexorable
+denials of destiny. "I wonder if it satisfies her, just knitting?"
+thought Gabriella. "Has she submitted like Arthur to chance, to the
+way things happen when one no longer resists? Is she really
+contented merely to knit, or is she knitting as a condemned
+prisoner might knit while he is waiting for the scaffold?" And
+while she watched the patient fingers, she added: "One must either
+conquer or be conquered, and I will never be conquered."</p>
+<p>It was eight o'clock when she reached New York, and as she drove
+the short distance to West Twenty-third Street she began to wonder
+when she should see O'Hara, and what she should say to him. In the
+end she decided that she would wait for a chance meeting, that she
+would let it happen when it would without moving a step or lifting
+a hand. Before many days they would be obliged to meet in the yard
+or the hall, and some obscure, consecrated tradition of sex, some
+secret strain of her mother's ineradicable feminine instinct,
+opposed the direct and sensible way. "As soon as I meet
+him&mdash;and in the end I shall surely meet him&mdash;everything
+will be right," she thought, with her eyes on the streets where the
+spring multitude of children were swarming. And from this multitude
+of children, of young, ardent, and adventurous life, there seemed
+to emanate a colossal and irresistible will&mdash;the will to be,
+to live, to love, to create, and to conquer.</p>
+<p>The taxicab turned swiftly into Twenty-third Street, and while
+it stopped beside the pavement, she saw that Mrs. Squires was
+standing, with her arms on the gate, staring into the street. As
+Gabriella alighted, the woman came forward and said, with
+suppressed emotion, while she wiped her eyes on the back of her
+hand: "You came just a minute too late to say good-bye to Mr.
+O'Hara."</p>
+<p>"Good-bye? But where has he gone?"</p>
+<p>"He has gone to Washington to-night. To-morrow he is starting to
+the West."</p>
+<p>"When is he coming back? Did he tell you?"</p>
+<p>At this Mrs. Squires broke down. "He ain't ever coming back,
+that's what I'm crying for. He's given up his rooms, and his
+furniture all went to the auction yesterday. He says he's going to
+live out in Colorado or Wyoming for the rest of his life, and he
+didn't even tell me where I could write to him. It's a great loss
+to me, Mrs. Carr. I'd got used to him and his ways, and when you've
+once got used to a man, it ain't easy to give him up."</p>
+<p>She sobbed audibly as she finished; and it seemed to Gabriella
+that a lifetime of experience passed in the instant while she stood
+there, with her pulses drumming in her ears, her throat contracting
+until she struggled for breath, and the lights of the city swimming
+in a nebulous blur before her eyes. Yet in that instant, as in
+every crisis of her life, she turned instinctively to action, to
+movement, to exertion, however futile. While she walked across the
+pavement to the waiting cab, for the crowning and ultimate choice
+of her life, she abandoned forever the authority and guide of
+tradition. Tradition, she knew, bade her sit and wait on destiny
+until she withered, like Arthur, to the vital core of her nature;
+but something mightier than tradition, something which she shared
+with the swarming multitude of children in the streets&mdash;the
+will to live, to strive, and to conquer&mdash;this had risen
+superior to the empty rules of the past. With her hand on the door
+of the taxicab, she spoke rapidly to the driver: "Drive back to the
+station as fast as you can, there is not a minute to lose."</p>
+<p>When the cab started, she leaned forward, with her hands clasped
+on her knees, and her eyes on the street, where the children were
+playing. Because of the children, they drove very slowly, and once,
+when the traffic held them up for a few minutes, she felt an
+impulse to scream. Suppose she missed him, after all! Suppose she
+lost him in the station! Suppose she never saw him again! And
+beside this possibly it seemed to her that all the other suffering
+of her life&mdash;George's desertion, her humiliation, her struggle
+to make a living for her children, the loneliness of the long
+summers, her poverty and hunger and self-denial&mdash;that all
+these things were merely superficial annoyances. "If we don't go
+on, I shall die," she said aloud suddenly; "if we don't go on, I
+shall die," and when at last the cab started again, she heard the
+words like an undercurrent beneath the innumerable noises of the
+street, "If we don't go on, I shall die."</p>
+<p>The taxicab stopped; a porter ran forward to take her bag, and
+while she thrust the money into the driver's hand, she heard her
+voice coolly and calmly giving directions.</p>
+<p>"I must catch the next train to Washington."</p>
+<p>"Have you got your ticket, Miss?"</p>
+<p>She stared back at him blankly. Though she saw his lips moving,
+it was impossible for her to distinguish the words because she was
+still hearing in a muffled undercurrent the roar of the
+streets.</p>
+<p>"Have you got your ticket?" They were passing through the
+station now, and he explained hurriedly: "You can't go through the
+gate without a ticket."</p>
+<p>She drew out her purse, and panic seized her afresh while she
+waited before the window behind a bald-headed man who counted his
+change twice before he would move aside, and let her step into his
+place. Then, when the ticket was given to her, she turned and ran
+after the porter through the gate and down the steps to the
+platform. As she ran, her eyes wavered to the long platform, and
+the little groups gathered beside the waiting train, which seemed
+to shake like a moving black and white picture.</p>
+<p>"Suppose I miss him, after all! Suppose I never see him again!"
+she thought, and all that was young in her, all that was vital and
+alive, strained forward as her feet touched the platform. Except
+for several coloured porters and a woman holding a child by the
+hand, the place was deserted. Then a man stepped quickly out of one
+of the last coaches, and by his bigness and the red of his hair,
+she knew that it was O'Hara. At the first sight of him the panic
+died suddenly in her heart, and the old peace, the old sense of
+security and protection swept over her. Her face, which had been
+lowered, was lifted like a flower that revives, and her feet, which
+had stumbled, became the swift, flying feet of a girl. It was as if
+both her spirit and her body sprang toward him.</p>
+<p>At the sound of his name, he turned and stood motionless, as if
+hardly believing his vision.</p>
+<p>"I came back because I couldn't help it," she said.</p>
+<p>But he was always hard to convince, and he waited now, still
+transfixed, still incredulous.</p>
+<p>"I came back because I wanted you more than anything else," she
+added.</p>
+<p>"You came back to me?" he asked, slowly, as if doubting her.</p>
+<p>"I came back to you. I wanted you," she repeated, and her voice
+did not quaver, her eyes did not drop from his questioning gaze. It
+was all so simple at last; it was all as natural as the joyous
+beating of her heart.</p>
+<p>"And you'll marry me now&mdash;to-night?"</p>
+<p>It was the ultimate test, she knew, the test not only of her
+love for O'Hara, but of her strength, her firmness, her courage,
+and of her belief in life. The choice was hers that comes to all
+men and women sooner or later&mdash;the choice between action and
+inaction, between endeavour and relinquishment, between affirmation
+and denial, between adventure and deliberation, between youth and
+age. One thought only made her hesitate, and she almost whispered
+the words:</p>
+<p>"But the children?"</p>
+<p>He laughed softly. "Oh, the children are always there. We're not
+quitters," and in a graver tone, he asked for the second time:
+"Will you come with me now&mdash;to-night, Gabriella?"</p>
+<p>At the repeated question she stretched out her hands, while she
+watched the light break on his face.</p>
+<p>"I'll come with you now&mdash;anywhere&mdash;toward the future,"
+she answered.</p>
+<p>THE END</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Life and Gabriella, by Ellen Glasgow
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Life and Gabriella, by Ellen Glasgow
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Life and Gabriella
+       The Story of a Woman's Courage
+
+Author: Ellen Glasgow
+
+Release Date: January 3, 2005 [EBook #14571]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND GABRIELLA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Rick Niles, Charlie Kirschner and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LIFE AND
+GABRIELLA
+
+THE STORY OF A WOMAN'S COURAGE
+
+BY
+ELLEN GLASGOW
+
+
+
+FRONTISPIECE
+BY
+C. ALLAN GILBERT
+
+GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
+
+DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
+1916
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+BOOK FIRST--THE AGE OF FAITH
+
+CHAPTER                              PAGE
+     I. Presents a Shameless Heroine    3
+    II. Poor Jane                      30
+   III. A Start in Life                61
+    IV. Mirage                         90
+     V. The New World                 122
+    VI. The Old Serpent               148
+   VII. Motherhood                    176
+
+BOOK SECOND--THE AGE OF KNOWLEDGE
+
+     I. Disenchantment.               211
+    II. A Second Start in Life        241
+   III. Work                          274
+    IV. The Dream and the Years       300
+     V. Success                       331
+    VI. Discoveries                   368
+   VII. Readjustments                 406
+  VIII. The Test                      444
+    IX. The Past                      476
+     X. Dream and the Reality         501
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST
+
+THE AGE OF FAITH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+PRESENTS A SHAMELESS HEROINE
+
+
+After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw
+a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour. On the
+window-sill, midway between the white curtains, a pot of blue hyacinths
+stood in a cracked china plate, and as the sunlight shone into the room,
+the scent of the blossoms floated to the corner where Gabriella was
+patiently pulling basting threads out of the hem of a skirt. For a
+minute her capable hands stopped at their work, and raising her smooth
+dark head she looked compassionately at her sister Jane, who was
+sitting, like a frozen image of martyrdom, in the middle of the long
+horsehair sofa. Three times within the last twelve months Jane had fled
+from her husband's roof to the protection of her widowed mother, a weak
+person of excellent ancestry, who could hardly have protected a sparrow
+had one taken refuge beneath her skirt. Twice before Mrs. Carr had wept
+over her daughter's woes and returned her, a sullen saint, to the arms
+of the discreetly repentant Charley; but to-day, while the four older
+children were bribed to good behaviour with bread and damson preserves
+in the pantry, and the baby was contentedly playing with his rubber ring
+in his mother's arms, Gabriella had passionately declared that "Jane
+must never, never go back!" Nothing so dreadful as this had ever
+happened before, for the repentant Charley had been discovered making
+love to his wife's dressmaker, a pretty French girl whom Jane had
+engaged for her spring sewing because she had more "style" than had
+fallen to the austerely virtuous lot of the Carr's regular seamstress,
+Miss Folly Hatch. "I might have known she was too pretty to be good,"
+moaned Jane, while Mrs. Carr, in her willow rocking-chair by the window,
+wiped her reddened eyelids on the strip of cambric ruffling she was
+hemming.
+
+Unmoved among them the baby beat methodically on his mother's breast
+with his rubber ring, as indifferent to her sobs as to the intermittent
+tearful "coos" of his grandmother. He had a smooth bald head, fringed,
+like the head of a very old man, with pale silken hair that was almost
+white in the sunshine, and his eyes, as expressionless as marbles,
+stared over the pot of hyacinths at a sparrow perched against the deep
+blue sky on the red brick wall of the opposite house. From beneath his
+starched little skirt his feet, in pink crocheted shoes, protruded with
+a forlorn and helpless air as if they hardly belonged to him.
+
+"Oh, my poor child, what are we going to do?" asked Mrs. Carr in a
+resigned voice as she returned to her hemming.
+
+"There's nothing to do, mother," answered Jane, without lifting her eyes
+from the baby's head, without moving an inch out of the position she had
+dropped into when she entered the room. Then, after a sobbing pause, she
+defined in a classic formula her whole philosophy of life: "It wasn't my
+fault," she said.
+
+"But one can always do something if it's only to scream," rejoined
+Gabriella with spirit.
+
+"I wouldn't scream," replied Jane, while the pale cast of resolution
+hardened her small flat features, "not--not if he killed me. My one
+comfort," she added pathetically, "is that only you and mother know how
+he treats me."
+
+Her pretty vacant face with its faded bloom resembled a pastel portrait
+in which the artist had forgotten to paint an expression. "Poor Jane
+Gracey," as she was generally called, had wasted the last ten years in a
+futile effort to hide the fact of an unfortunate marriage beneath an
+excessively cheerful manner. She talked continually because talking
+seemed to her the most successful way of "keeping up an appearance."
+Though everybody who knew her knew also that Charley Gracey neglected
+her shamefully, she spent twelve hours of the twenty-four pretending
+that she was perfectly happy. At nineteen she had been a belle and
+beauty of the willowy sort; but at thirty she had relapsed into one of
+the women whom men admire in theory and despise in reality. She had
+started with a natural tendency to clinging sweetness; as the years went
+on the sweetness, instead of growing fainter, had become almost cloying,
+while the clinging had hysterically tightened into a clutch. Charley
+Gracey, who had married her under the mistaken impression that her type
+was restful for a reforming rake, (not realizing that there is nothing
+so mentally disturbing as a fool) had been changed by marriage from a
+gay bird of the barnyard into a veritable hawk of the air. His behaviour
+was the scandal of the town, yet the greater his sins, the intenser grew
+Jane's sweetness, the more twining her hold. "Nobody will ever think of
+blaming you, darling," said Mrs. Carr consolingly. "You have behaved
+beautifully from the beginning. We all know what a perfect wife you have
+been."
+
+"I've tried to do my duty even if Charley failed in his," replied the
+perfect wife, unfastening the hooks of her small heliotrope wrap trimmed
+with tarnished silver passementerie. Above her short flaxen "bang" she
+wore a crumpled purple hat ornamented with bunches of velvet pansies;
+and though it was two years old, and out of fashion at a period when
+fashions changed less rapidly, it lent an air of indecent festivity to
+her tearful face. Her youth was already gone, for her beauty had been of
+the fragile kind that breaks early, and her wan, aristocratic features
+had settled into the downward droop which comes to the faces of people
+who habitually "expect the worst."
+
+"I know, Jane, I know," murmured Mrs. Carr, dropping her thimble as she
+nervously tried to hasten her sewing. "But don't you think it would be a
+comfort, dear, to have the advice of a man about Charley? Won't you let
+me send Marthy for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"
+
+"Oh, mother, I couldn't. It would kill me to have everybody know I'm
+unhappy!" wailed Jane, breaking down.
+
+"But everybody knows anyway, Jane," said Gabriella, sticking the point
+of her scissors into a strip of buckram, for she was stiffening the
+bottom of the skirt after the fashion of the middle 'nineties.
+
+"Of course I'm foolishly sensitive," returned Jane, while she lifted the
+baby from her lap and placed him in a pile of cushions by the deep arm
+of the sofa, where he sat imperturbably gazing at the blue sky and the
+red wall from which the sparrow had flown. "You can never understand my
+feelings because you are so different."
+
+"Gabriella is not married," observed Mrs. Carr, with sentimental
+finality. "But I'm sure, Jane--I'm just as sure as I can be of anything
+that it wouldn't do a bit of harm to speak to Cousin Jimmy Wrenn. Men
+know so much more than women about such matters."
+
+In her effort to recover her thimble she dropped her spool of thread,
+which rolled under the sofa on which Jane was sitting, and while she
+waited for Gabriella to find it, she gazed pensively into the almost
+deserted street where the slender shadows of poplar trees slanted over
+the wet cobblestones. Though Mrs. Carr worked every instant of her time,
+except the few hours when she lay in bed trying to sleep, and the few
+minutes when she sat at the table trying to eat, nothing that she began
+was ever finished until Gabriella took it out of her hands. She did her
+best, for she was as conscientious in her way as poor Jane, yet through
+some tragic perversity of fate her best seemed always to fall short of
+the simplest requirements of life. Her face, like Jane's, was long and
+thin, with a pathetic droop at the corners of the mouth, a small bony
+nose, always slightly reddened at the tip, and faded blue eyes beneath
+an even row of little flat round curls which looked as if they were
+plastered on her forehead.
+
+Thirty-three years before, in the romantic and fiery 'sixties, she had
+married dashing young Gabriel Carr for no better reason apparently than
+that she was falling vaguely in love with love; and the marriage, which
+had been one of reckless passion on his side, had been for her scarcely
+more than the dreamer's hesitating compromise with reality. Passion,
+which she had been taught to regard as an unholy attribute implanted by
+the Creator, with inscrutable wisdom, in the nature of man, and left out
+of the nature of woman, had never troubled her gentle and affectionate
+soul; and not until the sudden death of her husband did she begin even
+remotely to fall in love with the man. But when he was once safely dead
+she worshipped his memory with an ardour which would have seemed to her
+indelicate had he been still alive. For sixteen years she had worn a
+crape veil on her bonnet, and she still went occasionally, after the
+morning service was over on Sunday, to place fresh flowers on his grave.
+Now that his "earthly nature," against which she had struggled so
+earnestly while he was living, was no longer in need of the pious
+exorcisms with which she had treated its frequent manifestations, she
+remembered only the dark beauty of his face, his robust and vigorous
+youth, the tenderness and gallantry of his passion. For her daughters
+she had drawn an imaginary portrait of him which combined the pagan
+beauty of Antinous with the militant purity of Saint Paul; and this
+romantic blending of the heathen and the Presbyterian virtues had passed
+through her young imagination into the awakening soul of Gabriella.
+
+By the town at large Mrs. Carr's sorrow was alluded to as "a beautiful
+grief," yet so deeply rooted in her being was the instinct to twine,
+that for the first few years of her bereavement she had simply sat in
+her widow's weeds, with her rent paid by Cousin Jimmy Wrenn and her
+market bills settled monthly by Uncle Beverly Blair, and waited
+patiently for some man to come and support her.
+
+When no man came, and Uncle Beverly died of a stroke of apoplexy with
+his will unsigned, she had turned, with the wasted energy of the unfit
+and the incompetent, to solve the inexplicable problem of indigent
+ladyhood. And it was at this crucial instant that Becky Bollingbroke had
+put her awful question: "Have you made up your mind, Fanny, what you are
+going to do?" That was twelve years ago, but deep down in some secret
+cave of Fanny's being the ghastly echo of the words still reverberated
+through the emptiness and the silence.
+
+"Don't you think, darling," she pleaded now, as she had pleaded to Becky
+on that other dreadful occasion, "that we had better send immediately
+for Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"
+
+"I--I can't think," gasped Jane, "but you may if you want to, mother."
+
+"Send, Gabriella," said Mrs. Carr quickly, and she added tenderly, while
+Gabriella dropped her work and ran to the outside kitchen for Marthy,
+the coloured drudge, "you will feel so much better, Jane, after you have
+had his advice."
+
+Then at the sight of Jane's stricken face, which had turned blue as if
+from a sudden chill, she hurriedly opened the drawer of her sewing
+machine, and taking out a bottle of camphor she kept there, began
+tremulously rubbing her daughter's forehead. As she did so, she
+remembered, with the startling irrelevance of the intellectually
+untrained, the way Jane had looked in her veil and orange blossoms on
+the day of her wedding.
+
+"I wonder what on earth we have done to deserve our troubles?" she found
+herself thinking while she put the stopper back into the bottle and
+returned to her sewing.
+
+"Marthy has gone, mother," said Gabriella, with her cheerful air as she
+came back into the room, "and I shut the children in the laundry with
+Dolly who is doing the washing."
+
+"I hope they won't make themselves sick with preserves," remarked Jane,
+with the first dart of energy she had shown. "Perhaps I'd better go and
+see. If Fanny eats too much we'll be up all night with her."
+
+"I told Dolly not to let them stuff," answered Gabriella, as she sat
+down by the window and threaded her needle. She was a tall, dark girl,
+slender and straight as a young poplar, with a face that was frank and
+pleasant rather than pretty, and sparkling brown eyes which turned
+golden and grew bright as swords when she was angry. Seen by the strong
+light of the window, her face showed sallow in tone, with a certain
+nobility about the bony structure beneath the soft girlish flesh, and a
+look of almost stern decision in the square chin and in the full rich
+curve of the mouth. Her hair, which was too fine and soft to show its
+thickness, drooped from its parting at the side in a dark wing over her
+forehead, where it shadowed her arched black eyebrows and the clear
+sweet gravity of her eyes. As she bent over her sewing the thin pure
+lines of her body had a look of arrested energy, of relaxed but
+exuberant vitality.
+
+"You won't go to the dance to-night, will you, Gabriella?" inquired Mrs.
+Carr nervously.
+
+"No, I'm not going," answered the girl regretfully, for she loved
+dancing, and her white organdie dress, trimmed with quillings of blue
+ribbon, lay upstairs on the bed. "I'll never dance again if only Jane
+won't go back to Charley. I'll work my fingers to the bone to help her
+take care of the children."
+
+"I'll never, never go back," chanted Jane with feverish passion.
+
+"But I thought Arthur Peyton was coming for you," said Mrs. Carr. "He
+will be so disappointed."
+
+"Oh, he'll understand--he'll have to," replied Gabriella carelessly.
+
+The sunshine faded slowly from the hyacinths on the window-sill, and
+drawing her crocheted cape of purple wool closer about her, Mrs. Carr
+moved a little nearer the fireplace. Outside the March wind was blowing
+with a melancholy sound up the long straight street, and rocking the
+glossy boughs of an old magnolia tree in the yard From the shining
+leaves of the tree a few drops of water fell on the brick pavement,
+where several joyous sparrows were drinking, and farther off, as bright
+as silver in the clear wind, a solitary church spire rose above the
+huddled roofs of the town. When the wind lulled, as it did now and then,
+a warm breath seemed to stir in the sunshine, which grew suddenly
+brighter, while a promise of spring floated like a faint provocative
+scent on the air. And this scent, so vague, so roving, that it was like
+the ghostly perfume of flowers, stole at last into the memory, and made
+the old dream of youth and the young grow restless at the call of Life,
+which sang to the music of flutes in the brain. But the wind, rising
+afresh, drove the spirit of spring from the street, and swept the broken
+leaves of the magnolia tree over the drenched grass to the green-painted
+iron urns on either side of the steps.
+
+The house, a small brick dwelling, set midway of an expressionless row
+and wearing on its front a look of desiccated gentility, stood in one
+of those forgotten streets where needy gentlewomen do "light
+housekeeping" in an obscure hinterland of respectability. Hill Street,
+which had once known fashion, and that only yesterday, as old ladies
+count, had sunk at last into a humble state of decay. Here and there the
+edges of porches had crumbled; grass was beginning to sprout by the
+curbstone; and the once comfortable homes had opened their doors to
+boarders or let their large, high-ceiled rooms to the impoverished
+relicts of Confederate soldiers. Only a few blocks away the stream of
+modern progress, sweeping along Broad Street, was rapidly changing the
+old Southern city into one of those bustling centres of activity which
+the press of the community agreed to describe as "a metropolis"; but
+this river of industrialism was spanned by no social bridge connecting
+Hill Street and its wistful relicts with the statelier dignities and the
+more ephemeral gaieties of the opposite side. To be really "in society"
+one must cross over, either for good and all, or in the dilapidated
+"hack" which carried Gabriella to the parties of her schoolmates in West
+Franklin Street.
+
+For in the middle 'nineties, before social life in Richmond had become
+both complicated and expensive, it was still possible for a girl in
+Gabriella's position--provided, of course, she came of a "good
+family"--to sew all day over the plain sewing of her relatives, and in
+the evening to reign as the acknowledged belle of a ball. "Society," it
+is true, did not reach any longer, except in the historic sense, to Hill
+Street; but the inhabitants of Hill Street, if they were young and
+energetic, not infrequently made triumphant excursions into "society."
+Though Gabriella was poor and sewed for her living, she had been, from
+the moment she left school, one of the most popular girls in town. To be
+sure, she was neither so pretty as Florrie Spencer nor so clever as
+Julia Caperton, but in the words of Julia's brother Algernon, she was
+"the sort you could count on." Even in her childhood it had become the
+habit of those about her to count on Gabriella. Without Gabriella, her
+mother was fond of saying, it would have been impossible to keep a roof
+over their heads.
+
+Twelve years before, when they had moved into the house in Hill Street,
+Mrs. Carr had accepted from Jimmy Wrenn the rent of the first floor and
+the outside kitchen, which was connected with the back porch by a
+winding brick walk, overgrown with wild violets, while the upper story
+was let to two elderly spinsters, bearing the lordly, though fallen,
+name of Peterborough. These spinsters, like Mrs. Carr, spent their lives
+in a beautiful and futile pretence--the pretence of keeping up an
+appearance. They also took in the plain sewing of their richer
+relatives, who lived in Franklin Street, and sent them little trays of
+sweet things as soon as the midday dinner was over on Sunday. Sometimes
+they would drop in to see Mrs. Carr just before supper was ready, and
+then they would pretend that they lived on tea and toast because they
+were naturally "light eaters," and that they sewed all day, not for the
+money, but because they liked to have "something to do with their hands"
+They were tall thin women in organdie caps and black alpaca dresses made
+with long basques which showed a greenish cast in the daylight. The
+walls of their rooms were covered with family portraits of the colonial
+period, and Mrs. Carr, who had parted with most of her treasures, often
+wondered how they had preserved so many proofs of a distinguished
+descent. Even her silver had gone--first the quaint old service with the
+Bolton crest, which had belonged to her mother; then, one by one, the
+forks and spoons; and, last of all, Gabriella's silver mug, which was
+carried, wrapped in a shawl, to the shop of old Mr. Camberwell. She was
+a woman who loved inanimate things with the passion which other women
+give only to children, and a thousand delicate fibres of sentiment knit
+her soul to the portraits on the wall, to the furniture with which she
+lived, to the silver and glass that had once belonged to her mother.
+When one after one these things went from her, she felt as if the very
+roots of her being were torn up from the warm familiar earth in which
+they had grown. "There's nothing left in the parlour that I shouldn't be
+ashamed to have your grandmother look at," she had once confessed to her
+daughters.
+
+Seen by the light of history, this parlour, in which so much of
+Gabriella's childhood was spent, was not without interest as an archaic
+survival of the fundamental errors of the mid-Victorian mind. The walls
+were covered with bottle-green paper on which endless processions of
+dwarfed blue peacocks marched relentlessly toward an embossed
+border--the result of an artistic frenzy of the early 'eighties. Neither
+Mrs. Carr nor Jimmy Wrenn, who paid the rent, had chosen this paper, but
+having been left on the dealer's hands, it had come under the eye of the
+landlord, who, since he did not have to live with it had secured it at a
+bargain. Too unused to remonstrance to make it effective, Mrs. Carr had
+suffered the offending decoration in meekness, while Jimmy, having a
+taste for embossment, honestly regarded the peacocks as "handsome."
+From the centre of the ceiling a massive gilt chandelier, elaborately
+festooned with damaged garlands, shed, when it was lighted, a dim and
+troubled gloom down on the threadbare Axminster carpet. Above the white
+marble mantelpiece, the old French mirror, one of the few good things
+left over from a public sale of Mrs. Carr's possessions, reflected a
+pair of bronze candelabra with crystal pendants, and a mahogany clock,
+which had kept excellent time for half a century and then had stopped
+suddenly one day while Marthy was cleaning. In the corner, between the
+door and the window, there was a rosewood bookcase, with the bare
+shelves hidden behind plaited magenta silk, and directly above it hung
+an engraving of a group of amiable children feeding fish in a pond.
+Across the room, over the walnut whatnot, a companion picture
+represented the same group of children scattering crumbs before a polite
+brood of chickens in a barnyard. Between the windows a third engraving
+immortalized the "Burial of Latané" in the presence of several sad and
+resigned ladies in crinolines, while the sofa on which Jane sat was
+presided over by a Sully portrait of the beautiful Angelica Carr,
+wearing a white scarf on her head and holding a single rose in her hand.
+This portrait and a Saint Memin drawing of Mrs. Carr's grandfather, the
+Reverend Bartholomew Berkeley as a young man in a high stock, were the
+solitary existing relics of that consecrated past when Fanny Berkeley
+was "not brought up to do anything."
+
+To Mrs. Carr, whose mind was so constituted that any change in her
+surroundings produced a sensation of shock, the room was hallowed by the
+simple fact that she had lived in it for a number of years. That an
+object or a custom had existed in the past appeared to her to be an
+incontestible reason why it should continue to exist in the present. It
+was distressing to her to be obliged to move a picture or to alter the
+position of a piece of furniture, and she had worn one shape of bonnet
+and one style of hairdressing, slightly modified to suit the changing
+fashions, for almost twenty years. Her long pale face, her pensive blue
+eyes, and her look of anxious sweetness, made a touching picture of
+feminine incompetence; and yet it was from this pallid warmth, this
+gentle inefficiency of soul, that the buoyant spirit of Gabriella had
+sprung.
+
+For Gabriella was the incarnation of energy. From the moment of her
+birth when, in the words of her negro "mammy" she had looked "as peart
+as life," she had begun her battle against the enveloping twin powers of
+decay and inertia. To the intense secret mortification of her mother,
+who had prayed for a second waxlike infant after the fashion of poor
+Jane, she had been a notoriously ugly baby (almost as ugly as her Aunt
+Becky Bollingbroke who had never married), and as she grew up, this
+ugliness was barely redeemed by what Jane, in her vague way, described
+as "the something else in her face." According to Cousin Jimmy, who
+never recognized charm unless its manifestations were soft and purring,
+this "something else" was merely "a sunny temper"; and one of the
+constant afflictions of Gabriella's childhood was overhearing her mother
+remark to visitors: "No, she isn't so pretty as poor Jane, but, as
+Cousin Jimmy tells us, she is blessed with a sunny temper."
+
+"Give me that ruffle, mother, and I'll whip the lace on while we're
+waiting," she said now, laying aside the skirt of her Easter dress, and
+stretching out her hand for the strip of cambric in her mother's lap.
+But Mrs. Carr did not hear, for she was gazing, with the concentrated
+stare of Jane's baby, at a beautiful old lady who was walking slowly
+through the faint sunshine on the opposite pavement.
+
+"I wonder where Mrs. Peyton can be coming from in her best dress?" she
+remarked, forgetting Jane for an instant while her sense of tragedy
+yielded to the keener impulse of curiosity.
+
+"She never goes anywhere but to church or to the Old Ladies' home,"
+replied Gabriella. "Arthur says she hasn't paid a call since her
+husband's death."
+
+"Well, I haven't made one, except of course to my relatives, for fifteen
+years," rejoined Mrs. Carr a trifle tartly. Then her manner lost its
+unusual asperity, and she added excitedly, "They're coming now, Jane.
+There's Cousin Jimmy and he's bringing Cousin Pussy and Uncle
+Meriweather!"
+
+"Oh, mother, I can't possibly see them! I feel as if it would kill me!"
+cried Jane in desperation.
+
+"Give her the camphor, mother," said Gabriella with grim humour as she
+went to open the door.
+
+"Brace yourself, my darling. They are coming," pleaded Mrs. Carr, as she
+slipped her arm under Jane's head. At the first hint of any excitement
+she invariably lost her presence of mind and became distracted; and
+Jane's hysterical outbursts never failed to convince her, though they
+usually left the more skeptical Gabriella unmoved. "Don't you think you
+would feel better if you lay back on the pillows?" she urged.
+
+Then the bell rang, and before Jane could swallow her sobs, her sister
+ushered in Jimmy and Pussy Wrenn, who were closely followed by the
+ponderous figure of Uncle Meriweather, a gouty but benign old gentleman,
+whose jet-black eyebrows and white imperial gave him a misleading
+military air.
+
+"Well, well, my dear, what's this I hear about Charley?" demanded Cousin
+Jimmy, whose sprightly manner was never sprightlier than in the hour of
+tragedy or the house of mourning. "What does he mean by letting you run
+away from him?"
+
+"I've done my duty by Charley. I've never, never failed in my duty!"
+wept Jane, breaking down on Pussy's tender bosom, and waking the
+sleeping baby.
+
+"We know, darling, we know," said Pussy, patting Jane's shoulder, while
+Jimmy drew a white silk handkerchief from his pocket, and hid his face
+under the pretence of blowing his nose.
+
+To see a woman cry never failed to wring a sympathetic tear from Jimmy.
+Though he was a man of hard common sense, possessed of an inflexible
+determination to make money, there was a soft spot inside of him which
+was reached only by the distress of one of the opposite sex. The
+suffering--particularly the financial suffering--of men left him
+unmoved. He could foreclose a mortgage or press a debt (as long as the
+debtor's wife or daughter did not appeal to him) as well as another; but
+the instant a skirt fluttered on the horizon that soft something inside
+of him appeared, as he expressed it, "to give way." Apart from their
+afflictions, he had an eye, he used to boast, for but one woman in the
+world, and she, thank God, was his wife. Handsome, portly, full-blooded,
+and slightly overfed, he had let Pussy twine him about her little finger
+ever since the afternoon when he had first seen her, small, trim, and
+with "a way with her," at the age of six.
+
+"Poor, poor child," said Pussy, cuddling Jane and the baby together
+against her sympathetic bosom. "Something must be done, Cousin Fanny.
+Something must be done, as Mr. Wrenn said on the way down, if it's only
+for the satisfaction of letting Charley know what we think of him."
+
+"We've got to put down our pride and take some step," declared Jimmy,
+wondering vaguely how he could have forgotten the spirited utterance his
+wife attributed to him. "I'm all for the authority of the husband, of
+course, and the sanctity of the home, and everything according to the
+Bible and all that--but, bless my soul, there's got to be a limit to
+what a woman is expected to stand. There're some things, and I know
+Uncle Meriweather will agree with me, that it isn't in human nature to
+put up with."
+
+"If I were forty years younger I'd call him out and give him a whipping
+he wouldn't forget in a jiffy," blustered Uncle Meriweather, feebly
+violent. "There's no way of defending a lady in these Godforsaken days.
+Why, I remember when I was a boy, my poor father--God bless him!--you
+recollect him, don't you Fanny?--never used a walking stick in his life
+and could read print without glasses at ninety--"
+
+"Making love to the dressmaker," pursued Jimmy, whose righteous anger
+refused to be turned aside from its end.
+
+"Don't you think, Cousin Fanny," whispered Pussy, "that Gabriella had
+better leave the room?"
+
+"Gabriella? Why, how on earth can we spare her?" Mrs. Carr whispered
+back rather nervously. Then, beneath Pussy's compelling glance, she
+added timidly: "Hadn't you better go, darling, and see what the children
+are doing?"
+
+"They are playing in the laundry," replied Gabriella reassuringly. "I
+told Dolly not to let them go out of her sight."
+
+"She knows so much already for her age," murmured Mrs. Carr
+apologetically to Pussy.
+
+"I don't know what Mr. Wrenn will think of your staying, dear," said
+Pussy, smiling archly at the girl. "Mr. Wrenn, I was just saying that I
+didn't know what you would think of Gabriella's staying in the room."
+
+Jimmy's large handsome face, with its look of perpetual innocence--the
+incorruptible innocence of a man who has never imagined anything--turned
+helplessly in the direction of his wife. All things relating to
+propriety came, he felt instinctively, within the natural sphere of
+woman, and to be forced, on the spur of the moment, to decide a delicate
+question of manners, awoke in him the dismay of one who sees his
+accustomed prop of authority beginning to crumble. Surely Pussy knew
+best about things like that! He would as soon have thought of
+interfering with her housekeeping as of instructing her in the details
+of ladylike conduct. And, indeed, he had not observed that Gabriella was
+in the room until his wife, for her own purpose, had adroitly presented
+the fact to his notice.
+
+"Gabriella in the room?" he repeated in perplexity. "Why, you'd better
+go, hadn't you, Gabriella? Oughtn't she to go, Pussy?"
+
+"Just as you think best, dear, but it seems to me--"
+
+"Certainly she ought to go," said Uncle Meriweather decisively. "The
+less women and girls know about such matters, the better. I don't
+understand, Fanny, how you could possibly have consented to Gabriella's
+being present."
+
+"I didn't consent, Uncle Meriweather," protested poor Mrs. Carr, who
+could not bear the mildest rebuke without tears; "I only said to Pussy
+that Gabriella knew a great deal more already than she ought to, and I'm
+sure I'm not to blame for it. If I'd had my way she would have been just
+as sheltered as other girls."
+
+"Don't cry, mother, it isn't your fault," said Gabriella. "Uncle
+Meriweather, if you make mother cry I'll never forgive you. How can she
+help all these dreadful things going on?"
+
+She was sensible, she was composed, she was perfectly sweet about it;
+but, and this fact made Pussy gasp with dismay, she did not budge an
+inch from her position. With her clear grave eyes, which lost their
+sparkle when she grew serious, and her manner of eager sympathy, she
+appeared, indeed, to be the only one in the room who was capable of
+facing the situation with frankness. That she meant to face it to the
+end, Pussy could not doubt while she looked at her.
+
+"Oh, it doesn't matter about Gabriella. She knows everything," said
+Jane, with the prickly sweetness of suffering virtue.
+
+"But she's a young girl--young girls oughtn't to hear such things,"
+argued Uncle Meriweather, feeling helplessly that something was wrong
+with the universe, and that, since it was different from anything he had
+ever known in the past, he was unable to cope with it. Into his eyes,
+gentle and bloodshot above his fierce white moustache--the eyes of one
+who has never suffered the painful process of thinking things out, but
+has accepted his opinions as unquestioningly as he has accepted his
+religion or the cut of his clothes--there came the troubled look of one
+who is struggling against forces that he does not understand. For
+Gabriella was serious. There was not the slightest hope in the disturbed
+mind of Uncle Meriweather that she was anything but perfectly serious.
+Caprice, being a womanly quality, was not without a certain charm for
+him. He was quite used to it; he knew how to take it; he had been taught
+to recognize it from his childhood up. It was pretty, it was playful;
+and his mind, if so ponderous a vehicle could indulge in such activity,
+was fond of play. But after the first perplexed minute or two he had
+relinquished forever the hope that Gabriella was merely capricious.
+Clearly the girl knew what she was talking about; and this knowledge, so
+surprising in one of her age and sex, gave him a strange dreamy sense of
+having just awakened from sleep.
+
+"I must say I like girls to be girls, Fanny," he pursued testily; "I
+reckon I'm only an old fogy, but I like girls to be girls. When a woman
+loses her innocence, she loses her greatest charm in the eyes of a
+man--of the right sort of a man. Pluck the peach with the bloom on it,
+my poor father used to say. He didn't believe in all this new-fangled
+nonsense about the higher education of women--none of his daughters
+could do more I than read and write and spell after a fashion, and yet
+look what wives and mothers they made! Pokey married three times, and
+was the mother of fourteen children, nine of them sons. And are we any
+better off now than then, I ask? Whoever heard of a woman running away
+from her husband before the war, and now here is poor Jane--"
+
+"But it isn't my fault, Uncle Meriweather!" cried Jane, in desperation
+at his obtuseness. "I've tried to be the best wife I could--ask Charley
+if I haven't. He neglected me long before I let any one know--even
+mother. I forgave him again and again, and I'd go on forgiving him
+forever if he would let me. I've told him over and over that I was going
+to be a faithful wife to him if he killed me."
+
+"Of course, my dear, I'm not meaning to reproach you," said Uncle
+Meriweather, overcome by the effect of his words. "We all know that
+you've stood as much as any woman could and keep her self-respect. It
+isn't possible, I suppose, for you to go on living with Charley?"
+
+"Oh, I couldn't bear a separation, not a legal one at any rate," groaned
+Mrs. Carr. "Of course she must come away for a time, but nobody must
+hear of it or it would kill me. They are one in the sight of God, and my
+dear old father had such a horror of separations."
+
+"Well, I'd kick him out--I'd kick him out so quickly he wouldn't know
+it," declared Jimmy. "If a daughter of mine were married to that scamp,
+she'd never lay eyes on him except over my dead body. I reckon God would
+enjoy the sight of his getting his deserts."
+
+Deep down in Cousin Jimmy, deeper than sentiment, deeper than tradition,
+deeper even than the solid bedrock of common sense, there was the
+romantic essence of his soul, which hated baseness with a fiery hatred.
+His ruddy face, still boyish in spite of his fifty years, blanched
+slowly, and there came into his soft dark eyes the look he had worn at
+Malvern Hill under the fire of the enemy.
+
+At the sight Gabriella thrilled as she did when drums were beating and
+armies were marching. "Oh, Cousin Jimmy, don't let her go back!" she
+cried.
+
+"I can't go back to him now! I can never, never go back to him again!"
+intoned Jane with passionate energy.
+
+"No, God bless her, she shan't go back," declared Jimmy, as profoundly
+stirred as Gabriella.
+
+"But the children? What will become of the children?" demanded Mrs.
+Carr, not of Jimmy, but of the universe. Her helpless gaze, roving
+wildly from face to face, and resting nowhere, was like the gaze of a
+small animal caught in a trap. "If Jane separates the children from
+their father what will people think of her?" she asked, still vainly
+addressing Heaven.
+
+"As long as she is right it doesn't matter what people think," retorted
+Gabriella; but her protest, unlike her mother's, was directed to the
+visible rather than to the invisible powers. The thought of Jane's
+children--of the innocent souls so unaware of the awful predicament in
+which they were placed that their bodies could be devouring bread and
+damson preserves in the laundry. The poignant thought of these children
+moved her more deeply than she had ever been moved before in her twenty
+years. A passion for self-sacrifice rushed through her with the piercing
+sweetness of religious ecstasy. Nothing like this had ever happened to
+her before--not when she was confirmed, not when she had stood at the
+head of her class, not when she had engaged herself to Arthur Peyton two
+years before. It was the pure flame of experience at its highest point
+that burned in her.
+
+"I will take care of the children," she said breathlessly. "I will give
+up my whole life to them. I will get a place in a store and work my
+fingers to the bone, if only Jane will never go back."
+
+For a moment there was silence; but while Gabriella waited for somebody
+to answer, she felt that it was a silence which had become vocal with
+inexpressible things. The traditions of Uncle Meriweather, the
+conventions of Mrs. Carr, the prejudices of Jimmy, and the weak impulses
+of Jane, all these filled the dusk through which the blank faces of her
+family stared back at her. Then, while she stood white and trembling
+with her resolve--with the passionate desire to give herself, body and
+soul, to Jane and to Jane's children--the voice of Experience spoke
+pleasantly, but firmly, through Cousin Pussy's lips, and it dealt with
+Gabriella's outburst as Experience usually deals with Youth.
+
+"You are a dear child, Gabriella," it said; "but how in the world could
+you help Jane by going into a store?"
+
+In the midst of the emotional scene, Cousin Pussy alone remained sweetly
+matter-of-fact. Though she was not without orderly sentiments, her
+character had long ago been swept of heroics, and from her arched gray
+hair, worn à la Pompadour, to her pretty foot in its small neat boot,
+she was a practical soul who had as little use for religious ecstasy as
+she had for downright infidelity. There seemed to her something
+positively unnatural in Gabriella's manner--a hint of that "sudden
+conversion" she associated with the lower classes or with the negroes.
+
+"You are a dear child," she repeated, biting her fresh lips; "but how
+will you help Jane by going into a store?"
+
+"I can trim hats," returned Gabriella stubbornly. "Mr. Brandywine will
+take me into his new millinery department, I know, for I said something
+to him about it the other day."
+
+"Oh, Gabriella, not in a store! It would kill mother!" cried Jane, with
+the prophetic wail of Cassandra.
+
+"Not in a store!" echoed Mrs. Carr; "you couldn't work in a store. If
+you want to work," she concluded feebly, "why can't you work just as
+well in your home?"
+
+"But it isn't the same thing, mother," explained Gabriella, with angelic
+patience. "Nobody will get me to make hats at home, and, besides, I've
+got to learn how to do it. I've got to learn business methods."
+
+"But not in a shop, my dear," protested Uncle Meriweather in the precise
+English of his youth.
+
+"Bless my heart!" chuckled Cousin Jimmy. "Business methods! You're as
+good as a show, Gabriella, and, by George! you've plenty of pluck. I
+like pluck in man or woman."
+
+"I shouldn't encourage her if I were you, Mr. Wrenn," said Cousin Pussy,
+almost forgetting to be indirect.
+
+"Well, of course, I don't approve of that store business," replied
+Jimmy, deprecatingly, "but I can't help liking pluck when I see it. Look
+here, Gabriella, if you're bent on working, why don't you turn in and
+teach?"
+
+"Yes, let her teach by all means," agreed Uncle Meriweather, with
+genuine enthusiasm for the idea. "I've always regarded teaching as an
+occupation that ought to be restricted by law to needy ladies."
+
+"But I can't teach, I don't know enough, and, besides, I'd hate it,"
+protested Gabriella.
+
+"I'm sure you might start a school for very little children," said Mrs.
+Carr. "You don't have to know much, to teach them, and you write a very
+good hand."
+
+"What about plain sewing?" asked Pussy in her ready way. "Couldn't you
+learn to make those new waists all the girls are wearing?"
+
+"I haven't the patience to sew well. Look how hard mother works, making
+buttonholes with stitches so fine you can hardly see them, and yet she
+doesn't get enough to put bread into her mouth, and but for her
+relatives she'd have been in the poorhouse long ago. I'm tired of being
+on charity just because we are women. Now that Jane has come home for
+good I am simply obliged to find something to do."
+
+"I don't mind your wanting to work, dear, I think it's splendid of you,"
+returned Pussy, "but I do feel that you ought to work in a ladylike
+way--a way that wouldn't interfere with your social position and your
+going to germans and having attention from young men and all that."
+
+"Why don't you make lampshades, Gabriella?" demanded Jane in an emphatic
+burst of inspiration. "Sophy Madison earns enough from lampshades to
+send her sister and herself to the White Sulphur Springs every summer."
+
+"Sophy makes all the lampshades that anybody wants, and, besides, she
+gets orders from the North--she told me so yesterday."
+
+"Gabriella crochets beautifully," remarked Mrs. Carr a little nervously
+because of the failure of her first suggestion. "The last time I went to
+see Miss Matoaca Chambers in the Old Ladies' Home, she told me she made
+quite a nice little sum for her church by crocheting mats."
+
+"And Gabriella can cook, too," rejoined Pussy, with exaggerated
+sprightliness, for she felt that Mrs. Carr's solution of the problem had
+not been entirely felicitous. "Why doesn't she try sending some of her
+angel food to the Woman's Exchange?"
+
+Jimmy, who had listened to this advice with the expression of tolerant
+amusement he always wore when women began to talk about the more serious
+affairs of life in his presence, made an honest, if vulgar, attempt to
+lighten the solemnity of the situation with a joke.
+
+"Gabriella isn't trying to earn church money. You're out gunning for a
+living, aren't you, Ella?" he inquired.
+
+"I'm sick of being dependent," repeated Gabriella, while her face grew
+stern. "Do you think if Jane had had enough money to live on that she
+would ever have stood Charley so long?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I should, Gabriella. Marriage is sacred to me!" exclaimed
+Jane, whose perfect wifeliness atoned, even in the opinion of Jimmy, for
+any discrepancies in logic. "Nothing on earth could have induced me to
+leave him until--until this happened."
+
+The conviction that she had never at any moment since her marriage
+"failed in her duty to Charley" lent a touching sanctity to her
+expression, while the bitter lines around her mouth faded in the wan
+glow that flooded her face. Whatever her affliction, however intense her
+humiliation, Jane was supported always by the most comforting of
+beliefs--the belief that she had been absolutely right and Charley
+absolutely wrong through the ten disillusioning years of their married
+life. Never for an instant--never even in a nightmare--had she been
+visited by the disquieting suspicion that she was not entirely
+blameless.
+
+"Well, you've left him now anyway," said Gabriella, with the disarming
+candour which delighted Jimmy and perplexed Uncle Meriweather, "so
+somebody has got to help you take care of the children."
+
+"She shall never come to want as long as Pussy and I have a cent left,"
+declared Cousin Jimmy, and his voice expressed what Mrs. Carr described
+afterward as "proper feeling."
+
+"And we'd really rather that you'd earn less and keep in your own
+station of life," said Pussy decisively.
+
+"If you mean that you'd rather I'd work buttonholes or crochet mats than
+go into a store and earn a salary, then I can't do it," answered
+Gabriella, as resolute, though not so right-minded, as poor Jane. "I'd
+rather die than be dependent all my life, and I'm going to earn my
+living if I have to break rocks to do it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+POOR JANE
+
+
+Supper was over, and Gabriella, still in the dress she had worn all day,
+was picking up the children's clothes from the floor of her room.
+According to Mrs. Carr's hereditary habit in sorrow or sickness, Jane
+had been served in bed with tea and toast, while several small hard cots
+had been brought down from the attic and arranged in the available space
+in the two bedrooms. As Gabriella looked at the sleeping children, who
+had kicked the covering away, and lay with round rosy limbs gleaming in
+the lamplight, she remembered that Arthur Peyton was coming at nine
+o'clock to take her to Florrie's party, and she told herself with grim
+determination that she would never go to a party again. The Berkeley
+conscience, that vein of iron which lay beneath the outward softness and
+incompetence of her mother and sister, held her, in spite of her
+tempting youth, to the resolution she had made. She had told Jimmy that
+she meant to earn her living if she had to break rocks to do it, and
+Gabriella, like Pussy, came of a race that "did not easily change its
+mind."
+
+Turning to the bureau, she smoothed out the children's hair ribbons and
+pinned them, in two tight little blue and pink rolls, to the pincushion.
+Then taking up a broken comb, she ran it through the soft lock of hair
+that fell like a brown wing over her forehead. Her bright dark eyes,
+fringed in short thick lashes and set wide apart under arched eyebrows,
+gazed questioningly back at her from a row of german favours with which
+she had decorated the glass; and it was as if the face of youth,
+flickering with a flamelike glow and intensity, swam there for an
+instant in the dim greenish pool of the mirror. Beneath the charm of the
+face there was the character which one associates, not with youth, but
+with age and experience. Beneath the fine, clear lines of her head and
+limbs, the tall slenderness of her figure, the look of swiftness and of
+energy, which was almost birdlike in its grace and poise, there was a
+strength and vigour which suggested a gallant boy rather than the
+slighter and softer frame of a girl.
+
+While she stood there, Gabriella thought regretfully of all that it
+would mean to give up her half-dependent and wholly ladylike existence
+and go to work in a shop. Necessity not choice was driving her; and in
+spirit she looked back almost wistfully to the securely circumscribed
+lot of her grandmother. For there was little of the rebel in her
+temperament; and had she been free to choose, she would have
+instinctively selected, guided by generations of gregarious ancestors,
+the festive girlhood which Cousin Pussy had so ardently described. She
+wanted passionately all the things that other girls had, and her only
+quarrel, indeed, with the sheltered life was that she couldn't afford
+it. In the expressive phrase of Cousin Jimmy, the sheltered life "cost
+money," and to cost money was to be beyond the eager grasp of Gabriella.
+
+The door opened as if yielding under protest, and Marthy entered, still
+hurriedly tying the strings of the clean apron she had slipped on over
+her soiled one before answering the door-bell.
+
+"Yo' beau done come, Miss Ella. Ain't you gwine?"
+
+"No, I'm not going to the party, Marthy, but ask him to wait just a
+minute."
+
+"He's settin' over yonder in de parlour wid his overcoat on."
+
+"Well, ask him to take it off; I'll be there in a moment." She spoke as
+gravely as Marthy had done, yet in her face there was a light play of
+humour.
+
+Two years ago she would have thrilled with joy at the thought that
+Arthur was waiting for her; but in those two years since her engagement
+she had grown to look upon her first love as the gossamer, fairylike
+romance of a child. For months she had known that the engagement must be
+broken sooner or later; and she knew now, while she listened to Marthy's
+shuffling feet hastening to deliver her message, that she must break it
+to-night. In the dim pool of her mirror a face looked back at her that
+was not the face of Arthur Peyton; she saw it take form there as one
+sees a face grow gradually into life from the dimness of dreams. It was,
+she told herself to-night, the very face of her dream that she saw.
+
+"Well, I must get it over," she said with a sternness which gave her a
+passing resemblance to the Saint Memin portrait of the Reverend
+Bartholomew Berkeley; "I've got to get it over to-night, and whatever
+happens I've got to be honest." Then, with a last glance at the sleeping
+children, she lowered the gas, and went across the darkened hail, which
+smelt of pickles and bacon because one end of it was used as a
+storeroom.
+
+The parlour had been swept since the family council had deliberated
+there over Jane's destiny. The scraps of cambric had been gathered up
+from the threadbare arabesques in the carpet; the chairs had been placed
+at respectable distances apart; the gas-jets in the chandelier were
+flaming extravagantly under the damaged garlands; and the sewing machine
+had been wheeled into the obscurity of the hail, for it would have
+humiliated Gabriella's mother to think that her daughter received young
+men in a room which looked as if somebody had worked there.
+
+When Gabriella entered, Arthur Peyton was standing in front of the
+fireplace, gazing abstractedly at his reflection in the French mirror.
+Though his chestnut hair was carefully brushed, he had instinctively
+lifted his hand to smooth down an imaginary lock, and while he did this,
+he frowned slightly as if at a recollection that had ruffled his temper.
+His features were straight and very narrow, with the look of
+sensitiveness one associates with the thoroughbred, and the delicate
+texture of his skin emphasized this quality of high-breeding, which was
+the only thing that one remembered about him. In his light-gray eyes
+there was a sympathetic expression which invariably won the hearts of
+old ladies, and these old ladies were certain to say of him afterward,
+"such a gentleman, my dear--almost of the old school, you know, and we
+haven't many of them left in this hurrying age."
+
+He had done well, though not brilliantly, at college, for his mind, if
+unoriginal, had never given anybody, not even his mother, the least bit
+of trouble. For three years he had worked with admirable regularity in
+the office of his uncle, Carter Peyton, one of the most distinguished
+lawyers in the Virginia of his period, and it was generally felt that
+young Arthur Peyton would have "a brilliant future." For the present,
+however, he lived an uneventful life with his widowed mother in a
+charming old house, surrounded by a walled garden, in Franklin Street.
+Like the house, he was always in perfect order; and everything about
+him, from his loosely fitting clothes and his immaculate linen to his
+inherited conceptions of life, was arranged with such exquisite
+precision that it was impossible to improve it in any way. He knew
+exactly what he thought, and he knew also his reason, which was usually
+a precedent in law or custom, for thinking as he did. His opinions,
+which were both active and abundant, were all perfectly legitimate
+descendants of tradition, and the phrase "nobody ever heard of such a
+thing," was quite as convincing to him as to Mrs. Carr or to Cousin
+Jimmy Wrenn.
+
+"Gabriella, aren't you going?" he asked reproachfully as the girl
+entered.
+
+"Oh, Arthur, we've had such a dreadful day! Poor Jane has left Charley
+for good and has come home, with all the children. We've been busy
+dividing them among us, and we're going to turn the dining-room into a
+nursery.
+
+"Left Charley? That's bad, isn't it?" asked Arthur doubtfully.
+
+"I feel so sorry for her, Arthur. It must be terrible to have love end
+like that."
+
+"But she isn't to blame. Everybody knows that she has forgiven him again
+and again."
+
+"Yes, everybody knows it," repeated Gabriella, as if she drew bitter
+comfort from the knowledge, "and she says now that she will never, never
+go back to him."
+
+For the first time a shadow appeared in Arthur's clear eyes.
+
+"Do you think she ought to make up her mind, darling, until she sees
+whether or not he will reform? After all, she is his wife."
+
+"That's what mother says, and yet I believe Charley is the only person
+on earth mother really hates. Now Cousin Jimmy and I will do everything
+we can to keep her away from him."
+
+"I think I shouldn't meddle if I were you, dearest. She'll probably go
+back to him in the end because of the children.
+
+"But I am going to help her take care of the children," replied
+Gabriella stanchly. "Of course, my life will be entirely different now,
+Arthur," she added gently. "Everything is altered for me, too, since
+yesterday. I have thought it all over for hours, and I am going to try
+to get a place in Brandywine's store."
+
+"In a store?" repeated Arthur slowly, and she saw the muscles of his
+mouth tighten and grow rigid.
+
+"Mother doesn't like the idea any more than you do, but what are we to
+come to if we go on in the old aimless way? One can't make a living out
+of plain sewing, and though, of course, Charley will be supposed to
+provide for his children, he isn't exactly the sort one can count on.
+Brandywine's, you see, is only a beginning. What I mean is that I am
+obliged to learn how to support myself."
+
+"But couldn't you work just as well in your home, darling?
+
+"People don't pay anything for home work. You must see what I mean,
+Arthur."
+
+"Yes, I see," he replied tenderly; but after a moment's thought, he
+went on again with the gentle obstinacy of a man whose thinking had all
+been done for him before he was born. "I wish, though, that you would
+try to hold out a little longer, working at home with your mother. In a
+year or two we shall be able to marry."
+
+"I couldn't," said Gabriella, shaking her head. "Don't urge me, Arthur."
+
+"If you would only consent to live with mother, we might marry now," he
+pursued, after a minute, as if he had not heard her.
+
+"But it wouldn't be fair to her, and how could I ask her to take mother
+and Jane and the children? No, I've thought it all out, dear, and I must
+go to work."
+
+"But I'll work for them, Gabriella. I'll do anything on earth rather
+than see you ordered about by old Brandywine."
+
+"He won't order me about," answered Gabriella cheerfully; "but mother
+feels just as you do. She says I am going out of my class because I
+won't stay at home and work buttonholes."
+
+"You couldn't go out of your class," replied Arthur, with an instinctive
+gallantry which even his distress could not overcome; "but I can't get
+used to the thought of it, darling--I simply can't. You're so sacred to
+me. There's something about the woman a man loves that's different from
+every other woman, and the bare idea of your working in a shop sickens
+me. I always think of you as apart from the workaday world. I always
+think of you as a star shining serenely above the sordid struggle--"
+Overwhelmed by the glowing train of his rhetoric, he broke down suddenly
+and caught passionately at the cool hand of Gabriella.
+
+As he looked at her slender finger, on which he had placed her
+engagement ring two years before, it seemed to him that the situation
+was becoming intolerable--that it was an affront not only to his ideal
+of Gabriella, as something essentially starlike and remote, but to that
+peculiar veneration for women which he always spoke and thought of as
+"Southern." His ideal woman was gentle, clinging, so perfectly a "lady"
+that she would have perished had she been put into a shop; and, though
+he was aware that Gabriella was a girl of much character and
+determination, his mind was so constructed that he was able, without
+difficulty, to think of her as corresponding to this exalted type of her
+sex. By the simple act of falling in love with her he had endowed her
+with every virtue except the ones that she actually possessed.
+
+"I know, I know," said Gabriella tenderly, for she saw that he suffered.
+Her training had been a hard one, though she had got it at home, and in
+a violent reaction from the sentimentality of her mother and Jane she
+had become suspicious of any language that sounded "flowery" to her
+sensitive ears. With her clear-sighted judgment, she knew perfectly well
+that by no stretch of mind or metaphor could she be supposed to resemble
+a star--that she was not shining, not remote, not even "ideal" in
+Arthur's delicate sense of the word. She had known the horrors of
+poverty, of that bitter genteel poverty which must keep up an appearance
+at any cost; and she could never forget the grim days, after the death
+of Uncle Beverly Blair, when they had shivered in fireless rooms and
+gone for weeks without butter on their bread. For the one strong quality
+in Mrs. Carr's character was the feeling she spoke of complacently,
+though modestly, as "proper pride"; and this proper pride, which was
+now resisting Gabriella's struggle for independence, had in the past
+resisted quite as stubbornly the thought of an appeal to the ready
+charity of her masculine relatives. To seek a man's advice had been from
+her girlhood the primal impulse of Mrs. Carr's nature; but, until Fate
+had starved her into sincerity, she had kept alive the ladylike fiction
+that she was in need of moral, not material, assistance.
+
+"Of course, if there were any other way, Arthur," said Gabriella,
+remembering the earlier battles with her mother, and eager to compromise
+when she could do so with dignity; "but how can I go on being dependent
+on Cousin Jimmy and Uncle Meriweather. Neither of them is rich, and
+Cousin Jimmy has a large family."
+
+Of course she was reasonable. The most disagreeable thing about
+Gabriella, Jane had once said, was her inveterate habit of being
+reasonable. But then Jane, who was of an exquisite sensibility, felt
+that Gabriella's reasonableness belonged to a distinctly lower order of
+intelligence. When all was said, Gabriella saw clearly because she had a
+practical mind, and a practical mind is usually engrossed with material
+matters.
+
+"I understand exactly how you feel, dear, but if only you could go on
+just as you are for a few years longer," said Arthur, sticking to his
+original idea with a tenacity which made it possible for him to argue
+for hours and yet remain exactly where he had started. Though they
+talked all night, though she convinced him according to all the laws and
+principles of logic, she knew that he would still think precisely what
+he had thought in the beginning, for his conviction was rooted, deeper
+than reason, in the unconquerable prejudices which had passed from the
+brain into the very blood of his race. He would probably say at the end:
+"I admit all that you tell me, Gabriella, but my sentiment is against
+it;" and this sentiment, overruling sense, would insist, with sublime
+obstinacy, that Gabriella must not work in a shop. It would ignore,
+after the exalted habit of sentiment, such merely sordid facts as
+poverty and starvation (who ever heard of a woman of good family
+starving in Virginia?), and, at last, if Gabriella were really in love
+with Arthur, it would triumph over her finer judgment and reduce her to
+submission. But while she watched him, in the very minute when, failing
+for words, he caught her in his arms, she said to herself, suddenly
+chilled and determined: "I must get it over to-night, and I've got to be
+honest." The scent of the hyacinths floated to her again, but it seemed
+to bring a cold wind, as if a draught had blown in through the closed
+slats of the shutters.
+
+"Everything has changed, Arthur," she said, "and I don't think I ought
+to go on being engaged." Then because her words sounded insincere, she
+added sternly: "Even if we could be married--and of course we can't
+be--I--I don't feel that I should want to marry. I am not sure that I
+love you enough to marry you."
+
+It was all so unromantic, so unemotional, so utterly different from the
+scene she had pictured when she imagined what "breaking her engagement"
+would be like. Then she had always thought of herself as dissolving in
+tears on the horsehair sofa, which had become sacred to the tragedy of
+poor Jane; but, to her surprise, she did not feel now the faintest
+inclination to cry. It ought to have been theatrical, but it wasn't--not
+even when she took off her engagement ring, as she had read in novels
+that girls did at the decisive instant, and laid it down on the table.
+When she remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but
+Arthur seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the
+fire in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray's Elegy
+and brought it back to Gabriella.
+
+"I'll never give you up," said Arthur stubbornly, and knowing his
+character, she felt that he had spoken the truth. He could not give her
+up even had he wished it, for, like a belief, she had passed from his
+brain into the fibre of his being. She had become a habit to him, and
+not love, but the inability to change, to cease thinking what he had
+always thought, to break a fixed manner of life, would keep him faithful
+to her in his heart.
+
+"I'm sorry--oh, I'm sorry," she murmured, longing to have it over and to
+return to Jane and the children. It occurred to her almost resentfully
+that love was not always an unmixed delight.
+
+"Is there any one else, Gabriella?" he asked with a sudden choking sound
+in his voice. "I have sometimes thought--in the last four or five
+months--that there might be--that you had changed--that--" He stopped
+abruptly, and she answered him with a beautiful frankness which would
+have horrified the imperishable, if desiccated, coquetry of her mother.
+
+"There is some one else and there isn't," she replied simply. "I mean I
+think of some one else very often--of some one who isn't in my life at
+all--from whom I never hear--"
+
+"Is it George Fowler?"
+
+She bowed her head, and, though she did not blush, her eyes grew
+radiant.
+
+"And you have known him less than a year?"
+
+Again she bowed her head without speaking. What was there, after all,
+that she could say in justification of her behaviour?
+
+A groan escaped him, smothered into a gentle murmur of protest. "And I
+thought women were more constant than men!" he exclaimed with something
+of the baffled and helpless feeling which had overtaken Uncle
+Meriweather while he regarded Gabriella.
+
+The generalization was not without interest for Gabriella.
+
+"I thought so, too," she observed dispassionately. "I thought so, too,
+and that is why it was such a dreadful surprise to me when it happened.
+You yourself aren't more shocked and surprised than I was in the
+beginning," she added.
+
+"But you've got used to the thought, I suppose?"
+
+"Well, one has to, you see. What else is there to do? I always
+understood from mother"--she went on with the same eager interest, as if
+she were stumbling upon new and important intellectual discoveries--"I
+always understood that women never fell in love with men first--I mean
+until they had had positive proof that their love would be returned. But
+in this case that didn't seem to matter at all. Nothing mattered, and
+the more I fought against it and tried to be true to my engagement, the
+more I found myself being false. It's all very strange," she concluded,
+"but that is just how it happened."
+
+"And he knows nothing about it?"
+
+"Oh, no. I told him I was engaged to you, and then he went away."
+
+For an instant he was silent, and watching his face, so carefully
+guarded and controlled by habit that it had the curious blank look of a
+statue's, Gabriella could form no idea of the suppressed inarticulate
+suffering in his heart.
+
+"And if he came back would you marry him?" he asked.
+
+Before replying she sat for a minute gazing down on her folded hands and
+weighing each separate word of her answer.
+
+"I should try not to, Arthur," she said at last, "but--but I am not sure
+that I should be able to help it."
+
+When at last he had said "good-bye" rather grimly, and gone out of the
+door without looking back, she was conscious of an immense relief, of a
+feeling that she could breathe freely again after an age of oppression.
+There was a curious sense of unreality about the hour she had just
+passed through, as if it belonged not to actual life, but to a play she
+had been rehearsing. She had felt nothing. The breaking of her
+engagement had failed utterly to move her.
+
+After bolting the front door, she turned out the gas in the parlour,
+pushed back the lump of coal in the grate in the hope of saving it for
+the morrow, and went cautiously down the hall to her room. As she passed
+her mother's door, a glimmer of light along the threshold made her pause
+for a minute, and while she hesitated, an anxious voice floated out to
+her:
+
+"Gabriella, is that you?"
+
+"Yes, Mother, do you want anything?"
+
+"Jane has one of her heart attacks. I put her to bed in my room because
+it is more comfortable than the dining-room. Don't you think you had
+better go back and wake Marthy?"
+
+"Is she ill? Let me come in," answered Gabriella, pushing open the door
+and brushing by Mrs. Carr, who stood, shrunken and shivering, in a gray
+flannel wrapper and felt slippers.
+
+Though Jane's attacks were familiar occurrences, they never failed to
+produce an immediate panic in the household. As a child of nine,
+Gabriella remembered being aroused in the middle of a bitter night,
+hastily wrapped in her mother's shawl and a blanket, and hurried up the
+staircase to Jane, who had broken her engagement to Charley the evening
+before. Jane, pale, angelic, palpitating, appeared to draw her last
+breath as they entered, while the old doctor supported her in his arms,
+and Marthy, in a frenzy of service, rattled the dead embers in the
+grate. It had all been horribly vivid, and when Jane had murmured
+Charley's name in a dying voice, they had stood, trembling and blue with
+cold, around her bed, waiting for the end. But the end had not come, and
+three months later Jane was married to Charley Gracey.
+
+After that scene, Gabriella had associated Jane's attacks with a
+freezing January night and a fireless grate (though the last but one had
+occurred in mid-August), and she was relieved now to find a fire burning
+in her mother's room and a kettle singing merrily on the fender. The
+elder children, with their flannel petticoats pinned over their thin
+little shoulders, were sitting straight and stiff on a box couch which
+had been turned into a bed, and their strange little faces looked wan
+and peaked in the firelight.
+
+Jane was really ill, Gabriella decided, after a glance at her sister.
+Nothing except acute suffering could have given her that ghastly pallor
+or made her eyes sink so far back in her head. She lay quite motionless
+on the far side of the big tester bed, staring straight up at the
+ceiling with an expression which terrified Gabriella, though she had
+seen it on her sister's face at least a dozen times before to-night.
+
+"Has Arthur gone?" asked Mrs. Carr in a voice that sounded as if she
+were running.
+
+"Yes. Did you want him, mother?"
+
+"I thought we might send him for the doctor and for Charley. Don't you
+think Charley ought to be told of her condition? She has asked for the
+children."
+
+"Have you given her the digitalis?"
+
+"I can't make her swallow it. There are the drops on the table by the
+bed. My hands tremble so I had to measure them three times."
+
+Taking the glass from the table, Gabriella bent over her sister and
+implored her to swallow the drops, but, without appearing to hear her
+voice, Jane still stared blankly upward, with the rigid, convulsed look
+of a woman who has been stricken with dumbness. Her flaxen hair, damp
+with camphor, which Mrs. Carr had wildly splashed on her forehead, clung
+flat and close to her head, while the only pulse in her body seemed to
+beat in irregular, spasmodic throbs in her throat.
+
+"Don't go, mother. I'll wake Marthy," cried Gabriella, for Mrs. Carr,
+inspired by the spirit of panic, was darting out of the door in her felt
+slippers. Then, while the children, crying distractedly, rushed to
+Jane's bedside, the girl ran out of the house and along the brick walk
+to the kitchen and the room above it where Marthy lived the little life
+she had apart from her work. In answer to Gabriella's call she emerged
+entirely dressed from the darkness; and at the news of Jane's illness
+she was seized with the spurious energy which visits her race in the
+moment of tragedy. She offered at once to run for the doctor, and
+suggested, without a hint from Gabriella, that she had better leave
+word, on her way home, for Marse Charley.
+
+"I knowed 'twuz comin' jez ez soon ez I lay eyes on 'er," she muttered,
+for she was an old family servant. "Dar ain' no use 'n tryin' ter come
+betweenst dem de good Lawd is done jine tergedder fur worse. A baid
+husban'! Hi! Dar ain't un 'oman erlive, I reckon, dat 'ouldn't ruther
+own a baid husban' den no husban' at all. You all is got to teck 'em de
+way dey's made, en dar's moughty few un um dat is made right."
+
+Still muttering, she stumbled down the walk and out of the gate, while
+Gabriella returned to her mother's room and hurried the weeping children
+into their shoes and stockings. Mrs. Carr, still in her flannel wrapper,
+with her little flat gray curls screwed up on pins for the night, and
+her thin ankles showing pathetically above her felt slippers, ran
+nervously to and fro with mustard plasters and bottles of hot water
+which she continually refilled from the kettle on the fender.
+Occasionally she paused long enough to hold the camphor to Jane's nose
+or to lift the quilt from the bottom of the bed and then put it
+carefully back in the very spot where it had lain before she had touched
+it. And because she was born to take two steps to every one that was
+necessary, because she could not accomplish the simplest act without a
+prodigious waste of energy and emotion, because she died twenty deaths
+over the slightest anxiety, and, most of all, because she was the last
+person on earth who ought to have been burdened with poverty and hard
+work and an unhappily married daughter--because of all these things Mrs.
+Carr wore herself to a shadow in the quarter of an hour they spent
+waiting for the doctor and Charley Gracey.
+
+Though she had brought Jane through at least a dozen "attacks," she
+still lost her presence of mind as completely as on that January night
+when, utterly distraught, she had hurried Gabriella to the first
+death-bed scene of her sister; she still grew as forgetful of herself
+and her own feelings, and, in obedience to some profound law of her
+nature, she still as confidently "expected the worst." For Mrs. Carr's
+philosophy, like Jane's, was of that active but dreary sort that thrives
+best upon misery. Just as Jane, who had lost every illusion about
+Charley, went on loving him in spite of it, so Mrs. Carr, having lost
+her illusions about life, retained a kind of wistful fondness for the
+thing that had wounded her.
+
+The door-bell rang sharply, and Gabriella went to let in the doctor, a
+brisk, authoritative young man of the new school, who had learned
+everything there was to be known about medicine except the way to behave
+in a sickroom, and who abhorred a bedside manner as heartily as if it
+were calomel or castor oil. His name was Darrow, and he was the
+assistant of old Dr. Walker, Mrs. Carr's family physician, who never
+went out at night since he had passed his seventieth birthday.
+Gabriella, who liked him because he was not anecdotal and gave small
+doses of medicine, hastily led the way to her mother's room before she
+ran back to meet Charley Gracey at the door of the dark parlour.
+
+"You can't see her now. The doctor is with her," she whispered. "I'll
+make a light in here and you can wait."
+
+"Let me," said Charley, quite as pleasantly as if he were not a bad
+husband, while he found a match and struck it on the sole of his foot.
+Then, as the gas flared up, he exclaimed, with a low whistle, "By Jove,
+you're a sight, Gabriella!"
+
+"Well, it's your fault," replied Gabriella sharply, letting him see, as
+she told herself, exactly what she thought of him. "You've made Jane so
+ill we thought she was dying."
+
+"I'm sorry for that," he said, suddenly smitten with gravity. "Is she
+really so bad?"
+
+His charming freckled face, with its irrepressible humour, grew almost
+grotesquely solemn, while the habitual merriment faded slowly from his
+light-gray eyes, leaving them empty of expression. He was a short,
+rather thick-set man, not particularly good-looking, not particularly
+clever, but possessing a singular, if unaccountable, charm. Everybody
+liked Charley, though nobody respected him. He was a scamp, but a
+lovable scamp, while Jane, with the best intentions in the world, had
+managed to make every virtue unattractive. When people condemned him,
+they said that he was "utterly unprincipled"; when they softened in
+their judgment, they admitted that he had "the best heart in the world."
+
+"I suppose it isn't any worse than other attacks," answered Gabriella,
+"but you know what they are like."
+
+"Yes, I know," replied Charley. "Oh, Lord, don't I?"
+
+"She asked mother to send for you," continued Gabriella. "She wants you
+to know that she has forgiven you."
+
+"Has she?" said Charley, without elation. Turning away, he stared for a
+minute or two at the engraving of the children feeding fish in a pond;
+then, with his eyes still glued to the picture, he burst out
+passionately: "Gabriella, I'd hoped she wouldn't this time!"
+
+"If I were she," retorted Gabriella crushingly, "I would never speak to
+you again until the day of my death."
+
+"If she were you," rejoined Charley, with barefaced audacity, "I'd have
+been a good husband. Why, I was simply starving to be a good husband
+when I married Jane. It's my ideal in life. I'm all for the domestic
+thing by nature. I was tired--positively dog-tired of the other kind. I
+wanted a wife. I adored--I've always adored babies--"
+
+"If that is true," returned Gabriella sternly, for she was not disposed
+to soften to Charley, and in her heart she deeply resented what she
+called Jane's "weakness," "if that is true why do you behave so
+outrageously to Jane and the children? Why can't you be decent?"
+
+"I could," answered Charley, with engaging lucidity, "if she were less
+so. It's her infernal virtue I can't stand, Gabriella. No man could
+stand it without taking to drink."
+
+"But you knew she was that way. She was always trying to make people
+better. It is her mission. Why, I remember one winter night before you
+were married mother got me out of bed in the cold to come and hear Jane
+forgive you beautifully about something."
+
+"That was the first time, and it was very touching. I suppose the first
+time always is touching. Of course, I didn't know she meant to keep it
+up. No man could possibly have kept it up," said Charley, with
+bitterness, "but she married me to reform me, and it is the only thing
+she has really enjoyed about her marriage. She's a born reformer. I
+haven't eaten a thing I cared about, nor drank a drop I wanted, nor used
+a bad word I was fond of, since I married, without being nagged at about
+it. She loved me for my vices, and yet she hasn't let me keep a single
+one--not even the smallest--not even cigarettes. Nag! Good God! She's
+nagged me to perfection ever since the day of our wedding when she made
+me sign the pledge before she let me kiss her!"
+
+"Well, that doesn't make it any easier for us or for the children,"
+replied Gabriella, without sympathy; "and if you don't think of Jane,
+you might at least think of your children."
+
+"Of course it's hard on the kids," admitted Charley ruefully. "But as
+for Jane--now, will you tell me what would become of Jane after she had
+reformed me? Why, she'd be bored to death. She'd be a martyr without any
+martyrdom. When she made me give up tobacco, she lost interest in
+everything for a week. She was like your Uncle Meriweather after the
+surrender. There wasn't anything left to fight about, and fighting was
+all he could do--"
+
+"I believe--I really believe you have been drinking," interrupted
+Gabriella with cold disgust. "Suppose Jane were to die?"
+
+"She won't die. She'll be all right as soon as she has forgiven me."
+
+He was not only bad, she told herself, he was perfectly shameless. He
+appeared to have been born without the faintest sense of responsibility.
+And yet, while Gabriella listened to him, she realized that, in some
+ways, he might be a less trying companion than poor Jane. His candour
+was as simple, as unaffected, as the serene artlessness of a child. It
+was impossible not to believe in his sincerity. Though she "despised
+him," as she told herself, still she was obliged to admit that there was
+something to be said on his side. The harsh judgment of youth--of youth
+that never tries to understand, that never makes allowances--softened
+under the influence of Charley's reprehensible charm. Even badness,
+Gabriella conceded grudgingly, might be easier to live with in some
+circumstances than a too exalted self-righteousness.
+
+"If you'll bring Jane to that way of thinking," retorted Charley, with
+vulgar frankness, "I'll give you five hundred dollars down. If you'll
+thoroughly corrupt her mind and persuade her to neglect her duty to me,
+I'll make it a thousand."
+
+He was jesting! It was monstrous, with Jane lying ill in her mother's
+room; it was indecent; it was grossly immoral; but he was actually
+jesting! Not even scandal, not even the doctor's presence in the house,
+could suppress his incorrigible spirit of levity. "If I were Jane, I'd
+never speak to him," thought Gabriella, and the question flashed through
+her mind, "how in the world could she ever have loved him?" It was
+impossible for her to conceive of any situation when Charley could have
+made a girl fall in love with him. Though she had heard stories of his
+early conquests, she had never believed them. There were times when she
+almost liked him, but it was the kind of liking one gave to an inferior,
+not to an equal. She admitted his charm, but it was the charm of an
+irresponsible creature--the capricious attraction of a child or an
+animal. Her common sense, she told herself, would keep her from making
+a mistake such as Jane had made with her life; and, besides, she was
+utterly devoid of the missionary instinct which had lured Jane to
+destruction. "If I ever marry, it will be different from that," she
+thought passionately. "It will be utterly different!"
+
+The door of Mrs. Carr's room opened suddenly, Marthy's name was called
+in a high voice, and the doctor was heard saying reassuringly: "She is
+over the worst. There is no need to worry."
+
+"Don't send me in there alone, Gabriella," begged Charley piteously.
+"I'd rather face bullets than Jane in an attack." His bravado had
+deserted him, and he appeared positively craven. The stiffness seemed to
+have gone not only out of his character, but out of his clothes also.
+Even his collar had become limp with emotion.
+
+"Well, I don't care," answered Gabriella, "you've got to stand it.
+There's no use squirming when you've only yourself to blame." With a
+malicious pleasure, she watched the consternation in Charley's face,
+while the doctor's footsteps came rapidly down the hall and stopped at
+the threshold of the parlour.
+
+"You may go in, Mr. Gracey--your wife is asking for you; but be very
+careful not to say anything that might disturb her. Just keep her as
+quiet as you can for a few hours."
+
+Then the door in the distance opened again, and Mrs. Carr, in the hollow
+tones of destiny, called: "Gabriella, Jane is waiting to speak to her
+husband."
+
+"Come, Charley," ordered Gabriella, grimly, and a moment later she
+pushed him across her mother's threshold and turned back into the hall.
+"I hope she'll make him squirm," she said to herself, with relish.
+Nothing, she felt, except the certainty of Charley's squirming, could
+make up to her for the half-hour she had just spent with him.
+
+She was still standing there when Jane's medicine came from the druggist
+at the corner, and for a while she waited outside the door, fearing to
+lighten Charley's punishment by her entrance. The medicine had to be
+measured in drops, and she went into the dining-room, where the children
+were huddled together in an improvised bed, and diluted the mixture with
+water before she could persuade herself to go into her mother's room.
+Even then she hesitated until she remembered that the doctor had said
+Jane must take the first dose immediately. Not by her, if she could help
+it, should the divine wrath of the furies be appeased.
+
+But with the first touch of her hand on the knob, Charley's flippant
+voice greeted her with, "Won't you come in, Gabriella?" and swallowing
+her angry retort, she entered stiffly, with the glass held out straight
+before her. Charley, on his knees beside the bed, with his arm under his
+wife's pillow, stared up at his sister-in-law with the guilty look of a
+whipped terrier, while Jane, pallid, suffering, saintly, rested one thin
+blue-veined hand on his shoulder. Her face was the colour of the sheet,
+her eyes were unnaturally large and surrounded by violet circles; and
+her hair, drenched with camphor, spread over the pillow like the hair of
+a drowned woman. Never had she appeared so broken, so resigned, so
+ineffably spiritual; and Gabriella's solitary comfort was the thought
+that Jane's attack had conquered Charley as completely as it had
+conquered the rest of them.
+
+"Gabriella, I've forgiven him," said Jane, with fainting sweetness,
+"and he wants you and mother to do so. He has promised to be good in the
+future."
+
+"Well, I shan't forgive him for keeping me up all night," answered
+Gabriella resentfully, and she felt that even if it killed Jane, she
+could not keep back her reply. "I can't answer for mother, but I haven't
+forgiven him and I never shall." She felt her anger hardened to a rock
+inside of her, and it hurt her so that she put the glass hurriedly down
+on the table and ran out of the room. As she closed the door behind her
+she heard Jane saying gently: "Yes, I forgive you, Charley, but I can't
+help feeling that you don't love me as you ought to."
+
+An old cape of her mother's was lying on a chair in the hall, and,
+throwing it over her shoulders, Gabriella went out on the porch and
+stood breathing quickly in the cold air, with her hand pressed on her
+bosom, which rose and fell as if she had been running. She was not only
+furious, she was grossly affronted, though she had known from the
+beginning, she said to herself, exactly how it would end. She had never
+trusted Jane--no, not a minute; she had never really trusted her mother.
+Something had told her that Jane had never meant in her heart to leave
+Charley, that she was only making a scene, after the immemorial habit of
+women, before going back to him. And yet, though she had suspected this
+all along, she was as indignant as if she had been deceived by a
+conspiracy of the three of them. Her sense of decency was outraged. She
+despised Jane because she had no strength of character; but even while
+this thought was still in her mind, she admitted that Jane had had
+sufficient strength of character to upset the household, bring Charley
+to repentance, and emerge, faint but victorious, from the wreck of
+their peace. Yes, she despised Jane, though it was impossible to deny
+that Jane's methods were successful, since she had got what she wanted.
+
+The street was very quiet, for it was in the small gray hours between
+midnight and dawn, and a solitary policeman, strolling by on his beat,
+appeared as wan and spectral as the bare boughs of the poplar trees
+beneath which he moved. The wind was still blowing over the brow of the
+hill, and now and then it tossed a wisp of straw or a handful of dust on
+the porch where Gabriella was standing. As it swept onward it drove a
+flock of shadows, like black birds, up the open street into the clear
+space under the old-fashioned gas lamp at the corner. All the lights
+were out in the neighbouring houses, but from a boarding-house down the
+block there floated suddenly the gay snatch of a waltz played on a banjo
+with a broken string. Then the music stopped, the policeman passed, and
+Gabriella and the wind were alone in the street. Overhead the stars
+shone dimly through a web of mist; and it seemed to her that the sadness
+of the sky and the sadness of the earth had mingled there in the long
+straight street where the wind blew with a melancholy sound between rows
+of silent and darkened houses.
+
+A noise in the hall made her turn, and, looking up, she saw the gaunt
+figure of Miss Amelia Peterborough standing in the bend of the
+staircase. In her hand the old maid held a twisted candlestick of
+greenish brass, and the yellow flame of the candle cast a trembling,
+fantastic shadow on the wall at her back. Her head, shorn of the false
+"front" she wore in the day, appeared to have become all forehead and
+beaked nose; her eyes had dwindled to mere points of blackness; her
+mouth, sunken and drawn over toothless gums, was like the mouth of a
+witch. The wind, blowing in gusts through the open door, inflated her
+gray shawl and the skirt of her dressing-gown, while, with each flutter
+of her garments, the grotesque shadow on the white wall danced and
+gibbered behind her. And, as she gazed down on the girl, it was as if
+the end of life, with its pathos, its cruelties, its bitterness and its
+disillusionment, had stopped for a fleeting instant to look back at life
+in the pride and ignorance of its beginning.
+
+"There was so much moving about, I thought something might have
+happened," said Miss Amelia apologetically, while Gabriella, closing the
+door, shut the draught from the staircase.
+
+"Jane had one of her heart attacks," answered the girl. "I'm so sorry we
+waked you."
+
+But she was thinking while she spoke, "So that is old age--so that is
+what it means to be old?" There is a vague compassion in the thought,
+but it held no terror, for the decay of Miss Amelia seemed as utterly
+remote and detached from her own life as one of the past ages in
+history. The youth in her brain created a radiant illusion of
+immortality. By no stretch of imagination could she picture herself like
+the infirm and loveless creature before her. Yet she knew, without
+realizing it, that Miss Amelia had once been young, that she had once
+even been beautiful. There was a legend, fading now into tradition, that
+her lover had been killed in a duel, fought for her while she was still
+a girl, and that she had worn only white or black since that day--she
+who was now well over eighty. She had known love; a man had died for
+her; it was said that she had been a famous coquette in the 'thirties;
+and now she stood there, grotesque and sexless, with her eyes empty of
+dreams and of memories, and her face as gray and sinister as the face of
+her shadow.
+
+"I hope she is better, poor child," she said, for, like the rest of
+Richmond, she believed Jane to be all saint and Charley all sinner. "If
+I can be of any help, be sure to let me know."
+
+"Yes, I'll let you know, thank you. I hope we didn't disturb Miss
+Jemima."
+
+The younger Miss Peterborough--called "the happy one" by Gabriella and
+Mrs. Carr because she was always cheerful, though, as far as any one
+could tell, she had nothing and had never had anything to be cheerful
+about--was named Jemima. A chronic invalid, from some obscure trouble
+which had not left her for twenty years, she was seldom free from pain,
+and yet Gabriella had never seen her (except at funerals, for which she
+entertained a perfectly healthy fondness as diversions free to the poor)
+without a smile on her face.
+
+"Sister Jemima doesn't wake easily. She is a sound sleeper and she's
+getting a little hard of hearing"; and lifting the candlestick to light
+her way, Miss Amelia turned back up the stairs, while the flame flitted
+like a golden moth into the dimness.
+
+"Poor old thing," thought Gabriella, imagining in her ignorance that she
+could understand the tragedy of Miss Amelia's life; "poor old thing, she
+must have had a terrible time."
+
+As she approached her mother's door, Charley came out, glanced at her
+sheepishly, and hurried to where his hat hung on the walnut hatrack in
+the front hall. Then, as if overcoming his first impulse to avoid her,
+he beckoned to her furtively, and said in a sepulchral whisper:
+"Gabriella, be very careful what you say to her."
+
+The audacity of it! This from Charley, the abandoned, the depraved, the
+unutterably abhorrent in her sight. Without replying, she turned
+indignantly away and opened her mother's door.
+
+Lying in the middle of the bed now, and slightly propped with pillows,
+Jane was sipping a second dose of medicine from a glass Mrs. Carr held
+to her lips.
+
+"I know you don't understand my forgiving him, Gabriella," she said very
+gently, "but some day, after you are married, you will realize that I do
+it from a sacred duty--from a sacred duty," she repeated firmly, while
+the shining light of martyrdom illumined her features.
+
+"Well, it's none of my business," answered Gabriella crossly, "but the
+sooner you do it, I suppose the sooner you will have to do it again." If
+only for once Jane would be direct, if only she would be natural, if
+only she would speak the truth and not fiction.
+
+"Oh, no, dear, you don't understand him any better than you do me," said
+Jane as sweetly as ever in spite of Gabriella's deplorable loss of
+temper. "He is really dreadfully penitent, and he sees that he hasn't
+always treated me as he ought to have done. But you'll know what I mean
+when you marry, Gabriella. She'll understand me then, won't she,
+mother?"
+
+"I'm sometimes tempted to hope that Gabriella will never marry," replied
+Mrs. Carr with the uncompromising bitterness of abject despair; "the
+Carrs all seem to marry so badly."
+
+In her normal mood she would never have uttered this heresy, for she
+belonged to a generation that regarded even a bad marriage as better for
+a woman than no marriage at all; but the night had worn her out, and one
+of her spells of neuralgia, which followed fatigue, was already
+beginning in her face. The purple crocheted "fascinator" she had caught
+up at the doctor's entrance was still on her head, and her long pale
+face, beneath the airy scallops, appeared frozen in an expression of
+incurable melancholy. For the rest she had been too frightened, too
+forgetful of herself and her own comfort even to put on her stockings,
+though Gabriella had begged her to do so. "Don't think about me. Attend
+to poor Jane," she had repeated over and over.
+
+"Mother, go into my room and get into bed," commanded Gabriella, whose
+patience, never abundant, was ebbing low. "If you don't get some sleep
+your neuralgia won't be any better."
+
+"It isn't any better. I don't expect it to be any better."
+
+"Well, you must go to bed or it will get worse. I'll heat you a cup of
+milk and wrap you up in warm blankets."
+
+"Don't worry about me, dear. Think of poor Jane."
+
+"We've been thinking of Jane all night, and you need it now more than
+she does. I can tell by your eyes how you are suffering."
+
+In the first streak of dawn, which was beginning to glimmer faintly on
+the window-panes, Mrs. Carr looked as if she had withered overnight.
+
+"It's only my left temple," she said dully, "otherwise I am quite well.
+No, dear, I must rub Jane's forehead until she falls asleep. The doctor
+said it was important that we should keep her soothed."
+
+But it was a law of Gabriella's nature that she never knew when she was
+beaten. Failure aroused the sleeping forces within her, and when these
+forces were once liberated, the spasmodic efforts of Mrs. Carr and the
+indirect methods of Jane were alike powerless to oppose them. At such
+times a faint flush rose to her pale cheeks, her eyes shone with a
+burning darkness, while her mouth lost its fresh young red and grew hard
+in outline.
+
+"You must go to bed, mother," she repeated in a voice which Mrs. Carr
+would have obeyed had it issued from the wall or a piece of furniture.
+
+Fifteen minutes later Gabriella stood authoritatively beside the bed,
+while her mother, with a mustard plaster at the back of her neck,
+obediently sipped hot milk from a teacup. Mrs. Carr had surrendered to
+the conquering spirit of her daughter, but her surrender, which was
+unwilling and weakly defiant, gave out presently a last feeble flicker
+of resistance.
+
+"Don't you think, Gabriella, we might arrange to live with Jane?" she
+asked. "It would be a saving of expense for us both, and we might be so
+helpful about the children."
+
+"And about Charley, too, I suppose," suggested Gabriella maliciously.
+
+Mrs. Carr, having been born without a sense of humour, never understood
+the broadest joke unless it was illustrated; but even to her it became
+evident, after a moment's anxious thought, that Gabriella was teasing
+her.
+
+"You seem to forget that he is her husband," she replied, with a
+pathetic clutch at her dignity, which, owing perhaps to the purple
+"fascinator" and the mustard plaster, she failed completely to
+recapture. Then, as she finished the milk and handed back the empty cup
+to her daughter, she added wearily, for life, as she often said to
+herself of late, was becoming almost too much for her, and she was
+feeling worn out and old:
+
+"My one comfort, Gabriella, is the thought that Arthur Peyton loves you.
+There couldn't be anybody more unlike Charley."
+
+"There couldn't be," agreed Gabriella mildly, for she felt that another
+blow would prostrate her mother.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A START IN LIFE
+
+
+In the late 'seventies and early 'eighties the most important shop in
+the town of Gabriella's birth was known to its patrons (chiefly ladies
+in long basques, tightly tied back skirts, and small eccentric bonnets)
+as Brandywine & Plummer's drygoods store. At that period, when old Mrs.
+Carr, just completing her ninetieth year with a mind fixed upon heaven,
+would have dropped dead at the idea that her granddaughter should ever
+step out of her class, Gabriella's mother bought her dresses (grosgrain
+of the very best quality) from Major Brandywine. To be sure, even in
+those days, there were other shops in the city--for was not Broad Street
+already alluded to in the newspapers as "the shopping thoroughfare of
+the South?"--but, though they were as numerous as dandelions in June,
+these places were by no means patronized so widely by "the best people."
+Small shops, of course, carrying a single line of goods and supplying
+their particular products to an exacting and discriminating class, held
+their own even against the established reputation of Brandywine &
+Plummer's. O'Connell's linen store, Twitlow's china store, Mrs. Tonk's
+doll store, and Green & Brady's store for notions--all these were
+situated in Broad Street hardly a stone's throw from the Second Market.
+But none of these, excellent as they were, could bear comparison with
+the refined atmosphere, so different from the vulgar bustle of a modern
+department store, which enveloped one in the quiet gloom of Brandywine &
+Plummer's. In the first place, one could be perfectly sure that one
+would be waited on by a lady--for Brandywine & Plummer's, with a
+distinguished Confederate soldier at its head and front, provided an
+almost conventual shelter for distressed feminine gentility. There was,
+for instance, Miss Marye of the black silk counter, whose father had
+belonged to Stuart's cavalry and had fallen at Yellow Tavern; there was
+Miss Meason of the glove counter, and there was Mrs. Burwell Smith of
+the ribbon counter--for, though she had married beneath her, it was
+impossible to forget that she was a direct descendant of Colonel Micajah
+Burwell, of Crow's Nest Plantation.
+
+Then, if one happened to be in search of cotton goods, one would be
+almost certain to remark on the way home: "Miss Peters, who waited on me
+in Brandywine's this morning, has unmistakably the manner of a lady," or
+"that Mrs. Jones in Brandywine's must be related to the real Joneses,
+she has such a refined appearance." And, at last, in the middle
+'nineties, after the opening of the new millinery department, which was
+reached by a short flight of steps, decorated at discreet intervals with
+baskets of pink paper roses, customers were beginning to ask: "May I
+speak to Miss Gabriella for a minute? I wish to speak to Miss Gabriella
+about the hat she is having trimmed for me."
+
+For here, also, because of what poor Jane called her "practical mind,"
+the patrons of Brandywine & Plummer's were learning that Gabriella was
+"the sort you could count on." As far as the actual work went, she
+could not, of course, hold a candle (this was Mr. Plummer's way of
+putting it) to Miss Kemp or Miss Treadway, who had a decided talent for
+trimming; but no customer in balloon sleeves and bell-shaped skirt was
+ever heard to remark of these young women as they remarked of Gabriella,
+"No, I don't want anybody else, please. She takes such an interest." To
+take an interest in other people might become quite as marketable an
+asset, Mr. Plummer was discovering, after fifty years of adherence to
+strictly business methods, as a gift for the needle; and, added to her
+engaging interest, Gabriella appeared to know by instinct exactly what a
+customer wanted.
+
+"I declare Miss Kemp had almost persuaded me to take that brown straw
+with the green velvet bandeau before I thought of asking Gabriella's
+advice," Mrs. Spencer was overheard saying to her daughter, as she
+paused, panting and breathless, at the head of the short flight of
+steps.
+
+"Oh, Gabriella always had taste; I'll ask her about mine," Florrie
+tossed back gaily in the high fluting notes which expressed so perfectly
+the brilliant, if slightly metallic, quality of her personality.
+
+Beside her mother, a plump, bouncing person, with a noisy though
+imperfectly articulate habit of speech, and the prominent hips and bust
+which composed the "fine figure" of the period, Florrie seemed to float
+with all the elusive, magic loveliness of a sunbeam. From the shining
+nimbus of her hair to her small tripping feet she was the incarnation of
+girlhood--of that white and gold girlhood which has intoxicated the
+imagination of man. She shed the allurement of sex as unconsciously as a
+flower sheds its perfume. Though her eyes were softly veiled by her
+lashes, every male clerk in Brandywine & Plummer's was dazzled by the
+deep blue light of her glances. In her red mouth, with its parted lips,
+in the pure rose and white of her flesh, in the rich curve of her bosom,
+which promised already the "fine figure" of her mother, youth and summer
+were calling as they called in the velvet softness of the June breeze.
+Innocent though she was, the powers of Life had selected her as a
+vehicle for their inscrutable ends.
+
+"Where is Miss Carr? I must speak to Miss Carr, please," she said to one
+of the shop girls who came up, eager to serve her. "Will you tell her
+that Miss Spencer is waiting to speak to her?"
+
+Responding to the girl's artless stare of admiration, she threw a
+friendly glance at her before she turned away to try on a monstrous
+white Leghorn hat decorated around the crown with a trellis of pink
+roses. Unless she happened to be in a particularly bad humour--and this
+was not often the case--Florrie was imperturbably amiable. She enjoyed
+flattery as a cat enjoys the firelight on its back, and while she purred
+happily in the pleasant warmth, she had something of the sleek and
+glossy look of a pretty kitten.
+
+"How does this look on me, mother?" she asked over her shoulder of Mrs.
+Spencer, who was babbling cheerfully in her loud tones to Miss
+Lancaster, the forewoman.
+
+Though some of the best blood in Virginia, profusely diluted with some
+of the worst, flowed comfortably in Mrs. Spencer's veins, it was
+impossible even for her relatives to deny that she could be at times
+decidedly vulgar. Having been a conspicuous belle and beauty of a bold
+and dashing type in her youth, she now devoted her middle-age to the
+enjoyment of those pleasures which she had formerly sacrificed to the
+preservation of her figure and her complexion. Though she still dyed her
+somewhat damaged hair, and strenuously pinched in her widening waist,
+she had ceased, since her fiftieth birthday, to forego the lesser
+comforts of the body. As she was a person of small imagination, and of
+no sentiment, it is probable that she was happier now than she had been
+in the days when she suffered the deprivations and enjoyed the triumphs
+of beauty.
+
+"What's that, Florrie?" she inquired shrilly. "No, I shouldn't get that
+if I were you. It doesn't flare enough. I'm crazy about a flare."
+
+"But I want a pink bandeau, mother," replied Florrie a little pettishly,
+as she patted her golden-red fringe. "I wonder where Gabriella is? Isn't
+she ever coming, Miss Lancaster?"
+
+"I thought I saw her when I came in," observed Mrs. Spencer, craning her
+handsome neck, which was running to fat, in the direction of the
+trimming room. "Florrie, just turn your head after a minute and look at
+the hat Patty Carrington is buying--pea green, and it makes her face
+look like a walnut. She hasn't the faintest idea how to dress. Do you
+think I ought to speak to her about it?"
+
+
+"No, let her alone," replied Florrie impatiently. "Is this any better
+than the Leghorn?"
+
+"Well, I must say I don't think there is much style about it, though, of
+course, with your hair, you can carry off anything. Isn't it odd how
+exactly she inherited my hair, Miss Lancaster? I remember her father
+used to say that he would have fallen in love with a gatepost if it had
+had golden-red hair."
+
+Miss Lancaster, a thin, erect woman of fifty, with impassive features,
+and iron-gray hair that looked as if it were rolled over wood, glanced
+resignedly from Mrs. Spencer's orange-coloured crimps to the imprisoned
+sunlight in Florrie's hair.
+
+"I'd know you were mother and daughter anywhere," she remarked in the
+noncommittal manner she had acquired in thirty years of independence;
+"and she is going to have your beautiful figure, too, Mrs. Spencer."
+
+"Well, I reckon I'll lose my figure now that I've stopped dieting,"
+remarked the lively lady, casting an appreciative glance in the mirror.
+"Florrie tells me I wear my sleeves too large, but I think they make me
+look smaller."
+
+"They are wearing them very large in Paris," replied Miss Lancaster, as
+if she were reciting a verse out of a catalogue. She had, as she
+sometimes found occasion to remark, been "born tired," and this
+temperamental weariness showed now in her handsome face, so wrinkled and
+dark around her bravely smiling eyes. Where she came from, or how she
+spent her time between the hour she left the shop and the hour she
+returned to it, the two women knew as little as they knew the intimate
+personal history of the Leghorn hat on the peg by the mirror. Beyond the
+fact that she played the part of a sympathetic chorus, they were without
+curiosity about her life. Their own personalities absorbed them, and for
+the time at least appeared to absorb Miss Lancaster.
+
+"I like the Leghorn hat," said Florrie decisively, as she tried it on
+for the third time, "but I'll wait till I ask Gabriella's opinion."
+
+"I hope she's getting on well here," said Mrs. Spencer, who found it
+impossible to concentrate on Florrie's hat. "Don't you think it was very
+brave of her to go to work, Miss Lancaster?"
+
+"I understood that she was obliged to," rejoined Miss Lancaster, with
+the weary amiability of her professional manner.
+
+"She might have married, I happen to know that," returned Mrs. Spencer.
+"Arthur Peyton has been in love with her ever since she was a child, and
+there was a young man from New York last winter who seemed crazy about
+her. Florrie, don't you think George Fowler was just crazy about
+Gabriella?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know, mother. He paid her a great deal of attention,
+but you never can tell about men."
+
+"Julia Caperton told me, and, of course, she's very intimate with
+George's sister, that he went back to New York because he heard that
+Gabriella was engaged to Arthur. Florrie, do you suppose she is really
+engaged to Arthur?"
+
+Thus appealed to, Florrie removed the Leghorn hat from her head, and
+answered abstractedly: "Jane thought so, but if she is engaged, I don't
+see why she should have started to work. I know Arthur would hate it."
+
+"But isn't he too poor to marry?" inquired Mrs. Spencer, whose curiosity
+was as robust as her constitution. "Haven't you always understood that
+the Peytons were poor, Miss Lancaster, in spite of the lovely house they
+live in?"
+
+Her large, good-humoured face, which had once been as delicate as a
+flower, but was now growing puffed and mottled under a plentiful layer
+of rice powder, became almost violently animated, while she adjusted her
+belt with a single effective jerk of her waist. Though Bessie Spencer
+was admitted to have one of the kindest hearts in the world, she was
+chiefly remarkable for her unhappy faculty of saying the wrong thing at
+the wrong time. An inveterate, though benevolent, gossip, she would
+babble on for hours, reciting the private affairs of her relatives, her
+friends, and her neighbours. Everybody feared her, and yet everybody was
+assured that "she never meant any harm." The secrets of the town flowed
+through her mind as grist flows through a mill, and though she was
+entirely without malice, she contrived, in the most innocent manner, to
+do an incalculable amount of injury. Possessing a singularly active
+intelligence, and having reached middle-age without acquiring sufficient
+concentration to enjoy books, she directed a vigorous, if casual,
+understanding toward the human beings among whom she lived. She knew
+everything that it was possible to know about the people who lived in
+Franklin Street, and yet her mind was so constituted that she never by
+any chance knew it correctly. Though she was not old, she had already
+passed into a proverb. To receive any statement with the remark, "You
+have heard that from Bessie Spencer," was to cast doubt upon it.
+
+"You don't think I'm getting any stouter, do you, Miss Lancaster?" she
+inquired dubiously, with her hands on her hips and her eyes measuring
+the dimensions of her waist. "I'm making up my mind to try one of those
+B. and T. corsets that Mrs. Murray is wearing. She told me it reduced
+her waist at least three inches."
+
+"Oh, you aren't like Mrs. Murray--she didn't measure a fraction under
+thirty inches," replied Miss Lancaster, with her patient politeness.
+Then, after a pause, which Mrs. Spencer's nimble wit filled with a story
+about the amazing number of mint juleps Mrs. Murray was seen to drink at
+the White Sulphur Springs last summer, Florrie exclaimed eagerly:
+
+"Why, there is Gabriella! Won't you get her for us, Miss Lancaster?"
+
+Near one of the long windows, beyond which large greenish flies were
+buzzing around the branch of a mulberry tree in the alley, Gabriella was
+trying a purple hat on a prim-looking lady who regarded herself in the
+mirror with a furtive and deprecating air as if she were afraid of being
+unjustly blamed for her appearance. "I'm not sure--but I don't think it
+suits me exactly," she appeared to murmur in a strangled whisper, while
+she twisted her mouth, which held a jet-headed hatpin, into a quivering
+grimace.
+
+"She's waiting on Matty French," said Mrs. Spencer, and she added
+impulsively, "I wonder what it is that men see in Gabriella. You
+wouldn't call her really pretty, would you, Miss Lancaster?"
+
+"Well, not exactly pretty, but she has an interesting face. It is so
+full of life."
+
+"Can't you get her, mother?" asked Florrie; and Mrs. Spencer, always
+eager to oblige, rustled across the room and pounced vivaciously upon
+the prim lady and Gabriella.
+
+"We've been looking for you everywhere, Gabriella," she began, nodding
+agreeably to Miss French. "Florrie has tried on all the hats in the
+room, and she wants you to tell her if that white Leghorn is becoming.
+Good morning, Matty! That blue wing is so stylish. I think you are very
+sensible to wear colours and not to stick to black as Susie Chamberlain
+does. It makes her look as old as the hills, and I believe she does it
+just to depress people. Life is too short, as I said when I left off
+mourning, to be an ink blot wherever you go. And it doesn't mean that
+she grieves a bit more for her husband than anybody else does. Everybody
+knows they led a cat and dog's life together, and I've even heard,
+though I can't remember who told me, that she was on the point of
+getting a divorce when he died. Are you going? Well, I'm glad you
+decided on that blue hat. I don't believe you'll ever regret it.
+Good-bye. Be sure and come to see me soon. Gabriella, will you help
+Florrie about her hat now? I declare, I thought Matty would never get
+through with you. And, of course, we didn't want anybody but you to wait
+on us. We were just saying that you had the most beautiful taste, and it
+is so wise of you to go out to work and not sit down and sew at home in
+order to support your position. A position that can't support itself
+isn't much of a prop, my husband used to say. But I don't believe you'll
+stay here long, you sly piece. You'll be married before the year is up,
+mark my word. The men are all crazy about you, everybody knows that.
+Why, Florrie met George Fowler in the street this morning, and when he
+asked after you, his face turned as hot as fire, she said--"
+
+Gabriella's face, above her starched collar with its neat red tie, was
+slowly flooded with colour. Her brown eyes shone golden under her dark
+lashes, and Mrs. Spencer told herself that the girl looked almost pretty
+for a minute. "If she wasn't so sallow, she'd be really good looking."
+
+Happily unaware that her face had betrayed her, Gabriella slid back a
+glass door, took a hat out of the case, and answered indifferently,
+while she adjusted the ribbon bow on one side of the crown:
+
+"I didn't know Mr. Fowler had come back. I haven't seen him for ages."
+
+From her small, smooth head to her slender feet she had acquired in
+three months the composed efficiency of Miss Lancaster; and one might
+have imagined, as Mrs. Spencer remarked to Florrie afterwards, that "she
+had been born in a hat shop."
+
+But instead of the weary patience of Miss Lancaster, she brought to her
+work the brimming energy and the joyous self-confidence of youth. It was
+impossible to watch her and not realize that she had given both ability
+and the finer gift of personality to the selling of hats. Had she
+started life as a funeral director instead of a milliner, it is probable
+that she would have infused into the dreary business something of the
+living quality of genius.
+
+"Oh, Florrie hadn't seen him for ages either," chirped Mrs. Spencer,
+with her restless eyes on the hat in Gabriella's hand. "I don't know
+whether I ought to tell you or not, but you and Florrie are so intimate
+I suppose I might as well--Julia Caperton told Florrie that George came
+back because he heard in some way that you had broken your engagement to
+Arthur. Of course, as I told Julia afterwards, you hadn't mentioned a
+word of it to me, but I've got eyes and I can't help using them. I was
+obliged to see that George was simply out of his mind about you. It
+would be a splendid match, too, for they say his father has made quite a
+large fortune since he went to New York--"
+
+"Mother!" interrupted Florrie sternly, over her shoulder, "you know
+Julia told you not to breathe a single word as coming from her. She is
+the bosom friend of George's sister."
+
+"But, Florrie, I haven't told a soul except Gabriella, and I know she
+wouldn't repeat a thing that I said to her."
+
+"Now, isn't that exactly like mother?" observed Florrie, with the casual
+disapprobation of youth. "She was on the point of telling Miss Lancaster
+all about it when I stopped her."
+
+"Why, Florrie, I didn't say a word except that men were crazy about
+Gabriella--you know I didn't. Of course, I talk a great deal," she
+pursued in an aggrieved, explanatory tone to Gabriella, "but I never
+repeat a word--not a single word that is told me in confidence. If Julia
+had asked me not to tell Gabriella what she said, I shouldn't have
+dreamed of doing so."
+
+"Oh, it doesn't matter in the least, Mrs. Spencer," said Gabriella
+hastily, "only there isn't a word of truth in it."
+
+The becoming flush was still in her cheeks, and she poised a hat over
+Florrie's head with a swift, flying grace which Mrs. Spencer had never
+noticed in her before. "I wonder if Gabriella can really care about
+George?" she thought quickly. "But if it is George she is in love with,
+why on earth did she start to work in a shop?" Then suddenly, following
+a flash of light, she reasoned it out to her complete satisfaction. "It
+must have been that she didn't know that George cared--that is why she
+is blushing so at this minute."
+
+An hour or so later, when Florrie and her mother had fluttered volubly
+downstairs, and the exhausted assistants were putting the hats away
+before closing the cases, Gabriella went into the dressing-room, where
+Miss Nash, a stout, pleasant-looking girl, was sitting in a broken
+chair, with her shoes off, her blue serge skirt rolled back from her
+knees, and her head bowed, over her crossed arms, on the window-sill.
+
+At Gabriella's entrance she glanced up, and remarked cheerfully: "My
+feet were killing me. I just had to take off my shoes."
+
+"They do get dreadfully tired," assented Gabriella in the tone of
+sympathetic intimacy she had caught from the other girls.
+
+Her naturally friendly spirit had refused to "hold aloof" from her
+companions, as her mother had begged her to do, and at the end of three
+months she had learned things about most of them which interested her
+profoundly. One supported an invalid father, another had a family of six
+little brothers and sisters to care for, and still another had lost her
+lover through a railroad accident only two days before her marriage.
+Several of them were extravagantly loud, one or two were inclined to be
+vulgar; but the others were quite as refined and gentle as the girls
+with whom she had grown up, and what impressed her about them all was
+their courageous and yet essentially light-hearted Southern spirit. To
+her surprise, she found an utter absence of jealousy among them. The
+elder women were invariably kind and helpful, and though she liked the
+girls, she soon discovered in herself a growing feeling of respect for
+these older women. They represented a different type, for the hardness
+she noticed in some of the younger girls was entirely lacking in the
+women of Miss Lancaster's generation. Many of them even her mother
+would have called well born, and one and all, they were almost painfully
+ladylike. With their thin, erect figures, their wan, colourless faces,
+their graying hair, and their sweet Southern voices, they imparted a
+delicate social air to the shop.
+
+Usually Gabriella stopped to talk to the girls who crowded in from the
+workroom, brushing shreds of silk or ribbon from their skirts, but
+to-day her mind wandered while she answered Miss Nash, and when, a
+minute later, Miss Lancaster spoke to her on her way out, and asked her
+to match the flowers for Florrie's hat, she was obliged to make an
+effort before she could recall her roving attention. She was thinking
+not of Florrie's hat, but of Mrs. Spencer's words, "He has come back
+because he heard that your engagement was broken." And at the first
+insurgent rise of emotion, she ceased to be the business woman and
+became merely an imaginative girl, dreaming of love.
+
+"They aren't quite the right shade, are they?" she asked with an
+uncertainty which was tactful rather than sincere, "or, perhaps, the
+ribbon might be darker?"
+
+Her eyes questioned Miss Lancaster, who moved a step nearer the window
+as she held the bolt of ribbon toward the daylight.
+
+"Well, we'd better look at it again in the morning. You are in a hurry,
+Miss Carr?"
+
+"Oh, no, I've all the time in the world," answered Gabriella, though she
+longed to be out with the June scents and her dreams, "but I am sure the
+ribbon ought to be a deeper blue to tone with the ragged robins."
+
+"You've a wonderful eye for colour, that's why I ask your advice," said
+the other, and a sudden friendliness shone in her tired eyes, for she
+had liked Gabriella from the beginning. That the girl possessed a
+genuine gift of taste, the elder woman had already discovered. For
+herself, Miss Lancaster had always hated the sight of hats, and had
+taken up the work merely because a place in Brandywine & Plummer's had
+been offered her shortly after her father, a gallant fighter but a poor
+worker, had gone to end his kindly anecdotal days in the Home for
+Confederate Soldiers. She was a repressed, conscientious woman, who had
+never been younger than she was now at fifty, and who regarded youth,
+not with envy, but with admiring awe. For she, also, patient and
+uncomplaining creature, belonged to that world of decay and inertia from
+which Gabriella had revolted. It was a world where things happened
+to-day just as they happened yesterday, where no miracles had occurred
+since the miracles of Scripture, where people hated change, not because
+they were satisfied, but because they were incapable of imagination.
+Miss Lancaster, who had never wanted anything with passion, except to be
+a perfect lady, was proud of the fact that she had been twenty years in
+business without losing her "shrinking manner."
+
+"Yes, you have an eye for colour," she repeated gently; "if you could
+only learn to sew, you might command a most desirable position."
+
+"I despise sewing," replied Gabriella, with serene good-humour, "and I
+could never learn, even at school, anything that I despised. But I
+suppose I can always tell somebody else how it ought to be done."
+
+Then, because her work always interested her, she forgot the disturbing
+words Mrs. Spencer had spoken--she forgot even her impatience to feel
+the June air in her face. Her best gift, the power of mental control,
+enabled her to bring the needed discipline to her emotion; and when the
+moment of her release came, she found that the brief restlessness had
+passed from her mind. "There's no use letting myself get impatient," she
+thought; "I've got to stick to it, so it won't do a bit of good to begin
+wriggling."
+
+All the other girls had gone home before her, and on the sidewalk Miss
+Meason, of the glove counter, stood talking about the spring sales to
+Mr. Brandywine. As Gabriella passed them, in her white shirtwaist and
+dark belted skirt, they looked thoughtfully after her until her sailor
+hat, with the scarlet band, crossed Broad Street and disappeared on the
+opposite side.
+
+"She's a remarkable girl," observed Mr. Brandywine, with his paternal
+manner. "I hope she is beginning to feel at home with us."
+
+"I believe she'd feel at home anywhere," replied Miss Meason, "and she's
+obliged to get on. There's no doubt of it."
+
+"A pleasant face, too. Not exactly pretty, I suppose, but you would call
+it a pleasant face."
+
+"Oh, well, I'd call her pretty in her way," answered Miss Meason. "Her
+eyes are lovely, and she has a singularly bright expression. I always
+say that a bright expression makes up for anything."
+
+"Her mother was a beauty in her day," said Mr. Brandywine reminiscently;
+"she was the snow and roses sort, and her eldest daughter took after
+her, though she is a wreck now, poor lady."
+
+"That's Charley Gracey," remarked Miss Meason tartly, for she had the
+self-supporting woman's contempt for the rake. "Yes, she was lovely as a
+girl. I remember as well as if it were yesterday how happy she looked
+when I sold her her wedding gloves. She is a beautiful character, too,
+they say, but somehow Gabriella, even as a child, appealed to me more.
+She has three times the sense of her sister."
+
+Then they shook hands and parted, while Gabriella, tripping through the
+Second Market, was saying to herself: "There's not the least bit of
+sense in your thinking about him, Gabriella."
+
+In Hill Street, maple and poplar trees were in full leaf, and little
+flakes of sunshine, as soft as flowers, were scattered over the brick
+pavement. Beyond the housetops the sky was golden, and at the corner the
+rusty ironwork of an old balcony had turned to the colour of bronze. The
+burning light of the sunset blinded her eyes, while an intense sweetness
+came to her from the honeysuckle clambering over a low white porch; and
+this light and this sweetness possessed an ineffable quality. Life,
+which had been merely placid a few hours before, had become suddenly
+poignant--every instant was pregnant with happiness, every detail was
+piercingly vivid. Her whole being was flooded with a sensation of
+richness and wonder, as if she had awakened with surprise to a different
+world from the one she had closed her eyes on a minute before.
+
+As she crossed the street she saw her mother's head above a box of clove
+pinks in the window; and a little later the front door opened and Miss
+Polly Hatch, a small, indomitable spinster who sewed out by the day,
+walked rapidly between the iron urns and stopped under the creamy
+blossoms of the old magnolia tree in the yard.
+
+"It's too late for your ma to be workin', Gabriella. You'd better stop
+her."
+
+Pausing in the middle of the walk, she comfortably tucked under her arm
+an unwieldy bundle she carried, and added, with the shrewdness which was
+the result of a long and painful experience with human nature: "It's
+funny--ain't it?--how downright mulish your ma can be when she wants
+to?"
+
+"I can't do a thing on earth with her," answered Gabriella in distress.
+"You have more influence over her than I have, Miss Polly."
+
+Miss Polly, who had the composed and efficient bearing of a machine,
+shook her head discouragingly as she opened the gate and passed out.
+
+"I reckon she's set for good and all," she remarked emphatically, and
+went on her way.
+
+"Mother, it's time to stop sewing and think about supper," called
+Gabriella gaily, as she ran into the room and bent to kiss her mother,
+who turned a flat, soft cheek in her direction, and remarked gloomily:
+"Gabriella, you've had a visitor."
+
+Not for worlds would Mrs. Carr have surrendered to the disarming
+cheerfulness of her daughter's manner; for since Gabriella had gone to
+work in a shop, her mother's countenance implied that she was piously
+resigned to disgrace as well as to poverty. It was inconceivable to her
+that any girl with Berkeley blood in her veins could be so utterly
+devoid of proper pride as Gabriella had proved herself to be; and the
+shock of this discovery had left a hurt look in her face. There were
+days when she hardly spoke to the girl, when refusing food, she opened
+her lips only to moisten her thread, when the slow tears seemed forever
+welling between her reddened eyelids. As they had just passed through
+one of these painful periods, Gabriella was surprised to find that, for
+the moment at least, her mother appeared to have forgotten her righteous
+resentment. Though it could hardly be said that Mrs. Carr spoke
+cheerfully--since cheerfulness was foreign to her nature--at least she
+had spoken. Of her own accord, unquestioned and unurged, she had
+volunteered a remark to her daughter; and Gabriella felt that, for a
+brief respite, the universe had ceased to be menacing.
+
+"Gabriella, you have had a visitor," repeated Mrs. Carr, and it was
+clear that her sorrow (she never yielded to passion) had been overcome
+by a natural human eagerness to tell her news.
+
+"Not Cousin Jimmy?" asked the girl lightly.
+
+"No, you could never guess, if you guessed all night."
+
+"Not Charley Gracey surely? I wouldn't speak to him for the world."
+
+Though Jane had returned to Charley, and even Mrs. Carr, feeling in her
+heart that her younger daughter had dealt her the hardest blow, had been
+heard to say that she "pitied her son-in-law more than she censured
+him," Gabriella had not softened in her implacable judgment.
+
+"Of course it wasn't Charley. I shouldn't have mentioned it if it had
+been, because you are so bitter against him. But it was somebody you
+haven't seen for months. Do you remember Evelyn Randolph's son who paid
+you so much attention last winter?"
+
+"George Fowler! Has he been here?" asked Gabriella, and her voice
+quivered like a harp.
+
+"I told Marthy to say you were out. Of course I wasn't fit to see
+company, but he caught sight of me on his way to the gate and came back
+on the porch to speak to me. He remembered all about my having gone to
+school with his mother, and it seems she had told him about the time she
+was Queen of May and I maid of honour. I asked him how Evelyn stood
+living in New York, but he said she likes it better than his father
+does. Archie Fowler insists that he is coming back to Virginia to end
+his days. They seem to have plenty of money. I expect Archie has made a
+fortune up there or he wouldn't be satisfied to live out of Virginia."
+
+"Did George ask when I'd be at home?" inquired Gabriella.
+
+Though she knew that it was unwise to divert her mother's attention from
+the main narrative, her whole body ached with the longing to hear what
+George had said of her, and she felt that it was impossible to resist
+the temptation to question.
+
+"He said something about you as he was going away, but I can't remember
+whether he asked when you would be in or not." In spite of the fact that
+Mrs. Carr had the most tenacious memory for useless detail, she was
+never able to recall the significant points of an interview.
+
+"He didn't ask where I was?"
+
+The question was indiscreet, for it jerked Mrs. Carr's mind back with
+violence from its innocent ramble into the past, while it reminded her
+of Gabriella's present unladylike occupation. She shut her lips with
+soft but obstinate determination, and Gabriella, watching her closely,
+told herself that "wild horses couldn't drag another word out of her
+mother to-night." The girl longed to talk it over; but she might have
+tried as successfully to gossip with the angel on a marble tombstone.
+She wanted to hear what George had said, to ask how he was looking, and
+to wonder aloud why he had come back. She wanted to throw herself into
+her mother's arms and listen to all the little important things that
+filled the world for her. If only the aloof virtue in Mrs. Carr's face
+would relax into a human expression!
+
+Taking off her hat, Gabriella went into the bedroom, and then, coming
+back again after a short absence, remarked with forced gaiety: "I
+suppose he didn't have anything interesting to tell you, did he?"
+
+"No." Though the light had almost waned, Mrs. Carr broke off a fresh
+piece of thread and leaned nearer the window, while she tried to find
+the eye of the needle.
+
+"Let me thread your needle, mother. It is too late to work, anyway. You
+will ruin your eyesight."
+
+"I have never considered my eyesight, Gabriella."
+
+"I know you haven't, and that's why you ought to begin."
+
+As it was really growing too dark to see, Mrs. Carr rolled the thread
+back on the spool, stuck the needle into the last buttonhole, and
+folding the infant's dress on which she was working, laid it away in her
+straw work-basket.
+
+"Will you light the gas, Gabriella?"
+
+"Don't work any more to-night, mother. It is almost supper time."
+
+Without replying, Mrs. Carr moved with her basket to a chair under the
+chandelier. Once seated there, she unfolded the dress, took the needle
+from the unfinished buttonhole, and tried again unsuccessfully to run
+the thread through the eye. Then, while Gabriella rushed to her aid, she
+removed her glasses and patiently polished them on a bit of chamois skin
+she kept in her basket.
+
+"Don't you feel as if you could eat a chop to-night, mother?"
+
+"I haven't been able to swallow a morsel all day, Gabriella."
+
+"I've saved you a little cream. Shall I make you a toddy?"
+
+"I don't want it. Drink it yourself, dear."
+
+After this there followed one of those pauses which fill not only the
+room, but the universe with a fury of sound. There were times when
+Gabriella felt that she could stand anything if only her mother would
+fly into a rage--when she positively envied Florrie Spencer because her
+plebeian parent scolded her at the top of her voice instead of
+maintaining a calm and ladylike reticence. But Mrs. Carr was one of
+those women who never, even in the most trying circumstances, cease to
+be patient, who never lose for an instant so much as the palest or the
+thinnest of the Christian virtues.
+
+Going into the bedroom, Gabriella changed from her shirtwaist into a
+gown of flowered muslin, with sleeves that looked small beside the
+balloon ones of the season, and a skirt which was shrunken and pale from
+many washings the summer before. She had worn the frock when she met
+George, and though it was old, she knew it was becoming, and she told
+herself joyfully that if she put it on to-night, "something must come of
+it." As she smoothed her hair by the dim gas-jet over the mirror, she
+saw again the face of George as it had first smiled down on her beneath
+the boughs of a mimosa tree in Mrs. Spencer's front garden. At the
+time, a year ago, she was engaged to Arthur--she had even called the
+placid preference she felt for him "being in love"--but while she talked
+to George she had found herself thinking, "I wonder how it would feel to
+be engaged to a man like this instead of to Arthur?" Then, since all
+Southern engagements of the period were secret, she had seen a good deal
+of George during the summer; and in the autumn, while she was still
+trying to make believe that it was merely a friendship, he had gone back
+to New York without saying good-bye. She had tried her best to stop
+thinking of him, and until this evening, she had never really let
+herself confess that she cared. But if she didn't care why was she so
+happy to-night? If she didn't care why was there such intoxicating
+sweetness in the thought of his return? If she didn't care why had she
+dressed herself so carefully in the flowered muslin he had once said
+that he liked? Her face, smiling back at her from the mirror, was
+suffused with a delicate glow--not pink, not white, but softly luminous
+as if a lamp, shining behind it, enkindled its expression. She had never
+seen herself so nearly pretty, and with this thought in her mind, she
+went back to her mother, who was still working buttonholes under the
+chandelier.
+
+"Marthy has brought the lamp, mother. Why don't you move over to the
+table?"
+
+"I can see perfectly, thank you, Gabriella."
+
+"I hate to see you working. Let me finish those buttonholes."
+
+"I'd rather get through them myself, dear."
+
+"Have you seen Jane to-day?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Has Cousin Pussy been here?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Did you get out for a walk?"
+
+"No."
+
+The appalling silence again filled the room like a fog, and Gabriella,
+moving cautiously about in it, began straightening chairs and picking up
+shreds of cambric from the carpet. She felt suddenly that she could not
+endure the strain for another minute, and glancing at Mrs. Carr's bent
+head, where the thin hair was wound into a tight knot and held in place
+by a tortoise-shell comb with a carved top, she wondered how her mother
+could possibly keep it up day after day as she did? But, if she had only
+known it, this silence, which tried her nerves to the breaking point,
+was positively soothing to her mother. Mrs. Carr could keep it up not
+only for days and weeks, but, had it been necessary, she could have kept
+it up with equal success for half a lifetime. While she sat there,
+working buttonholes in a bad light, she thought quite as passionately as
+Gabriella, though her mental processes were different. She thought
+sadly, but firmly, with a pensive melancholy not untinged with pleasure,
+that "life was becoming almost too much for her." It seemed incredible
+to her that after all her struggles to keep up an appearance things
+should have turned out as they had; it seemed incredible that after all
+her sacrifices her children should not consider her more. "They have no
+consideration for me," she reflected, while she took the finest stitch
+possible to the needle she held. "If Jane had considered me she would
+never have married Charley. If Gabriella had considered me, or anybody
+but herself, she would not have gone to work in a store." No, they had
+never considered her, they had never asked her advice before acting,
+though she had brought them into the world and had worked like a slave
+in order to keep them in that respected station of life in which they
+had been born. Then, her sorrow getting the better of her resolution,
+she turned her head and spoke:
+
+"I know you never tell me anything on purpose, Gabriella, but I think I
+have a right to know whether or not you have discarded Arthur for good."
+
+"I told you all about it, mother. I told you I found I was mistaken."
+
+"I suppose you never thought for a moment how much it would distress me?
+Though Lydia Peyton is so much older than I am, she was always my best
+friend--we often stayed in the room together when we were girls. I had
+set my heart on your marrying her son."
+
+"I know that, mother, and I am very sorry, but when it came to the point
+I couldn't marry him. You can't make yourself care--"
+
+"I should have thought that my wishes might influence you. I should
+never wish you to do anything that wasn't for your good, Gabriella."
+
+"Of course, mother, you've given up your life to us. I know that, and
+Jane knows it as well as I do. That's why I want to earn money enough to
+let you rest. I want you to stop work for good and be happy."
+
+"There are worse things than work," replied Mrs. Carr in a tone which
+implied that Gabriella had brought them upon her.
+
+After a pause, in which her needle flew mournfully, she added: "I hope
+for your own sake that you will marry some good man before you lose
+your attractions. Poor Becky Bollingbroke proved to me how unfortunate
+it is for a woman to remain unmarried."
+
+For an instant Gabriella looked at her mother without replying. She felt
+tempted--strongly tempted, she told herself--to say something cross.
+Then the sight of the bent gray head, of the bowed shoulders, of the
+knotted needle-pricked fingers, pierced her heart. Though she could not
+always agree with her mother, she loved her devotedly, and the thought
+that she must lose her some day had been the most terrible nightmare of
+her childhood.
+
+"Don't worry about me, mother, dear," she answered tenderly. "I can
+always take care of myself. I can manage my life, you know that, don't
+you?" Then she stopped quickly while her heart gave a single bound and
+lay quiet. She had heard the click of the gate, and a minute later, as
+Mrs. Carr gathered up her sewing, there was a ring at the bell.
+
+"It can't be a visitor before supper, can it, Gabriella?"
+
+"I think not, mother, but I shouldn't run away if I were you."
+
+"I'd better go. I don't feel dressed. Wait a minute, Marthy, and let me
+get out of the room before you open the door." She fled, clutching her
+work-basket, while Gabriella, turning to lower the flaming wick of the
+lamp, heard George's voice at the door and his footsteps crossing the
+hall.
+
+"I knew something would happen," she thought wildly, as she went forward
+to meet him.
+
+"I saw you pull down the shade as I was going by," he began rather
+lamely; and she hardly heard his words because of the divine tumult in
+her brain. Her heart sang; her pulses throbbed; every drop of her blood
+seemed to become suddenly alive with ecstasy. Under the tarnished
+garlands of the chandelier his face looked younger, gayer, more
+intensely vivid than it had looked in her dreams. It was the face of her
+dreams made real; but with what a difference! She saw his crisp brown
+hair brushed smoothly back from its parting, his blue eyes, with their
+gay and conquering look, the firm red brown of his cheek, and even the
+bluish shadow encircling his shaven mouth. In his eyes, which said
+enchanting things, she could not read the trivial and commonplace
+quality of his soul--for he was not only a man, he was romance, he was
+adventure, he was the radiant miracle of youth!
+
+"Florrie told me this morning that you had come back," she answered
+coldly, as she held out her hand.
+
+Her words seemed to come to her from a distance--from the next room,
+from the street outside, from the farthest star--but while she uttered
+them, she knew that her words meant nothing. She shed her joy as if it
+were fragrance; and her softness was like the magnolia-scented softness
+of the June night. Even her mother would not have known her, so greatly
+had she changed in a minute. Of the businesslike figure in the sailor
+hat and trim shirtwaist--of the Gabriella who had said, "I can manage my
+life"--there remained only an outline. The very feet of the capable
+woman had changed into the shrinking and timid feet of a lovesick girl.
+She was afraid to go forward, afraid to move, afraid to breathe lest she
+break the wonderful spell of the magic. Not only her basic common sense,
+but the very soul that shaped her body had become as light, as sweet,
+as formless as liquid honey.
+
+But of course, she knew nothing of this. She was innocent of deception;
+she was innocent even of any definite purpose to allure. The thought in
+her mind, if there were any thought, which is doubtful, was that she
+must be composed, she must be indifferent if it killed her.
+
+"I know I've come at an awkward hour, but I simply couldn't go by after
+I saw you."
+
+"Won't you stay?" she asked, trying in vain to shut out the ominous
+sound of Marthy bringing their scant supper. She remembered, with
+horror, that she had ordered only two chops, and a wave of rebellion
+swept over her because life always spoiled its divine instants.
+
+"No, I can't stay. I've an engagement for supper. I merely wanted to see
+you. You've no idea how I've wanted to see you."
+
+"Have you?" said Gabriella in so low a voice that he hardly heard her.
+Then, lifting her glowing eyes, she added softly, "I am glad that you
+wanted to."
+
+"There were times when I simply couldn't get you out of my mind," he
+responded, and went on almost joyously, with the romantic look which had
+first enchanted her imagination. "You see I believed that you were going
+to marry Arthur Peyton. Julia told me that your engagement was broken.
+That was why I came back. Didn't you guess it?"
+
+"Yes, I guessed it," she answered simply, and all the softness, the
+sweetness, the beauty of her feeling passed into her voice.
+
+Then, in the very midst of her happiness, there occurred one of those
+sordid facts which appear to spring, like vultures, upon the ineffable
+moments. She heard the bell--the awful supper bell which her mother
+insisted upon having rung because her parents had had it rung for
+generations before her. As the horrible sound reverberated through the
+house, Gabriella felt that the noise passed through her ears, not into
+her brain, but into the very depths of her suffering soul.
+
+"There, I must go," said George, without embarrassment, for which she
+blessed him. From his manner, the supper bell might have made a
+delightful harmony instead of a hideous discord. "I'll see you
+to-morrow, if I may. May I, Gabriella?"
+
+He smiled charmingly as he went, and looking after him, a minute later,
+over the clove pinks in the window-box, she saw him turn and gaze back
+at her from the opposite pavement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+MIRAGE
+
+
+On a bright Sunday in October Mrs. Carr stopped on her way from church
+to tell Mrs. Peyton of Gabriella's engagement. A crape veil, slightly
+scented with camphor, hung from her bonnet, and in her gloved hands she
+carried a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums, for she intended to go on to
+Hollywood, where her husband was buried. The sermon had been unusually
+inspiring, and there was a pensive exaltation in her look as she laid
+her hand on the gate of the walled garden.
+
+"If it couldn't be Arthur--and of course my heart was set on her
+marrying Arthur--I suppose George is the one I should have chosen," she
+said to Mrs. Peyton with tender melancholy as she turned her soft,
+clammy cheek, which was never warm even in summer, to be kissed.
+
+There was nothing against George that she could advance even to
+Gabriella. He was well born, for his mother had been a Randolph; he was
+comfortably rich (at least his father was); he was good-looking; he was
+almost arrogantly healthy--yet because she was obliged to regret
+something, she found herself clinging fondly to the memory of Arthur.
+"If it could only have been Arthur," she repeated sadly, gazing through
+the French window of the drawing-room to the garden where beds of
+scarlet sage flaunted brilliantly in the sunshine.
+
+"I hope and pray that dear Gabriella will be happy," replied Mrs.
+Peyton, a beautiful old lady, with wonderful white hair under the
+widow's ruching in her bonnet. The exquisite simplicity of her soul was
+reflected in the rose-leaf delicacy of her skin, in her benignant and
+innocent smile, in the serene and joyous glance of her eyes. Never in
+her life had she thought evil of any one, and she did not mean to begin
+on the verge of the grave, with the hope of a peaceful eternity before
+her. If dear Gabriella had "discarded" dear Arthur, then she could only
+hope and pray that dear Gabriella would not live to regret it.
+
+"She will be married at once, I suppose?" she said, and beamed as
+happily as if Gabriella had not disappointed the dearest hope of her
+heart. "There is no need to wait, is there?"
+
+"They have decided on the 17th of November. I wanted you to know it
+first of all, Lydia, so I haven't mentioned it to a soul except to
+Cousin Jimmy Wrenn."
+
+"You will live with dear Jane, will you not? Poor child, what a blessing
+you will be to her."
+
+"No, I shall be with Jane only for a month or two until Gabriella and
+George have taken a house in New York. She wouldn't consent to be
+married so soon until I promised to live with them. But how on earth
+shall I ever manage to go so far away, Lydia? To think of being so far
+from Hollywood almost breaks my heart, and yet what can I do?"
+
+Mrs. Peyton's loving gaze enfolded not only her visitor, but the house
+and the dreamy garden where frost was already blighting the flowers.
+
+"I understand your feeling, of course, Fanny," she said, "but you must
+think of Gabriella. How different it will be for her if her mother is
+with her. I shall miss you every minute, but for the sake of that
+splendid child of yours, I must not allow myself to be sorry."
+
+If Mrs. Carr's features could have lost the fixed impression of a
+lifetime, they would have appeared almost cheerful while her old friend
+held her hand and gazed benignly upon her; but so relaxed had the
+muscles of her face become that, even when her spirits rose, her
+countenance did not alter, and the flicker of light in her smile only
+served to illumine its profound melancholy.
+
+"I try to think of Gabriella," she answered, "but I oughtn't to forget
+poor Jane. Whenever I remember her, I begin to reproach myself."
+
+"Don't reproach yourself, Fanny. There is nothing on earth for which you
+can justly be blamed. I am sure you have never considered your own
+wishes for a minute in your life. If ever a mother gave up everything
+for her children, you have done so, Fanny, and you needn't deny it. But
+tell me about Gabriella. How thankful you ought to be that she has given
+up that work in a store!"
+
+"If it had been God's will, I suppose I must have borne it, Lydia, but I
+felt as if it was killing me."
+
+"The dear child has a strong character," observed Mrs. Peyton, and it
+seemed to her, while she thought of Gabriella, that a strong character
+was a beautiful and wonderful thing.
+
+"You would hardly know Gabriella, she is so changed," replied Mrs. Carr.
+"I declare I sometimes think that I never saw a girl so wildly in love
+as she is. She positively worships George, and when I look at her, I
+remember Becky Bollingbroke's saying that a smart woman in love is
+worse than a silly one. She has that much more to get foolish with, poor
+Becky used to say.
+
+"How happy it must make you," murmured the other. "There is nothing in
+life I'd rather see than my Arthur happily married."
+
+"I always thought that he and Gabriella were made for each other, but
+one never can tell--"
+
+"That must be Gabriella now," said Mrs. Peyton as the bell rang. "Is she
+coming for you?"
+
+"Yes, Cousin Jimmy was to bring her, and then drive me out to Hollywood.
+Isn't that Arthur's voice talking to her?"
+
+"Poor boy," whispered Mrs. Peyton, and then she rustled forward and
+enveloped Gabriella in a warm embrace. "My darling girl, your mother has
+just told me," she said.
+
+"And Gabriella has just told me," added Arthur at her elbow. Though
+there was a hurt look in his eyes, his manner was perfect. Years
+afterwards, whenever Gabriella thought of him, she remembered how
+perfect his manner was on that morning.
+
+"I wanted you to know first of all," said Gabriella.
+
+As the old lady looked at her with loving eyes, it seemed to her that
+the girl was softly glowing with happiness. She accepted joy as she
+accepted sorrow, with quietness, but there was a look in her face which
+made her appear, for the moment, transfigured. A radiance like that of a
+veiled flame shone in her eyes; the cool tones of her voice had grown
+richer and gentler; and at last, as Mrs. Peyton said to herself,
+Gabriella, the sensible and practical Gabriella, was sweet with the
+honeysuckle sweetness of Jane.
+
+"She must be over head and ears in love," she thought; and the next
+minute, "I wonder how it will end?"
+
+The question brought a pang to her kind old heart, which longed to make
+everybody, and particularly her boy Arthur, happy. Then, because her
+eyes were filling, she stroked the girl's arm gently, and said:
+
+"That's a pretty dress, my dear. I never saw you look better."
+
+"She's really getting pretty," remarked Mrs. Carr. "Cousin Jimmy was
+saying only yesterday that if Gabriella keeps it up, she'll be a better
+looking old lady than Jane."
+
+"Well, I think her a very pretty young one," replied Mrs. Peyton. "She
+hasn't such small features as Jane has, but there is more in her face.
+Now, I'm willing to wager that George thinks her a beauty."
+
+Gabriella laughed happily. "He hasn't the faintest idea what I look
+like, but he declares he won't be a bit disappointed if he finds out
+some day that I am ugly."
+
+The glow of youth, of hope, of love, gave to her expressive face an
+almost unearthly brightness. She seemed to draw to her all that was
+vital and alive in the dim old house, so filled with memories, and in
+the October pageantry of the garden. It was the day of her miracle, and
+against the splendour of the scarlet sage, she shone with an
+unforgettable radiance.
+
+When, a little later, Mrs. Carr, in Cousin Jimmy's buggy, with her bunch
+of chrysanthemums held rigidly in her lap, drove off at an amble to
+Hollywood, and Gabriella, turning to wave her hand, had vanished behind
+the corner of the gray wall, Mrs. Peyton said gently:
+
+"She looked very happy, dear boy. You and I must pray for her
+happiness."
+
+The beauty which all her life she had created through faith awoke in
+Arthur's suffering heart while she spoke to him. She demanded nobility
+of being, and it existed; she exacted generosity of nature, and it was
+there. By her mere presence, by the overflowing love in her heart, she
+not only banished jealousy and envy, but made the very idea of them
+unthinkable.
+
+"She is obliged to be happy. It is her nature," answered Arthur, for his
+disposition was hardly less perfect than his manner.
+
+Crossing Broad Street, which wore its look of Sabbath sleepiness,
+Gabriella hurried on to Hill Street, and saw George waiting for her
+between the two green-painted urns filled with the summer's fading bloom
+of portulaca.
+
+He was staring straight upward at one of the poplar trees, where a gray
+squirrel was playing among the branches, and for several minutes before
+he was aware of her presence, she watched him with her impassioned, yet
+not wholly uncritical, gaze. The sunlight sparkled in his eyes, which
+shone brightly blue against the red brown of his flesh; and between his
+smiling lips, which were thick and somewhat loosely moulded, she saw the
+gleaming whiteness of his teeth. She could not explain--she had never
+even tried to understand--why this face, which was not in the least a
+remarkable one, should so profoundly appeal to her. When George was
+absent, his look haunted her with the intensity of an hallucination;
+when at last she saw it again, she felt that nothing else in the world
+mattered to her, so supreme was the contentment that swept over her.
+Though she was more intelligent than Jane, not even Jane herself had
+surrendered so unconditionally to the primal force. At least Jane had
+made exactions, but so complete was the subjugation of Gabriella that
+she exacted nothing, not even a return of her love. To give was all she
+asked, and in the giving she bloomed into a beauty and fullness of
+nature which Jane's small, closed soul could never attain.
+
+"George!" she called, and went swiftly toward him.
+
+He turned, threw away the cigar in his hand, and held open the gate
+while she entered.
+
+"There's a jolly little beggar up in the poplar," he said; "I've been
+watching him for ten minutes."
+
+Then, as she passed before him into the parlour, he shut the door, and
+catching her in his arms, kissed the back of her neck.
+
+"Oh, George!" she murmured, and her voice was like music. Even to his
+short-sighted vision there was pathos at the heart of her happiness--the
+pathos of ignorance, Of innocence, of the reckless generosity of soul
+that spends its best for the pure joy of spending. With the instinctive
+miserliness of the man who realizes that passion to last must be
+hoarded, not scattered, he had drawn back almost unconsciously from the
+simple abandonment of her love. He wanted her because the deep
+discomfort of his nature could not be satisfied without her; but in
+possessing her he did not mean to give up anything else. Never for an
+instant had he deluded himself with the mystic ecstasies of Gabriella.
+The passion which had changed her whole being as if by a miracle, had
+altered neither his fundamental egoism nor his superficial philosophy.
+He loved her, he knew, as much as it was possible for him to love any
+woman; but he was still able to take a profound and healthy interest in
+his physical comfort. In one thing, however, they were passionately
+agreed, and that was that the aim and end of their marriage was to make
+George perfectly happy.
+
+"You are sweet enough to eat this morning," he said as he kissed her.
+
+"I told Mrs. Peyton that you didn't know whether I was pretty or ugly,"
+she answered merrily.
+
+"It isn't beauty that takes a man, though women think so," he rejoined
+lightly, and yet as if he were imparting one of the basic facts of
+experience. "I don't know what it is--but it's something else, and
+you've got it, Gabriella."
+
+She looked at him with luminous eyes.
+
+"I've got you," she answered in a whisper; "that's all--nothing else on
+earth matters. I want nothing but love."
+
+"But you let me go away for six months. I could never understand that."
+
+"I had to, George. I couldn't be mean even for you, could I?"
+
+"Well, I don't know." His gaze dwelt on her moodily. "Sometimes I wonder
+if you haven't too much conscience in your body?"
+
+Careless as were his words, they brought stinging tears to her eyes. Her
+throat ached with the longing to pour out her love; but it seemed to her
+suddenly that a wall of personality had risen between them, and that she
+could only beat blindly against the impenetrable mass that divided them.
+She knew now that he could never understand, and yet the knowledge of
+this intensified rather than diminished her love. The mere physical
+attraction, which she had glorified into passion, was invested with the
+beauty and the mystery of an unattainable ideal.
+
+"I believe you are going to cry, darling. Don't be so serious," he said,
+laughing.
+
+"But you know--tell me you know that I love you."
+
+"Of course I know it. Am I blind or a fool?"
+
+Then before the glowing worship in her face, he caught her in his arms,
+while he said over and over, "I love you! I love you!"
+
+He held her close, thrilling at her touch, seeking her warm lips with an
+eagerness which comforted her because she was too inexperienced to
+understand how ephemeral was its nature and its sweetness.
+
+"Promise to love me always, George, as you do now," she said,
+passionately trying to make the fugitive joy immortal.
+
+"If you'll tell me how to help it, I shall be grateful," he retorted as
+gaily as if her eyes had not filled with tears.
+
+"Swear it!"
+
+"I swear it. Now, are you satisfied?"
+
+"I don't believe it. I'll never believe that you love me as much as I
+love you. Nobody could."
+
+In his heart he agreed with her. That Gabriella loved him more than he
+loved her was a fact to which he was easily reconciled. He loved her
+quite as much as he could love anybody except himself and be
+comfortable, and if she demanded more, she merely proved herself to be
+an unreasonable person. Women did love more than men, he supposed, but
+what else were they here for? During the six months when he had thought
+that she belonged to another, she had, he told himself, almost driven
+him out of his mind; but possession once assured, he had speedily
+recovered his health and his sanity. Her worship flattered him, and in
+this flattery she had, perhaps, her strongest hold on his heart. Nothing
+in his engagement had pleased him more than the readiness with which she
+had given up her work at his request. He abhorred independence in a
+wife; and Gabriella's immediate and unresisting acquiescence in his
+desire appeared to him to establish the fact of her essential and
+inherent femininity. Had not all laws, as well as all religions,
+proclaimed that woman should be content to lay down not only her life
+but her very identity for love; and that Gabriella was womanly to the
+core of her nature, in spite of her work in Brandywine's millinery
+department, it was impossible to doubt while he kissed her. There were
+times, indeed, when the exaltation of Gabriella's womanliness seemed to
+have left her without a will of her own; when, in a divine submission to
+love, she appeared to exist only for the laudable purpose of making her
+lover happy.
+
+"I'd do anything on earth for you, Gabriella," said George suddenly. "I
+wonder if you would make a sacrifice for me if I asked it?" From his
+face as he looked down on her it was evident that he was not speaking
+from impulse, but that he had seized an opportune moment.
+
+"You know I would, George. I'd give up the whole world for you. I'd beg
+my bread with you by the roadside."
+
+"Well, it isn't so bad as that, darling--it's only about your mother
+coming to us so soon. I've had a letter from home, and it seems that
+father has had losses and can't help me out as he intended to do. He's
+always either losing or making piles of money, so don't bother your
+precious head about that. In six months he'll probably be making piles
+again, but, in the meantime, mother suggests that we should postpone
+taking a house, and come and live with her for a few months."
+
+"I'd rather live on your income, George, no matter how small it is. I'm
+an awfully good manager, and you'd be surprised to see how far I can
+make a little money go. Why can't we take an apartment somewhere in an
+inexpensive neighbourhood--one just big enough for mother and you and
+me?"
+
+"We couldn't live half so well in the first place, and, besides, I'd
+hate like the devil to see you working yourself to death and losing your
+looks. That's just exactly what Patty is doing. She was the family's
+greatest investment, you know. Everything we had for years was spent on
+her because she was such a ripping beauty, and mother set her heart on
+her marrying nothing less than a duke. So we sent her abroad to be
+educated and squandered a fortune on her clothes, and then, just as
+mother was gloating over her triumphs, the very day after the Duke of
+Toxbridge proposed to her, Patty walked out one morning and married
+Billy King at the Little Church Around the Corner. Billy, of course,
+hasn't a cent to his name except what he makes painting blue pictures,
+and that's precious little. They're up on the West Side now, living in
+four rooms with neighbours who fry onions at nine o'clock in the morning
+next door to them, and half the time Patty hasn't even a maid, I
+believe, and has to do her work with the help of a charwoman."
+
+"And is she happy?" There was eagerness in Gabriella's voice, for she
+was sure that she should love Patty.
+
+"Oh, yes, Patty is happy, but mother isn't. It's rough on mother."
+
+"I think she ought to have told your mother before she married."
+
+"Well, Patty thought she could stand the fuss better after she'd done it
+than she could before. She said she needed the support of knowing they
+couldn't stop it. Cheeky, wasn't it?"
+
+"And is she really so beautiful?"
+
+"Ripping," said George; "simply ripping."
+
+"I know I shall love her. Is she dark or fair?"
+
+"I never thought about it, but she's a towering beauty--something
+between dark and fair, I suppose. She has golden hair, you know."
+
+His arm was around her, and lifting her earnest face to his, Gabriella
+began in her softest voice: "I shouldn't mind a bit living like that,
+George--honestly I shouldn't."
+
+"Yes, you would. It would be rotten."
+
+"I wish you would tell me just how much we shall have to live on, dear.
+Even if it is very, very little, it would be so much better not to
+expect anything from your father. If the worst comes to the worst, I can
+always go back to work, you know, and I feel as if I ought to help
+because you are so generous about wanting mother to live with us."
+
+He frowned slightly, while a dark flush rose to his forehead. Already
+Gabriella was learning how dangerously easy it was to irritate George.
+Serious discussions always appeared to disturb him, and at the first
+allusion to the responsibilities he had assumed, she could see the look
+of bored restlessness creep into his face. It was evidently abhorrent to
+him to hear her talk about business; but with her practical nature and
+her fundamental common sense it was impossible that she should be
+content to remain in a fool's paradise of financial mysteries. She had
+only the vaguest idea how he earned a living, and a still vaguer one of
+what that living represented. There was an impression in her mind that
+he worked in his father's office somewhere in Wall Street--he had once
+given her the number--and that he went "downtown" every morning after
+breakfast and did not get home to luncheon. Cousin Jimmy had once told
+her that George's father was a stockbroker, but this information
+conveyed little to her mind. The men she knew in Richmond were lawyers,
+doctors, clergymen, or engaged, like Cousin Jimmy, in the "tobacco
+business," and she supposed that "a stockbroker" must necessarily belong
+to a profession which was restricted to New York. The whole matter was
+hazy in her thoughts, but she hoped in time, by intelligent and tactful
+application, to overcome her ignorance as well as George's deeply rooted
+objection to her enlightenment.
+
+"Well, you see, my income is uncertain, Gabriella. It depends a good
+deal upon the stock market and the sort of stuff we've been buying. Look
+here, darling, don't, for heaven sake, get the business bee in your
+bonnet. A mannish woman is worse than poison, and the less you know
+about stocks the more attractive you will be. Mother has lived for
+thirty years with father, and she doesn't know any more how he makes his
+money than you do at this minute."
+
+This was as lucid, she suspected, as George was ever likely to be on
+the subject, and, since he was becoming visibly annoyed, she abandoned
+her fruitless search for information. After she was married there would
+be time and opportunity to find out all that she wanted to know; and
+even if he never told her anything more--well, she was quite accustomed
+to the masculine habit of never telling women anything more. Her mother
+and Jane were as ignorant of finance as they had been in their cradles;
+Cousin Pussy spoke of the "tobacco business" as if it were a sacred
+mystery superior to the delicate feminine faculties; and while Gabriella
+was engaged to Arthur, he had fallen into the habit of gently reminding
+her that she "knew nothing of law."
+
+"Very well, dearest, I shan't bother you," she said cheerfully, "only,
+of course, I couldn't possibly leave mother with Jane and Charley. She
+doesn't realize it, but she would be perfectly miserable."
+
+"She told me that leaving Richmond was like death to her."
+
+"That's only because she knows she's going," answered Gabriella, but her
+endeavour to explain her mother's habit of mind appeared to her to be so
+hopeless that she added unconvincingly: "You can't imagine how dependent
+she is on me. Jane doesn't know how to manage her at all, though they
+are so much alike."
+
+"Well, of course, if we live at home--"
+
+"But you promised me we'd be to ourselves, George; you can't have
+forgotten it. We talked it over, every bit of it, and I told you in the
+beginning I couldn't leave mother."
+
+"If you loved me enough to marry me, I should think you'd be willing to
+give up your family for me." He spoke doggedly; it was his way to speak
+doggedly when he was driving a point.
+
+"It isn't that, dear, you know it isn't that."
+
+Taking a letter from his pocket, he drew a sheet of blue note paper,
+closely interlined, from the envelope, and handed it to her.
+
+"You can see for yourself how it is," he said in an aggrieved voice. By
+his tone he had managed to put her in the wrong as utterly as if she,
+not he, were trying to break her word. Yet she had told him in the very
+beginning that she could not leave her mother; she had refused to engage
+herself to him until he had offered Mrs. Carr a home with them. It had
+all been carefully arranged at the start, and now, within a month of
+their marriage, he had apparently forgotten that the matter was settled.
+
+Leaning forward until the light fell on the paper, she read with
+trembling lips:
+
+     My Dear Son:
+
+     Your letter was a blow to me because you had said nothing of
+     Gabriella's plan to bring her mother to New York to live with her,
+     and, of course, this makes it out of the question that you should
+     come straight to us. Now that Patty has gone--poor child, I am
+     afraid she will live to repent her rashness--your father and I had
+     quite looked forward to having you young people in the house; but
+     we haven't room, even if I could bring myself to face the prospect
+     of a rival mother-in-law under the same roof with me--and frankly I
+     can't. And your father has simply put his foot down on the idea. As
+     you know he hasn't been very well of late--the doctor says he is
+     threatened with diabetes--so my one thought is to spare him every
+     useless anxiety. He sleeps very badly and doesn't seem able, even
+     at night, to detach his mind from his business worries. If he
+     hadn't had such a bad summer, he might have been able to help you
+     start housekeeping, but there have been a great many failures in
+     the last few months, and he says he is obliged to cut down all his
+     expenses in order to tide over the depression in the market. We are
+     trying to retrench in every possible way, and, for this reason, I
+     fear we shall hardly be able to go down to your wedding. This is a
+     terrible disappointment to us both, and your father is particularly
+     distressed because he will not be able to add to your income this
+     year. Of course, if you should change your mind and decide to come
+     to us, we can get Patty's old room ready for you at once, and turn
+     yours into a sitting-room. Think this over and let me know as soon
+     as you possibly can.
+
+     I see Patty occasionally. She is in high spirits, but looking a
+     little thinner, I think. Billy has painted a portrait of Mrs.
+     Pletheridge, but it isn't a bit flattering, and he wouldn't let her
+     wear her pearls, so I'm afraid she won't buy it. I don't believe he
+     will ever make anything of himself. What a waste when Patty might
+     have been Duchess of Toxbridge. Though I am not a bit worldly, I
+     can't help regretting all that she has lost.
+
+     Your loving mother,
+
+     EVELYN FOWLER.
+
+When she had folded the letter and given it back to him, Gabriella
+dropped her hands in her lap and sat gazing thoughtfully at the square
+of sunlight by the window.
+
+"If you cared as much as I do, you'd be willing to give up your family,"
+he said suddenly, encouraged not only by her manner, which appeared
+yielding, but by his secret ineradicable conviction that her love was
+greater than his. Across the romantic screen of his features there
+flashed a swift change of expression, like the flicker of light on a
+coloured mask. If she could only have looked through the charming
+vacancy of his face, she would have been surprised to discover the
+directness and simplicity of his mental processes. He wanted his way,
+and he meant, provided it was humanly possible, to have whatever he
+wanted.
+
+"It isn't that, George. Love has nothing to do with it. It is a question
+of right."
+
+For a minute he surveyed her moodily; then, rising from her side on the
+sofa, he took two steps to the window and looked up at the boughs of the
+poplar tree. The gray squirrel was still there, and he watched it
+attentively while he pondered his answer. Yes, the whole trouble with
+Gabriella was too much conscience. This conscience of hers had got in
+his way before now, and he had suddenly an uneasy feeling, as if he had
+struck against the vein of iron which lay beneath the rich bloom of her
+passion. The thought of her opposition, of her secret hardness, bitterly
+angered him. He wanted her--no other woman could satisfy him--but he
+wanted her utterly different from what she was. He was seized with an
+indomitable desire to make her over, to change her entirely from that
+Gabriella with whom he had fallen in love. Of course, she was right as
+far as the mere facts of the case were concerned. He had promised that
+her mother should live with them; but he felt indignantly that it was an
+act of disloyalty for her to be right at his expense. She ought to have
+given in, and she ought to have given in gracefully, there was no
+question of that. When a woman loved a man as much as she loved him, it
+was unreasonable of her to let these innumerable little points of fact
+come between them; it was ungenerous of her to cling so stubbornly to
+her advantage. Her very quietness--that look of gentle obstinacy which
+refused either to fight back or to surrender--irritated him almost to
+desperation. His temper, always inflammable, suddenly burst out, and he
+felt that he wanted to shake her. He wanted, indeed, to do anything in
+the world except the sensible thing of walking out of the house and
+leaving her to reflection.
+
+"I should think your first duty would be to your husband," he said,
+while the streak of cruelty which was at the heart of his love showed
+like a livid mark on the surface of his nature. His mind was conscious
+of but a single thought while he stood there in the wind which fluttered
+the curtains and filled the room with the roving scents of October, and
+this was the bitter longing to make Gabriella over into the girl that he
+wanted her to become. Though it cost him her love, he felt that he must
+punish her for being herself.
+
+"Do you mean always to put your mother before me?" he asked
+passionately, after a minute.
+
+Still she did not answer, and in the deep, earnest eyes that she turned
+on him he saw not anger, not sorrow even, but wonder. As he stretched
+out his hand, it fell on Mrs. Carr's window box, where a rose geranium
+remained bright green in the midst of the withered stems of the clove
+pinks, and the scent of the leaves, as he crushed them between his
+fingers, evoked a swift memory of Gabriella in one of her soft moods,
+saying over and over, "I love you! Oh, I do love you!" At the image his
+temper changed as if by magic, and crossing the room, he bent down and
+kissed her with a fierceness that bruised her lips.
+
+"I adore you, Gabriella," he said.
+
+Though she had seen these sudden changes in him before, she had never
+grown wholly used to them. Her deeper nature, with its tranquil
+brightness, untroubled by passing storms, was unprepared for the shallow
+violence which swept over him, leaving no visible trace of its passage.
+No, she could not understand him--she could only hope that after they
+were married the blindness would pass from her love, and she would
+attain that completer knowledge for which she was striving so patiently.
+The transforming miracle of marriage, she trusted, would reveal this
+mystery, with so many others.
+
+"How can you hurt me so, George?" she asked with reproachful tenderness.
+
+"It's because you are so stubborn, darling. If you weren't so stubborn I
+shouldn't do it. Do you know you get almost mulish at times," he added,
+laughing, while she moved nearer and rubbed her cheek softly against his
+sleeve.
+
+"You frighten me," she whispered. "I was just beginning to believe that
+you really meant it."
+
+"Oh, lovers always quarrel. There's nothing in that."
+
+"But I hate to see you angry. It would almost kill me if it lasted
+longer than a minute. Never let it last, will you, George?"
+
+"Of course not, Goosey. It never has lasted, has it?"
+
+"Goosey" was one of his favourite names for her. He liked it because it
+gave him a merry feeling of superiority when he said it, and Gabriella
+liked it for perhaps the same reason. In the first ardour of her
+self-surrender she caught eagerly at any straw that she might cast on
+the flame of her passion.
+
+"And I'm not really stubborn, dear. Tell me that I'm not really
+stubborn."
+
+"You darling! I was only teasing you."
+
+"I'll do anything on earth for you that I can, George."
+
+"I know you will, dearest, and you don't honestly care more for your
+family, do you?"
+
+"I love you better than all the rest of the world put together. There
+are times when I think it must be wrong to love any man as much as I
+love you. My grandmother used to say that when you loved like that you
+'tempted Providence.' Isn't it dreadful to believe that you could tempt
+Providence by loving?"
+
+He kissed her throat where a loosened strand of dark hair had fallen
+against the whiteness.
+
+"Will you do what I ask, Gabriella?"
+
+So it was all to begin over again! He had not really given in, he had
+not really yielded even while he was kissing her. She closed her eyes,
+leaning her head on his shoulder. For a moment she felt as if a physical
+pain were pressing into her forehead.
+
+"Will you do it, Gabriella?" It was as if he put his soul into his
+voice, wooing her tenderly away from her better judgment. He was testing
+his power to dominate her; and never had she felt it so vividly, never
+had her will been so incapable of resisting him as at that instant.
+Moving slightly in his arms she looked at the clear red brown of his
+throat, at his sensitive mouth, with the faint dent in the lower lip, at
+his bright blue eyes, which had grown soft while he pleaded. His
+physical power over her was complete, and he knew it. Her flesh had
+become as soft as flowers in his arms, while her eyes, like dark flames,
+trembled and fell away from his look.
+
+"It isn't only the thing itself, darling, but I don't like you to refuse
+me. It hurts me that you won't do what I ask of you."
+
+"If it were anything else, George."
+
+"But it isn't anything else. It is just that I want you to myself--all
+to myself, after we are married."
+
+"Don't ask me, dearest. If you only knew how it makes me suffer."
+
+Her voice was a caress when she answered, but, as he told himself
+passionately, she had not yielded an inch. Once again he had run against
+the iron hidden under the bloom.
+
+"Then you refuse absolutely?" he asked, and though his voice quivered
+still, it was no longer from tenderness. He hated stubbornness, and,
+most of all, he hated it in the woman who was going to be his wife. A
+life of continual contradiction, he felt, would be intolerable. A strong
+will, which he had always admired in himself, became a positive failing
+in Gabriella. A woman's strength lay, after all, not in force of
+character, but in sweetness of nature. And yet how lovely she was! How
+soft, how sweet she looked as she gazed up at him with her radiant eyes.
+There was a fascination for him in her tall slenderness, in the graceful
+curve of her head, which drooped slightly like a dark flower on its
+stem. Everything about her charmed him, and yet he had never called her
+beautiful in his thoughts.
+
+"I told you how it was, dear, when you first asked me to marry you," she
+said, with infinite patience. "I told you that it wasn't fair to ask you
+to take mother, but that I couldn't possibly leave her alone in her old
+age. Jane's home is wretchedly unhappy--she can never tell when Charley
+is to be counted on--and it would kill mother to be dependent on Charley
+even if he were willing. I see your side, George, indeed, indeed, I do,
+but I can't--I simply can't act differently. I have always known it was
+my duty to look after mother--nothing can change that, not even love.
+She worked for us while we were little, and it is trouble that has made
+her what she is to-day. You must see that I am right, George; you can't
+possibly help it."
+
+But he couldn't see it. If the truth had been twice as evident, if
+Gabriella had been twice as reasonable, he could still have seen only
+his wishes.
+
+"I am only asking you to do what is best for us both, Gabriella."
+
+"But how can it be best for me to become an ungrateful child, George?"
+
+Neither of them wanted to quarrel, yet in a minute the barbed words were
+flying between them; in a minute they faced each other as coldly as if
+they had been strangers instead of adoring lovers. At the last, he
+looked at her an instant in silence while she sat perfectly motionless
+with her deep eyes changing to gold in the sunlight; then, turning on
+his heel, without a word, he left the house, and walked rapidly over the
+coloured leaves on the pavement. As he passed under the poplar tree the
+gray squirrel darted gaily along a bough over his head, but he did not
+look up, and a minute later Gabriella saw him cross the street and
+vanish beyond the pointed yew tree in the yard at the corner.
+
+"I wonder if this is the end?" she thought bitterly, and she knew that
+even if it were the end, that even if she died of it, she could never
+give way. Something stronger than herself--that vein of iron in her
+soul--would not bend, would not break though every fibre of her being
+struggled against it. All the happiness of her life vanished with George
+as he passed beyond the yew tree at the corner, yet she sat there with
+her hands still folded, her lips still firm, watching the tree long
+after its pointed dusk had hidden her lover's figure. Had she followed
+her desire as lightly as George followed his, she would have run after
+him as he disappeared, and bringing him back to the room he had left,
+dissolved in tears on his breast. She longed to do this, but the vein of
+iron held her firm in spite of herself. She could not move toward him,
+she could not even have put out her hand had he entered.
+
+The bell rang, and her blood drummed in her ears; but it was only Cousin
+Jimmy bringing Mrs. Carr back from the cemetery. Hearty, deep-chested,
+meticulously brushed and groomed, he wore his Sunday frock with an
+unnatural stiffness, as if he were still hearing Pussy's parting warning
+to be "careful about his clothes." His dark hair, trained for twenty
+years from a side parting, shone with the lustre of satin, and his
+shining eyes, so like the eyes of adventurous youth, wore their
+accustomed Sabbath look of veiled and ashamed sleepiness.
+
+"So you're going to take the old lady to New York with you, Gabriella?"
+
+"I can't bear to think of it, Cousin Jimmy," remarked Mrs. Carr, while
+she adjusted her crape veil over the back of her chair. "I don't see how
+I can stand living in the North."
+
+"Well, what about our friend Charley? Do you think you could get on any
+better with Charley for a son-in-law?"
+
+"You oughtn't to joke about it, Cousin Jimmy. It is too serious for
+joking."
+
+"I beg your pardon, Cousin Fanny--but where is George, Gabriella? I
+thought he was to meet you here."
+
+"He had to go just before you came. Don't you think mother is looking
+well?"
+
+"As well as I ever saw her. I was telling her so as we drove back from
+Hollywood. All she needs is to leave off moping for a while and she'd
+lose ten years of her age. Why, I tell you if it were I, I'd jump at the
+chance to go to New York for a few years. If there wasn't a single thing
+there except the theatres, I'd jump at it. You can go to a different
+show every night of your life, Cousin Fanny."
+
+"I have never been inside of a theatre in my life. You ought to know me
+better than to think it," replied Mrs. Carr, while the corners of her
+mouth drooped. She had laid her bag of grosgrain silk on the table at
+her elbow, and untying the strings of her bonnet, she neatly rolled them
+into two tight little wads which she fastened with jet-headed pins.
+
+"You make her go, honey, when you get hold of her," said Jimmy to
+Gabriella in a sympathetic aside "What she needs is bracing up--I was
+saying so to Pussy only this morning. 'If you could just brace up Cousin
+Fanny, she'd be as well as you or I,' was what I said to her Now I don't
+believe there's a better place on earth to brace a body up than old New
+York. I remember I took my poor old father there just a month or two
+before his last illness, when he was getting over a spell of lumbago,
+and it worked on him like magic. We stayed at the Fifth Avenue
+Hotel--you must be sure to get a dinner at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,
+Cousin Fanny--and went to a show every blessed night for a week. It made
+the old man young again, upon my word it did, and he was still talking
+about it when he came down with his last illness. Well, I must be going
+home to Pussy now. The boys and I went out squirrel hunting yesterday,
+and Pussy promised me Brunswick stew for dinner. Now, don't you forget
+to brace up, Cousin Fanny. That's all on earth you need. The world ain't
+such a bad place, after all, when you sit down and think right hard
+about it."
+
+He went out gaily, followed by Mrs. Carr's accusing eyes to the hatrack,
+where he stopped to take his glossy silk hat from a peg. Turning in the
+buggy as he drove off, he waved merrily back at them with the whip
+before he touched the fat flanks of his gray.
+
+"Cousin Jimmy means well, but he has a most unfortunate manner at
+times," observed Mrs. Carr.
+
+"What is the matter, Gabriella? Have you a headache?"
+
+"Oh, no, but the sunshine is so strong."
+
+"Then you'd better lower the shade. Why, what in the world has happened
+to my rose geranium? I was just going to pot it for the winter."
+
+"I'm sure it isn't hurt, mother. George broke the leaves when he was
+looking out of the window."
+
+"I thought he was going to stay for dinner. Did you make the jelly and
+syllabub?"
+
+"I made it, but he wouldn't stay."
+
+"Well, we'll send some upstairs to Miss Jemima. Do you know she had to
+have the doctor this morning? I met him as I was going out, and he said
+he was sorry to hear I was going to leave Richmond. I can't imagine
+where on earth he could have heard it, for I haven't mentioned it to a
+soul except Lydia Peyton. Yes, I believe I did speak of it to Bessie
+Spencer at the meeting of the Ladies' Aid Society the other day. Where
+are you going, Gabriella? Would you mind putting my bonnet in the
+bandbox?"
+
+No, Gabriella wouldn't mind, and taking the folds of crape in her arms,
+she went to get the green paper bandbox out of the closet. Though she
+had sacrificed her happiness for her mother, she felt that it would be
+impossible for her to listen with a smiling face to her innocent
+prattle.
+
+In the afternoon, when Mrs. Carr, with a small and inconspicuous basket
+in her hand, had set out on her Sunday visit to the Old Ladies' Home,
+and Marthy, attired in an apron with an embroidered bib, had taken the
+jelly and syllabub upstairs to Miss Jemima, Gabriella sat down in her
+mother's rocking-chair by the window, and tried desperately to be
+philosophical. The sound of the old maids from the floor above
+descending on their way to a funeral disturbed her for a minute, and she
+thought with an extraordinary clearness, "That is what my life will be
+if George never comes back. That is what it means to be old." And there
+was a morbid pleasure in pressing this thought, like a pointed weapon,
+into her heart. "That is all there will be for me--that will be my
+life," she went on after an instant of throbbing anguish. "I had no
+right to think of marriage with mother dependent on me, and the best
+thing for me to do is to start again with Mr. Brandywine. George was
+right in a way. Yes, it is hard on him, and I was wrong ever to think of
+it--ever to let him fall in love with me." The mere thought that George
+was right in a way gave her singular comfort, and while she dwelt on it,
+the discovery seemed to throw a vivid light on the cause of the quarrel.
+Of course, she had expected too much of him. It was natural that he
+should not want to be burdened with her family. What she had looked upon
+as selfishness was only the natural instinct of a man in love with a
+woman. He had said that he wanted her to himself, and to want her to
+himself appeared now to be the most reasonable desire in the world.
+
+Yes, she had acquitted George; but, in acquitting him, it was
+characteristic of her that she should not have yielded an inch of her
+ground. She drew comfort from declaring him innocent, but it was the
+tragic comfort of one who blesses while she renounces. George's
+blamelessness did not alter in the least her determination to cling to
+her mother.
+
+The afternoon wore on; the soft golden light on the pavement was dappled
+with shadows; and the wind, blowing over the iron urns in the yard,
+scattered the withered leaves of portulaca over the grass. Though the
+summer still lingered, and flowers were blooming behind the fences along
+the street, the faint violet haze of autumn was creeping slowly over the
+sunshine. Now and then an acquaintance, returning from afternoon
+service, looked up to bow to her, and while the daylight was still
+strong, Marthy, resplendent in Sunday raiment, came out of the little
+green gate at the side of the yard and passed, mincing, in the direction
+of the negro church. Then the door opened slowly, and the two old maids
+came in and stopped for a minute at the parlour door to see if Gabriella
+"had company."
+
+"Such a lovely evening, my dear"--they never used the word
+afternoon--"we went all the way to the cemetery. She was buried in her
+grandfather's lot, you know, in the old part up on the hill. It was a
+beautiful drive, but Amelia and I couldn't help thinking of the poor
+young thing all the time."
+
+It was Miss Jemima who had spoken, and her kind, plain face, all puffs
+and pleasant wrinkles, had not yet relaxed from the unnatural solemnity
+it had worn at the funeral. She was seldom grave, and never despondent,
+though to Gabriella she appeared to lead an unendurable life. Unlike
+Miss Amelia, she had not even a happy youth and a lover to look back
+upon; she had nothing, indeed, except her unfailing goodness and
+patience to support her.
+
+"I don't like to see you alone, honey," she said, untying the strings of
+her black silk bonnet, which fitted her cheerful features like a frame.
+"If the doctor hadn't told me to go to bed as soon as I came in, we'd
+sit a while with you for company."
+
+She felt that it was morbid and unnatural in Gabriella to sit alone in a
+dim room when there were so many young people out in the streets. "You
+mark my words, there's some reason back of Gabriella's moping all by
+herself," she remarked to Miss Amelia as she took off her "things" a few
+minutes later. "It wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear that she'd had a
+fuss with her sweetheart."
+
+"I declare, sister Jemima, you are too sentimental to live," observed
+Miss Amelia as she filled the tea kettle on the fender "Anybody would
+think to hear you talk that there was nothing in life except making
+love."
+
+"Well, there isn't anything else so interesting when you're young. You
+used to think so yourself, sister Amelia."
+
+Standing gaunt and black, with the tea kettle held out stiffly before
+her, Miss Amelia turned her tragic face on her sister.
+
+"Well, I reckon you don't know much about it," she responded with the
+unconscious cruelty of age. Having been once the victim of a great
+passion, she had developed at last into an uncompromising realist,
+wholly devoid of sentimentality, while Miss Jemima, lacking experience,
+had enveloped the unknown in a rosy veil of illusion.
+
+"You don't have to know a thing to think about it, sister Amelia,"
+replied the invalid timidly as she put on her flannel wrapper and
+fastened it with a safety pin at the throat.
+
+"Well, I reckon it's all right for a girl like Gabriella," said Miss
+Amelia crushingly, "but when you look back on it from my age, you'll
+know it isn't worth a row of pins in a life."
+
+And beside the window downstairs Gabriella was thinking passionately:
+"Shall I ever grow old? Is it possible that I shall ever grow old like
+that?"
+
+With the bare question, terror seized her--the terror of growing old
+without George, the terror of dying before she had known the full beauty
+of life. Looking ahead of her at the years empty of love, she saw them
+like a gray road, leaf strewn, wind swept, deserted, and herself
+creeping through them, as bent, as wrinkled, as disillusioned, as Miss
+Amelia. The very image of a life without love was intolerable to her
+since she had known George--for love meant George, and only George, in
+her thoughts. That she could ever be happy again, ever take a natural
+pleasure in life if she lost him, was unimaginable to her at the
+instant. She loved him, she had loved him from the first moment she saw
+him, she would never, though she lived a million years, love any one
+else. It was as absurd to think that she could love again as that a
+flower could bloom afresh when its petals were withered. No, without
+George there was only loveless old age--there was only the future of
+Miss Amelia before her. And she clung to this idea with a horror which
+Miss Amelia, who seldom reflected that she was loveless and by no means
+considered herself an object of pity, would have despised.
+
+"I have no right to marry George, and yet if I don't marry him I shall
+be miserable all my life," she told herself with a sensation of panic.
+It would be so long, the rest of her life, and without George it was as
+desolate as the gray road of her vision. All the beauties of the
+universe, all the miracles of hope, of youth, of spring; her health, her
+intellect, her capacity for work and for taking pleasure in little
+things--all these were as nothing to her if she lost George out of her
+life. "I oughtn't to marry him," she repeated, "but if I don't marry him
+I shall be miserable every minute until I die."
+
+Then a terror more awful than any she had yet suffered clutched at her
+heart. Suppose he should never come back! Suppose he had really meant to
+leave her for good! Suppose he had ceased to love her since he went out
+of the house! The possibility was so agonizing that she rose blindly
+from her chair and turned from the window as if the quiet street, filled
+with the dreamy sunshine of October, had offered an appalling, an
+unbelievable sight to her eyes. If he had ceased to love her, she was
+helpless; and this sense of helplessness awoke a feeling of rage in her
+heart. If he did not come back, she could never go after him. She could
+only sit and wait until she grew as old and as ugly as Miss Amelia.
+While the minutes, which seemed hours, dragged away, she wept the
+bitterest tears of her life--tears not of wounded love, but of anger
+because she could do nothing but wait.
+
+While she wept the bell rang. When she did not answer it, it rang again,
+and after an interminable pause the footsteps of Miss Amelia were heard
+descending the stairs. Then the door opened and shut, the footsteps
+began their slow ascent of the stairs, and after an eternity of silence,
+she knew that George had entered the room.
+
+Wiping her eyes on the ruffle of the sofa pillow, she sat up and faced
+him, while her pride hardened again.
+
+"Gabriella, I have come back."
+
+"I see you have," she answered coldly, and choked over a sob.
+
+"What are you crying about, Gabriella?"
+
+"I--I have a headache."
+
+"Have you thought about me at all to-day?"
+
+"A little."
+
+He laughed softly, the laugh of a conqueror.
+
+"I'm glad at least that I didn't give you the headache."
+
+"You didn't. I had it anyway."
+
+He was radiant, he was as fresh as the wind. Never in his life had he
+looked so gay, so handsome, so kind. His blue eyes were brimming with
+light. The mere fact of being alive appeared to fill him with ecstasy.
+And she loved him for his gaiety, for his lightness, for the ease with
+which he took for granted her unchangeable love. She longed with all her
+soul and body to prove this love by a surrender more complete than any
+she had made in the past. She longed to say: "I am yours to do with as
+you please, and nothing in the universe matters but you and my love for
+you." The very core of her nature longed to say this to him; but her
+indomitable pride, which even passion could not overcome, kept her
+sitting there in silence while she felt that her heart was bursting with
+happiness.
+
+"Have you thought it over, Gabriella?"
+
+She nodded. To save her life, she felt, she could not utter a word
+without sobbing.
+
+"And you have absolutely and finally decided to have your way?"
+
+This time she shook her head, but the tears fell on her cheeks and she
+did not brush them away. From his voice she knew that she had triumphed,
+but there was no delight in the knowledge. She did not want to triumph;
+she wanted only to yield to him and to make him happy by yielding.
+
+"O George!" she cried suddenly, and held out her arms to him.
+
+As he looked down at her his expression changed suddenly to one of
+intense sadness. From his face, which had grown pale, he might have been
+contemplating the Eternal Verities, though, in reality, he was
+considering nothing more exalted than the dreary prospect of a lifetime
+spent in the society of Mrs. Carr.
+
+Then, as Gabriella enfolded him, he laughed softly. He had given in, but
+he knew in the very instant of his defeat that he should some day turn
+it to victory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE NEW WORLD
+
+
+Gabriella stood in front of the station, ecstatically watching George
+while he struggled for a cab. In the pale beams of the early sunshine
+her face looked young, flushed, and expectant, as if she had just
+awakened from sleep, and her eyes, following her husband, were the happy
+eyes of a bride. She wore a new dress of blue broadcloth, passionately
+overtrimmed by Miss Polly Hatch; on her head a blue velvet toque from
+Brandywine's millinery department rested as lightly as a benediction;
+and her hands clasped Arthur's wedding present, a bag of alligator skin
+bearing her initials in gold. One blissful month ago she and George had
+been married, and now, on the reluctant return from a camp in the
+Adirondacks, they were confronting the disillusioning actuality of the
+New York streets at eight o'clock in the morning. While Gabriella
+waited, shivering a a little, for the air was sharp and her broadcloth
+dress was not warm, she amused herself planning a future which appeared
+to consist of inexhaustible happiness. And mingling with her dreams
+there were divine memories of the last month and of her marriage. After
+that one quarrel George, she told herself, had been "simply perfect."
+His manner to her mother had been beautiful; he had been as eager as
+Gabriella to obliterate all memory of the difference between them,
+though, of course, after his yielding that supreme point she had felt
+that she must give up everything else--and the giving up had been
+rapture. He had shown not the faintest disposition to crow over her when
+at last, after consulting Mrs. Carr, she had told him that her mother
+really preferred to stay with Jane until summer, though he had remarked
+with evident relief: "Then we'll put off looking for an apartment. It's
+easier to find one in the summer anyway, and in the meantime you can
+talk it over with mother."
+
+After this everything had gone so smoothly, so exquisitely, that it was
+more like a dream than like actual life when she looked back on it. She
+saw herself in the floating lace veil of her grandmother, holding white
+roses in her hand, and she saw George's face--the face of her dreams
+come true--looking at her out of a starry mist, while in the shining
+wilderness that surrounded them she heard an organ playing softly "The
+Voice That Breathed O'er Eden." Then the going away! The good-byes at
+the station in Richmond; her mother's face, pathetic and drawn against
+the folds of her crape veil; Cousin Jimmy, crimson and jovial; Florrie's
+violent waving as the train moved away; Miss Jemima, with her smiling,
+pain-tortured eyes, flinging a handful of rice; the last glimpse of
+them; the slowly vanishing streets, where the few pedestrians stopped to
+look after the cars; the park where she had played as a child; the
+brilliant flower-beds filled with an autumnal bloom of scarlet cannas;
+the white-aproned negro nurses and the gaily decorated perambulators;
+the clustering church spires against a sky of pure azure; the negro
+hovels, with frost-blighted sunflowers dropping brown seeds over the
+paling fences; the rosy haze of it all; and her heart saying over and
+over, "There is nothing but love in the world! There is nothing but love
+in the world!"
+
+"I've got a cab--the last one," said George, pushing his way through the
+crowd, and laying his hand on her arm with a possessive and
+authoritative touch. "Let me put you in, and then I'll speak to the
+driver."
+
+As he gave the address she watched him, still fascinated with the
+delicious strangeness of it all. It was like an adventure to have George
+whisk her so peremptorily into a cab, and then stand with his foot on
+the step while he curtly directed the driver. Nothing could surpass the
+romance--the supreme exciting romance of life. Every minute was an
+event; every act of George's was as thrilling as a moment in melodrama.
+And as they drove through the streets, over the pale bands of sunshine,
+she had a sense of lightness and wonder, as if she were driving in a
+world of magic toward ineffable happiness.
+
+"Isn't it strange to be here together, George?" she said. "I can hardly
+believe it." But in her heart she was thinking: "I shall never want
+anything but love in my life. If I have George I shall never want
+anything else." The bedraggled, slatternly figures of the women sweeping
+the pavements in the cross-street through which they were driving filled
+her with a fugitive sadness, so faint, so pale that it hardly dimmed the
+serene brightness of her mood. "I wish they were all as happy as I am,"
+she thought; "and they might be if they only knew the secret of
+happiness. If they only knew that nothing in the world matters when one
+has love in one's heart."
+
+"You'll believe it soon enough when we turn into Fifth Avenue," replied
+George, glancing with disgust out of the window. A month of intimacy had
+increased the power of his smile over her senses, and when he turned to
+her again after a minute, she felt something of the faint delicious
+tremor of their first meeting. Already she was beginning to discover
+that beyond his expressive eyes he had really very little of importance
+to express, that his prolonged silences covered poverty of ideas rather
+than abundance of feeling, that his limited vocabulary was due less to
+reticence than to the simple inarticulateness of the primitive mind.
+Through the golden glamour of her honeymoon there had loomed suddenly
+the discovery that George was not clever--but cleverness mattered so
+little, she told herself, as long as he loved her.
+
+"I hope your mother will like me," she said nervously after a minute.
+
+"I'll be sorry for her if she doesn't."
+
+"Do I look nice?"
+
+"Of course you do. I never saw you when you didn't."
+
+"I feel so dreadfully untidy. I never tried to dress in a sleeping-car
+before."
+
+"It did rock, didn't it?"
+
+"I'll never travel again at night if I can help it. There's a cinder in
+your eye; let me get it out for you." It thrilled her pleasantly to
+remove the cinder with the corner of her handkerchief, and to order him
+to sit still whenever the cab jolted. It was incredibly young,
+incredibly foolish, but it was all a part of the wonderful enchantment
+in which she moved. The cinder had made an agreeable episode, but when
+it had been removed there was nothing more for them to talk about. In
+four weeks of daily and hourly companionship they had said very easily,
+Gabriella had found, everything they had longed so passionately to say
+to each other. It was strange--it was positively astounding how soon
+they had talked themselves empty of ideas and fallen back upon
+repetition and ejaculation. Before her marriage she had thought that a
+lifetime would be too short to hold the full richness of their
+confidences; and yet now, after a month, though they still made love,
+they had ceased, almost with relief, to make conversation.
+
+After turning into Fifth Avenue they drove for ages between depressing
+examples in brownstone of an architecture which, like George, was trying
+rather vaguely to express nothing; and then rolling heavily into
+Fifty-seventh Street stopped presently before one of the solemn houses
+which stood, in the dignity of utter ugliness, midway of a long block.
+"They are all so alike I don't see how I shall ever know where I live,"
+thought Gabriella. Then, as George helped her out of the cab, the door
+opened as if by magic, and beyond the solemn manservant she saw the
+short, stout figure of a lady in a tightly fitting morning gown of black
+silk. Hurrying up the steps, she was pressed against a large smooth
+bosom which yielded as little as if it had been upholstered in leather.
+
+"My dear daughter! my dear Gabriella!" exclaimed the lady in a charming
+voice; and looking down after the first kiss, Gabriella saw a handsome,
+slightly florid face, with the vivacious smile of a girl and a beautiful
+forehead under a stiffly crimped arch of gray hair which looked as hard
+and bright as silver.
+
+"I've been up since seven o'clock waiting for you. You must be
+famished. Come straight in to breakfast. Your father is already at the
+table, George. Poor man, he has to start downtown so dreadfully early."
+
+Bright, effusive, vivacious, and as emphatically Southern as if she had
+never left Franklin Street, Mrs. Fowler took off Gabriella's hat and
+coat, kissed her several times while she was doing so, and at last,
+still talking animatedly, led them into the dining-room.
+
+"Archibald, here they are," she said in a tone of unaffected delight,
+while a thin, serious-looking man, with anxious eyes, pale, aristocratic
+features, and skin that had a curious parchment-like texture, put down
+the _Times_, and came forward to meet them. Though he did not speak as
+he kissed her, Gabriella felt that there was sincere, if detached,
+friendliness in his little pat on her shoulder. He led her almost
+tenderly to her chair; and as soon as she was comfortably seated and
+supplied with rolls and bacon, resigned her contentedly to his wife and
+the butler. His manner of gentle abstraction, which Gabriella attributed
+first to something he had just read in the newspaper, she presently
+discovered to be his habitual attitude toward all the world except Wall
+Street. He ate his breakfast as if his attention were somewhere else; he
+spoke to his son and his daughter-in-law kindly, but as if he were not
+thinking about them; he treated his wife, whom he adored, as if he had
+not clearly perceived her. In the profound abstraction in which he lived
+every impression appeared to have become blurred except the tremendous
+impression of whirling forces; every detail seemed to have been obscured
+except the gigantic details of "Business." His manner was perfectly
+well-bred, but it was the manner of a man who moves through life
+rehearsing a part of which he barely remembers the words. From the
+first minute it was evident to Gabriella that her father-in-law adored
+his wife as an ideal, though he seemed scarcely aware of her as a
+person. He had given her his love, but his interests, his energies, his
+attention were elsewhere.
+
+"Is that the way George will treat me--as if I were only a dream woman?"
+thought Gabriella while she watched her father-in-law over the open
+sheet of the _Times_. Then, with her eyes on her husband, she realized
+that he was of his mother's blood, not his father's. Business could
+never absorb him. His restlessness, his instability, his love of
+pleasure, would prevent the sapping of his nature by one supreme
+interest.
+
+The table, like everything else in the room, was solid, heavy, and
+expensive. On the floor a heavy and expensive carpet, with a pattern in
+squares, stretched to the heavy and expensive moulding which bordered a
+heavy and expensive paper. Mrs. Fowler's taste, like Jimmy's (he was her
+third cousin), leaned apparently toward embossment, for behind a massive
+repoussé silver service she sat, as handsome and substantial as the
+room, with her face flushing in splotches from the heat of her coffee.
+
+Some twenty-odd years before the house had been furnished at great cost,
+according to the opulent taste of the early 'seventies, and, unchanged
+by severer and more frugal fashions, it remained a solid monument to the
+first great financial deal of Archibald Fowler. It was at the golden
+age, when, still young and energetic, luck had come to him in a day,
+that he had bought the brownstone house in Fifty-seventh Street, and his
+wife, also young and energetic, had gone out "to get whatever she
+liked." Trained in a simple school during the war, and brought up in the
+formal purity of high-ceiled rooms furnished in Chippendale and
+Sheraton, her natural tastes were, nevertheless, as ornate as the
+interiors of the New York shops. Though the blood of colonial heroes ran
+in her veins, she was still the child of her age, and her age prided
+itself upon being entirely modern in all things from religion to
+furniture.
+
+As she sat there behind the mammoth coffee urn, from which a spiral of
+steam floated, her handsome face irradiated the spirit of kindness.
+Because of her rather short figure, she appeared at her best when she
+was sitting, and now, with her large, tightly laced hips hidden beneath
+the table and her firm, jet-plastered bosom appearing above it, she
+presented a picture of calm and matronly beauty. Not once did she seem
+to think of herself or her own breakfast. Even while she buttered her
+toast and drank her steaming coffee, her bright blue eyes travelled
+unceasingly over the table, first to her husband's plate, then to
+Gabriella's, then to her son's. It was easy to see that she was the
+dominant and vital force in the household. She ruled Archibald, less
+indirectly perhaps, but quite as consistently as Cousin Pussy ruled
+Cousin Jimmy.
+
+"My dear, you must eat your breakfast," she said urgently to her
+daughter-in-law. "Archibald, let me give you your second cup of coffee.
+Remember what a trying day you have before you, and make a good
+breakfast. It is so hard to get him to eat," she explained to Gabriella;
+"I have to coax him to drink his two cups of coffee, for if he doesn't
+he is sure to come home with a headache."
+
+"Well, give me a cup, Evelyn," replied Mr. Fowler, in his gentle voice,
+yielding apparently to please her. In his youth he must have been very
+handsome, Gabriella thought; but now, though he still retained a certain
+distinction, he had the look of a man who has been drained of his
+vitality. What surprised her--for she had heard him described as "a hard
+man in business"--was the suggestion of the scholar in his appearance.
+With his narrow, carefully brushed head, his dreamy and rather wistful
+blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses, his stooping, slender shoulders,
+and his long, delicate hands covered with prominent veins, he ought to
+have been either a poet or a philosopher.
+
+"You must be happy with us, my dear," he had said to Gabriella, showing
+a minute later such gentle eagerness to return to a part of the
+newspaper which Gabriella had never read and did not understand, that
+his wife remarked pityingly: "Read your paper, Archibald, and don't let
+our chatter disturb you. There are a thousand things I want to say to
+the children."
+
+"Well, it's time for me to be going, Evelyn," Mr. Fowler responded,
+reluctantly folding the pages; "I'll look into this on the way down."
+
+"Remember, dear, that Judge Crowborough is coming to dinner."
+
+"I'll remember. Is there any one else?"
+
+"Mrs. Crowborough, of course, and Colonel Buffington, and one or two
+others. Nobody that you will care for except the judge and Patty and
+Billy."
+
+"I shan't forget, but I may be a little late getting home. Good-bye, my
+dear, until evening."
+
+Bending over her chair, he kissed her flushed cheek, while George
+remarked carelessly: "I'll see you later, father, when I've had a bath
+and a shave."
+
+After the gentle tones of Mr. Fowler, the vitality of George's voice
+sounded almost brutal, and he added just as carelessly when the front
+door had shut softly: "The old man looks seedy, doesn't he, mother?"
+
+A worried look brought out three startling lines in Mrs. Fowler's
+forehead, and Gabriella observed suddenly that there were tiny crow's
+feet around her blue eyes where the whites were flecked ever so faintly
+with yellow. Though she was well into the mid-fifties, her carefully
+preserved skin had kept the firmness and the texture of youth, and she
+still flushed easily and unbecomingly as she had done as a girl.
+
+"He hasn't been a bit well, George. I am very anxious about him. You
+know when he worries over his business, he doesn't eat his meals, and as
+soon as he stops eating he begins to have nervous dyspepsia. He has just
+had a bad attack; that's why he looks so run down and haggard."
+
+"Can't the doctor do anything for him?"
+
+"He gave him some drops, but it is so hard to get your father to take
+medicine. Rest is what he needs, and, of course, that is out of the
+question while things are so unsettled. You must help him all you can,
+my boy, and Gabriella and I will manage with each other's company."
+
+Her bright smile was still on her lips, but Gabriella noticed that she
+pushed her buttered roll away as if she were choking.
+
+In the early afternoon, when George had gone to join his father in the
+office, and Gabriella, seated at a little white and gold desk in the
+room which had been Patty's, was just finishing a letter to her mother,
+Mrs. Fowler came in, and pushing a chintz-covered chair close to the
+desk, sank into it and laid her small nervous hand on the arm of her
+daughter-in-law. She was wearing a velvet bonnet, with strings, and a
+street gown of black broadcloth, which fitted her like a glove and
+accentuated, after the fashion of the 'nineties, her small, compact
+waist and the deep substantial curves of her bosom and hips. Her eyes,
+behind the little veil of spotted tulle which reached to the tip of her
+nose, were bright and wistful, and though her colour was too high, a
+smile of troubled sweetness lent it a peculiar charm of expression.
+
+"How nice you look, my dear," she said, with her pleasant manner, which
+no anxiety, hardly any grief, could dispel. "Are you very busy, or may I
+talk to you a little while?"
+
+Drawing closer to her, Gabriella raised the plump little hand to her
+lips. Beneath the surface pleasantness of Mrs. Fowler's life--that
+pleasantness which wrapped her like a religion--she was beginning to
+discern a deep disquietude.
+
+"I want to talk to you, mamma," she said, and her manner was a caress.
+
+"You love George very much, dear?" asked Mrs. Fowler so suddenly that
+Gabriella looked at her startled.
+
+For a minute the girl could not speak. "Oh, yes; oh, yes," she answered
+presently, and choked over the words.
+
+"We wanted so much to go to your wedding--we were afraid you would think
+it strange that we stayed away, but Archibald had his attack just then,
+and on top of it he was terribly worried about his affairs. We have had
+a very hard year, and we feel so sorry, both of us, that we can't do
+more for your pleasure. As it is, we are cutting down our expenses in
+every way, and I have even decided to give up my carriage the first of
+next year.
+
+"I know, I know," said Gabriella, who had never had a carriage, and to
+whom the giving up of one seemed the smallest imaginable sacrifice. "We
+mustn't add to your cares," she went on after a minute. "Wouldn't it be
+better, really better, if we were to take an apartment at once instead
+of waiting until June?"
+
+"Until June?" repeated Mrs. Fowler vaguely, and she added quickly: "It
+is the greatest pleasure to have you here. Since Patty went I get so
+terribly lonely, and I don't think it would be at all wise for you to go
+to yourselves. George has hardly anything except what his father is able
+to give him, you know. The poor boy hasn't the least head for business."
+
+"But we shouldn't need much. I am sure I could manage just with what
+George makes--no matter how little it is."
+
+For an instant Mrs. Fowler looked at her thoughtfully.
+
+"You could, but George couldn't," she answered.
+
+"You mean he is extravagant?"
+
+"He has never had the slightest idea of the value of money--that is one
+of the things you must teach him. He is a dear boy, but he has never
+made a success of anything he has undertaken, and his father thinks he
+is too unpractical ever to do so. But you must try to get him to live
+within your means, my dear, or you will both be miserable. Try to keep
+him from borrowing."
+
+"But he refuses to talk to me about his work. It bores him," said
+Gabriella; and her simple soul, trained to regard debt as a deeper
+disgrace than poverty, grew suddenly troubled. In her childhood they had
+gone without food rather than borrow, she remembered.
+
+"The matter with dear George," pursued Mrs. Fowler--and from the
+sweetness of her manner she might have been paying him a compliment--"is
+that he has never been steady. He doesn't stick at anything long enough
+to make it a success. If he were left to himself he would speculate
+wildly, and this is why his father is obliged to overlook all that he
+does in the office. It is just here that you can be of such wonderful
+help to him, Gabriella, by your influence. This is why I am telling
+you."
+
+But had she any influence over him? In spite of his passion for her had
+she ever turned him by so much as a hair's breadth from the direction of
+his impetuous desires? Once only she had withstood him--once only she
+had triumphed, and for that triumph she had paid by a complete
+surrender! She had been too glad to yield, too fearful of bringing a
+cloud over the sunny blue of his eyes.
+
+"I want to help him--I want you to tell me how I can help him," she said
+earnestly. "While we are with you this winter, you must teach me how to
+do it. Before we begin housekeeping in the summer, I want to learn all I
+possibly can about George's affairs. He won't talk to me about practical
+matters, so you must do it."
+
+"But where are you going, Gabriella? I thought you had decided to live
+with us?"
+
+"But didn't George tell you? Surely he must have told you. We are to
+take an apartment in June so my mother can come to us. I felt, of
+course, that I couldn't leave mother, and George understands. He was
+perfectly lovely about it."
+
+"I see, I see," murmured Mrs. Fowler, as if she were thinking of
+something else. "Well, that will all come right, dear, I hope."
+
+Rising abruptly, she began to draw on her gloves. "If you only knew how
+I long to make you happy," she said softly; "as happy as I have been
+with George's father."
+
+"They are so unlike," answered Gabriella, and the next day when she
+remembered the admission, she wondered how it had slipped from her.
+
+"Yes, they are unlike," agreed Mrs. Fowler. "George takes after me, and
+I am a frivolous person. But there doesn't live a better man than my
+husband," she added, glowing. "I've been his wife for thirty years, and
+in all that time I don't believe he has ever thought first of himself.
+Yes, it was thirty years ago that I drove through the streets with my
+bridal veil on, and felt so sorry for all the girls I saw who were not
+going to be married. To-day I feel exactly the same way--sorry for all
+the women who couldn't have Archibald for a husband. I've lived with him
+thirty years, I've borne him children, and I'm still sorry for all the
+other women--even for you, Gabriella."
+
+"He seems so kind," said Gabriella; "I felt that about him, and it's the
+best thing, after all, isn't it?" It was the best thing, and yet she
+knew that George was not kind--that he was not even good-tempered.
+
+"Yes, it's the best thing, after all, in marriage," answered the older
+woman; "it's the thing that wears."
+
+"I have always wanted the best of life," rejoined Gabriella
+thoughtfully; and she went on gravely after a moment: "I couldn't love
+George any more than I do, but I wish that in some ways he would grow
+like his father."
+
+"The boy has a very sweet nature," replied George's mother, "and I hope
+marriage will steady him." It was a warning, Gabriella knew, and she
+wondered afterwards if her silent acquiescence in Mrs. Fowler's judgment
+had not been furtive disloyalty to George.
+
+"A great deal will depend on you, dear, for he is very much in love,"
+resumed Mrs. Fowler when Gabriella did not speak, and she repeated very
+solemnly, "I hope marriage will steady him."
+
+In her heart Gabriella was hoping so, too, but all she said was, "I
+promise you that I will do all I can." She had given her word, and,
+looking into her eyes, Mrs. Fowler understood that her daughter-in-law
+was not one to give her word lightly. Gabriella would keep her promise.
+She would do her best, whatever happened.
+
+The older woman, with her life's history behind her, watched the girl
+for a minute in silence. There was so much that she longed to say, so
+much that could never be spoken even between women. She herself was an
+optimist, but her optimism had been wrung from the bitter core of
+experience. Her faith was firm, though it held few illusions, for, if
+she was an optimist, she was also a realist. She believed in life, not
+because it had satisfied her, but because she had had the wisdom to
+understand that the supreme failure had been, not life's, but her own.
+If she could only have lived it again and lived it differently from the
+beginning! If she could only have used her deeper wisdom not to regret
+the past, but to create the future! Much as she had loved her husband,
+she knew now that she had sacrificed him to the world. Much as she had
+loved her children, she would have sacrificed them, also, had it been
+possible. To the tin gods she had offered her soul--to the things that
+did not matter she had yielded up the only things that mattered at all.
+And she knew now that, in spite of her clearness of vision, the
+worldliness which had ruined her life was still bound up in all that was
+essential and endurable in her nature. She still wanted the illusions as
+passionately as if she believed in their reality; she still winced as
+sharply at the thought of Patty's marriage and of all that Patty had
+given up. In the case of George, she admitted that it was her
+fault--that she had spoiled him--but how could she have helped it? She
+remembered how he had looked as a child, with his round flushed face,
+his chestnut curls, and his eager, questioning eyes. He had been a
+beautiful child, more beautiful even than Patty, and because of his
+beauty she had been able to refuse him nothing. Then she thought of his
+boyhood, of his reckless extravagance at college; of the tales of his
+wildness to which she had shut her ears; of his debts, and still of his
+debts, which she had paid out of the housekeeping money because she was
+afraid to let his father know of them. Yes, George, in spite of his
+sweet nature, had given them a great deal of trouble, so much trouble
+that she had been quite reconciled to his marriage with any respectable
+girl. The memory of a chorus girl with whom he had once entangled
+himself still gave her a shiver at the heart when she recalled it.
+Money, always more money, had gone into that; and at last, just as she
+had grown hopeless of saving him, he had met this fine, sensible
+Gabriella, who looked so strong, so competent, and there had come an end
+to the disturbing stories which reached her at intervals. Surely it was
+proof of her son's inborn fineness that from the pink perfection of
+girlhood he should have chosen the capable Gabriella! At first she had
+regretted his choice, hoping, as the worldly and the unworldly alike
+hope for their sons, that the object of George's disinterested affection
+would prove to be wealthy. Then at the sight of Gabriella she had
+surrendered completely. The girl was fine all through, this she could
+see as soon as she looked at her. She liked her noble though not
+beautiful face, with the broad clear forehead from which the soft dark
+hair was brushed back so simply, and, most of all, she liked the charm
+and sympathy in her voice. George had chosen well, and if she could
+trust his choice, why could she not trust him to be true to it?
+
+"I wonder if you would like to put on your hat and come with me?" she
+asked, obeying an impulse. "I'm going to drive up to Patty's with some
+curtains for her bedroom."
+
+"Oh, I'd love to," replied Gabriella with eagerness, for she hated
+inaction, and it was impossible to spend a whole afternoon merely
+thinking about one's happiness. "It won't take me a minute to get
+ready."
+
+While she put on her hat and coat, Mrs. Fowler watched her thoughtfully,
+saying once: "It is quite cool, you'd better bring your furs, dear."
+
+When Gabriella answered frankly, "I haven't any, I never had any furs in
+my life," a tender expression crept into the rather hard blue eyes of
+her mother-in-law, and she said quickly: "Well, I've a set of white fox
+that I am too old to wear, and you shall have it."
+
+"But what of Patty?" asked Gabriella, for she had grown up thinking of
+other people and she couldn't break the habit of twenty years in a
+minute.
+
+"Oh, Patty has all the furs she'll need for years. We spent every penny
+we had on Patty before she married," answered Mrs. Fowler, but she was
+saying to herself: "Yes, the girl is the right wife for him. I am sure
+she is the right wife for him."
+
+The Park was brilliant with falling leaves, and as they drove beneath a
+perfect sky beside a lake which sparkled like sapphire, Gabriella,
+lifting her chin above the white furs, said rapturously, "Oh, I am so
+happy! Life is so beautiful!"
+
+A shadow stole into the eyes with which Mrs. Fowler was watching the
+passing carriages, and the fixed sweetness about her mouth melted into
+an expression of yearning. Tears veiled the faces of the women who spoke
+to her in passing, for she was thinking of her first drive in the Park
+with her husband, and though her marriage had been a happy one, she felt
+a strange longing as if she wanted to weep.
+
+"I never saw such wonderful horses," said Gabriella. "Cousin Jimmy would
+be wild about them;" and she added impetuously, "But the hats aren't in
+the least like the one I am wearing." A misgiving seized her as she
+realized that her dresses, copied by Miss Polly with ardent fidelity
+from a Paris fashion book, were all hopelessly wrong. She wondered if
+her green silk gown with the black velvet sleeves was different in style
+from the gowns the other women were wearing under their furs? Had
+sleeves of a different colour from the bodice, which Miss Polly
+considered the last touch of elegance, really gone out of fashion?
+
+The carriage passed out of the Park, and turning into one of the streets
+on the upper West Side stopped presently before a small dingy apartment
+house, where a dozen ragged children were playing leapfrog on the
+pavement.
+
+"Patty has the top floor--there's a studio." Drawing her skirts away
+from the children, for her generation feared contact with the lower
+classes, Mrs. Fowler walked briskly to the low brown steps, on which an
+ash can stood waiting for removal. Inside, where the hall smelled
+uninvitingly of stale cooking, they rang for the elevator under a dim
+yellow light which revealed a hundred secret lines in their faces.
+
+"I can't imagine how Patty puts up with the place," remarked Patty's
+mother dejectedly. "You wouldn't believe the trouble we went to to start
+her well. She was the acknowledged beauty of her winter--everybody was
+crazy about her looks--and the very week before she ran off with Billy
+she had a proposal from the Duke of Toxbridge. Of course, if I'd ever
+dreamed she had a fancy for Billy, I'd have kept him out of her sight
+instead of allowing him to paint her portrait whenever she had any time
+she could spare. But who on earth would have suspected it? Billy King,
+whom she had known all her life, as poor as a church mouse, and the kind
+of painter whose work will never 'take' if he lives to be a thousand!
+His portraits may be good art--I don't pretend to know anything about
+that--but I do know pictures of pretty women when I see them, and his
+women are frights, every last one of them. If you're thin, he paints
+your skeleton, and if you're fat, he makes you as square as a house,
+and, thin or fat, he always gives you a blue and yellow complexion. He
+wouldn't even make Patty white, though I implored him to do it--and he
+made her look exactly ten years older than her age."
+
+"I've never seen any portraits of living people--only of ancestors,"
+said Gabriella, "and I am so much interested."
+
+"Well, you mustn't judge them by Billy's, my dear, even if he did get
+all those prizes in Paris. But I always said the French were queer, and
+if they hadn't been, they would never have raved so over the things
+Billy painted. Now, Augustus Featherfield's are really charming. One can
+tell to look at his portraits that he paints only ladies, and he gives
+them all the most perfectly lovely hair, whether they have it or not.
+Some day I'll take you to his studio and let you see for yourself."
+
+The elevator descended, creaking beneath the weight of a negro youth who
+seemed half asleep, and a little later, creaking more loudly, it bore
+them slowly upward to the top of the house.
+
+"I feel as if I were taking my life in my hands whenever I come here,"
+observed Mrs. Fowler, in the tone of dispassionate resignation with
+which she always discussed Patty and the surroundings amid which Patty
+lived. Marching resolutely, though disapprovingly, down a long hall, she
+pressed a small bell at the side of a door, and stood, holding tightly
+to the bundle of curtains, while her expression of unnatural
+pleasantness grew almost painful in its determination. Here, also, they
+waited some time, and when at last the door was opened by an agitated
+maid, without an apron, and they were led into a long, queerly furnished
+studio, with a balcony from which they had a distant cloudless view of
+the river, Gabriella felt for a minute that she must have fallen into a
+dream. Long afterwards she learned that Billy's studio was charming,
+with its blurred Italian tapestries, which had faded to an exquisite
+tone, with its broken torsos of old marble, warming to deep ivory in the
+sunlight, with its ecstatic haloed saints praying against dim Tuscan
+landscapes, with its odd and unexpected seats of carved stone on which
+the cushions made strange splotches and pools of colour. At the time,
+seen through provincial eyes, it seemed merely "queer" to her; and
+queerer still appeared the undraped figures of women, all lean lines and
+violet shadows, which, unframed and unhung, filled the dusty corners.
+
+"The river is lovely, but it is so far away," she said, turning her
+abashed eyes from the nude figures, and thinking how terribly they would
+have shocked the innocence of Cousin Jimmy.
+
+"I always look at the river when I come here," responded Mrs. Fowler,
+and her tone implied that the river at least was perfectly proper. "A
+month ago the colours were wonderful."
+
+In the drive, which they could see from a corner view, a few old men,
+forgotten by time, warmed themselves in the sunlight. Far below, the
+river reflected the changeable blue of the sky, while the autumnal
+pageantry on the horizon was fading slowly, like a burned-out fire, to
+the colour of ashes.
+
+"Mother, dear, I'm so glad," said a gay voice in the doorway, and
+turning quickly, Gabriella stared with wide eyes at the vision of
+Patty--of Patty in some soft tea-gown, which borrowed its tone from the
+old tapestries on the wall, with her honey-coloured hair hanging over
+her shoulders, and her eyes as fresh as blue flowers in the ivory pallor
+of her face.
+
+"And this is Gabriella," she added, holding out her arms. "What a
+darling you are to come so soon, Gabriella."
+
+She was a tall girl, so tall that she stooped to kiss Gabriella, whose
+height measured exactly five feet and seven inches, and she was
+beautiful with the faultless beauty which is seen only once or twice in
+a generation, but which, seen once, is never forgotten. For Patty's
+beauty, as a poet once wrote of a dead woman, was the beauty of destiny,
+the beauty that changes history and turns men into angels or into
+beasts. Though Gabriella had seen lovely skins on Southern
+women--rose-leaf skins, magnolia skins, peach-blossom skins--she had
+seen nothing that resembled the exquisite colour and texture of Patty's
+face.
+
+"The curtains were finished, so I brought them," said Mrs. Fowler,
+pointing to the bundle. "I wanted Gabriella to see the Park. You are
+coming to-night without fail, aren't you, Patty?"
+
+"Without fail, even if we have to walk," answered Patty. "You can't
+imagine how much it costs to get about when one lives so far uptown.
+That's one reason we are anxious to move. Billy has been looking for a
+studio for weeks, and, do you know, he has really found one at last.
+Harry Allen is moving out of the Rubens Building, and we are going to
+take his studio on the top floor. We're awfully lucky, too, to get it,
+for it is the first vacancy there for years."
+
+"But it's over a stable, isn't it?" asked Mrs. Fowler. "How could you
+possibly live there? And the East Side way down there is just as bad as
+up here"
+
+"I believe there is a stable, but it won't bother us--we're too high,"
+replied Patty.
+
+"Well, we can't stop; Gabriella hasn't unpacked her trunks," returned
+Mrs. Fowler; "but be sure to come early, Patty. I want your father to
+see you."
+
+"I wish there wasn't going to be anybody else. I want to talk to my
+sister. Isn't it lovely to have a sister, and mamma was too selfish to
+give me one. Do you call her 'mamma,' too, Gabriella?"
+
+"Of course she calls me 'mamma,'" answered Mrs. Fowler before Gabriella
+could speak, "and she is a much better daughter already than you ever
+were."
+
+"And a much better son, too, than George ever was?" asked Patty slyly.
+
+"We aren't talking about George. George has settled down," said Mrs.
+Fowler quickly, too quickly it occurred to Gabriella, who was eager to
+hear all that the daring Patty would say. "Don't you think those white
+furs look well on Gabriella?"
+
+"She looks like the snow queen in them. Does it matter what I wear
+to-night? Who is coming?"
+
+"Nobody you will care about--only Judge and Mrs. Crowborough and Colonel
+Buffington."
+
+"That old bore of a colonel! And why do you have to ask the judge again
+so soon? He looks like a turkey gobbler, Gabriella, and he has so much
+money that it is impossible to judge him by the standards of other
+people, everybody says that--even Billy."
+
+"Hush, Patty. You mustn't corrupt Gabriella."
+
+"If the judge doesn't, I shan't, mamma."
+
+"Well, your father has the greatest respect for him, and as for asking
+him often to dinner, it isn't by any means so easy to get him as you
+think. I don't suppose there's another man in New York who is invited
+out so often and goes out so little."
+
+"Papa is a sweet innocent," observed Patty maliciously, "but if you can
+stand the judge, mamma, dear, I am sure I can, especially as I shan't
+have to sit by him. That honour will be reserved for poor Gabriella. I
+wish you didn't have to go, but you really must, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes, we must go. Come, Gabriella, or you won't have time to get into
+your trunks before dinner."
+
+On the drive home Mrs. Fowler was grimly silent, while the sweetness
+about her mouth ebbed slowly away, leaving the faintest quiver of the
+muscles. For the first time Gabriella saw George's mother look as she
+must look in her sleep, when the artificial cheerfulness of her
+expression faded into the profound unconsciousness which drowns not only
+happiness, but the very pretence of happiness. So here, also, was
+insincerity, here, also, was the striving, not for realities, but for
+appearances! In a different form she saw her mother's struggle
+again--that struggle, without beginning and without end, which moved
+always in a circle and led nowhere. Was there no sincerity, no reality
+even in love? Was George, too, only a shadow? And the visible sadness of
+the November afternoon, with its faint haze like the haze of a dream
+landscape, seemed a part of this invisible sadness which had sprung from
+nothing and which would change and pass away in a breath. "If things
+would only last," she thought, looking with wistful eyes on the gold and
+purple around her. "If things would only last, how wonderful life would
+be!"
+
+"To think that all Patty's beauty should have been thrown away," said
+Mrs. Fowler suddenly.
+
+Though Gabriella had never seen Billy, she was inclined at the moment,
+in her mood of dissatisfaction with the universe, to sympathize with
+Mrs. Fowler's view of the matter. To her frugal mind, trained to economy
+of material, it seemed that Patty was altogether too much for a poor
+man--even though he could paint her in lean lines and violet shadows.
+
+Upstairs she found her trunks in her bedroom, and after she had unpacked
+her wedding-gown of white satin, removed the tissue paper stuffing from
+the sleeves, and shaken out the creases with gentle hands, she sat down
+and pondered deeply the problem of dressing for dinner. By removing the
+lace yoke, she might make the gown sufficiently indecorous for the
+fashion of the period, and her only evening dress, the white muslin she
+had worn to dances in Richmond, she reflected gloomily, would appear
+absurd in New York.
+
+"I wish I didn't look such a fright," she said aloud, as she ripped and
+sewed. Then, in a flash, her mind wandered from herself, and she
+thought: "I wonder why George didn't tell his mother that we are going
+to take an apartment? I wonder why he didn't tell her that mother is
+coming in June? When he comes I must ask him."
+
+Looking at the clock, she saw that it was after seven, and hurriedly
+taking the last few stitches, she laid the gown on the bed, bathed her
+face in cold water, and then, sitting down before her dressing-table,
+drew the pins from her hair. In some obscure way she felt herself a
+different person from the bride who had watched George so ecstatically
+at the station that morning. She could not tell how she had altered, and
+yet she felt perfectly conscious that an alteration had taken place in
+her soul--that she was not the same Gabriella--that life could never be
+again exactly as it had been before. Nothing and yet everything seemed
+to have happened to her in a day. Her face, gazing gravely back at her
+from the mirror, looked young and wistful, the face of one who, like a
+bird flying suddenly out of darkness against a lamp, is bewildered by
+the first shock of the light.
+
+When her hair was arranged in the simple way she had always worn it, she
+slipped her dress over her bare shoulders, and fastened it slowly--for
+Miss Polly had no patience with "back fastenings"--while she told
+herself again that George would not be satisfied. She knew that her gown
+was provincial, knew that she lacked the "dash" he admired in women; and
+from the first she had been mystified by a love which could, while still
+passionately desiring her, wish her different in so many ways. "I'd like
+him to be proud of me, but I suppose he never will be," she thought
+dejectedly, "and yet he fell in love with me just as I was, and he did
+not fall in love with any of the dashing women he knows," she added
+quickly, consoled by the reflection. "And of course in a few things I
+wish him different, too. I wish he wasn't so careless. He is so careless
+that I shall have to be twice as careful, I shall have to look after him
+all the time. Even to-night he has forgotten about the dinner, and he'll
+be obliged to dress in a hurry, which he hates."
+
+Glancing at the clock again, she saw that it was a quarter of eight, and
+still George had not come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE OLD SERPENT
+
+
+At five minutes of eight o'clock he came in, with a lighted cigar in his
+mouth. For the first few days after her marriage there had been a
+pleasant excitement in the scent of George's cigars in her bedroom. Now,
+however, habit had dulled the excitement, and the smell of tobacco gave
+her a headache.
+
+"Oh, George, you are late!" she exclaimed, sinking the lesser into the
+greater offence after the habit of wives. As if he had all night instead
+of five minutes before him in which to dress, he stood in the centre of
+the room, blandly looking her over.
+
+"You're all right," he said after a pause. "I met a fellow at the club I
+hadn't seen for a year. He had been hunting big game in Africa, and he
+was telling me about it. By Jove, that is life!"
+
+They had been married but a month; it was their first day at home, and
+he could linger at the club to talk of big game while she waited for
+him. Flushed, excited, he stood there on the white bearskin rug midway
+between the bed and the wood-fire, while she felt his charm stealing
+like a drug over her senses. Though she had begun to realize the
+thinness of his mental qualities, she was still as completely in the
+power of his physical charm as she had been on the day of her wedding.
+In the flickering light of the fire he appeared to diffuse the glamour
+of romance, of adventure; and she felt that this single day in New York
+had left a vital impression upon him. It was as if he had become
+suddenly more alive, more inexplicable in his simplicity; and, though
+she had grasped vaguely the fact that his personality was composed of
+innumerable reactions, she had never really understood before how
+entirely he was the creature of his environment. It was as if the very
+essence of his soul floated there, a variable and fluid quantity,
+forever changing form and colour beneath the shallow ripples of his
+personality. She had seen him in many moods, but never in this one. Did
+he possess a deeper subtlety than she had imagined or was it the
+sincerity of his nature that defied analysis?
+
+"Did you enjoy yourself?" she asked cheerfully. Tell me about it."
+
+"Oh, it was rather jolly," he replied, and she knew that this was as
+much as she should ever get out of him. Beyond a few stock phrases,
+words hardly existed for him at all, or existed only in foreign
+languages, for, having been educated abroad, he spoke French and German
+fluently, if without felicity. Already his inarticulateness was like an
+encumbering veil between them--a veil in which she struggled as
+helplessly as a moth in a net. And only a month ago she had believed
+that the very immensity of his nature rendered him dumb.
+
+"Then you had better hurry, dear. Dinner is at eight, and you have only
+a minute."
+
+"You go down and tell them not to wait. I was detained downtown, but it
+won't take me a second to dress."
+
+As he passed under the electric light by the mirror, she saw his face
+with exaggerated distinctness, as if it were held under a microscope,
+and a heaviness, which she had never noticed before, marred the edge of
+his profile. If he hadn't been George, would she have said that he
+looked stupid at the moment? For a flashing instant of illumination she
+saw him with a vision that was not her own, but a stranger's, with a
+pitiless clearness unsoftened by any passion. Then the clearness faded
+rapidly before an impulse of tenderness, and she told herself that he
+was merely handsome, gay, and careless, as he had been on their
+honeymoon. If he would only talk to her, she felt that he would be
+perfect.
+
+"Yes, I'm going. Come as soon as you can," she said; and catching up her
+satin train, she descended the oak staircase to the drawing-room, where
+a fire was burning and the lights were shaded in crimson.
+
+Twenty minutes later, seated at the round table, which was bright with
+chrysanthemums in tall silver vases, she looked with a feeling of
+resentment at George's empty place. Why was he so careless? Time had for
+him, she realized, as little meaning as words had. Then, in the midst of
+her disquietude, she caught the serene blue eyes of George's mother
+fixed upon her. With her young face, her red lips, and her superb
+shoulders rising out of the rich black lace of her gown, Mrs. Fowler
+looked almost beautiful. Had Patty not been present, with her loveliness
+like a summer's day, her mother would have seemed hardly more than a
+girl; but who could shine while Patty, beside that long, lean man with
+the gray imperial, smiled with lips that were like a scarlet flower in
+her face?
+
+There were only four guests, but these four, as Mrs. Fowler had said,
+"counted for something." The long, lean man beside Patty was one Colonel
+Buffington, a Virginia lawyer, who had wandered North in search of food
+in the barren years after the war. As his mind was active in a patient
+accumulative fashion, he had become in time a musty storehouse of war
+anecdotes, and achieving but moderate success in his law practice, his
+chief distinction, perhaps, was as a professional Southerner. Combining
+a genial charm of manner with as sterile an intellect as it is possible
+to attain, he was generally regarded as a perfect example of "the old
+school," and this picturesque reputation made him desirable as a guest
+at club dinners as well as at the larger gatherings of the various
+Southern societies. His conversation, which was entirely anecdotal,
+consisted of an elaborate endless chain of more or less historical
+"stories." Social movements and the development of civilization
+interested him as little as did art or science--for which he entertained
+a chronic suspicion due to the indiscretions of Darwin. Change of any
+kind was repugnant to his deeper instincts, and of all changes the ones
+relating to the habits of women appeared to him to interfere most
+unwarrantably with the Creator's original plan. For the rest he had the
+heart of a child, would strip the clothes from his back to give to a
+friend, or even to an enemy, and possessed an infallible gift for making
+a dinner successful.
+
+On Colonel Buffington's right sat Mrs. Hamilton, a very pretty, very
+sprightly widow, with her hair coiled into the fashionable Psyche knot,
+and the short puffs of her sleeves emphasizing the hour-glass perfection
+of her figure. Next to Mrs. Hamilton there was Billy King, who wore a
+white flower in his buttonhole and looked like a soldier out of
+uniform, and beyond Billy sat Mrs. Crowborough, whom he was trying
+despairingly to entertain. She, renowned and estimable woman, was
+planning in her mind what she should say at a board meeting of one of
+her pet charities on the morrow, a charity which, like all of her
+favourite ones, concerned itself with the management and spiritual
+elevation of girl orphans. Tall, raw-boned, strung with jet, Mrs.
+Crowborough, who had been married for her money, looked as sympathetic
+as a moral principle or an organized charity. Unfortunately, for she was
+rather heavy in company, Judge Crowborough was obliged by custom to
+bring her to dinner; and she came willingly, inspired less by
+sociability than by the virtuous instinct which animated her being. Mr.
+Fowler had taken her in to dinner, and while she lent an inert attention
+to Billy's jests, he talked across Gabriella to Judge Crowborough, who
+was eating his soup with the complete absorption of a man to whom the
+smallest of his appetities is sacred. It was a grievance of Mrs.
+Fowler's that her husband would never, as she said, "pay any attention
+to women," and in order to feel assured of even so much as a cheerful
+noise at his end of the table, she was obliged to place within hearing
+distance of him somebody who could talk fluently, if not eloquently, of
+the stock market.
+
+To Gabriella's surprise, her father-in-law, who had appeared inert and
+listless at breakfast, became, in the stimulating presence of the judge,
+not only awake, but mildly animated. She had felt before the charm in
+his scholarly face, with its look of detached spirituality so strangely
+out of keeping with the calling he pursued; and she recognized now the
+quality of controlled force which had enabled him to hold his own in
+the financial whirlpool of his country. Had the girl known more of life,
+she would have understood that in the American business world there were
+hundreds of such men winning their way and leaving their mark at that
+moment of history--men whose natures were redeemed from grossness by the
+peculiar idealism they infused into their material battles. Of
+Scotch-Irish inheritance, the direct descendant of one Gregory
+Truesdale, who had died a martyr for Presbyterianism, Archibald Fowler
+was inspired by something of the austere devotion which had fortified
+his religious ancestor. Since his college days his private life had been
+irreproachable. Though he was a stronger character than his wife, he
+regarded her with almost superstitious reverence, and made no decision
+above Wall Street without consulting her. His heart, and as much of his
+time as he could spare from business, were hers, and she made the most
+of them. Women, as women, did not attract him, and he avoided them
+except at his own table, where custom constrained him to be polite.
+After a few courteous words to Mrs. Crowborough, he had turned with
+relief to her husband.
+
+"You've got a bright chap in your office, Stanley," he said; "that
+fellow Latham. I was talking to him this morning. He's from Colorado,
+isn't he?"
+
+"Oh, yes, they're all from the West now," responded the judge--he had
+sat on the bench in his youth. "Ten years ago the bright ones were from
+the South, but you Southerners are outstripped to-day, and it's the men
+from the West who are doing it. There's a fundamental reason there, I
+suppose, if you go deep enough," he added, fingering the ends of his
+short gray moustache while he kept an eye on his champagne glass.
+"We've done with mere classifying and imitation, and we're waiting for a
+fresh explosion of raw energy. Now for pure constructive imagination the
+North and South don't hold a candle--they simply don't hold a candle--to
+the West. Mark my words, in twenty-five years there'll hardly be a big
+railroad man in the country who wasn't born in sight of the Rockies."
+Unlike Mr. Fowler, whose mind ran in a groove leading directly to
+business, the judge had a natural bent toward generalization, and when
+dining, preferred to discuss impersonal topics. He was a tall, florid
+man with an immense paunch flattened by artificial devices, and a
+vitality so excessive that it overflowed in numberless directions--in
+his hearty animal appetites, in his love of sports, in his delight in
+the theatre and literature, particularly in novels of the sentimental
+and romantic school, in his fondness for the lighter operas, and in his
+irrepressible admiration for pretty women. His face, large, ruddy, with
+a hooked nose, where the red was thickly veined with purple, and
+protruding lips over square yellow teeth that gripped like the teeth of
+a bulldog, aroused in Gabriella a quick repulsion which only the genial
+humour of his smile overcame. That he should have married his wife for
+her money was less amazing to the girl than that his wife should have
+married him for any reason whatsoever. Only a moral principle or a
+charitable institution, she felt, could have endured him and survived.
+But in spite of his repulsiveness he had evidently experienced the
+natural activities of humanity. He had taken a wife; he had begotten
+children; he had judged other men; he had dug into the bowels of the
+earth for mines, and had built railroads on its surface; he had made
+grass grow in deserts and had turned waste places into populous cities;
+he had read romances and heard music; he had attained a social position
+securely founded upon millions of dollars--and all these things he had
+achieved through his unconquerable colossal vitality. "I wonder why they
+put him by me," thought Gabriella. "I shall never get on with him."
+
+Then he turned to her and said bluntly, between two mouthfuls of
+lobster: "So you're George's wife! Handsome chap George, but he hasn't
+much head for business. He lacks the grip of the old man. Where's he
+to-night?"
+
+"He got home so late that he wasn't ready for dinner. He'll be down in a
+minute."
+
+"It's a bad habit. He oughtn't to be late. Now, I haven't been late for
+dinner for twenty years."
+
+"I'm afraid he doesn't pay much attention to time. I'll try to change
+him."
+
+"You won't. No woman alive ever changed a man's habits. All you can do
+is to hide them."
+
+That his blunt manner was an affectation, she was quick to discern.
+While he talked to her, he looked at her knowingly with his light fishy
+eyes, and by his look and his tone he seemed to establish an immediate
+intimacy between them--as if he and she were speaking a language which
+was foreign to the rest of the table. He appeared to be kind, she
+thought, and on his side he was thinking that she was a nice girl, with
+an attractive face and remarkable eyes. On the whole, he preferred brown
+eyes, though his wife's were the colour of slate. "Why the deuce did she
+marry that fool?" he questioned impatiently.
+
+Across the table Billy King was working hopelessly but valiantly to
+engage Mrs. Crowborough's attention. What a splendid figure he had, and
+how clean and fine was the modelling of his features! He was just the
+man a girl like Patty would fall in love with, and Gabriella no longer
+felt that. Patty's beauty was wasted. Once or twice she caught fleeting
+glances passing between them, and these glances, so winged with
+happiness, spoke unutterable and ecstatic things.
+
+A hush dropped suddenly on the table, and in this hush she heard the
+voice of Colonel Buffington telling a story in dialect. It was an
+immemorial anecdote of Cousin Jimmy's--she had heard him tell it a dozen
+times--and while she listened, it made her feel comfortably at home.
+
+"'Uncle Amos,' I said to him, 'we've been together thirty years, but
+we've got to part. You're a drunkard and a thief and a worthless darky
+all round, and you've lived on my place ever since the war without doing
+a lick of work for your keep. I've stood it as long as I can, but
+there's an end to human endurance. Yes, Amos, the time has come for us
+to part.'
+
+"Hi! Marse Beverly,' said the old rascal, 'whar you gwine?"
+
+"Capital!" ejaculated the judge softly. "Capital!" And he added for
+Gabriella's ear: "Buffington tells the best negro stories of any man I
+know. Ought to have heard him at the club the other night."
+
+Gabriella did not answer; Cousin Jimmy's story had made her think of
+Cousin Jimmy, with his soft heart and his dark shining eyes like the
+eyes of a good and gentle dog. Then she thought of her mother, and
+reminded herself that she must ask George when they were to begin the
+hunt for an apartment. He had said they were very hard to find when you
+wanted them.
+
+Another hush fell, and Colonel Buffington was just beginning a second
+story--one of Uncle Meriweather's this time--when George came in from
+the drawing-room, and after a murmured apology, took his seat between
+Patty and Mrs. Hamilton.
+
+"That's a handsome boy," said the judge in a husky whisper to Gabriella,
+"but he hasn't much to say for himself, has he?"
+
+His manner of playful intimacy conveyed the impression that the secret
+understanding between them did not include Gabriella's husband. George
+was an outsider, but this hideous old man, with his curious repelling
+suggestion of over-ripeness, as of fruit that is beginning to rot at the
+core, was the dominant personality in her mind at the moment. She
+wondered if he knew how repulsive he was, and while she wondered, the
+judge, unaware of his tragic plight, went on eating lobster with
+unimpaired relish. His importance, founded upon a more substantial basis
+than mere personal attraction, had risen superior not only to morality,
+but to the outward failings of the flesh. Had he been twice as
+repulsive, she realized that his millions would have commanded a respect
+denied to both beauty and virtue.
+
+"I wonder how any woman can stand him," mused Gabriella. Then, glancing
+across the table at Mrs. Crowborough, she realized something of the
+amazing insensibility of the more ethereal sex. No man, not even in the
+last extremity, could have loved a woman as ugly as Judge Crowborough
+was. The roughest man would have had sufficient esthetic sense to have
+been shocked into revolt; yet a woman, a refined and intelligent woman,
+had married the judge and survived it. She appeared now, not only
+expressionless and unrevolted, but filled with a healthy zest for social
+reforms and the spiritual welfare of girl orphans.
+
+"Well, I've learned something of life to-night," thought Gabriella while
+she watched her.
+
+Later in the evening, when she passed into the drawing-room, with Mrs.
+Crowborough, bleak, unbending, and trailing her chains of jet, she
+comforted herself again with the reflection that what she was "seeing"
+might not be particularly exciting, "but it was life."
+
+On a short, hard sofa near the fire, beside Fatty, who bloomed like a
+white rose under the red-shaded light, she listened to Mrs. Fowler's
+unflagging efforts to "get on" with the judge's wife. Never had the
+dauntless little woman revealed more surprising resourcefulness, never
+had she talked so vivaciously, never had she appeared so relentlessly
+pleasant. It was as if she said in the face of Mrs. Crowborough's
+insensibility, which was the insensibility not of mind, but of inanimate
+matter, "Whatever you do, you can't keep me from being sweet." And in
+this strained sweetness there was something touching, something wistful,
+a hint of inner weariness which showed now and then beneath the restless
+vivacity.
+
+"Isn't it funny," said Patty suddenly, "how much mamma cares about
+things that don't matter at all? You wouldn't believe it to look at her,
+but she is in her heart the most worldly one of the family. Father
+wouldn't give a tallow candle for anything that isn't real."
+
+A log broke in the centre, and fell, scattering a shower of golden
+embers over the hearth. Rising quickly, with one of her sprightly
+movements, Mrs. Fowler reached for a pair of small brass tongs and
+pushed the broken log back on the andirons. Then she threw some fresh
+wood on the flames, and resumed her seat with an animated gesture as if
+the incident had enlivened her.
+
+"Now they are talking about the everlasting Pletheridges," whispered
+Patty. "I never understand how mother can take so much interest in those
+people just because they are rich."
+
+But to Gabriella it was more inconceivable still that her mother-in-law,
+with the bluest blood of Virginia in her veins, should regard with such
+artless reverence the social activities of the granddaughter of a
+tavern-keeper. In her native State an impoverished branch of Mrs.
+Fowler's family still lived on land which, tradition said, had been
+granted one of her ancestors by Charles the Second in recognition of
+distinguished services to that dubious monarch; yet she could long
+enviously for a closer acquaintance with the plutocratic descendant of
+an Irish tavern-keeper--an honest man, doubtless, who had laid the
+foundations of his fortune in a string of halfway houses stretching from
+New York to Chicago.
+
+"Yes, I dined with Mrs. Pletheridge once," she was saying in the tone in
+which her royalist ancestor might have acknowledged a command from his
+King.
+
+"It always makes me angry, I can't help it," pursued Patty. "If dear
+mamma had only some other weakness--cards or wine or clothes or anything
+else. It's queer, with all her pride, how little social backbone she
+has. Now to hear her talk, you would imagine that that vulgar snob,
+whose father kept hotels and married one of his chambermaids, had
+conferred an honour by inviting her to dinner. And the funniest part is
+that, for all her good breeding, and her family portraits, and her
+titled ancestors, mother hasn't half so much respect for the genuine New
+Yorkers--I mean the New Yorkers whose names really mean something--as
+she has for these mushroom plutocrats. She had set her heart on George
+marrying one of them, you know, but it's a jolly good thing he didn't."
+
+"That's the girl he told me about," said Gabriella. "Was he ever
+interested in her?"
+
+"Not for a minute. We're awfully contrary about our love affairs. We
+will marry for love--even mother did though she may have forgotten it.
+We never marry the people--" She clipped off the sentence, but Gabriella
+caught it up with a laugh:
+
+"I know," she said gaily, "you never marry the people your family pick
+out for you."
+
+"Well, of course, Billy went dreadfully hard with them--at least with
+mother. She wanted the Duke of Somewhere so very badly. But it was Billy
+or nobody for me. I'd have married Billy," she added while her beautiful
+face grew stern, "if I'd had to walk all the way across the world to
+him."
+
+"He looks as if he were worth it," admitted Gabriella.
+
+"He is, but that probably wasn't my reason for marrying him. One never
+knows why one marries, I suppose, unless one marries for money and then
+it is so beautifully simple. Now, you and George don't seem a bit alike,
+but it all happened on the spur of the moment, didn't it?"
+
+"It always seems that way when one looks back, doesn't it?" asked
+Gabriella. "But what I can't understand"--she brought it out with a
+frown--"is why marriage doesn't change one. I used to think I'd be
+different, but I'm not. And even love seems to leave people wanting
+everything else just as badly. Your mother has had a perfect love--she
+told me so--and yet it hasn't kept her from wanting all the other things
+in life, has it? I wish I could work it out," she finished, a little
+sadly, for she was thinking of her mother's cry on the night of Jane's
+attack: "I am tempted to hope Gabriella will never marry. The Carrs all
+marry so badly!" Why had those words come back to her to-night? She had
+not remembered them for months, she had even forgotten that she had
+heard them, and now they floated to her as clearly as if they had been
+spoken aloud.
+
+In a little while Billy came in, and when, after a few moments of
+spasmodic affability, Mrs. Crowborough rose and pleaded an early board
+meeting on the morrow, Gabriella watched Patty wrap her honey-coloured
+head in a white scarf and then stand, waiting for a cab, in the doorway.
+Happiness, with so many people an invisible attribute, encircled Patty
+like a garment of light. It crowned her white brow under the glory of
+her hair; it shone in her eyes; it rippled in her smile; it lingered in
+a beam of sunshine on her lips. With her arm in Billy's she looked back
+laughing from the steps, and it seemed to Gabriella that all the
+brightness of life was going with them into the darkness. Beside the
+curbstone an old cab horse, dazzled by the light from the door, turned
+his head slowly toward them; and the look in his eyes, wistful,
+questioning, expectant, seemed to say, "This is not life, but a
+miracle." And from his box the red-cheeked, wheezy Irish driver gazed
+down on Patty with the same wistfulness, the same questioning, the same
+expectancy.
+
+"I never see Patty go off in a cab that I don't feel she has thrown
+herself away," observed Mrs. Fowler, yawning, while she turned to the
+staircase. "Archibald, I hope you had a really good time with the judge.
+I must say it is like ploughing to talk to his wife."
+
+Upstairs in her room a little later Gabriella said to George: "Patty was
+telling me about the girl your mother wanted you to marry."
+
+He was pouring out a glass of water, and, absorbed in the act, he merely
+grunted for answer. It was his disagreeable habit to grunt when grunting
+saved effort.
+
+"I wish you'd talk to me, George. It is so annoying to be grunted at."
+
+"Well, what do you want?" he replied amiably enough. "Patty is a regular
+sieve, you know. Never tell her a secret."
+
+"Did you ever like that girl--really?"
+
+"The girl mother had in mind?" Having emptied the glass, he returned it
+to the tray and came over to her. "Yes, but if you want the truth, I
+preferred the girl in the chorus--the one the old lady got in a blue
+funk about, you know. She's still there, the last but one from the end,
+in the Golden Slipper. I'll take you to see it some night."
+
+"Men are strange," observed Gabriella, with philosophic detachment. "Now
+I couldn't feel the slightest interest in a man in comic opera. Did she
+really attract you?"
+
+"Um--humph," he was grunting again.
+
+"Wasn't she terribly common?"
+
+"Um--humph."
+
+"Wasn't she vulgar?"
+
+"Rather. They all are."
+
+"And fast?"
+
+"Regular streak of lightning."
+
+Then it was that Gabriella arrived at an understanding of masculine
+nature. "You never can tell what men will like," she concluded.
+
+While she spoke he winked at her from the mirror into which he was
+looking--mirrors always fascinated George and he could never keep away
+from them--and there was in his face the whimsical and appealing
+naughtiness of a child. Suddenly Gabriella felt that as far as character
+and experience counted, she was immeasurably older than George. Her
+superior common sense made her feel almost middle-aged when he was in
+one of his boyish moods. At the age of nine she had not been so utterly
+irresponsible as George was at twenty-six; as an infant in arms she had
+probably regarded the universe with a profounder philosophy. Though of
+course George was charming, he was without any sense of the deeper
+purpose of life. Like a child he must have what he wanted, and like a
+child he sulked when he was thwarted and grew angelic when his wishes
+were gratified. A single day had taught her that his father could not
+depend on him in business, that his mother could not trust him even to
+remember a dinner engagement. Gabriella loved him, she had chosen him,
+she told herself now, and she meant to abide by her choice; but she was
+not blind, she was not a fool, and she was deficient in the kind of
+loyalty which obliges one to lie even in the sanctity of one's own mind.
+She would be true to him, but she would be true with her eyes open, not
+shut.
+
+"George," she said presently, while she loosened her hair, "your father
+told me you didn't stay more than an hour in the office." The question,
+"What were you doing?" rose to her lips, but she strangled the words
+before they escaped her. Her mind was quick to grasp facts, and she had
+learned already something of a man's instinctive dislike to being made
+to give an account of himself.
+
+"You've been hearing too much gossip to-night," he rejoined gaily. "Take
+care what you listen to."
+
+"Don't joke, dear. I wish you would tell me things."
+
+"There isn't anything to tell, is there?"
+
+"Is your father very rich?"
+
+"Not very. Did you think you were marrying a millionaire?"
+
+"I never thought about it, but everybody at home thinks he has a great
+deal of money, and yet your mother talks as if she were poor."
+
+"Well, he made a pile of money in a big deal about ten years ago, and
+the papers had a lot about it. After that he lost it, or most of it, and
+the papers didn't tell. The fact is, he's always either making or
+losing, and now he's losing. That's why they wanted me to put off our
+marriage."
+
+"They wanted you to put it off?"
+
+"Mother did--the old man never interferes. She had got into her head,
+you see, that the only way for me to make a living was to marry one, so
+it was a little while before she could get used to the idea that I was
+going to marry because I wanted to, not because my family wanted me to.
+She was a brick though when she found out I was in earnest. Mother is
+true blue when you know how to take her."
+
+"But you never told me."
+
+"You bet I didn't. If I had, as likely as not, you would be Gabriella
+Mary Carr at this minute."
+
+Drawing gently out of his grasp, which had grown possessive, she stood
+looking at him with a smile in which tenderness and irony mingled; and
+the tenderness was her own, while the irony seemed to belong to the
+vision of an impersonal spectator of life. The smile fascinated him. He
+could not withdraw his gaze from it, and yet it had the disturbing
+effect of placing her at an emotional distance.
+
+"Your mother is very good to me," she said, "but I feel somehow as if I
+had taken an unfair advantage of her. And you hadn't even told her," she
+added, "that we are going to take an apartment in June."
+
+"Oh, that's all right--there's plenty of time," he responded irritably.
+"Only you mustn't make mountains out of molehills."
+
+Then, because she dreaded his anger, she gave up her point as she had
+given up many before. He was irresponsible, but he was hers and she
+loved him.
+
+"I am so sleepy," she said, stifling a yawn, "that I feel as if I could
+cry."
+
+Marriage, at the end of a month, had already disciplined the fearless
+directness of Gabriella. She had learned not to answer back when she
+knew she was right; she had learned to appear sweet when her inner
+spirit demanded a severe exterior; she had learned to hold her tongue
+when a veritable torrent of words rose to her lips. And these lessons,
+which George's temper and her own reason had taught her, remained with
+her in the future, long after she had forgotten George and the severity
+of her schooling.
+
+There were many things for her to learn, and the lessons of that first
+day and night stretched through the winter and well into the beginning
+of spring. Accompanying Mrs. Fowler on her busy rounds, she discovered
+that here also, as in the house in Hill Street, the chief end of life
+was to keep up an appearance; here also the supreme effort, the best
+energies, were devoted to a sham--to a thing which had no actual
+existence. Though Mrs. Fowler was rich beside Mrs. Carr, Gabriella soon
+found out that she was not nearly so rich as her neighbours were, not
+nearly so rich as her position in society exacted that she should be.
+She was still not rich enough to be spared the sordid, nerve-racking
+effort to make two ends meet without a visible break. Her small
+economies, to Gabriella's surprise, were as rigid as Mrs. Carr's; and
+though she lived in surroundings which appeared luxurious to the girl,
+there was almost as little ready money to spend as there had been in
+Mrs. Carr's household. Bills were made recklessly, and dinner parties
+were given at regular intervals; for Mrs. Fowler, who denied herself a
+hundred small comforts of living, who gave up cream in her coffee and
+bought her butter from a grocer below Washington Square, took quite as a
+matter of course the fact that she must, as she put it, "pay off social
+scores." Though they ate the simplest food in the market for six days of
+the week, on the seventh, hothouse flowers bloomed profusely in the
+lower rooms and champagne flowed abundantly into the delicate Venetian
+glasses on the round table. To be sure, Mrs. Fowler's gown may have been
+two seasons old, but it was covered with rare laces, which she had
+picked up during her summers abroad; and her pearls--the string was
+short, but really good, for she had matched it in Paris--shone, rich
+and costly, around her still beautiful neck. After one of these dinners
+the family lived on scraps and looked at fading flowers for days, while
+Mrs. Fowler, with the air of one who has done her duty, sat upstairs
+before the little French writing-desk in her room, and patiently added
+accounts from morning till night. A strained look would come into her
+plump, firm face, three little wrinkles would appear between her
+eyebrows, and her blue eyes, circled by faint shadows, would grow dark
+and anxious. Then, when at last the accounts were finished and the
+unpaid bills laid away in a pigeonhole, she would remark with animation:
+
+"I don't see how on earth I am ever to pay all these bills," and, after
+changing her dress, set out to bring her butcher or her grocer to
+reason. On one of these days she took Gabriella (they went in the stage
+because she had given up her carriage) on a hunt for bargains in
+underwear, and, to the girl's astonishment, her mother-in-law, who
+presented so opulent an appearance on the surface, purchased for herself
+a supply of cheap and badly made chemises and nightgowns. As she grew to
+know Mrs. Fowler better, she found that the expenditures of that
+redoubtable woman, in spite of her naturally delicate tastes, were
+governed by one of the most elementary principles of economy. Through
+long habit she had acquired a perception as unerring as instinct, and
+this perception enabled her to tell exactly where extravagance was
+useful and where it failed in its effect. She had learned to perfection
+never to spend money on things that did not show a result. An appearance
+was what she strove for, and one's chemises and nightgowns, however
+exquisite in themselves, could not very well contribute to one's
+external appearance. "Of course I like good underclothes," she remarked
+cheerfully to her daughter-in-law, "but, after all, nobody sees them."
+
+This was so different from the poverty-stricken point of view of
+Gabriella's childhood, that the girl puzzled over it afterwards when she
+sat in her corner of the stage. Mrs. Carr had kept up an appearance,
+too, she reflected, but, like the old maids on the floor above, she had
+kept it up even to herself. Perhaps the difference lay in the immense
+gulf which divided the appearance of Hill Street from the appearance of
+the East Fifties. Mrs. Fowler was obliged by the public opinion she
+obeyed to appear affluent, while Mrs. Carr was merely constrained not to
+appear destitute. On the whole Gabriella felt that she preferred the
+safe middle distance between the two exacting standards of living.
+
+But, though she might disapprove of her mother-in-law's philosophy,
+there was no question about her fervent admiration for her disposition.
+It was Mrs. Fowler's habit to appear "sweet," and never once did
+Gabriella see her lose her temper, never once, no matter how hard the
+day or how exasperating the accounts, did she show so much as a passing
+hint of irritability. Her temper was so angelic that it was the more
+surprising George should not have inherited a trace of it.
+
+If George had not inherited his mother's nature, he revealed, as time
+went on, even less resemblance to the perfect reasonableness of his
+father's temperament. Ever since her first day in the house, Gabriella
+had been drawn to her father-in-law with an affection which his wife,
+for all her preoccupied kindness, had not inspired. She respected him
+for his calm strength, against which the boisterous moods of George
+reacted as harmlessly as the whims of a child, and she liked him for his
+unfailing courtesy, for his patience, for his gentleness, which made her
+feel that he was, in spite of the material nature of his occupation, the
+only member of the household who possessed even a glimmer of
+spirituality. All day long, and the greater part of the night, he
+thought about money, and yet he had escaped the spiritual corruption
+which the ceaseless pursuit of wealth had produced in the other rich men
+whom Gabriella met in his house. It was as if some subtle alchemy in his
+soul had transmuted the baser qualities into the pure gold of character;
+and sometimes the girl wondered if the fact that he worked not for
+himself but for others had preserved him from the grosser contamination
+of money. For he seemed to think of himself so little, that after three
+months in his house, Gabriella was still ignorant of his interests apart
+from his work, except, of course, his absorbing interest in the morning
+papers. From the time he got up at seven o'clock until he went to bed
+punctually on the stroke of ten, he appeared to order his life with the
+single purpose of giving as little trouble as was compatible with living
+at all. His tastes were the simplest; he drank only boiled water; he ate
+two eggs and a roll with his coffee at breakfast; he spent hardly a
+third as much on his clothes as George spent; and beyond an occasional
+visit to his club in the evening, he seemed to have absolutely no
+recreation. His life was in the stock market, and it was a life of
+almost monastic simplicity and self-sacrifice. If he had any pleasure,
+except the pleasure of providing his wife with the money for her dinner
+parties, which bored him excruciatingly, Gabriella had never discovered
+it. "He asks so little for himself that it is pathetic," she remarked
+to George one night, when Mr. Fowler had gone upstairs, carrying the
+evening papers to bed with him.
+
+"Oh, well, he gets what he asks for," retorted George indifferently,
+"and that's more than the rest of us can say."
+
+George was in a bad humour; he had been in a bad humour for weeks; and
+for this reason Gabriella had put off from day to day telling him that
+she expected a child in the autumn. All her efforts to soothe had merely
+exasperated him; and there were days when her presence worked him into a
+fit of nervous irritability. After four months of marriage prolonged
+boredom had replaced the passionate tenderness of their honeymoon. Why
+this should be so she was too well-balanced emotionally to understand.
+She saw only the outward evidences of change, of gradual
+disillusionment; and though at first she wept a little while she
+wondered, she ended by drying her tears and attributing his casual
+indifference and his explosive violence alike to some obscure disturbing
+condition of health. Every evening, except when there were guests, he
+spent at his club; he came to bed late, and his waking hour was filled
+with complaint about the number and the size of his bills. He treated
+these bills as if they had been gratuitous insults, as if they had
+leaped, without reason for being, out of a malign world to assail him.
+As yet Gabriella had bought nothing; and she dreaded the time when her
+clothes would wear out beyond the hope of repairing, and she should be
+obliged to add another bill to the growing pile under the silver paper
+weight on the little white and gold desk.
+
+But in the last few weeks even this anxiety had faded from her mind,
+for the miracle of life which stirred in her body had diffused its
+golden halo around every trivial incident of her existence. After days
+of physical wretchedness, which she had hidden from George, she sat one
+evening, utterly at peace, in front of the fire in the room which had
+been Patty's before her marriage. It was past midnight, and she was
+waiting for George to come home because she felt that she could not
+sleep until she had told him. In the morning he had been unusually
+gentle, and as he left the house, she had said to herself a little
+sternly that he must know about the child before the day was over. A
+secret consultation with her mother-in-law had strengthened her
+resolution. "Don't keep it from him another day, Gabriella," Mrs. Fowler
+had urged. "It will make such a difference. I shall never forget
+Archibald's joy when I told him George was coming. Men are like that
+about children, you know."
+
+"Yes, I'll tell him to-night," Gabriella had answered; and sitting now
+in the rocking-chair by the fire, she began to wonder if George would be
+exactly like other men about children.
+
+The house was very still, but even in its stillness it exhaled the
+nervous apprehension which she felt to be its living character--as if
+George's parents, sleeping two doors away, had dropped their guard for
+the night, and allowed their anxious thoughts the freedom of the halls
+until daybreak. And these thoughts, which had become like invisible
+presences to the girl, wandered up and down the dim staircase, where the
+lowered lights awaited George's return, invaded the drawing-room, filled
+with stuffy red velvet chairs, so like crouching human beings in the
+darkness, and even thronged about her threshold, ready to spring inside
+at the instant when George should open the door. While her fire burned
+brightly on the andirons, and rosy shadows danced on the white rug
+beside her bed, on the lace coverlet turned back for the night, on the
+deep pillows with their azure lining showing through the delicate linen
+of the slips, on her simple nightdress, in which the buttonholes were so
+beautifully worked by her mother,--while she looked at these things it
+was easy for her to shut out the apprehensions of yesterday. But these
+apprehensions would come with George and they would not go until George
+left her again. The house with its heavy late-Victorian furniture, its
+velvet carpets which muffled footsteps, its thick curtains which hid
+doorways, its red walls, its bevelled mirrors, its substantial and
+costly ornaments, its solid paintings in solid frames--the house and all
+that it contained diffused for Gabriella an inescapable atmosphere, and
+this atmosphere was like the one in which she had waited expectantly in
+her childhood for the roof to be sold over her head. Now, as then, she
+waited for something to happen, and this something was a fact of dread,
+a shape of terror, which must be ignored as long as its impending
+presence was not directly before one's eyes. But with the look she was
+familiar, for she had seen it in her mother's face as far back as she
+could remember. It was associated in her mind with the need of money,
+with scant food, with scant fires, with a brooding and sinister hush in
+the house. With the knowledge of these things in her mind how could she
+hope that George would be glad of the child that was coming to them in
+the autumn?
+
+And yet to Mrs. Fowler the news had appeared to bring no additional
+anxiety. She had seemed pleased rather than otherwise, mildly
+interested, animatedly sympathetic.
+
+"I am afraid it will be very expensive," Gabriella had reminded her a
+little timidly, feeling frankly apologetic when she thought of all the
+trouble she must bring to the harassed and over-burdened little woman.
+
+But into Mrs. Fowler's face there had come the look with which she was
+accustomed to receive the suggestion that her dinner parties were an
+extravagance. That economy which she practised so rigidly, which was so
+elastic to cover little pleasures and the minor comforts of life, broke
+like a cobweb when she tried to stretch it over larger needs and
+desires. The severity of her self-denial was directed entirely against
+the trivial and the unessential. With regard to the indispensable
+materials for happiness, she seemed to feel that she possessed an
+unquestionable right to enjoy them at any cost; and she had reassured
+Gabriella with an optimism which appeared perfectly genuine. After
+talking to her the girl had felt that she might allow herself to be
+happy if only George would change back into his old way.
+
+Four months ago, at the beginning of her marriage, she had told herself
+that she needed only the daily intimacy of life to make her understand
+him. Now, after living with him, she felt that she was growing to
+understand him less every hour--that the relation which ought to have
+brought them spiritually closer, had ended by thrusting them to an
+incalculable distance from each other. Of the nervous reactions which he
+had suffered she knew nothing. All she saw clearly was that the widening
+breach between them would soon become impassable unless it could be
+filled by their new love for the child. The power to hold him must slip
+from her hands to the child's, and she was more than ready, she was even
+eager, to relinquish it. In the last few months her feeling for George
+had altered, and, though she was hardly conscious of the change in
+herself, her love for him had become less passionate and more maternal.
+The tenderness was there, but the yearning, the delight in his mere
+physical presence was gone. Like every other emotion that she had felt
+in the past, her love for her husband had become absorbed in the
+passion, the longing, the delight with which she enfolded the thought of
+her child.
+
+"I wonder if mother felt like this about me," she would say to herself,
+and the wonder was like a cord drawing her back to her mother and to her
+own babyhood. Then George would become strangely vague, strangely remote
+in her thoughts; and her mother would seem nearer to her than everything
+except the child under her heart.
+
+But since her talk with Mrs. Fowler, who had shown her photographs of
+George as a baby, some in long clothes, some in his first short frock,
+with a woolly lamb in his hands, some in a velvet suit, with his
+lustrous curls falling over a lace collar, Gabriella had felt that she
+possessed a new understanding of her husband and of the imperative needs
+of his nature. The child quality in him, the eternal boy that he
+betrayed sometimes by accident, appeared to her now to be the salient
+attribute of his character. After all, because of this quality, which
+was at once his charm and his weakness, she could not judge him as
+harshly as she might judge another man, she could not demand of him the
+gravity and the restraint of his father, who had never been young.
+
+"I ought not to have kept it from him. His mother is right. She
+understands him better than I do," she thought, as she looked at the
+clock. "If I had told him sooner he might be with me now."
+
+Through the muffled stillness of the house the sound of the opening
+front door stole up to her, and she heard George come in and stop for a
+minute to take off his hat and coat in the lower hail. Then she heard
+his footsteps move to the staircase; and while she listened she had a
+curious intuitive sense that it was not George at all, but a stranger
+who was coming to her, and that this stranger walked like a very old
+man. She heard him reach the bend in the stairs, and without stopping to
+put out the light, pass on to her door, which was the first on the
+landing. As he reached the top of the stairs, he stumbled once; then she
+heard his hand on the knob and a fumbling sound as if the knob would not
+turn. The door seemed to take an eternity to open, and while she sprang
+up with the clutch of terror at her heart, she felt again the sharp,
+agonizing premonition that a stranger was approaching her.
+
+"George!" she called in a strangled voice, and waited, standing, for him
+to enter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MOTHERHOOD
+
+
+At noon the next day Mrs. Fowler came into Gabriella's room and found
+her sewing beside the window which looked on a gray expanse of sky and
+street, where a few snowflakes were falling.
+
+"Did you tell him, dear?" she asked, arranging a handful of red roses in
+a little alabaster vase on the desk.
+
+No, Gabriella had not told him. She felt now that she should never be
+able to tell him, but all she said was:
+
+"I didn't get a chance. How lovely those roses are."
+
+Mrs. Fowler set the vase where the gray light fell on it, and then
+turning with empty hands from the desk, asked gently:
+
+"Aren't you making a mistake, dear?" Her movements were like those of a
+character in a play who is made to fill in an awkward pause with some
+mechanical action.
+
+"I couldn't tell him last night," replied Gabriella; "he was sick all
+night."
+
+She was very pale, even her lips had lost their rich colour, and her
+eyes had a drawn and heavy look as if she had not slept. Without looking
+at her mother-in-law, she went on with her sewing, working buttonholes
+of exquisite fineness in a small white garment. In her lap there was a
+little wicker basket filled with spools of thread and odd bits of lace
+and cambric; and every now and then she stopped her work and gazed
+thoughtfully down on it as if she were trying to decide how she might
+use the jumble of scraps that it contained.
+
+"Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler suddenly, after she had watched her a
+moment, "did anything happen last night?"
+
+"Happen? No, what could have happened?"
+
+"At what time did George come in?"
+
+"About one o'clock. I sat up for him."
+
+"Was--was anything the matter with him? Was he in any way different?"
+
+"He was sick. He was sick all night." A look of disgust crossed her face
+while she stopped to wipe away a drop of blood from her finger. "I don't
+remember pricking my finger since I was a child," she remarked.
+
+"You are keeping something from me," said Mrs. Fowler; and sitting down
+in the small chair by the desk, she leaned her elbow, in her full sleeve
+of violet cashmere, on the edge of the blotting-pad. She was wearing a
+morning gown made, as all her house gowns were made, after the princess
+style, and Gabriella could see the tight expanse of her bosom rising and
+falling under a garniture of purple and silver passementerie. Her hair,
+fresh from the crimping pins, rose in stiff ridges from her forehead,
+and her bright red lips were so badly chapped from cold that they
+cracked a little when she smiled. She looked as hard as granite though
+in reality her heart was breaking with pity.
+
+"I want to help you," she said, "and I can't if you keep things back."
+
+"I told you George was sick. I was up all night with him." Again a look
+of disgust, which she could not control, flickered and died in her face.
+
+"But you oughtn't to have let him keep you awake. You need all the sleep
+you can get. When he comes in late he must sleep in the spare room
+across the hall."
+
+"His things are all in here and he would come in to get them; that would
+wake me."
+
+For a moment Mrs. Fowler hesitated while the struggling breath grew more
+irregular under the passementerie on her bosom. The ripe colour faded
+from her cheeks and her lips looked blue in the harsh light from the
+window.
+
+"I think I'd better speak to George," she said. "He is spoiled and he
+always thinks first of his own comfort. I suppose it's the way we
+brought him up--but when he understands, he will be more considerate."
+
+For the first time Gabriella laid down her sewing and, leaning forward
+in her chair, fixed her eyes, with their look of deep stillness, of
+wistful expectancy, on the face of her mother-in-law.
+
+"Would you mind telling me if George was ever--ever wild about women?"
+she asked, and though her voice was very low and quiet, her words seemed
+to echo loudly through the hushed suspense in her brain. It was as if
+every piece of furniture, every vacant wall, every picture, and every
+pane of glass, repeated the sound.
+
+The pleasant smile on Mrs. Fowler's lips became suddenly painful. As if
+she were suffering a physical hurt, she put her handkerchief to her
+mouth while she answered:
+
+"He was once--but that was before he fell in love with you. We hoped
+that you would be able to steady him--that marriage would make him
+settle down."
+
+"Did he drink then?"
+
+"A little--not enough to make him show it. I never saw him really show
+it but once, and then he was dreadfully sick. Was--was he like that last
+night?"
+
+For a long minute, while she looked out of the window at the falling
+snowflakes, Gabriella did not reply. Then she spoke in a voice that was
+sternly accusing.
+
+"You ought to have told me. I ought to have known." Her own wild passion
+for George was forgotten. She felt only a sense of outrage, of wounded
+and stunned resentment, They had treated her as if she were a child or a
+fool. That she had been a fool she was not prepared to admit at the
+instant--and yet it was less than a year ago, that June night when she
+had watched George over the clove pinks while her heart melted with
+happiness. She had had her way, and she was already regretting her
+madness. "Is this what love comes to?" she asked herself bitterly as she
+watched the white flakes whirling out of the gray sky. "Is this what it
+all comes to in the end, or am I different from other women?"
+
+Moistening her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, Mrs. Fowler smiled
+bravely, though there were tears in her eyes. "Archibald wanted to, but
+I wouldn't let him," she replied; "I hoped that you would make
+everything different. He was so much in love with you. I thought you
+could do anything with him."
+
+Though her reasoning failed to convince Gabriella, it was sufficiently
+forcible to justify her in her own judgment, and with an easier
+conscience, she settled comfortably behind the impregnable defences of
+the maternal instinct. After all, she had only done what she believed
+to be best for her boy. She had not been selfish, she had not even been
+thoughtless, she had been merely a mother.
+
+"I wish you would tell me what really happened last night, Gabriella,"
+she said, and her tone showed that she had recovered her shaken
+confidence in the righteousness of her cause.
+
+"I can't tell you," answered Gabriella. "What good would it do? George
+was disgusting, that was all." She spoke sternly, for no lingering
+tenderness softened the judgment of her youth and her injured pride. How
+could she possibly have tenderness for a man who had tired of her in
+four months, who had become so lost to common decency that he could let
+her see him revoltingly drunk? And she had held her head so high, she
+had so despised Jane for her weakness and folly! At the moment she knew
+that she was helpless, but deep down within her she felt that this
+helplessness would not last--that the wings of her soul were still
+strong, still free, still untouched by the shame her body had suffered.
+With a single effort she could break the net of passion, and escape into
+the wonderful world which surrounded her. Like Jane, she had been a
+fool, but, unlike Jane, she would not stay a fool always.
+
+"You seem so hard, Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler. "Is it because you are
+young? Young people never make allowances."
+
+The taste of bitterness rose to Gabriella's lips.
+
+"I suppose I am hard," she answered, "and I am going to stay so. There
+is safety in hardness."
+
+Remembering Jane, remembering the hereditary weakness of the Carrs, who
+had all married badly, she told herself that in hardness lay her
+solitary refuge from despair. After all, it was better to be hard than
+to break.
+
+"You can't judge George quite as you would other men," began George's
+mother, and she was aware after a minute that the maternal instinct had
+in this instance led her to defeat.
+
+"I am not judging other men," replied George's wife coldly; "I am
+judging George." Against men as men she had never even thought of
+cherishing a grievance. All her life she had looked to some man as to
+the saviour of the family fortunes, and her vision was still true enough
+to perceive that, as a human being, Archibald Fowler was finer and
+bigger than his wife, that Billy was finer and bigger than Patty. She
+had found men less the servants of mere instinct than she had found
+women, less the passive and unresisting vehicles of the elemental
+impulses. Then, too, they were so seldom the victims of life, and there
+was in her nature a fierce contempt for a victim. She despised people
+who submitted to circumstances, who resigned themselves to necessity, as
+if resignation were a virtue instead of a vice.
+
+"Well, you must try not to worry, dear; worry is so bad for you. I am so
+sorry it happened. You won't mind my speaking to George, will you?"
+
+Gabriella shook her head. "I don't care what you say to him."
+
+"Do you feel able to come down to lunch?"
+
+"Oh, yes, perfectly. I am simply dying for a cup of tea, and afterwards
+I think I'll go out for a walk. One gets so stuffy and dull when one
+stays in the house."
+
+Her manner had changed as if by magic. In putting the thought of George
+out of her mind she seemed to have put aside her resentment and
+despondency.
+
+In the evening George came home, looking a little yellow, with a box of
+gardenias in his hand; but the scent of the flowers sickened Gabriella,
+and she put them out of the room while she dressed for dinner. The
+attention, instead of pleasing her, brought an ironic twist to her lips,
+though she thanked George quite as courteously as if he had been a
+stranger to her. At dinner when Mr. Fowler abruptly asked his son why he
+had not been to the office, she kept her eyes fixed on her plate, in
+which she seemed to see palely reflected the anxious pleasantness of her
+mother-in-law's smile. It hardly occurred to her to wonder where George
+had spent his day, though, when she met Mr. Fowler's kind and tired
+look, a pang shot through her heart. She was sorrier for George's father
+than she was for herself. He looked so lonely, yet so patient. He so
+obviously needed help, and no one appeared to notice it, not even his
+wife, who began planning a dinner party in the futile effort to come to
+George's assistance. It was by coming to George's assistance in every
+difficulty, Gabriella surmised, that his mother had made George what he
+was; and the girl saw in imagination an endless line of subterfuges, of
+pitiful excuses and feeble justifications, all hidden in the tortuous
+labyrinthine windings of the maternal instinct. She saw, with the
+relentless vision of a Hebrew prophet, the inevitable ruin of the love
+that does not submit to wisdom as its law.
+
+More than seven months afterwards, when she lay in her room with her
+child in the crook of her arm, she prayed passionately that some supreme
+Power would grant her the strength not of emotion, but of reason. All
+her life she had suffered from an unrestrained indulgence of the
+virtues--from love running to waste through excess, from the
+self-sacrifice that is capable of everything but self-discipline, from
+the intemperate devotion to duty that is as morbid as sin. Balance,
+moderation, restraint--these seemed to her, lying there with her child
+on her arm, to be the things most worth striving for. She saw her
+mother, worn to a shadow by the unnecessary deaths she had died, by the
+useless crucifixions she had endured; she saw Jane, haggard, wan, with
+her sweetness turning to bitterness because it was wasted; and again she
+found herself asking for balance, moderation, restraint. The child, a
+little girl, with George's eyes and hair like gauze, had liberated
+Gabriella from the last illusions of her girlhood.
+
+And yet, though Gabriella prayed for moderation, she found after a few
+months that motherhood was absorbing the full strength of her nature.
+George hardly existed for her; he came and went like the passing of a
+shadow, and she began gradually to sink her life into the life of her
+child. Not until the winter was she brought back to a sharp realization
+of her neglected duty to her mother; and this came with a letter from
+Mrs. Carr during the last week in January. Mrs. Carr was still living
+with Jane, and though she had accepted mildly Gabriella's reasons for
+postponing her coming to New York, she was beginning somewhat
+plaintively to question. She had made little effort to hide her
+disappointment at not being with her daughter when her grandchild was
+born, for, in spite of the fact that she had tragically assisted at the
+entrance of Jane's six children into the world, she still possessed an
+insatiable appetite for the perpetually recurring scenes of birth and
+death. Then only did her natural bent of mind appear to be justified by
+universal phenomena.
+
+And now on this morning in January, when Frances Evelyn, the baby, lay
+good and quiet in her crib, Gabriella read over again the disturbing
+letter she had just received from her mother.
+
+     MY DEAR DAUGHTER:
+
+     Jane wrote you that I had had a slight attack of pneumonia, so you
+     understood why I was obliged to let so long a time go by without
+     sending you a letter. Though I have been out of bed now for more
+     than a fortnight, I still feel so weak and good for nothing that I
+     am hardly equal to the exertion of writing. Then, too, I have had
+     some trouble with my wrist--the right one--and this has made it
+     really painful for me to hold a pen or even a fork. The doctor
+     thinks it is a nervous affection and that it will pass away as soon
+     as I get back my strength, and I am sure I hope and pray that it
+     will. But sometimes I feel as if I should never get any stronger,
+     and of course while my wrist is crippled I am unable to do any
+     sewing. This has depressed me very much, for poor Jane has so many
+     worries of her own that I dread being dependent on her, and Charley
+     has not been at all well this winter, though kinder and more
+     considerate than I have ever known him to be. He has his faults,
+     but I have always felt that he was not entirely responsible and
+     that we ought to pity rather than blame him. Women can never be too
+     thankful that they are spared by a merciful Providence the
+     temptations which seem to beset men. When we consider how much more
+     sheltered our lives are, we ought to be lenient in our judgment,
+     and I cannot help feeling that God meant us to be so when he gave
+     us more spiritual natures than those of men. Dr. Preston gave a
+     very instructive and impressive talk on that subject before the
+     Ladies' Aid Society of our church the week before I was taken sick.
+     Indeed, I am afraid I caught the cold that led to pneumonia sitting
+     in Charley's pew, which gets a bad draught from the door of the
+     Sunday-school room.
+
+     I must apologize for this dull letter, as I haven't been able to
+     get out even to market. Before I was taken ill I used to do all of
+     Jane's marketing, and you know what a place the market is for
+     meeting people and hearing all the latest news. There are, however,
+     two things to tell you, and you'll never be able to guess them.
+     First, poor Miss Amelia Peterborough is dead. She was stricken with
+     paralysis a week ago when she was all alone in the house--Miss
+     Jemima was at a funeral--and she never regained consciousness until
+     the end, which came at three o'clock Sunday night. Poor Miss
+     Jemima, I feel so sorry for her. She keeps up beautifully and is
+     very pious and resigned. They say she will go into the Old Ladies'
+     Home as soon as the arrangements can be made.
+
+     The other piece of news is more cheerful, though, for my part, life
+     seems so short and so uncertain that I can't see much cheerfulness
+     anywhere. So many people are dying that you can't help wondering
+     who will be next, and as Dr. Preston said when he called on me
+     during my illness, our only substantial hope is in a blessed
+     hereafter. My one regret will be leaving my children and
+     grandchildren, and especially my precious little Frances Evelyn,
+     whom I have never seen. I have no doubt that Mrs. Fowler was far
+     more useful than I could have been at the time of your trial, but
+     it was a great disappointment to me not to be able to receive the
+     little darling into the world.
+
+     But I had entirely forgotten that I started to tell you about
+     Florrie Spencer's marriage to Algernon Caperton. Of course I
+     couldn't go, but Jane says the wedding was lovely and that Florrie
+     looked really beautiful. Bessie had on rose-coloured brocade. Did
+     you ever hear of such a thing at her age? She was just as gay and
+     flirtatious as a girl, Charley said, and she sent me some of the
+     cake and a bottle of champagne, which, of course, I didn't touch.
+     It is a pity she is so loud, for there isn't a kinder heart in the
+     world. Florrie and Algernon are going to New York on their wedding
+     trip. Isn't it exactly like Florrie to want to go to all the
+     theatres? They send you word, by the way, that they are certainly
+     coming to see you and the baby.
+
+     And now that I have told all my news, I must write a little about
+     myself, though I am afraid you will be upset by what I am obliged
+     to tell you. I put it off as long as I could--for I do hate to
+     worry you--but the doctor has just been to see me and he says I
+     must go to Florida immediately to stay until the bad weather is
+     over. I told him I couldn't possibly afford it--the trip would take
+     a great deal of money--but he insisted that I should write and tell
+     you exactly what he said. He said my lungs were very weak and that
+     he ordered the change--you know they never seem to consider
+     expense--and when he was leaving, he stopped in the hall to speak
+     to Jane about it. Poor Jane, she is so worried that she has almost
+     gone deranged over my health, but as far as I am concerned I feel
+     that I would rather pass away than cause so much trouble and upset
+     everybody. Jane, as you know, hasn't a cent to her name, and it is
+     out of the question her asking Charley, because he has had a very
+     bad winter financially. Even Cousin Jimmy stopped sending me the
+     rent of the house since I moved to Jane's, and as for Uncle
+     Meriweather, he has been obliged to give up his business and go to
+     live with his niece in the country. So, much as I hate to ask you,
+     my dear child, I feel that you would rather I did so--and that I
+     ought to be perfectly frank about the situation, particularly since
+     poor Jane feels so deeply her inability to help me. I am afraid I
+     should need about four hundred dollars, as I have bought nothing to
+     wear for years. Bessie Spencer has told me of a very reasonable
+     place where I could board, and it is just possible that she will be
+     going herself by the time I am ready. If for any reason you are
+     unable to let me have the money, just destroy this letter and don't
+     think about it again. I wouldn't cause you a moment's worry for
+     anything in the world.
+
+     With love to George and a dozen kisses for my precious little
+     grandchild,
+
+     Your devoted mother,
+     FANNY CARR.
+
+     Did I remember to tell you that Miss Polly Hatch has gone to New
+     York to look after her nephew's children? He lost his wife a few
+     months ago, and was left with four little children, the youngest
+     only a year old.
+
+So her punishment had come! As Gabriella dropped the letter into her
+lap, and looked at little Frances, so good and happy in her crib, she
+felt that she was punished not only for her reckless marriage, but for
+all the subterfuge, all the deceit which had followed it. She had not
+told her mother the truth, for she, also, had been chiefly concerned
+with "keeping up an appearance." For the purpose of shielding George,
+who was blandly indifferent to her shielding, she had lied to her
+mother, if not in words, yet in an evasion of the truth, and the result
+was that her lies and her evasions had recoiled not on George's head,
+but on her own. For George wouldn't care. So little value did he place
+upon Mrs. Carr's good opinion, that he would not care even if Gabriella
+were to tell her the truth. And if she had only been honest! If she had
+only refused to lie because custom exacted that a wife should be willing
+to lie in defense of her husband. Some obscure strain of dogmatic piety
+struggled in the convulsed depths of her being, as if she had been
+suddenly brought up against the vein of iron in her soul--against the
+moral law, stripped bare of clustering delusions, which her ancestors
+had known and fought for as "the Berkeley conscience." The Berkeley
+conscience, bred for centuries on a militant faith, told her now that
+she was punished because she had lied to her mother.
+
+Then, as if this reversion to primitive theology had been merely an
+automatic reaction of certain nerve cells, she saw and condemned the
+childlike superstition. No, she was not punished so quickly; but she had
+been a fool, and she was paying the price of her incredible folly. How
+little, how pitifully little she knew of the world, after all! A year
+ago, on that horrible night, she had thought that her lesson was
+finished, but it was only beginning. Her immense, confiding ignorance
+would lead her into other abysses. And again, as on the morning after
+that night of revelation, she resolved passionately that she would not
+stay a fool always--that she would not become a victim of life.
+
+The empty bottle had slipped to one side of the crib, and little Frances
+lay smiling at the friendly universe, with her wet mouth wide open and
+her blue eyes, so like George's, sparkling with laughter. The down on
+her head, as fine and soft as spun silk, made tiny rings over her pink
+skull, which was as clear and delicate as an eggshell; and these golden
+rings filled Gabriella with a tenderness so poignant that it brought
+tears to her eyes. Whatever her mother may have thought about the world,
+it was perfectly obvious that Frances Evelyn considered her part in it
+remarkably jolly. To be a well baby in an amiable universe was her ideal
+of felicity.
+
+When George came up to luncheon, which he did sometimes now, he went
+straight to the nursery for a glimpse of his daughter. Ever since
+little Frances had lost her first hair and gained her golden down, he
+had taken an interest in the rapid stages of her development; and,
+though he never "wasted time," as he said, in the nursery, he liked to
+look in once a day and see whether or not she had changed in the night.
+On her side the baby treated her father as if he were an inexhaustible
+family joke, to be enjoyed not too seriously, but with a polite
+recognition of its humorous points. If she were sucking her bottle when
+he entered, she immediately stopped and laughed at him while the rubber
+nipple dropped from her toothless gums; if she awoke and discovered him
+at the side of her crib, she greeted him with subdued but inappeasable
+merriment; if he lifted her in his arms, her crocheted shoes could
+barely contain the kicks of her ecstatic feet. And because she was a
+jolly little beggar, George grew, after a time, to cherish a certain
+fondness for her. There was some use in a laughing baby, but he hated
+anything, child, woman, or animal, that cried.
+
+On this particular day the baby happened to be asleep when he entered,
+so, without stopping, he went into Gabriella's bedroom, where the
+perfume of roses mingled with the scent of the burning logs on the
+andirons.
+
+"That's a good fire," he observed, stopping on the hearth-rug. "I don't
+wonder you hate to go out."
+
+"Yes, the room was a little chilly, so I lit the fire for the baby's
+bath. I don't usually have one," replied Gabriella, explaining her
+apparent extravagance.
+
+"Has she been well?"
+
+"She is always well. I haven't had a day's anxiety about her since she
+was born."
+
+"But she isn't very old yet." Already little Frances was supplying
+conversational material to her parents.
+
+"I wish you would sit down, George," said Gabriella, with a change of
+tone. "I want to read you a part of a letter from mother."
+
+"Can't you tell me instead?"
+
+"If you'd rather. You know I never told mother why we couldn't have her
+to live with us. I never told her anything. I simply made excuses."
+
+"That was all right, wasn't it?" He was plainly nervous.
+
+"At the time I thought I couldn't do differently, but now--"
+
+She gave him the letter, and while he unfolded it awkwardly, she watched
+him anxiously and yet without interrupting his reading. Beyond the
+simple facts, she had told him nothing, and it was characteristic of her
+that she did not embellish these facts with picturesque phrases. She
+herself was so insensible to the appeal of rhetoric that she hardly
+thought of it as likely to influence anybody. Then, too, in moments of
+intense feeling she had always a sensation of dumbness.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry about her illness," he said, "but when you think of
+it, the best thing that could have happened to her was not to come to
+New York. This climate would have been the end of her."
+
+"Will you let me have the money, George? I will try to save in every way
+that I can. I've made all the baby's clothes, as it is, and I can easily
+make the few things I need, also. Since the baby came I have stopped
+calling with your mother."
+
+A flush rose to his face. "I know you've been a regular brick about
+money, Gabriella. I never saw a woman buy as little as you do, and you
+always manage to look well dressed."
+
+She smiled with faint irony. Her clothes were dowdy, for she had turned
+the broadcloth dress she had had at her marriage and was wearing it in
+the street; but if he thought her well dressed, it seemed hardly fair to
+undeceive him. Had she been any other woman, she reflected, he would
+probably have looked at her long enough to discover that she had grown
+decidedly shabby.
+
+Since the baby's birth, as she told him, she had stopped calling with
+her mother-in-law, and a black net dress, given her by Mrs. Fowler
+because it had grown too small in the waist, was still presentable
+enough for the family dinners. But she never worried about her
+appearance, and it was a relief to find that George was quite as
+indifferent on the subject as she was. In the days of their honeymoon he
+had been so particular that she had spent hours each day before the
+mirror.
+
+"Will you let me have the money, George?" she asked again. The form of
+the request had not changed, but there was a deeper note in her voice:
+the irony, which had been at first only a glancing edge to her smile, a
+subdued flash in her eyes, had passed now into her speech. George,
+looking sideways at the slightly austere charm of her profile, thought
+suddenly, "Gabriella is growing hard." He noticed, too, for the first
+time, that she looked older since the birth of the baby, that her bosom
+was fuller and that her figure, which had always been good, was now
+lovely in its long flowing lines. She was handsomer than she had been
+before her marriage, for her complexion had become clearer since she
+had lived in the North, and though she was still pale, her skin was
+losing its sallow tone.
+
+Yet, though he thought her more attractive than she had been as a girl,
+she had ceased to make the faintest appeal to his senses. There were
+times even when he wondered how she had ever appealed to him, for she
+had not been beautiful, and beauty had always seemed to him to be
+essential in the women with whom one fell in love. But, however it had
+happened, still it had happened, and she was now his wife and the mother
+of the adorable Frances Evelyn.
+
+"I'm awfully cut up about it, Gabriella," he said, "but honestly I am
+out of the money. I couldn't lay my hands on it just now to save my
+life."
+
+His excuses convinced him while he uttered them, but he had barely
+paused before Gabriella demolished them with a single blow of her
+merciless logic.
+
+"You were talking last night about buying a horse," she replied.
+
+He frowned resentfully, and she immediately regretted her words. By
+speaking the truth she had defeated her purpose.
+
+"It isn't as if I were buying a horse for pleasure," he answered
+doggedly; "I am dependent on exercise--you can see for yourself how I've
+gone off in the last two or three months. Of course if the horse were
+simply for enjoyment, like a carriage, it would be different. But mother
+has given up her carriage," he concluded triumphantly.
+
+He was a spendthrift, she realized, but he was a spendthrift with a
+streak of stinginess in his nature. Though he enjoyed gratifying his own
+desires, which were many, it pained him inexpressibly to witness
+extravagance on the part of others, and by a curious twist of the
+imagination, all money spent by Gabriella appeared to him to be an
+extravagance. To be sure, he had just told her that she was a brick
+about money, but that had been intended as a warning to virtue rather
+than as an encouragement to weakness. There was, to be sure, a vague
+understanding that she might make bills when they were unavoidable; but
+so in want of spending money had she been since her marriage, that
+several times she had been obliged to borrow car fare from her
+mother-in-law. When she had asked George for an allowance, however
+small, he had put her off with the permission to charge whatever she
+bought in the shops. As the bills apparently never lessened, and her
+conscience revolted from debt, she had gone without things she needed
+rather than accept the barren generosity of his promises. At Christmas
+her father-in-law had given her fifty dollars in gold, and with this she
+had bought presents for her mother and Jane and the servants.
+
+In the old days in Hill Street she had had little enough, but at least
+that little had really belonged to her; and since her marriage she had
+learned that when one is poor, it is better to live surrounded by want.
+To be poor in the midst of wealth--to be obliged to support a fictitious
+affluence on one's secret poverty--this was after all to know the
+supreme mortification of spirit. There were days when she almost prayed
+that the brooding suspense would assume a definite shape, that the blow
+would fall, the crash come, and ruin envelop them all. Any visible fact
+would be better than this impending horror of the imagination--this
+silent dread so much worse than any reality of failure--which
+encompassed them with the impalpable thickness and darkness of a cloud.
+
+"Then I can't help my mother even if it's a matter of life and death?"
+she asked.
+
+"I don't believe it's as bad as that, Gabriella. Ten chances to one the
+rest of the winter will be mild, and she would find Florida too
+depressing. You never can tell about doctors, you know. It's their
+business to make trouble. Now you mustn't let yourself worry--there's
+anxiety enough without that, heaven knows. Why, just look at father! He
+has lost almost all he ever had--he is simply staving off failure for I
+don't know how long, and yet from mother's manner who on earth would
+suspect that there is anything wrong? Now that's what I call pluck. By
+Jove--"
+
+Again her impetuous spirit--dangerous gift!--flashed out recklessly in
+defence of the truth.
+
+"Then why don't you try to help your father, George?" she asked. "He
+tells me that you rarely go down to the office." Her voice vibrated, but
+the stern lines of her mouth, which had lost its rich softness under the
+stress of her anger, hardly quivered.
+
+His frown darkened to a scowl. The calm disdain in her manner made him
+feel that he hated her, and he told himself stubbornly that if she had
+been gentler, if she had been more womanly, he would have done what she
+asked of him, forgetting in his rage that, if she had been these things,
+he would have found even less difficulty in refusing her.
+
+"You know as well as I do that I can't stand office work when I'm not
+fit," he returned sullenly. "It plays the devil with my nerves."
+
+Her case was hopeless. If it had not been so in the beginning, she had
+ruined it by her irrefutable arguments, and while he rambled on moodily,
+making excuses for his neglect of business, she sat silently planning
+ways by which she might get the money for her mother. To ask her
+father-in-law was, of course, out of the question; and Mrs. Fowler,
+beyond a miraculously extended credit, due probably to the shining
+bubble of her husband's financial security, was as penniless as
+Gabriella. Unless she could find something to sell there seemed little
+likelihood of securing four hundred dollars in a day. It was imperative,
+then, that she should find something to sell; and remembering her
+mother's tragic visits to old Mr. Camberwell, she ran hastily over her
+few personal possessions. As her wedding gifts had been entirely in the
+form of clothes--the donors doubtless surmising that the wife of a rich
+man's son would have other gifts in abundance--there remained only the
+trinkets George and George's parents had given her. All through
+luncheon, while Mrs. Fowler, with an assumed frivolity which Gabriella
+found more than usually depressing, rippled on over the warmed-over
+salmon, the girl mentally arranged and sorted in their cases a diamond
+brooch, an amethyst necklace, a bracelet set with pearls, and a topaz
+heart she occasionally wore on a gold chain, which she valued because it
+had belonged to her grandmother. Once she stopped, and lifting her hand,
+looked appraisingly at her engagement ring for an instant, while Mrs.
+Fowler, observing her long gaze, remarked caressingly:
+
+"I always thought it an unusually pretty stone, my dear. George knows a
+good deal about stones." Then, as if inspired by an impulse, she added
+quickly:
+
+"Wasn't George upstairs before lunch? I thought I heard his voice."
+
+"Yes, but he said he had an engagement at the club."
+
+"I wonder if he knows I have asked the Capertons to dinner to-night? You
+know I got Florrie's card the other day. She is here on her wedding
+journey, but even then she doesn't like to be quiet, for she is her
+mother all over again. I used to know Bessie very well. Kind hearted,
+but a little vulgar."
+
+"I didn't tell George. Perhaps you had better telephone him."
+
+"Oh, well, he usually comes up to dinner because of the baby. I've asked
+one or two people to meet Florrie, for I remember that Bessie's one idea
+of enjoyment was to be in a crowd. The Crowboroughs are coming and the
+Thorntons and the Blantons."
+
+"I'll be dressed in time," responded Gabriella, but she was thinking
+rapidly, "I can sell the diamond brooch and the bracelet and, if it is
+necessary, the amethyst necklace. The brooch must have cost at least
+three hundred dollars."
+
+The meal was finished in silence, for even Mrs. Fowler's cheerfulness
+would flag now and then without a spur; and Gabriella made no effort to
+keep up the strained conversation. As soon as they had risen from the
+table, she ran upstairs to dress for the street, and then, before going
+out, she sat down at her desk, and wrapped up the brooch and the
+bracelet in tissue paper. For a minute she gazed, undecided, at the
+amethyst necklace. Mr. Fowler had given it to her, and she hated to part
+with it. George's gifts meant nothing to her now, but she felt a
+singular fondness for the amethyst necklace.
+
+"I'd better take it with me," she thought; and wrapping it with the
+others, she put the package into her little bag, and went out of the
+room. It was her habit to stop for a last look at little Frances before
+she left the house, but to-day she hurried past the nursery, and ran
+downstairs and out of doors, where Mrs. Fowler was getting into a hansom
+with the assistance of Burrows, the English butler.
+
+"May I drop you somewhere, Gabriella?" inquired Mrs. Fowler, while
+Burrows arranged the parcels on the seat of the hansom. In the strong
+sunshine all the little lines which were imperceptible in the shadow of
+the house--lines of sleeplessness, of anxiety, of prolonged aching
+suspense--appeared to start out as if by magic in her face. And over
+this underlying network of anxious thoughts there dropped suddenly, like
+a veil, that look of artificial pleasantness. She would have died sooner
+than lift it before one of the servants.
+
+"No, thank you. I need the walk," answered Gabriella, stopping beside
+the hansom. "You will be tired if you do all those errands. May I help
+you?"
+
+"No, no, dear, take your walk. I am so glad the storm is over. It will
+be a lovely afternoon."
+
+Then the hansom drove off; Burrows, after a longing glance at the blue
+sky, slowly ascended the brownstone steps; and Gabriella, closing her
+furs at the throat, for the wind was high, hurried in the direction of
+Fifth Avenue.
+
+The streets were still white after the storm; piles of new-fallen snow
+lay in the gutters; and when Gabriella crossed Madison Avenue, the wind
+was so strong that it almost lifted her from the ground. Above the
+shining whiteness of the streets there was a sky of spring; and spring
+was blossoming in the little cart of a flower vendor, which had stopped
+to let the traffic pass at the corner. There were few people out of
+doors, and these few appeared remote and strangely unreal between the
+wintry earth and the April sky. Beside the gutters, where the street
+cleaners were already at work, wagons drawn by large, heavy horses moved
+slowly from crossing to crossing. At Forty-second Street the traffic was
+blocked by one of these wagons; and from the windows of the stage, which
+had stopped by the sidewalk, the eyes of the passengers stared with
+moody resignation at the hurrying pedestrians. And it seemed to
+Gabriella that these faces wore, one and all, the look of secret
+anxiety, the faint network of lines which she had seen in the face of
+her mother-in-law. "I wonder if I have it, too," she thought, pausing
+before a shop window. But her reflection flashed back at her from the
+glass, smooth, stern, unsmiling, as if her features had been sculptured
+in marble.
+
+Below Fortieth Street there was the shop of a jeweller she sometimes
+went to with Mrs. Fowler in that lady's despairing quest for suitable
+wedding presents at moderate prices; and something in the kindly,
+sympathetic face of the clerk who waited on them made Gabriella decide
+suddenly to trust him. As she unwrapped the tissue paper rather
+nervously, and keeping back the necklace, laid the brooch and the
+bracelet on the square of purple velvet he spread out on the counter,
+she raised her eyes to his with a look that was childlike in its appeal.
+Again she thought of the morning on which they had surreptitiously taken
+her silver mug, hidden in Mrs. Carr's gray and black shawl, to the shop
+of old Mr. Camberwell.
+
+"How much might I get for these? I have worn them only a few times. They
+do not suit me," she said.
+
+For a minute the clerk looked at her reflectively, but without
+curiosity; then lifting the trinkets from the square of velvet, he
+passed behind a green curtain into an adjoining room. After a short
+absence, in which she nervously examined an assortment of travelling
+clocks, he came back and told her that they would give her four hundred
+and fifty dollars for the two pieces.
+
+"The stones alone are worth that," he added, "and, of course, they will
+have to be reset before we can sell them."
+
+"May I have the check now?"
+
+"Shall we send it to you by mail?"
+
+"No, I must have it now. I want it this afternoon--immediately."
+
+He yielded, still with his reflective but incurious manner; and when she
+left the shop a quarter of an hour later the check was in her little bag
+beside the amethyst necklace. "I am glad I didn't have to sell the
+necklace," she thought. "Now I'll find a hotel and write to mother, and
+it will all be settled. It will all be settled," she repeated in a
+joyous tone; and this joyousness, overflowing her breast, showed in her
+eyes, in the little quivering smile on her lips, and in her light and
+buoyant step over the snow. A weight had been lifted from her heart, and
+she felt at peace with the world, at peace with the shivering
+passers-by, at peace even with George. The wind, hastening her walk,
+stung her face till it flushed through its pallor, and sent the warm
+blood bounding with happiness through her veins. Under the stainless
+blue of the sky, it seemed to her that the winter's earth was suddenly
+quickening with the seeds of the spring.
+
+In the Waldorf she found a corner which was deserted, except for an
+elderly man with a dried face and a girl in a green hat, who appeared to
+be writing to her lover; and sitting down at a little desk behind a
+lamp, she wrote to her mother without mentioning George, without
+explaining anything, without even making excuses for her failure to keep
+her promise. She knew now that George had never meant that her mother
+should live with them, that he had never meant that they should take an
+apartment, that he had lied to her, without compunction, from the
+beginning. She knew this as surely as she knew that he was faithless and
+selfish, as surely as she knew that he had ceased to love her and would
+never love her again. And this knowledge, which had once caused her such
+poignant agony, seemed now as detached and remote as any tragedy in
+ancient history. She was barely twenty-two, and her love story had
+already dwindled to an impersonal biographical interest in her mind.
+
+When she had finished her letter, she placed the check inside of it, and
+then sat for a minute pensively watching the girl in the green hat,
+whose face paled and reddened while she wrote to her lover.
+
+"It seems a hundred years ago since I felt like that," she thought, "and
+now it is all over." Then because melancholy had no part in her nature,
+and she was too practical to waste time in useless regrets, she rose
+quickly from the desk, and went out, while the exhilaration of her mood
+was still proof against the dangerous weakness of self-pity. "It's life
+I'm living, not a fairy tale," she told herself sternly as she posted
+the letter and left the hotel. "It's life I'm living, and life is hard,
+however you take it." For a few blocks she walked on briskly, thinking
+of the shop windows and of the brightness and gaiety of the crowd in
+Fifth Avenue; but in spite of her efforts, her thoughts fluttered back
+presently to herself and her own problems. "After all, you can't become
+a victim unless you give in," she said grimly; "and I'll die rather than
+become a victim."
+
+Her walk kept her out until five o'clock, and when she entered the house
+at that hour she found her mother-in-law in the front hall giving
+directions to Burrows. At sight of Gabriella she paused breathlessly,
+and said with undisguised nervousness:
+
+"A very queer-looking person who says she was sent by your mother has
+just come to see you, dear--a seamstress of some kind, I fancy. As she
+looked quite clean, I let her go upstairs to the nursery to wait for
+you. I hope you don't mind. She was so eager to see the baby."
+
+"Oh, it's Miss Polly!" cried Gabriella; and without stopping to explain,
+she ran upstairs and into the nursery, where little Frances was cooing
+with delight in Miss Polly's arms.
+
+The seamstress' small birdlike face, framed by the silk quilling of her
+old lady's bonnet, broke into a hundred cheerful wrinkles at the sight
+of Gabriella. Even the grotesqueness of her appearance--of her fantastic
+mantle trimmed with bugles, made from her best wrap in the 'seventies,
+of her full alpaca skirt, with its wide hem stiffened by buckram, of her
+black cotton gloves, and her enormous black broadcloth bag--even these
+things could not extinguish the pleasure Gabriella felt in the meeting.
+If Miss Polly was ridiculous at home, she was twice as ridiculous in New
+York, but somehow it did not seem to matter. The sight of her brought
+happy tears to the girl's eyes, and in the attempt to hide them, she
+buried her face in the warm, flower-scented neck of little Frances.
+
+"She's the peartest baby I ever saw," remarked Miss Polly with pride.
+"Wouldn't yo' ma dote on her?"
+
+"Wouldn't she? But how did you leave mother and Jane and the children?
+The baby must be a big boy now."
+
+"He's runnin' around all the time, and never out of mischief. I never
+saw such a child for mischief. I was tellin' yo' ma so last week.
+There's another baby on the way with Jane, you know."
+
+"How in the world will she take care of it? I suppose Charley is just
+the same?"
+
+"Well, if you ask me, Gabriella, I never was so dead set against Mr.
+Charley as the rest of you. I helped raise Jane from the time she was no
+higher than that--and I ain't sayin' nothin' against her except that Mr.
+Charley ain't half as bad to my mind as she makes him out. Some men
+respond to naggin' and some don't--that's what I said to her one day
+when she broke down and cried on my shoulder--and you've got to be
+mighty particular when you begin to nag that you're naggin' the right
+sort. But she won't listen, not she. 'If I don't tell Charley of his
+faults, who's goin' to?' she asks. You know Jane always did talk pretty
+free to me ever since she was a little girl. Well, there are some people
+that simply can't stand bein' told of their faults, and Mr. Charley is
+one of 'em. It ain't the kind of treatment that agrees with him, and if
+I'd been in Jane's place, I reckon I'd have found it out long ago. But
+it ain't her way to learn anything--you know that as well as I do. She's
+obliged to make the world over even if it drops to pieces in her hands."
+
+"She doesn't seem to have done much with Charley."
+
+"Well, you mark my words, Mr. Charley ain't bad, but he's full of
+natur', and Jane, is the kind of woman that's never happy unless she's
+gettin' the better of natur'. Whatever's natural is plum wrong, that's
+the way she looks at it; but mind you, I ain't sayin' she's all in the
+right. Naggin' ain't a virtue to my mind any mo' than drink is, but
+Jane, she can't see it that way, and there ain't a bit of use tryin' to
+make her. She's soft, but she's mulish, and the hardest thing on earth
+to push is a mule that looks soft."
+
+"It's such a pity, but I suppose nothing will change her. Tell me about
+mother."
+
+"Yo' ma looks downright po'ly. What with her sickness and her bother
+about Jane and the bad weather, she ain't managin' to keep as spry as
+I'd like to see her. From the stitch in her back she has most of the
+time it wouldn't surprise me any day to hear that she'd come down with
+kidney trouble, and she breathes so short that consumption has crossed
+my mind mo' than once when I was talkin' to her."
+
+Miss Polly, having, as she expressed it, "an eye for symptoms,"
+possessed an artistic rather than a scientific interest in disease; and
+the vivid realism of her descriptions had often, on her "sewing days" at
+home, reduced Gabriella to faintness, though Mrs. Carr, with her more
+delicate sensibilities, was able to listen with apparent enjoyment to
+the ghastly recitals. Not only had Miss Polly achieved in her youth a
+local fame as a "sick nurse," but, in the days when nursing was neither
+sanitary nor professional, she was often summoned hastily from her
+sewing machine to assist at a birth or a burial in one of the families
+for whom she worked. And happy always, as befits one whose life,
+stripped bare of ephemeral blessings, is centred upon the basic
+realities, she was never happier than when she put down her sewing, took
+off her spectacles, exchanged her apron for a mantle, and after
+carefully tying her bonnet strings, departed for a triumphant encounter
+with the Eternal Issues.
+
+"I am so anxious about mother," said Gabriella. "Did she tell you she
+was going to Florida?"
+
+"She cert'ny did. She was real full of it, and she talked a lot about
+you all up here--the baby and you and Mr. George. You know I ain't laid
+my eyes on Mr. George mo' than three times in my life. Well, I reckon
+I'd better be gettin' along back, or the children will miss me. I've got
+four children to do for now, and one of 'em ain't any bigger than
+Frances. It does seem funny--don't it, for an old maid to have her hands
+full of children? But, you know, I always did dote on children. There
+wouldn't be half so much fun in this world if it wan't for children and
+men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under their
+skins. Yes, I can find my way back real easy. I always was good at
+finding my way about, and all I've got to do is to set out and walk in
+that direction till I come to a car over yonder by that high building,
+and as soon as I get on I'll ask the conductor to put me off right at my
+do'."
+
+When she had gone, Gabriella went back into the nursery, and stood
+looking down at little Frances, who had fallen asleep, with the smile of
+an angel on her face. "I wonder if I can be the least bit like Jane?"
+she said aloud while she watched the sleeping child.
+
+George did not come home to dinner; and the wonder was still in
+Gabriella's mind when she dressed herself in her black net gown, and
+went downstairs to meet Florrie, who looked younger and more brilliant
+than ever in a dress of white and silver brocade. Florrie's husband, a
+dreamy, quiet man,--the safe kind of man, Gabriella reflected, who
+inevitably marries a dangerous woman--regarded his noisy wife with a
+guileless admiration which was triumphantly surviving a complete
+submergence in the sparkling shallows of Florrie's personality. He was a
+man of sense and of breeding. He possessed the ordinary culture of a
+gentleman as well as the trained mind of a lawyer, yet he appeared
+impervious alike to the cheapness of Florrie's wit and the vulgarity of
+her taste. Her beauty had not only blinded him to her mental
+deficiencies; it had actually deluded him into a belief in her
+intelligence. He treated her slangy sallies as if they were an original
+species of humour; he accepted the sweeping comment of her ignorance as
+if it had been an inspired criticism of life. While she chattered,
+parrotlike, to the judge, who was obviously impressed by her appearance,
+Algernon listened to her ejaculatory conversation with a mixture of
+admiration and awe.
+
+"How do you think Florrie is looking?" he asked in a low tone of
+Gabriella, while his wife's laugh, high, shrill, penetrating in its dry
+soprano quality, fluted loudly on the opposite side of the table. Beside
+Patty's patrician loveliness, as serene and flawless as that of a
+marble goddess, Florrie appeared cheap, common, and merely pretty to
+Gabriella. The hard brilliancy of her surface was like a shining polish
+which would wear off with sleep and have to be replenished each morning;
+and while she watched her, Gabriella saw, in imagination, a vaguely
+ominous outline surrounding her which might have been the uncertain edge
+of her mother's shadow. In twenty-five years Florrie would be the image
+of her mother--protuberant hips, pinched waist, mottled complexion, and
+hopelessly tarnished hair; yet, with this awful prospect before him,
+Algernon could appear not only tolerant, but positively adoring. He had
+seen Bessie--he had known her for years--and he could marry her
+daughter!
+
+"I never saw her look handsomer," said Gabriella, "that white and silver
+gown is very becoming."
+
+"That's what I told her, but she wouldn't believe me. She thought it was
+too plain for her style. Your sister-in-law is something of Florrie's
+type, isn't she? Not quite so striking a figure, perhaps, but the same
+sort of colouring."
+
+Was it possible that for the first time in his life the simple Algernon
+was speaking in irony? Turning in her chair, she looked questioningly
+into his kind, grave face, so empty of humour, into his serious gray
+eyes, which followed each movement of his wife's with admiring
+attention. No, he was not ironic; he was perfectly solemn. It was a
+miracle--a miracle not of piety, but of passion--that she was
+witnessing.
+
+"Yes, Patty is lovely," she answered, thinking, as she reflected upon
+the eccentricities of love, how much too good he was for his wife.
+
+Across the table Florrie's voice was heard exclaiming: "Now, you don't
+mean it! Well, I'm just as flattered as I can be!" and Gabriella
+surmised that she was completing her conquest of the judge.
+
+"It's wonderful how well she gets on with everybody," observed Algernon.
+"She's never at a loss for a word, and I tell her if I had her ready
+wit, I'd be the greatest lawyer in Virginia to-day. Have you noticed the
+way she is managing Judge Crowborough?"
+
+"She always gets on well with men," acquiesced Gabriella, though without
+the enthusiasm of Algernon. "Do you remember what a belle she always was
+at the germans?" Though she was willing to admit that love was the
+ruling principle of life, it occurred to her that Algernon would be more
+amusing if he were less abundantly supplied with that virtue.
+
+They talked of nothing but Florrie until the women went into the
+drawing-room; and there, from the safe haven of a window, Gabriella
+listened to Florrie's ceaseless prattle about herself. She was as
+egotistical, as effervescent, as she had been as a schoolgirl; and it
+seemed to Gabriella that she was hardly a day older. Her eyes, of a
+grayish blue, like pale periwinkles, were as bold, as careless, as
+conquering in their glances; her hair was still as dazzling; her face,
+with its curious resemblance in shape to the face of a pretty cat, was
+still as frank, as naïve, as confiding in its innocence. If she had
+changed at all, it was that, since her marriage to the silent Algernon,
+she had become even more talkative than she had been in her girlhood.
+Her vivacity was as disturbing as the incessant buzzing of a June
+beetle.
+
+"Well, you need never tell me again that you wouldn't rather live in New
+York, Gabriella," she fluted at parting, "because I shan't believe a
+single word of it. Why, we've been to the theatre every night for a
+fortnight, and we haven't seen half the good plays that are going on.
+Algy wanted to stay at Niagara Falls--you know we went to Niagara Falls
+first--but it was so deadly quiet I couldn't stand it. 'I don't care if
+I am married,' I said to Algy, 'what I want is the theatre.'"
+
+After she had gone, adoringly wrapped up by Algernon, Patty turned to
+her mother with a little malicious grimace:
+
+"I know it's horrid to say she's dreadful, mamma, but she really is."
+
+"Don't, Patty, it isn't kind, and, besides, she's a friend of
+Gabriella's. What I can't understand," she added, "is how Bessie ever
+came out of Virginia, yet there were always a few like her. You don't
+remember Pussy Prime, do you? Of course you don't, she died long before
+your day, but she was just that loud, boisterous kind, and all the men
+were in love with her."
+
+"Well, if I'm ever born again," remarked Gabriella, as she kissed Patty
+good-night, "I hope I'll be born a fat blonde. They always get taken
+care of."
+
+She ascended the stairs wearily to her room. Yes, she was barely
+twenty-two and love was over forever. "I couldn't hold a man six
+months," she thought dejectedly, "and yet Florrie, who is a fool and
+vulgar, will be adored all her life."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND
+
+THE AGE OF KNOWLEDGE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DISENCHANTMENT
+
+
+In July Gabriella joined her mother in the mountains of Virginia, and
+when she returned in the autumn, she found that the character of her
+home had changed perceptibly during her absence. Brightness had followed
+gloom; the fog of suspense had dissolved, and the hazy sunshine of an
+ambiguous optimism flooded the house. What the change implied she could
+not immediately discover; but before the first day was over she surmised
+that the financial prospects of her father-in-law had improved since the
+spring. If she had had any doubt of his rising fortunes, the sight of
+the diminished pile of bills on Mrs. Fowler's desk would have quickly
+dispelled it.
+
+And even George had apparently altered for the better. His improved
+finances had sweetened his temper and cast the shining gloss of
+prosperity over his appearance; and, in a measure at least, time had
+revived in him the ardent, if fluctuating, emotions of the lover. For
+three months after her return, he evinced a fervent sentiment for
+Gabriella, which she, who was staunchly paying the price of her folly,
+received with an inner shrinking but an outward complaisance. Her
+feeling for George was quite dead--so dead that it was impossible for
+any artificial stimulus to revive it--but she had learned that marriage
+is founded upon a more substantial basis than the romantic emotions of
+either a wife or a husband. Though she had ceased to love George, she
+could still be amiable to him; and it occurred to her at times that if
+one had to choose between the two not necessarily inseparable qualities
+of love and amiability, George was not losing greatly by the exchange.
+When, however, at the end of three months, George's capricious symptoms
+disappeared as suddenly as they had come, and his attentions lapsed into
+casual expressions of a nonchalant kindness, she drew a breath of
+relief, and devoted her happiest days to the nursery. There at least she
+had found a stable refuge amid the turmoil of selfish human desires.
+
+In the house, which like George, began presently to show the gloss of
+prosperity, the winter brought a continuous flashing stream of gaiety,
+in which Mrs. Fowler darted joyously about like some bright hungry
+minnow beneath the iridescent ripples of a brook. There were new rugs,
+new curtains, new gowns, new bonnets; and Gabriella was led compliantly
+from dressmaker to milliner, until she lost in the process her look of
+shabbiness and developed into the fashionable curving figure of the
+period. She had always liked clothes; her taste was naturally good; and
+as she followed eagerly from shop to shop, she recalled the three months
+she had spent in Brandywine's millinery department, and the rudiments of
+a trade she had learned there. "I'd rather design my next gown myself,"
+she said one day to Mrs. Fowler, while they were looking at French
+models in the establishment of Madame Dinard, who had been born an
+O'Grady. "I know I can do better than these, and besides I shan't meet
+duplicates of myself every time I go out." That night she dreamed of
+hats and gowns, and the next morning she drew pictures of them in
+coloured chalk. "It's the only talent I ever had," she remarked gaily to
+her mother-in-law, "and it is running to waste."
+
+Madame, who regarded the sketches with uncompromising disdain, showed
+great interest in the practical application of Gabriella's ideas to the
+dressing of Mrs. Fowler.
+
+"Yes, you have undoubtedly ideas," she said, discarding in her
+enthusiasm the accent she had spent twenty years in acquiring, "and
+there is nothing so rare in any department--in any walk of life--as
+ideas. You have style, too," she pursued admiringly, turning her eyes on
+Gabriella's figure in one of her Parisian models. "It is very rare--such
+chic. You wear your clothes with a grace."
+
+"That, also, is a marketable asset in a dressmaker," laughed Gabriella.
+"Do you know I ought to have been a dressmaker, Madame. Only I hate the
+very sight of a needle."
+
+"But I never sew! I haven't had a needle in my hand for twenty
+years--no, not for thirty," protested Madame.
+
+"Then I mustn't give up hope. If I ever have to earn my living, I'll
+come to you, Madame."
+
+Then Madame bowed and smiled and shrugged as if at a gracious jest, and
+Mrs. Fowler observed in her crisp, matter-of-fact manner: "Yes, my
+daughter has a genuine instinct for dress, and, as you say, that is very
+rare. She carries her clothes well, doesn't she? It's such a blessing to
+be tall--though my husband insists that the women who have ruled the
+world have always been small ones. But I do love a fine figure, and she
+looks so distinguished in that cherry-coloured cloth, doesn't she?"
+
+To all of which Madame agreed, as she bowed them out, with her
+ingratiating professional manner.
+
+"It's so lovely to have clothes," said Gabriella, sinking back in the
+victoria, "money is one of the best gifts of the gods, isn't it?"
+
+"It's hard to do without it," replied Mrs. Fowler, brisk and perfectly
+businesslike even in her generalizations. "I expect the worst suffering
+in the world comes from poverty."
+
+Then, after a thoughtful pause, she added with the practical air of one
+who scorns to be abstract: "But do you know I sometimes think Archibald
+and I'd both be happier if we had never made any money at all--I mean,
+of course, except just enough to live simply somewhere in the South.
+When once you begin, you can't stop, and I wish sometimes we had never
+begun." Above the narrow black velvet strings of her bonnet, her round
+florid face, from which the fine tracery of lines had vanished, assumed
+the intent and preoccupied expression which Gabriella associated with
+the pile of unpaid bills on the little French desk. "I believe Archibald
+feels that way, too," she concluded after a minute, while her firm and
+unemotional lips closed together over the words.
+
+"But you enjoy it so much when you have it."
+
+"That's just the trouble. You have to enjoy it as quickly as you can
+because you never know when you are going to lose every bit of it
+without warning. It's been that way ever since I married--rich one year,
+poor the next, or poor for two years and then rich for three. Life has
+been a seesaw with prosperity at one end of the plank and poverty at
+the other. Of course I know," she pursued, with characteristic lucidity,
+"that you think me dreadfully extravagant, but we'd just as well spend
+it as lose it, and it's sure to be one thing or the other."
+
+"But couldn't you save something? Couldn't you put by something for the
+future?" Saving for the future was one of the habits of Gabriella's
+frugal past which still clung to her.
+
+"That would go, too. If we ever come to ruin--and heaven knows we've
+been on the brink of it before this--Archibald would not keep back a
+penny. That's his way, and that's one of the reasons I spend all we
+have--up to the very margin of his income."
+
+The logic of this was so confusing that Gabriella was obliged to stop
+and puzzle it out. At the end she could only admit that Mrs. Fowler's
+reasoning processes, which were by nature singularly lucid and exact,
+showed at times a remarkable subtlety--as if some extraneous hybrid
+faculty had been grafted on the simple parent stock of her mind.
+
+"I can't help feeling, though," resumed the practical little lady before
+Gabriella had reached the end of her analysis, "that I'd be a great deal
+happier at this minute if we'd been poor all our lives."
+
+"It wouldn't have suited George," observed George's wife with an
+inflection of irony.
+
+"He mightn't have liked it, but I believe it would have been a great
+deal better for him," replied Mrs. Fowler, while she bowed gravely to a
+woman in a passing victoria. "There are many things George can't be
+blamed for, and the way he was brought up is one of them. Of course,
+he's no good whatever as a business man--his father hardly ever sees
+him in the office--but it's useless to scold him about it, for it only
+exasperates him. But he might have been a sensible, steady boy, if he
+had been brought up in some small place in the South where there was
+nothing to tempt him."
+
+That there was any place in the South small enough not to afford
+temptation to George seemed improbable to Gabriella; but she felt that
+Mrs. Fowler's earnest belief, supported as it was by the unshakable prop
+of maternal feeling, hardly justified the effort she must make to dispel
+it; and she had still no answer ready when the carriage turned into
+Fifty-seventh Street, and stopped beside the pavement where little
+Frances--they had already begun to call her Fanny--sat in a
+perambulator. Flushed and smiling, with her red mouth gurgling
+delightedly, and a white wool lamb clasped in her arms, the adorable
+child was certainly worth any seesaw of destiny, any disillusioning
+experience of marriage.
+
+Before the beginning of the next winter Gabriella's second child was
+born--a brown, sturdy boy, who came into the world with a frowning
+forehead and crying lustily from rage (so the nurse said) not from
+fright. He was named Archibald after his grandfather, who developed
+immediately a passionate fondness for him. His eyes were brown like the
+eyes of the Carrs, though by the time he was two years old, he was
+discovered to be painfully near-sighted, a weakness which Mrs. Carr,
+when she heard of it, insisted he must have inherited from his father's
+side of the family. He was not nearly so beautiful a baby as little
+Fanny had been; but he was from the very beginning a child of much
+character, strong, mutinous, utterly uncompromising in his attitude
+toward life. When he was first put into shoes he fought with
+desperation, and surrendered at last, neither to persuasion nor to
+punishment, but to an exhaustion so profound that he slept for hours
+with his small protesting feet doubled under him and sobs of fury still
+bursting from his swollen lips. The next day the struggle began again,
+and Mrs. Fowler remarked sympathetically:
+
+"You'll never be able to break his will, Gabriella. He is unmanageable."
+
+"I don't want to break his will, mamma," replied Gabriella, for she
+belonged to a less Scriptural generation, "but he must be disciplined,
+if it kills me." Pale, gentle, resolute, she waited for Archibald to
+surrender. In the end she carried her point and won the adoring
+obedience of Archibald. There was a magnanimous strain in him even at
+that age, Gabriella used to say, and though he fought to the bitter end,
+he bore no malice after he was once soundly defeated.
+
+Long afterwards, when Gabriella looked back on the next few years of her
+life, she could remember nothing of them except the tremendous
+difference that the children had made. All the rest was blotted out, a
+drab blur of what Mrs. Fowler described with dignity as "social duties,"
+moving always against the variable atmosphere of the house, which was
+gay or sombre, light or gloomy, according to the fluctuating financial
+conditions in Wall Street. There were extravagant winters and frugal
+winters; winters of large entertainments and winters of "women's
+luncheons"; but always the summers shimmered green and peaceful against
+the blue background of the Virginia mountains. The summers she loved
+even in memory; but of the winters she could recall but one glowing
+vision, and that was of Patty. Though she had lost George, she had
+gained Patty, and it was impossible to deny that Patty might be
+compensation for almost any lack.
+
+For the rest she made few friends, partly from reserve, partly from the
+shyness she always felt in the presence of strangers. It was difficult
+to establish fundamental relations at dinners or even at women's
+luncheons; social reforms were scarcely beginning to be fashionable; and
+apart from the reading which she did in order, as she said, "to keep her
+mind open," her life narrowed down gradually to a single vivid centre of
+activity. She lived in her children and in the few books she obtained
+from the library--(since the purchase of books, even in extravagant
+years, represented gross prodigality to Mrs. Fowler)--in Patty's
+friendship, and in the weekly gossiping letters she received from her
+mother.
+
+Mrs. Carr had long ago given up her plan to live with Gabriella and
+George; and a failure of circumstances, which fitted so perfectly into
+the general scheme of her philosophy, had done much to fortify the
+natural melancholy of her soul. Since even so gentle a pessimist was not
+devoid of a saving trace of spiritual arrogance, she found consoling
+balm in the thought that she had refrained from reminding Gabriella how
+very badly the Carrs had all married. There was, for example, poor
+Gabriel's brother Tom, whose wife had "gone deranged" six months after
+her wedding, and poor Gabriel's sister Johanna, who had died (it was
+common gossip) of a broken heart; and besides these instances, nobody
+could possibly maintain that Jane had not made a disastrous choice when
+she had persisted, against the urgent advice of her mother, in marrying
+Charley. Yes, the Carrs had all married badly, reflected Mrs. Carr, with
+the grief of a mother and the pride of a philosopher whose favourite
+theory has been substantially verified--every one of them, with, of
+course, the solitary exception of poor Gabriel himself.
+
+Her weekly letters, pious, gossipy, flowing, reached Gabriella regularly
+every Monday morning, and were read at breakfast while Mr. Fowler
+studied the financial columns of the newspaper, and his wife opened her
+invitations in the intervals between pouring out cups of coffee and
+inquiring solicitously if any one wanted cream and sugar.
+
+"What's the news?" George would sometimes ask carelessly; and Gabriella
+would glance down the pages covered with the formless characters of Mrs.
+Carr's fine Italian handwriting (the ladylike hand of the 'sixties), and
+read out carefully selected bits of provincial gossip, to which a
+cosmopolitan dash was usually contributed by the adventures, matrimonial
+or merely amorous, of Florrie Caperton. Hard, dashing, brilliant on the
+surface at least, a frank hedonist by inclination, if not by philosophy,
+Florrie had triumphantly smashed her way through the conventions and the
+traditions of centuries.
+
+"It's really dreadfully sad about Florrie," wrote Mrs. Carr. "I am so
+sorry for poor Bessie, who must feel it more than she lets any one see.
+While Algernon was alive we always hoped he would keep Florrie straight
+(you remember how everybody used to talk about her when she was a girl),
+but now he has been, dead only a year and a half, and she has already
+married again and gotten a divorce from her second husband. You know
+she ran away with a man named Tom Westcott--nobody ever heard of him,
+but she met him at the White Sulphur Springs, where he had something to
+do with the horses, I believe--and the marriage turned out very badly,
+though for my part I don't believe he was the least bit to blame.
+Florrie is so reckless that she would make any man unhappy, and two
+weeks after the wedding she was separated from him and was back here
+with Bessie, looking as well and pretty as I ever saw her. You know
+black was so becoming to her that she didn't take it off even when she
+eloped, and now after her divorce she always wears it, just as if she
+were still in mourning for poor Algernon. Nobody would believe, unless
+they had seen her in it, how very loud black can be. I used to think
+widows ought to wear it because it kept them from being noticed, but on
+Florrie it is the most conspicuous thing you ever imagined--as Cousin
+Jimmy says it simply makes her blaze, and you know how striking she
+always was anyway. I am sure I should think it would be embarrassing for
+her to go in the street in New York where nobody knows that she is
+really a lady--or at least that she was born a lady on her father's
+side--and this reminds me--(I declare I ramble on so I can never
+remember what I started to say)--but this reminds me that she has just
+been in to tell Jane that she is going to New York to take an apartment
+somewhere downtown; she told me the street and the number, but I have
+forgotten both of them. Jane says she looks more beautiful than ever
+after her last tragic experience (though she doesn't seem to think it
+tragic at all), but I was brought up to believe that a divorced woman,
+even if she is in the right, ought to live in a retired way and show
+that she feels her position. Now, I saw Florrie for a minute as she was
+going out and she ran on like a girl of sixteen--you would think from
+her talk that she is not a bit sensitive about the unfortunate situation
+she is in. She had on a huge bunch of violets, and Cousin Pussy tells me
+another man is paying her the most devoted attention. Please don't
+mention this to a soul--I hate so to spread gossip--but I felt that you
+ought to be prepared, for Florrie will certainly come to see you, and
+you must be kind and polite to her, though I do not think you ought ever
+to be intimate again. It is not as if she were merely unfortunate--many
+divorced women are that, and we sympathize with them because they show
+that they realize their position--but I cannot believe that Florrie is
+unfortunate if she allows another man to pay her such marked attention,
+and even accepts handsome presents from him. So do be careful, my child,
+and if you find yourself in an embarrassing situation, consult Mrs.
+Fowler and be guided by her advice."
+
+"Florrie Spencer is coming to New York," said Gabriella on the morning
+she received Mrs. Carr's letter. "You know she has just been divorced
+from her second husband--somebody she met at the White Sulphur Springs."
+
+George looked up interested, from his breakfast.
+
+"Florrie coming, is she?" he remarked. "Well, she's great fun. I wonder
+if she has her eye on anybody now?"
+
+"Not on you, I hope," observed his father, who joked mildly on the
+mornings when the news was good; "but she's a beautiful woman, and
+she'll doubtless be able to get whatever she has set either her heart or
+her eye on."
+
+"She'll marry again within six months," prophesied Mrs. Fowler, with an
+anxious glance in the direction of her husband's coffee cup. "Poor Algy,
+I always thought he was a hundred times too good for her," she added,
+while she abstractedly buttered her toast. It was one of their
+extravagant years, and the butter was delicious.
+
+"He adored her," said Gabriella. "I shall never forget the evening they
+spent here. He couldn't keep his eyes away from her. If she had been the
+most admirable character on earth he couldn't have loved her better."
+
+"As if a man ever loved a woman because of her character!" remarked Mrs.
+Fowler, from the security of her experience.
+
+Several months later Florrie arrived, gay, brilliant, and beautiful,
+with her waxlike complexion as unlined by care as if it had been on the
+face of a doll. Though she had lightened her mourning since Mrs. Carr
+had described her to Gabriella, she still wore black, and her flaring
+skirt, her inflexible collar, and her lace sleeves, narrow at the
+shoulder and full at the wrists, resembled a fashion plate. Perched at a
+daring angle above her wheaten-red pompadour, with its exaggerated
+Marcel wave, she wore a curiously distorted hat of black velvet,
+lavishly overtrimmed with ostrich feathers; and before this miracle of
+style, Gabriella became at once oppressively aware of her own lack of
+the quality which Florrie would have described as "dash." Already
+Florrie's figure was becoming slightly too protuberant for the style of
+the new century, and after kissing Gabriella effusively, she stood for a
+minute struggling for breath, in the attitude of her mother, with her
+hands pressed to the palpitating sides of her waist.
+
+"I told mother I was certainly coming to see you right straight," began
+Florrie, while, with her recovered breath, her figure curved as suddenly
+as if it were moved by a spring into the fashionable bend of the period.
+"I've been perfectly crazy to come, but between dressmakers and theatres
+and I don't know what else, I simply haven't had a minute in which I
+could sit down and breathe. Mother says I ought to be downright ashamed
+of myself for being so frivolous when I've just got out of such a
+scrape--did you ever hear before of anybody getting married for two
+weeks, Gabriella? But I know you never did--you needn't trouble to tell
+me so. Well, mother says I oughtn't to look so pleased, and I tell her
+there might be some sense in that if I'd stayed in the scrape, but if I
+haven't a right to look pleased at getting out, I'd like to know who
+has. It was all too funny for words, now, wasn't it? Of course, I
+shouldn't dream of talking to everybody like this--even if I am a big
+talker, I reckon I know when to hold my tongue and when not to--but I've
+always told you everything, Gabriella, and I don't mind the least bit in
+the world telling you about this. It always relieves my mind to talk to
+somebody I can trust, and I know I can trust you. Don't you remember the
+way I used to run in on rainy afternoons when you lived way over in Hill
+Street, and tell you all about Fred Dudley and Barbour Willis? And then
+I used to come and talk about poor Algy by the hour. Wasn't it too
+distressing about poor Algy? I don't believe I'll ever get over it if I
+live to be a hundred, and even if I do run on like this, it doesn't mean
+that my heart isn't broken--simply broken--because it is. Mother used
+to say, after father died, that you couldn't measure a widow's grief by
+the length of her veil; and that's just exactly the way I feel about
+Algy. I know you'll understand, Gabriella, because you always understand
+everything--"
+
+"He was so deeply in love with you," observed Gabriella sympathetically,
+while Florrie, diving amid the foam of her laces, brought out a tiny
+handkerchief, and delicately pecked at the corner of her eye, not near
+enough to redden the lid and not far enough away to disturb the rice
+powder on the side of her nose.
+
+"He was crazy about me to the very last, you never saw anything like it.
+Of course we weren't a bit alike, I don't mind telling you so,
+Gabriella, because I know you'll never repeat it. We weren't really
+congenial, for Algy was just wrapped up in his law books, and there were
+whole days together when he wouldn't open his mouth, but that didn't
+seem to make any difference because, as he used to say, one of us had to
+listen sometimes. But, you know, mother says a pair of opposites makes
+the happiest marriage, and after being married to Algy, I feel how true
+that is. I got into the habit of talking so much when I used to run on
+about nothing to cheer him up--he was always so grave and glum even as a
+boy, you remember--and during his last illness--you know he died of
+Bright's disease, poor darling, and it came on just like that!--he used
+to make me talk to him for hours and hours just to keep him from
+thinking. Well, well, that's all over now, and I don't care what anybody
+says, my heart's buried with Algy. I don't believe you were ever in love
+but once either, were you, Gabriella?" she inquired cheerfully.
+
+"Well, what about Mr. Westcott? Is that his name?" asked Gabriella,
+without malice. As a study Florrie had always interested her, for she
+regarded her less as an individual than as an awful example of the utter
+futility of moral maxims. Florrie was without intelligence, without
+feeling, without imagination, virtue, breeding, or good taste, yet
+possessing none of these qualities, she had by sheer beauty and "dash"
+achieved all the ends for which these qualities usually strive. Good
+humour she had as long as one did not get in her way; but, beyond this
+single redeeming grace, she was as empty of substance as a tinted shell
+filled with sea foam. If power and efficiency are the two supreme
+attributes of success, then by all the laws and principles of logic,
+Florrie ought to have been a failure. But she was not a failure. She was
+a fool whose incomparable foolishness had conferred not only prosperity,
+but happiness upon her. She shone, she scintillated, she diffused the
+glow of success. Though she was undeserving of admiration, she had been
+surfeited on it from her childhood; though she was devoid of the moral
+excellence which should command love, by a flashing glance or a waving
+curl, she could bring the most exalted love down from the heavens. There
+was no question that Algernon had really loved her to distraction, and
+Algernon was a man of sense, of breeding, of distinction. As for
+Florrie, she had, of course, as little capacity for loving as she had
+for thinking.
+
+"Tom Westcott! I declare, Gabriella, I am almost ashamed to tell you
+about him. You've never been to a Virginia summer resort, so you
+couldn't understand that there is something about a Virginia summer
+resort that just seems to make any man better than none at all. You get
+so bored, you know, that you'd flirt with a lamp-post if there wasn't
+anything human around; and when you haven't laid eyes on a real sure
+enough man for several months, it's surprising how easy it is to take up
+with the imitation ones. Of course, I don't mean that Tom wasn't all
+right as far as family and all that goes; but he was simply no earthly
+account--he was just mean all through, and as soon as I found it out, I
+packed right straight up and left him. After Algy I couldn't have stood
+one of that sort, and there was no sense in my trying to. Life is too
+short, I always say, for experiments. There's no use sticking to a bad
+job when you can get away from it. That's the trouble with so many
+women, you know; they try and try to stand the wrong man when they know
+all the time that it isn't a particle of use, and that they are just
+bringing wrinkles into their faces; and then by the time they give up,
+they're all worn out and it's too late to look about for another chance.
+Now, I've seen too much of that kind of thing, and so I thought two
+weeks weren't long enough to bring wrinkles in my face, but they were
+plenty long for me to find out whether or not I could stand any man on
+earth. So here I am in little old New York instead of being stuck away
+in some God-forsaken Virginia town, where there isn't even a theatre,
+darning stockings for a family of children. But there's no use talking
+about that--" And Florrie, who had been born a lady on her father's
+side, adjusted her pompadour under the high bandeau of her hat, and rose
+with a dashing air from the sofa.
+
+"I'd love to see the babies, darling," she said; "I'm just crazy about
+babies."
+
+"They are out in the Park. I'm so sorry. Perhaps they are coming in now,
+I hear the door-bell."
+
+But it was George instead of the children; and he entered presently with
+a moody look, which vanished quickly before the brilliant vision of
+Florrie.
+
+"I thought I heard you," he observed with the casual intimacy of an old
+playmate, "so I came in. Have you got fixed yet? What about the
+apartment? You'd better let me help you hunt for it?"
+
+"Oh, I'm not sure about the apartment. I may take a house--a teeny weeny
+one, you know," said Florrie, as she bent softly toward him, scented and
+blooming. If one didn't know there wasn't really a bit of harm in her,
+one would be puzzled just what to think of her, Gabriella reflected.
+Amid the perfect order of Gabriella's inner life, the controlled
+emotion, the serene efficiency, the balanced power, Florrie's noisy
+beauty produced a disturbing effect. She liked her because she had known
+her from childhood, and it was impossible to think any harm of a girl
+one had played with at school; but she could not deny that Florrie was
+vulgar. As a matter of fact, Florrie's mother had been vulgar before
+her, and the thin strain of refinement inherited from her father's stock
+had obviously been overborne by the torrential vulgarity of the maternal
+blood.
+
+"A house? Well, that's even better," replied George. "I've no use for
+apartments, have I, Gabriella?"
+
+His effrontery was incredible! That he should joke about his broken
+promise before Florrie amazed Gabriella even after her disillusioning
+experience with him.
+
+"Then I'll get you to help me. Will you lend him to me, darling?"
+trilled Florrie piercingly from the door, where she stood in a striking
+pose which revealed her "fine figure" to the best advantage. The request
+was directed to Gabriella, but her blue eyes mocked a challenge to
+George while she spoke.
+
+"Oh, I'll give him," answered Gabriella pleasantly. There was no harm in
+it, she told herself innocently again; but it was a pity that Florrie,
+with her remarkable beauty, should be quite so ill bred.
+
+Five minutes later when George came back from putting Florrie into her
+hansom, he remarked carelessly:
+
+"She's got a figure all right."
+
+"Yes, she looks beautiful in black. No wonder she won't leave it off."
+
+"By Jove, to think it's little Florrie! Why, I don't believe there's a
+finer figure in New York. When she passed by the club yesterday the men
+were breaking their necks to look out of the window." Then, as if struck
+by a sudden suspicion, he added quickly: "Where did she get her money
+from? I thought Algy died rather hard up."
+
+"I never heard much about it. Mrs. Spencer must give her something."
+
+"I don't believe the old lady has a penny over three thousand a year,
+and that won't do in New York. This Westcott didn't have anything, did
+he?"
+
+"It never occurred to me to ask," replied Gabriella indifferently. What
+did it matter to George where Florrie got her money? But, then, George
+was always like that, and though he never made a penny himself, he was
+possessed of an insatiable curiosity about the amount and the sources of
+other people's incomes.
+
+"Well, it looks queer," he observed with intense interest after a
+prolonged pause. "That short pearl necklace she had on couldn't have
+cost a cent under ten thousand dollars."
+
+"It was lovely. I noticed how well the pearls matched," replied his
+wife. She was not in the least excited about the methods by which
+Florrie had obtained the necklace--all that was a part of the miraculous
+way she got everything she wanted in life--but she liked the pearls and
+she had envied Florrie while she looked at them.
+
+A deep furrow had appeared between George's eyebrows, and his mouth
+sagged suddenly at the corners, giving his face the ugly look Gabriella
+distrusted and dreaded. While she watched him she recalled vaguely that
+she had once thought the latent brutality in his face an expression of
+power. How young she had been when she married him! How inconceivably
+ignorant! Yet at twenty years she had imagined herself wise enough to
+judge a man. She had deluded herself with the sanctified fallacy that
+mere instinct would guide her aright--that her marriage would be
+protected from disaster by the infallible impulse which she had mistaken
+for love.
+
+"I wonder," said George with a suddenness that startled her out of her
+musing--"I wonder if it can be Winston Camp!"
+
+And Gabriella, who had forgotten Florrie, looked up to remark
+absentmindedly: "Winston Camp? You mean the man who dined here last
+winter and couldn't eat anything but nuts?"
+
+In the months that followed George did not mention Florrie again, and if
+he pursued his investigations into the obscure sources of her
+livelihood, his researches did not lead him back in the direction of
+Gabriella. But, from the day of Florrie's visit, it seemed to Gabriella,
+when she thought of it afterwards, his casual indifference began to
+develop into brutal neglect. Not that she regretted his affection, or
+even his politeness, not that she cared in the least what his manner
+was--this she made quite plain to herself--but her passion to see life
+clearly, to test experience, to weigh events, brought her almost
+breathlessly round again to the question, "What does it mean? Is there
+something hidden? Am I still the poor abject fool that Jane was or am I
+beginning really to be myself?"
+
+"You aren't looking well, Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler at breakfast one
+morning when George, as she confided afterwards to Patty, had behaved
+unspeakably to his wife before his father came down. "I want you to go
+about with me more, as you used to do before the children took up all
+your time."
+
+Gabriella had just crossed George's will about something--a mere trifle,
+something about calling on Florrie--and he had turned to her with a look
+of hatred in his eyes, a kind of nervous, excitable hatred which she had
+never seen until then. "Why does he look at me like that?" she had
+thought quite coldly; "and why should he have begun all of a sudden to
+hate me? Why should my words, my voice, my gestures even, exasperate him
+so profoundly? Of course he has stopped loving me, but why should that
+make him hate me? I stopped loving him, too, long ago, yet there is only
+indifference, not hate, in my heart."
+
+"You must go about with me more, dear," repeated Mrs. Fowler, in
+obedience to a vague but amiable instinct, which prompted her to shield
+George, to deceive Gabriella, to deny the truth of facts, to do anything
+on earth except acknowledge the actual situation in which she found
+herself. "Don't you think she ought to go about more, George?"
+
+"I don't care what she does," returned George brutally, while his blue
+eyes squinted in the old charming way from which all charm had departed.
+"I don't care--I don't care--" He checked himself, snapping his words in
+two with a virulent outburst of temper, and then, rising hurriedly, as
+his father entered the room, he left the table with his breakfast
+uneaten.
+
+"He's so nervous. I can't imagine what's the matter. I hope Burrows
+wasn't in the pantry. Did you say anything to hurt his feelings before
+you came down, Gabriella?" asked Mrs. Fowler, distractedly, with one eye
+on her daughter-in-law and the other on the pantry door, through which
+the discreet Burrows had disappeared at the opportune instant.
+
+"No, I haven't said anything that I can remember," answered Gabriella
+with calmness. It occurred to her that George's behaviour was hardly
+that of a man whose "feelings" had been wounded, but she made no audible
+record of her reflection; "and of course I'll go out with you if you
+want me to," she added, for she felt sincerely sorry for her
+mother-in-law, even though she had ruined George in his infancy. "I am
+going to the library to return a book, and we might pay some calls
+afterwards."
+
+"That's just what I was thinking," responded Mrs. Fowler, embarrassed,
+bewildered. Was it possible, she asked herself, that Gabriella had not
+noticed George's outrageous behaviour?
+
+But Gabriella did not "go about" with her mother-in-law that season, for
+a higher will than Mrs. Fowler's frustrated that lady's benevolent
+intentions. To a casual glance it would have seemed the merest accident
+which disturbed these felicitous plans, but such accidents, when
+Gabriella looked back on them afterwards, appeared to her to be woven
+into the very web and pattern of life. It was plainly incredible that
+her whole existence should be changed merely because Archibald was
+naughty, as incredible as the idea that Destiny should have used so
+small a medium for the accomplishment of its tragic designs.
+
+But Archibald had hardly reached the Park before he was brought home,
+resisting with all his strength, because he had given his shoes and
+stockings away; and the next ten minutes, while Gabriella gently
+reasoned with him on the pavement, were pregnant with consequences.
+
+"He's fierce, that's what he is," declared the nurse, who was Irish and
+militant. "He kicked me so I'm black and blue, ma'am, all over the
+shins, and every bit because I wouldn't let him pull off his shoes and
+socks and give 'em to a barefooted boy in the Park. You tell her,
+darlin'"--to Frances, who stood, bright-eyed and indignant, in her white
+fur coat and little fur cap which she wore drawn down tight over her
+curls--"you tell your mamma, darlin', you tell her how fierce and bold
+he was, and how he kicked me about the shins because I wouldn't let him
+take off his shoes and socks."
+
+"The poor boy wanted 'em! I won't wear 'em! I will give 'em to the poor
+boy!" screamed Archibald, furious, scowling, struggling in the
+restraining hold of his nurse. He was a robust, thick-set child of four
+years, with a thatch of dark-brown hair, and strange near-sighted brown
+eyes, behind spectacles which he had worn from the time he could walk.
+
+"What is it, Archibald? Tell me about it. Tell mother," pleaded
+Gabriella while he struggled desperately to escape from her tender
+grasp. "Who was the poor boy and where did you see him?"
+
+"He oughtn't to have been in the Park, ought he, mamma?" inquired
+Frances, who was guiltless of democratic tendencies. "Ragged people have
+no right to be in the Park, have they?"
+
+"Hush, darling, I want to hear what Archibald has to say. Tell me about
+him, Archibald. Shall you and I go out to look for him?"
+
+"If you do, he'll pull his shoes and socks right off again," insisted
+Frances emphatically. "He had got one quite off and had given it to the
+boy before we saw him, and Nanny was obliged to go and take it back, and
+I had to hold Archibald while she put it on him. He screamed very loud
+and everybody stopped to ask what was the matter, and one old gentleman
+with a long beard, like Moses in the Bible, gave Archibald a little box
+of candy--he took it out of his pocket--but Archibald threw it away, and
+kept on hollerin' louder than ever--"
+
+"That's right, darlin', you tell her," urged nurse, a stout woman with a
+red face and three gold teeth in the front of her mouth.
+
+"I understand now. Don't tell any more, Fanny," said Gabriella. "Now,
+Archibald dear, will you stop crying and be good?"
+
+"Am," replied Archibald sullenly, twisting out of her hands.
+
+"Am what, darling?"
+
+"Am good."
+
+"Well, will you stop crying?"
+
+"Have."
+
+"Then what do you want? Shall we go back and look for the poor boy?"
+
+"Hadn't any shoes. Feet were red. Wanted to give him shoes, 'cause I had
+plenty more at home. Nanny jerked him back. Hated Nanny. Hoped she would
+die. Hoped bears would eat her. Hoped tigers would eat her. Hoped lions
+would eat her. Hoped robins would cover her with leaves in the Park--"
+
+While he sobbed out his accusations against nurse, Gabriella, holding
+his hand tightly in hers, turned toward Fifth Avenue, and by the time he
+was pacified, they had walked several blocks together, with nurse and
+Fanny sedately bringing up the rear. Then, at last, having reasoned him
+alike out of his temper and his generosity, Gabriella retraced her
+steps, and entering the house with her latchkey, ran quickly up the
+stairs to the closed door of Mrs. Fowler's room. As she raised her hand
+to knock the sound of her own name reached her, and almost involuntarily
+she hesitated for an instant.
+
+"Yes, Gabriella is out. I saw her a minute ago on her way to the Park
+with the children."
+
+"Well, somebody ought to tell her, mother. I think it is perfectly
+outrageous to keep her in ignorance. Everybody is talking about it."
+
+"Oh, Patty, you couldn't! How on earth could you tell her a thing like
+that?" wailed George's mother, and she went on with a plaintive sigh as
+Gabriella opened the door: "George was always so mad about beauty, and
+though Gabriella has a fine face, she isn't exactly--"
+
+Then, at the startling apparition of Gabriella, with her face paling
+slowly above her black furs and her large indignant eyes fixed on them
+both, Mrs. Fowler wavered and broke off with a pathetic clutch at the
+pleasantness which had entirely departed from her manner. "Why,
+Gabriella, I didn't know you had come in! I was just saying to Patty--"
+It was, as she said afterwards to her husband, exactly as if her mind
+had become suddenly blank. She couldn't to save her life think of a
+single word to add to her sentence, and all the time Gabriella was
+standing there, as white as a ghost, with her accusing eyes turning
+slowly from one to the other of them. "Somehow I just couldn't lie to
+her when she looked like that, and the truth seemed too dreadful," Mrs.
+Fowler added that night to Archibald. "Damn George!" was Mr. Fowler's
+fervent retort. "And it took me so by surprise I almost fainted, for I'd
+never in my life heard him swear before," his wife had commented later.
+"But aren't men strange? To think he knew how all the time and kept it
+to himself! I declare they are entirely too secretive for anything!"
+
+"I heard what you were saying when I knocked," began Gabriella, with
+perfect composure. "I don't quite know what it was about, but I think--I
+think--"
+
+"It was nothing, dear; Patty and I were gossiping," replied Mrs. Fowler,
+with an eagerness that was almost violent. "Oh, Patty, you
+wouldn't!"--for Patty had broken in, conquering and merciless, with the
+declaration: "If you don't tell Gabriella, mamma, I'm going to. It's
+outrageous, anyhow, I've always said so, the way people keep things from
+women. Gabriella has a right to know what everybody is saying."
+
+"Of course I've a right to know," rejoined Gabriella, with a firmness
+before which Mrs. Fowler felt herself gradually dissolving--"melting
+away" was the description she gave of her feeling. "If anybody has a
+right to know, I suppose I have. Of course, it's about George. I know
+that much, anyhow," she added quietly.
+
+"I don't believe it's half so bad as they say," protested Mrs. Fowler
+feverishly. "I don't believe he really keeps her. His father says he
+couldn't possibly do it on the allowance he gives him, and, you know,
+George doesn't make a cent himself--not a cent. He never supported
+himself in his life--"
+
+She paused breathlessly, with a bright and confident glance as if she
+had made a point--a minor one perhaps, but still a point--in George's
+favour. The jet fringe on her bosom, which had rattled furiously with
+her excited palpitations, became gradually quiet, and as she pressed her
+lips firmly with her handkerchief, which she had rolled into a ball, she
+appeared to be pressing her customary smile back into place.
+
+"It won't last, Gabriella," she began again very suddenly with renewed
+assurance. "These things never last, and I think Patty is quite wrong to
+insist upon telling you. Of course it is humiliating for a time,
+but--but"--she hesitated, and then brought out triumphantly--"he married
+very young, you know, and men aren't like women--there's no use
+pretending they are. Now when a woman loves a man--"
+
+"But, you see, I don't love George," answered Gabriella, and her awful
+words seemed to reverberate through the horrified silence that
+surrounded her.
+
+"Not love him? O Gabriella! Of course, it's natural that you should feel
+angry and wounded, and that your pride should resent what looks like an
+affront to you; but you can't mean in your heart that you've got over
+caring. Women don't change so easily. Why, you're his wife--poor foolish
+boy that he is--and Florrie--"
+
+"So it's Florrie?" observed Gabriella, with a strangely dispassionate
+interest. It was queer, she reflected afterwards, that she had not felt
+the faintest curiosity about the woman.
+
+"I always suspected that there was something wrong about her," pursued
+Mrs. Fowler, reassured by the knowledge that she was placing the blame
+where it belonged according to all the laws of custom and tradition. "I
+must say I never liked her manner and her way of dressing, and she made
+eyes at every man she was introduced to--even at Archibald--"
+
+"Well, I didn't believe there was any real harm in her," said Gabriella,
+in a tone she might have used at one of her mother-in-law's luncheons.
+She was still standing near the door, in the very spot where she had
+paused at her entrance, with her head held high above the black fur at
+her throat, and one gloved hand playing with a bit of cord on the end of
+her muff. She could not possibly have taken it better. Bad as the
+situation was, it might have been a hundred times worse except for
+Gabriella's composure, thought Mrs. Fowler discreetly, adding with an
+inexplicable regret, that in her youth women were different. Yes, they
+had shown more feeling then, though they had behaved perhaps less well
+in a crisis. In spite of her gratitude--and she was sincerely grateful
+to her daughter-in-law for not making a scene--she became conscious
+presently that she was beginning to cherish an emotion not unlike
+resentment on George's account. That the discovery of George's
+faithlessness should be received so coolly by George's wife appeared
+almost an affront to him. Mrs. Fowler liked Gabriella, she was fond of
+her--and nobody could look in the girl's face and not see that she was a
+fine woman--but there were times, and this was one of them, when she
+thought her a little hard. Had Gabriella wept, had she raged, had she
+threatened Florrie's life or happiness, it might have been painful, but
+at least it would have been human; and above all things Mrs. Fowler felt
+that she liked women to be human.
+
+"Nothing that anybody says or does can excuse George," said Patty
+sternly. "He has behaved abominably, and if I were Gabriella, I'd simply
+wash my hands of him. I don't care if he is my brother, that doesn't
+make me blind, does it? If he were my husband," she concluded
+passionately, "I'd feel just the same way about it."
+
+"Oh, you mustn't! Oh, Patty, hush, it's wicked! It's sinful!" moaned
+Mrs. Fowler, shutting her eyes, as if the sight of Patty's indignant
+loveliness gave her a headache. "Don't try to harden Gabriella's heart
+against him. Don't try to make her think she's really stopped loving
+him."
+
+Gabriella's answer to this outburst was a look which, as poor Mrs.
+Fowler said afterwards, "cut her to the heart." Backing weakly to a
+chair, the valiant little lady sat down suddenly, because she felt that
+her legs were giving way beneath the weight of her body. And, though she
+was unaware of its significance, her action was deeply symbolical of the
+failure of the old order to withstand the devastating advance of the
+new spirit. She felt vaguely that she wished women and things were both
+what they used to be; but this, since she had little imagination, was as
+far as she penetrated into the psychology of Gabriella's behaviour.
+
+"But, you see, you're making the mistake of thinking that I love
+George," said Gabriella, with a reasonableness which made Mrs. Fowler
+feel that she wanted to scream, "and I don't love him--I don't love him
+at all. I haven't loved him for a long time--not since the night I saw
+him drunk. How could I love a man I've seen drunk--disgustingly drunk--a
+man I couldn't respect? I'm not made that way, and I can't help it. Some
+women may be like that, but I'm not. I couldn't, even if I wanted to,
+love a man who has treated me as George has done. I don't see how any
+woman could--any woman with a particle of pride and self-respect. Of
+course I had to live with him after I married him," she finished
+abruptly. "Marriage isn't made for love. I used to think it was--but it
+isn't--"
+
+"But, Gabriella, you don't mean--you can't--" Mrs. Fowler was really
+pitiable, for, after all, George was her son, and the ties of blood
+would not break so easily as the ties of marriage. In the depths of her
+humiliation she had almost convinced herself that she had never
+respected George, that she had never believed in him, forgetting the
+pride and adoration of her young motherhood. Whatever George did she
+could not change his relation to her--she could not shatter the one
+indissoluble bond that holds mankind together.
+
+"Gabriella, you don't--you can't--" she repeated wildly.
+
+Then, as Gabriella turned quickly and left the room, a scene--she
+became conscious presently that she was beginning to cherish an emotion
+not unlike resentment on George's account. That the discovery of
+George's faithlessness should be received so coolly by George's wife
+appeared almost an affront to him. Mrs. Fowler liked Gabriella, she was
+fond of her--and nobody could look in the girl's face and not see that
+she was a fine woman--but there were times, and this was one of them,
+when she thought her a little hard. Had Gabriella wept, had she raged,
+had she threatened Florrie's life or happiness, it might have been
+painful, but at least it would have been human; and above all things
+Mrs. Fowler felt that she liked women to be human.
+
+"Nothing that anybody says or does can excuse George," said Patty
+sternly. "He has behaved abominably, and if I were Gabriella, I'd simply
+wash my hands of him. I don't care if he is my brother, that doesn't
+make me blind, does it? If he were my husband," she concluded
+passionately, "I'd feel just the same way about it."
+
+"Oh, you mustn't! Oh, Patty, hush, it's wicked! It's sinful!" moaned
+Mrs. Fowler, shutting her eyes, as if the sight of Patty's indignant
+loveliness gave her a headache. "Don't try to harden Gabriella's heart
+against him. Don't try to make her think she's really stopped loving
+him."
+
+Gabriella's answer to this outburst was a look which, as poor Mrs.
+Fowler said afterwards, "cut her to the heart." Backing weakly to a
+chair, the valiant little lady sat down suddenly, because she felt that
+her legs were giving way beneath the weight of her body. And, though she
+was unaware of its significance, her action was deeply symbolical of the
+failure of the old order to withstand the devastating advance of the
+new spirit. She felt vaguely that she wished women and things were both
+what they used to be; but this, since she had little imagination, was as
+far as she penetrated into the psychology of Gabriella's behaviour.
+
+"But, you see, you're making the mistake of thinking that I love
+George," said Gabriella, with a reasonableness which made Mrs. Fowler
+feel that she wanted to scream, "and I don't love him--I don't love him
+at all. I haven't loved him for a long time--not since the night I saw
+him drunk. How could I love a man I've seen drunk--disgustingly drunk--a
+man I couldn't respect? I'm not made that way, and I can't help it. Some
+women may be like that, but I'm not. I couldn't, even if I wanted to,
+love a man who has treated me as George has done. I don't see how any
+woman could--any woman with a particle of pride and self-respect. Of
+course I had to live with him after I married him," she finished
+abruptly. "Marriage isn't made for love. I used to think it was--but it
+isn't--"
+
+"But, Gabriella, you don't mean--you can't--" Mrs. Fowler was really
+pitiable, for, after all, George was her son, and the ties of blood
+would not break so easily as the ties of marriage. In the depths of her
+humiliation she had almost convinced herself that she had never
+respected George, that she had never believed in him, forgetting the
+pride and adoration of her young motherhood. Whatever George did she
+could not change his relation to her--she could not shatter the one
+indissoluble bond that holds mankind together.
+
+"Gabriella, you don't--you can't--" she repeated wildly.
+
+Then, as Gabriella turned quickly and left the room, Mrs. Fowler rose
+stoically to her feet, adjusted her belt with a tremulous movement of
+her hands, and smiled bravely as she went to the mirror to put on her
+hat. Heartbroken and distraught of mind though she was, she submitted
+instinctively to the lifelong tyranny of appearances.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A SECOND START IN LIFE
+
+
+With deliberation Gabriella walked the length of the hall to her room,
+turned and locked the door after she had entered, and took off her hat
+and wraps and put them away in the closet. Her head was still carried
+high and her eyes were defiant and dark in the marble-like pallor of her
+face. Except for her burning eyes and the scarlet line of her tightly
+closed lips, she looked as still and as cold as a statue.
+
+"I'd rather die than have them know that it made any difference," she
+thought. "I'd rather die than have them know that I cared." Then sinking
+into a chair by the dressing-table, she laid her head on her arm and
+wept tears, not of wounded love, but of deep and passionate anger.
+
+She had spoiled her life! Because of her mad and headstrong folly, she
+had spoiled her life, and she was barely twenty-seven! Had she been the
+veriest fool she couldn't have done worse--she who had thought herself
+so sensible, so strong, so efficient! Jane couldn't have done worse, and
+yet she had always despised Jane for her weakness. But she had been as
+weak as Jane, she had been as unreasonable, she had been as incredibly
+sentimental and silly. And even in her folly she had irretrievably
+failed. She had made her choice, and yet she had not been able to keep
+the thing she had chosen. George had tired of her--here was the
+sharpest sting--a man had tired of her after a few months--had tired of
+her while she was still deeply in love with him. Her humiliation, while
+she sat there strangling her sobs, was so intense that it ran in little
+flames over her body. At the moment she was not angry with George, she
+was not even angry with Florrie. It was as if all the slumbering
+violence of her nature was aroused to a burning and relentless hatred of
+her own weakness. This emotion, which was so profound, so torrential, in
+its force that it seemed to shake the depths of her being, left room for
+no other feeling--for no other thought in her consciousness. She had but
+one life to live, and by her own fault, she had ruined it in its
+beginning.
+
+Then her mood changed, and she sat up, straight and stern, while she
+wiped her reddened eyelids with an impetuous and resolute gesture. No,
+she was not crushed; she would not allow herself even to be hurt. Her
+lot might be as sordid as Jane's, but she would make it different by the
+strength and the effectiveness of her resistance. She would never submit
+as Jane submitted; she would never become, through sheer inertia, a part
+of the ugliness that enveloped her. Thanks to the vein of iron in her
+soul she would never--no, not if she died fighting--become one of the
+victims of life.
+
+Going into the dressing-room, she bathed her eyes with cold water; and
+she was still drying them before the mirror when the children came in,
+flushed and blooming, with their hands in Miss Polly Hatch's. What
+splendid children they were, she thought, looking wistfully at their
+eager faces. Any father, any mother in the world, might be proud of
+them. Fanny, the elder, was like an angel in her white fur coat and
+pert little cap, with her short golden curls like bunches of yellow silk
+on her shoulders, and her blue eyes, as grave as a philosopher's,
+beaming softly under her thick jet-black lashes. She was not
+particularly bright; she was, for her age, an unconscionable snob; but
+no one could deny that she was as beautiful as an angel to look at.
+
+"Miss Polly wanted to kiss me, mamma, but I wouldn't," she said coolly
+as she examined a little bundle of sewing the seamstress had put down on
+the table. "I needn't kiss people if I don't want to, need I? Archibald
+doesn't like to kiss either. He's naughty about it sometimes when ladies
+ask him to. He doesn't like scratchin'. Isn't it funny to call kissing,
+'scratchin'? He told me Miss Polly scratched him and he didn't like it.
+He is afraid of her because she is so ugly. Why are you ugly, Miss
+Polly? Couldn't you help it? Did God make you ugly just for fun? Why
+doesn't he make everybody pretty? I would if I were God. What is God's
+last name? Archibald says it is Walker. Is it Walker, mamma, and how
+does Archibald know? Who told him--"
+
+When at last she was suppressed and sent out of the room with the nurse,
+she went at a dancing step, turning to make faces at Archibald, who
+stood stolidly at his mother's knee, biting deep bites into a red apple
+Miss Polly had given him. He was not a handsome child, even Gabriella
+admitted that his spectacles spoiled his appearance; but he was
+remarkably intelligent for his four years, and he was so strong and
+sturdy that he had never had a day's illness in his life. His face was
+unusually thoughtful and expressive, and his eyes, in spite of the
+disfiguring glasses, were large, brown, and beautiful, with something of
+the luminous softness of Cousin Jimmy's. Though she could not remember
+her father, it pleased Gabriella to think that Archibald was like him,
+and Miss Polly declared, with conviction, that he was "already his
+living image." Of the two children, for some obscure reason which she
+could not define and which was probably rooted in instinct, Gabriella
+had the greater tenderness for her son; and though she denied this
+preference to herself, Mrs. Fowler and Miss Polly had both commented
+upon it. Even his temper, which was uncontrollable at times, endeared
+him to her, and the streak of savage in his nature seemed to awaken some
+dim ancestral memories in her brain.
+
+"Thank Miss Polly for the apple and run away to Fanny," said his mother,
+after she had held him pressed closely to her breast for a minute. While
+she did so, she felt, with profound sadness, that her whole universe had
+dwindled down to her children. Of all her happiness only her children
+remained to her.
+
+"Don't want to run," replied Archibald with beaming good humour. In his
+passion for brevity he eliminated pronouns whenever it was possible.
+
+"But Fanny is waiting for you."
+
+"Would rather stay with mother than go with Fanny and Mutton." That was
+another of his eccentricities. Just as he had insisted that God's "last
+name was Walker," so he had begun of his own accord, and for no visible
+reason, to call nurse "Mutton." He was always fitting names of his own
+invention to persons; and in his selection he was guided by a principle
+so obscure that Gabriella had never been able to discover its origin.
+Thus his grandmother from the first had been "Budd," and he had
+immediately started to call Miss Polly "Pang."
+
+"Don't you want to go back to the Park, Archibald? You must finish your
+walk."
+
+"Will the poor boy be there?" He never forgot anything. It was quite
+probable that he would inquire for "the poor boy" a year hence.
+
+"Perhaps. You might take him an apple and a penny."
+
+He stood gravely considering the plan, with one hand in his mother's and
+one on Miss Polly's knee.
+
+"I'll take Pang to nurse him," he said when he had decided against the
+suggestion of the apple and the penny. "He hasn't any nurse, and Fanny
+wouldn't like him to have hers. I'll take Pang."
+
+"But Pang isn't a nurse, dear. There, now, run to Fanny. Miss Polly
+lives so far away she can't stay very long."
+
+He went obediently, for he was usually amenable to his mother's
+commands, stopping only once at the door to ask if "Pang lived as far
+away as God and could she manage to get a message to Him about the poor
+boy needing shoes?"
+
+"I declare I can't make out that child to save my soul," remarked Miss
+Polly as he shut the door carefully and ran down the hall to the
+nursery. "The more I study him the curiouser he seems to me. If he wan't
+so quick about some things you might think his wits were sort of
+addled--but they ain't, are they? Now, whatever do you reckon put the
+notion in his head to call me 'Pang?"
+
+All the smiling, circular wrinkles in her face were working with
+amusement while her little black eyes twinkled like jet beads above the
+ruddy creases in her cheeks.
+
+"I can't imagine, for he must have made up the word for himself. But
+don't you think he is like father, Miss Polly? I love to hear you say
+so."
+
+"That child? Why, he's the very spit of yo' pa, Gabriella, and there
+ain't any two ideas about it. I thought so the very first time I ever
+saw him, and now that I come to think of it, it is exactly like yo' pa
+to be makin' up all kinds of foolish names out of nothin'. Yo' pa used
+to call me Poll Parrot, that he did."
+
+"Mother thinks Archibald is going to be very much like him. She saw him
+in the mountains last summer."
+
+"So she told me when I was down home. You ain't looking a bit well,
+Gabriella. You've got exactly the look Miss Letty Marshall had before
+she came down with heart complaint. The doctors were fussin' over her
+for weeks before they could find out what the trouble was, but I said
+all along it wan't nothin' in the world but a bruised heart, and sure
+enough that was just what they found out was the matter. You ain't had a
+feelin' of heart burn after you eat, have you? Sometimes it don't take
+you that way, though; you just begin to have palpitations when you go up
+and down stairs and then you start to wakin' up in the night with
+shortness of breath. That's the way my Aunt Lydy had it. You know I
+nursed her till she died, and I've seen her get right black in the face
+when she stooped to pick up a pin. It's her daughter Lydy that's waiting
+on old Mrs. Peyton now. You know Mrs. Peyton was feelin' kind of run
+down so her son Arthur--I call him Arthur to his face because I used to
+sew there when he wan't more'n knee high--well, Arthur said she'd have
+to have somebody to wait on her every minute and she thought she'd
+rather have Lydy than anybody else because Lydy was always so handy in a
+sickroom. That was six months ago, and Lydy's been stayin' on there ever
+since. She says there ain't anybody on earth like Mr. Arthur, and she
+never could make out why you didn't marry him. He ain't ever had an eye
+for anybody but you, and he's got yo' picture--the one in the white
+dress--on his bureau and he keeps a rose in a vase before it all the
+time. That ain't much like a man, but then there always was a heap of a
+girl in Arthur in little ways, wan't there?"
+
+"I wonder why I didn't marry him?" said Gabriella softly; and not until
+Miss Polly answered her, was she aware that she had spoken aloud. In her
+spiritual reaction from the grosser reality of passion, the delicacy and
+remoteness of Arthur's love borrowed the pious and mystic qualities of
+religious worship. She had seen the sordid and ugly sides of sex; and
+she felt now a profound disgust for the emotion which drew men and women
+together--for the light in the eyes, the touch of the lips, the clinging
+of the hands. Once she had idealized these things into love itself; now
+the very memory of them filled her with repulsion. She still wanted
+love, but a love so pure, so disembodied, so ethereal that it was
+liberated from the dominion of flesh. In the beginning, as a girl, she
+had accepted love as the supreme good, as the essential reality; now,
+utterly disillusioned, she asked herself: "What is there left in life?
+What is the thing that really counts, after all? What is the possession
+that makes all the striving worth while in the end? At twenty-seven love
+is over for me, and if love is over, what remains to fill the rest of
+my life? There must be something else--there must be a reality somewhere
+which is truer, which is profounder, than love." This, she knew, was the
+question which neither tradition nor custom could answer. Religion,
+perhaps, might have helped her; but it was characteristic of her
+generation that she should give religion hardly a thought as a possible
+solution of the problem of life. She wanted substance, facts,
+experience; she wanted to examine, to analyze, to discover; and it was
+just here that religion hopelessly failed her as a guide. Faith she had
+had in her cradle--faith in life, faith in love, faith in herself; and
+it was faith that had brought her to this bleak disenchantment of
+spirit. No, she wanted knowledge now, not faith; she wanted truth, not
+illusion.
+
+"Well, you never can tell about a thing like that," Miss Polly was
+saying in her sprightly way, quite as if she were discussing the pattern
+of a dress or the stitching of a seam. "It was feelin', I reckon, and
+feelin' is one of the things nobody can count on. But you did mighty
+well, even if you didn't marry Arthur. I saw Mr. George downtown
+yesterday, when I went around to Stern's to match the edging for a baby
+dress, and I thought to myself I'd seldom seen a handsomer piece of
+flesh than he was. He was walkin' along up Fifth Avenue with Florrie
+Spencer--I'll always call her Florrie Spencer I don't care how many
+times she marries--and everybody in the street turned right plumb round
+to look at 'em. She's prettier than she ever was, ain't she? And such a
+fit as her dress was! One of them trailin' black things that fit as
+tight as wax over the hips and flares out all round the feet. She was
+holdin' up her skirts to show her feet, I reckon, and her collar was so
+high behind her ears, she could hardly turn her head to look at Mr.
+George. But I never saw anybody with more style--no, not if it was that
+Mrs. Pletheridge who is everlastingly in the Sunday papers. I declare
+Florrie's waist didn't look much bigger round than the leg of that
+table--honestly it didn't--and her hat was perched on a bandeau so high
+that you could see the new sort of way she'd gone and had her hair
+crimped--they call it Marcellin' up here, don't they?"
+
+"Was she with George?" asked Gabriella indifferently.
+
+"They were goin' to some restaurant or another for tea, I reckon, and
+they certainly were a fine-lookin' pair. I wish you could have seen 'em.
+Not that you wouldn't have been a match for 'em," she added consolingly.
+"You and Mr. George look mighty well when you're together. You're just
+on a level, and if you could manage to tighten yo' corset a little mite
+at the waist, and hold yo'self with that bend out at the back the way
+Florrie does, you'd have pretty near as fine a figure as she has. Ain't
+it funny," she added irrelevantly, "but I was just studyin' last night
+about the way yo' ma used to say that all yo' folks married badly. I
+reckon she got that idea along of yo' pa's kin. You don't recollect much
+about 'em, but one of yo' pa's brothers married a woman who went clean
+deranged inside of a year and tried to kill him. Then there was yo'
+Cousin Nelly Harrison--she married badly, or only middlin' well anyway.
+There certainly was a lot of 'em when you come to think--not countin'
+Jane and Mr. Charley, and I can't help what happens," she concluded
+sentimentally, "I ain't ever goin' back on Mr. Charley--not after the
+way he sent me two loads of coal the winter I was laid up with
+rheumatism and couldn't work. Well, it's about time for me to be goin',
+Gabriella. If you want me for anything, you just drop me a line to say
+so. William's children are gettin' so big, I can come out for the day
+'most any time now, and if William's courtin' goes on all right, I
+reckon he won't be wantin' me much longer. He's been waitin' on a young
+woman right steady for more'n six months, and it wouldn't surprise me a
+bit if something was to come of it befo' summer."
+
+"Then you'd go South again, wouldn't you?" There was a wistful sound in
+Gabriella's voice as she put the question. Miss Polly was a tiresome
+person, but at least she was faithful, and long habit had established a
+bond of tolerance, if not of affection, between them. In the last few
+months Gabriella had grown to look upon her as the one living
+association with her childhood, and she was so lonely that she dreaded
+to sever the single tie with the past that still remained to her. "I
+believe she'd work her fingers to the bone for me, and, of course, she
+can't help being so garrulous," she thought.
+
+"I reckon I will, if it comes to that, but I'd hate like anything to
+leave you and the children," answered Miss Polly. "I feel somehow as if
+I belonged up here with you all, and I've grown real fond of Archibald."
+
+"Yes, I'd hate to give you up," said Gabriella, as she let her go and
+turned back again into the room. Her brain had worked quickly while Miss
+Polly was talking, and the undercurrent of gossip had helped, rather
+than retarded, the clearness and rapidity of her thoughts. All her
+weakness, all her anger had passed. She saw the situation without
+exaggeration and without illusion, for she had made her decision in the
+few minutes between the entrance and the departure of the seamstress.
+The embittering memories of her life with George were submerged in the
+invigorating waves of energy that flooded her being. Her inert body
+responded to the miraculous restoration of her spirit; and, while she
+walked swiftly from the door to the window, she had a sensation of
+lightness and ease as if she had just awakened from a refreshing sleep.
+For seven years all the strength of her character had been drained by
+the supreme function of motherhood; but now her children had ceased to
+need the whole of her life, and she was free to belong at least in part
+to herself--free to enter unrestricted into the broader human
+activities. And, above all, she was free from George. She had escaped
+from the humiliating bondage of her marriage; for, since he had broken
+the tie between them, she realized with a strange, an almost unnatural,
+exhilaration, how little except duty--how little except the bare legal
+husk of the marriage contract--still held her to him. She had loved him
+once, but she loved him no longer, and she resolved passionately that
+she would not allow her life to be spoiled because of a single mistake.
+Seven years were lost out of her youth, it was true, but those years had
+given her her children, and so they were not wasted in spite of the
+mistakes she had made, of the shame she had suffered. Judged simply as a
+machine she was of greater value at twenty-seven than she had been at
+twenty, and a part of this value lay in her deeper knowledge of life.
+She had had her adventure, and she was cured forever of adventurous
+desires. Her imagination, as well as her body, was firmer, harder, more
+disciplined than it had been in her girlhood; and if her vision of the
+universe was less sympathetic, it was also less sentimental. The bluest
+eyes in the world, she told herself sternly, could not trouble her fancy
+to-day, nor could the wildest romance quicken her pulses.
+
+A wagon, filled with blue and white hyacinths, passed by in the street,
+and while she watched it, there flashed into her mind, with the
+swiftness of light, a memory of the evening when she had broken her
+engagement to Arthur. All her life he had loved her, and, but for an
+accident, she might have married him. If she had not seen George at
+Florrie's party--if she had not seen him under a yellow lantern, with
+the glow in his eyes, and a dreamy waltz floating from the arbour of
+roses at the end of the garden--if this had not happened, she would have
+married Arthur instead of George, and her whole life would have been
+different. Because of a single instant, because of a chance meeting, she
+had wrecked the happiness of three lives. Now, when the bloom had
+dropped from her love, it was impossible for her to gather the withered
+leaves and bare stems in her hands and find any fragrance about them; it
+was impossible for her to understand how or why she had followed so
+fleeting an impulse. People had told her that love lasted forever, yet
+she knew that her emotion for George was so utterly dead that there was
+no warmth left in the ashes. It had all been so vivid once, and now it
+was as dull and colourless as the dust drifting after the blue and white
+hyacinths.
+
+From the trail of dust and the fragrance of the hyacinths, Arthur's face
+floated up to her, grave, gentle, and thin-featured, with its look of
+detached culture, of nameless distinction. She recalled the colour of
+his eyes, as clear and cool as running water, his sensitive lips under
+the thin, brown moustache, and his slender, aristocratic hands, with
+their touch as soft and as tender as a woman's. "He had intellect--he
+had culture--I suppose these are the things that really matter," she
+thought, for George, she knew, possessed neither of these qualities.
+And, as she remembered Arthur, she was stirred, not by tenderness, but
+by a passionate gratitude. He had loved her, and by loving her, he had
+saved her pride from defeat. In the hour of her deepest humiliation, she
+found comfort in the knowledge of his bleeding heart, of his tragic and
+beautiful loyalty; for though she was strong enough to live without
+love, she was not strong enough to live with the thought that no man had
+ever loved her.
+
+For a few minutes she allowed her fancy to play with the comforting
+memory of Arthur's devotion--with the image of her photograph on his
+bureau and the single rose in the vase he kept always before it. "But
+for an accident I might have loved him," she said, and the thought of
+this love which might have been sent a wave of sweetness to her heart.
+"I might have loved him and been happy." The vision was so dangerously
+beautiful that she put it resolutely away from her, and told herself,
+with an effort to be philosophical, that there was no use whatever in
+regretting the past, and since love was over for her, she must set her
+mind to solve the problem of work. "I've got my life to live," she said
+with stoical calmness, "and however bad it is I've nobody to blame for
+it but myself."
+
+Then, because she had only one talent, however small, she changed her
+dress, and went out to ask for a position as designer, saleswoman, or
+milliner in the house of Dinard.
+
+The Irish woman, voluble, painted, powdered, bewigged, and with the
+remains of her handsome figure laced into a black satin gown, nodded her
+false golden locks and smiled an ambiguous smile when she heard the
+explanation of young Mrs. Fowler's afternoon call.
+
+"But, no, it ees impossible," she protested, forgetting her foreign
+shrug and preserving with difficulty the trace of an accent. Then,
+becoming suddenly natural as she realized that no immediate profit was
+to be derived from affectation, she added decisively, "you have no
+training, and I have quite as many salesladies as I need at this season.
+Not that you are not chic," she hastened to conclude, "not that you
+would not in appearance be an adornment to any establishment."
+
+"I am willing to do anything," said Gabriella, pressing her point with
+characteristic tenacity. "I want to learn, you know, I want to learn
+everything I possibly can. You yourself told me that I had a natural
+gift for designing, and I am anxious to turn it to some account. I
+believe I can make a very good milliner, and I want to try."
+
+"But what would Madame Fowler, your mother-in-law, say to this? Surely
+no one would want to earn her living unless she was obliged to."
+
+For Madame had known life, as she often remarked, and the knowledge so
+patiently acquired had gone far to confirm her natural suspicion of
+human nature. She had got on, as she observed in confidential moments,
+by believing in nobody; and this skepticism, which was fundamental and
+rooted in principle, had inspired her behaviour not only to her patrons,
+but to her husband, her children, her domestic servants, her
+tradespeople, and the policeman at the corner. Thirty years ago she had
+suspected the entire masculine world of amorous designs upon her person;
+to-day, secretly numbering her years at sixty-two, and publicly
+acknowledging forty-five of them, she suspected the same world of
+equally active, if less romantic, intentions regarding her purse. And if
+she distrusted men, she both distrusted and despised women. She
+distrusted and despised them because they were poor workers, because
+they were idlers by nature, because they allowed themselves to be
+cheated, slighted, underpaid, underfed, and oppressed, and, most of all,
+she despised them because they were the victims of their own emotions.
+Love was all very well, she was accustomed to observe, as a pleasurable
+pursuit, but, as with any other pursuit, when it began to impair the
+appetite and to affect the quality and the quantity of one's work, then
+a serious person would at once contrive to get rid of the passion. And
+Madame prided herself with reason upon being a strictly serious person.
+She had been through the experience of love innumerable times; she had
+lost four husbands, and, as she pointed out with complacency, she was
+still living.
+
+In the dubious splendour of her showrooms, which were curtained and
+carpeted in velvet, and decorated with artificial rose-bushes flowering
+magnificently from white and gold jardinières, six arrogant young women,
+in marvellously fitting gowns of black satin, strolled back and forth
+all day long, or stood gracefully, with the exaggerated curve of the
+period, awaiting possible customers. Though they were as human within as
+Madame Dinard--and beneath her make-up she was very human
+indeed--nothing so variable as an expression ever crossed the waxlike
+immobility of their faces; and while they trailed their black satin
+trains over the rich carpets, amid the lustrous piles of silks and
+velvets which covered the white and gold tables, they appeared to float
+through an atmosphere of eternal enchantment. Watching them, Gabriella
+wondered idly if they could ever unbend at the waist, if they could ever
+let down those elaborate and intricate piles of hair. Then she overheard
+the tallest and most arrogant of them remark, "I'm just crazy about him,
+but he's dead broke," and she realized that they also belonged to the
+unsatisfied world of humanity.
+
+Madame, who had slipped away to answer the telephone, came rustling
+back, and sank, wheezing, into a white and gilt chair, which was too
+small to contain the whole of her ample person. Though she had spoken
+quite sharply at the telephone, her voice was mellifluous when she
+attuned it to Gabriella.
+
+"That gown is perfect on you," she remarked in honied accents. "It was
+one of my best models last season, and as I said before, Madame, you are
+so fortunate as to wear your clothes with a grace." She was urbane, but
+she was anxious to be rid of her, this young Mrs. Fowler could see at a
+glance. "Your head is well set on your shoulders, and that is rare--very
+rare! It would surprise you to know how few women have heads that are
+well set on their shoulders. Yes, I understand. You wish to learn, but
+not to make a living. That is very good, for the only comfortable way
+for a woman to make her living is to marry one--a man is the only
+perfectly satisfactory means of livelihood. I tell this to my daughter,
+who wishes to go on the stage. If you are looking for pleasure, that is
+different, but when you talk of a living--well, there is but one way to
+insure it, and that is to marry a man who is able to provide it--either
+as allowance or as alimony. The best that a woman can do gives her only
+bread and meat--an existence, not a living. Only a man can provide one
+with the essential things--with clothes and jewels and carriages and
+trips to Europe. These are the important things in life, and what woman
+was ever able to procure these except from a man?"
+
+Her face, so thickly covered with rouge and liquid powder that it was as
+expressionless as a mask, turned its hollow eyes on a funeral which was
+slowly passing in the street; and though her creed was hardly the kind
+to fortify one's spiritual part against the contemplation of death, she
+surveyed the solemn procession as tranquilly as any devoted adherent of
+either religion or philosophy could have done. Not a shadow passed over
+her fantastic mockery of youth as she glanced back at her visitor.
+
+"But you have worked--you have supported yourself," insisted Gabriella
+with firmness.
+
+"Myself and six children, to say nothing of three husbands. Yes, I
+supported three of my four husbands, but what did I get out of it?"
+replied Madame, shrugging her ample shoulders. "What was there in it for
+me? Since we are talking freely, I may say that I have worked hard all
+my life, and I got nothing out of it that I couldn't have got with much
+less trouble by a suitable marriage. Of course this is not for my girls
+to hear. I don't tell them this, but it is true nevertheless. Men should
+do the work of the world, and they should support women; that is how God
+intended it, that is according to both nature and religion; any priest
+will say as much to you." And she, who had defied both God and Nature,
+wagged her false golden head toward the funeral procession.
+
+"Yet you have been successful. You have built up a good business. The
+work has repaid you."
+
+"A woman's work!" She snapped her gouty fingers with a playful gesture.
+"Does a woman's work ever repay her? Think of the pleasures I have
+missed in my life--the excursions, the theatres, the shows. All these I
+might have had if I hadn't shut myself up every day until dark. And now
+you wish to do this! You with your youth, with your style, with your
+husband!"
+
+She protested, she pleaded, she reasoned, but in the end Gabriella won
+her point by the stubborn force of her will. Madame would take her for a
+few weeks, a few months, a few years, as long as she cared to stay and
+gave satisfaction. Madame would have her taught what she could learn,
+would discover by degrees the natural gifts and the amount of training
+already possessed by young Mrs. Fowler. Young Mrs. Fowler, on the other
+hand, must "stand around" when required in the showrooms (it was just
+here that Gabriella won her victory); she must assist at the ordering of
+gowns, at the selections, and while Madame's patrons were fitted, young
+Mrs. Fowler must be prepared to assume graceful attitudes in the
+background and to offer her suggestions with a persuasive air.
+Suggestions, even futile ones, offered in a charming voice from a
+distinguished figure in black satin had borne wonderful results in
+Madame's experience.
+
+"I began that way myself, Mrs. Fowler. You may not believe it, but I was
+once slenderer than you are--my waist measured only nineteen inches and
+my bust thirty-six--just the figure a man most admires. The result was,
+you see, that I have had four husbands, though it is true that I
+supported three of them, and it is always easy to marry if one provides
+the support. Men are like that. It is their nature. Yes, I began that
+way with little training, but much natural talent, and a head full of
+ideas. If one has ideas it is always possible to become a success, but
+they are rarer even than waists measuring nineteen inches. And I had
+charm, though you might not believe it now, for charm does not wear. But
+I made my way up from the bottom, first as errand girl, at the age of
+ten, and I made it, not by work, for I could never handle a needle, but
+by ideas. They were once plentiful, and now they are so scarce," she
+broke off with a sigh of resignation which seemed to accept every fact
+of experience except the fact of age. "It was a hard life, but it was
+life, after all. One is not put here to be contented, or one would dread
+death too much for the purpose of God." In spite of her uncompromising
+materialism, she was not without an ineradicable streak of superstition
+which she would probably have called piety.
+
+"I am ready to begin at once--to-morrow," said Gabriella, and she added
+without explanation, obeying, perhaps, an intuitive feeling that to
+explain a statement is to weaken it, "and I should like to be called by
+my maiden name while I am here--just Mrs. Carr, if you don't mind."
+
+To this request Madame agreed with effusion, if not with sincerity. For
+her own part she would have preferred to speak of her saleswoman as
+young Mrs. Fowler; but she reflected comfortably that many of her
+patrons would know young Mrs. Fowler by sight at least, and to the
+others she might conveniently drop a word or two in due season. To drop
+a word or two would provide entertainment throughout the length of a
+fitting; and, for the rest, the mystery of the situation had its charm
+for the romantic Irish strain in her blood. The prospect of securing
+both entertainment and mystery at the modest expenditure of fifteen
+dollars a week impressed her as very good business, for she combined in
+the superlative degree the opposite qualities of romance and economy. To
+be sure, except for the advertisement she afforded and the gossip she
+provided, young Mrs. Fowler might not prove to be worth even her modest
+salary; but there was, on the other hand, a remote possibility that she
+might turn out to be gifted, and Madame would then be able to use her
+inventiveness to some purpose before the gifted one discovered her
+value. In any case, Madame was at liberty to discharge her with a day's
+notice, and her salary would hardly be increased for three months even
+should she persist in her eccentricity and develop a positive talent for
+dressmaking. And if young Mrs. Fowler could do nothing else, Madame
+reflected as they parted, she could at least receive customers and
+display models with an imposing, even an aristocratic, demeanour.
+
+To receive Madame's customers and display Madame's models were the last
+occupations Gabriella would have chosen had she been able to penetrate
+Madame's frivolous wig to her busy brain and detect her prudent schemes
+for the future; but the girl was sick of her dependence on George's
+father, and, in the revolt of her pride, she would have accepted any
+honest work which would have enabled her to escape from the insecurity
+of her position. Of her competence to earn a living, of her ability to
+excel in any work that she undertook, of the sufficiency and soundness
+of her resources, she was as absolutely assured as she had been when she
+entered the millinery department of Brandywine & Plummer. If Madame,
+starting penniless, had nevertheless contrived, through her native
+abilities, to support three husbands and six children, surely the
+capable and industrious Gabriella might assume smaller burdens with the
+certainty of moderate success. It was not, when one considered it, the
+life which one would have chosen, but who, since the world began, had
+ever lived exactly the life of his choice? Many women, she reflected
+stoically, were far worse off than she, since she started not only with
+a modicum of business experience (for surely the three months with
+Brandywine & Plummer might weigh as that) but with a knowledge of the
+world and a social position which she had found to be fairly marketable.
+That Madame Dinard would have accepted an unknown and undistinguished
+applicant for work at a salary of fifteen dollars a week she did not for
+an instant imagine. This inadequate sum, she concluded with a touch of
+ironic humour, represented the exact value in open market of her
+marriage to George.
+
+In the front room, where a sparse mid-winter collection of hats
+ornamented the scattered stands, she stopped for a few minutes to
+inspect, with a critical eye, the dingy array. "I wonder what makes them
+buy so many they can't sell?" she said half aloud to the model at which
+she was gazing. "Nobody would wear these hats--certainly nobody who
+could afford to buy Parisian models. I could design far better hats
+than these, I myself, and if I were the head of the house I should never
+have accepted any of them, no matter who bought them. I suppose, after
+all, it's the fault of the buyer, but it's a waste--it's not economy."
+
+Lifting a green velvet toque trimmed with a skinny white ostrich feather
+from the peg before which she was standing, she surveyed the august
+French name emblazoned in gold on the lining. "Everything isn't good
+that comes from Paris," she thought, with a shrug which was worthy of
+Madame at her best. "Why, I wonder, can't Americans produce 'ideas'
+themselves? Why do we always have to depend on the things the French
+send over to us? Half the hats and gowns Madame has aren't really good,
+and yet she makes people pay tremendous prices for things she knows are
+bad and undistinguished. All that ought to be changed, and if I ever
+succeed, if I ever catch on, I am going to change it." An idea, a whole
+flock of ideas, came to her while she stood there with her rapt gaze on
+the green velvet toque, which nobody had bought, and which she knew
+would shortly be "marked down," august French name included, from forty
+to fifteen and from fifteen to five dollars. Her constructive
+imagination was at work recreating the business, and she saw it in fancy
+made over and made right from the bottom--she saw Madame's duplicity
+succeeded by something of Brandywine & Plummer's inflexible honesty, and
+the flimsy base of the structure supplanted by a solid foundation of
+credit. For she had come often enough to Dinard's to discern the
+slipshod and unsystematic methods beneath the ornate and extravagant
+surface. Her naturally quick powers of observation had detected at a
+glance conditions of which the elder Mrs. Fowler was never aware. To
+sell gowns and hats at treble their actual value, to cajole her
+customers into buying what they did not want and what did not suit them,
+to give inferior goods, inferior workmanship, inferior style wherever
+they would be accepted, and to get always the most money for the least
+possible expenditure of ability, industry, and honesty--these were the
+fundamental principles, Gabriella had already discovered, beneath
+Madame's flourishing, but shallow-rooted, prosperity. Brandywine &
+Plummer did not carry Parisian models; their shop was not fashionable in
+the way that the establishment of a New York dressmaker and milliner
+must be fashionable; but the standard of excellence in all things
+excepting style was far higher in the old Broad Street house in the
+middle 'nineties than it was at Madame Dinard's during the early years
+of the new century. Quality had been essential in every hat that went
+from Brandywine & Plummer's millinery department; and Gabriella,
+deriving from a mother who worked only in fine linen, rejected
+instinctively the cheap, the tawdry, and the inferior. She had heard a
+customer complain one day of the quality of the velvet on a hat Madame
+had made to order; and pausing to look at the material as she went out,
+she had decided that the most prosperous house in New York could not
+survive many incidents of that deplorable sort. To be sure, such
+material would not have been supplied to Mrs. Pletheridge, or even to
+the elder Mrs. Fowler, who, though Southern, was always particular and
+very often severe; but here again, since this cheap hat had been sold at
+a high price, was a vital weakness in Madame's business philosophy.
+
+On the whole, there were many of Madame's methods which might be
+improved; and when Gabriella passed through the ivory and gold doorway
+into the street, she had convinced herself that she was preëminently
+designed by Nature to undertake the necessary work of improvement. The
+tawdriness she particularly disliked--the trashy gold and ivory of the
+decorations, the artificial rose-bushes from which the dust was never
+removed, the sumptuous velvet carpets which were not taken up in the
+summer.
+
+While she was crossing the street a man joined her; and glancing up as
+soon as she was clear of the traffic, she saw that it was Judge
+Crowborough. In the last seven years her dislike for him had gradually
+disappeared, and though she had never found him attractive, she had
+grown to accept the general estimate of his character and ability. A man
+so gifted ought not to be judged as severely as poorer or less actively
+intelligent mortals; and as long as other men did not judge him, she
+felt no inclination to usurp so unfeminine a prerogative. He had always
+been kind to her, and she understood now from his manner that he meant
+to be still kinder. It occurred to her at once that he knew of George's
+infatuation for Florrie, and that he was chivalrously extending to
+George's wife a sympathy which he would probably have withheld in such
+circumstances from his own. Had it been possible she would have liked to
+explain to him that in her case his sympathy was not needed; but she
+realized, with resentment, that one of her most galling burdens would be
+the wasted pity which her unfortunate situation would inspire in the
+friends of the family. Social conventions made it impossible for her to
+tell the world, including Judge Crowborough, that George's infidelity
+was a matter of slight importance to her, since it struck only at her
+pride, not at her heart. Her pride, it is true, had suffered sharply for
+an hour; but so superficial was the wound that the distraction of
+seeking work had been almost sufficient to heal it.
+
+"A most extraordinary day for January," remarked the judge as they
+reached a corner. "You hardly need your furs, the air is so mild."
+
+Overhead small, birdlike clouds drifted in flocks across a sky of
+changeable brightness, and the wind, blowing past the tray of a flower
+vendor at the corner, was faintly scented with violets. It was one of
+those rare days when happiness seems as natural as the wind or the
+sunlight, when the wildest dreams appear not too wild to come true in
+reality, when one hopes by instinct and believes, not with the reason,
+but with the blood. To Gabriella, forgetting her humiliation, it was a
+day when life for the sake of the mere act of living--when life, in
+spite of disappointment and loss and treachery and shame, was enough to
+set the heart bounding with happiness. For she was one of those who
+loved life, not for what it brought to her of pleasure, but for what it
+was in itself.
+
+"Yes, it is a lovely afternoon," she answered, and added impulsively:
+"It is good to be alive, isn't it?" She had forgotten George, but even
+if she had remembered him, it would have made little difference. For six
+years, not for a few hours, George had been lost to her; and in six
+years one has time to forget almost anything.
+
+The judge's answer to this was a look which penetrated like a flash of
+light into her brain. By this light she read all that he thought of
+her, and she saw that he was divided between admiration of her spirit
+and an uneasy suspicion of its perfect propriety. Tier offence, she
+knew, was that, being by all the logic of facts an unhappy wife, she
+should persist so stubbornly in denying the visible evidence of her
+unhappiness. Had her denial been merely a pretence, it would, according
+to his code, have appeared both natural and womanly; but the conviction
+that she was sincere, that she was not lying, that she was not even
+tragically "keeping up an appearance," increased the amazement and
+suspicion with which he had begun to regard her. He walked on
+thoughtfully at her side, fingering the end of his long yellowish-gray
+moustache, and bending his sleepy gaze on the pavement. When he was
+thinking, he always looked as if he were falling asleep, and he seldom
+made a remark, even to a woman, without thinking it over. Into his small
+steel-gray eyes, surrounded by purplish and wrinkled puffs of skin,
+there crept the cautious and secretive look he wore at directors'
+meetings, while a furtive smile flickered for an instant across his
+loose mouth under the drooping ends of his moustache. His ungainly body,
+with its curious suggestion of over-ripeness, of waning power,
+straightened suddenly as if in reaction from certain destructive
+processes within his soul. Though he was only just passing his prime, he
+had lived so rapidly that he bore already the marks of age in his face
+and figure.
+
+"Yes, it's good to be alive," he assented, for there was nothing in
+either his philosophy or his experience to contradict this simple
+statement. "I've always maintained, by the way, that happiness is the
+chief of the virtues."
+
+For an instant Gabriella looked at the sky; then turning her candid eyes
+to his, she answered: "Happiness and courage. I put courage
+first--before everything."
+
+Her gaze dropped, but not until she had seen his look change and the
+slightly cynical smile--the smile of one who has examined everything and
+believes in nothing--fade from his lips. She had touched some chord deep
+down within him of which he had long ago forgotten even the
+existence--some echoed harmony of what had been perhaps the living faith
+of his youth.
+
+"You're a gallant soul," he said briefly, and she wondered what it was
+that he knew, what it was that he was keeping back.
+
+At the corner where they parted, he stood for a few moments, holding her
+hand in his big, soft grasp while he looked down on her. The suspicion
+and the cynicism had gone from his face, and she understood all at once
+why people still trusted him, still liked him, notwithstanding his
+reputation, notwithstanding even his repulsiveness. He was all that--he
+was immoral, he was repulsive--but he was something else also--he was
+human.
+
+When she entered the house her first feeling was that the old atmosphere
+had returned, the old suspense, the old waiting, the old horror of
+impending calamity. A nervous dread made her hesitate to mount the
+steps, to go to her room, to inquire in a natural voice for the
+children. It was imaginary, of course, she assured herself, but it was
+very vivid as long as it lasted. Then she noticed that the usual order
+of the hall was disturbed, and when she rang, Burrows came, with a
+hurried, apologetic manner, after keeping her waiting. Mrs. Fowler's
+fur scarf hung on the massive oak post of the staircase; the cards in
+the little tray on the hail table were scattered about; and the petals
+of a yellow chrysanthemum were strewn over the carpet.
+
+Burrows, instead of explaining the confusion, appeared embarrassed when
+she questioned him, and spurred by a sharp foreboding, she ran up the
+stairs to her mother-in-law's sitting-room. At her entrance a trembling
+voice wailed in a tone of remonstrance:
+
+"Oh, Gabriella, have you been out?"
+
+"Yes, I've been out. Mamma, what is the matter?"
+
+"I looked for you everywhere. Archibald has been here, but he has just
+gone out again. I have never seen him so deeply moved--so--so
+indignant--" Mrs. Fowler broke off, bit her lip nervously, and paused
+while she tried to swallow her sobs. Her hat lay on a chair at her side,
+and in her hands she held a pair of half-soiled white gloves, which she
+smoothed out on her knee, as if she were hardly aware of what she was
+doing. In her blue eyes, so like George's, there was an agonizing terror
+and suspense. Her usually florid face was pale to the lips; and this
+pallor appeared to accentuate the dark, faintly lined shadows beneath
+her eyes and the grayness of her rigidly waved hair.
+
+"Courage!" said Gabriella in a whisper to herself, and aloud she asked
+gently: "Dear mamma, what is it? Don't be afraid. I can bear it."
+
+"Archibald has ordered George out of the house. He--George, I mean--had
+given him his promise not to see Florrie again, and it seems that he--he
+broke it. There has been a dreadful scene. I never imagined that
+Archibald could be so angry. He was terrible--and he is ill anyway and
+in great trouble about his financial affairs. I have been worried to
+death about him for weeks. He says things are going so badly downtown
+that he can't stave off the crash any longer, and now--this--this--" She
+broke down utterly, burying her convulsed face in her hands, which even
+in the instant of horror and tragedy, Gabriella noticed, had been
+manicured since the morning. "George has gone--we think he has gone off
+with Florrie," she cried, "and he--he will never come back as long as
+Archibald lives."
+
+She was not thinking of Gabriella. True to the deepest instincts of her
+nature, she thought first of her son, then of her husband. It was not
+that she did not care for her daughter-in-law, did not sympathize; but
+the fact remained that Gabriella was only George's wife to her, while
+George was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, soul of her soul.
+Though her choice was not deliberate, though it was unconscious and
+instinctive--nevertheless, she had chosen. At the crucial moment
+instinct had risen superior to reason, and she had chosen, not with her
+judgment, but with every quivering nerve and fibre of her being.
+Gabriella was right, but George was her son; and had it been possible to
+secure George's happiness by sacrificing the right to the wrong, she
+would have made that sacrifice without hesitation, without scruple, and
+without regret.
+
+"There's his father now," she whispered, lifting her disfigured face.
+"Oh, Gabriella, I believe it will kill me!"
+
+While Gabriella stood there waiting for George's father to enter, and
+listening to his slow, deliberate tread on the stairs, the heavy,
+laborious tread of a man who is uncertain of his strength, she
+remembered vividly, as if she were living it over again, the night she
+had waited by her fire to tell George that his first child was to be
+born. Many thoughts passed through her mind, and at last these thoughts
+resolved themselves into a multitude of crowding images--all distinct
+and vivid images of George's face. She saw his face as she had first
+seen and loved it, with its rich colouring, its blue-gray eyes, like
+wells of romance she had once thought, its look of poetry and emotion
+which had covered so much that was merely commonplace and gross. She saw
+him as he had looked at their marriage, as he had looked, bending over
+her after her first child was born, and then she saw him as he had
+parted from her that morning--flushed, sneering, a little coarsened, but
+still boyish, still charming. Well, it was all over now. It had been
+over so long that she had even ceased to regret it--for she was not by
+nature one of the women who could wear mourning for a lifetime.
+
+The door opened: Archibald Fowler came in very slowly; and the first
+sight of his face brought home to her with a shock the discovery that he
+was the one of them who had suffered most. He looked an old man; his
+gentle scholar's face had taken an ashen hue; and his eyes were the eyes
+of one who has only partially recovered from the blow that has
+prostrated him.
+
+"My dear child," he said; "my dear daughter," and laid his hand on her
+shoulder.
+
+She clung to him, feeling a passionate pity, not for herself, but for
+him. "You have too much to bear," she murmured caressingly. "You mustn't
+take it like this. You must try to get over it. For all our sakes you
+must try to get over it." The irony of it all--that she should be
+consoling her husband's father for her husband's desertion of her--did
+not appear to her until long afterwards. At the time she thought only
+that she--that somebody--must make the tragedy easier for him to bear.
+
+"Come and sit down, Archibald," said Mrs. Fowler pleadingly. "Let me
+give you a glass of sherry and a biscuit; you are too tired to talk."
+
+There was the old devotion in her manner, but there was also a new
+deference. For the first time in thirty years of marriage he had shown
+his strength to her, not his gentleness; for the first time he had
+opposed his will to hers in the cause of justice, and he had conquered
+her. In spite of her anguish, something of the romantic expectancy of
+her first love had returned to her heart and it showed in her softened
+voice, in her timid caresses, in her wistful eyes, which held a pathetic
+and startled brightness. He had triumphed in honour; and if her defeat
+had not involved George, she could almost have gloried in the
+completeness of her surrender.
+
+He sat down with the air of a man who is not entirely awake to his
+surroundings; and his wife, after ordering the sherry, hovered over him
+with the touching solicitude of one who is living for the moment in the
+shadow of memory. While he sipped the wine, he waited until Burrows'
+footsteps had passed down the staircase, and then said with his usual
+quietness:
+
+"There is something else, Evelyn, that I kept back. I couldn't tell you
+while you were so worried about George, but there is something else--"
+
+She caught the words from him eagerly, with a gesture almost of relief.
+
+"You mean it has come at last. I suspected it, and, oh, Archibald, I
+don't care--I don't care!"
+
+"There were several failures to-day in Wall Street, and--" He broke off
+as if he were too tired to go on, and added slowly after a moment: "I am
+too old to begin again. I'd like to go back home--to go back to the
+South for my old age. Yes, I'm old."
+
+But his wife was on her knees beside him, with her arms about his neck
+and her face hidden on his breast. "I don't care, I never cared," she
+said in a voice that was almost exultant. "We can be happy on so
+little--happier than we've ever been in our lives--just you and I to
+grow old together. We can go home to Virginia--to some small place and
+be happy. Happiness costs so little."
+
+Slipping away, Gabriella went into the hail, and passing her room,
+noiselessly pushed open the door of the nursery, where the children were
+sleeping. A night lamp was burning in one corner under a dark shade, and
+the nurse's knitting, a pile of white yarn, was lying on the table in
+the circle of green light, which was as soft as the glimmer of a
+glow-worm in a thicket. In their two little beds, separated by a strip
+of white rug, the children were sleeping quietly, with a wonderful
+freshness, like the dew of innocence, on their faces. Frances lay on her
+back, very straight and prim even in sleep, with the sheet folded neatly
+under her dimpled chin, her hands clasped on her breast, and her golden
+curls spread in perfect order over the lace-trimmed pillow. Her
+miniature features, framed in the dim gold of her hair, had the trite
+prettiness of an angel on a Christmas card; and beside her ethereal
+loveliness there was something gnome-like in the dark sturdiness of
+Archibald, who slept on his side, with his fists pressed tightly under
+the pillow, and the frown produced by near-sightedness still wrinkling
+his forehead. Though he was not beautiful, he showed already the promise
+of character in his face, and his personality, which was remarkably
+developed for a child of his age, possessed a singular charm. He was the
+kind of child people describe as "unlike other children." His
+temperament was made up of surprises, and this quality of unexpectedness
+inspired in his mother a devotion that was almost tragic in its
+intensity. Never had she loved the normal Frances Evelyn as she loved
+Archibald.
+
+As she looked down on them, sleeping so peacefully in the green light, a
+wave of sadness swept over her, and she thought of them suddenly as
+fatherless, impoverished, and unprotected, dependent on her untried
+labour for their lives and their happiness. Then, before the anxiety
+could take possession of her mind, she put it from her, and whispered,
+"Courage!" as she turned away and went out of the room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+WORK
+
+
+They had planned the future so carefully that there was a pitiless irony
+in the next turn of the screw--for when they tried to awaken Archibald
+Fowler in the morning, he did not stir, and they realized presently,
+with the rebellious shock such tragedies always bring, that he had died
+in the night--that all that he had stood for, the more than thirty years
+of work and struggle, had collapsed in an hour. When the first grief,
+the first excitement, was over, and life began to flow quietly again in
+its familiar currents, it was discovered that the crash of his fortune
+had occurred on the day of his son's flight and disgrace, and that the
+two shocks, coming together, had killed him. While they sat in the
+darkened house, surrounded by the funereal smell of crape, the practical
+details of living seemed to matter so little that they scarcely gave
+them a thought. Not until weeks afterwards, when Patty and Billy had
+sailed for France, and Mrs. Fowler, shrouded in widow's weeds, had gone
+South to her old home, did Gabriella find strength to tear aside the
+veil of mourning and confront the sordid actuality. Then she found that
+the crash had buried everything under the ruins of Archibald Fowler's
+prosperity--that nothing remained except a bare pittance which would
+insure his widow only a scant living on the impoverished family acres.
+For the rest there was nothing, and she herself was as poor as she had
+been in Hill Street before her marriage.
+
+Walking back from the station after bidding her mother-in-law a tearful
+and tender good-bye, she tried despairingly to gather her scattered
+thoughts and summon all her failing resources; but in front of her plans
+there floated always the pathetic brightness of Mrs. Fowler's eyes
+gazing up at her from the heavy shadow of the crape veil she had lifted.
+So that was the end--a little love, a little hope, a little happiness,
+and then separation and death. Effort appeared not only futile, but
+fantastic, and yet effort, she knew, must be made if she were to ward
+off destitution. She must recover her cheerfulness, she must be strong,
+she must be confident. Alone, penniless, with two children to support,
+she could not afford to waste her time and her energy in useless regret.
+Whatever it cost her, she must keep alive her fighting courage and her
+belief in life. She had youth, health, strength, intelligence,
+resourcefulness on her side; and she told herself again that there were
+thousands of women living and fighting around her who were far worse off
+than she. "What others have done, I can do also, and do better," she
+murmured aloud as she walked rapidly back to Dinard's.
+
+In the long front room the crowded mid-winter sale was in progress, and
+the six arrogant young women, goaded into a fleeting semblance of
+activity, were displaying dilapidated "left over" millinery to a throng
+of unfashionable casual customers. Madame, herself, scorned these casual
+customers, but her scorn was as water unto wine compared with the
+burning disdain of the six arrogant young women. They sauntered to and
+fro with their satin trains trailing elegantly over the carpet, with
+their fashionable curves accentuated as much as it was possible for
+pride to accentuate them, with their condescending heads turning
+haughtily above the high points of their collars. As Gabriella entered
+she saw the tallest and the most scornful of them, whose name was
+Murphy, insolently posing in the green velvet toque before a jaded
+hunter of reduced millinery, who shook her plain, sensible head at the
+hat as if she wished it to understand that she heartily disapproved of
+it.
+
+Madame was not visible, but Gabriella found her a little later in the
+workroom, where she was volubly elucidating obscure points in business
+morality to the forewoman. Of all the women employed in the house, this
+particular forewoman was the only one who appeared to Gabriella to be
+without pretence or affectation. She was an honest, blunt, capable
+creature, with a face and figure which permanently debarred her from the
+showrooms, and a painstaking method of work. There was no haughtiness,
+no condescension, about her. She had the manner of one who, being
+without fortuitous aids to happiness, is willing to give good measure of
+ability and industry in return for the bare necessaries of existence.
+"She is the only genuine thing in the whole establishment," thought
+Gabriella while she watched her.
+
+If Miss Smith, the forewoman, had been in ignorance of the failure and
+death of Archibald Fowler, she would probably have read the announcement
+in Madame's face as she watched her welcome the wife of his son. There
+was nothing offensive, nothing unkind, nothing curt; but, in some subtle
+way, the difference was emphasized between the eccentric daughter-in-law
+of a millionaire and an inexperienced young woman who must work for her
+living. For the welcome revealed at once to the observant eyes of Miss
+Smith the significant detail that Madame's role had changed from the
+benefited to the benefactor. And, as if this were not enough for one
+morning's developments, it revealed also that Gabriella's fictitious
+value as a saleswoman was beginning to decline; for Madame was disposed
+to scorn the sort of sensational advertisement which the newspapers had
+devoted of late to the unfortunate Fowlers. At one moment there had been
+grave doubt in Madame's mind as to whether or not she should employ
+young Mrs. Fowler in her respectable house; then, after a brief
+hesitation, she had shrewdly decided that ideas were worth something
+even when lacking the support of social position and financial security.
+There were undoubtedly possibilities in Gabriella; and disgrace, Madame
+concluded cheerfully, could not take away either one's natural talent or
+one's aristocratic appearance. That the girl had distinction, even rare
+distinction, Madame admitted while she nodded approvingly at the severe
+black cloth gown with its collar and cuffs of fine white crape. The
+simple arrangement of her hair, which would have ruined many a pretty
+face, suited the ivory pallor of Gabriella's features. Mourning was
+becoming to her, Madame decided, and though she was not beautiful, she
+was unusually charming.
+
+"She has few good points except her figure, and yet the whole is
+decidedly picturesque," thought Madame as impersonally as if she were
+criticising a fashion plate. "Very young men would hardly care for
+her--for very young men demand fine complexions and straight noses--but
+with older men who like an air, who admire grace, she would be taking,
+and women, yes, women would undoubtedly find her imposing. But she is
+not the sort to have followers," she concluded complacently.
+
+"Shall I go to the workroom?" asked Gabriella in a businesslike voice
+when she had taken off her hat, "or do you wish me at the sale?"
+
+Her soul shrank from the showrooms, but she had determined courageously
+that she would not allow her soul to interfere with her material
+purpose, and her purpose was to learn all that she could and to make
+herself indispensable to Madame. Only by acquiring a thorough knowledge
+of the business and making herself indispensable could she hope to
+succeed. And success was not merely desirable to her; it was vital. It
+meant the difference between food and hunger for her children.
+
+"Miss Smith will find something for you to do this morning," replied
+Madame, politely, but without enthusiasm. "If there is a rush later on
+in the millinery, I will send for you to help out."
+
+In the old days, when Dinard's was a small and exclusive house in one of
+the blocks just off Fifth Avenue, Madame would have scorned to combine
+the making of gowns and hats in a single establishment; but as she
+advanced in years and in worldly experience, she discovered that
+millinery drew the unwary passer-by even more successfully than
+dressmaking did. Then, too, hats were easy to handle; they sold for at
+least four or five times as much as they actually cost; and so,
+gradually, while she was still unaware of the disintegrating processes
+within, Madame's principles had crumbled before the temptation of
+increasing profits. A lapse of virtue, perhaps, but Madame, who had been
+born an O'Grady, was not the first to discover that one's virtuous
+principles are apt to modify with one's years. The time was when she had
+despised false hair, having a natural wealth of her own, and now, with a
+few thin gray strands hidden under her golden wig, she had become
+morally reconciled to necessity. "It is a hard world, and one lives as
+one must," was her favourite maxim.
+
+On the whole, however, having a philosophic bent of mind, she
+endeavoured to preserve, with rosy cheeks and golden hair, several other
+cheerful fictions of her youth. The chief of these, the artless delusion
+that, in spite of her obesity, her wig and her rouge, she still had
+power to charm the masculine eye, offered to her lively nature a more
+effective support than any virtuous principle could have supplied. A
+perennial, if ridiculous, coquetry sweetened her days and added
+sprightliness to the gay decline of her life. Being frankly material,
+she had confined her energies to the two unending pursuits of men and
+money, and having captured four husbands and acquired a comfortable bank
+account, she might have been content, had she been as discreet as she
+was provident, to rest on her substantial achievements. But the trouble
+with both men and money, when considered solely as rewards to
+enterprise, is that the quest of them is inexhaustible. One's income,
+however large, may reasonably become larger, and there is no limit to
+the number of husbands a prudent and fortunate woman may collect. And so
+age, which is, after all, a state of mind, not a term of years, was
+rendered harmless to Madame by her simple plan of refusing to
+acknowledge that it existed. This came of keeping one's head, she
+sometimes thought, though she never put her thought into words--this and
+all things else, including financial security and the perpetual pursuit
+of the elusive and lawless male. For at sixty-two she still felt young
+and she believed herself to be fascinating.
+
+But Gabriella, patiently stitching bias velvet bands on the brim of a
+straw hat for the early spring trade, felt that she was sustained
+neither by the pleasures of vanity nor by the sounder consolations of
+virtue. Her philosophy was quite as simple, if not so material, as
+Madame's. Human nature was divided between the victors and the victims,
+and the chief thing was not to let oneself become a victim. Her theory,
+like those of greater philosophers, was rooted not in reason, but in
+character, and she believed in life with all the sanguine richness of
+her blood. Of course it was a struggle, but she was one of those vital
+women who enjoy a struggle--who choose any aspect of life in preference
+to the condition of vegetative serenity. Unhappiness, which is so
+largely a point of view, an attitude of mind, had passed over her at a
+time when many women would have been consecrated to inconsolable misery.
+She was penniless, she was unloved, she was deserted by her husband, she
+had lost, in a few weeks, her friends, her home, and her family, and she
+faced the future alone, except for her dependent and helpless
+children--yet in spite of these things, though she was thoughtful,
+worried, and often anxious, she realized that deep down in her the
+essential core of her being was not unhappy. When she had tried and
+failed, and lost her health and her children--if such sorrows ever came
+to her, then there would be time enough for unhappiness. Now, she was
+only twenty-seven; the rich, wonderful world surrounded her; and this
+world, even if she put love out of her life, was brimming over with
+beauty. It was good to be alive; it was good to watch the crowd in the
+street, to see the sunlight on the pavement, to taste the air, to feel
+the murmurous currents of the city flow around her as she walked home in
+the twilight. It was good to earn her bread and to go back in the
+evening to the joyful shouts of two well and happy children. She saw it
+all as an adventure--the whole of life--and the imperative necessity was
+to keep to the last the ardent heart of the true adventurer. While she
+stitched with flying fingers, there passed before her the pale sad line
+of the victims--of those who had resigned themselves to unhappiness. She
+saw her mother, anxious, pensive, ineffectual, with her widow's veil,
+her drooping eyelids, and her look of mournful acquiescence, as of one
+who had grown old expecting the worst of life; she saw poor Jane,
+tragic, martyred, with the feeble virtue and the cloying sweetness of
+all the poor Janes of this world; and she saw Uncle Meriweather wearing
+his expression of worried and resentful helplessness, as if he had been
+swept onward against his will by forces which he did not understand. All
+these people were victims, and from these people she had sprung. Their
+blood was her blood; their traditions were her traditions; their
+religion was her religion; even their memories were her memories. But
+something else, which was not theirs, was in her nature, and this
+something else had been born in the instant when she revolted against
+them. Perhaps the fighting spirit of her father--of that father who had
+gone out like a flame in his youth had battled on her side when she had
+turned against the inertia and decay which had walled in her girlhood.
+
+In the afternoon Madame summoned her into the showrooms, and she
+assisted the exhausted young women at the sale of slightly damaged
+French hats to the unfashionable purchasers who preferred to pay
+reasonable prices. While she served them, which she did with a
+cheerfulness, an interest, and an amiability that distinguished her from
+the other saleswomen, she wondered how they could have so little common
+sense as to allow themselves to be deluded by the French labels on the
+soiled linings? She could have made a better hat in two hours than any
+one of those she sold at the reduced price of ten dollars; yet even the
+dingiest of them at last found a purchaser, and she saw the green velvet
+toque, which had been rejected by the sensible middle-aged woman in the
+morning, finally pass into the possession of a hard-featured spinster.
+What amazed her, for she had a natural talent for dress, was the
+infallible instinct which guided the vast majority of these customers to
+the selection of the inappropriate. A few of them had taste, or had
+learned from experience what they could not wear; but by far the larger
+number displayed an ignorance of the most elementary principles of dress
+which shocked and astonished Gabriella. The obese and middle-aged winged
+straight as a bird toward the coquettish in millinery; the lean and
+haggard intuitively yearned for the picturesque; the harsh and simple
+aspired to the severely smart. Yet beneath the vain misdirection of
+impulses there was some obscure principle of attraction which ruled the
+absurdity of the decisions. Each woman, Gabriella discovered after an
+attentive hour at the sale, was dressing not her actual substance, but
+some passionately cherished ideal of herself which she had stored in a
+remote and inaccessible chamber of her brain.
+
+In all of the tedious selections Gabriella assisted with the pleasant
+voice, the ready sympathy, and the quick understanding which had made
+her so popular when she had worked for the old shop in Broad Street. The
+truth was that human nature interested her even in its errors, and her
+pleasant manners were simply the outward manifestation of an unaffected
+benevolence.
+
+"I shouldn't mind going there if they were all like that one," remarked
+a customer, who had bought three hats, in the hearing of Madame as she
+went out; "but some of them are so disagreeable you feel like slapping
+their faces. Once last winter I had that tall girl with red hair--the
+handsome, stuck-up one, you know--and I declare she was so downright
+impertinent that I got straight up and walked out without buying a
+thing. Then I was so angry that I went down to Paula's and paid
+seventy-five dollars for this hat I've got on. It was a dreadful price,
+of course, but you'll do anything when you're in a rage."
+
+"Do you know the name of this one? I'd like to remember it."
+
+"Yes, it's Carr. I asked for her card. C-a-r-r. I think she's a widow."
+
+From her retreat behind one of the velvet curtains Madame overheard this
+conversation, and a few minutes later she stopped Gabriella on her way
+out, and said amiably that it would not be necessary for her to leave
+the showroom to-morrow.
+
+"I believe you can do better there than in the workroom," she added,
+"and, after all, that is really very important--to tell people what they
+want. It is astounding how few of them have the slightest idea what
+they are looking for."
+
+"But I want to get that hat right. I left it unfinished, and I don't
+like to give up while it is wrong," replied Gabriella, not wholly
+pleased by the command.
+
+But Madame, of a flightier substance notwithstanding her business
+talents, waved aside the remark as insignificant and without bearing
+upon her immediate purpose.
+
+"I am going to try you with the gowns," she said resolutely; "I want to
+see if you catch on there as quickly as you did with the hats--I mean
+with the sale, of course, for your work, I'm sorry to say, has been
+rather poor so far. But I'll try you with the next customer who comes to
+place a large order. They are always so eager for new suggestions, and
+you have suggestions of a sort to make, I am sure. I can't quite tell,"
+she concluded uncertainly, "whether or not your ideas have any practical
+value, but they sound well as you describe them, and to talk
+attractively helps; there is no doubt of that."
+
+It was closing time, and Miss Fisher, one of the skirt fitters, came up,
+in her black alpaca apron with a pair of scissors suspended by red tape
+from her waist, to ask Madame a question. As Mrs. Bydington had not kept
+her appointment, was it not impossible to send her gown home as they had
+promised?
+
+"Oh, it makes no difference," replied Madame blandly, for she was in a
+good humour. "She'll come back when she is ready. The next time she is
+here, by the way, I want her to see Mrs. Fowler--I mean Mrs. Carr. She
+has worn out every one else in the place, and yet she is never
+satisfied; but I'd like her to take that pink velvet from Gautier,
+because nobody else is likely to give the price." The day was over and
+Madame's blandness was convincing evidence of her satisfaction.
+
+As Gabriella passed through the last showroom, where the disorder of the
+sale was still visible, she saw Miss Murphy, the handsomest and the
+haughtiest of the young women, wearily returning the few rejected hats
+to the ivory-tinted cases.
+
+"You are glad it is over, I know," she remarked sympathetically, less
+from any active interest in Miss Murphy's state of feeling than from an
+impulsive desire to establish human relations with her fellow
+saleswoman. If Miss Murphy would have it so, she preferred to be
+friendly.
+
+"I am so tired I can hardly stand on my feet," replied Miss Murphy,
+piteously. Her pretty rose-leaf skin had faded to a dull pallor; there
+were heavy shadows under her eyes; her helmet of wheaten-red hair had
+slipped down over her forehead, and even her firmly corseted figure
+appeared to have grown limp and yielding. Without her offensive elegance
+she was merely a pathetic and rather silly young thing.
+
+"I'll help you," said Gabriella, taking up several hats from a chair.
+"The others have gone, haven't they?"
+
+"They got out before I'd finished waiting on that middle-aged frump who
+doesn't know what she wants any more than the policeman out there at the
+corner does. She's made me show her all we've got left, and after she'd
+tried them all on, she said they're too high, and she's going to think
+over them before she decides. She's still waiting for something, and my
+head's splitting so I can hardly see what I'm doing." With a final
+surrender of her arrogance, she grew suddenly confidential and
+childish. "I'm sick enough to die," she finished despairingly, "and I've
+got a friend coming to take me to the theatre at eight o'clock."
+
+"Well, run away. I'll attend to this. But I'd try to rest before I went
+out if I were you."
+
+"You're a perfect peach," responded Miss Murphy gratefully. "I said all
+along I didn't believe you were stuck up and snobbish."
+
+Then she ran out, and Gabriella, after surveying the customer for a
+minute, selected the most unpromising hat in the case, and presented it
+with a winning smile for the woman's inspection.
+
+"Perhaps something like this is what you are looking for?" she remarked
+politely, but firmly.
+
+The customer, an acidulous, sharp-featured, showily dressed person--the
+sort, Gabriella decided, who would enjoy haggling over a
+bargain--regarded the offered hat with a supercilious and guarded
+manner, the true manner of the haggler.
+
+"No, that is not bad," she observed dryly, "but I don't care to give
+more than ten dollars."
+
+"It was marked down from thirty," replied Gabriella, and her manner was
+as supercilious and as guarded as the other's. There were women, she had
+found, who were impressed only by insolence, and, when the need arose,
+she could be quite as insolent as Miss Murphy. Unlike Miss Murphy,
+however, she was able to distinguish between those you must encourage
+and those you must crush; and this ability to draw reasonable
+distinctions was, perhaps, her most valuable quality as a woman of
+business.
+
+"I don't care to pay more than ten dollars," reiterated the customer in
+a scolding voice. Rising from her chair, she fastened her furs, which
+were cheap and showy, with a defiant and jerky movement, and flounced
+out of the shop.
+
+That disposed of, Gabriella put on her coat, which she had taken off
+again for the occasion, and went out into the street, where the night
+had already fallen. After her long hours in the overheated air of the
+showrooms, she felt refreshed and invigorated by the cold wind, which
+stung her face as it blew singing over the crossings. Straight ahead
+through the grayish-violet mist the lights were blooming like flowers,
+and above them a few stars shone faintly over the obscure frowning
+outlines of the buildings. Fifth Avenue was thronged, and to her anxious
+mind there seemed to be hollowness and insincerity in the laughter of
+the crowd.
+
+At the house in East Fifty-seventh Street, from which she would be
+moving the next day, she found Judge Crowborough awaiting her in the
+dismantled drawing-room, where packing-cases of furniture and pictures
+lay scattered about in confusion. In the dreadful days after Archibald
+Fowler's death, the judge had been very kind, and she had turned to him
+instinctively as the one man in New York who was both able and willing
+to be of use to her. Though he had never attracted her, she had been
+obliged to admit that he possessed a power superior to superficial
+attractions.
+
+"I dropped in to ask what I might do for you now?" he remarked with the
+dignity of one who possesses an income of half a million dollars a year.
+"It's a pity you have to leave this house. I remember when Archibald
+bought it--somewhere back in the 'seventies--but I suppose there's no
+help for it, is there?"
+
+"No, there's no help." She sat down on a packing-case, and he stood
+gazing benevolently down on her with his big, soft hands clasped on the
+head of his walking-stick and his overcoat on his arm. "I've rented
+three rooms in one of the apartments of the old Carolina over on the
+West Side near Columbus Avenue. The rest of the apartment is rented to
+art students, I believe, and we must all use the same kitchen and the
+same bath-tub," she added with a laugh. "Of course it isn't luxury, but
+we shan't mind very much as soon as we get used to it. I couldn't be
+much poorer than I was before my marriage."
+
+"But the children? You've got to have the children looked after."
+
+"I've been so fortunate about that," her voice was quite cheerful again.
+"There's a seamstress from my old home--Miss Polly Hatch--who has known
+me all my life, and she is coming to sleep in a little bed in my room
+until we can afford to rent an extra bedroom. As long as she has to work
+at home anyhow, she can very easily look after the children while I am
+away. They are good children, and as soon as they are big enough I'll
+have to send them to school--to the public school, I'm afraid." This,
+because of Fanny's violent opposition, was a delicate point with her.
+She felt that she should like to start the children at a private school,
+but it was clearly impossible.
+
+"The boy won't be big enough for a year or two, will he?" He was
+interested, she saw, and this unaffected interest in her small affairs
+moved her almost to tears.
+
+"I wanted him to go to kindergarten, but, of course, I cannot afford it.
+He is only four and a half, and I'm teaching him myself in the
+evenings. Already he can read very well in the first reader," she
+finished proudly.
+
+For a minute the judge stared moodily down on her. His sagging cheeks
+took a pale purplish flush, and he bit his lower lip with his large
+yellow teeth, which reminded Gabriella of the tusks of a beast of prey.
+Then he laid his overcoat and his stick carefully down on a
+packing-case, and held out his hand.
+
+"I'm going now, and there's one thing I want to ask you--have you any
+money?"
+
+It was out at last, and she looked up composedly, smiling a little
+roguishly at his embarrassment.
+
+"I have six hundred dollars in bank for a rainy day, and I am making
+exactly fifteen dollars a week."
+
+"But you can't live on it. Nobody could live on it even without two
+children to bring up."
+
+She shook her head. "Oh, Judge Crowborough, how little you rich men
+really know! I've got to live on it until I can do better, and I hope
+that will be very soon. If I am worth anything now, in three months I
+ought to be worth certainly as much as twenty-five dollars a week. In a
+little while--as soon as I've caught on to the business--I'm going to
+ask for a larger salary, and I think I shall get it. Twenty-five dollars
+a week won't go very far, but you don't know how little some people can
+live on even in New York."
+
+"As soon as the six hundred dollars go you'll be headed straight for
+starvation," he protested, sincerely worried.
+
+"Perhaps, but I doubt it."
+
+"How much do you have to pay for your rooms?"
+
+"Twenty-five dollars a month. It isn't much of a place, you see, as far
+as appearances go. Fortunately, I have a little furniture of my own
+which Mrs. Fowler had given me."
+
+His embarrassment had passed away, and he was smiling now at the
+recollection of it.
+
+"Well, you're a brick, little girl," he said, "and I like your spirit,
+but, after all, why can't you put your pride in your pocket, and let me
+lend you a few thousands? You needn't borrow much--not enough to keep a
+carriage--but you might at least take a little just to show you aren't
+proud--just to show you'll be friends. It seems a downright shame that I
+should have money to throw away, and you should be starting out to pinch
+and scrape on fifteen dollars a week. Fifteen dollars a week! Good Lord,
+what are we coming to?"
+
+She was not proud, and she wanted to be friends, but she shook her head
+obstinately, though she was still smiling. "Not now--not while I can
+help it--but if I ever get in trouble--in real trouble--I'll remember
+your offer. If the children fall ill or I lose my place, I'll come to
+you in a minute."
+
+"Honour bright? It's a promise?"
+
+"It's a promise."
+
+"And you'll let me keep an eye on you?"
+
+She laughed with the natural gaiety which he found so delightful. "You
+may keep two eyes on me if you will!"
+
+He had already reached the door when, turning suddenly, he said with
+heavy gravity: "You don't mind my asking what you're going to do about
+George, do you?
+
+"No, I don't mind. As soon as I can afford it, I shall get my freedom,
+but everything costs, you know, even justice."
+
+"I could help you there, couldn't I?"
+
+From the gratitude in her eyes he read her horror of the marriage which
+still bound her. "You could--and, oh, if you would, I'd never, never
+forget it," she answered.
+
+Then they parted, and he went out into the cold, with a strange warmth
+like the fire of youth at his heart, while she ran eagerly up the
+uncarpeted stairs to the nursery.
+
+The trunks were packed, the boxes were nailed down, and the two children
+were playing shipwreck while they ate a supper of bread and milk at a
+table made from the bare top of a packing-case. Several days before the
+nurse had left without warning, and Miss Polly sat now, in hat and
+mantle, on one of the little beds which would be taken down the next day
+and sent over to the apartment on the West Side.
+
+"I've been to the Carolina and unpacked the things that had come," she
+said at Gabriella's entrance. "Those rooms ain't so bad as New York
+rooms go; but it does seem funny, don't it, to cook in the same kitchen
+with a lot of strangers you never laid eyes on befo'? I br'iled some
+chops for the children right alongside of an old maid who had come all
+the way up from New Orleans to study music--imagine, at her age! Why,
+she couldn't be a day under fifty! And on the other side there was the
+mother of a girl who's at the art school, or whatever you call it, where
+they teach you paintin'. They are from somewhere up yonder in New
+England and their home folks had sent 'em a pumpkin pie. She gave me a
+slice of it, but I never did think much of pumpkin. It can't hold a
+candle to sweet potato pudding, and I wouldn't let the children touch
+it for fear it might set too heavy in the night. I ain't got much use
+for Yankee food, nohow."
+
+"I hope the place is perfectly sanitary," was Gabriella's anxious
+rejoinder. "The front room gets some sunshine in the afternoon, doesn't
+it?"
+
+"It's a horrid street. I don't want to live there," wailed Fanny, who
+had rebelled from the beginning against her fallen fortunes. "I got my
+white shoes dirty, and there were banana peels all about. A man has a
+fruit-stand in the bottom of our house. Don't let's go there to live,
+mother."
+
+"You'll have to wear black shoes now, darling, and you mustn't mind the
+fruit-stand. It will be a good place to buy oranges."
+
+"I like it," said Archibald stoutly. "I like to slide on banana peels,
+and I like the man. He has black eyes and a red handkerchief in his
+pocket. Will you buy me a red handkerchief, mamma? He has a boy, too. I
+saw him. He can skate on roller skates, and the boy has a dog and the
+dog has a black ear. May I have roller skates for my birthday, and a
+dog--a small one--and may I ask the boy up to play with me?"
+
+"But the boy is ugly and so is the dog. I hate ugly people," complained
+Fanny.
+
+"I like ugly people," retorted Archibald, glowering, not from anger, but
+from earnestness. "Ugly people are nicer than pretty ones, aren't they,
+mamma? Pang is nicer than Fanny."
+
+He was always like that even as a baby, always on the side of the
+unfortunate, always fighting valiantly for the under dog. With his large
+head, his grotesque spectacles, and his pouting lips, he bore a curious
+resemblance to a brownie, yet when one observed him closely, one saw
+that there was a remarkable blending of strength and sweetness in his
+expression.
+
+The next day Miss Polly finished the moving, and at six o'clock
+Gabriella went home in the Harlem elevated train to the grim,
+weather-beaten apartment house on the upper West Side. The pavements, as
+Fanny had scornfully observed, were not particularly clean; the air, in
+spite of the sharp wind which blew from the river, had a curiously
+stagnant quality; and the rumble of the elevated road, at the opposite
+side of the house, reached her in a vibrating undercurrent which was
+punctuated now and then by the staccato cries of the street. The house,
+which had been built in a benighted and spacious period, stood now as an
+enduring refuge for the poor in purse but proud in spirit. A few studios
+on the roof were still occupied by artists, while the hospitable
+basement sheltered a vegetable market, a corner drug-store, a
+fruit-stand, and an Italian bootblack. Within the bleak walls, from
+which the stucco had peeled in splotches, the life of the city had ebbed
+and flowed for almost half a century, like some deep wreck-strewn
+current which bore the seeds of the future as well as the driftwood of
+the past on its bosom. One might never have set foot outside those
+gloomy doors and yet have seen the whole of life pass as in a vivid
+dream through the dim halls, lighted by flickering gas and carpeted in
+worn strips of brown carpet. And once inside the apartments one might
+have found, sometimes, cheerfulness, beauty of line and colour, and a
+certain spaciousness which the modern apartment house, with its rooms
+like closets, its startling electricity, and its more hygienic
+conditions of living, could not provide. It was because she could find
+space there that Gabriella, guided by Miss Polly, had rented the rooms.
+
+She passed the drug-store and the fruit-stand, entered the narrow hail,
+where a single gas-jet flickered dimly beside the door of the elevator,
+and after touching the bell, stood patiently waiting. After a time she
+rang again, and presently, with deliberate ease and geniality, the negro
+who worked the elevator descended slowly, with a newspaper in his hand,
+and opened the door for her.
+
+"Good evening, Robert," she said pleasantly, for he also was from
+Virginia, and the discovery of the bond between them had given Gabriella
+a feeling of confidence. Like Miss Folly, she had never become entirely
+accustomed to white servants.
+
+The ropes moved again, the elevator ascended perilously to the fifth
+floor, and Gabriella walked quickly along the hall, and slipped her
+latchkey into the keyhole of the last apartment. As the door opened, a
+woman in worn black came out and spoke to her in passing. She was the
+old maid of Miss Folly's narrative, and her face, ardent, haggard, with
+the famished look which comes from a starved soul, gazed back at
+Gabriella with a touching expression of admiration and envy. There were
+spots of vivid colour in her cheeks, and this brightness, combined with
+her gray hair, gave her a theatrical and artificial appearance.
+
+"I have been playing to your little boy, Mrs. Carr," she said with the
+manner which Miss Polly had described as "flighty." "He came into my
+room when he heard the piano, and it was a real pleasure to play for
+him."
+
+"You are very good," returned Gabriella, wondering vaguely who she was,
+for she was obviously the kind of woman people wondered about. "I hope
+Archibald didn't make himself troublesome."
+
+"Oh, no, I enjoyed him. My name is Danton. I am Miss Danton," she added
+effusively, "and I'm so glad you have come into this apartment. My room
+is the one next to yours."
+
+Then she fluttered off, with her look of spiritual hunger, and Gabriella
+closed the door and went on to her rooms, which were at the opposite end
+of the hail from the kitchen. On the way she passed the pretty art
+student, who was coming from the bathroom, with a freshly powdered face
+and a pitcher of water in her hand, and again she was obliged to stop to
+hear news of the children.
+
+"I'm so glad to have your little girl here. I want to paint her. I'm
+just crazy about her face," said the girl, whose name she learned
+afterwards was Rosy Plover. Though she was undeniably pretty, and had
+just powdered her face with scented powder, she had a slovenly, unkempt
+appearance which Gabriella, from that moment, associated with art
+students. "If she'd only dress herself properly, she'd be a beauty," she
+thought, with the aversion of one who is an artist in clothes. She
+herself, after her long, hard day, was as neat and trim as she had been
+in the morning. Her severe black suit was worn with grace, and hung
+perfectly; her crape collar was immaculately fresh; her mourning veil
+fell in charming folds over her hat brim. "It's a pity some one can't
+tell her," she mused, as she smiled and hurried on to the doubtful
+seclusion of her own end of the apartment.
+
+With the opening of the door, the children fell rapturously into her
+arms, and while she took off her hat and coat, Miss Polly laid the
+table for supper in front of the ruddy glow of the fire. On the fender a
+plate of buttered toast was keeping warm, a delicious aroma of coffee
+scented the air, and a handful of red carnations made a cheerful bit of
+colour in the centre of the white tablecloth. It was a pleasant picture
+for a tired woman to gaze on, and the ruddy glow of the fire was
+reflected in Gabriella's heart while she enfolded her children. After a
+day in Madame's hothouse atmosphere, it was delightful to return to this
+little centre of peace and love, and to feel that its very existence
+depended upon the work of her brain and hands. The children, she
+realized, had never loved her so dearly. In better days, when she was
+rarely separated from them for more than a few hours at a time, they had
+seemed rather to take her care and her presence for granted; but now,
+after an absence of nine hours, she had become a delight and an
+enchantment, something to be looked forward to and longingly talked
+about through the whole afternoon.
+
+"Mother, you've been away forever," said Fanny, folding her veil for her
+and putting away her furs.
+
+"Are you going every day just like this for ever and ever?
+
+"Every day, darling, but I'm here every night. Shall I run back to the
+kitchen and broil the chops, Miss Polly?"
+
+But the chops were already broiled, for Miss Polly had finished her
+sewing early, and she had beaten up two tiny cups of custard for the
+children.
+
+"It's nicer than nursery suppers, isn't it, Fanny?" asked Archibald a
+little later while he ate his bread and milk from a blue bowl. "Mother,
+I like being poor. Let's stay poor always."
+
+A phrase of Mrs. Fowler's, "happiness costs so little," floated through
+Gabriella's mind as she poured Miss Folly's coffee out of the tin coffee
+pot. She was so tired that her body ached; her feet were smarting and
+throbbing from the long standing; and her eyes stung from the cold wind
+and the glare of the elevated train; but she knew that in spite of these
+discomforts she was not unhappy--that she was, indeed, far happier than
+she had been for the past six years in the hushed suspense of her
+father-in-law's house. When she had carried the supper things back to
+the sink in the kitchen, had taught the children their lessons, heard
+their prayers, and put them to bed, she repeated the words to herself
+while she sat sewing beside the lamp in front of the comforting glow of
+the fire, "After all, happiness costs so little."
+
+The next morning, and on every morning throughout the winter, she was up
+by six o'clock, and had taken in the baker's rolls and the bottle of
+milk from the outer door before Miss Polly or the children were
+stirring. Then, having dressed quickly, she ran back to the kitchen and
+made the coffee and boiled the eggs while the other lodgers were still
+sleeping. Sometimes the mother of one of the art students would join her
+over the gas range, but usually her neighbours slept late and then
+darted through the hall in kimonos, with tumbled hair, to a hurried
+breakfast at the kitchen table.
+
+Her life was so busy that there was little time for anxiety, and less
+for futile and painful dwelling upon the past. To get through the day as
+best she could, to start the children well and in a good humour, to make
+herself useful, if not indispensable, to Madame, to return with a mind
+clear and fresh enough to give Fanny and Archibald intelligent lessons,
+to sew on their clothes or her own until midnight, and then to drop into
+bed, with aching limbs and a peaceful brain, too tired even to
+dream--these things made the life that she looked forward to, week after
+week, month after month, year after year. It was a hard life, as Miss
+Polly often remarked, but hard or soft, her strength was equal to it,
+her health was good, her interest in her work and in her children never
+flagged for a minute. Only on soft spring days, coming home in the dusk,
+she would sometimes pass carts filled with hyacinths, and in a wave the
+memory of Arthur and of her first love would rush over her. Then she
+would see Arthur's face, gentle, protective, tender, as it had looked on
+that last evening, and for an instant her lost girlhood and her
+girlhood's dream would envelop her like the fragrance of flowers. At
+such moments she thought of this love as tenderly as a mother might have
+thought of the exquisite dead face of an infant who had lived only an
+hour. Though it was over, though it bore no part, with its elusive
+loveliness, in her practical plans for the future, this dream became
+gradually, as the years passed, the most radiant and vital thing in her
+life. Though it was so vague as to be without warmth, it was as vivid
+and as real as light. The knowledge that in the past she had known
+perfect love, even though in her blindness she had thrust it aside, was
+a balm which healed her wounds and gave her courage to go on, friendless
+and alone, into the loveless stretch of the future. There was hardly a
+minute of her day for the next three years which was not sweetened by
+this hyacinth-scented dream of the past, there was hardly an hour of her
+drudgery which was not ennobled and irradiated by the splendour of this
+love that she had lost.
+
+Of George--even of George as the father of her children--she rarely
+thought. He had dropped out of her life like any other mistake, like any
+other illusion, and she was too sanguine by nature, too buoyant, too
+full of happiness and of energy, to waste herself on either mistakes or
+illusions. During the months when she had waited for her freedom she had
+resolutely put the thought of him out of her mind, and when at last her
+divorce was granted, she dismissed the fact as completely as if it had
+not changed the entire course of her life. The past was over, and only
+that part of it should live which contributed sweetness and beauty to
+the present--only that part of it which she could use in the better and
+stronger structure of the future. Whatever living meant in the end, she
+told herself each morning as she started out to her work, it must mean,
+not resignation, not inertia, but endeavour, enterprise, and courage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE DREAM AND THE YEARS
+
+
+In one of the small fitting-rooms, divided by red velvet curtains on
+gilt rods from the long showrooms of Madame Dinard, a nervous group,
+comprising the head skirt fitter, the head waist fitter, Miss Bellman,
+the head saleswoman, and Madame herself, stood disconsolately around the
+indignant figure of Mrs. Weederman Pletheridge, who, attired in one of
+Madame's costliest French models, was gesticulating excitedly in the
+centre of four standing mirrors. For three years Mrs. Pletheridge had
+lived in Paris, and her return to New York, and to the dressmaking
+establishments of Fifth Avenue, was an event which had shaken Dinard's,
+if not the fashionable street in which it stood, to its foundations.
+
+"I don't know what is the matter with it," she said fussily, "but it
+doesn't suit me, and yet it looked so well in the hand. I wonder if I
+could wear it if you were to take out some of this fulness, and change
+the set of the sleeves? The fashions this spring are perfectly
+hopeless."
+
+"Why, it suits you to perfection, Madame. Just a stitch or two like
+this--and this--and it will look as if it were designed for you by
+Worth. Is it not so, Miss Bellman? Don't you think it is wonderful on
+Madame?"
+
+Miss Bellman, having learned her part, agreed effusively, and then each
+of the fitters, as she was appealed to in turn, contributed an
+enraptured assent to the discussion. The price of the gown was a
+thousand dollars, and Mrs. Pletheridge's favourable decision was worth
+exactly that much in terms of money to Dinard's. As the season had been
+scarcely a brisk one, Madame was particularly anxious to have her more
+extreme models taken off her hands. "It was unpacked only yesterday,"
+she lied suavely, "and no one else has had so much as a glimpse of it."
+
+"I can't imagine what is the matter with it," Mrs. Pletheridge sighed
+dejectedly, while she regarded her ample form with a resentful and
+critical gaze. As long as one had nothing else to worry about, Madame
+reflected without sympathy, one might find cause for positive distress
+in the fact that a gown appeared to better advantage in the hand than on
+one's person. The truth--and the truth, as sometimes happens, was the
+last thing Mrs. Pletheridge cared to admit--was that she had grown too
+stout to wear pronounced fashions.
+
+"Nothing could be more charming," insisted Madame with increased
+effusion, "but if you are in doubt, let us ask the opinion of Mrs. Carr.
+She has the true eye of the artist--a wonderful eye. I don't know
+whether you remember Mrs. Archibald Fowler or not?" she added as the
+skirt fitter sped in search of Gabriella; "this is her daughter-in-law.
+Her husband ran away with another woman about three years ago. It made a
+great sensation at the time, and his wife got a divorce from him
+afterwards. Ever since then she has been in my establishment."
+
+No, Mrs. Pletheridge did not remember Mrs. Fowler; but, having had a
+notorious amount of trouble with her own husbands, she was amiably
+disposed toward the unfortunate daughter-in-law of the lady she couldn't
+remember. Thirty years ago, as a pretty, vulgar, kind-hearted girl, she
+had captured with a glance the eldest son of the newly rich Pletheridge,
+who had, perhaps, inherited his grandfather's genial admiration for
+chambermaids; but, to-day, after a generation of self-indulgence, her
+prettiness had coarsened, her vulgarity had hardened, and her kind heart
+had withered, through lack of cultivation, to the size of a cherry. And,
+from having had everything she wanted for so long, she had at last
+reached that melancholy state of mind when she could think of nothing
+more to want.
+
+A brisk step crossed the room outside, the curtains were parted with a
+commanding movement, and Gabriella joined the anxious group surrounded
+by the four mirrors.
+
+"Did you send for me, Madame?" she asked, and waited, grave, attentive,
+and perfectly composed, with her hand, the small, strong hand of the
+Carrs, on the curtain. Her hair was brushed severely back from her
+candid forehead, and though her figure had grown somewhat heavier and
+less girlish in line, she still wore her plain black dress and white
+collar with an incomparable distinction. Through all the hardship and
+suffering of the last three years she had kept her look of bright
+intelligence, of radiant energy. In dress and manner she was the
+successful woman of business, but she was the woman of business with
+something added. Though she spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, her voice
+had a vibrating quality; though she wore only the plainest clothes, her
+grace, her good-breeding, her indefinable charm, softened the severity.
+
+"Mrs. Pletheridge is uncertain about this gown," explained Madame, "but
+I tell her that it suits her to perfection, as well as if it had been
+designed for her by Worth. Do you not agree with me, Mrs. Carr? You
+have, as I said to her, the true eye of the artist."
+
+Without changing her position or moving a step into the room, Gabriella
+attentively regarded the gown and the wearer. From the mirror Mrs.
+Pletheridge stared back at her ill-humouredly, with a spiteful gleam in
+her small black eyes between the carefully darkened lids.
+
+"I can't imagine what is the matter with it," she reiterated, as if she
+were repeating a sad refrain, and her manner was as insolent as Miss
+Murphy's had been to the casual customer.
+
+For an instant Gabriella returned her look with the steady gaze of one
+who, having achieved the full courage of living, has attained also a
+calm insensibility to the shafts of arrogance. Three years ago she would
+have flinched before Mrs. Pletheridge's disdain, but in those three
+years she had passed beyond the variegated tissue of appearances to the
+bare structure of life--she had worked and wept and starved and
+suffered--and to-day her soul was invulnerable against even more
+destructive weapons than the contempt of a plutocrat. Perhaps, too,
+though she assured herself that she was without snobbishness, there was
+a secret satisfaction in the knowledge that one of her ancestors had
+been a general under Washington while the early Pletheridges were
+planting potatoes in a peasant's patch in Ireland. Her dignity was more
+assured than Madame's; for she was perfectly aware of a fact to which
+Madame was blind, and this was, that, in spite of her position in the
+social columns of the newspapers and her multitudinous possessions, Mrs.
+Pletheridge was not, and could never be, a lady. While Gabriella stood
+there these thoughts flashed recklessly through her mind; yet she
+answered Madame's question as frankly and honestly as if the woman they
+were staring at with such intentness had not been the tragic vulgarian
+she was.
+
+"I think the gown doesn't suit her at all," she said quietly to Madame,
+who made a horrified face at her over the sumptuous shoulder of Mrs.
+Pletheridge. "There is too much of it, too much billowy lace
+everywhere." She did not add that the coral and silver brocade gave Mrs.
+Pletheridge a curious resemblance to an overblown prize hollyhock.
+
+Madame's horrified face changed, as if under a spell, to one of abject
+despair; and a menacing frown convulsed the puffy features of Mrs.
+Pletheridge, while she burst out of her gorgeous sheath with a petulant
+haste which expressed her inward perturbation better than words could
+have done. For a minute one could have heard a flower drop in the
+fitting-room; then the offended customer spoke, and her words, when she
+found them, were not lacking in either force or effectiveness. "No,
+there's no use trying on anything else, I have an appointment at
+Cambon's." Cambon was Dinard's hated and wholly incompetent rival; and
+until this illuminating instant Madame had never suspected that her
+particular Mrs. Pletheridge had ever entered the high white doors of
+Cambon's establishment.
+
+"But, surely, we have something else. There is a lovely Doucet model--in
+white and silver--"
+
+But no, Mrs. Pletheridge would have none of the lovely model. "Give me
+my skirt at once," she commanded haughtily, bending her opulent bosom
+and holding the lacy frills of her petticoat together while Agnes, the
+youngest and the gentlest of the assistants, knelt at her feet with her
+dress skirt held invitingly open on the floor. As she inserted the toe
+of her exquisitely shod foot into the opening, she remarked maliciously:
+"It is impossible to find decent clothes in New York--one might as well
+give up trying. Paris dressmakers send you only their failures." And,
+having crushed Madame to silence, she finished her dressing, fastened
+her black lace veil with a flying swallow in diamonds, flung her feather
+boa over her shoulders, and taking up her gold chain bag, studded with
+rubies, marched out of the establishment with all the pomp and
+impressiveness of a military parade.
+
+"I've lost her. She will never come back," moaned Madame, and burst into
+tears.
+
+"But she couldn't possibly have worn that gown. She would have found it
+out as soon as she got home," replied Gabriella reassuringly, though her
+heart was almost as heavy as Madame's.
+
+It was all her fault, of course, as Madame, recovering her voice as she
+lost her temper, began immediately to tell her. It was all her fault,
+and yet how could she have stood there and lied to the woman in cold
+blood because Madame expected it of her as a part of her work? That she
+had infuriated Madame and imperilled her position she realized
+perfectly; but, realizing this, she still felt that she could not have
+told Mrs. Pletheridge that the gown was becoming to her. "There are
+times when one has to be honest no matter what happens," she thought
+rebelliously, while she went back to the workroom. Had Madame discharged
+her on the spot she would not have been surprised, and it was with a
+sensation of relief that she presently saw the forewoman measuring a
+dose of aromatic spirits of ammonia, and heard that the crisis was
+passing. A little later, when she went into the showroom with a hat for
+Miss Bellman, she encountered Madame bonneted, cloaked, panting, with
+moist eyes and raddled cheeks, preparing to take a slow airing in a
+hansom. As she was assisted into the vehicle by Miss Murphy and the
+driver, Madame pressed her beringed hand to her forehead with a
+despairing gesture; then the driver cracked his whip, the horse started,
+and the hansom disappeared up Fifth Avenue.
+
+"What under the sun did you do to her?" inquired Miss Murphy, holding
+her wheaten-red pompadour down in the wind. "I declare I thought at
+first it was murder!"
+
+"I told her the truth, when she asked me, that was all."
+
+"Well, I never! Now what, in the name of goodness, possessed you?"
+
+"I had to. I don't see how I could have kept from it."
+
+"Good gracious! There're always ways, but what sort of truth was it? You
+see, it's been so long since I've met one," she explained airily, "that
+I don't even know what they're like."
+
+"It was about Mrs. Pletheridge's gown--the one she wanted her to buy,
+you know. I told her it didn't suit her. And it didn't--you know it
+didn't," she concluded emphatically.
+
+"Of course it didn't, but I don't see why you had to go and tell her."
+
+"She asked me. They both asked me, and if I'd lied she wouldn't have
+believed me. You can't fool people so outrageously, and I wouldn't if I
+could. It isn't honest, and it isn't good business."
+
+"Anything is good business that gets by," remarked Miss Murphy, who had
+a philosophy. "I must go indoors or this wind will blow all my puffs
+away."
+
+She departed breezily; and Gabriella, returning to the workroom, spent
+her afternoon patiently stitching flat garlands of flowers on the brim
+of a hat. When she left the house at six o'clock the April weather was
+so lovely that she decided to walk all the way home; and while she moved
+rapidly with the crowd in Fifth Avenue, she considered anxiously the
+possible disastrous results of Madame's anger. Between her and absolute
+want there stood only her salary, and she had deliberately--she realized
+now how deliberate her reply had been--undermined that thin and insecure
+protection. Though she was now earning as much as thirty dollars a week,
+an illness of a year ago, when she had been obliged to stop work for
+several months, had exhausted the remains of the modest nest egg with
+which she had started; and to lose her place, she knew, would mean
+either starvation or beggary. There was no one, with the exception of
+Cousin Jimmy, of whom she could beg, and to beg of him would be a tacit
+confession that she had failed as a breadwinner. In Mrs. Carr's last
+letter Charley had appeared in a new light as a reformed character, a
+devoted attendant at church, and an enthusiastic convert to the
+prohibition party; and Gabriella had gathered from her mother's pious
+rambling that, like other sinners who have outlived temptation, he was
+devoting his middle years to a violent crusade against the moderate
+indulgences of the abstemious. But Charley, she felt, was out of the
+question. She would die before she would stoop to ask help of a man she
+had despised as heartily as she had once despised Charley. She must sink
+or swim by her own strength, not by another's.
+
+"I wonder why I did it?" she asked herself again, and again she could
+not answer the question. She felt that she might have lied had it been
+merely a lie and not a test of courage before her; but she could not lie
+simply because she was afraid of speaking the truth. In every character
+there is one supreme vice or virtue which strikes the deepest root and
+blossoms most luxuriantly, and in the character of Gabriella this virtue
+was courage. At the crucial moments of life some primordial instinct
+prompted her to fight, not to yield. "I ought to have been evasive, I
+suppose," she thought regretfully. "But how could I have been?" There
+were instants, she had discovered, when wisdom surrendered to the more
+militant virtues.
+
+When she reached home she found Fanny, who was fretfully recovering from
+influenza, lying on the sofa in the living-room, with Miss Polly busily
+stitching at her side, while Archibald, excited by a strenuous afternoon
+with the son of the Italian fruit dealer, was kneeling before the
+window, making mysterious signs to a group of yellow-haired German
+children in the apartment house on the opposite side of the street.
+Both children were eagerly expecting their mother, and as soon as she
+entered they grew animated and cheerful.
+
+She kissed and cuddled them, and listened sympathetically to their
+excited stories of the day, and of Dr. French, who had been to see
+Fanny, and who had waited as long as he could.
+
+"He's going to take us for a drive to-morrow, mother, and we're to sit
+in the carriage while he goes in to pay his calls, and then he's to show
+us the river and we're to stop somewhere to have tea."
+
+"Did he stay long?" asked Gabriella of Miss Folly.
+
+"For more than an hour," replied Miss Folly, and commented shrewdly
+after a minute: "It looks to me as if there was more in that young man
+than you can see on the surface, Gabriella."
+
+A blush tinged Gabriella's cheek, but she shook her head almost
+indignantly. "Oh, there's nothing of that kind," she answered
+emphatically, and rose to take off her hat and prepare supper.
+
+Since her illness of a year ago, when she had summoned the strange young
+doctor who had once been the assistant of the Fowlers' family physician,
+she had grown to feel a certain dependence upon Dr. French as the only
+useful friend who was left to her. He was a thin, gray-eyed, fair-haired
+young man, who practised largely among the poor, from choice rather than
+from necessity, since Dr. Morton had given him an excellent start in
+life. His pale, ascetic face had attracted Gabriella from their first
+meeting; there was the flamelike enthusiasm of the visionary in his
+eyes; and he had, she thought, the most beautiful and sympathetic hands
+she had ever seen. Even Fanny, who was usually impervious to sensitive
+impressions, felt the charm of his touch when he stroked her forehead or
+placed his long, delicate fingers on her wrist. From that first visit he
+had been a source of comfort and strength to Gabriella; but of late she
+had felt moments of uneasiness when she was with him. Was it possible,
+she asked herself now, as she went back to the kitchen to stew the
+oysters Miss Polly had bought for supper, that the kindly doctor was
+misinterpreting the simple and unaffected nature of her friendship? For
+herself she felt that she had put the reality of love out of her life,
+and that if the emotion existed for her at all, it existed only as a
+dream and a regret. She enshrined the memory of Arthur in something of
+the sentimental worship which Mrs. Carr had consecrated to Gabriel after
+she had lost him. It was an exquisite consolation to her to feel that if
+things had been otherwise, she might have loved a man with the whole of
+her nature--with both body and spirit; there were even moments in the
+spring of the year, when, softened by the caressing air and the scent of
+hyacinths, she felt that she did so love a memory; but beyond this her
+feeling was as bodiless and ethereal as the vague image to which it was
+dedicated. And yet this gentle regret was all that she wanted of love.
+
+In the kitchen she found Miss Danton, the musical spinster, making her
+scant supper of tea and toast on the gas-range. Though the hectic flush
+still burned in Miss Danton's cheeks, the famished look in her eyes
+seemed to have devoured all the strength of her body, and she moved like
+one who has run to the point of exhaustion and is about to drop to the
+ground. Long ago Gabriella had heard her story, and she understood now
+that the yearning in her face was the yearning for life, which she had
+rejected in her youth, and which, in middle-age, had eluded her. As a
+young girl, aflame with temperament, she had sacrificed herself to a
+widowed father and a family of little brothers and sisters in a small
+town in the South. For thirty years she had fought down her dreams and
+her impulses; for thirty years she had cooked, washed, ironed, and
+sewed, until the children had all grown up and married, and her father,
+after a long illness, had died in her arms. On her fifty-second birthday
+her freedom had come--freedom not only from cares and responsibilities,
+but from love, from duty, from the constant daily thought that she was
+necessary to some one who depended on her. At fifty-three, with broken
+health and a few thousand dollars brought from the sale of the old home,
+she had come to New York to study music as she had dreamed of doing when
+she was young. And the tragedy of it was that she had a gift, she had
+temperament, she had genuine artistic feeling.
+
+"When I remember the way I used to cook for the children," she remarked
+while she measured a teaspoonful of green tea into a little Japanese
+tea-pot, "why, I'd think nothing of roasting a turkey when we had one at
+Christmas or Thanksgiving, and now, I declare, it seems too much trouble
+to do more than make a pot of tea. Sometimes I don't even take the
+trouble to toast my bread."
+
+"You ought to eat," replied Gabriella, briskly. "When one gets run down,
+one never looks at life fairly." True to her fundamental common sense,
+she had never underestimated the importance of food as a prop for
+philosophy.
+
+"I'd never eat if I could help it," rejoined Miss Danton, with the
+abhorrence of the aesthetic temperament for material details. "It's
+queer the thoughts I have sometimes," she added irrelevantly as she sat
+down before the kitchen table, and poured out a cup of tea. "I don't
+know what's come over me, but I'd give anything on earth--if it wasn't
+wicked I'd almost give my soul--to be your age and to be starting to
+live my life. I never had any life. It wasn't fair. I never had any,"
+she repeated bitterly, dropping a lump of sugar into her cup.
+
+"Well, I've had my troubles, too," observed Gabriella, busily stirring
+the oysters.
+
+"You've had them and you'll have others. It doesn't matter--nothing
+really matters as long as you're young. It's all a part of the game,
+trouble and everything else--everything except old age and death. I'm
+getting old--I'm getting old, and I began too late, and that's the worst
+that can happen to a woman. Do you know I never had a love affair in my
+life," she pursued bitterly after a moment. "I never had love, or
+pleasure, or anything but work and duty--and now it's too late. It's too
+late for it all," she finished, rising to take her toast from the oven.
+
+"Poor thing, she exaggerates so dreadfully," thought Gabriella. "I
+believe it comes from drinking too much green tea"; and she resolved
+that she would never touch green tea as long as she lived. Like most
+women whose love had ended not in unfulfilment, but in satiety and
+bitterness, she was inclined to deny the supreme importance of the
+passion in the scheme of life. As a deserted wife and the mother of two
+children, she felt that she could live for years without the desire,
+without even the thought of romantic love in her mind. "I wonder why I,
+who have known and lost love, should be so much freer from that
+obsession than poor Miss Danton, who has never been loved in her life?"
+she asked herself while she carried the supper tray down the long hall
+and into the living-room.
+
+Some hours later, when the children were asleep, and Gabriella sat
+darning Archibald's stockings beside the kerosene lamp, she described to
+Miss Polly the scene with Madame and Mrs. Pletheridge.
+
+"I don't know how it will end. She may discharge me to-morrow," she
+deliberated, as she cut off a length of black darning cotton, and bent
+over to thread her needle. "I wonder what I ought to do?"
+
+"Well, now, ain't that exactly like you, Gabriella," scolded Miss Polly;
+"but when you come to think of it," she conceded after a minute or two,
+"I reckon we're all made like that in the beginning. Why, I remember way
+back yonder in the 'seventies how I was always tryin' to persuade a
+woman with a skinny figure not to wear a cuirass basque and a woman with
+a stout figure not to put on a draped polonaise. I got to know better
+presently, and you will, too, before you've been at it much longer. They
+all think they can look like fashion plates--the skinniest and the
+stoutest alike--and there ain't a bit of use tryin' to undeceive 'em.
+The last thing a woman ever sees straight is her figure."
+
+"I can't help feeling," demurred Gabriella, forsaking the moral issue
+for the argument of mere expediency, "that honesty is good business."
+
+"Well, it ain't," retorted Miss Polly sharply. "It may be good religion
+and good behaviour, but there's one thing it certainly ain't, and that
+is good business. How many of these rich men we read about in the papers
+do you reckon spend their time settin' around and bein' honest? Mind you
+I ain't sayin' I'd lie or steal myself, Gabriella, but I'm poor, and
+what I'm sayin' is that when you feel that way about it, you're as
+likely to stay poor as not."
+
+But the next day, life, with one of those startling surprises which defy
+philosophy and make drama, confirmed the most illogical of Gabriella's
+assumptions. Madame, coming in late, with a blotched face and puffy
+eyelids, had dispatched her to the workroom, and she was sitting before
+one of the long tables, embroidering azure beads on a black collar, when
+Agnes darted through the door and jerked the needle out of her hand.
+
+"Madame is asking for you. Come as quick as you can!" she cried
+excitedly, and sped back again to the shelter of the artificial
+rose-bushes at the end of the hall.
+
+Rising hurriedly, and brushing the scraps of silk from her cloth skirt
+as she walked, Gabriella followed the sound of Madame's wheedling voice,
+and found herself, as she parted the curtains of a fitting-room, in the
+opulent presence of Mrs. Pletheridge.
+
+"Yes, as I told you, we trust implicitly to Mrs. Carr's eye. She has the
+true eye of the artist," Madame simpered fawningly as she entered. "Did
+you send for me?" asked Gabriella, business-like and alert on the
+threshold.
+
+"Good morning, Mrs. Carr! I told Madame Dinard that I wanted you to wait
+on me. I want some one who tells me the truth," explained Mrs.
+Pletheridge so graciously that Gabriella would hardly have recognized
+her. Something--sleep, pleasure, or pious meditation--had altered
+overnight not only her temper but even the fleshly vehicle of its
+uncertain manifestations. Her features appeared to have adjusted
+themselves to the size of her face, and she spoke quite affably, though
+still with her manner of addressing an inferior.
+
+"I want you to show me something that will really suit me," she said. "I
+think the grayish-green cloth from Blandin might be copied in silver,
+but I should like you to see it on me. I know you will tell me what you
+really think." Her voice faltered and deepened to a note of pathos.
+
+"Poor woman," thought Gabriella, "it must be hard for her to get people
+to tell her what they really think," and she added exultantly while she
+went for the gowns: "If I satisfy her now, I am saved with Madame!"
+
+When she returned, with the green cloth in one hand and a charming
+lavender crêpe tea-gown in the other, she approached Mrs. Pletheridge
+with the manner of intelligent sympathy, of serene and smiling
+competence, which had made her so valuable to Madame as a saleswoman.
+She had the air not only of seeking to please, but of knowing just how
+to go about the difficult matter of pleasing. With the eye of an artist
+in dress, she analyzed Mrs. Pletheridge's possibilities; and softening
+here and there her pronounced features, succeeded presently in producing
+a charming and harmonious whole. By the time a dozen gowns were tried on
+and their available points discussed and criticised in detail, Mrs.
+Pletheridge had given the largest order ever received by the house, and
+was throwing out enthusiastic hints of an even greater munificence in
+the future. She left at last in a thoroughly good humour not only with
+Dinard's, but with her own rejuvenated attractions; and Gabriella,
+exhausted but triumphant, watched Agnes gather up the French models from
+chairs and sofas and carry them back to the obscurity of the closets. In
+her heart there was both peace and rejoicing because her belief in life
+had been justified. In spite of Madame, in spite of Miss Polly, in spite
+of experience, the day had proved that it was, after all, "good
+business" to be honest. Though she was still in debt, though she was
+still compelled to scrimp and save over market bills, nevertheless she
+felt that her work had progressed beyond the experimental stages, and
+that her place at Dinard's was secured until some better opening
+appeared. For that morning at least she had made herself indispensable
+to Madame. For years, she knew, Madame had striven fawningly for the
+exclusive patronage of Mrs. Pletheridge, and she, Gabriella, had
+attained it, without loss of pride or self-respect, by a few words of
+honest and sensible criticism. She had applied her intelligence to the
+situation, and her intelligence had served Dinard's more successfully
+than Madame's duplicity had done.
+
+At home she found Dr. French, who had just brought the delighted
+children back from their drive. When she thanked him, she saw that there
+was a glow of pleasure in his rather delicate face, and that this glow
+lent an expression of ecstasy to his dark-gray eyes--the eyes of a
+mystic and a dreamer. "I wonder how he ever became a physician," she
+thought. "He is more like a priest--like a priest of the Middle Ages."
+But aloud she only said: "You have done them a world of good. Fanny has
+got some of her colour back already, and that means an appetite for
+supper."
+
+"We had tea," broke in Archibald, with enthusiasm, "but it was really
+milk, and we had cake, but it was really bread and butter." He looked so
+well and vigorous that Gabriella called the doctor's attention to the
+animation in his face. "If only he didn't have to wear glasses," she
+said. "I'm so afraid it will interfere with his love of sports. His
+ambition is to be captain of a football team and to write poetry."
+
+"It's a queer combination," responded the doctor, smiling his slightly
+whimsical smile. He was rather short, with an almost imperceptible limp,
+and he had, as he put it, "never gone in for sports." "There's so much
+else when one comes to think of it," he added, pausing, with his hat in
+his hand, at the door; "there are plenty of ways of having fun even
+without football." Then he turned away from the children, and said
+directly to Gabriella:
+
+"Will you come out with me to-morrow? It is Sunday."
+
+"And leave the children?" she asked a little blankly.
+
+"And leave the children!" He was laughing, but it occurred to her
+suddenly, for the first time, that her maternal raptures were beginning
+to bore him. For a year she had believed that his interest in her was
+mainly a professional interest in the children; and now she was
+confronted with the disturbing fact that he wanted to be rid of the
+children for a few hours at least, that he evidently saw in her
+something besides the overwhelming force of her motherhood.
+
+"But I never leave them on Sunday. It is the only day I have with them,"
+she answered.
+
+"Don't go, mother! You mustn't go!" cried Fanny, and clung to her.
+
+"Oh, very well," returned Dr. French, dismissing the subject with
+irritation. "But you look pale, and I thought the air might do you
+good."
+
+He went away rather abruptly, while Gabriella stood looking at Miss
+Polly in regret and perplexity. "I hope I didn't hurt his feelings by
+declining," she said; and then, as the children raced into the nursery
+to take off their coats, she added slowly, "He couldn't expect me to go
+without them."
+
+"If you want to know what I think," replied Miss Polly flatly, "it is
+that he's just sick to death of the children. You've stuck them down his
+throat until he's had as much of them as he can swallow."
+
+For a moment Gabriella considered this ruefully.
+
+"You don't honestly believe that he's interested in me in that way?" she
+demanded in a horrified whisper.
+
+"I don't know but one way in which a man's ever interested in a woman,"
+retorted Miss Polly. "It's either that way or it's none at all, as far
+as I can see. But if I was you, honey, I'd drop him a little
+encouragement now and then, just to keep up his spirits. Men ain't no
+mo' than flesh and blood, after all" and it's natural that he shouldn't
+be as crazy about the children as you are."
+
+"But why should I encourage him? Even if you are right, I couldn't marry
+him. I could never marry again."
+
+"I'd like to know why not, if you get a chance? You're free enough,
+ain't you?"
+
+"Yes, it isn't that--but I couldn't."
+
+"You ain't hankerin' after George, are you, Gabriella?"
+
+"After George? No!" responded Gabriella with so sincere an accent that
+Miss Polly jumped.
+
+"Well, I'm glad you ain't," observed the seamstress soothingly as she
+stooped to pick up her sewing. "I shouldn't think he was worth hankerin'
+after, myself, but you've looked kind of peaked and thin this spring, so
+I've just been wonderin'."
+
+"I never loved George. It was madness, nothing else," returned
+Gabriella, and she really believed it.
+
+"Well, your thinkin' it madness now don't mean it wan't love ten years
+ago," commented Miss Polly, with the shrewdness of a detached and
+observant spinster.
+
+"I suppose you're right," admitted Gabriella thoughtfully. Though she
+had not mentioned Arthur, her mind was full of him, and she was
+perfectly convinced that she had loved him all her life--even during her
+brief period of "madness." It was a higher love, she felt, so much
+higher, indeed, that it had been too spiritual, too ethereal, to take
+root in the earthly soil from which her passion for George had sprung.
+But, if it were not love, why was it that every faint stirring of her
+emotions revived the memory so poignantly? Why was it that Miss Polly's
+sentimental interpretation of the doctor's interest evoked the image of
+Arthur?
+
+"No, I never think of George--never," she repeated, and her fine, pure
+features assumed an expression of sternness. "But I shan't marry again,"
+she went on after a pause in which Miss Polly's sewing-machine buzzed
+cheerfully over its work. "I've had enough of marriage to last me for
+one lifetime."
+
+The machine stopped, and Miss Polly, snipping the thread as she came to
+the end of a seam, turned squarely to answer. "Don't you be too sure
+about that, honey. You may have had enough to last you for ten years or
+so, but wait till you've turned forty, and if the hankerin' for love
+don't catch you at forty, you may begin to expect it somewhere around
+fifty. Why, just look at that poor piano-playin' old maid in there.
+Wouldn't you think she'd have done with it? Well, she ain't--she ain't,
+and you ain't either, for that matter, I don't care how hard you argue!"
+
+"There are ten happy years ahead of me anyhow!" rejoined Gabriella, with
+a ringing laugh--the laugh, as Dr. French had once remarked, of a woman
+who is sound to the core. She had triumphed over the past, and was not
+afraid, she told herself valiantly, of the future.
+
+At the beginning of July the children went with Miss Polly to the
+country, and Gabriella, after seeing them off, turned back alone to
+begin a long summer of economy and drudgery. In order to keep Fanny and
+Archibald out of town she was obliged to deny herself every unnecessary
+comfort--luxuries she had given up long ago--and to stay at Dinard's, in
+Madame's place, through the worst weeks of the year, when the showroom
+was deserted except for an occasional stray Southerner, and even the six
+arrogant young women were away on vacations. Even if she had had the
+chance, the money for a trip would have been lacking, and to fill
+Madame's conspicuous place gave her, she realized, a certain importance
+and authority in the house. There was opportunity, in a small way, to
+work out some of her ideas of system and order, and there was sufficient
+time to think out a definite and practical plan for the future. Her aim
+from the first had been, not only to catch on, but to master the details
+of the business, and she knew that, in spite of Madame's sporadic
+attempts to keep her in her place, she was gradually making herself
+felt--she was slowly impressing her individual methods upon the
+establishment. Madame was no longer what she once was, and the business
+was showing it. She was getting old, she was growing tired, and her
+naturally careless methods of work were fastening upon her. In the last
+years she had offered less and less resistance to her tendency to let
+go, to leave loose ends ungathered, to allow opportunities to slip out
+of her grasp, to be inexact and unsystematic. There was urgent need of a
+strong hand at Dinard's, if the business was to be kept from running
+gradually downhill, and Gabriella became convinced, as the days passed,
+that hers was the only hand in the house strong enough to check the
+perilous descent to failure. Her plans were made, her scheme arranged,
+but, as Madame was both jealous and suspicious, she saw that she must
+move very cautiously.
+
+There were times--since this is history, not romance--when her spirits
+flagged and her strength failed her. The heat of the summer was intense,
+and the breathless days dragged on interminably into the breathless
+nights. When her work was over she would wait until the last of her
+fellow-workers had gone home, and then walk across to Sixth Avenue and
+take the Harlem elevated train for her deserted rooms, which appeared
+more desolate, more ugly than ever because the children were absent. In
+the lonely kitchen--for Miss Danton and the art students were all
+away--she would eat her supper of bread and tea, which she drank
+without cream because it was more economical; and then, lighting her
+lamp, she would sew or read until midnight. Sometimes, when it was too
+hot for the lamp, and she found it impossible to work by the flickering
+gas, she would sit by her window and look down on the panting humanity
+in the street below--on the small shopkeepers seated in chairs on the
+sidewalk, on the little son of the Italian fruiterer playing with his
+dog, on the three babies of the Jewish tobacco merchant, sprawling in
+the door of the tiny shop which was pressed like a sardine between a
+bakery and a dairy. She was alone in the apartment, and there were late
+afternoons when the grim emptiness of the rooms seemed haunted, when she
+shrank back in apprehensive foreboding as she turned her key in the
+lock, when the profound silence within preyed on her nerves like an
+obsession. On these days she dreaded to go down the long hail to the
+kitchen, where the fluttering clothes-lines on fire-escapes at the back
+of the next apartment house offered the only suggestion of human
+companionship in the unfriendly wilderness of the city. The sight of the
+children's toys, of Fanny's story books, of Archibald's roller skates,
+moved her to tears once or twice; and when this happened she caught
+herself up sharply and struggled with the vague, malignant demon of
+melancholy.
+
+"Whatever comes, I must not lose my courage," she told herself at such
+times. "If I lose my courage I shall have nothing left."
+
+Then she would put on her hat, and go down into the street, where the
+unwashed children swarmed like insects over the pavements, and the air
+was as hot and parched as the air of a desert. If the mother of the
+Jewish babies sat on her doorstep, she would stop for a little talk with
+her about the heat and the health of the children, and the increasing
+price of whatever one happened to buy in the market, or, perhaps, if the
+fruit stall still kept open, she would ask after the Italian's little
+boy, and stop to pat Archibald's friend, the white mongrel with the
+black ear. She had left her acquaintances when she left Fifty-seventh
+Street, and, with the exception of Judge Crowborough, who telephoned
+occasionally to inquire if she needed assistance, she was without
+friends in New York. Patty wrote often from Paris, but Billy was happy
+with his work, and they said nothing of returning to America. In the
+whole city, outside of Dinard's, she knew only Dr. French, and from him
+she had had no word or sign for several months.
+
+It was on one of these depressing evenings, while she was boiling an egg
+in the kitchen, that the ringing of the door-bell reverberated with an
+uncanny sound through the empty apartment. Spurred by an instinctive
+fear of a telegram, she ran to open the door, and found Dr. French
+standing in the dimly lighted hail, with the negro Robert grinning
+cheerfully at his back.
+
+"I am so glad," she said, "so glad," and her voice shook in spite of the
+effort she made.
+
+"I've been thinking about you all summer," he explained, "and the other
+day I passed you in the street as you were coming from work. You are not
+looking well. Is it the heat?"
+
+"No, it isn't the heat. I think it is the loneliness. You see it is so
+different not having the children to come back to in the afternoon, and
+when I get lonely I see things in false proportions. This apartment has
+been like a grave to me all summer."
+
+She led the way into the living-room, where her sewing, a blue cambric
+frock she was scalloping for Fanny, was lying on the chair by the
+window. "Things are all upset. I hope you won't mind," she added
+apologetically while she folded the dress and laid it aside, "but
+nothing seems to matter when I sit here all by myself."
+
+"What are you doing?"
+
+"Oh, I work all day. There is really very little to do except plan for
+the autumn, and I like that. Madame is in Paris, and I am in charge of
+the place."
+
+"And in the evenings?"
+
+She laughed with recovered spirit. "In the evening I sew and read and
+mope."
+
+"Well, we must change all that," he said, with a tenderness which
+brought tears to her eyes. "Why can't you come out with me somewhere to
+dinner?"
+
+Three years ago, when she was first separated from George, she would
+have evaded the suggestion; but to-night, at the end of the long summer,
+she caught eagerly at the small crumb of pleasure.
+
+"Oh, I'd love to! Only wait until I put out the stove and tidy my hair."
+
+"I want to see what you have to eat," he remarked in his whimsical tone,
+as he followed her back into the kitchen. "Only an egg!"
+
+"It is so hot. I wasn't hungry, but I am now," she replied gaily, her
+thin face flushing to beauty. After her loneliness there was a delight
+in being cared for, in being scolded. "But for the mistake I made this
+might happen to me always," she thought, and her mind went back to
+Arthur.
+
+When she came out of her room, wearing a fresh linen blouse, with her
+hair smoothly brushed, and her eyes sparkling with pleasure, he was
+gazing abstractedly down into the street, and she was obliged to speak
+twice to him before he heard her and turned. At last he broke away,
+almost with an effort, from his meditation, and when he looked at her
+she saw that there was the mystic gleam in his eyes--the light as of a
+star shining through clouds--which attracted her so strongly. The
+thought flashed through her vague impressions, "He loves me. I may win
+him by a smile, by a word, by a look," and, for a minute, she rested on
+the certainty with an ineffable sense of peace, of ease, of deep inward
+rejoicing. "Love is everything. There is nothing worth while except
+love," she thought; and love meant to her then, not passion, not even
+romance, but comfort, tenderness, and the companionship that sweetens
+the flat monotony of daily living. Then, beneath the beauty and
+sweetness of the vision, she felt the vein of iron in her soul as she
+had felt it whenever she struggled to escape the sterner issues of life.
+The face of Arthur rose in her memory, tender, wistful, protecting, and
+young with the eternal youth of desire. No, love was not for her again.
+Not for the second time would she betray the faith of her Dream.
+
+They dined at a little French restaurant, where the green-shaded lights,
+festooned with grape leaves, shed a romantic pallor over their faces,
+and the haunting refrains of an Italian love song stirred the buried
+ghosts in their hearts. The doctor made her drink a glass of champagne;
+and after her frugal meals and the weakening effect of the heat and the
+loneliness, the sparkle of the wine, mingling with the music and the
+lights, sent a sudden rush of joy through her veins. Her courage came
+back to her, not in slow drops, but in a radiant flood, which pervaded
+her being. After the lonely months there was delight in the clasp of a
+friend's hand, in the glance of a friend's eye, in the sound of a
+friend's voice speaking her name. Life appeared divinely precious at the
+instant; and by life she meant not happiness, not even fulfilment, but
+the very web, the very texture and pattern of experience.
+
+"You're better already," he said, with a solicitude that was more
+intoxicating than wine to her. "How I wish I'd known all summer that you
+were here. I might have done something to make you happy, and now I've
+missed my chance."
+
+"I don't think I've ever been so happy as I am to-night," she answered
+simply, and then after a pause she let fall word by word, "After all, it
+takes so little to make me happy."
+
+"One can tell that to look at you. You have the air of happiness. I
+noticed it the first moment I saw you. And yet you have not had an easy
+life. There must have been terrible hours for you in the past."
+
+"No, I haven't had an easy life, but I love it. I mean I love living."
+
+"I know, I understand," he said softly. "It is the true American
+spirit--optimism springing out of a struggle. Do you know you have
+always made me think of the American spirit at its best--of its
+unquenchable youth, its gallantry, its self-reliance--"
+
+They walked back slowly through the hot, close streets, and sat for an
+hour beside her window-sill on which a rose geranium was blooming in an
+earthen pot. Now and then a breeze entered warily, stealing the
+fragrance from the rose geranium, and rippling the dark, straying
+tendrils of Gabriella's hair. By the dim light she saw the wistful
+pallor of his face, and his blue eyes, with their exalted look, which
+moved her heart to an inexpressible tenderness.
+
+"You are so different from other physicians," she said in perplexity, "I
+can't think of you as one, no matter how hard I try. All the others I
+have known, even old Dr. Walker, were materialists."
+
+"Well, I got in some way. There are fools in every school, I suppose.
+But if it's any comfort to you, they've done their best to get rid of
+me. They don't like my theories." When he talked of his work he seemed
+all at once another man to her, and she discerned presently, while she
+listened to his earnest voice, that he was one of the men whose
+emotional natures are nourished by an abstract and impersonal
+passion--by the passion for science, for truth in its concrete form.
+After all, he was a mystic only in his eyes. Beneath his dreamer's face
+he was a scientist to the last drop of his blood, to the last fibre of
+his being. "He can't be hurt deeply through the heart," she thought;
+"only through the mind."
+
+"I've wondered about you all summer," he repeated presently, "and yet I
+kept away--partly, I suppose, because I was thinking too much of you."
+
+At his change of tone from the impersonal to the tender all the frozen
+self-pity in her heart seemed to melt suddenly, threatening in its
+overflow the very foundations of her philosophy. The temptation to yield
+utterly, to rest for a while not on her strength, but on his, assailed
+her with the swiftness and the violence of a spiritual revulsion. For an
+instant she surrendered to the uncontrollable force of this desire;
+then she drew quickly back while the world about her--the room, the
+window, the bare skeleton of the elevated road, the street, and even the
+rose geranium blooming on the sill--became as remote and impalpable as a
+phantom.
+
+"It has been a long summer," she heard herself saying from a distance in
+a thin and colourless voice.
+
+"And you suffered?"
+
+"Sometimes, but I'm interested in my work, and I've been thinking and
+planning all summer."
+
+For a moment he was silent, and though she did not look at him, she
+could feel his intense gaze on her face. The breeze, scented with rose
+geranium, touched her forehead like the healing and delicate stroke of
+his fingers.
+
+"You are still so young, so vital, not to have something else in your
+life," he went on presently in a voice so charged with feeling that her
+eyes filled while she listened to it.
+
+"I have had love, and I have my children."
+
+"But you will love again? You will marry again some day?"
+
+She shook her head, hearing, above the street cries and the muffled
+rumble of the elevated train, a voice that said: "I shall never give you
+up, Gabriella!" To her weakened nerves there appeared, with the
+vividness of an hallucination, the memory of Arthur as he had looked in
+her school-days when she had first loved him; and in this hallucination
+she saw him, not as he was in reality, but divinely glorified and
+enkindled by the light her imagination had created around him.
+
+"No, I shall never love again, I shall never love again," she answered
+at last, while a feeling of exultation surged through her.
+
+"You mean," his voice shook a little, "that your husband still holds
+you?"
+
+"My husband? No, I never think of my husband."
+
+"Is there some one else?"
+
+Before answering she looked up at him, and by his face she knew that her
+reply would cost her his friendship. She wanted his friendship--at the
+moment she felt that she would gladly give a year of her life for it. It
+meant companionship instead of loneliness, it meant plenty instead of
+famine. Yet only for an instant, only while she stopped to draw breath,
+did she hesitate. "Women must learn to be honourable," she found herself
+thinking suddenly with an extraordinary intensity.
+
+"Yes, there is some one else--there has always been some one else," she
+said, driven on by an impulsive desire for full confession, for absolute
+candour. "When I met George I was engaged to another man, and I have
+loved that man all my life."
+
+She had confessed all, she told herself; and the remarkable part was
+that she really believed her confession--she was honestly convinced that
+she had spoken only the truth. Her soul, like the soul of Cousin Jimmy,
+sheltered a romantic strain which demanded that one supreme illusion
+should endure amid a world of disillusionment. Because she was obliged
+to believe in something or die, she had built her imperishable Dream on
+the flame-swept ruins of her happiness.
+
+"He must be a big man if he can fill a life like yours," said Dr.
+French.
+
+"I don't know why I told you," she faltered; "I have never told any one
+else. It is my secret."
+
+"Well, it is safe with me. Don't be afraid."
+
+For the few minutes before he rose to go they talked indifferently of
+other things. She had lost him, she knew, and while she held his hand at
+parting, she felt a sharp regret for what was passing out of her
+life--for the one chance of love, of peace, of a tranquil and
+commonplace happiness. But beneath the regret there was a hidden spring
+of joy in her heart. At the instant of trial she had found strength to
+be true to her Dream.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SUCCESS
+
+
+"I declare you're real pretty to-night, honey," remarked Miss Polly from
+the floor, where she knelt pinning up the hem of a black serge skirt she
+was making for Gabriella. "Some days you're downright plain, and then
+you flame out just like a lamp. Nobody would ever think to look at you
+that you'd be thirty-seven years old to-morrow." For it was the evening
+before Gabriella's birthday, and she was at the end of her thirty-sixth
+year.
+
+"I feel young," she answered brightly, "and I feel happy. The children
+are well, and I've had all the success I could ask. Some day I'm going
+to own Madame's business, Miss Polly."
+
+"I reckon she's gettin' mighty old, ain't she?"
+
+"She gave up the work years ago, and I believe she'd be glad to sell out
+to me to-morrow if I had the money.
+
+"I wish you had. It would be nice for you to be at the head, now
+wouldn't it?" rejoined Miss Polly, speaking with difficulty through a
+mouthful of pins.
+
+"Yes, I wish I had, but I've thought and thought, and I don't see how I
+could borrow enough. I've sometimes thought of asking Judge Crowborough
+to invest some money in the business. It would be investing, the returns
+are so good."
+
+"He'd do it in a minute, I expect. He always set a lot of store by you,
+didn't he?"
+
+"He used to, but somehow I hate to ask favours."
+
+"You were always a heap too proud. Don't you remember how you'd never
+eat the other children's cake when you were a child unless you had some
+of your own to offer 'em?"
+
+Gabriella laughed. "No, I don't remember, but it sounds like me. I was
+horrid."
+
+"There was always a hard streak somewhere down in you, and you don't
+mind my sayin' that you ain't gettin' any softer, Gabriella. There are
+times now when your mouth gets a set look like your Aunt Becky
+Bollingbroke's. You don't recollect her, I 'spose, but she never
+married."
+
+"Well, I married," Gabriella flippantly reminded her; "so it can't be
+that."
+
+Though the hard work of the last ten years had left its visible mark
+upon her, and she looked a little older, a little tired, a little worn,
+experience had added a rare spiritual beauty to her face, and she was
+far handsomer than she had been at twenty. The rich sprinkling of silver
+in the heavy waves of hair over her ears framed the firm pale oval of
+her face with a poetic and mysterious darkness, and gave depth and
+softness to her brilliant eyes. For the struggle, which had stolen her
+first freshness and left faintly perceptible lines in her expressive
+face, had not robbed her of the eyes and the heart of a girl.
+
+"I don't count George, somehow," retorted Miss Polly. "That wan't like
+marryin' a real man, you know, and, when all's said and done, a lone
+woman gets mighty hard and dried up."
+
+"But I can't marry when there's nobody to marry me," laughed Gabriella.
+"I haven't seen a man for seven years except in the street or
+occasionally in the shop. Men have either passed me by without seeing me
+or they have wanted to sell me something."
+
+At the sound of the children's voices she slipped out of the serge
+skirt, and began hurriedly fastening the old black silk gown she wore at
+dinner. Through all the years of toil and self-denial she had preserved
+a certain formality of living, a gracious ease of manner, which she kept
+for the evenings with her children. Cares were thrust away then, to be
+taken up again as soon as Fanny and Archibald were in bed, and no matter
+how hard the day had been, she was always cheerful, always gay and
+light-hearted for the dinner hour by the fireside. Not often had she
+been too poor to buy a handful of flowers for the table, and never once,
+except during her illness, had she come home too tired to change to the
+black silk gown, which she had turned and made from bishop sleeves to
+small ones, and from "dropped" shoulders to high ones, for the last six
+or seven years. The damask on the table was darned and mended, but it
+was always spotlessly fresh. In winter the fire was made up brightly in
+the evenings; in summer the room was deliciously scented with rose
+geranium and heliotrope from the box in the window. For ten years she
+had not had a holiday; she had worked harder than a man, harder than any
+servant, for she had worked from dawn until midnight; but into her hard
+life she had instilled a quality of soul which had enabled her to endure
+the strain without breaking. "No life is so hard that you can't make it
+easier by the way you take it," she had said to herself in the
+beginning; and remembering always that courage is one of the eternal
+virtues, she had disciplined her mind as well as her body to firmness
+and elasticity of fibre. "Nobody, except myself, is ever going to make
+me happy," she would repeat over and over again when the day was
+wearying and the work heavy. "I want to be happy. I have a right to be
+happy, but it depends on myself."
+
+This indestructible belief in her "right to happiness" supported her
+through the hardest hours of her life, and diffused an invigorating
+atmosphere not only in her home, but even in her long working hours at
+Dinard's. The children grew and strengthened in its bracing air; Miss
+Polly quickly responded to it; the women in the workroom breathed it in
+as if it were the secret of health, and even Madame showed occasional
+signs that she was not entirely impervious to its vital and joyous
+influence. It was not always easy for Gabriella to keep the light in her
+eyes and the faith in her heart. There were days when both seemed to
+fail her, when, with aching body and depressed mind, she felt that she
+could not look beyond the immediate suffering minute, when she told
+herself despairingly that she had lost everything in losing her courage.
+But bad days passed as irrevocably as good ones; and left her, when they
+were over, with her strong soul unshaken, and her philosophy of
+happiness still undestroyed. Like other human beings, she found that her
+moods were largely controlled by her physical health.
+
+"Oh, mother dear, I went down to meet you, and I missed you by just five
+minutes," said Fanny, kissing her cheek. "I wanted you to go with me to
+look at the house in London Terrace. Miss Polly and I are crazy about
+it."
+
+"I know," said Gabriella tenderly, while she feasted her eyes on her
+daughter.
+
+The old apartment house in which they had spent the last ten years would
+be torn down in the summer, and Fanny and Miss Folly had devoted the
+past week to an exhaustive hunt for a home.
+
+"Then you'll look at it to-morrow, won't you, mother?" urged Fanny. "We
+can get the upper rooms and they are larger than these. There is a
+little yard in front, with an elm tree and a rose-bush, and plenty of
+space for flowers."
+
+"I can't recall the house exactly," said Gabriella thoughtfully. "It
+must be in a row, isn't it? I have a vague recollection of some old
+houses, with fronts of stuccoed pilasters, and rather nice yards. But
+West Twenty-third Street is too far away, dear. I don't like the
+neighbourhood. Wouldn't you rather be in Park Avenue?" Her ignorance of
+New York, though she had lived there seventeen years, amazed Fanny, who
+was a true child of the city.
+
+"Carlie Herndon lives in that row, mother"--Carlie Herndon, the daughter
+of a distinguished and unpopular novelist, was Fanny's best friend for
+the moment--"and I could always go out with her in the evening."
+
+"It isn't the location I should have liked, Fanny," said Gabriella,
+weakly yielding, as she always yielded to her daughter; "but if you
+really fancy the house, I'll try to look at it on my way home to-morrow.
+One has to be very careful about the plumbing in these old houses. I
+insist upon good plumbing. After that, you may have what you want."
+
+"Oh, it has brand new bathrooms, Mrs. Mallon told me so, and she's
+lived there until a year ago. And if you had only seen the new
+apartments we looked at, mother, nothing on the East Side that would
+have held us under twenty-five hundred a year, and even at that the
+bedrooms were no bigger than closets, and you'd have to have electric
+light all day in the bathroom. We searched everywhere, didn't we, Miss
+Polly?"
+
+"West Twenty-third Street is mighty far out of the way, honey," observed
+Miss Polly cautiously.
+
+"Oh, but I'd have Carlie, and she's my best friend," persisted Fanny,
+with caressing obstinacy.
+
+"Well, we'll see, precious," said Gabriella, while she assured herself
+that if Fanny cost her every penny she had, at least the child was worth
+what she spent on her. To a superficial observer, Fanny would probably
+have appeared merely an attractive girl, of Jane's willowy type, with
+something of Jane's trite prettiness of feature; but to Gabriella, who
+suffered from a maternal obliquity of vision, she seemed both brilliant
+and beautiful. Of course she was selfish, but this selfishness, as long
+as it was clothed in her youth and loveliness, was as inoffensive as the
+playfulness of a kitten. Her face was round and shallow, with exquisite
+colouring which veiled the flatness and lack of character in her
+features. Above her azure eyes her hair, which was not plentiful, but
+fine and soft, and as yellow as ripe corn, broke in a shining mist over
+her forehead. All her life, by being what she was, she had got, without
+effort, everything that she wanted. She had got dolls when she wanted
+dolls; she had got Miss Ludwell's expensive school when she wanted an
+expensive private school; she would get the house in West Twenty-third
+Street to-morrow, and when she began to want love, she would get it as
+easily and as undeservedly as she got everything else. She was very
+expensive, but, like the flowers on the table and the spotless damask
+and the lace in Gabriella's sleeves, she was one of her mother's
+luxuries to be paid for by additional hours of work and thought.
+
+"Wasn't Archibald with you?" inquired Gabriella, while she pushed the
+chairs into place and tidied the room.
+
+"He stopped at the library. There's his ring now. I'll open the door."
+
+She ran out, and Gabriella, with the tablecloth in her hand, stood
+waiting for Archibald to enter. In her eager expectancy, in the wistful
+brightness of her eyes, in the tender quivering of her lips, she was
+like a girl who is awaiting a lover. Every evening, after her day's
+work, she greeted her son with the same passionate tenderness. Never had
+it lessened, never, even when she was most discouraged, had she failed
+to summon her strength and her sweetness for this beatific end to the
+day. For Archibald was more than a son to her. As he grew older their
+characters became more perfectly adjusted, and the rare bond of a deep
+mental sympathy held them together. Fanny loved her as a spoiled child
+loves the dispenser of its happiness; but in Archibald's devotion there
+was something of the worship of a man for an ideal.
+
+Flushed and hungry, the boy came in, and after kissing her hurriedly,
+ran off to wash his face and hands before dinner. When he came back the
+table was laid, with a bunch of lilacs in a cut glass vase over the
+darned spot in the tablecloth, and Miss Polly was bringing in the
+old-fashioned soup tureen, which had belonged to Gabriella's maternal
+grandmother.
+
+"If you don't sit right straight down everything will be cold," said
+Miss Polly severely, for this was her customary manner of announcing
+dinner. Every night for ten years she had threatened them with a cold
+dinner while she served them a hot one.
+
+With a child on either side of her, Gabriella sat down, and ladled the
+soup out of the old china tureen. It was her consecrated hour--the
+single hour of her toiling day that she dedicated to personal happiness;
+and because it was her hour, her life had gradually centred about it as
+if it were the divine point of her universe--the pivot upon which her
+whole world revolved. Nothing harsh, nothing sordid, nothing sad, ever
+touched the sacred precincts of her twilight hour with her children.
+
+"I can beat any boy at school running, mother," said Archibald, watching
+his plate of soup hungrily as it travelled toward him. "If my eyes won't
+let me be captain of a football team, I'm going to become the champion
+runner in America. I bet I can, if I try."
+
+"I shouldn't wonder, dear. It's good for you, too. I never saw you look
+better."
+
+He was a tall, thin boy, with a muscular figure, and thick brown hair,
+which was always rumpled. Through his ugly spectacles his eyes showed
+large, dark, and as beautifully soft as a girl's. His mind was
+remarkably keen and active, and there was in his carriage something of
+Gabriella's capable and commanding air, as if, like her, he embodied
+those qualities which compel acknowledgment. Though she had never
+admitted it even to herself, he was her favourite child.
+
+When dinner was over she had the children to herself--to the gracious,
+unhurried self she gave them--until ten o'clock. Then their books were
+put away, and after she had kissed them good-night, and tucked the
+covers about them, she came back to the living-room, and sat down to her
+sewing with Miss Polly. The ease and cheerfulness dropped from her at
+the approach of midnight, and while the two women bent over their
+needles they talked of their anxieties, and planned innumerable and
+intricate ways of economy.
+
+"Fanny's school costs so much, and, of course, she must have clothes.
+All the other girls dress so expensively."
+
+"You spend three times as much on her as you do on Archibald."
+
+"I know," her voice melted to the mother note, "but Archibald is
+different. He is a man, and he will make his way in the world. Then,
+too, his expenses will be trebled next year when he goes off to school,
+and after that, of course, will come college. I don't believe anything
+or anybody can keep Archibald back," she went on proudly. "Do you know
+he talks already of going to work in a shipping office in order to help
+me?"
+
+"It's a pity about his eyes."
+
+"There's nothing wrong except near-sightedness, but he'll have to wear
+glasses all his life."
+
+For a minute Miss Polly stitched almost furiously, while her small
+weatherbeaten face, with its grotesque features, was visited by an
+illumination that softened and ennobled its ugliness. From living
+entirely in the lives of others, she had attained the spiritual serenity
+and detachment of a saint as well as the saint's immunity from the
+intenser personal forms of suffering. Long habit had accustomed her to
+think of herself only in connection with somebody's need of her, and
+beyond this she hardly appeared as an individual existence even in her
+own secret reflections. As far as it is possible to achieve absolute
+unselfishness in a world planned upon egoistic principles Miss Polly had
+achieved it; and the result was that she was almost perfectly happy.
+
+"Fanny seems right set on goin' down to Twenty-third Street, don't she?"
+she inquired, after an interval of musing.
+
+"It's all because Carlie lives in the row, and by next year, after we've
+had all the trouble of moving, she'll find another bosom friend and want
+to go to Park Avenue."
+
+"It's a real comfortable sort of house, more like Richmond than New
+York, and I reckon we could get flowers to grow there just about as well
+as they did in Hill Street."
+
+"I don't like having those O'Haras on the lower floor. If they are loud
+and common, it might be very disagreeable."
+
+"There ain't but one, a man, and he's hardly ever there, the caretaker's
+wife told me. She said he was almost always in the West, and anyway his
+lease is up next year, and he thinks he'll give up his rooms. She says
+he has made piles of money in mines somewhere out West, and he only
+keeps those rooms because they used to belong to a man who picked him
+out of the street when he was a little boy selling newspapers. That
+caretaker's wife seems to be a mighty kind-hearted creature, but she
+talks as if she was never goin' to stop."
+
+"I think I could afford to take an apartment in Park Avenue," returned
+Gabriella, dismissing the name of O'Hara; "but, of course, I want to
+save as much as I can in order to invest in the business. If it wasn't
+for that, I could stop scraping and pinching. I can't bear, though, to
+think of leaving nothing for the children when I die."
+
+"Go away from here, honey. The idea of your talkin' about dyin'! You
+look healthier than you ever did in your life, only you're gettin' that
+set look again about your mouth."
+
+"I wonder if I'm growing hard," said Gabriella, stopping to glance in
+the mirror. "I suppose that's the problem of life for the working
+woman--not to grow hard." In some ways, she realized, Miss Polly was
+right. She was a handsome woman, as Madame occasionally informed her;
+but she was no longer shrinking, she was no longer alluringly feminine.
+To dress smartly for Dinard's was a part of her work, and she had grown
+quite indifferent to having men turn and stare after her in the street
+or when she entered a restaurant. But the men who stared never spoke to
+her as they did to Fanny when she was alone. They regarded her
+admiringly, but she aroused neither disrespect nor the protective
+instinct in their minds. Only when she smiled her face grew as young as
+her eyes, and with the powdering of silver on her hair, gave her a look
+of radiance and charm; but at other times, when she was grave or
+preoccupied with the management of Dinard's, the "set look" that Miss
+Polly dreaded hardened her mouth.
+
+"I wish you could go easier now for a while," resumed the little
+seamstress, after a pause which she had filled with vague speculations
+about Gabriella's sentimental prospects. "I just hate like anything to
+see you wearing yourself out. Of course I'd like you to own part of the
+business, and I can't help thinkin' that the judge could get you the
+money as easy as not. It ain't as if you couldn't pay him the interest
+regular, is it?" she pursued with the financial helplessness of a woman
+who has never thought in terms of figures. "You couldn't be doin' any
+better, could you? There ain't anybody can run the business as well as
+you do, I don't care who 'tis."
+
+"I sometimes think," returned Gabriella deliberately, while she draped a
+lace bertha on a white silk frock she was making for Fanny, "that I will
+try to borrow the money."
+
+"It couldn't hurt, could it?"
+
+"No, I don't suppose it could hurt."
+
+Her eyes were on the lace, which she was adjusting over the shoulder,
+and Miss Polly followed her gaze with a look which was not entirely
+approving.
+
+"There ain't a bit of sense in your wearin' yourself out over that
+child," said the seamstress presently, with so sharp an accent that
+Gabriella glanced up quickly from her work. "It was just the way Mrs.
+Spencer started Florrie, and it ain't right."
+
+"Florrie!" exclaimed Gabriella, startled, and she added slowly, "I
+wonder what has become of her? I haven't thought of her for years."
+
+"It was a mean trick she played you, Gabriella. I'd never have believed
+it of Florrie if I hadn't been there to see it with my own eyes."
+
+"Yes, it was mean," assented Gabriella, but there was no anger in her
+voice. She had left the past so far behind her that its disappointments
+and its cruelties had become as dim and shadowy to her imagination as
+if they had been phantoms of the mind instead of actual events through
+which she had lived.
+
+"Well, I'm glad she didn't spoil your life for you, honey."
+
+"No, she didn't spoil my life. Don't I look happy? And Madame told me
+to-day that my figure was distinguished. Now, when a woman's life is
+spoiled her figure and her complexion are the first things to show it."
+
+"Of course you ain't gettin' slouchy, I don't mean anything like that.
+But I hate to see you workin' your fingers to the bone and bringin'
+lines around your eyes when you ought to be taken care of. I don't hold
+with women workin' unless they're obliged to."
+
+"But I'm obliged to. How on earth could I take care of the children if I
+didn't work?"
+
+For a minute there was an austere silence while Miss Polly reflected
+grimly that Gabriella Mary--she thought of her as "Gabriella Mary" in
+moments of disapprobation"--was gettin' almost as set as her ma."
+
+"You could marry," she said flatly at last, stopping to press down the
+hem she had turned with the blunted nail of her thumb. "Of course your
+ma would be dead against it, but there ain't any reason in the world why
+you shouldn't go back home and marry Arthur Peyton, as you ought to have
+done seventeen years ago."
+
+Though Gabriella laughed in reply, there was no merriment in the sound,
+and a look of sadness crept into the eyes she turned away from the sharp
+gaze of the little seamstress.
+
+"You've forgotten that I haven't seen him for seventeen years," she
+answered.
+
+"That don't make any difference in his sort, and you know it. He ain't
+ever married anybody else, and he ain't goin' to. The faithfulness that
+ought to be spread over the whole sex gets stored up in a few, and he's
+one of 'em."
+
+"He has never written to me. No, he must have got over it," responded
+Gabriella, with an impassioned emphasis, "and, besides, even if he
+cared, I don't want to marry again. My children are enough for me."
+
+"It won't look that way next year when both the children are away at
+school, and when they once break away from your apron strings they're
+the sort that will go the way they want to and look out for their own
+happiness. You won't have much of Archibald while he's at school and
+college, and Fanny will marry befo' she's twenty just as sure as you
+live. Why, she's already got her head full of beaux. Have you noticed
+that picture of an actor she keeps on her bureau?"
+
+"Yes" admitted Gabriella anxiously, "I've noticed it, but when I asked
+her about it, she only laughed."
+
+After this the conversation dropped, and the two women put away their
+work for the might; but hours later, while Miss Polly lay in her hard
+little bed wondering if it would be possible to "fix" things between
+Gabriella and Arthur, the stern heroine of her romance wept a few tender
+tears on her pillow.
+
+In the morning, with the tears still ready to spring at a touch,
+Gabriella read a letter from her mother, which he had found, beside the
+baker's rolls, at the door.
+
+     _Richmond, Thursday_.
+
+     DEAR CHILD:
+
+     As the others are all out to-night, and I have finished the mat I
+     was crocheting, I thought I would send you a letter to reach you
+     on your birthday instead of the telegram from the family. I am so
+     thankful to hear that you keep well and happy and that Fanny has
+     quite recovered from her cold. It was thoughtful of you to send the
+     check, and I shall find it very useful, though Jane refuses to let
+     me pay any board since Charley has inherited such a large income
+     from his brother Tom. I sent you all the papers about the dreadful
+     accident on the River road in which poor Tom and his wife were
+     killed, but you haven't heard yet that Tom left his new house in
+     Monument Avenue--they had only just moved into it--and almost all
+     of his property to Charley. Of course, this will make a great
+     difference in our manner of living; but just now none of us can
+     think of anything except poor Tom and Gertrude, to whom we were all
+     so deeply attached. No amount of money could in any way soften the
+     blow of their loss, and the accident has given me such a horror of
+     automobiles, though both Charley and Jane tell me this is very
+     foolish.
+
+     To turn to more cheerful subjects, I can't begin to tell you how
+     much the last photograph of Fanny has been admired. She is such a
+     lovely girl, almost as pretty, we think, as Jane used to be when
+     she first grew up, and I'm sure there could be no higher praise
+     than that. You pleased me by saying that Archibald is like his
+     grandfather, even if he isn't so handsome, and that he has a strong
+     character. Good looks aren't nearly so important in a man as they
+     are in a woman, and, you know, I don't think that men are as
+     handsome to-day as they used to be when I was a girl. They have
+     lost something--I can't make out just what it is.
+
+     Charley and Jane are at the Prohibition meeting. It is the first
+     time they have gone anywhere since the accident, but we all felt
+     that Tom and Gertrude would have wanted them to go for the sake of
+     the cause. I don't suppose you, would recognize Charley now if you
+     were to meet him. He is entirely changed, and I believe our new
+     minister is the reason for it, though Jane likes to think that her
+     influence reclaimed him. But, you remember, neither you nor I ever
+     thought that Jane went about reforming Charley in the right way;
+     and even now, though I wouldn't hurt dear Jane's feelings for
+     anything in the world, I am afraid she nags Charley and the
+     children too much. Of course, she means it for the best. No one
+     could look at the dear child without realizing what a beautiful
+     character she is.
+
+     But the change in Charley is really remarkable, and he won't allow
+     a drop of alcohol to come into the house--not even as medicine. I
+     can't help feeling sorry for poor old Uncle Meriweather, who
+     despises grape juice and misses his mint julep when he comes to
+     dine on Sunday; but Charley forbids Jane to make him a julep; and I
+     suppose he is right since he says it is a matter of principle. Even
+     Jane, however, thinks dear Charley is going a little too far when
+     he refuses to let me have the sherry and egg the doctor ordered.
+     However, I tell Jane that, since Charley feels so strongly about my
+     taking it, she must not try to persuade him against his
+     convictions. Dr. Darrow doesn't know that I stopped the sherry when
+     Charley found out I was buying it. Perhaps the plain eggs will do
+     me quite as much good. Anyhow, I wouldn't let my health stand in
+     the way of Charley's salvation.
+
+     Margaret has gone out to a concert, and you would never guess who
+     came to take her. I said to her when she was starting, "Well, I'm
+     going to sit straight down and write your Aunt Gabriella that
+     you've gone out with her old sweetheart." But doesn't it make you
+     realize how time flies when you think of Arthur Peyton's paying
+     attention to Jane's daughter? Of course, it isn't anything
+     serious--everybody knows that he has never recovered from his
+     feeling for you--but last winter he took Margaret to two germans
+     and to any number of plays. I believe Jane would be really pleased
+     if he were to take a fancy to Margaret, but I don't think there is
+     the faintest chance of it, for his Cousin Lizzie told me last
+     winter that she couldn't mention your name in his presence. She
+     says his faithfulness is perfectly beautiful, and she ought to know
+     for she has lived with him ever since his mother's death. Of
+     course, he has never accomplished very much in his profession.
+     Chancy says all the men downtown look upon him as a failure; but,
+     then, he is such a perfect gentleman, and, as I tell Charley and
+     Jane, one can't have everything. How different your life would have
+     been, my dear daughter, if you had listened to the prayers of your
+     mother, and married a gentle Christian character like Arthur
+     Peyton.
+
+     But I mustn't let my thoughts run away with me. Of course, even if
+     your heart had not been broken, it would be impossible for you to
+     think of another man as long as your husband is living. No pure
+     woman could do that, and when people tell me about divorced women
+     who remarry, I always maintain that they are not what my mother and
+     I would call "pure women." I would rather think of you nursing your
+     broken heart forever in solitude than that you should put such a
+     blot upon your character and the name of the Carrs. Of course, you
+     were right to divorce George after he forsook you for Florrie--even
+     his mother tells everybody that you were right--but the thought of
+     a second marriage would, I know, be intolerable to your refined and
+     sensitive nature. After all, he is still your husband in the sight
+     of God, and I said this to Miss Lizzie Peyton when we were talking
+     of Arthur.
+
+     It is almost eleven o'clock, and I must stop and undress. Kiss the
+     dear children, and remember me kindly to Miss Polly.
+
+     Your loving MOTHER.
+
+As she refolded the letter Gabriella stood for an instant with her
+dreaming gaze on the delicate Italian handwriting on the envelope.
+
+"It's amazing how wide the gulf is between the generations," she
+thought, not without humour. "I believe mother thinks of George oftener
+than I do, and I'd marry Arthur to-morrow if he wanted me to--except for
+the children."
+
+Then, as Archibald rushed into the room, she caught him in her arms, and
+held him hungrily to her bosom.
+
+"My darling, you want to keep your mother, don't you?"
+
+"I jolly well do. What's the trouble, mother? I believe it's all that
+sitting up over Fanny's old dresses. Why don't you make something pretty
+for yourself?"
+
+"She has to have things, and you love me just as well without them,
+don't you?"
+
+"But I want you to have them, too. I like you to look pretty, and you
+are pretty."
+
+"Then I can look pretty in plain clothes, can't I?"
+
+"I tell you what I am going to do," he hesitated a minute, knitting his
+heavy brows over his spectacles, which looked so odd on a boy. "Next
+summer when school is over I'm going to work and make some money so you
+can have a velvet dress in the autumn--a black velvet dress with lace on
+it--lots of lace--and a hat with feathers."
+
+"You foolish boy!" laughed Gabriella. "Do you think for an instant I'd
+let you?" Her voice was gay, but when he had broken away from her clasp,
+and was racing along the hail for his school books, she turned aside to
+wipe the tears from her eyes.
+
+"It's wrong, but I love, him more than I love Fanny," she said. "I love
+him more than all the rest of the world.".
+
+An hour later, sitting beside an Italian labourer in an elevated train,
+she tried hard to keep her mind on the day's work and on the morning
+paper, which she held open before her--for in adopting a business life
+she had adopted instinctively a man's businesslike habits. A subtle
+distinction divided her from the over-dressed shopgirls around her as
+completely as her sex separated her from the portly masculine
+breadwinner in the opposite seat. Her tailored suit of black serge, with
+its immaculate white collar and cuffs, had an air of charming
+simplicity, and the cameolike outline of her features against the
+luminous background of the window-pane was the aristocratic racial
+outline of the Carrs. In the whirlpool of modern business she still
+preserved the finer attributes which Nature had bred in her race. The
+bitter sweetness of the mother's inheritance, grafted on the hardy stock
+of the Carr character, had flavoured without weakening the daughter's
+spirit, and, though few of the men in the train glanced in the direction
+of Gabriella, the few who noticed her in her corner surmised by
+intuition that she possessed not only the manner, but the heart of a
+lady. She was not particularly handsome, not particularly young, and her
+charm was scarcely the kind to flash like a lantern before the eye of
+the beholder. To the portly breadwinner she was probably a nice-looking
+American business woman, nothing more; to the Italian labourer she was,
+doubtless, a lady with a pleasant face, who would be polite if you asked
+her a question; and to the other passengers she must have appeared
+merely a woman reading her newspaper on her way down to work. Her primal
+qualities of force, restraint, and capability were the last things these
+superficial observers would have thought of; and yet it was by these
+qualities that she must succeed or fail in her struggle for life.
+
+When she reached Dinard's she found Miss Smith, the only woman in
+Madame's employ who was ever punctual, ill-humouredly poking the spring
+hats out of the cases. Miss Smith, who excelled in the cardinal virtues,
+manifested at times a few of those minor frailties by which the cardinal
+virtues are not infrequently attended. Her one pronounced fault was a
+bad temper, and on this particular morning that fault was conspicuous.
+As she carried the hats from the cases to the window, which she was
+decorating with the festive millinery of the spring, she looked as if
+she were resisting an impulse to throw Madame's choicest confections at
+the jovial figure of the traffic policeman. Gabriella, who was used to
+what she called the "peculiarities" of the forewoman, said "good
+morning" with her bright amiability, and hurried back to the dim regions
+where she changed from her street suit to the picturesque French gown
+which she wore in the showroom. When she came out again Miss Smith had
+finished ornamenting the white pegs in the window, and was vigorously
+upbraiding a messenger boy who had delivered a parcel at the wrong door.
+
+"You are always so prompt," remarked Gabriella cheerfully, as she
+arranged the hats in the front room. Her rule of business conduct was
+simple, and consisted chiefly of the precept that whatever happened she
+must keep her temper. Never once, never even in Madame's most trying
+moments, had she permitted herself to appear angry, and her strict
+adherence to this resolution had established her in an enviable position
+of authority. Obeying unconsciously some inherited strain of prudence
+in her nature, she had sacrificed her temper on the solid altar of
+business expediency.
+
+"Somebody has to be on time, I guess," replied Miss Smith snappishly.
+"I'd like to know who would be here if I wasn't?"
+
+She was a thin, soured, ugly little woman, with an extraordinary
+capacity for work, and an excess of nervous vitality bordering on
+hysteria. Gabriella, who knew something of her story, was aware of the
+self-sacrificing goodness of her private life, and secure in her own
+unclouded cheerfulness, could afford to smile tolerantly at the waspish
+sting.
+
+"It's a pity we can't get more system here," she observed, for Miss
+Smith, she knew, was no tale-bearer. "The waste of time and misdirected
+energy are appalling. The business would be worth three times as much to
+anybody who could give her whole attention to it, but, as Madame is
+forever telling us, her health keeps her from really overlooking
+things."
+
+"I wonder why she doesn't sell out?" asked Miss Smith, suddenly
+good-humoured and interested. "There's a lot in it for the right person,
+and it isn't in nature that she can hold on much longer. If I could find
+the money, I'd buy it and cut down expenses until I made a big profit.
+It would be easy enough." Then she added, while she slammed the
+ivory-tinted door of a case: "I wish you could run the house, Mrs. Carr.
+You are so pleasant to work with. Nothing ever seems to depress you."
+
+"It would be nice, wouldn't it?" responded Gabriella promptly, and as
+she said the words, she decided that she would try to borrow the money
+from Judge Crowborough. For three months she had been struggling to
+bring herself to the point of asking his help--or at least his
+advice--and now, in a flash, without argument or discussion, she had
+settled the question. "It's a simple business proposition--a promising
+investment," she thought. "I'll ask him to get the money for me at a
+fair interest--to get me enough anyhow to give me control of the
+business. The worst he can do is to refuse," she concluded, with a kind
+of forlorn optimism; "at least he can't kill me."
+
+Making a hurried excuse, she went back to the telephone, and calling up
+the judge, asked for an appointment in his office at five o'clock. From
+his surprised response she inferred his curiosity, and from his hearty
+acquiescence, she gathered that his surprise was not an unpleasant one.
+"At five o'clock, then. It is so good of you. There is a little matter
+of business. Yes, I know how kind you are, and of course your advice is
+invaluable. I can't think of anybody else on earth I can ask. Oh, thank
+you. Yes, at five o'clock. I shan't be late and I promise to keep you
+but a minute. Good-bye. What? Oh, yes, I'll come straight from
+Dinard's."
+
+His voice, eager and friendly over the telephone, had given her
+confidence, and when she went back to the showroom, where the saleswomen
+were assembling, she was already planning the interview.
+
+At eleven o'clock Madame, who never arrived earlier, was seen descending
+from a hansom, and a few minutes later she waddled, wheezing, asthmatic,
+and infirm of joints, through the ivory and gold doorway. Like some
+fantastically garlanded Oriental goddess of death, her rouged and
+powdered face nodded grotesquely beneath the flowery wreath on her hat.
+The indestructible youth of her spirit, struggling valiantly against the
+inert weight of the flesh, had squeezed her enormous figure into the
+curveless stays of the period, and had painted into some ghastly
+semblance of health the wrinkled skin of her cheeks. For underneath the
+decaying mockery of Madame's body, the indomitable soul of Madame still
+fought the everlasting battle of mind against matter, of the immaterial
+against the material elements.
+
+"There was no use my trying to get here any sooner," she began in an
+apologetic tone when she was face to face with Gabriella behind the red
+velvet curtains of her private office. "My asthma was so bad all night,
+I had to doze sitting up, and I didn't get any sound sleep until
+daybreak. If I don't begin to mend before long I'll have to give up,
+that's all there is to it. There ain't any use my trying to hold on much
+longer. I'm too sick to think about fighting, and sometimes I don't care
+what becomes of the business. I want to go to some high place in Europe
+where I can get my breath, and I'm going to stay there, I don't care
+what happens. There ain't any use my trying to hold on," she repeated
+disconsolately.
+
+Gabriella's opportunity had come, and she grasped it with the quickness
+of judgment which had enabled her to achieve her moderate success.
+
+"I believe I could carry on this business," she said, and her quiet
+assurance impressed Madame's turbulent temper. With a brief return of
+her mental alertness, the old woman studied her carefully.
+
+"I don't want any responsibility. I want to be rid of the whole thing,"
+she said after a pause.
+
+Gabriella nodded comprehendingly. "I believe I could carry it on
+successfully," she repeated. "Your customers like me. I think I
+understand how the business ought to be run. I have been here ten years,
+and I feel perfectly confident that I could make it successful."
+
+"I've had offers--good offers," observed Madame warily, for she was
+incapable of liberating herself at the age of seventy-two from the
+lifelong suspicion that some one was taking advantage of her, that
+something was being got from her for nothing, "and, of course, I was
+only joking about having to stop work," she added, "I am retiring from
+choice, not from necessity."
+
+"I understand," agreed Gabriella quietly.
+
+"But I should like you to have the name," pursued Madame "A little money
+would be necessary, of course--perhaps you might buy a half
+interest--that would be simple. You could make a big success of it with
+your social position and your wealthy acquaintances. Surely you can find
+some one who is ready to make such a splendid investment?"
+
+"Perhaps," admitted Gabriella, as quietly as before. Unlike Madame, who,
+being an incurable idealist, had won her victories not by accepting but
+by evading facts, Gabriella was frankly skeptical about the practical
+value of either her social position or her wealthy acquaintances.
+Neither possession impressed her at the moment as marketable, except in
+the vivid imagination of Madame, and her social position, at least, was
+constructed of a very thin and unsubstantial fabric. Guided by the
+prudent streak in her character, she rested her hope not upon
+incorporeal possessions, but upon the solid bodies of her patrons that
+must be clothed. Her imposing acquaintances would avail her scarcely
+more, she suspected, than would the noble ghost of that ancestor who was
+a general in the Revolution. What she relied on was the certainty that
+she knew her work, and that Madame's customers from the greatest to the
+least, from Mrs. Pletheridge to poor Miss Peterson, who bought only one
+good gown a year, admitted the thoroughness of her knowledge. She had
+got on by learning all that there was to learn about the details of the
+work, and she stood now, secure and unassailable, on the foundation of
+her achievement. In ten years she had fulfilled her resolution--she had
+made herself indispensable. By patience, by hard work, by self-control,
+by ceaseless thought, and by innumerable sacrifices, she had made
+herself indispensable; and the result was that, as Madame weakened, she
+had grown steadily stronger. Without her Dinard's would have dropped
+long ago to the position of a second-rate house, and she was aware that
+Madame understood this quite as clearly as she did. For whatever
+Madame's executive ability may have been in the past, it had dwindled
+now to the capricious endeavours of a chronic invalid--of an aging
+invalid, notwithstanding her desperate struggle for youth. Half as much
+energy as Madame had spent resisting Nature might have won for her a
+sanctified memory had it been directed toward the practice of piety, or
+a tablet of imperishable granite had it been devoted to as tireless a
+pursuit of art or science. To her battle against age she had brought the
+ambition of a conqueror and the devotion of a martyr; and at the last,
+even to-day, there was a superb defiance in her refusal to acknowledge
+defeat, in her demand that her surrender should be regarded as a
+capitulation.
+
+"In a day or two I hope to be able to discuss my plan with you," said
+Gabriella, and she could not keep the softness of pity out of her voice.
+So this was what life came to, after all? For an instant she felt the
+overwhelming discouragement which is the portion of those who approach
+life not through vision, but through outward events, who seek a solution
+not in the deeper consciousness of the spirit, but in the changing
+surface of experience. Then, even before her glance had left Madame's
+golden head, her natural optimism regained control of her mind, and she
+told herself stoutly that if this was Madame's present, then it followed
+logically that Madame must have had a past, and that past must have been
+an agreeable one. It was inconceivable that she should defy the laws of
+God for the sake of a prolongation of tragedy.
+
+"It is a splendid investment," croaked the old woman in the midst of
+Gabriella's painful reflections. "The house was never more flourishing."
+
+The ruling principle which decreed that Gabriella should keep her temper
+had disciplined her not less thoroughly in the habit of holding her
+tongue. The house was in a flourishing condition; but she remembered how
+fragile and thinly rooted had been its showy prosperity, when she had
+entered it; and had she cared to confound Madame utterly, she might have
+reminded her of that unwritten history of the past ten years in which
+the secret episode of Mrs. Pletheridge occurred. For Gabriella was not
+inclined to underrate her own efficiency, and her confidence was
+supported by the knowledge that if she left Dinard's the most
+fashionable of Madame's clientele would follow her.
+
+"You'll never have such another opportunity--not if you live to be a
+hundred. At your age I should have jumped at the idea," persisted
+Madame.
+
+"So should I," responded Gabriella merrily, "if I were sure of landing
+on my feet."
+
+"You'll always land on your feet--you're that sort. You've got push, and
+it's push that counts most in business. A woman may have all the brains
+in the world, but without push she might as well give up the struggle.
+That was what brought me up in spite of four husbands and six children,"
+pursued Madame, while she took out a small flask from one of the drawers
+of her desk and measured out, as she remarked in parenthesis, "a little
+stimulant." "Yes, I had a great success in my line, and if I could only
+have kept clear of men, I might have saved a fortune to retire on in my
+old age. But I had a natural taste for men, and they were the ruin of
+me. As soon as I lost one husband and managed to get on a bit, another
+would come, and I couldn't resist him. I never could resist marriage;
+that was the undoing of me as a woman of business."
+
+"Four husbands, and yet you were remarkably successful," observed
+Gabriella, because it was the only thing with a cheerful sound she could
+think of to utter, and an intermittent cheerful sound was all that
+Madame required from a listener when she was under the enlivening
+influence of brandy.
+
+"But think what I might have done with my talent if I had remained a
+widow, as you have done. It was my misfortune to attract men whether I
+wanted to or not," wheezed Madame, wiping her eyes; "some women are like
+that."
+
+"So I have heard," murmured Gabriella, seeing that Madame paused for the
+note of encouragement.
+
+"I don't suppose that has been your trouble, for there's a
+stand-offishness about you that puts men at a distance, and they don't
+like to be put at a distance. Then, though your figure is very fine for
+showing off models, it isn't exactly the kind that men lean to. If you'd
+fatten up it might be different, but that would spoil you for the
+clothes, and that, after all, is more important. It's strange, isn't
+it?" she croaked, with an alcoholic chuckle, "how partial men are to
+full figures even after they have gone out of fashion?"
+
+And with this wonder still ringing in her ears, Gabriella turned away,
+to attend a customer, who demanded, in cool defiance of man and nature,
+to be transformed into a straight silhouette.
+
+Gabriella had not seen Judge Crowborough for several years, and her
+first impression, when she entered his office at five o'clock, was one
+of surprise at his ugliness. Though he had changed but little since
+their first meeting at Mrs. Fowler's dinner, the years had softened her
+memory of his appearance, and she had skilfully persuaded herself that
+one should not judge a man by a repelling exterior, which, after all,
+might cover a great deal of goodness. After George's flight and
+Archibald Fowler's death he had been very kind to her. "I don't know
+what I should have done without him at that time," she thought now, as
+she stood with his big, soft hand clasping hers and his admiring fishy
+eyes on her face. "No, it is impossible to judge by appearances, and all
+men think well of him, all men respect him," she concluded, feeling
+suddenly reassured.
+
+"It's been a long time--it must be nearly' three years--since I saw
+you," he remarked, with flattering geniality, "and you look younger than
+ever."
+
+"Hard work keeps me young, then. I work very hard." Her charming smile
+flashed like an edge of light on her lips, and lent glow and fervor to
+her pale face beneath the silver-brightened cloud of her hair. She read
+his admiration in the bold gaze he fastened upon her, and though she was
+without coquetry, she was conscious that her vanity was agreeably
+soothed.
+
+"What is it? Dressmaking?" He was obviously interested.
+
+"Yes--dresses and hats. Hats are rather my specialty. I manage things
+now almost entirely at Dinard's. Have you ever heard of the house?"
+
+He nodded. "I remember. That's where you went after Archibald died,
+wasn't it?" His memory amazed her. What a mind for trifles he had! What
+a wonderful man he was for his years!
+
+"Yes, I've been there ever since. I've done well as things go, but, of
+course, it has been hard. It has been a hard life."
+
+"And you never came to me. I wanted to help you. I'd have done anything
+I could to make it easier for you, but you were so proud. You'd have got
+on twice as well if you had given up your pride."
+
+The telephone rang, and while he answered it, she watched his broad,
+slouching back, his swelling paunch overflowing now above the stays he
+wore to reduce it, the coarsened flesh of his neck, bulging above the
+edge of his collar, and the shining, baldness on the top of his head,
+which gave an appearance of commanding intellect to his empurpled
+forehead. How hideous he was, how revolting, and yet what a power! A
+face like his on a woman would have condemned her to isolation and
+misery, but, so far as one could judge, it had scarcely interfered with
+his happiness. His mental force had risen superior to his face, to his
+paunch, to his whole repulsive appearance. Greater than Madame because
+of his sex, he had achieved a triumph over the corporeal mass of his
+body which she, fortified and abetted by a hundred cosmetics and
+manipulations, could never attain. Where Madame relied on futile
+artificial aids in her battle against decay, he hurled the tremendous
+power of his personality, and ugliness became at once as insignificant
+as immorality in his life. "One can't judge him by the standards of
+other men," thought Gabriella, using a remembered phrase of
+Fifty-seventh Street.
+
+Judge Crowborough was still talking earnestly into the telephone, and
+she gathered vaguely that his earnestness related to a donation he had
+promised his church. "Raise two hundred thousand, and I'll double it,"
+he said abruptly, and hung up the receiver. "We want a new
+organ--something really fine, you know," he observed casually as he
+turned back to Gabriella. "We are moving--everything is moving up, and
+the church has to keep step with the age. You can't keep progress out of
+religion any more than you can out of business--not that I'm in favour
+of modernism or any of that stuff--but we've got to keep moving." He
+spoke with conviction, and there was no doubt that he sincerely believed
+himself to be an important factor in the religious movement of his
+country. Then his tone changed to one of intimate friendliness and he
+asked: "Have you heard any music this winter? If I'd only known about
+you, I'd have sent you tickets to the opera."
+
+"The children go sometimes," she answered. That he should imagine her
+buying opera tickets for herself, with the children needing every penny
+she made, seemed to her ridiculous; but rich men were always like that,
+she reflected a little scornfully.
+
+"If I'd only remembered about you," he murmured, and turning heavily in
+his chair, he added authoritatively: "Now tell me about it. Tell me the
+whole thing straight through. I am going to help you."
+
+She told him rapidly, and while she talked a sense of perfect peace and
+security enveloped her. It was so long since she had been able to ask
+advice of a man; it was so long since anybody bigger and stronger than
+she had undertaken to adjust her perplexities. The past returned to her
+as a dream, and she felt again that absolute reliance on the masculine
+ability to control events, to ease burdens, to remove difficulties,
+which had visited her in her childhood when Cousin Jimmy appeared in the
+front parlour in Hill Street. "It's wonderful how men manage things,"
+she thought. "It's wonderful being a man. Everything is so simple for
+men."
+
+"Well, don't worry a minute longer. It's all as easy as--as possible,"
+observed the great man serenely when she had finished. "From what you
+tell me it looks as if it were a pretty good investment to begin with,
+and there are plenty of people around looking for ways to invest money.
+I'm looking for ways myself, when it comes to that," he proclaimed, with
+a paternal smile as he sank back on the luxurious leather cushions of
+his chair.
+
+"You are so good," she responded gratefully, "so good"; and she was
+speaking sincerely.
+
+With his casual gaze, which seemed to turn inward, fixed on the ceiling
+above her head, he invited her confidence by a few perfectly chosen
+expressions of comprehension and sympathy. The acuteness and activity
+of his mental processes delighted her while he questioned her. After the
+slovenly methods of Madame, after the loose reasoning and the muddled
+thinking of all the women she met in the course of her work, there was a
+positive pleasure in following the exactness and inflexibility of his
+logic. His reasoning was orderly, neat, elastic, without loose ends or
+tangled skeins to unravel, and she felt again, while she listened to
+him, the confidence which had come to her as soon as she entered his
+office. He was efficiency incarnate, and from her childhood up she had
+respected efficiency. In an hour, in less time than it had taken her to
+tell her story, he had lifted the weight from her shoulders, had
+mastered the details of Madame's intricate problems, and had outlined
+the terms by which Gabriella could accept the old woman's offer without
+placing herself under financial obligations. Her pride, he had discerned
+at a glance, shrank from obligation, and he was as alert to save her
+pride as he was to make a good bargain with Madame.
+
+"It's a good thing. It's good business. Don't think I'm losing for a
+minute," he said as she rose to go, and she felt that some secret
+delicacy, the last feeling she would have attributed to him, was
+prompting his words.
+
+"I can't tell you what a relief it is to talk to you," she said, holding
+out her hand while she hesitated between the desk and the door. "I can't
+even begin to tell you how grateful I am. I haven't had any one to
+advise me since I left Richmond, and it is such a comfort"
+
+"Well, I'll give you the best advice in my power. I'll give you the very
+best," he replied as frankly as if he were discussing his gift to the
+church. "What's more, I'll think it over a bit while I'm at the Hot
+Springs, and talk to you about it when I come back. I suppose I can
+always get you on the telephone, can't I?"
+
+His manner was still casual and business-like, and it did not change by
+so much as a shade when he moved a step nearer and put his arm about her
+waist. If he had taken down his hat or lighted a cigar, he would
+probably have performed either action with the same air of automatic
+efficiency; and she realized, in the very instant of her amazement, that
+his manner was merely an authoritative expression of his power. What
+astonished her most in the incident, after all, was not the judge's
+share in it, but the vividness and coolness of her own mental
+impressions. She was not frightened, she was not even disturbed, she was
+merely disgusted. Never before had she understood so clearly the
+immeasurable distance that divided the Gabriella of seventeen years ago
+from the Gabriella who released herself calmly from the appalling clasp
+of the casual and business-like old man. To the Gabriella who had loved
+George such an episode would have appeared as an inconceivable horror.
+Now, with her worldly wisdom and her bitter knowledge of love, she found
+herself regarding the situation with sardonic humour. The stupendous,
+the incredible vanity of man!--she reflected disdainfully. Was there
+ever a man too ugly, too repulsive, or too old to delude himself with
+the belief that he might still become the object of passion?
+
+"Now you've spoiled it," she said shortly, but without embarrassment.
+"Now you've spoiled it." She put the case to him plainly, the Gabriella
+who would have blushed and trembled and wept seventeen years ago.
+
+"But I meant nothing," he said, genuinely disturbed. "I assure you I am
+truly sorry if I have offended you. It was nothing--a mere matter of--"
+the word "habit," she knew, hovered on his lips, though he did not utter
+it, and broke off inconclusively.
+
+So there had not been even the excuse of emotion about it. He had
+embraced her as instinctively, as methodically, as he might have
+switched on the electric light over his desk. Here again she was brought
+to a stop before an overwhelming realization of the fundamental
+differences between man and woman. To think of woman behaving like that
+merely because it had become a matter of habit!
+
+"I always liked you, you know," he said abruptly, with a sincere
+emphasis.
+
+"Well, there are different ways of liking," she rejoined coldly, "and I
+happen not to care for this way."
+
+"If you don't like it, I'll never do it again," he promised, almost
+humbly. "I'll be a good friend to you, honestly I will. I'll treat you
+as if you were--you were--"
+
+"A gentleman," finished Gabriella, and smiled in spite of herself. After
+all, what was the use of resenting the facts of life? What was the use
+of reproaching the mud that spattered over one's clothes?
+
+"Well, that's a bargain. I'll treat you as a gentleman." There was a
+fine quality about the man; she could not deny it.
+
+"I'll forgive you then and forget it." It was the tolerant Gabriella who
+spoke--the Gabriella of disillusioning experience and a clear vision of
+life--not the impassioned idealist of the 'nineties. When all was said,
+you had to take men and things as you found them. That was philosophy,
+and that was also "good business." It was foolish to apply romantic
+theories to the positive actuality.
+
+"Well, you _are_ a gentleman," exclaimed the judge, with facetiousness.
+"That's why I always liked you, I suppose. You're straight and you're
+honest and there's no nonsense about you."
+
+If he had only known! She thought of the romantic girl of the 'nineties,
+of her buoyant optimism, her childlike ignorance, her violent
+certainties, and of her triumphant, "I can manage my life!" If he had
+only known how she had "muddled things" at the beginning, would he have
+said that she had "no nonsense about her?"
+
+In the subway, a little later, clinging to a dirty strap, with a
+blackened mechanic in the seat before her, a box of tools at her feet,
+and a garlic-scented charwoman jolting against her shoulder, she was
+overcome by a sudden cloud of despondency. Her courage, her hopefulness,
+her philosophy, seemed to melt like frost in her thoughts, leaving
+behind only a sodden sense of loss, of emptiness, of defeat. "I've had a
+mean life," she said to herself resentfully. "I've had a mean life. What
+has ever happened to me that was worth while? What have I ever had
+except hard work and disappointment? I am thirty-seven years old. My
+youth is going, and I have nothing to show for it but ten years of
+dressmaking. The best of my life is over, and when I look back on it, it
+is only a blank." It was as if the interview with the great man she had
+just left had completed the desolating retrospect of a lifetime. Was
+there nothing but disenchantment ahead of her? Was life merely the
+dropping of illusion after illusion, the falling of petals at the first
+touch from a flower that is beginning to fade? "Yes, nothing has ever
+happened to me that was worth while," she repeated, forgetting her
+children for the moment. Then, because the heavy air stifled her, she
+left the car and turned into West Twenty-third Street where the lights
+were coming out softly in the spring twilight. Though it was too late to
+go over the house Fanny wanted, it occurred to her that she might look
+at the outside of it before she took the Harlem elevated train at one of
+the West Side stations. The walk would do her good and perhaps blow away
+the disquieting recollections of her encounter with Judge Crowborough.
+Not until her mood changed, she determined, would she go back to the
+children.
+
+At the corner she bought a bunch of lilacs because a man held them out
+to her temptingly when she approached, and as she buried her face in the
+blossoms, she said resolutely: "No, I haven't had a mean life. It can't
+be mean unless I think it so, and I won't--I won't. After all, it isn't
+the kind of life you have, but the way you think about it that matters."
+
+The air was deliciously mild; streaks of pale gold lingered above the
+grim outlines of the buildings; and the wild, sweet spirit of spring
+fluttered like an imprisoned creature in the gray streets of the city.
+It was May again, and the pipes of Pan were fluting the ancient songs in
+the ancient racial fields of the memory. There was a spring softness in
+the fleecy white of the clouds, in the flowing gold of the sunset, in
+the languorous kiss of the breeze, in the gentle rippling waves of the
+dust on the pavement. For years she had been so tranquil, and now
+suddenly, at the flitting touch of the spirit of spring, she knew that
+youth was slipping, slipping, and that with youth, went romance,
+enchantment, adventure. It was slipping from her, and she had never
+really held it. She had had only the second-rate; she had missed the
+best always--the best of life, the best of love, the best of endeavour
+and achievement. She had missed the finer reality. From somewhere, from
+the past or the present, from the dream or the actuality, her young
+illusions and her young longings rushed over her, driven by the
+fragrance of the lilacs, which was stinging her blood into revolt. Only
+an instant the revolt lasted, but in that instant of vision nothing
+mattered in life except romance, enchantment, adventure.
+
+"Yes, I've missed life," she thought, and the regret was still in her
+mind when one of those miracles which in our ignorance we call accidents
+occurred. Out of the lilac-scented twilight, out of the wild, sweet
+spirit of spring, a voice said in her ear, "Alice, you waited!"
+
+Turning quickly, she had a vivid impression of height, breadth, bigness,
+of roughened dark red hair, of gray eyes so clean that they looked 'as
+if they had been washed by the sea. Then the voice spoke again: "I beg
+your pardon. It was a mistake." And the next instant she was alone in
+the street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+DISCOVERIES
+
+
+"Who is Alice?" she wondered on her way home, "and for whom was she
+waiting?" A shopgirl perhaps, and he was, probably--not a clerk in a
+shop--he looked more like a mechanic--but hardly a gentleman. Not, at
+any rate, what her mother or Jane would call a gentleman--not the kind
+of gentleman that George was, or Charley Gracey, for instance. He was
+doubtless devoid of those noble traditions by and through which, her
+mother had always told her, a gentleman was made out of a man--the
+traditions which had created Arthur and Cousin Jimmy as surely as they
+had created George and Charley. "I wonder what tradition really amounts
+to?" she thought, while she stood on the rear platform of a Harlem
+train, grasping the handle of the door as the car swung round a curve.
+"All my life, I have been getting farther away from it--a woman has to,
+I suppose, when she works--and if I get away from it myself how can I
+honestly hold to it for men, who, according to mother, can't be
+gentlemen without it?" Then reverting to her first question, she resumed
+musingly: "Who _is_ Alice? It would be rather amusing to be Alice for
+one evening, and to find out what it means to be loved by a man like
+that, even if he isn't a gentleman. He was, I think, the cleanest
+creature I ever saw, and it wasn't just the cleanness of soap and
+water--it went deeper than that. It was the cleanness of the winds and
+the sea--as if his eyes had been washed by the sea. I wonder who Alice
+is? A common little shopgirl probably from Sixth Avenue, with padded
+hair and painted lips, and smelling of cheap powder. That's just the
+kind of girl to fascinate a big, strong, simple creature like that Yes,
+of course, Alice is cheap and tawdry and vulgar, with no substance to
+her mind." She tried to think of Arthur, but her mental image of him had
+become as thin and unsubstantial as a shadow.
+
+When she reached the apartment, Fanny rushed into her arms, and inquired
+breathlessly if she had taken the house?
+
+"We went down again to look at it, mother, and we like it even better
+than ever. It will be so lovely to live next door to Carlie. We can
+tango every evening, and Carlie knows a lot of boys who come in to dance
+because the floor is so good."
+
+Her cheeks flushed while she talked, and, for the moment, she lost
+entirely her resemblance to Jane, who was never animated, though she
+made a perpetual murmurous sound. Unlike Jane, Fanny was vivacious,
+pert, and, for her years, extraordinarily sophisticated. Already she
+dressed with extreme smartness; already she was thinking of men as of
+possible lovers; and already she was beginning, in her mother's phrase,
+"to manage her life." Her trite little face, in its mist of golden hair,
+which she took hours to arrange, still reminded one of the insipid angel
+on a Christmas card; but in spite of the engaging innocence of her look,
+she was prodigiously experienced in the beguiling arts of her sex.
+Almost from the cradle she had had "a way" with men; and her "way" was
+as far superior in finesse to the simple coquetry of Cousin Pussy as the
+worldliness of Broadway was superior to the worldliness of Hill Street.
+From her yellow hair, which she wore very low over her forehead and
+ears, to her silk stockings of the gray called "London smoke," which
+showed coquettishly below her "hobble" skirt, and above the flashing
+silver buckles on her little pointed shoes of; patent leather, Fanny was
+as uncompromisingly modern in her appearance as she was in her tastes or
+her philosophy. Her mind, which was small and trite like her face, was
+of a curiously speculative bent, though its speculations were directed
+mainly toward the by-paths of knowledge which Gabriella, in her busy
+life, had had neither the time nor the inclination to explore. For Fanny
+was frankly interested in vice with the cool and dispassionate interest
+of the inquiring spectator. She was perfectly aware of the social evil;
+and unknown to Gabriella she had investigated, through the ample medium
+of the theatre and fiction, every dramatic phase of the traffic in white
+slaves. Her coolness never deserted her, for she was as temperamental as
+a fish, and, for all the sunny white and gold of her surface, she had
+the shallow restlessness of a meadow brook. At twelve years of age she
+had devoted herself to music and had planned an operatic career; at
+fourteen, she had turned to literature, and was writing a novel; and a
+year later, encouraged by her practical mother, she had plunged into the
+movement for woman suffrage, and had marched, in a white dress and
+carrying a purple banner, through an admiring crowd in Fifth Avenue.
+To-day, after a variable period, when she had dabbled in kindergarten,
+wood engraving, the tango, and settlement work, she was studying for
+the stage, and had fallen in love with a matinée idol. Gabriella, who
+had welcomed the wood engraving and the kindergartening and had been
+sympathetically, though impersonally, aware of the suffrage movement,
+just as she had been aware many years before of the Spanish War, was
+deeply disturbed by her daughter's recent effervescence of emotion.
+
+"I suppose she'll get over it. She gets over everything," she had said
+to Miss Polly, drawing painful comfort from the shallowness and
+insincerity of Fanny's nature, "but something dreadful might happen
+while she is in one of her moods."
+
+"Not with Fanny," Miss Polly had replied reassuringly. "Fanny knows more
+already than you and I put together, and she's got about as much red
+blood as a lemon. She ain't the sort that things happen to, so don't you
+begin to worry about her. She's got mighty little sense, that's the
+gospel truth, but the little she's got has been sharpened down to a
+p'int."
+
+"I can't help feeling that she hasn't been well brought up. I did what I
+could, but she needed more time and care than I could give her. It
+wasn't, of course, as if I'd chosen to neglect her. I have been obliged
+to work or she would have starved."
+
+"Oh, well, I wouldn't bother about that. It's like wishing chickens back
+in the shell after they're hatched--there ain't a particle of use in it.
+If you ask me what I think--then, I'd say that Fanny would be just
+exactly what she is if you'd raised her down yonder in Virginia. Her
+father's in her as well as you, and it seems to me that she grows more
+like him every day that she lives. Now, Archibald is your child,
+anybody can tell that at a glance. It's queer, ain't it how the boys
+almost always seem to take after the mother?"
+
+"But Charley has a splendid daughter. Think of his Margaret."
+
+"Of course, there ain't any rule that works out every time; but you
+know, I'll always take up for Mr. Charley if it's with the last breath I
+draw. It ain't always the woman that gets the worst of marriage, though
+to hear some people talk you'd think it was nothin' but turkey and plum
+puddin' for men. But it ain't, I don't care who says so, and if anybody
+but a saint could have married Jane without takin' to drink, I'd like to
+have seen him try it, that's all."
+
+That was three weeks ago, and to-night, while Fanny rattled on about the
+house in West Twenty-third Street, her mother watched her with a
+tolerant affection in which there was neither admiration nor pride. She
+was not deluded about Fanny's character, though the maternal mote in her
+eye obscured her critical vision of her appearance. But, notwithstanding
+the fact that she thought Fanny beautiful, she was clearly aware that
+the girl had never been, since she left the cradle, anything but a
+source of anxiety; and for the last week or two Gabriella had been more
+than usually worried about her infatuation for the matinée idol. In
+spite of Miss Polly's assurances that Fanny was too calculating for rash
+adventures, Gabriella had spent several sleepless nights over the remote
+possibility of an entanglement, and her anxiety was heightened by the
+fact that the child told her nothing. They were so different that there
+was little real sympathy between them, and confidences from daughter to
+mother must spring, she knew, from fulness of sympathy. "I wonder if
+she ever realizes how hard I have worked for her?" she thought. "How
+completely I've given up my life?" And there rose in her thoughts the
+wish that her children could have stayed children forever. "As long as
+they were little, they filled my life, but as soon as they get big
+enough for other things, they break away from me--even Archibald will
+change when he goes away to school, next year, and I shall never have
+him again as he is now." At the very time, she knew, when she needed
+them most--when middle-age was approaching--her children were failing
+her not only as companions, but as a supreme and vital reason for
+living. If they could have stayed babies, she felt that she should have
+been satisfied to go on forever with nothing else in her life; but in a
+little while they would grow up and begin to lead their own intense
+personal lives, while she, having outlived her usefulness, would be left
+with only her work, with only dressmaking and millinery for a life
+interest. "Something is wrong with me," she thought sternly; "the visit
+to the judge must have upset me. I don't usually have such wretched
+thoughts in the evening."
+
+"Did you bring me your school report, darling?" she asked.
+
+Yes, Fanny had brought it, and she drew it forth reluctantly from the
+pages of a novel. It was impossible to make her study. She was as
+incapable of application as a butterfly. "I thought you were going to do
+better this month, Fanny," said Gabriella reproachfully.
+
+"Oh, mother dear, I want to leave school. I hate it! Please let me begin
+to study for the stage. You know you always said the study of
+Shakespeare was improving."
+
+They were in the midst of the argument when Archibald came in, and he
+showed little sympathy with Fanny's dramatic ambition.
+
+"The stage? Nonsense! What you want is to get safely married," he
+remarked scornfully, and Gabriella agreed with him. There was no doubt
+in her mind that for some women, and Fanny promised to be one of these,
+marriage was the only safeguard. Then she looked at Archibald, strong,
+sturdy, self-reliant, and clever; and she realized, with a pang, that
+some day he also would marry--that she must lose him as well as Fanny.
+
+"I've had a letter from Pelham Forest, dear," she said--Pelham Forest
+was a school in Virginia--"and I am making up my mind to let you go
+there next autumn."
+
+"And then to the University of Virginia where Grandfather went?"
+
+"Yes, and then to the University of Virginia."
+
+Though she tried to speak lightly, the thought of the coming separation
+brought a pang to her heart.
+
+"Well, I'd rather work," said Archibald stoutly. "I don't want to go
+away to school. I'd a long sight rather start in with a railroad or a
+steamship company and make my way up."
+
+"But, darling, I couldn't bear that. You must have an education. It's
+what I've worked for from the beginning, and when you've finished at the
+university, I want to send you abroad to study. If only Fanny would go
+to college, too, I'd be so happy."
+
+"Don't you waste any money on Fanny's education," retorted Archibald,
+"because it isn't worth it. What we ought to do is to get to work and
+let you take a rest. The first money I make, I'm going to spend on
+giving you pretty clothes and a rest."
+
+"I don't want to rest, dear," replied Gabriella, with a laugh. "I'm not
+an old lady yet, you silly boy." How ridiculous it was that he always
+spoke of her work as if it were a hardship--a burden from which she must
+be released at the first opportunity. That was so like Cousin Jimmy, a
+survival, she supposed, from the tradition of the South. Unlike Fanny,
+whose horizon was bounded by her personal inclinations, Archibald seemed
+never to think of himself, never to put either his comfort or his career
+before his love for his mother. To attempt to shape Fanny's character
+was like working in tissue paper, but there was stout substance in
+Archibald. Gabriella had tried hard--she told herself over and over
+again that she had tried as hard as she could--with both of her
+children; and with one of them at least she felt that she had succeeded.
+There was, she knew, the making of a splendid man in her son; and his
+very ugliness, which had been so noticeable when he was a child, was
+developing now into attractiveness. For it was the ugliness of strength,
+not of weakness, and there was no trace in his nature of the
+self-indulgence which had ruined his father.
+
+"But I don't want to go to college, mother dear," protested Fanny, who
+always addressed Gabriella as "dear" when she was about to become
+intractable; "I want to go on the stage."
+
+"You are not to see another play, except when I take you, for a whole
+year. Remember what I tell you, Fanny!" replied Gabriella sternly. Not
+Mrs. Carr herself, not Cousin Becky Bollingbroke, of sanctified memory,
+could have regarded an actress's career with greater horror than did the
+advanced and independent Gabriella. Any career, indeed, appeared to her
+to be out of the question for Fanny (a girl who couldn't even get on a
+street car without being spoken to), and of all careers the one the
+stage afforded was certainly the last she would have selected for her
+daughter.
+
+"I'll remember," responded Fanny coolly, and Gabriella knew in her heart
+that the girl would disobey her at the first opportunity. It was
+impossible to chaperon her every minute, and Fanny, unchaperoned, was,
+in the realistic phrase of her brother, "looking for trouble."
+
+"I'll send her to boarding-school next year," Gabriella determined; and
+she reflected gloomily that with Fanny and, Archibald both away, she
+might as well be a bachelor woman.
+
+"Well, children, you're both going away next winter," she said
+positively. "I can't look after you, Fanny, and make your living at the
+same time, so I shall send you to boarding-school. What do you say to
+Miss Bradfordine's?"
+
+"That's up on the Hudson, mother. I don't want to go out of New York."
+Fanny was genuinely alarmed at last.
+
+"The farther away from New York the better, my daughter."
+
+"What will you do here all alone with Miss Polly?
+
+"Oh, we'll do very well," answered Gabriella with cheerful promptness;
+"you need not worry about me."
+
+"If I'm good this summer, will you change your mind, mother?"
+
+"Try being good, and see." Though Gabriella spoke sweetly, it was with
+the obstinate sweetness of Mrs. Carr. One thing she had resolved firmly
+in the last quarter of an hour: Fanny should go away to boarding-school
+next September.
+
+"Ain't you goin' to walk in the suffrage parade this year, Fanny?"
+inquired Miss Polly, who always thought it necessary to interrupt an
+argument between Gabriella and her daughter.
+
+"I haven't anything to wear," replied Fanny pettishly. Her brief
+interest in "votes for women" had evaporated with the entrance of the
+matinée idol into her life.
+
+"There's a lovely white gown just in from Paris I'll get for you," said
+Gabriella pleasantly. She was tired, for she had had a trying day; but
+long ago, when her children were babies, she had determined that she
+would never permit herself to speak sharply to them. In Fanny's most
+exasperating humours, Gabriella tried to remember her own youthful
+mistakes, tried to be lenient to George's faults which she recognized in
+the girl's character.
+
+"As if anybody needed to be dressed up to march!" exclaimed Archibald
+scornfully, and he added: "She's always acting, isn't she, mother?"
+
+"Hush, dear, you mustn't tease your sister," Gabriella admonished the
+boy, though her voice when she spoke to him was attuned to a deeper and
+softer note.
+
+"If you make me go to boarding-school next year, I don't care whether
+you take the rooms in Twenty-third Street or not," said Fanny sullenly,
+for, in spite of her fickle temperament, there was a remarkable tenacity
+in her thwarted inclinations.
+
+"Very well. I'll look at the house and decide to-morrow." As the servant
+came in to lay the table, Gabriella dismissed the subject of Fanny's
+school, and opened the book--it chanced to be a volume of
+Browning--which she was reading aloud to the children.
+
+"I am really worried about Fanny," she said to Miss Folly at midnight,
+while she lingered in the living-room before going to bed. "I honestly
+don't know what to make of her, and I feel, somehow, that she is one of
+my failures."
+
+"Well, you can't expect everything to go the way you want it. Did you
+see the judge?"
+
+"Yes, I saw him, but it was no use." Her visit to Judge Crowborough
+appeared to her perturbed mind as a piece of headstrong and extravagant
+folly, and she dismissed it from her thoughts as she had dismissed
+heavier burdens in the past. "Men simply won't treat Women in business
+as they treat men, and I don't see unless human nature changes, how it
+is to be helped. But what about the house in Twenty-third Street? Do you
+think I ought to look at it?"
+
+"It was the most homelike place we saw, by a long way. There ain't many
+places in New York where you can have a flower-bed in the front yard."
+
+"Do you think Fanny will be happy there? A year before this stage mania
+seized her, you know, she was wild to move to Park Avenue."
+
+"Well, you know I've got a suspicion," Miss Folly dropped her voice to a
+whisper. "Of course it ain't nothin' but a suspicion, for she never
+opens her mouth about it to me, but I've got a right smart suspicion
+that that young actor she is so crazy about lives somewhere down there
+in that neighbourhood, and she thinks she could watch him go by in the
+street. I don't believe, you know, that she's ever so much as spoken to
+him in her life."
+
+"It's impossible!" exclaimed Gabriella, for this revelation of Miss
+Polly's discernment was astonishing to her; "but if that's the case,"
+she added gravely, "I oughtn't to think of moving into the house."
+
+"Oh, well, I don't know that he's anywhere very near, and Fanny's goin'
+to be at boarding-school for a year or two and away with Jane at the
+White Sulphur in the summers. She won't be there much anyhow, will she?"
+
+"Not much, but how I shall miss her--and, of course, if I miss her, I'll
+miss Archibald even more, because he gives me no anxiety. It's odd," she
+finished abruptly, "but I've been depressed all day. I suppose my
+birthday has something to do with it."
+
+"You ain't often like that, Gabriella. I never saw anybody keep in
+better spirits than you do."
+
+"I'm happy, but the spring makes me restless. I feel as if I'd missed
+something I ought to have had."
+
+"All of us feel that way at times, I reckon, but it don't last, and we
+settle down comfortably after a while to doin' without what we haven't
+got. And you've been mighty successful, honey. You've succeeded in
+everything you undertook except marriage."
+
+"Yes, except my marriage."
+
+"Well, I reckon things happen and you can't do 'em over again," observed
+the little seamstress, with the natural fatalism of the "poor white" of
+the South.
+
+As she undressed and got into bed, Gabriella told herself cheerfully
+that there was, indeed, no need to worry over things that you couldn't
+change after they happened. From the open window a shaft of light fell
+on her mirror, and while she watched it, she tried to convince her
+rebellious imagination that she was perfectly satisfied, that life had
+given her all that she had ever desired. "I have more than most women
+anyhow," she insisted, weakening a little. "I've accomplished what I
+undertook, and by the time I'm fifty, if things go well, I may become a
+rich woman. I'll be able to give Fanny everything that she wants, and if
+she hasn't married, we can go abroad every summer, and Archibald can
+join us in Switzerland or the Tyrol. About Archibald, at least, I can
+feel perfectly easy. He is the kind of boy to succeed. He is strong, he
+hasn't a weakness, and I am sure there isn't a brighter boy in the
+world." Around the shaft of light in the mirror a stream of sparks, like
+tiny comets, began to form and quiver back and forth as if they were
+flying. "It's a pity the judge can't help me, but it wouldn't do. I'd
+never forget what happened to-day, and you can never tell when trouble
+like that is coming. I'll either make Madame give me half the profits
+for managing the business or I'll go to Blakeley & Grymn at a salary of
+ten thousand a year. She won't let me go, of course, because she knows
+I'd take two thirds of her customers with the. Then I'll invest all I
+can save in the business until finally I am able to buy it entirely--"
+An elevated train passed the corner, and while the rumble died slowly in
+the distance, she found herself thinking of Arthur. "How different my
+life might have been if I had only stayed true to him. That's the
+happiest lot that could fall to a woman, to be loved by a man as
+faithful and tender as Arthur." For a few minutes she lay, without
+thought, watching the lights quiver and dance in the mirror, and
+listening to the faint rumble of the elevated train far up the street.
+Then, just as she was falling asleep, a question flashed out of the
+flickering lights into her mind, and she started awake again. "I wonder
+who Alice is?" she said aloud to the night.
+
+Several weeks, later, at the end of a busy day, Gabriella stood in front
+of the house in London Terrace, watching her furniture as it passed
+across the pavement and up the flagged walk into the hail. The yard was
+neglected and overgrown with dandelions and wire-grass; but an old
+rose-bush by the steps was in full bloom, and already Miss Polly was
+surveying the tangled weeds with the eye of a destroyer.
+
+"I declare I'm just hungerin' for flowers," she said wistfully,
+following the dining-room table as far as the foot of the steps where
+Gabriella stood. "The very first thing in the morning before I get
+breakfast, I'm goin' to sow some mignonette and nasturtium seeds in that
+border along the wall, and fix some window boxes with clove pinks and
+sweet alyssum in 'em like your ma used to have in summer. I reckon
+that's why I was so set on this place from the first. It looks more like
+Richmond in old times than it does like New York."
+
+Beyond the grass and weeds, over which Gabriella was gazing, the street
+was so quiet for the moment that it might have been one of those
+forgotten squares in Richmond (she had never called them blocks) where
+needy gentlewomen still practised "light housekeeping" in the social
+twilight of the last century. Now and then a tired man or woman slouched
+by from work; once a newsboy stopped at the gate to shout the name of
+his paper in belligerent accents; and a few wagons or a clanging car
+passed rapidly in the direction of Broadway. From the corner of Ninth
+Avenue the elevated road, which seemed to her at times the only
+permanent thing in her surroundings, still roared and rumbled its
+disturbing undercurrent in her life.
+
+"I think we shall be quite comfortable here," she said, watching the
+last piece of furniture pass through the door. "Where are the children?"
+The air had the rich softness of summer, and the roving fragrance from
+the old garden rose-bush by the steps awakened a strange homesickness in
+her heart--that mysterious homesickness which the spring gives us for
+places we have never seen.
+
+"The children are upstairs fixing their rooms," replied Miss. Polly,
+stooping to pluck up a weed by the roots. "I reckon I'd better go and
+tell Minnie to begin gettin' dinner, hadn't I?"
+
+"Yes, I'll come in presently. I hate to leave the air and the roses."
+
+"I wish we had the whole house, Gabriella."
+
+"It would be ever so much nicer, because I'm afraid the man on the first
+floor is dreadfully common. I don't like the look of that golden-oak
+hatrack in the hail."
+
+"Well, men never did have much taste. Think of the things your Cousin
+Jimmy would admire if Miss Pussy didn't tell him not to. Do you
+recollect that paper in your parlour at home? Now Mr. Jimmy thought that
+paper downright handsome. I've heard him say so."
+
+"It was dreadful, but, do you know, I designed a gown last winter in
+peacock blue like that paper, and it was a tremendous success. Poor
+mother, I wish she could have seen it--peacock blue with an embossed
+border."
+
+"You may laugh about it now, but I don't believe your mother minded it
+much. People in old times didn't let things get on their nerves the way
+they do to-day."
+
+She went indoors to attend to the dinner table; and as Gabriella turned
+back to the steps, she heard the gate slam and a man's voice exclaim
+heartily: "I'll see you about it to-morrow." Then a figure came rapidly
+up the walk--a large, free figure, with a buoyant swing, which awoke a
+trivial and fleeting association in her memory. Without noticing her,
+the man stooped for an instant beside the rose-bush, plucked a bud, and
+held it to his nostrils as he turned to the steps. His voice, singing a
+snatch of ragtime which she recognized without recalling the name of it,
+rang out, gay and powerful, as he approached her.
+
+"I've seen him somewhere. Who can he be?" she thought, and then swiftly,
+as in a blaze of light, she remembered the May afternoon in West
+Twenty-third Street, and "Alice," whom she had wondered about and
+forgotten. She had again a vivid impression of bigness, of freshness,
+and of gray eyes that, reminded her vaguely of the colour of a storm on
+the sea.
+
+"Good evening!" he remarked with impersonal friendliness as he passed
+her; and from the quality of his voice she inferred, as she had done on
+that May afternoon, that he was without culture, probably without
+education.
+
+He went inside; the door of his front room opened and shut, and after a
+minute or two the snatch of ragtime floated merrily through his window.
+If there was anything on earth she disliked, she reflected impatiently,
+it was a comic song.
+
+"He isn't a gentleman. I was right, he is common," she thought
+disdainfully, as she went indoors and ascended the stairs. "And he may
+make it very disagreeable for us if he insists on bringing common people
+into the houses" There was a vague impression in her mind that the males
+of the lower classes were invariably noisy.
+
+"I saw the man on the first floor as I came up," she remarked to Miss
+Folly. "I hope he isn't going to be an annoyance."
+
+"Mrs. Squires says he's never in evenings. He gets all his meals out
+except breakfast, and she fixes that for him. She told me he was hardly
+ever here unless he was eatin' or sleepin', so I don't reckon he'll
+bother us?"
+
+"Well, I'm glad of that, because he isn't the kind of person I'd like
+the children to see anything of. You can tell that he is quite common."
+
+"What does he look like? Is he rough?"
+
+"Oh, no, he is good looking enough--a fine animal. I suppose he's
+handsome in a way, and he was dressed very carefully, but, of course, he
+isn't a gentleman." For the second time this stranger had made her feel
+that she had missed something in life, and she felt almost that she
+hated him.
+
+"Oh, well, I don't reckon it will hurt us to pass him in the hall,"
+replied Miss Polly soothingly, "as long as he don't bring in any
+diseases."
+
+The next day they settled comfortably in the upper rooms and, as far as
+sound or movement went, the floor below might have been tenanted by the
+dead. When she went out Gabriella passed the dreadful hatrack of
+golden-oak in the lower hail; and after a day or two she noticed that
+it held a collection of soft felt hats, two overcoats of good cut and
+material, and an assortment of gold-headed walking-sticks, which
+appeared never to be used. Though she tried to ignore the presence of
+the hatrack, there was an aggressive masculinity about it which revived
+in her the almost forgotten feeling of having "a man in the house." The
+mere existence of a man--of an unknown man--on the first floor, altered
+the character not only of the lower hail, but of the entire house; it
+was, she felt instinctively, a different place from a house occupied by
+women alone. She had seen so little of men in the last ten years that
+she had almost forgotten their distinguishing characteristics, and the
+scent of tobacco stealing through the closed door of the front room
+downstairs came as a fresh surprise when she passed Out in the morning.
+"I suppose I'm getting old maidish," she thought. "That comes of leading
+a one-sided life. Yes, I am getting into a groove." And she determined
+that she would go out more in the evenings and try to take an interest
+in the theatre and the new dances. But even while she was in the act of
+resolving, she realized that when her hard day's work was over, and she
+came home at six o'clock, she was too tired; too utterly worn out, for
+anything except dinner and bed. There was still the cheerful hour with
+the children (that she had kept up in the busiest seasons); but when the
+question of going out was discussed at dinner, she usually ended by
+sending the children to a lecture or a harmless play with Miss Polly.
+"When you work as hard as I do, there isn't much else for you in life,"
+she concluded regretfully, and there swept over her, as on that May
+afternoon, a sense of failure, of dissatisfaction, of disappointment.
+Youth was slipping, slipping, and she had missed something.
+
+At such moments she thought sadly of her life, of its possibilities and
+its significance. It ought in the nature of things, she felt, to mean so
+much more than it had meant; it ought to have been so much more vital,
+so much more satisfying and complete. As it was, she could remember of
+it only scattered ends, frayed places, useless beginnings, and broken
+promises. With how many beliefs had she started, and now not one of them
+remained with her--well, hardly one of them! The dropping of illusion
+after illusion--that was what the years had brought to her as they
+passed; for she saw that she had always been growing farther and farther
+away from tradition, from accepted opinions, from the dogmas and the
+ideals of the ages. The experience and the wisdom of others had failed
+her at the very beginning.
+
+At the end of the week, when she and Miss Polly were watering seeds in
+the yard one afternoon at sunset, the man from the first floor came
+leisurely up the walk, and removing a big black cigar from his mouth,
+wished them "good evening" as he passed.
+
+"Good evening," responded Gabriella coolly. She had resolved that there
+should be no interchange of unnecessary civilities between the first
+floor and the upper storeys. "One can never tell how far men of that
+class will presume," she thought sternly.
+
+"Don't you think he's good lookin', honey?" inquired Miss Polly in a
+whisper when O'Hara had entered the house with his latchkey and closed
+the door after him.
+
+"Is he? I didn't look at him."
+
+"You wouldn't think he'd ever had a day's sickness in his life. I
+reckon he's as big as your Cousin Micajah Berkeley was. You don't
+recollect, him, do you?"
+
+"He died before I was born. Are those wisps of gray green, in the
+border, pinks, Miss Polly?"
+
+"Clove pinks like your ma used to raise. It ain't the right time to set
+'em out, but I sent all the way down to Richmond for 'em. I'm goin' to
+get a microphylla rose, too, in the fall. Do you reckon it would grow up
+North, Gabriella?"
+
+"Well, we might try, anyhow. Where are the children?"
+
+"Fanny's over at Carlie's, an' Archibald said he was goin' to the
+gymnasium befo' dinner. He's just crazy about gettin' as strong as the
+man on the first floor. He was punching a ball this mornin', and
+Archibald saw him. I never knew the boy to take such a sudden fancy."
+
+"When did he speak to him?" asked Gabriella, and her tone had a touch of
+asperity so unusual that Miss Polly exclaimed in astonishment: "For
+goodness sake, Gabriella, what has come over you? Do you feel any sort
+of palpitations? Shall I run after the harts-horn?"
+
+"No, I'm not ill, but I don't like Archibald to pick up acquaintances I
+know nothing about."
+
+"I reckon if you're goin' to sample all Archibald's acquaintances,
+you'll have a job on your hands. You ain't gone an' taken a dislike to
+Mr. O'Hara for nothin', have you?"
+
+"Oh, no, but I have to be careful about the children. Suppose he should
+begin speaking to Fanny?" She had been vividly aware of the man as he
+passed, and the sensation had provoked her. "If it wasn't for Alice, I
+shouldn't have given him another thought," she told herself savagely.
+"Imagine me at my age blushing because a strange man spoke to me in the
+street!"
+
+"You needn't worry about his admirin' Fanny," replied Miss Polly, in her
+matter-of-fact manner, while she lifted the green watering-pot. "He was
+on the steps when she set out for school this mornin', an' he didn't
+notice her any more than he did me. Fanny ain't the sort he takes notice
+of, I could see that in a minute."
+
+"Then he must be blind." There was a resentful sound in Gabriella's
+voice. "It embarrasses me when I get on a street car with her because
+the men stare so."
+
+"Well, he didn't stare. But it's a mighty good thing that all men
+haven't got the same kind of eyes, ain't it? What I could never make out
+was why men ever marry women who haven't got curly hair, an' yet they do
+it every day--they go right straight out an' do it with their wits about
+'em."
+
+The front door opened suddenly, and the man came out again, and,
+descended the walk with the springy step Gabriella had noticed at their
+first meeting. Notwithstanding his size, he moved with the lightness and
+agility of a boy, and without looking at him she could see, as she bent
+over the flower-bed, that he had the look of exuberant vitality which
+accompanies perfect physical condition. Without meaning to, without
+knowing why she did it, she glanced up quickly and met his eyes.
+
+"So you are making a garden?" he remarked, and stopped beside the
+freshly turned flower-bed. Against the gray twilight the red of his hair
+was like a dark flame, and the vivid colour appeared to intensify the
+sanguine glow in his face, the steady gaze of his eyes, and the
+cheerful heartiness of his voice.
+
+"He is cyclonic," she said to herself. "Yes, that is the word--he is
+cyclonic--but he isn't a gentleman."
+
+"It's a pity to let the yard run to waste," she responded, with an
+imperiousness which took Miss Polly's breath away, though it left the
+irrepressible O'Hara still buoyantly gay and kind.
+
+"Now it takes a woman to think of that," he observed with an off-hand
+geniality which she felt was directed less toward herself than toward an
+impersonal universe. "I like to look at that old rose-bush when it is in
+bloom, but the idea"--(he pronounced it idee)--"of planting anything
+would never have occurred to me."
+
+Gabriella's lips closed firmly, while she sprinkled the earth with an
+air of patient finality which made Miss Polly think of Mrs. Carr on one
+of her neuralgic days.
+
+"What's that stringy looking grass over there?" pursued the man,
+undismayed by her manner.
+
+"Clove pinks." Nothing, she told herself indignantly, could persuade her
+to encourage the acquaintance of a man who mispronounced his words so
+outrageously.
+
+"And here?" He pointed to the flower-bed she was watering.
+
+"Mignonette and nasturtium seeds."
+
+"When will they come up?"
+
+"Very soon if they're watered."
+
+"And they'll bloom about July, I guess?"
+
+"They ought to bloom all summer. In the autumn, if we have room, we're
+going to plant some dahlias, and a row of hollyhocks against the house.
+By next summer the yard will look much better."
+
+"By George!" he exclaimed abruptly, and after a minute or two: "Do you
+know, I can remember the first time I ever saw a flower--or the first
+time I took notice of one, anyway. It was red--a red geranium. There was
+a whole cart of 'em, and that's why I noticed 'em, I expect. But a red
+geranium is a Jim-dandy flower, ain't it?"
+
+To this outburst Gabriella made no reply. Her will had hardened with the
+determination not to be drawn into conversation, and while he waited
+with his eager gray eyes--so like the alert, wistful eyes of a great
+dog--on her profile, she began carelessly plucking up spears of grass
+from the flower-bed.
+
+For a minute he waited expectantly; then, as she did not look up, he
+remarked, "So long!" in a voice of serene friendliness, and went on to
+the gate. He had actually said "So long" to her, Gabriella, and he had
+said it with a manner of established intimacy!
+
+"Well, what do you think of that?" she demanded scornfully of Miss Polly
+when he had disappeared up the street.
+
+"I reckon he don't know any better, honey. You don't learn much about
+manners in a mine, I 'spose, and when he ain't down in a mine, Mrs.
+Squires says he's building railroads across deserts. She says he ain't
+ever had anything, education or money, that he didn't pick up for
+himself, and you oughtn't to judge him as you do some others you've
+known. Anyway, she says he's made a big pile of money."
+
+"I believe you're taking up for him, Miss Polly. Has he bewitched you?"
+
+"I don't like to see you hard, Gabriella. You're almost always so
+tolerant. It ain't like you to sit in judgment."
+
+"I am not sitting in judgment, but I don't see why I'm obliged to be
+friendly with a strange man who says 'idee.' It would be bad for the
+children."
+
+"Mrs. Squires has known him for thirty years--he's forty-five now--and
+she says it's a miracle the way he's come up. He was born in a cellar."
+
+"I dare say he has a great deal of force, but you must admit that blood
+tells, Miss Polly."
+
+"I never said it didn't, Gabriella--only that there's much more credit
+to a man that comes up without it."
+
+"Oh, I'll admire him all you please," retorted Gabriella, "if you'll
+promise to keep him away from the children."
+
+Though she spoke sharply, the sharpness was directed not to Miss Polly,
+but to herself--to her own incomprehensible childishness. The man
+interested her; already she had thought of him daily since she first
+came to the house; already she had begun to wonder about him, and she
+realized that she should wonder still more because of what Miss Polly
+had told her. When he had approached her in the yard, she had been
+vaguely disturbed, vaguely thrilled by the strangeness and the mystery
+surrounding him; she had been subtly aware of his nearness before she
+heard his step, and turning, found his eyes fixed upon her. Her own
+weakness in not controlling her curiosity, in recurring, in spite of her
+determined resolve to that first meeting, in allowing a coarse, rough
+stranger--yes, a coarse, rough, uneducated stranger, she insisted
+desperately--to hold her attention for a minute--the incredible weakness
+of these things goaded her into a feeling of positive anger. For ten
+years there had been no men in her life, and now at thirty-seven, when
+she was almost middle-aged, she was beginning to feel curious about the
+history of the first good-looking man she encountered--about a mere
+robust, boisterous embodiment of masculinity. "What difference can it
+make to me who Alice is?" she demanded indignantly. "What possible
+difference?" She forced herself to think tenderly of Arthur; but during
+the last few months the image of Arthur had receded an immeasurable
+distance from her life. His remoteness and his unreality distressed her;
+but try as she would, she could not recall him from the gauzy fabric of
+dreams to the tangible substance of flesh.
+
+"It isn't that I care for myself," she said to Miss Polly abruptly, as
+if she were defending herself against an unspoken accusation.
+"I am a working woman, and a working woman can't afford to be
+snobbish--certainly a dressmaker can't--but I must look after my
+children. That is an imperative duty. I must see that they form
+friendships in their own class."
+
+But life, as she had already discovered, has a sardonic manner of its
+own in such crises. That night she planned carefully, lying awake in the
+darkness, the subterfuges and excuses by which she would keep Archibald
+away from O'Hara, and the very next afternoon when she came home from
+work she found confusion in the street, a fire engine at the corner,
+and, on the steps of her home, the boy clinging rapturously to the hand
+of the man.
+
+"You ought to have been here, mother," cried Archibald in tones of
+ecstatic excitement. "We had a fire down the street in that apartment
+house--and before the firemen came Mr. O'Hara went in and got out a
+woman and some children who had been overcome by smoke. He had to lower
+them from a fire-escape, and he got every one of them out before the
+engine could get here. I saw it all. I was on the corner and saw it all.
+
+"I hope Mr. O'Hara wasn't hurt," remarked Gabriella, but her voice was
+not enthusiastic.
+
+"To hear the kid run on," responded O'Hara, overpowered by
+embarrassment, "you'd think I'd really done something, wouldn't you?
+Well, it wasn't anything. It was as easy as--as eating. Now, I was
+caught down in a mine once in Arizona--"
+
+"Tell me about it. Mother, ask him to tell you about it," entreated
+Archibald. The boy was obviously consumed with curiosity and delight.
+Gabriella had never seen him so enthusiastic, so swept away by emotion.
+Already, she suspected, he had fallen a victim to the passion of hero
+worship, and O'Hara--the man who spoke of "idees"--was his hero! "I
+shall have to be careful," she thought. "I shall have to be very careful
+or Archibald will come under his influence."
+
+"Well, I guess I must be going along," remarked O'Hara, a little
+nervously, for he was evidently confused by her imperious manner. "A
+fellow is expecting me to dinner over at the club."
+
+"But I want to hear about the mine. Mother, make him tell us about the
+mine!" cried Archibald insistently.
+
+"I'll tell you another time, sonny. We'll get together some day when
+your mother don't want you, and we'll start off on a regular bat. How
+would you like that?"
+
+"When?" demanded the boy eagerly. His fear of losing O'Hara showed in
+the fervour with which he spoke, in the frantic grasp with which he
+still clung to his hand. It occurred to Gabriella suddenly that she
+ought to have thrown Archibald more in the companionship of men, that
+she had kept him too much with women, that 'she had smothered him in her
+love. This was the result of her selfish devotion--that he should turn
+from her to the first male creature that came into his life!
+
+Her heart was sore, but she said merely: "That is very kind of you, Mr.
+O'Hara, but I'm afraid I mustn't let my boy go off on a regular bat
+without me."
+
+"Oh, yes, I may, mother. Say I may," interrupted Archibald with
+rebellious determination.
+
+"Well, we'll see about it when the time comes." She turned her head,
+meeting O'Hara's gaze, and for an instant they looked unflinchingly into
+each other's eyes. In her look there was surprise, indignation, and a
+suspicion of fear--why should he, a stranger, come between her and her
+son?--and in his steady gaze there was surprise, also, but it was
+mingled, not with indignation and fear, but with careless and tolerant
+amusement. She knew from his smile that he was perfectly indifferent to
+her resentment, that he was even momentarily entertained by it, and the
+knowledge enraged her. The glance he gave her was as impersonal as the
+glance he gave Miss Polly or the rose-bush or the street with its casual
+stream of pedestrians. It was the glance of a man who had lived deeply,
+and to whom living meant action and achievement rather than criticism or
+philosophy. He would not judge her, she understood, simply because his
+mind was not in the habit of judging. His interest in her was merely a
+part of his intense, zestful interest in life. She shared with Miss
+Polly and Archibald, and any chance object that attracted his attention
+for an instant, the redundant vitality of his inquiring spirit. "No
+wonder he has worked his way up with all that energy," she reflected.
+"No wonder he has made money." His face, with its clear ruddiness, was
+the face of a man who has breathed strong winds and tasted the sharp
+tang of sage and pine; and she noticed again that his deep gray eyes had
+the unwavering look of eyes that have watched wide horizons of sea or
+desert. There was no suggestion of the city about him, though his
+clothes were well cut, and she was quick to observe, followed the latest
+styles of Fifth Avenue. "Yes, he is good looking," she admitted
+reluctantly. "There is no question about that, and he has personality,
+too--of a kind." His hat was in his hand--a soft hat of greenish-gray
+felt--and her eye rested for a moment on his uncovered head with its
+thick waves of red hair, a little disordered as if a high wind had
+roughened them. "If he only had breeding or education, he might be
+really worth while," she added, almost approvingly.
+
+When he spoke again O'Hara ignored Gabriella, and turned his alert
+questioning glance on the little seamstress. Fanny had sauntered up the
+walk to join the group--Fanny in all the glory of her yellow curls, and
+her "debutante slouch "--and he bowed gravely to her without the
+faintest change of expression. If he admired Fanny's beauty and pitied
+Miss Polly's plainness, there was no hint of it in the indifferent look
+he turned from the girl to the old woman.
+
+"The next time you're planting things," he said earnestly, "I wish you'd
+set out a red geranium. I saw a cart of 'em go by in the street this
+morning and I had half a mind to buy a pot or two for the yard. If I
+get some, will you put 'em out?"
+
+"Why, of course, I will. I'll be real glad to," responded Miss Polly,
+agreeably flattered by his request. "Is there any special place you want
+me to plant them?"
+
+"Anywhere I can see 'em from the window. I'd like to look at 'em while I
+eat my breakfast. And while we are about it, wouldn't it be just as well
+to set out a whole bed of 'em?" he asked with a munificent gesture which
+included in one comprehensive sweep the weeds, the walk, the elm tree,
+the blossoming rose-bush, and the freshly turned flower-borders. The
+large free movement of his arm expressed a splendid scorn of small
+things, of little makeshifts, of subterfuges and evasions.
+
+"Don't you think it would cut up the yard too much to make another bed?"
+asked Gabriella, inspired by the whimsical demon of opposition. It was
+true that she had no particular fondness for red geraniums; but if Miss
+Polly had expressed, on her own account, a desire to plant the street
+with them, she would never have thought of objecting.
+
+"Well, the yard ain't much to brag of anyhow," replied Miss Polly with
+that careful penetration which never sees below the surface of things.
+"To tell the truth I've always had a sort of leanin' toward geraniums
+myself--especially rose geraniums. I don't know why on earth," she
+concluded with animated wonder, "I never thought of putting rose
+geraniums in that window box along with the sweet alyssum. They would
+have been the very things and they don't take so much watering."
+
+"That's a bargain, then," said O'Hara, with his ringing laugh which made
+Gabriella smile in spite of herself. Then, after shaking hands with each
+one of the group, he went down the walk and passed with his vigorous
+stride in the direction of Broadway.
+
+When the gate had closed, and his large figure had vanished in the
+distance, Gabriella said sternly: "Archibald, you must not lose your
+head over strangers. We know nothing on earth about Mr. O'Hara except
+that he lives in this house."
+
+"Oh, but, mother, he was splendid at the fire! You ought to have seen
+him holding a girl by one arm out of the window. He was as brave as a
+fireman, everybody said so, didn't they, Miss Polly?"
+
+"Men of that sort always have courage," observed Gabriella
+contemptuously, and despised herself for the remark. What was the matter
+with her this afternoon? Why did this man arouse in her the instinct of
+combativeness, the fever of opposition? Was it all because she suspected
+him of a vulgar intrigue with a shopgirl? And why had she decided so
+positively that Alice was vulgar? Certainly, she, a dressmaker, should
+be the last to condemn shopgirls as vulgar.
+
+"I declare, I can't begin to make you out, Gabriella," said Miss Polly
+uneasily. "I never heard you talk about folks bein' common before. It
+don't sound like you."
+
+"Well, he is common, you know," protested Gabriella, with a strange,
+almost tearful violence. "Why did he have to shake hands with us
+all--with each one of us, even Fanny, when he went away? We'd hardly
+spoken to him."
+
+"I don't know what's come over you," observed the seamstress gloomily.
+"I reckon I'm common, too, so I don't notice it. But I must say I like
+the way he spoke about geraniums. He showed a real nice feelin'."
+
+The words were hardly out of her mouth before Gabriella had caught her
+in her arms. "I know I'm horrid, dear Miss Polly," she said penitently,
+"but I don't like Mr. O'Hara."
+
+"Then I shouldn't see any more of him than I was obliged to, honey, and
+there ain't a bit of use in Archibald's goin' with him if you don't want
+him to."
+
+"I don't like to forbid him. Of course, I know nothing against the
+man--it is only a feeling."
+
+"Well, feelin's are mighty queer things sometimes," remarked Miss Polly,
+scoring a triumph which left the indignant Gabriella at her mercy; "and
+when I come to think of it; I don't recollect that yours have always
+been such good judges of folks."
+
+The geraniums arrived in a small cart the next morning, but O'Hara did
+not appear, and for several weeks, though Gabriella glanced suspiciously
+at the hatrack each morning when she passed through the hail, there was
+no sign of life in his rooms. Then one afternoon he reappeared as
+suddenly as he had vanished, and she found Archibald with him in the
+yard when she came home at six o'clock. That the boy would be her
+difficulty, she knew by instinct, for he had been seized by one of those
+unaccountable romantic fancies to which the young of the race are
+disposed. Though the sentiment was certainly far less dangerous than
+Fanny's passion for the, matinée idol, since it revealed itself
+principally as a robust and wholly masculine ambition to follow in the
+footsteps of adventure, Gabriella fought it almost as fiercely as she
+had fought Fanny's incipient love affair.
+
+"He is making Archibald rough," she said to Miss Polly, after a
+fortnight of unavailing opposition to the new influence in Archibald's
+life. "Until we came here," she added despondently, "Archibald loved me
+better than anything in the world, and now he seems to think of nothing
+but this man."
+
+"It looks to me as if it was mighty good for the child, honey. You can't
+keep a boy tied to your apron-strings all the time. Archibald needs a
+father the same as other boys, and if he hasn't got one, he's either
+goin' to break loose or he's goin' to become a mollycoddle. You don't
+want to make a mollycoddle of him, do you?"
+
+"Of course not," answered Gabriella honestly, for, in spite of her
+strange fits of unreasonableness, she was still sensible enough in
+theory. "I've tried hard to keep him manly--not to spoil him, you know
+that as well as I do. And it isn't that I object to his making friends.
+I'd give anything in the world if he could know Arthur. If it had been
+Arthur," she went on gently, "I should have been glad to have him come
+first. I shouldn't have cared a bit if he had loved Arthur better than
+me."
+
+"You oughtn't to talk like that, Gabriella, for you know just as well as
+can be that Archibald don't love anybody better than he loves you. As
+far as I can make out though, Mr. O'Hara sets him a real good example. I
+don't see that he's doin' the child a particle of harm, and I don't
+believe you see it either. To be sure you don't think much of football,
+but it's a long ways better than loafin' round with nothin' to do, and
+this boy scout business that Archibald talks so much about sounds all
+right to me. Now, he never would have thought a thing about that except
+for Mr. O'Hara."
+
+"Yes, that's all right. I approve of that, but I can't help hating to
+see a stranger get so strong an influence over my son. It isn't fair of
+him."
+
+"Then why don't you tell him to stop it. I believe he'd be sensible
+about it, and if I was you, I'd have it every bit out with him."
+
+"If it doesn't stop, I'll find some way of showing him that I object to
+the friendship. But, after all, it may be only a fancy of Archibald's.
+Anyhow, I'll wait a while before I take any step."
+
+At the beginning of August Gabriella sent the children to the country
+with Miss Polly, and sailed, on a fast boat, for a brief visit to the
+great dress designers of Paris. Ever since Madame's age and infirmities
+had forced her to relinquish this annual trip, Gabriella had taken her
+place, and all through the year she looked forward to it as to the last
+of her youthful adventures. On her last visit, Billy and Patty had been
+in Switzerland; but this summer they met her at Cherbourg; and she spent
+several brilliant days with them before they flitted off again, and left
+her to the doubtful consideration of dressmakers and milliners. Patty,
+who appeared to grow younger and lovelier with each passing year, came
+to her room the evening before they parted, and asked her in a whisper
+if she had heard of George or Florrie in the ten years since their
+elopement?
+
+"Not a word--not a single word, darling. I haven't heard his name
+mentioned since I got my divorce."
+
+"You didn't know, then, that Florrie left him six months after they ran
+away?"
+
+"No, I didn't know. Does he ever write to you?"
+
+"Not to me, but mother hears from him every now and then when he wants
+money badly. Of course she doesn't have much to send him, but she gives
+him every penny she can spare. A year ago she had a letter from some
+doctor in New Jersey telling her that he was treating George for the
+drink habit, and that he needed to be kept somewhere for treatment for
+several months. We sent her the money she needed, Billy and I, but in
+her next letter she said that George had escaped from the hospital and
+that she hadn't heard of him since. That must have been about six months
+ago."
+
+"It's dreadful for his mother," observed Gabriella, with vague
+compassion, for she felt as if Patty were speaking of a stranger whose
+face she was incapable of visualizing in her memory. In the last ten
+years she had not only forgotten George, but she had forgotten as
+completely the Gabriella who had once loved him. Though it was still
+possible for her to revoke the hollow images of the past, she could not
+restore to these images even the remotest semblance of reality and
+passion. It was as if some nerve--the sentimental nerve--had atrophied.
+She could remember George as she remembered the house in Fifty-seventh
+Street or her wedding-gown which Miss Polly had made; she could say to
+herself, "I loved him when I married him," or, "It was in such a year
+that he left me"; but the empty phrases awoke no responsive echoes in
+her heart; and it would have been impossible to imagine a woman less
+crushed or permanently saddened by the wreck of her happiness. "I
+suppose it's hard work that keeps me from thinking about the past," she
+reflected while she watched Patty's beautiful face framed by the pale
+gold of her hair. "I suppose it's work that has driven everything else
+out of my thoughts."
+
+"Have you any idea what became of Florrie?" she asked, moved by a
+passing curiosity.
+
+"She left George for a very rich man she met in London. I believe he had
+a wife already, but things like that never stood in Florrie's way."
+
+"It's queer, isn't it, because she really has a kind heart."
+
+"Yes, she is kind-hearted when you don't get in her way, but she was
+born without any morality just as some people are born without any sense
+of smell or hearing. I know several women over here who are like
+that--American women, too--and, do you know, they are all surprisingly
+successful. Nobody seems to suspect their infirmity, least of all the
+men who become their victims."
+
+"I sometimes think," observed Gabriella cynically, "that men like women
+to be without feeling. It saves them so much trouble."
+
+The next day Patty fluttered off like a brilliant butterfly, and
+Gabriella began to suffer acute homesickness for the house in
+Twenty-third Street and her children. Not once during her stay in Paris
+did the thought of O'Hara enter her mind; and so completely had she
+ceased to worry about his friendship for Archibald that it was almost a
+shock to her when, after landing one September afternoon, she drove up
+to the gate and found the man and the boy standing together beside a
+flourishing border of red geraniums, which appeared almost to cover the
+yard.
+
+"Oh, look, Ben, there's mother!" cried Archibald; and turning quickly,
+the two came to meet her.
+
+"My darling, I thought you were still in the country," said Gabriella,
+kissing her son.
+
+"We've been here almost a week.. The place closed, so we decided to come
+back to town. It's much nicer here," replied Archibald eagerly. He
+looked sunburned and vigorous, and it seemed to Gabriella that he had
+grown prodigiously in six weeks.
+
+"Why, you look so much taller, Archibald!" she exclaimed, laughing with
+happiness, "or, perhaps, I've been thinking of you as a little boy."
+Then, while her manner grew formal, she held out her hand to O'Hara.
+"How do you do, Mr. O'Hara?"
+
+He was standing bareheaded in the faint sunshine, and while her eyes
+rested on his dark red hair, still moist and burnished from brushing,
+his tanned and glowing face, and on the tiny flecks of black in the
+clear gray of his eyes, she was startled by a sensation of strangeness
+and unreality as if she were looking into his face for the first time.
+
+"Oh, we're well. I've been playing with Archibald. Did you have a good
+crossing?"
+
+"It was smooth enough, but I got so impatient. I wanted to be with the
+children."
+
+"Well, I went once, and I was jolly glad to get back again. There was
+nothing to do over there but loaf and lie around."
+
+There would be nothing else for him, of course, she reflected; and she
+wondered vaguely if he had ever entered a picture gallery? What would
+Europe offer to a person possessing neither culture nor a passion for
+clothes?
+
+The driver had placed her bags inside the gate; and O'Hara took charge
+of them as if it were the most natural thing in the world to carry for
+a fellow tenant. Upstairs in the sitting-room he put his burden down,
+unfastened the straps, and commented upon the leather of a bag she had
+bought in Paris.
+
+"I'd like to have a grip like that myself. Is there anything else I can
+help about?"
+
+"No, thank you." She was embracing Fanny, and she did not glance at him
+as she responded: "You are very kind, but my trunks are arranged for."
+
+At this he went without a word, and Gabriella began a joyous account of
+her trip to the children.
+
+"Year after next, if you work hard with your French, you may both go
+with me. Then you'll be big enough to look after each other while I am
+with the dressmakers."
+
+"Oh, tell me about the dressmakers, mother. What did you bring me?"
+urged Fanny, prettily excited by the thought of her gifts. "I need
+dreadfully some dancing frocks. Carlie has a lovely one her mother has
+just bought for her."
+
+"I have all your autumn dresses, darling; everything you can possibly
+need at Miss Bradfordine's."
+
+Fanny's eager face grew suddenly fretful. "Am I really to go away to
+school, mother?"
+
+"Really, precious, both you and Archibald. Think of your poor lonely
+mother." Breaking off with a start she glanced inquiringly about the
+room, and turned a hurt look on Miss Polly. "Why, where is Archibald? I
+thought he was in the room."
+
+"I reckon he must have gone down after Mr. O'Hara. They had just got
+back from a ball game, and I 'spose they felt like talking about it.
+He'll be up again in a minute, because Mr. O'Hara goes out at six
+o'clock."
+
+"But I've just come home." Her lip trembled. "I should think Archibald
+would rather be with me."
+
+"Oh, he won't stay, and you'll have him all the evening. Archibald is
+just crazy about gettin' you back."
+
+Taking off her hat, a jaunty twist of black velvet from Paris, Gabriella
+went into her bedroom and changed to a gown of clear blue crape, which
+she took out of the new bag. When she came out again, with her arms
+filled with Fanny's gifts, there was a flush in her usually pale face,
+and her eyes were bright with determination.
+
+"I put these in my bag, Fanny, so you wouldn't have to wait for the
+trunks. Try on this little white silk."
+
+"Oh, mother, you look so sweet in that blue gown!"
+
+"I got it for almost nothing, dear, but the colour is lovely." Turning
+restlessly away, she walked to the window and stood looking over Miss
+Polly's window box down on the brilliant border of red geraniums.
+
+"Has Archibald come upstairs yet, Miss Polly?"
+
+"Not yet, but he'll be up directly. Don't you worry."
+
+For an instant Gabriella hesitated; then crossing the room with a
+resolute step, she turned, with her hand on the knob, and looked back at
+the startled face of the little seamstress, who was fastening Fanny's
+white gown.
+
+"Well, I'm going after him," she said sternly; "I am going straight
+downstairs to find him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+READJUSTMENTS
+
+
+For a minute Gabriella stood outside the door of what had once been the
+drawing-room of the house, while she listened attentively to the sound
+of animated voices within. Then suddenly Archibald's breezy laugh rang
+out into the hail, and raising her hand from the knob, she knocked
+softly on the white-painted panel of the door.
+
+"Come in!" called O'Hara's voice carelessly; and Gabriell entered and
+imperatively held out her hand to her son, who was standing by the
+window.
+
+"Come, Archibald, I want you," she said gravely. "You went off without
+seeing your gifts." She had invaded the sitting-room of a strange man,
+but her purpose was a righteous one, and there was no embarrassment in
+her manner.
+
+"Oh, mother, are they upstairs? I'll run up and see them!" cried,
+Archibald delightedly. "I thought they were all in the trunks."
+
+Darting past her in a flash, he bounded up the staircase, while
+Gabriella stood facing O'Hara, who had risen and thrown away his cigar
+at her entrance. The room was still fragrant with tobacco; there was a
+light cloud of smoke over the mignonette in the window box, and beyond
+it, she could see the dim foliage of the elm tree waving over the
+flagged walk to the gate. With an eye trained to recognize the value of
+details, she saw that the sitting-room was furnished with the same
+deplorable taste which had selected the golden-oak hatrack and the
+assortment of ornamental walking-sticks. The woodwork had been stained
+to match the oak of the barbarous writing-table, which held a distorted
+bronze lamp, with the base composed of a heavily draped feminine figure,
+a massive desk set, also of bronze, a pile of newspapers, a dictionary,
+and several dull-looking books with worn covers and dog's eared pages.
+She noticed that the chairs were all large and solid, with deep arms and
+backs upholstered in red leather, which looked as if it would never wear
+out, that the rug was good, and that, except for a few meretricious oil
+paintings on the greenish walls, the room was agreeably bare of
+decoration. After her first hesitating glance, she surmised that a
+certain expensive comfort was the end sought for and achieved, and that
+in the furnishing beauty had evidently been estimated in figures.
+
+"Mr. O'Hara," she began firmly, "I wish you would not take my son away
+from me."
+
+He did not lower his gaze, and she saw, after an instant in which he
+appeared merely surprised, a look of amusement creep into his expressive
+eyes. Within four walls, in his light summer clothes, with the gauzy
+drift of tobacco smoke over his head, he looked larger and more
+irrepressibly energetic than he had done out of doors.
+
+"I am sorry you feel that way," he returned very slowly after a pause.
+Already she had discovered that he had great difficulty with his words
+except when he was stirred by excitement into self-forgetfulness. At
+other times he seemed curiously inarticulate, and she saw now that,
+while she waited for his answer, he was groping about in his mind for a
+suitable phrase in which to repel her accusation.
+
+"I appreciate your interest in him," she resumed smoothly, "but he is
+with you too much. I do not know you. I know nothing in the world about
+you."
+
+"Well--" Again he hesitated as if over an impediment in his speech.
+Then, finding with an effort the words he needed, he went on more
+easily: "If there's anything you'd like to know, I guess you can ask
+me."
+
+She frowned slightly, and leaving the door moved resolutely to the
+writing-table, where she stopped with her hand on the pile of
+newspapers. Against the indeterminate colour of the walls her head, with
+its dark, silver-powdered hair, worn smooth and close after the Parisian
+fashion, showed as clear and fine as an etching. In her blue summer gown
+she looked almost girlish in spite of the imperious dignity of her
+carriage; and from her delicate head to her slender feet, she diffused
+an air of fashion which perplexed and embarrassed him, though he was
+unaware of the conscious art which produced it.
+
+"The only thing I'd like to know about you," she answered, "is why you
+have taken so sudden a fancy to my son?"
+
+At this he laughed outright, with a boyish zest which dispelled the
+oppressive formality of her manner. He was completely at his ease again,
+and while he ran his hand impatiently through his hair, he answered
+frankly:
+
+"Well, you see, when it comes to that, I didn't take any sudden fancy,
+as you call it--I didn't take any fancy at all--it was the other way
+about. The boy is a nice boy--a bully good boy, anybody can see
+that--and I like boys, that's all. When he began trotting round after
+me, we got to be chums in a way, but it would have been the same with
+any other boy who had come to the house--especially," he added with a
+clean blow given straight from the shoulder, "if he'd been a decent chap
+that a parcel of women were making into a muff."
+
+For a minute anger, righteous anger, kept her silent; then she responded
+with stateliness: "I suppose I have a right to decide how my son shall
+be brought up?"
+
+He met her stern gaze with a smile; and in the midst of her resentment
+she was distinctly aware of the impeccable honesty of his judgment. The
+peculiar breeziness she had always thought of as "Western" sounded in
+his voice as he answered:
+
+"By George, I'm not so sure that you have!"
+
+Before his earnestness she felt her anger melt slowly away. The basic
+reasonableness of her character--her passion to investigate experience,
+to examine facts, to search for truth--this temperamental attitude
+survived the superficial wave of indignation which had swept over her.
+
+"So you think I am making a mistake with Archibald?" she asked quietly;
+and growing tired of standing, she sank instinctively into one of the
+capacious leather-covered chairs by the table. "But the question is--are
+you able to judge?"
+
+"Well, I'm a man, and I hate to see a boy coddled. It's going to be
+devilish hard on the kid when he grows up."
+
+"Perhaps you're right"--her manner had grown softer--"and because I've
+thought of this, I am going to send him away to school this autumn--in a
+few weeks. Much as it will hurt me to part with them, I am going to send
+both of my children away from me. I have made the arrangements."
+
+Insensibly the note of triumph had crept into her voice. By the simple
+statement of her purpose she had vindicated her motherhood to this man.
+She stood clear now of his aspersions on her wisdom and her devotion.
+
+"I don't know much about girls," he replied, seating himself on the
+opposite side of the table, where the green light from the shaded lamp
+fell directly on his features. "I can't remember ever noticing one until
+I grew up, and then I was afraid to death of them, particularly when
+they were young--but I've been a boy, and I know all about boys. There
+isn't a blooming thing you could tell me about boys!" he concluded with
+animation.
+
+"And you think that all boys are alike?"
+
+"More or less under the skin. Of course some are washed and some are
+dirty--I was dirty--but they're all boys, every last one of them, and
+all boys are just kids. With the first money I made out West, I started
+a lodging-house for them--the dirty ones--down in the Bowery," he added.
+"They can get a wash and a supper and a night's lodging in a bed with
+real sheets any night in the year."
+
+She was suddenly interested. "Do you care for boys just because you were
+a boy yourself?" she asked.
+
+"Because I was such a God-forsaken little chap, I guess. You were never
+down in a cellar, I suppose, the kind of cellar people live in? Well, I
+was born in one, and my father had killed himself the week before
+because he was ill with consumption, and couldn't get work. He'd been a
+teamster, and he lost his job when he came down with pneumonia, and
+after they let him out of the hospital, he looked such a scarehead that
+nobody would employ him. After he died, my mother struggled on somehow,
+taking in washing or scrubbing floors--God knows how she managed
+it!--and by the time I was five, and precious big for my age, I was in
+the street selling papers. I used to say I was seven when anybody asked
+me, but I wasn't more than five; and I remember as plain as if it was
+yesterday, the way mother used to take me to a corner of Broadway, and
+put a bundle of papers in my arms, and how I used to hang on to the
+coppers when the bigger boys tried to get 'em away from me. Sometimes
+I'd get an extra dime or nickel, and then we'd have Irish stew or fried
+onions for supper. After my mother died, when I was about eight, I still
+kept on selling papers because I didn't know what else to do, but I
+didn't have any place to sleep then so I used to crawl into machine
+shops or areas (he said 'aries') or warehouses, when the watchmen
+weren't looking. In summer I'd sometimes hide under a bush in the park,
+and the policeman would never see me until I slipped by him in the
+morning. There was one policeman I hated like the devil, and I used to
+swear that I'd get even with him if it took me all the rest of my life."
+For a moment he paused, brooding complacently. "I did get even with him,
+too," he added, "and it didn't take me more than twenty years."
+
+"You never forget anything?"
+
+"Forget?" he laughed shortly. "When you find a thing I forget, it'll be
+so small you'll have to put on spectacles to recognize it!"
+
+She nodded comprehendingly. "And after that?"
+
+"After that they caught me and sent me to school, and I learned to read
+and write and do sums--I always had a wonderful head for figures--but
+after school I went on selling papers so I'd have something to eat---"
+
+The door burst open, and Archibald rushed in to show the evening clothes
+Gabriella had brought him from Paris.
+
+"They are jolly, mother! May I keep them on?"
+
+"If you like, dear, but they'll have to be altered a little. The coat
+doesn't quite fit across the shoulders."
+
+"You're a dandy, kid, a regular dandy," observed O'Hara, with humorous
+gravity.
+
+After a few moments Archibald rushed off again, and Gabriella made an
+uncertain movement to follow him. "I must go," she said, without rising,
+and added abruptly: "So you got on in spite of everything?"
+
+"Right you are!" He leaned back in his chair and regarded her with
+benevolent optimism. "You can always get on if the stuff is in you. I
+meant to get on, and a steam engine couldn't have kept me back. It's the
+gospel truth that I believe I came into the world meaning to get out of
+that cellar, and it was the same thing with areas and ash-bins. I knew
+all the time I wasn't going to keep grubbing a living out of an ash-bin.
+I was always growing, shooting up like one of those mullein stalks out
+there, and eating? Great Scott! I used to eat so much when I was a kid
+that mother starved herself near to death so as to give me a square
+meal. By the time I was twelve I had grown so fast that I got a job at
+cleaning the streets--my first job from the city. But I never went
+hungry. As far as I recollect I never went hungry except the time I beat
+my way out to Chicago--"
+
+Without moving, without lowering her eyes from his face, Gabriella
+listened, while she clasped and unclasped the hands in her lap. There is
+a personality that compels attention, and she realized for the first
+time that O'Hara possessed it. A new vision of life had opened suddenly
+before her, and she felt, with the illuminating intensity of a religious
+conversion, that the world she had been living in was merely a fiction.
+In spite of her experience she had really known nothing of life.
+
+"Yes, a lot of 'em went hungry, but I never did," he resumed in a tone
+of frank congratulation. "Sometimes, of course, I'd go without supper or
+breakfast, but that was nothing--that was not being really hungry, you
+know. I always managed, even when I was at school, to make enough to
+keep satisfied. What I minded most," he added musingly, "was not having
+a regular place to go home to at night, and that's why I started that
+lodging-house. When you've slept in holes and on benches, and under
+freight cars, and hidden away in machine shops, you know there's nothing
+on God's earth--not a blessed thing--that can take the place of a real
+sure enough bed with real sure enough sheets and pillow cases on it."
+
+"But how did you come out of it? How did you succeed? For you have
+succeeded beyond your dreams, haven't you?"
+
+"Beyond my dreams?" He threw back his big, bright head, laughing
+happily. "Did any man alive ever succeed beyond his dreams? Why, I used
+to dream of being President, and I guess I shan't be President this
+side of the Great Divide, shall I? But I made money, if that's what you
+mean. Why, I have a million to-day to every dollar I had when I was
+twenty. Do you mind my smoking? I can't talk unless I've got hold of a
+cigar."
+
+While he struck a match, she noticed with surprise how very neat and
+orderly he was about the ashes of his cigars, which lay in an exact gray
+heap in the massive bronze ash-tray. What a pity, she thought, moved by
+a feeling of compassion, that he had had no advantages!
+
+"I'll tell you how I got on," he pursued after a minute, leaning forward
+with the cigar in his hand--it was a good cigar, she knew from the smell
+of it. "Do you see this room?"--he glanced proudly about him--"do you
+know why I keep this place even when I am in the West?" She shook her
+head, and he went on with a kind of half-ashamed, whimsical tenderness:
+"Well, a man lived here once you never heard of--a common Irishman--just
+a common Irish politician--the Tammany sort, just the sort the
+newspapers are so down on. I guess he wasn't strong on civic morality as
+they call it, and the social conscience and all the other new-fashion
+catchwords, but he found me out there in the snow one night selling
+newspapers without any overcoat, and he brought me in and gave me one of
+his. He was a little fellow--not big as the Irish usually grow--and I
+could wear his clothes, though I wasn't thirteen at the time. The coat
+wasn't an old one, either," he explained with retrospective complacency;
+"no, sirree, he had just bought it, and he made me take it off after I'd
+tried it on and sit down at the table in that back room there--it's all
+just as he left it--and eat supper with him--the best supper I ever had
+in my life before or since, you may take my word for it. Then when I'd
+finished he gave me a dollar and told me to go out and rent a bed--" He
+broke off, glanced about the room with the pride of ownership, and added
+softly: "Who'd ever have thought on that night that this place would one
+day belong to me?"
+
+"Did you see him again?"
+
+"After that he never lost sight of me. He got me a room, he sent me to
+school--not that he thought much of education, the more's the pity--and
+when I was through with school he got me into the Mechanics' Institute,
+and gave me a job at engineering. But the job was too small for me, and
+so was New York--there ain't room enough here to get on without stepping
+on somebody's toes--and when I was twenty I set out to beat my way to
+Chicago, and went clean out to Arizona. That's a long story--I'll tell
+you that some day, for I've been everything on earth you can be in order
+to keep alive, and done pretty much everything you can do with two hands
+that will earn you a square meal. I've cut corn and ploughed fields, and
+greased wheels, and chopped wood, and mended machinery, and cleaned the
+snow away, and once out in some little town in Arizona, I even dug a
+grave because the sexton was down with pneumonia. I've been brakesman,
+and freightman, and, after that, freight agent. That was just before I
+struck it rich in Colorado. I was one of the first men at Bonanza City,
+and when I went there with the railroad--I was on the very first train
+that ever ran there--the whole town was just a row of miners' shacks
+near the foot of old Bonanza. It's the richest mineral streak in the
+State, and yet twenty-five years ago, before the C.A. & F.W. tapped it,
+there wasn't even a saloon out there at Bonanza. City. When you wanted a
+drink--and that didn't worry me, for I haven't tasted anything but water
+since I was twenty-five--you had to go all the way to Olympia to get it;
+and what was worse, all the ore had to go to Olympia, too, on a little
+no account branch road to be shipped over the main line. Well, as soon
+as I discovered Bonanza City I said that had to change, and it did
+change. I guess I did as much to make that town as any man out there,
+and to-day I own about two thirds of it. I've got a house on Phoenix
+Avenue, and I gave the town a church and a theatre and the ground for a
+library. We've got one of the handsomest churches in the State," he
+proclaimed with his unconquerable optimism, "and we've just begun
+growing. Why, in ten years more Bonanza City will be in the race with
+Denver."
+
+"And what about your friend?" she asked, finding it difficult to become
+enthusiastic over the most progressive town in Colorado, a State which
+she always pictured imaginatively as a kind of rocky desert, inhabited
+by tribes of gregarious invalids, which one visited for the sake of the
+scenery or the climate, when one had exhausted the civilized excitements
+of Europe.
+
+"I am coming back to him," he responded with a manner of genial
+remonstrance. "You just give me time. But I'd honestly like you to see
+Bonanza City. Why, it would take your breath away if I told you it
+hadn't even begun to grow twenty years ago. You people in New York don't
+know what progress means. Why, out there in Bonanza City we do things
+while you're thinking about doing them. But to come back to
+Barney--that was his name, Barney McGoldrick--after I made my pile out
+of Bonanza, I used to strike here once in a while to see how he was
+getting along, and when he died I took these rooms just as he left 'em.
+There wasn't a chick or a child to come after him, but he had a string
+of pensioners as long as the C.A. & F.W. His money--it must have been
+half a million--all went to charity, but I kept on in the rooms."
+
+"What kind of man was he?" she asked, sincerely interested.
+
+"What kind?" He pondered the question with deep puffs of his cigar.
+"Well, do you know, I don't believe, to save my life, I could tell you.
+The more you know of men, and of women, too, for they're all alike, the
+more you understand, somehow, that you can't judge unless you've been
+right in the other man's place--unless you know exactly what they've had
+to pull up against and how hard they have pulled. Now, if I was drawing
+my last breath, and you asked me what I thought of Barney McGoldrick,
+I'd be obliged to answer that he was the best man I ever knew, though
+there are others in this town, I guess, and the newspapers among 'em,
+who would tell you that he was--" He broke off abruptly, and she waited
+without speaking, until he solaced himself with his cigar, and went on
+less boisterously: "It's a downright shame, isn't it, that the same man
+can't manage to corner all the virtues. I can't explain how it is, but
+I've noticed that the virtues don't seem able to work along peaceably in
+one another's company, for if they did, I guess we'd have pure saints or
+pure sinners instead of the mixed lot we've got to make a world out of.
+I've seen a man who wouldn't have lied or stolen to save his wife from
+starving, and who was the first in the pew at church every Sunday, grind
+the flesh and blood out of his factory girls until they were driven into
+the streets, or crush the very life out of the little children he put to
+work in his mills. Yes, and I've seen a tombstone over him with 'I know
+that my Redeemer liveth' carved an inch deep in the marble. Well, Barney
+wasn't like that, but he had his weaknesses, and they were the kind
+people don't raise marble tombstones over. I never had a taste for
+politics myself, but it seems to be like any other weakness, and to drag
+a man a little lower down if it once gets too strong a hold on him. It's
+all right, of course, if you keep it in moderation, but there's precious
+few chaps, particularly if it's in their blood, and they're Irish, who
+can keep the taste under control. Barney was the most decent man to
+women I ever knew. He wouldn't have hurt one for a million dollars, in a
+factory or out of it, and he was faithful to his old wife up to the day
+of her death and long after. He grieved for her till he died, and I
+don't believe any woman ever asked his help without getting it. His
+private life was absolutely clean, but his public morality--well, I
+guess that wasn't exactly spotless. At any rate, they had an
+investigation--there was a committee of citizens appointed to sit in
+judgment on his record. The chairman was a pillar of the church and a
+public benefactor; he had led every political reform for a generation;
+and I happened to know that he kept two mistresses up somewhere in the
+Bronx, and his wife, who was old and ugly, wore herself to a shadow
+because he neglected her. Mark you, I'm not upholding Barney, but, good
+Lord! ain't it queer how easy men get off when they just sin against
+women and not against men or against the State?"
+
+"It's all queer." She rose from the leather chair, and held out her
+hand. "I'm glad I came in, Mr. O'Hara. Some day you must tell me the
+rest."
+
+"The rest?" His embarrassment had descended upon him, and he was
+awkwardly stammering for words, with her cool hand in his grasp. As long
+as his enthusiasm had lasted he had talked fluently and naturally, swept
+away from his self-consciousness; but with the return of the formal
+amenities he became as ill at ease and shy as a boy. "There ain't
+anything more except that we're building a railroad out there, and I'm
+going back to finish it next spring if I'm alive."
+
+The September breeze entered from the dim stretch of yard, under the
+waving elm boughs, and in an instant the room was filled with the
+fragrance of mignonette.
+
+"But you won't be if you never get your dinner," she retorted, as she
+smiled brilliantly. Then, turning quickly, she crossed the threshold,
+and went down the hall to the staircase.
+
+She was tremendously excited, and while she mounted the stairs she felt
+that she had not been so alive, so filled with energy since her girlhood
+in Richmond. It was as if a closed door into the world had been suddenly
+flung open, and she knew that she had passed beyond the narrow paths of
+convention into the sunny roads and broad fields of vision. In a moment
+of enlightenment she saw deeper and farther than she had ever dreamed
+of seeing before. "It teaches one not to judge," she thought, with a
+stab of self-reproach, "it teaches one not to judge others until one
+really knows." Twice before to-night, on the day when she resolved for
+the sake of Jane's children to go to work, and again on the June evening
+when George returned to her, she had felt this sudden quickening of
+life, this magical sense of the unexplored mystery and beauty of the
+world that surrounded her. But she had been very young then, and on that
+June evening she had been deeply in love. To-night, she assured herself,
+there was no touch of personal romance. In some inexplicable way the
+talk with O'Hara had renewed her broken connection with her Dream, and
+she felt closer in sympathy to Arthur than she had been able to feel for
+months. No, this awakening was utterly different from the awakening of
+love, for it shed its illumination not on a single person, but on the
+whole of humanity. O'Hara had moved her, not as a man, but as a force--a
+force as impersonal as the wind or the sea, which had swept her
+intellect away from its anchorage in the deeps of tradition. She had
+thought herself free, but she understood now that she had never really
+broken away--that in spite of her struggles to escape, the past had
+still held her. To-night it was more than an awakening, it was a
+conversion through which she was passing, and she knew she could never
+again believe as she had believed a few hours ago, that she could never
+judge again as unintelligently as she had judged yesterday. "So that is
+a man's world," and then with a rush of impulse: "What a mean little
+life I have been living--what a mean little life!" For she really knew
+nothing of life except dressmaking; she was familiar with no part of it
+except the way to Dinard's. She had been living a little life, with
+little standards, little creeds, little compromises. And yet, though the
+personality of O'Hara had enlarged her vision of the world, it had not
+altered her superficial view of the man. She still saw him outwardly at
+least without the glamour of romance--she still thought of him as
+boisterous, uneducated, slangy--but she was beginning almost
+unconsciously to distinguish between the faults of manner and the faults
+of character; she was beginning to be tolerant.
+
+From Fanny's open door a humming voice floated out to her, and going
+inside, she found the girl, in a new frock, practising a dance step
+before the mirror. "This is the lame duck, mother, but it's different
+from the one we danced last year."
+
+"Yes, dear, it's very pretty." Stopping before the dressing-table,
+Gabriella frowned on the photograph of a young man in a silver frame--a
+young man with a fascinating smile and inane features.
+
+"Fanny, where did you get this?"
+
+"Oh, mother, I didn't mean you to see it. I meant to put it away."
+
+"Where did you get it?"
+
+"He sent it to me. I wrote and asked him for it, and it has his
+autograph. Isn't he handsome? That's just the way he looked in 'Stolen
+Sweets' last winter."
+
+"Well, he looks like a calf, I think," returned Gabriella severely. "I
+suppose you may keep it out until you get tired of it, but please try to
+be sensible, Fanny." Though she spoke jestingly, she was secretly
+disturbed by the discovery of the photograph. "If she were not pretty,
+it wouldn't matter," she thought, "but she is so pretty that almost any
+man might be tempted to begin a flirtation. Thank Heaven, she didn't
+take a fancy to Mr. O'Hara. That would have been a calamity." For, in
+spite of the fact that she had become personally reconciled to O'Hara,
+she was as firmly resolved as ever to keep Fanny out of his sight. "You
+know so many nice boys, dear," she resumed after a minute, "that I think
+you might be content to let actors alone."
+
+"But boys are so stupid, mother." Fanny's tone was withering in its
+disdain. "They are wrapped up in sports, and I despise sports."
+
+"Then you oughtn't to tease them as you do. You're too young to have
+fancies."
+
+"I am sixteen."
+
+"Well, that is much too young for anything of that sort. I like you to
+have boy friends, but I don't like you to be foolish. What has become of
+that attractive boy, Carlie's brother? He doesn't come here any more,
+and I'm afraid you've hurt his feelings."
+
+"Oh, mother," hummed Fanny to the music of the lame duck as she
+practised before the mirror, "how can you really hurt a man?"
+
+The next morning when Gabriella, in a Parisian gown of black taffeta and
+one of the absurdly small hats of the autumn, started for Dinard's, she
+found herself thinking, not of Fanny's flirtation, but of her long talk
+with O'Hara. She cast a friendly glance on the golden-oak hatrack as she
+passed--for O'Hara had risen in her regard since she had discovered that
+he had not selected the furniture on the first floor--and then stopping
+for a few moments on the front steps, she closed her eyes, and inhaled
+the fragrance of the mignonette in the window box. The yard was
+brilliant in the early sunshine; and at the gate she saw the wife of the
+caretaker, who had looked after the flowers in her absence. Detaining
+the woman by a gesture, she joined her in the street, and the two
+started together to walk the long blocks that stretched to Fifth Avenue.
+
+"You are going home early to-day, Mrs. Squires."
+
+"Yes, ma'am; it's Johnny's birthday and I promised to take him up to the
+Bronx. Mr. O'Hara had his breakfast at seven, and I got through earlier
+than usual. He is so tidy that there ain't much to do except to dust
+around a little."
+
+She was a neat, red-faced woman, in rusty mourning for a child she had
+lost in the early summer, and while she talked, Gabriella felt an
+irresistible impulse to question her about O'Hara. "She has known him
+for thirty years, and I can find out more from her than I could discover
+for myself in six months," she thought; but she only said indifferently:
+
+"You've worked at this house a long time, haven't you?"
+
+"For thirty years--ever since I came here at eighteen as housemaid to
+Mr. McGoldrick. My husband was coachman for Mr. McGoldrick, you know--he
+drove the prettiest pair of bays in New York--and that was how I met
+him. When we married, Mr. McGoldrick set us up, and John drove his
+carriage for him as long as he lived. I often wonder what the old
+gentleman would think of everybody having automobiles. They were just
+beginning to come into fashion when he died."
+
+"You knew Mr. O'Hara then?"
+
+"Oh, yes, he was a great deal with Mr. McGoldrick. After he went West we
+didn't see much of him for a time--that was while he was making his
+money. Then he came back and brought his wife to a place here to be
+treated--"
+
+"His wife?"
+
+"Didn't you know? She died a few years ago, but before that he used to
+keep her with some doctor over on Long Island, and he went regularly to
+see her every Sunday afternoon as long as she lived."
+
+"What was the matter?"
+
+"Drugs. Drugs and drink, too, they said, though I never knew for certain
+about that. But they couldn't do anything with her. They tried all the
+cures anybody ever heard of, and she went back every time. No sooner
+would one thing fail, however, than Mr. O'Hara would hear of something
+or other over in Europe, and make them begin trying it. Finally for the
+last ten or twelve years she was quite out of her mind--clean crazy they
+said, and didn't know anybody. But he still went to see her every Sunday
+when he was staying in town, and he still made the doctors go on trying
+new things. He never gave up till the very last. Mr. McGoldrick used to
+say of him that he was the sort that would go on hoping in hell."
+
+"Who was she? Where did he meet her?"
+
+"God only knows. He never would say much about her even to Mr.
+McGoldrick, but John always stuck it out that she was never the right
+sort in the beginning, and that Mr. O'Hara got tangled up with her
+somewhere in a mining town out West, and couldn't get out. I've heard
+she was a chambermaid or a barmaid or something in a miners' hotel, but
+I don't know, and nobody else knows, for Mr. O'Hara never opened his
+mouth about her. All we know positive is that she must have been a drug
+fiend long before he ever married her, and that he stuck to her for
+better or for worse until she died and was buried. Some men are like
+that, you know, a few of 'em. When a thing once belongs to 'em, no
+matter what it is or how little it's worth, they'll go through fire and
+water for the sake of it--and it makes no difference whether it's a
+woman or a railroad or a dog or a mine. They've got the sense of
+responsibility like a disease. You see, Mr. O'Hara is that sort, and you
+might as well try to turn a steam roller as to start to reason him out
+of a notion. It would have been as easy as talking for him to have got a
+divorce. Time and again Mr. McGoldrick used to go after him about it,
+and talk himself hoarse; but it didn't do any good, not a particle.
+Instead of getting free out there in the West where it was easy, he kept
+on lugging that crazy woman back and forth, trying to cure her long
+after everybody else had given up hope and was wishing that she was
+dead."
+
+"Well, I suppose he loved her."
+
+"No, ma'am, that's the funny part, but it didn't look like love to
+me--not like what men call love, anyway. If it had been love, it would
+have worn itself out long ago. Who on earth could love a crazy, yellow,
+shrieking, cursing creature like that? I saw her sometimes when he'd
+send me to take things down to her, and I tell you it wasn't love--not
+man's love, anyhow--that made him do what he did."
+
+"Then it must have been something finer even than love," Gabriella
+acquiesced after a moment. "It's strange, when we come to think of it,
+how often we find spirituality in places where we'd never expect it to
+be."
+
+"I don't know that I'd call Mr. O'Hara spiritual exactly," replied Mrs.
+Squires thoughtfully. "I don't believe he ever puts his foot inside a
+church, and I've heard him swear when he got ready till you'd expect the
+roof to drop in on you, but when you come to think of it," she
+concluded, "I guess there's a good deal of religion floating around
+outside of walls."
+
+At the next corner they parted, and as the caretaker stopped to shake
+hands with Gabriella and thank her for a birthday present for Johnny,
+she added nervously: "I hope I haven't said anything that I oughtn't to
+have said, Mrs. Carr. Mr. O'Hara has been as good as gold to me, and I
+shouldn't like him to hear I'd been talking about him."
+
+"He shan't hear, I promise you"; and while Mrs. Squires hurried,
+reassured, to her home in Sixth Avenue, Gabriella walked briskly with
+the crowd which was streaming along Twenty-third Street into Broadway.
+
+A week ago she would scarcely have noticed the people about her. For ten
+years she had gone every morning to her work through the streets, and
+she had felt herself to be as aloof from the masses as the soaring
+skyscraper at the corner of Broadway. The psychology of the crowd had
+not touched her; even when she walked with it, when she made a part of
+it, she had felt herself to be detached from its purposes.
+
+To-day, however, a change had come over her, and she was happy with a
+large and impersonal happiness which seemed to belong less to herself
+than to the throng which surged about her and gathered her in. Her
+little standards, her little creeds, had become a part of the larger
+standards and creeds of humanity. In Broadway, moving onward with the
+other workers who were returning to the day's work, she was aware of an
+invisible current of joy which flowed from the crowd into her thoughts
+and through her thoughts back again into the crowd. For the first time
+she was feeling and thinking in unison with the multitude.
+
+That night, when she sat alone with Miss Polly, she said to her
+suddenly:
+
+"I believe I was wrong to wish Archibald not to see anything of Mr.
+O'Hara. Yesterday we had a long talk, and I think he must have some very
+fine traits."
+
+"Maybe," replied Miss Polly, a little snappishly. "I never could see
+what set you so against him, Gabriella."
+
+"Oh, he is dreadfully slangy, and, of course, he isn't educated. I
+suppose if I mentioned Hamlet to him, he'd think I was talking about
+some town in Oklahoma."
+
+"Well, I reckon he's been his own Hamlet," retorted Miss Polly; "and
+knowing about Hamlet don't make a man, anyhow. George knew all about
+Hamlet, but it didn't make him easy to live with."
+
+"Yes, that's just it. What did George's advantages do for him? I used to
+think it was love that mattered most," she said musingly after a pause,
+"and then, when love failed, I began to think it was culture. But I see
+now that it is something else. Do you ever wonder what the essential
+thing really is, Miss Polly?"
+
+"No, I never wonder," responded Miss Polly tartly, "but when you stew it
+down to the bones, I reckon it's just plain character."
+
+"Yes, if you can't have both culture and character, of course character
+is the more important. But think how much that man might have made of
+the university training that was wasted on George." While she spoke
+there came back to her in snatches a conversation she had had with an
+Englishman on the boat last summer, and she remembered that he had
+alluded to Judge Crowborough as "a man of the broadest culture." Surely
+the "broadest culture" must include character, and yet she could feel
+even now the casual and business-like clasp of the judge, she could see
+again the admiring gleam in his small, fishy eyes. "After all, I suppose
+it is a kind of spiritual consciousness that makes character," she said
+aloud, "and you can't train that into a man if he isn't born with it."
+
+"It seems to me that Mr. O'Hara has done mighty well, all things
+considered," pursued Miss Polly, and she inquired suspiciously: "Did
+Mrs. Squires ever tell you anything about his marriage?"
+
+"I met her this morning on my way to work, and she told me about it."
+
+"Well, what do you make of it? Don't it beat anything you ever heard?"
+
+"It does. There's not the slightest doubt of it. And, do you know,"
+Gabriella went on hurriedly, "that story made a remarkable impression on
+me--I've been thinking about it ever since. It made me see everything
+differently, and I've even asked myself if I had enough patience with
+George. If I wasn't too hard and intolerant with him in the beginning?"
+
+"I shouldn't worry about that, honey, because I don't believe it would
+have made any difference if you'd been gentler. It's the stuff in a man,
+I reckon, that counts more than the way a woman handles him. You
+couldn't have saved George any more than that other woman could ruin the
+man downstairs."
+
+"Perhaps not." Rising from her chair, Gabriella drew the pins from the
+smooth, close coil of her hair. "But I see things so differently since I
+had that talk with Mr. O'Hara. I am glad to have him for a friend," she
+added generously, "but of course I still feel the same about Fanny. I
+hope he won't begin to notice Fanny."
+
+"Well, he won't. He ain't thinkin' about it. I declare, Gabriella," the
+little woman went on with a change of tone, "your head don't look much
+bigger than a pincushion with your hair fixed that way. It makes you
+seem mighty young, but there ain't many women that could stand it."
+
+"It's the fashion in Paris. I have to be smart. Do you suppose many
+people guess that I wear extreme styles," she added laughingly, "because
+they are so hard to sell?"
+
+"You certainly do look well in 'em. I never saw anybody with more
+natural style. Why, you can put on those slouchy things without a piece
+of corset and look as if you'd just stepped out of a fashion plate."
+
+"When you aren't pretty, you're obliged to be smart."
+
+"Well, of course you never had the small features and pink and white
+colouring that Jane had; but you always had a way of your own even as a
+girl, and you're handsomer now than you ever were in your life. If you
+were to ask Mr. O'Hara, I bet you he'd say you were a heap better
+lookin' than Fanny."
+
+A gasp broke from Gabriella, and she turned from the mirror to stare
+blankly at the seamstress. "Mr. O'Hara! Why, what in the world made you
+think of him?"
+
+But Miss Polly had grown suddenly impenetrable. "Oh, nothin'," she
+responded evasively; "I've just seen him look at you both when you were
+together."
+
+Gabriella laughed brightly. "Oh, he looks at everything. I never saw
+such eyes."
+
+There was the note of accomplishment, of success, in her voice, and she
+brushed her fine, soft hair with long, vigorous strokes which had in
+them something of this same quality of unwavering confidence. To look at
+her as she sat, relaxed yet dominant, before the glass, was to recognize
+that she was a woman who had achieved the purpose of her life, who had
+succeeded in whatever she had undertaken. Not a great purpose,
+perhaps--there were hours when her purpose seemed to her to be
+particularly trivial--but still, great or small, she had accomplished
+it. She was not only directing Dinard's now--she _was_ Dinard's. Without
+her the business would collapse like a house of cards, and it was
+because she knew this, because Madame also knew this, that she had been
+able to perfect the arrangements she had planned that May afternoon
+after her depressing visit to Judge Crowborough. For she managed the
+house of Dinard's now by an arrangement which gave her one third of the
+profits; and in the last six months, since this scheme had gone into
+effect, the business had grown tremendously in certain directions. The
+millinery department, for instance, which Madame had once treated with
+such supercilious disdain, had become to-day the most fashionable hat
+shop in Fifth Avenue. The work was hard, but the returns were wonderful;
+and with a strange gloating, she told herself that she was making
+money--always more money for the children. "When Fanny finishes school
+year after next, we'll take a large apartment in Park Avenue, and spend
+every summer in Europe," she concluded.
+
+In the morning she rather expected to see O'Hara, but a month passed
+before she met him one evening in October, when she came home late from
+work. The autumn rains had come and gone, destroying the fugitive bloom
+of Miss Polly's flower-beds, and scattering the leaves of the elm tree
+in a moist, delicately tinted carpet over the grass. An hour ago the sun
+had set in a purple cloud, and beneath the electric lights, which shone
+through the fog with a wan and spectral glimmer, the dark outlines of
+the city assumed an ominous vagueness. There was no light in the house;
+and the deserted yard, silvered from frost and strewn with dead leaves,
+which lay in wind-drifts along the flagged walk, had the haunted aspect
+of a place where youth and happiness have passed so recently that the
+fragrance of them still lingers.
+
+"Archibald went off to school without telling you good-bye," she said in
+a friendly voice. "He was much disappointed."
+
+Stopping in the walk, he looked at her with unaffected surprise.
+
+"Why, I thought that was what you wanted!"
+
+She met this quite honestly. "Not after I talked to you."
+
+"What in thunder did I say to change your opinion of me?" The strong
+west wind blowing around him and lifting the roughened red hair from his
+forehead, appeared to lessen by contrast the breezy animation of his
+manner.
+
+"It wasn't anything you said," she answered simply. "I found out you
+were different from what I thought, that is all."
+
+"Then you must have thought something!" he laughed aloud.
+
+"I was afraid at first that you might have a bad influence over
+Archibald."
+
+"Oh, the kid!" His mirth was as irrepressible as his energy.
+
+"You see I have to be very careful," she went on gently. "I want to do
+my best by him."
+
+At this he turned on her with sudden earnestness. "You can't do your
+best by being too careful--take my word for it. If you want him to be a
+man, don't begin by making a mollycoddle of him. Let him rough it a bit,
+or it will be twice as hard for him when he grows up."
+
+"But I do--I do. I am sending him away from me. Isn't that right?"
+
+"You bet it is. Let him learn his own strength. I've lived among men
+ever since I was born, and I tell you, nine times out of ten, the boy
+who is tied to his mother's apron-strings, loses his grip when he is
+turned out into the world. At the first knock-down he goes under."
+
+Instinctively she flinched. If only he wouldn't!
+
+"After he leaves school of course he will go to the university," she
+said.
+
+"That's right," he agreed emphatically, and pursued a little wistfully:
+"Now, that's what I was cheated out of, and there've been times when I'd
+have given my right arm to have been through college instead of having
+to keep my mouth shut and then run home and look up the meaning of
+things in an encyclopædia. It's a handicap, not knowing things. Nobody
+who hasn't had to get along in spite of, it knows what a darned handicap
+it is!"
+
+"But you read, don't you?"
+
+"Not much. Never had time to form the habit. But I've read
+Shakespeare--at least I've read Julius Cæsar six times," he explained.
+"I had it in the desert once where there wasn't a newspaper for two
+months. And I've read the Kings, too--most of 'em."
+
+"But not Hamlet?" She was smiling as she looked from him into the
+street.
+
+He shook his head with a laugh. "Too much meandering in that. I don't
+like talk unless it is straight."
+
+Though he was upon the most distant terms of acquaintance with the
+English language, it occurred to her that he probably possessed a
+knowledge of men and things which no university training could have
+given him.
+
+"It is wonderful," she remarked, touched to sympathy by his confession,
+"that you should have succeeded."
+
+"Oh, any man could have done it--any man, that is, who loved a fight as
+much as I do. It was half luck and half bulldog grip, I suppose. When I
+once get my grip on a thing, I'll hold on no matter what happens. There
+ain't the power this side of Kingdom Come that could make me let go if I
+don't want to."
+
+She thought of his wife, of his losing fight against the craving for
+morphine, and she replied very gently: "If you hadn't been a good
+fighter, I suppose you would have been beaten long ago."
+
+"So long ago," he retorted with jovial humour, "that you wouldn't have
+known me."
+
+An impulse of curiosity urged her to an utterly irrelevant response. "I
+wonder if you have known many women?" She felt that she should like to
+hear his story from him, there in the deserted yard; but when he
+answered her, he revealed a personal reticence worthy of the
+aristocratic traditions of Mrs. Carr. "Oh, I haven't had time for them,"
+he replied indifferently.
+
+"Perhaps there aren't so many in Bonanza City?"
+
+"Oh, there're plenty," he rejoined gaily, "if you take the trouble to
+look for them."
+
+"And you didn't?" They had entered the house, and she spoke merrily as
+she crossed to the staircase.
+
+"Well, the sort I found didn't take my fancy, you see!" he tossed back
+playfully from his door.
+
+Her foot was on the lowest step, when, hesitating with a birdlike
+movement, she looked at him over her right shoulder.
+
+"Well, that's a pity. A woman could have told you a good many things,"
+she observed.
+
+"For instance?" He was still jesting.
+
+Poised for flight, she gazed back at him, challenging his eyes.
+
+"Oh, not to collect gold-headed walking-sticks, not to believe in
+golden-oak, and not to be so extravagantly--slangy."
+
+As she ran up the staircase, a burst of laughter followed her in the
+midst of which she distinguished the retort: "Well, I own to the slang,
+but I inherited the oak, and the sticks were all given me--by women."
+
+The temptation to fling back, "of a sort?" came to her; but she
+conquered it as she passed demurely into the sitting-room, where Miss
+Polly was reading the afternoon paper before an open fire. "I mustn't
+get too friendly," she told herself, reprovingly. "It is better to keep
+up a certain formality." And she determined that at the next meeting she
+would be dignified and aloof.
+
+But the next meeting did not occur until January, for O'Hara went West
+the following day, and for more than two months Miss Polly and Gabriella
+were alone in the house. Though she was working doubly hard at Dinard's,
+the loneliness of the winter evenings after the Christmas holidays were
+over became almost intolerable to Gabriella; and the bleak month of
+January stretched ahead of her in an interminable prospect of cold and
+gloom. For the past ten years the children had absorbed her life, after
+her working hours, so entirely that the parting from them had been an
+unbearable wrench, and had left her with an aching feeling as if an arm
+had been cut away. She had had little time to make friends; the streets
+of the city isolated her as completely as if they had been spaces of
+uninhabited wilderness; and, except for her casual remarks to Miss
+Polly, she had lived from day to day without speaking a word that was
+not directly concerned with the management or the sales of Dinard's.
+Since her divorce, obeying perhaps some inherited tradition, she had
+avoided men almost instinctively; and even if she had cared to make
+friends among them, her life was so narrow that it would have been
+almost impossible for her to do so. When she was not too tired, she
+still read as widely as she could; but at thirty-seven books had become
+but a poor substitute for the more robust human activities. As the
+theatres and the lecture rooms offered the only opportunities of
+relaxation and amusement, she went twice a week, accompanied by the
+little seamstress, who appeared to thrive on self-sacrifice, to see a
+play that was noticed in the papers, or to listen to explanatory
+descriptions of the scenery of South America or the grievances of the
+oppressed natives of Asia.
+
+"You mustn't let yourself mope, honey," urged Miss Polly, one snowy
+morning in January, when Gabriella was putting on a fur coat, cut in the
+latest fashion, which had been left on her hands after the mid-winter
+sales. "The children had to go sooner or later, and it's just as well it
+happened while you are young enough to get over it. A boy never stays at
+home anyway, and you know I always told you Fanny was the sort to marry
+before she is out of her teens."
+
+"Oh, I'm not moping, but of course I can't help missing them. The house
+seems so empty."
+
+"It's obliged to be empty with only us two women in it. I declare I got
+such a creepy feelin' about burglars last night that I kept wishin' Mr.
+O'Hara would hurry up and come home. Mrs. Squires says she was expectin'
+him all last week, but he didn't turn up, so she is kind of lookin' for
+him to-day."
+
+"Is she?" Gabriella's voice was charged with sincere thankfulness.
+Merely to know that there was a man on the first floor afforded a sense
+of security; and an occasional meeting with him would make, she was
+aware, a trivial diversion from the monotony of her existence. The
+loneliness of the winter had driven her like a storm-swept bird back to
+the enduring refuge of her Dream; but, after all, the flesh and blood
+presence of O'Hara could not seriously interfere with the tender and
+pensive visions her memory spun of the past. Every morning, standing
+beside her window and gazing on the bleak street and the bare elm
+boughs, she thought of Arthur and of her first love, with a pious and
+reverent mind--for they occupied in her day the hour and mood which her
+mother, belonging to a more orthodox generation, piously dedicated to
+"Daily Strength for Daily Need." But never for an instant would it have
+occurred to the granddaughter of that sanctified snob, Bartholomew
+Berkeley, who despised the lower orders and fraternized with the Deity
+in his pulpit every Sabbath, that the red-blooded and boisterous
+O'Hara--the man of force and slang--could by any accident usurp the
+sacred shrine where the consecrated relics of her first love reposed.
+Before the whirlwind of O'Hara's energy, she would congratulate herself
+that her Arthur, with the milder fluid of the Peytons in his veins,
+would never allow himself to be carried away by his impulses.
+
+"Well, I'm glad he's coming back, if it's only to protect us," she said,
+while she fastened her fur coat. "I wonder what he has been doing out
+West all this time?"
+
+"Makin' money, I reckon. They say he makes so much he don't know what to
+do with it."
+
+"We could teach him, couldn't we? But he ought to marry and let his wife
+spend it for him. Only," she concluded carelessly, "I suppose he'd
+select some dizzy chorus girl who would bring him to ruin. Men of his
+kind always pick out chorus girls, don't they?"
+
+"I thought 'twas the other sort that did that," observed Miss Polly,
+fresh from the perusal of the Sunday newspapers; "Dukes and society men
+and the sons of millionaires."
+
+"Perhaps. Maybe they're all alike," and taking up her umbrella,
+Gabriella started bravely out into the storm.
+
+At six o'clock, when she struggled back along Twenty-third Street, the
+wind had changed, and the storm driving furiously down the long blocks
+caught her in a whirl of blinding snowflakes. In the swirling whiteness
+of the distance, the black outlines of the city appeared remote and
+shadowy, while the waning lights, which shone like dim moons at the
+crossing, revealed the ghostly figures of a few struggling pedestrians.
+
+The gate was open, and she had almost reached it, when the lurching form
+of a man, emerging suddenly from the storm, was flung against her with
+such violence that she fell back for support on the icy railing of the
+yard. Then, as the obscure figure, drawing away from her with a
+staggering motion, began fumbling blindly at the gate, she caught sight
+of a ghastly face, which looked as if it had been stricken by an
+incurable illness. The man wore no overcoat; a knitted muffler was
+wrapped tightly about his neck; and she saw that the hands fumbling at
+the gate were red and trembling from cold.
+
+Steadying herself against the fence, she drew her purse from her muff,
+and she had already taken out a piece of silver, when she heard her name
+called in a voice which sounded vaguely familiar, though it awoke no
+immediate associations in her mind.
+
+"Gabriella! My God! I was looking for you, Gabriella!"
+
+With the money still in her hand, she stooped to look into his face.
+
+"You don't know me. I'm George," he said in an angry voice as if he were
+about to burst into tears. "I'm George, but you don't know me."
+
+The storm drove him against her, and he clung weakly to her arm, crying
+softly in a terrified whimper like a child that is awaking from a
+horrible nightmare. Though she did not realize that he was dying, not of
+disease, but of drink, the thought shot through her mind: "So this is
+George. So this is what George has come to--George who took everything
+that he wanted!"
+
+"Where are you going?" she asked, for the shock had restored him to some
+poor semblance of sanity.
+
+"I was looking for you. I heard you lived down here, and I knew you'd
+take me in. I've been ill--I'm ill enough to die, and they turned me out
+of the hotel. There was a woman who stole everything I had. She stole it
+and ran off in the night, damn her!"
+
+He shivered violently while he spoke, and she saw a glassy look creep
+into his eyes and over his face, as if his features had been frozen in
+an instant of terror. Panic seized her lest he should die there in the
+street, and she grasped his arm almost roughly as if she would shake him
+back into life. As she supported him his teeth began to rattle, not as
+the teeth of the living chatter from fear, but as the teeth of a dead
+man might rattle when he is jolted in his coffin. For a minute she felt
+the madness of her panic pass from her pulses to her brain, and her
+terror of him turned her as cold as the sleet-covered iron railing
+against which she leaned. A cowardly impulse tempted her to desert him
+and run for her life, to seek shelter behind bolted doors, to leave him
+there alone to freeze to death at her gate.
+
+"Gabriella, I'm afraid," he whined, clinging to her arm. "I'm afraid,
+Gabriella. You can't let go of me!"
+
+An unspeakable loathing swept over her; his very touch seemed
+contamination; and while she turned toward the gate, she knew that
+every fibre of her flesh, every quiver of her nerves, revolted against
+the thing she was doing. But something stronger than her flesh or her
+nerves--the vein of iron in her soul--decided the issue.
+
+"Come in with me, and I'll take care of you," she said. "There is the
+step. Don't stumble. Here, steady yourself with the umbrella. We are
+almost there now." Her voice was cold and hard; but the words were those
+she might have used to Archibald had she been leading him in out of the
+storm.
+
+Still whimpering and stumbling, George clung to her with his desperate
+clutch, while she dragged him up the short walk, which was deep in snow,
+to the six steps, which appeared to her to reach upward into eternity.
+As she approached the house, a light shone out suddenly in one of the
+windows and a sense of safety, of perfect security descended upon her,
+for she knew that it was the red glimmer of O'Hara's fire. With the
+sensation, she heard again her mother's voice speaking above the storm:
+"Gabriella, we'll send immediately for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn!" So, in
+the old days of her childhood, Cousin Jimmy had brought her this feeling
+of relief in the midst of distress.
+
+Opening the door with her latchkey, she dragged George into the hall,
+where her thankful eyes fell on O'Hara's overcoat, from which the water
+was, still dripping. For an instant she was tempted to call to him; then
+checking the impulse, she went on to the staircase, which she ascended
+with difficulty because George's legs seemed to give way when he tried
+to lift them to a step. At last, after what she felt to be an eternity,
+they reached the upper floor, and she pushed her burden into
+Archibald's room, where he fell like a log on the hearthrug. The sound
+of his fall shook the house, and when Miss Polly came running in, with a
+cry of alarm, Gabriella almost expected to see O'Hara behind her. But
+O'Hara did not come, and before the seamstress could recover from the
+palpitations the shock had produced, George was on his feet again, and
+was staring blankly, as if fascinated, at the reflection of the electric
+light in the mirror.
+
+"It's George," Gabriella explained in a harsh voice. "I found him in the
+street. He was looking for me, and I couldn't leave him to freeze. I
+think he's either drunk or ill. I don't know which it is, but it sounds
+like pneumonia."
+
+"God have mercy!" exclaimed Miss Polly, which was quite as lucid as she
+ever became in a crisis. Her face had turned blue, she was trembling
+with terror, and the violence of her palpitations almost exceeded the
+painful sounds in George's chest. "If there was only a man we could send
+for," she wailed hysterically. "Oh, Gabriella, if there was only a man!"
+
+"Well, there's the doctor," replied Gabriella shortly. "You'd better
+telephone for him at once. Get the nearest one. I think his name is
+McFarland."
+
+"And a nurse? You'll want a nurse, won't you?"
+
+"I'll want anything I can get, and I'll want it quickly. There, hurry,
+while I find a bathrobe of Archibald's. He's wet through--soaking wet.
+He must have been out all day in the storm."
+
+Miss Polly vanished into the dimness of the hall, and after a few
+minutes Gabriella heard her fluttering voice demanding a telephone
+number as if she were still supplicating the Deity.
+
+"Take off your wet clothes while I get you a drink and some hot
+blankets!" said Gabriella when she had found one of Archibald's
+bathrobes in the closet. It occurred to her that George was really
+incapable of undressing himself, but she felt that she would rather die
+than touch him again. The loathing which had overpowered her outside in
+the storm became stronger in the close air of the house. "I can't touch
+him. I don't care what happens I can't touch him," she told herself,
+while she placed the flannel robe on the rug, and hurried back to the
+kitchen. Her whole body was benumbed and chilled, not from cold, but
+from disgust, yet her mind was almost unnaturally active, and she found
+herself thinking over and over again: "So this is the man I loved, this
+is the man I married instead of Arthur!"
+
+When she came back with a cup of broth and some hot blankets, she found
+George in the flannel gown of Archibald's, with his wet clothes on the
+floor at his feet, from which he had forgotten to remove his shoes. He
+drank the soup greedily, while Miss Polly lighted the wood-fire she had
+laid in the open grate.
+
+"The heat's comin' up all right in the radiator," she said, "but I
+thought a blaze might make him more comfortable."
+
+"Yes, it's better," replied Gabriella sternly, while she stooped to
+unlace George's boots. There was no compassion in her heart, and it
+seemed to her, while she struggled with the wet lacing, that the fumes
+of whiskey spread contagion and disease over the room. She was not only
+hard and bitter--she felt that she loathed him with unspeakable
+loathing.
+
+"I declare, Gabriella, I believe he has gone deranged!" Miss Polly
+cried out sharply, dropping the poker and starting to her feet in an
+erratic impulse of flight.
+
+With the flannel gown clutched tightly to his chest, where the dull
+rattling sounds went on unceasingly, George was staring in fascinated
+intensity at the reflection of the electric light in the mirror. Then
+suddenly, with a scream of terror, he lifted the poker Miss Polly had
+dropped, and flung it over Gabriella's head in the direction of the
+dressing-table. At the noise of breaking glass, Gabriella rose from her
+knees, and said in the hard, quiet voice she had used ever since the
+first shock of the meeting:
+
+"If you are afraid, lock yourself in your room, Miss Polly. I am going
+downstairs for Mr. O'Hara."
+
+Without waiting for a response, she ran out into the hall and down the
+staircase, while her eyes clung to the comforting glimmer of light under
+the drawing-room door. As her feet touched the lowest step, the door
+opened quickly, and O'Hara stood on the threshold.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE TEST
+
+
+"I knew something was wrong," he said, emerging, big and efficient, from
+the firelight, "and I was just coming up." Before she could answer she
+felt his warm grasp on her hands, and it seemed to her suddenly that it
+was not only her hands he enfolded, but her agonized and suffering mind.
+
+"There's a man up there--" she faltered helplessly. "I was once married
+to him long ago--oh, long ago. Just now I found him in the street and he
+seems to be out of his mind. We are frightened."
+
+But he seemed not to hear her, not to demand an explanation, not even to
+wait to discover what she wanted. Already his long stride was
+outstripping her on the staircase, and while she followed more slowly,
+pausing now and then to take breath, she realized thankfully that the
+situation had passed completely away from her power of command. As Miss
+Polly's strength to hers, so was her strength to O'Hara's.
+
+Faint, despairing moans issued from Archibald's room as she reached the
+landing; and going inside, she saw George wrestling feebly with O'Hara,
+who held him with one hand while with the other he waved authoritative
+directions to Miss Polly.
+
+"Get the bed ready for him, with plenty of hot blankets. He's about at
+the end of his rope now. It's a jag, but it's more than a jag, too. If
+I'm not mistaken he's in for a case of pneumonia."
+
+Miss Polly, hovering timidly at a safe distance, held out the blankets
+and the hot water bottles, while O'Hara carried George across the room
+to the bed, and then covered him warmly. When he turned to glance about
+his gaze fell on Gabriella, and he remarked bluntly: "You'd better get
+out. You aren't wanted."
+
+"But I am obliged to be here. It is my business, not yours," she
+replied, while a sensation of sickness passed over her.
+
+For a moment he regarded her stubbornly, "Well, I don't know whose
+business it was a minute ago," he rejoined, "but it's mine now. I am
+boss of this particular hell, and you're going to keep out of it. I
+guess I know more about D.T. than you and Miss Polly put together would
+know in a thousand years."
+
+She was very humble. In the sweetness of her relief, of her security,
+she would have submitted cheerfully not only to slang, but to downright
+profanity. It was one of those unforgettable instants when character,
+she understood, was more effective than culture. Even Arthur would have
+appeared at a disadvantage beside O'Hara at that moment.
+
+"I think I ought to help you," she insisted.
+
+"Well, I think you oughtn't. Out you go! I guess I know what I'm up
+against."
+
+Before she could protest, before she could even resist, he had pushed
+her out into the hail, and while she still hesitated there at the head
+of the staircase, the door opened far enough to allow the huddled figure
+of Miss Polly to creep through the crack. Then the key turned in the
+lock; and O'Hara's voice was heard pacifying George as he might have
+pacified a child or a lunatic. After a few minutes the shrieks stopped
+suddenly; the door was unlocked again for a minute, and there floated
+out the reassuring words:
+
+"Don't stand out there any longer. It's as right as right. I've got him
+buffaloed!"
+
+"What does he mean?" inquired Gabriella helplessly of the seamstress.
+
+"I don't know, but I reckon it's all right," responded Miss Polly. "He
+seems to know just what to do, and anyhow the doctor'll be here in a
+minute. It seems funny to give him whiskey, don't it, but that was the
+first thing Mr. O'Hara thought of."
+
+"I suppose his heart was weak. He looked as if he were dying," answered
+Gabriella. "He asked for more whiskey, didn't he?"
+
+"Yes; I'm goin' right straight to get it. Oh, Gabriella, ain't a man a
+real solid comfort sometimes?"
+
+Without replying to this ejaculation, Gabriella went after the whiskey,
+and when she came back with the bottle in her hand, she found the doctor
+on the landing outside the locked door. He was a stranger to her, and
+she had scarcely begun her explanation when O'Hara called him into the
+room.
+
+"The sooner you take a look at him the better." Everything was taken out
+of her hands--everything, even her explanation of George's presence in
+her apartment.
+
+As there was nothing more for her to do, she went back to the
+sitting-room, where a fire burned brightly, and began to talk to Miss
+Polly.
+
+"I don't know what I should have done if he hadn't been here," she
+said.
+
+"Who? Mr. O'Hara? Well, it certainly was providential, honey, when you
+come to think of it."
+
+The door of Archibald's room opened and shut, and the doctor came down
+the hall to the telephone. They heard him order medicines from a chemist
+near-by; and then, after a minute, he took up the receiver, and spoke to
+a nurse at the hospital. At first he gave merely the ordinary
+directions, but at the end of the conversation he said sharply in answer
+to a question: "No, there's no need of a restraining sheet. He's too far
+gone to be violent. It is only a matter of hours."
+
+His voice stopped, and Gabriella went out to him. "Will you tell me what
+you think, Doctor?" she asked.
+
+"Is he your husband?" He had a blank, secretive face, with light eyes,
+and a hard mouth--so different, she thought from the poetic face of Dr.
+French.
+
+"I divorced him ten years ago."
+
+He looked at her searchingly. "Well, he may last until morning, but it
+is doubtful. His heart has given out."
+
+"Is there anything I can do?"
+
+"No. Morphine is the only thing. We are going to try camphorated oil,
+but there is hardly a chance--not a chance." He turned to go back into
+the room, then stopped, and added in the same tone of professional
+stoicism: "The nurse will be here in half an hour, and I shall wait till
+she comes."
+
+When Gabriella went back to the sitting-room, Miss Polly was weeping. "I
+followed you and heard what he said. Oh, Gabriella, ain't life too
+awful!"
+
+"I'll be glad when the nurse comes," answered Gabriella with impatience.
+Emotionally she felt as if she had turned to stone, and she had little
+inclination to explore the trite and tangled paths of Miss Polly's
+philosophy.
+
+The nurse, a stout, blond woman in spectacles, arrived on the stroke of
+the half-hour, and after talking with her a few minutes, the doctor took
+up his bag and came to tell Gabriella that he would return about
+daybreak. "I've given instructions to the nurse, and Mr. O'Hara will sit
+up in case he is needed, but there is nothing to do except keep the
+patient perfectly quiet and give the hypodermics. It is too late to try
+anything else."
+
+"May I go in there?"
+
+"Well, you can't do any good, but you may go in if you'd rather."
+
+Then he went, as if glad of his release, and after Gabriella had
+prevailed upon Miss Folly to go to bed, she changed her street dress for
+a tea-gown, and threw herself on a couch before the fire in the
+sitting-room. An overpowering fatigue weighed her down; the yellow
+firelight had become an anodyne to her nerves; and after a few minutes
+in which she thought confusedly of O'Hara and Cousin Jimmy, she let
+herself fall asleep.
+
+When she awoke a man was replenishing the fire, and as she struggled
+drowsily back into consciousness, she realized that he was not Cousin
+Jimmy, but O'Hara, and that he was placing the lumps of coal very softly
+in the fear of awaking her.
+
+"Hallo, there!" he exclaimed when he turned with the scuttle still in
+his hand; "so you're awake, are you?"
+
+She started up. "I've been asleep!" she exclaimed in surprise.
+
+"You looked like a kid when I came in," he responded cheerfully, and she
+reflected that even the presence of death could not shadow his jubilant
+spirit. "I went back to the kitchen to make some coffee for the nurse
+and myself, and I thought you might like a cup. It's first-rate coffee,
+if I do say it. Two lumps and a little cream, I guess that's the way. I
+rummaged in the icebox, and found a bottle of cream hidden away at the
+back. That was right, wasn't it?"
+
+A strange, an almost uncanny feeling of reminiscence, of vague yet
+profound familiarity, was stealing over her. It all seemed to have
+happened before, somewhere, somehow--the slow awakening to the large
+dark form in the yellow firelight, O'Hara's sudden turning to look at
+her, his exuberance, his sanguine magnetism, and even the cup of coffee
+he made and brought to her side. She felt that it was the most natural
+thing in the world to awake and find him there and to drink his coffee.
+
+"It's good," she answered; "I had no dinner, and I am very hungry."
+
+"I thought you'd be. That's why I brought a snack with it." He was
+cutting a chicken sandwich on the tray he had placed under the green
+shaded light, and after a minute he brought it to her and held the cup
+while she ate. A nurse could not have been gentler about the little
+things she needed; yet she knew that he was rough, off-hand,
+careless--she could imagine that he might become almost brutal if he
+were crossed in his purpose. She had believed him to be so simple; but
+he was in reality, she saw, a mass of complexities, of actions and
+reactions, of intricacies and involutions of character.
+
+"I don't know what I should have done if you hadn't been here," she said
+gratefully while she ate the sandwich and he sat beside her holding her
+cup. "But I'm so unused to being taken care of," she added with a
+trembling little laugh, "that I don't quite know how to behave."
+
+"Oh, you would have got on all right," he rejoined carelessly; "but I'm
+glad all the same that I was here."
+
+She motioned toward the hall. "Has there been any change?"
+
+"No, there won't be until morning. He'll last that long, I think. We're
+giving him a hypodermic every four hours, but it really ain't any good,
+you know. It is merely professional." For a minute he was silent,
+watching her gravely; then recovering his casual manner, he added: "I
+shouldn't let it upset me if I were you. Things happen that way, and
+we've got to take them standing."
+
+She shook her head. "I'm not upset. I'm not feeling it in the least.
+Somehow, I can't even realize that I ever knew him. If you told me it
+was all a dream, I should believe you."
+
+"Well, you're a plucky sort. I could tell that the first minute I saw
+you."
+
+"It's not pluck. I don't feel things, that's all. I suppose I'm hard,
+but I can't help it."
+
+"Hard things come useful sometimes; they don't break."
+
+"Yes, I suppose if I'd been soft, I should have broken long ago," she
+replied almost bitterly.
+
+After putting the plate and cup aside, he sat down by the table, and
+gazed at her attentively for a long moment. "Well, you look as soft as a
+white rose anyhow," he remarked with a curiously impersonal air of
+criticism.
+
+A rosy glow flooded her face. It was so long since any man had commented
+upon her appearance that she felt painfully shy and displeased.
+
+"All the same I've had a hard life," she returned with passionate
+earnestness. "I married when I was twenty, and seven years later my
+husband left me for another woman."
+
+"The one in there?"
+
+She shuddered, "Yes, the one in there."
+
+"The darn fool!" he exclaimed briefly.
+
+"There was a divorce, and then I had my two children to support and
+educate. Because I had a natural talent for dressmaking, I turned to
+that, and in the end I succeeded. But for ten years I never heard a word
+of the man I married--until--I met him downstairs--in the street."
+
+"And you brought him in?"
+
+"What else could I do? He was dying."
+
+"Do you know what he was doing out there?"
+
+"He was looking for me, I think. He thought. I would take him in."
+
+"Well, it's strange how things work out," was his comment after a pause.
+"There's something in it somewhere that we can't see. It's impossible to
+reason it out or explain it, but life has a way of jerking you up at
+times and making you stand still and think. I know I'm putting it badly,
+but I can't talk--I never could. Words, don't mean much to me, and yet I
+know--I know--" He hesitated, and she watched his thought struggle
+obscurely for expression. "I know you can't slip away from things and be
+a quitter, no matter how hard you try. Life pulls you back again and
+again till you've learned to play the game squarely."
+
+He was gazing into the fire with a look that was strangely spiritual on
+his face, which was half in shadow, half in the transfiguring glow of
+the flames. For the second time she became acutely aware of the hidden
+subtleties beneath his apparent simplicity.
+
+"I've felt that myself often enough," he resumed presently in a low
+voice. "I've been pulled up by something inside of me when I was
+plunging ahead with the bit in my teeth, and it's been just exactly as
+if this something said: 'Go steady or you'll run amuck and bu'st up the
+whole blooming show.' You can't talk about it. It sounds like plain
+foolishness when you put it into words, but when it comes to you, no
+matter where you are, you have to stand still and listen."
+
+"And is it only when you are running amuck that you hear it?" she asked.
+
+"No, there've been other times--a few of them. Once or twice I've had it
+come to me up in the Rockies when there didn't seem more than a few feet
+between me and the sky, and then there was a time out on the prairie
+when I was lost and thought I'd never get to the end of those darned
+miles of blankness. Well, I've had a funny road to travel when I look
+back at it."
+
+"Tell me about some of the women you knew in the West." An insatiable
+curiosity to hear the truth about his marriage seized her; but no sooner
+had she yielded to it than she felt an impulsive regret. What right had
+she to pry into the hidden sanctities of his past?
+
+A frown contracted his forehead, but he said merely: "Oh, there wasn't
+much about that," and she felt curiously baffled and resentful. "I think
+I'll go and take a look in there," he added, rising and walking softly
+in the direction of the room at the end of the hall.
+
+He was gone so long that Gabriella, crushing down the revolt of her
+nerves, went to the door, and opening it very gently, looked cautiously
+into the room. The window was wide open to the night, where the snow was
+still falling, and beside the candlestand at the head of the bed the
+nurse was filling a hypodermic syringe from a teaspoon. By the open
+window O'Hara stood inhaling the frosty air; and Gabriella crossed the
+floor so silently that he did not notice her presence until he turned to
+watch the nurse give the injection.
+
+Then he said in a whisper: "You'd better go out. You can't do any good."
+But she made an impatient gesture of dissent, and stopping between the
+bed and the wall, waited while the nurse bared George's arm and inserted
+the point of the needle. He was lying so motionless that she thought at
+first that he was already dead; but presently he stirred faintly, a
+shiver ran through the thin arm on the sheet, and a low, half-strangled
+moan escaped from his lips. Had she come upon him in a hospital ward,
+she knew that she should not have recognized him. He was not the man she
+had once loved; he was not the father of her children; he was only a
+stranger who was dying in her house. She could feel nothing while she
+looked down at him. When she tried to remember her young love she could
+recall but a shadow. That, too, was dead; that, too, had not left even a
+memory.
+
+As she bent there above him she made an effort to remember what he had
+once been, to recall his face as she had first seen it, to revive the
+burning radiance of that summer when they had been lovers. But a gray
+veil of forgetfulness wrapped the past; and her mind, when she tried to
+bring back the emotions of seventeen years ago, became vacant. For so
+long she had stoically put the thought of that past out of her life,
+that when she returned to it now, she found that only ashes remained.
+Then a swift stab of pity pierced her heart like a blade, and she saw
+again, not George her lover, not George her husband, but the photograph
+Mrs. Fowler had shown her of the boy in velvet clothes with the wealth
+of curls over his lace collar. So it was that boy who lay dying like a
+stranger in the bed of his son!
+
+She turned hurriedly and went out without speaking, without looking back
+when she opened the door.
+
+"If one could only understand it," she said aloud as she entered the
+sitting-room; and then, with a start of surprise, she realized that
+O'Hara had followed her. "You walked so softly I didn't hear you," she
+explained.
+
+"The rugs are thick, and I have on slippers. My boots were soaking when
+I came in, and I'd just taken them off when you called."
+
+They sat down again in front of the fire; and while she stared silently
+at the flames, with her chin on her hand and her elbow on the arm of the
+chair, he burst out so unexpectedly that she caught her breath in a
+gasp:
+
+"You didn't know that I was married, too, did you?" His words, and even
+more than his words, his voice, filled with suppressed emotion, awoke
+her from her reverie in which she had been dreaming of Arthur.
+
+She smiled evasively, remembering her promise to Mrs. Squires.
+
+He hesitated again, and then spoke with an effort. "Well, it was hell!"
+he said grimly.
+
+"I know"--she was very gentle, full of understanding and sympathy--"but
+you went through it bravely."
+
+"I stuck to her." His hand clenched while he answered. Then, after a
+pause in which she watched him struggle against some savage instinct for
+secrecy, he added quietly: "If she were alive to-day, I'd be sticking to
+her still."
+
+"You must have loved her." It was all she could think of to say, and yet
+the words sounded trite and canting as soon as she had uttered them.
+
+Lifting his head quickly, he made a contemptuous gesture of dissent.
+"No, it wasn't that. I never loved her, except, perhaps, just at the
+first. But there's something that comes before love, I guess. I don't
+know what it is, but there's something. It may be just plain doggedness,
+but after I married her there wasn't anything on top this earth that
+could have made me give up and let go. As soon as I found what I was up
+against--it was morphine--I knew I'd either got to fight it out or be a
+quitter, and I've never been a quitter. Until she got so bad she had to
+be shut up I kept a home for her out there in Colorado, and I lived with
+her in hell as long as she wasn't too bad to be out of a hospital. Then
+I brought her on here and we found a private place down on Long Island
+where she stayed till she died--"
+
+"And you still saw her?"
+
+"Except when I was out West, and that's where I was most of the time,
+you know. My work was out there, and there's nothing like hell behind
+you to keep you running. I made piles of money those years. That's all
+I ever cared for about money--just making it. I'd fight the devil to get
+it, but after I've once got it, I'll give it to the first fool who comes
+begging. But the getting of it is great."
+
+"How long did it last?"
+
+"My marriage? Going on eighteen years. She was down on Long Island for
+the last ten of them."
+
+"Then you lived with her eight. Was she always--always-"
+
+"Took it before I ever married her, and I found it out in a month. She
+wasn't so much to blame as you might think," he pursued thoughtfully.
+"You see she had a tough time of it, and she was little and weak, and
+everything was against her. She came out West first to teach school, and
+then she got mixed up with some skunk of a man who pretended to marry
+her when he had a wife living in Chicago, and after that I guess she
+went on taking a dope just to keep up her spirits and ease the pain of
+some spinal trouble she'd had since she was a child. There was nothing
+bad in her--she was just weak--and I began to feel sorry for her, and so
+I did it. If I had it to do over again, I'm not so sure I'd act
+differently. She was a poor little creature that didn't have any man to
+look after her, and I was just muddling along anyway, thinking about
+money. Heaven knows what would have become of her if I hadn't happened
+along when I did."
+
+He had lifted his head toward the light, while he ran his hand through
+his hair, and again she saw the look, so like spiritual exaltation,
+transfigure his face. Before this man, who had sprung from poverty and
+dirt, who had struggled up by his own force, overcoming and triumphing,
+fighting and winning, fighting and holding, fighting and losing, but
+always fighting--before this man, who had been born in a cellar, she
+felt suddenly humbled. Without friends, without knowledge, except the
+bitter knowledge of the streets, he had fought his fight, and had kept
+untarnished a certain hardy standard of honour. Beside this tremendous
+achievement she weighed his roughness, his ignorance of books and of the
+superficial conventions, and she realized how little these things really
+mattered--how little any outside things mattered in the final judgment
+of life. She thought of George, dying a drunkard's death in the room at
+the end of the hail--of George whose way had been smoothed for him from
+birth, who had taken everything that he had wanted.
+
+"I wish there was something I could do for you--something to help you,"
+she said impetuously. "But I never saw any one who seemed to need help
+so little."
+
+His face brightened, and she saw that her words had brought a touching
+wistfulness into his eyes.
+
+"Well, if you'd let me come and talk to you sometimes" he answered
+shyly. "There're a lot of things I'd like to talk to you about--things I
+don't know, things I do know, and things I half know."
+
+From the brilliant look she turned on him, he understood that he must
+have given her pleasure, and she saw the smile return to his face.
+
+"I'll tell you everything I know and welcome," she replied readily; "but
+that isn't much. Better than that, I'll read to you."
+
+"If you don't mind, I think I'd rather you'd just talk." Then he rose
+with one of his abrupt movements, "I'd better look in again now. The
+nurse might want something."
+
+"I feel that you oughtn't to stay up," urged Gabriella, rising as he
+turned away from her. "You have done all you can."
+
+His only response was an impatient negative gesture, and without looking
+at her, he crossed the room quickly and went out into the hall. Hardly a
+minute had passed, and she was still standing where he had left her,
+when he returned and said in a whisper:
+
+"He is going now--very quietly. Will you come?"
+
+She shook her head, crying out sharply: "No! no!" Then before something
+in his face her opposition melted swiftly away, and she added: "Yes,
+I'll come. He might like to have some one by him who knew him as he used
+to be."
+
+"After all, he got the worst of it, poor devil!" he answered gently as
+he opened the door.
+
+By a miracle of memory her resentment was swept out of her thoughts, and
+she was conscious of an infinite pity. In George's face, while she
+watched it, there flickered back for an instant the glory of that
+enchanted spring when she had first loved him. Of his brilliant promise,
+his ardent youth, there remained only this fading glimmer in the face of
+a man who was dying. And it seemed to her suddenly that she saw embodied
+in this wreck of youth and love all the inscrutable mystery not of
+death, but of life. Her tears fell quickly, and while they fell O'Hara's
+grasp enfolded her hand.
+
+"It's over now. The best thing that could happen to him has happened,"
+he said, and the touch of his hand was like the touch of life itself,
+consoling, strengthening, restoring.
+
+In the days that followed it was as if the helpful spirit of Cousin
+Jimmy had returned to her in the unfamiliar character of O'Hara. The
+ghastly details of George's burial were not only taken out of her hands,
+she was hardly permitted to know even that they were necessary. All
+explanations were made, not by her, but by O'Hara; and when they
+returned together from the cemetery, Gabriella brought with her a
+feeling that she had been watching something that belonged to O'Hara
+laid in the earth. But when she tried to thank him, she found that he
+was apparently unaware that he had done anything deserving of gratitude.
+
+"Oh, that's nothing. Anybody would have done it," he remarked, and
+dismissed the subject forever.
+
+For a week after this she did not see him again; and then one Saturday
+afternoon, when she was leaving Dinard's, they met by chance and walked
+home together. It was the first time she had been in the street with
+him, and she was conscious of feeling absurdly young and girlish--she,
+the mother of a daughter old enough to have love affairs! A soft
+flush--the flush of youth--tinted her pale cheek; her step, which so
+often dragged wearily after the day's work, was as buoyant as Fanny's;
+and her low, beautiful laugh was as gay as if she were not burdened by
+innumerable anxieties. As they passed a shop window, her reflection
+flashed back at her, and she thought happily: "Yes, it is true, you are
+better looking at thirty-seven, Gabriella, than you were at twenty."
+
+"Shall we walk down?" asked O'Hara, and added: "So that was your shop? I
+am glad that I saw it. But what do you do there all day?"
+
+She laughed merrily. "Put in pins and take them out again. Design,
+direct, scold, and flatter. We are getting in the spring models now,
+and it's very exciting."
+
+He glanced down at her figure, noting, as if for the first time, the
+narrowness at the feet, the large loose waist, and the bunchiness around
+the hips.
+
+"Did you make that?" he inquired.
+
+"This coat? Oh, no; it came from Paris. It was left on my hands," she
+explained, "or I shouldn't be wearing it. I wear only what people won't
+buy, you know."
+
+"No, I didn't know," he returned abstractedly, and she observed
+humorously after a minute that he was not thinking of her because he was
+thinking so profoundly about her clothes. It was his way, she had
+discovered, to concentrate his mind intensely upon the object before
+him, no matter how trivial or insignificant it might appear. He seemed
+never to have learned how to divide either his interest or his
+attention.
+
+"If you could make what you wanted," he remarked, "I should think you'd
+make them more comfortable. Are you going to wear those hobble skirts
+this spring?"
+
+"They'll be narrow at the feet but very bunchy at the top--doesn't that
+sound delightful? I am making a white taffeta for Fanny that has five or
+six yards of perfectly good material puffed out in the most ridiculous
+way at the back over a petticoat of silver lace."
+
+Her spirits felt so light, so effervescent, that she wanted to jest, to
+laugh, to talk nonsense interminably; and after his first moments of
+bewilderment, when he appeared still unable to detach his mind from his
+business, he entered gaily and heartily into her mood. His perplexities
+once disposed of, he gave himself entirely to the enjoyment of the walk
+with her, and she noticed for the first time his boyish delight in the
+simplest details of life. With the simplicity of a man to whom large
+pleasures are unknown, he threw himself whole-heartedly into the
+momentary diversion of small ones. Every person in the crowd, she
+discovered, excited his interest, and his humour bubbled over at the
+most insignificant things--at the grimace of a newsboy who offered him a
+paper, at the absurd hat worn by a woman in a motor car, at the
+expression of disgusted solemnity on the face of a servant in livery, at
+the giggles of an over-dressed girl who hung on the arm of an anemic and
+exhausted admirer. Never before had she encountered such vitality, such
+careless, pure, and uncalculating joy of life. There was a tonic quality
+in his physical presence, and while she walked at his side down Fifth
+Avenue she felt as if she were swept onward by one of the health-giving,
+pine-scented winds of Colorado. And she told herself reassuringly that
+only a man who had lived decently could have kept himself so
+extraordinarily young and exuberant at forty-five.
+
+The shop windows, particularly those displaying men's shirtings,
+enchanted him; and he stopped a moment before each one, while she
+yielded as obligingly as she might have yielded to a fancy of
+Archibald's, though she was aware that her son would have scorned to
+look into a window.
+
+"It's so seldom I get out on the Avenue, that's why I like it, I
+suppose," he remarked while they were surveying a festive arrangement of
+pink madras.
+
+She smiled up at him, and her smile, gay as it was, held a touch of
+maternal solicitude. Notwithstanding his bigness and his success and his
+forty-five years, there was something appealingly boyish about him.
+
+"It would be so easy to get out, wouldn't it?" she asked as they walked
+on again.
+
+"Well, there ain't much fun when you are by yourself."
+
+"But you know plenty of people."
+
+"Oh, yes, I know people enough in a business way, but that don't mean
+having friends, does it? Of course, I've men friends scattered
+everywhere," he added. "The West is full of 'em, but it's funny when you
+come to think of it--" He broke off, hesitated an instant, and then went
+on again: "It's funny, but I don't believe. I ever had a woman friend in
+my life--I mean a friend who wasn't just the wife of some man I knew in
+business."
+
+The confession touched her, and she answered impulsively: "Well, that's
+just what I want to be to you--a good friend."
+
+He laughed, but his eyes shone as he looked down on her. "If you'd only
+take the trouble."
+
+"It won't be any trouble--not a bit of it. After your goodness to me,
+how could I help being your friend?"
+
+Lifting her eyes she would have met his squarely while she spoke, but he
+was not looking at her--he appeared, indeed, to be looking almost
+obstinately away from her.
+
+"There wasn't anything in what I did," he responded in a barely audible
+voice, and she understood that he was embarrassed by her gratitude.
+
+"But there was something in it--there was a great deal in it," she
+insisted. It was so easy to be natural with a man, so easy to be candid
+and sincere when there was no question of sentiment, and, she thought
+almost gratefully of the elusive and mysterious Alice. The faintest
+suggestion of romance would have spoiled things in the beginning; but
+thanks to the hidden Alice, she might be as kind and frank as she
+pleased. Besides, she was nearly thirty-eight, and a woman of
+thirty-eight might certainly be trusted to make a friend of a man of
+forty-five.
+
+With this thought, over which the memory of Arthur brooded benevolently,
+in her mind, she said warmly: "It will make so much difference to me,
+too, having a real friend in New York."
+
+He turned to her with a start. "Do you mean that I could make a
+difference to you?"
+
+"The greatest difference, of course," she rejoined brightly, eager to
+convince him of his importance in her life. "I can't tell you--you would
+never understand how lonely I get at times, and now with the children
+away it is worse than ever--the loneliness, I mean, and the feeling that
+there isn't anybody one could turn to in trouble."
+
+For a minute he appeared to ponder this deeply. "Well, you could always
+come to me if you needed anything," he answered at last, and she felt
+intuitively that for some reason he was distrustful either of himself or
+of her. "I am not here very much of my time, but whenever I am, I am
+entirely at your service."
+
+"But that's only half of it." She was determined to reassure him. "A
+friendship can't be one-sided, can it? And it isn't fair when you give
+everything, that I should give nothing."
+
+His scruples surrendered immediately to her argument. "You give
+everything--you give happiness," he said--a strange speech certainly
+from the twilight lover of Alice. However, as she reasoned clearly
+after her first perplexity, men were often strange when one least
+expected or desired strangeness. At thirty-seven, whatever else life had
+denied her, she felt that it had granted her a complete understanding of
+men; and it was out of this complete understanding that she observed
+brightly after a minute:
+
+"Well, if you feel that way, we are obliged to be friends." At least she
+would prove by her frankness that she was not one of those foolish women
+who are always taking things seriously.
+
+"Yes, you give happiness. You scatter it, all over the place," he went
+on, groping an instant after the right words.
+
+"Cousin Jimmy used to say," she laughed back, "that I had a sunny
+temper."
+
+"That's it--that's what I meant," he replied eagerly; and she was
+impressed again by his utter inability to make light conversation. When
+he was once started, when he had lost himself in his subject, she knew
+that he could speak both fluently and convincingly; but she realized
+that he simply couldn't talk unless he had something to say. In order to
+put him at his ease again, she remarked with pleasant firmness: "Do you
+know there is something about you that reminds me of my Cousin Jimmy. It
+gives me almost a cousinly feeling for you."
+
+She had the air of expecting him to be interested, but he met it with
+the rather vague interrogation: "Cousin Jimmy?"
+
+"The cousin who always came to our help when we were in trouble. We used
+to say that if the bread didn't rise, mother sent for Cousin Jimmy."
+
+Though he laughed readily enough, she could see that his attention was
+still wandering. "I never had a cousin," he returned after a pause, "or
+a relation of any sort, for that matter."
+
+His voice was curiously distant, and she was conscious of a slight
+shock, as if she had run against one of the hard places in his
+character. "Well, I've done my best," she thought impatiently. "If he
+doesn't want to be friends he needn't be." Then, with a change of
+manner, she observed flippantly: "Sometimes one's relatives are useful
+and sometimes they're not." Really, he was impossibly heavy except in a
+crisis; and one could scarcely be expected to produce crises in order to
+put him thoroughly at his ease.
+
+As he made no response to her trite remark, she, also, fell silent,
+while they turned into Twenty-third Street, and began the long walk to
+Ninth Avenue. Once or twice, glancing inquiringly into his face, which
+wore a preoccupied look, she wondered if he were thinking of Alice.
+Then, as the silence became suddenly oppressive, she ventured warily in
+the effort to dispel it: "I hope you are not disturbed about anything?"
+
+"Disturbed?" He turned to her with a start. "No, I was only wondering if
+you knew how much your friendship would mean to me."
+
+It was out at last, and confirmed once more in her knowledge of men, she
+retorted gaily: "How can I know if you won't take the trouble to tell
+me?" After all, she reflected cheerfully, the education she had derived
+from George and Judge Crowborough, though lacking in the higher
+branches, was fundamentally sound. All men were alike in one thing at
+least--they invariably disappointed one's expectations.
+
+"I've been trying to tell you for a quarter of an hour," he answered,
+"and I didn't know how to put it."
+
+"But at last you didn't have to put it at all," she said laughingly; "it
+simply put itself, didn't it?"
+
+"I am still wondering," he persisted gravely.
+
+"Wondering if I know?" She spoke in the sweetly practical tone of one
+who is firmly resolved not to permit any nonsense. "Yes, I do know--that
+is, I know there are ways in which I might be useful to you."
+
+"For instance?"
+
+"Well, there are some little--some very little things I might tell you
+if we were friends--real friends," she made this plain, "just as two men
+might be."
+
+"But the very last things two men would tell each other," he was
+laughing now, "are the little things--the things about slang and
+walking-sticks and oak furniture."
+
+So he hadn't forgotten! The recollection of her impertinence confused
+her, and she hastened to make light of it by protesting gaily: "I was
+only joking. Of course, you didn't take that seriously."
+
+"I don't know how much more seriously," he replied emphatically, "I
+could have taken it."
+
+"But you haven't thought of it since?"
+
+"What would you say if I told you I hadn't thought of anything else?"
+
+"Then I wish I hadn't said it." She was obviously worried by his
+admission. "It was horrid of me--perfectly horrid. I ought to have been
+ashamed of myself. I had no right to criticise you, and you have been so
+heavenly kind."
+
+"After that"--he appeared to be hammering the idea into her mind--"I
+was so grateful I'd have done almost anything. Do you know," he burst
+out with evident emotion, "that was the first criticism--I mean
+downright honest criticism--I've ever had in my life. Nobody--that is
+nobody who knew--ever thought enough of me before to tell me where I was
+wrong."
+
+It was all a pathetic mistake, she saw, but she saw also that it was
+impossible for her to explain it away. She could not tell him the ugly
+truth that she had been merely laughing at him when he had believed, in
+his beautiful simplicity, that she was speaking as a friend. Though she
+felt ashamed, humbled, remorseful, there was nothing that she could say
+now which would not hurt him more than the original misunderstanding had
+done.
+
+In her desire to atone as far as possible, she remarked recklessly: "I
+only wish I could be of some real help to you."
+
+"You can," he answered frankly. "You can let me come to see you
+sometimes before I go West again."
+
+"You are going back in the spring?"
+
+He laughed happily, drawing himself erect with a large, free movement as
+if he needed to stretch his limbs. "I can't stand more than six months
+of the East, and I've been here a year now, off and on. After a time I
+begin to want air. I want to breathe."
+
+"Yet you lived here once."
+
+"A sort of life, yes, but that don't count."
+
+"What does count with you, I wonder?" She was smiling up at him, and as
+they passed under a street light her eyes shone with a misty brightness
+through her veil of dotted net.
+
+For a minute he thought over her question. "I guess fighting does," he
+answered at last. "Getting on in spite of hard knocks, and smashing
+things that stand in your way. I like the feeling that comes after
+you've put through a big deal or got the better of the desert or the
+mountains. I got joy in Arizona out of my first silver mine; but I
+didn't get the joy exactly out of the silver. I don't suppose you
+understand."
+
+"Oh, yes, I do. I understand perfectly. It's the pure spirit of
+adventure. Whenever we do a thing for the sake of the struggle, not for
+the thing itself, it's pure adventure, isn't it?"
+
+"Well, I like money," he said with the air of being entirely honest.
+"I'm not a romantic chap, don't think that about me. I care a lot about
+money, only after I've made it, somehow, I never know what to do with
+it. All I want for myself is a place to sleep and a bite to eat--I'm not
+over-particular what it is--and clothes to wear, good clothes, too--but
+I don't give a hang for motor cars except to go long distances in when
+there are no trains running."
+
+It was the commonplace problem, worked out in intricate detail, of the
+newly rich, of the uncultivated rich, of the rich whose strenuously
+active processes of enrichment had permanently closed all other highways
+to experience. Seventeen years ago the Gabriella of Hill Street would
+have had only disdain for the newly rich and their problems; but life,
+which had softened her judgment and modified her convictions, had
+completely reversed her inherited opinion of such a case as O'Hara's.
+Though he was as raw as unbaked brick, she was penetrating enough to
+discern that he was also as genuine; and, so radically had events
+altered her point of view, that at thirty-seven she found genuine
+rawness more appealing than superficial refinement. George had wearied
+her of the sham and the superficial, of gloss without depth, of manner
+without substance, of charm without character.
+
+"But there is so much that you might do to help," she said presently.
+"After all, money is power, isn't it?"
+
+"Misused power too often," he answered. "Of course, you can always build
+lodging-houses and tenements and hospitals; but when you come squarely
+down to facts, I've never in my life tried to help a man by giving him
+money that I haven't regretted it. Why, I've ruined men by helping to
+make their way too easy at the start."
+
+"Perhaps you're right," she admitted; "I don't know much about it, I
+confess; but I should have been spared a great deal of suffering if I
+had had something to start with when I was obliged to make my living."
+
+"That's different." His voice had grown gentle in an instant. "I can't
+think of your ever having had a hard time. You seem so strong, so
+successful, so happy."
+
+If she had answered straight from her heart, Gabriella would have
+retorted frankly: "A good deal of that is in the shape of my face and
+the way I dress," but instead of speaking sincerely, she remarked with
+impersonal cheerfulness: "Oh, well, happiness, like everything else, is
+mainly a habit, isn't it? I cultivated the habit of happiness at the
+most miserable time of my life, and I've never quite lost it."
+
+"But I don't like to think of your ever having worried," he protested.
+
+Of her ever having worried! Was he becoming dangerously sentimental or
+was it merely a random spark of his unquenchable Western chivalry?
+
+Though she told herself emphatically again that she was not falling in
+love with O'Hara, though she was perfectly faithful in her heart to the
+memory of Arthur, still she was vividly aware with every drop of her
+blood, with every beat of her pulses, of the man at her side. And
+through her magnetic sense of his nearness there flowed to her presently
+a deeper and clearer perception of the multitudinous movements of life
+which surrounded her--of the variable darkness out of which lights
+flashed and gigantic spectacular outlines loomed against a dim
+background of sky, of the vague shapes stirring, swarming, creating
+there in the darkness, and always of the pitiless, insatiable hunger
+from which the city had sprung. For the first time, flowing like a
+current from the mind of the man beside her, there came to her an
+understanding of her own share in the common progress of life--for the
+first time she felt herself to be not merely a woman who lived in a
+city, but an integral part of that city, one cell among closely packed
+millions of cells. Something of the responsibility she felt for her own
+children seemed to spread out and cover the city lying there in its
+dimness and mystery.
+
+"But I don't like to think of your ever having worried," he repeated.
+
+"Oh, it's over now," she returned, severely matter-of-fact. "It took me
+years to make my way, but I've made it at last, and I may settle down to
+a comfortable middle-age without the dread of the poorhouse to spur me
+into activity. My business is doing very well; our custom has doubled in
+the last two or three years."
+
+"But wasn't it a tough pull at one time?"
+
+"It was hard; but what isn't? Of course, when I was obliged to work from
+nine till six and then come home to cook the children's dinner and teach
+them their lessons, I used to be tired out by the end of the day--but
+that lasted only a few years: five or six at the most--and now I can
+afford to let Fanny wear imported gowns when she goes out to parties."
+
+Though she spoke gaily, making a jest of her struggle, she saw the
+gravity of his face deepen until his features looked almost wooden.
+
+"And through it all you kept something that so many other women seem to
+lose when they work for a living," he said. "You've kept your--your
+charm."
+
+Again she found herself on the point of exclaiming frankly: "heaven
+knows I've tried to!"--and again, checking herself, she proceeded
+cautiously: "I've never understood why charm should be merely a hothouse
+flower."
+
+"I suppose it does depend a good deal upon a sunny temper," he rejoined
+in his blindness.
+
+They had reached the gate, and stopping him when he would have entered,
+she said with the directness of a man: "So we're friends, and you're
+coming to see me?"
+
+"Yes, I'm coming," he replied gravely. Then, standing beside the gate,
+he watched her while she went up the walk and opened the door with her
+key.
+
+Upstairs, with her knitting on her lap and her feet on the fender, Miss
+Polly looked up to observe: "You're late, Gabriella. You must have
+walked all the way."
+
+"Yes, I walked all the way. Mr. O'Hara joined me."
+
+"Where did you run across him?"
+
+"Just as I left the shop. He was walking down Fifth Avenue."
+
+"Do you reckon he was waitin' outside?"
+
+"Oh, no, he said he had been up to Fifty-ninth Street on business."
+
+"Well, the walk certainly did you good. You are bloomin' like a rose."
+
+"The air was delicious, and I really like talking to Mr. O'Hara. He is
+quite interesting after you get over the first impression, and he isn't
+nearly so ignorant about things as I imagined. He has thought a great
+deal even if he hasn't read very much. It's wonderful, isn't it, what
+the West can do with a man? Now, if he'd stayed in New York he would
+have been merely impossible, but because he has lived out of doors he
+has achieved a certain distinction. I can understand a woman falling in
+love with him just because of his force and his bigness. They are the
+qualities a woman likes most, I think."
+
+"He must have made a great deal of money."
+
+"Yes, he's rich, and that's a good thing. I like money tremendously,
+though I used to think that I didn't. I wonder if he had been poor if I
+should have liked him quite so much?" she asked herself honestly.
+
+"I don't 'spose you could ever--ever bring yourself to think of him,
+honey? It would be a mighty good thing in some ways."
+
+Gabriella, being in a candid mood, pondered the question without
+subterfuge or evasion. "Of course I've passed the sentimental age," she
+answered. "If Mr. O'Hara had been poor, I suppose I should never have
+thought of him; but his money does make a difference. It stands for
+success, achievement, and ability, and I like all those qualities. Then
+he is rough in many ways, but he isn't a bit vulgar. He has genuine
+character. There is absolutely no pretence about him."
+
+"You could catch him in a minute," replied Miss Polly hopefully,
+animated by the inveterate match-making instinct of her class.
+
+Gabriella laughed merrily. "Oh, yes, I might capture him if I went
+questing for him. I am not a child. But put that out of your head
+forever, Miss Polly. I have given him clearly to understand that there
+must be no nonsense, though, for the matter of that, I doubt if he
+needed the warning. There is an Alice."
+
+"I reckon it would take more than an Alice to stand in the way if you
+wanted him," insisted the little seamstress, possessed by an obstinate
+conviction that fate could provide no happiness apart from marriage.
+
+"Perhaps. But you see I don't want him." Gabriella had become perfectly
+serious, and to Miss Polly's amazement a hint of petulance showed in her
+manner. "Everything of that kind was over for me long ago. I never think
+of love now, and if I did there wouldn't be but one--but one--"
+
+"I know, honey," agreed Miss Polly, suddenly softened, "and I'd give
+anything on earth if you and Arthur could come together again."
+
+"It wouldn't be any use. I made my choice, and I have had to abide by
+it. He could never forgive me--". She stopped as if she were choking,
+and Miss Polly said sympathetically:
+
+"Well, I wish he had a chance to, that's all. Why don't you run down to
+Richmond for a few days this spring to see your folks? Your ma and all
+would be so glad to see you, and it ain't as if you had the children to
+keep you back. The thing that worries me," she added with feeling, "is
+the thought of your spendin' the summer here without the children. If
+Archibald goes to camp from school and Fanny joins Jane at the White
+Sulphur Springs as soon as her school is out, you won't have them at
+all, will you?"
+
+"No, but they will be happy; that is the only thing that matters."
+
+"It seems all wrong to me. What do you get out of life, honey?"
+
+"What do any of us get out of it, dear little Miss Polly, except the joy
+of triumphing? It's overcoming that really matters, nothing else, and it
+is the same thing to you and to me that it is to the man downstairs. I
+am happy because in my little way I stood the test of struggle, and so
+are you, and so is Mr. O'Hara."
+
+"But you're young yet, and it ain't natural for you to live as you're
+doin'. Lots of women marry when they're older than you are."
+
+"Oh, yes, if they want to--"
+
+For a minute the little seamstress rattled her newspaper while she
+looked at her without replying. Then, after folding the paper, and
+removing her spectacles, she asked grimly: "Can you look me in the eyes,
+Gabriella, and tell me that you ain't still hankerin' after Arthur?"
+
+The blush of a girl made the business-like Gabriella appear as young and
+as piquantly feminine as her daughter.
+
+"No, Miss Polly, I cannot," she answered with incomparable directness;
+"I have loved Arthur all my life."
+
+"That's just what I thought all along, and yet you went off and married
+somebody else." Excited by the unexpected confession, Miss Polly was
+quivering with sympathy.
+
+In that supreme instant of self-revelation Gabriella answered this
+accusation as if it had been uttered by her remorseful conscience. "But
+that wasn't love," she said slowly; "it was my youth craving experience;
+it was my youth reaching after the unknown, the untried, the
+undiscovered. We all go questing for adventure one way or another, I
+suppose, but it was not the reality."
+
+"I wonder what is," said Miss Polly in a whisper; "I wonder what is,
+Gabriella?"
+
+"That," replied Gabriella softly, "is what I am still trying to
+discover."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE PAST
+
+
+It was the morning of Gabriella's thirty-eighth birthday, and she was
+standing, with her hat on, before the window of her sitting-room, gazing
+with dreaming eyes at the young leaves on the elm tree. The day's work
+was ahead of her, but for a little while, standing there by the open
+window, she gave herself, with a sense of pleasure, of abandonment, to
+the rare luxury of regret. Out of her whole year it was the one day
+when, for a few hours, she permitted herself to think sadly of the past
+and the future, when she cherished in her heart something of the gentle
+melancholy of her mother's retrospective philosophy.
+
+In the street, beyond the narrow yard, where the grass lay like a veil,
+there was a curious deadening of sounds, as if the traffic had become
+suddenly muffled in the languorous softness of spring. Out of this
+imaginary stillness floated the sharp twittering of sparrows and the
+bright laugh of a child at play in one of the neighbouring yards. Above
+the grim outlines of the city the sky shone divinely clear and blue,
+flecked by a single cloud, soft as an eagle's feather, which drifted in
+a mist of light above the horizon. The city, beneath that azure sky,
+borrowed the transparent brightness of an object that is imprisoned in
+crystal. White magic had transformed it for an hour, and the street,
+the houses, the shining elm tree, and the distant frowning brows of the
+skyscrapers, all seemed as unreal as the vivid yet impalpable images in
+a dream. And into this world of crystal there drifted, like the essence
+of spring, the dreamy fragrance from the window box filled with white
+hyacinths.
+
+While she stood there Gabriella thought pensively of many things. She
+thought of the day's work before her, of the gown she was designing for
+Mrs. Pletheridge, of Fanny's latest lover, the brother of a schoolmate,
+of the clothes she should send the child to the White Sulphur Springs,
+of her mother, and of Jane's eldest daughter, Margaret; and then very
+slowly, with the scent of the hyacinths drowning all merely prosaic
+memories, she began to think hopelessly and tenderly of Arthur Peyton.
+She thought of him as he had looked on the day when she had told him of
+her engagement of the sympathetic expression in his eyes, and of his
+beautiful manner, which she had felt at the time she could never forget.
+Well, after eighteen years she had not forgotten it. Compared with
+Arthur, all other men seemed to her as unreal as shadows. "How could
+Miss Polly imagine that I'd think of Ben O'Hara after a love like that?"
+she reflected indignantly.
+
+And then, perhaps because for a shadow he was so solidly substantial,
+she became aware that O'Hara's image was trespassing upon the hallowed
+soil of her reverie. To be sure, she had seen a great deal of him since
+George's death, when he had been so wonderfully considerate and helpful.
+Scarcely a day had passed since then that he had not brightened by some
+reminder of his friendship. They had spent long evenings together; and
+occasionally, accompanied by the delighted Miss Polly, they had gone to
+dinner at a restaurant and later to a concert or a play. That he had
+been almost too kind it was impossible for her to deny; but she had
+tried her best to repay him--she had, when one came to the point, done
+as much as she could to remedy the defects of his education. At first
+she had given zest, sympathy, eagerness, to her self-appointed task of
+making him over; then, as the months went by, a sense of doubt, of
+discouragement, of approaching failure, had tempered her enthusiasm, and
+at last she had realized that her work, except in the merest details,
+had been ineffectual and futile. The differences, which she had regarded
+as superficial, were, in reality, fundamental. It was impossible to make
+him over because he was so completely himself. He stood quite definitely
+for certain tendencies in democracy, and by no ingenious manipulation
+could she twist him about until he presented the sham appearance of
+moving in the opposite direction. For the logic of her failure was
+perfectly simple--he couldn't see, however hard he tried, the things she
+wanted him to look at. The difficulty was far deeper than a mere matter
+of finish, or even of education--for it was, after all, not one of
+manner, but of material. Day by day she had realized more clearly that
+the problem confronting them was one which involved their different
+standards of living and their individual philosophies. The things which
+she regarded as essential were to him only the accidental variations of
+life. He had lived so long in touch with the basic realities--with vast
+spaces and the stark aspect of desert horizons, with droughts, and
+winds, and the unquenchable pangs of thirst and hunger, with the vital
+issues of birth and death in their most primitive forms--he had lived so
+long in touch with the simplest and most elemental forces of Nature,
+that his spirit, as well as his vision, had adjusted itself to a
+trackless and limitless field of view. No, what he was now he must
+remain, since to change him, except in trivial details, was out of her
+power.
+
+And of course he had his virtues--she would have been the last to deny
+him his virtues. Whenever she applied the touchstone of character, she
+realized how little alloy there was in the pure gold of his nature. He
+was truthful, he was generous, he was brave, kind, and tolerant; but his
+virtues, like his personality, were large, flamboyant, and without
+gradations of colour. Custom had not pruned their natural luxuriance,
+nor had tradition toned down the violence of their contrasts. They were
+experimental, not established virtues, as obviously the expression of
+the man himself as was his uncultivated preference for red geraniums.
+For he possessed, she admitted, a sincerity such as she had not believed
+compatible with human designs--certainly not with human achievement.
+According to the code of the sheltered half of her sex--according to the
+inflexible code of her mother and Jane--he was not a gentleman. He
+lacked breeding, he lacked taste, he lacked the necessary education of
+schools; but in other ways, in ways peculiarly his own, she was
+beginning dimly to realize that he possessed qualities immeasurably
+larger than any superficial lack in his nature. In balance, moderation,
+restraint--in all the gracious attributes with which Arthur was endowed
+in her memory, in all the attributes she had particularly esteemed in
+the past--she understood that O'Hara would undoubtedly fall below her
+inherited standards. But, failing in these things, he had been able to
+command her respect by the sheer force of his character. Though he had,
+as he had confessed to her, gone down into hell, she could not talk to
+him for an hour without recognizing that he had never lost a natural
+chivalry of mind beside which the cultivated chivalry of manner appeared
+as exotic as an orchid in a hothouse. Even Arthur, she was aware, would
+have lied to her for her own good; but she would have trusted O'Hara to
+speak the truth to her at any cost. In this, as well as in his practical
+efficiency, and his crude yet vital optimism, he embodied, she felt, the
+triumphs and the failures of American democracy--this democracy of ugly
+fact and of fine ideals, of crooked deeds and of straight feeling, of
+little codes and of large adventures, of puny lives and of heroic
+deaths--this democracy of the smoky present and the clear future. "If
+this is our raw material to-day," she thought hopefully, "what will the
+finished and signed product of to-morrow be?"
+
+"Gabriella, ain't these lovely?"
+
+Whirling out of the sunshine, she saw Miss Polly holding a rustic basket
+of primroses and cowslips. "Mr. O'Hara wants to know if he may speak to
+you for a minute before you go out?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I'm not in a hurry this morning." Then Miss Polly disappeared
+and an instant later the vacant space in the doorway was filled
+exuberantly by O'Hara.
+
+"I wanted to be the first to wish you a happy birthday," he began, a
+little shyly, a little awkwardly, though his face was flushing with
+pleasure.
+
+"The flowers are wonderful!" For a minute, while she answered him, he
+seemed to be a part of the unreal intense brightness of the world
+outside--of that magic world where the elm tree and the grass and the
+sunny street were all imprisoned in crystal. He diffused a glowing
+consciousness of success, a sanguine faith in the inherent goodness of
+experience. For, as she had discovered long ago, O'Hara was one of those
+who stood not for the elimination of struggle, but for the complete
+acceptance of life. He had sprung out of ugliness, he had lived
+intimately with evil; and yet more than any one she had ever known, he
+seemed to her to radiate the simple, uncalculating joy of living. He was
+the strongest person she knew, as well as the happiest. He had never
+evaded facts, never feared a risk, never shirked an issue, never lacked
+the hardy, adventurous courage of battle. In his own words, life had
+never "found him a quitter."
+
+He stood in front of her now, fresh, smiling, robust, with his look of
+suddenly arrested energy, and the dark red of his hair, which was still
+moist from his bath, striking a vivid note against the cool grays and
+blues of the background. The sunshine, falling through the open window,
+warmed the ruddy tan of his face, and made his eyes like pools of clear
+light in which the jubilant spirit of the spring was reflected. "After
+all, it isn't what one does, it is what one is, that matters," she
+thought while she looked at him. "At the end, as Miss Polly said, it is
+character, not circumstances, that counts."
+
+"I've been all over New York this morning looking for that basket," he
+said. Though he had been so eager to make light of his services to her
+in her trouble, she was amused from time to time by a childlike vanity
+which prompted him to impress her with the value of small attentions;
+and this she was swift to recognize as the opposite of Arthur's
+delicacy. It was the only littleness she had observed in O'Hara so
+far--this reluctance to hide his smaller lights under a bushel--and in
+its place, it was amusing. Here was an obvious instance where nature
+unassisted by training appeared to fall short.
+
+"They couldn't be lovelier if you'd gone all over the world," she
+responded sincerely.
+
+Before answering her he hesitated a moment, and she watched pityingly
+the struggle he was making toward an impossible self-expression. The
+thing he wanted to say, the thing struggling so pathetically in the
+inarticulateness of his feeling, would not, she knew, be uttered in
+words.
+
+"You are the first woman I ever wanted to send flowers to," he said
+presently; and added with abject infelicity: "It's strange, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, it's strange," she assented pleasantly. Though his words were
+ineffectual, she was aware suddenly of a force before which she felt a
+vague impulse of flight. Now, if ever, she understood that she must keep
+their relations as superficial as she had always meant them to be--that
+she must cling with all her strength to the comfortable surface of
+appearances. "But you haven't had many women friends, have you?"
+
+"I've wanted to give other things," he went on hurriedly; "but not
+flowers. I never thought of flowers until I met you."
+
+"That's nice for me." She was growing nervous, and in her nervousness
+she precipitated the explosion by venturing rashly: "But there's Alice,
+too, isn't there, to like them?" Her voice was firm and friendly. Once
+for all she intended him to understand how aloof she stood from any
+sentimental advances.
+
+"Alice?" For an instant his response hung fire, enveloped in a fog of
+perplexity. Then, with an air of dispelling the cloud, he made a
+vigorous gesture of denial, and moved nearer to her with the swiftness
+and directness of a natural force. "Why, Alice was you! You were Alice
+all the time!" he exclaimed energetically.
+
+"You mean--" She checked herself in alarm, paralyzed the next instant by
+the tremendous, unexpected blow of her discovery.
+
+"So you thought there was somebody else!" The delight in his face kept
+her silent, amazed, incapable of explanation. His arm was still
+outstretched, as if he were brushing aside the last flimsy barrier
+between them, and his voice, with its unrestrained and radiant joy,
+stirred some faintly quivering echoes in the secret depths of her being.
+It was as if the jubilant spirit of spring had flowered suddenly in his
+look.
+
+"There wasn't anybody else." He came still nearer, and she stood there,
+startled, incredulous, powerless either to retreat or to prevent the
+inevitable instant that was approaching. "At least, there wasn't anybody
+I ever knew named Alice except a school teacher when I was a kid. She
+was good and she was pretty like you, and I used to dream about her
+after school, and every evening at dusk I would go out of my way to
+speak to her in Sixth Avenue. Once she told me that she'd wait for me to
+grow up and get rich so I could marry her, and after I went out to
+Arizona I used to think about her a lot. When I came on you suddenly,
+standing there in the dusk with your hands full of lilacs, it all came
+back to me because you, looked like her, with your dark hair and your
+tall slenderness. Then before I knew what I was, doing I called you by
+her name. I oughtn't to have done it," he finished ecstatically, "but
+I'm jolly glad now that I did."
+
+So he also, the man of action and of enterprise, he, the worker and the
+adventurer, so he also cultivated his garden of dreams!
+
+"I didn't know--I didn't know--" she found herself murmuring faintly in
+protest.
+
+"But you know now!" His voice rang out exultantly, and, though she felt
+that the thing she feared and dreaded was coming upon her, she still
+stood there without moving a step, without lifting a hand, mesmerized,
+enchanted, by the force of the man. "You know now," he repeated. "You
+know now, Gabriella, and you knew all along."
+
+It was true. In spite of her surprise, in spite of her shrinking, in
+spite of her evasion, she confessed it in her heart. She had known all
+the time. Something deep down in her, something secret and profound and
+clairvoyant, had discerned the truth from the beginning.
+
+"No! no!" she cried out sharply, for, mistaking her silence, he had
+stooped to her with the directness which impelled all his movements,
+which so easily brushed aside and discarded intervening encumbrances,
+and had kissed her on the lips.
+
+For an instant, in the merciless tenderness of his arms, her resistance
+melted from her. Beneath the crash of the storm she did not think, she
+did not struggle, she did not murmur. Her consciousness seemed
+suspended, and with her consciousness, her memory, her judgment, even
+her passionate unshaken loyalty to the love of her youth. Then, after
+the moment of weakness, of passive submission, it was as if her soul and
+body caught fire at a flash, and a quiver of anger ran through her,
+enkindling her glance and nerving her spirit.
+
+"But I do not love you! I never meant that I loved you!" she cried.
+
+At her words his arms dropped to his sides, and he stood as if turned to
+stone, with only his questioning eyes and the vivid red of his hair
+seeming alive. There was no need now for her to struggle. At her first
+movement to escape he had released her and drawn to a distance.
+
+"You don't love me?" he stammered. "Why, I saw it. I've seen it for
+weeks. I see it now in your face."
+
+"You see nothing--nothing." She denied it bitterly. "I liked you as a
+friend. I did not think of this. I never suspected it. I don't love you.
+I don't love you in the least."
+
+He was very still. The jubilant spirit of the spring had ebbed away from
+his look, and even in the height of her anger she was struck by the
+change in his face.
+
+"I don't believe you," he said gravely after a minute. "I don't believe
+you."
+
+"You must believe me. I don't love you. I have never thought of you
+except as a friend. I have loved another man all my life."
+
+Her voice rose accusingly, triumphantly, and so fervent was her look
+that she might have been repeating a creed. It was as if she hoped by
+convincing him to persuade her own rebellious heart of the truth she
+proclaimed.
+
+Now at last he understood. She had been lucid enough even for the
+crystalline lucidity of his thought.
+
+"I am sorry. I made a mistake," he said quietly, and after the exultant
+note of a few moments ago there was a dull level of flatness in his
+voice. "I am sorry. There don't seem to be anything else that I can say
+or do, but--but it wouldn't have happened if I had understood--" He
+paused, looked at her closely for a minute, and then added stubbornly,
+with an echo of the old confidence in his tone: "I still don't believe
+it."
+
+"It is true, nevertheless." She was trembling with indignation, and this
+indignation, in spite of her natural fairness, was not directed against
+herself, against her own blindness and folly. Though she knew that she
+was to blame, she was furious, not with herself, but with O'Hara. He had
+insulted her, and she resolved bitterly that she would never forgive
+him. Even now, whenever she was silent, she could still feel his kiss on
+her mouth, and the vividness of the sensation stung her into passionate
+anger. She was no longer the reasonable and competent Gabriella, who had
+so successfully "managed her life"; she was primitive woman in the grip
+of primitive anger; and balance, moderation, restraint, had flown from
+her soul. The very mystery of her feeling, its complexity, its
+suddenness, its remorselessness--these emotions worked together to
+deepen the sense of insult, of injury, with which she burned.
+
+"It is true, and you have no right to doubt it. You have no right." She
+caught her breath sharply, and then went on with inexcusable harshness:
+"Even if there hadn't been any one else, I should never--I could never
+in the world--"
+
+Her loss of self-control gave him an advantage, which he was either too
+generous or too stupid to perceive. "Well, forget all about it. I am
+going now," he answered quietly.
+
+While she watched him moving away from her, she was conscious of an
+inexplicable longing to stab him again more deeply before she lost him
+forever. It was intolerable to her that he should leave her while she
+was still indignant, that he should evade her just resentment by the
+natural cowardice of flight.
+
+"I can't forget it," she said; "how can you expect me to?"
+
+For an instant he seemed on the point of smiling. Then, turning, at the
+door, he walked back to where she was standing, and said gravely: "When
+I came in here it was to ask you to marry me, and, if it's the last word
+I ever speak, I thought you understood--that you knew how I felt. I was
+even fool enough to think you would be willing to marry me. That's all I
+can say. I haven't any other excuses."
+
+For the second time he went to the door, opened it, and then turning
+quickly, came back again. "I am not the sort to change, and I shan't
+change about this. You are a free woman, and if you ever feel that you
+made a mistake, if you ever want me or need me, you can just come to me.
+I shan't stop caring for you, and if you choose to come, I'll be
+waiting. I believed you were meant for me when I first saw you--and I
+believe it now. In spite of all you say, I am going to keep on believing
+it--"
+
+He went out, closing the door softly, and five minutes later, feeling
+extraordinarily young, she watched him pass through the gate, and walk
+as buoyantly as ever in the direction of Broadway. While she looked
+after him she wondered suddenly why novelists always dropped their
+heroines as soon as they passed twenty-seven? "If I'd been in a play,
+they'd have put me in the background, dressed in lavender, and made me
+look on and do fancywork," she thought humorously, "but this is real
+life, and I've just had a real love scene on my thirty-eighth birthday.
+He couldn't have been more romantic if I'd been Fanny," she mused with
+an agreeable complacency. "It's only in books and plays that people stop
+falling in love when they pass the twenties. I don't believe they ever
+stop in real life. I believe it goes on forever." And glancing at the
+glass, she added truthfully: "I want love more to-day than I wanted it
+when I was twenty--and so does Ben O'Hara."
+
+A sensation of stifling, as if her throat were closing together,
+oppressed her suddenly, and picking up her hand-bag, she ran downstairs
+and out of the house.
+
+By the time she reached Broadway her anger had ebbed, but the
+oppression, the feeling that she was being slowly smothered, was still
+in her throat and bosom. After all, seen in the sober light of reason,
+why had she been so indignant? There had been a misapprehension; he had
+thought that she was in love with him, and thinking so, he had kissed
+her. That was the case plainly stated; and what was there in this to
+send a burning, rush of anger to her heart? What was there in this that
+had made her turn and insult him? For the first time in her life she had
+lost her temper without cause, and had raged, she told herself sternly,
+like a fury. And beneath her rage she had been conscious always of some
+vague, incomprehensible disloyalty to Arthur--of a feeling of,
+humiliation, of self-reproach, which appeared ridiculous when she
+remembered that she had been kissed against her will and without
+warning. But, in spite of this, she knew intuitively, with a knowledge
+deeper than reason, that the glory of her Dream had paled in the moment
+when she lay in O'Hara's arms.
+
+A subtle change had come over the spirit of spring since she had left
+the elm tree and the emerald veil of the grass. It was no longer
+jubilant, but languorous, wistful, haunting, as if it eternally pursued,
+through the fugitive seasons, an immortal and ineffable beauty. The
+enchanted crystal had been shattered in an instant, and she saw life
+now, not imprisoned in magical sunshine, but gray, sordid, monotonous,
+as utterly hopeless as the faces thronging in Broadway. Yet not many
+months ago she had seen in these, same faces the inward hope, the joy in
+sadness, the gaiety in disappointment, which had brightened the world
+for her. Then she had been aware of an invisible current flowing from
+the crowd to herself; but to-day this shining current was broken or
+turned aside, and she felt detached, adrift, and distrustful of the
+future. That mental correspondence with the mood of the crowd, with the
+life of the city, which had come to her first on the brilliant morning
+in September, and then again when she walked home with O'Hara in the
+winter's dusk--which had released a new faculty in her soul, and had
+given her a fresh perception of human responsibilities--this had
+deserted her so utterly that she could barely remember its miraculous
+visitation. Then her personal life had seemed to become a part of the
+life of the street, of the sky, of the mysterious city outlined against
+the gray background of dusk. To-day she walked alone and without
+sympathy through the crowd. Her feet dragged, and she felt dully that
+she had lost her share in both the street and the sky. The very faces of
+the men and women around her--those lethargic foreign faces which
+crowded out the finer American type--awoke in her the sensation of
+hopeless revolt which one feels before the impending destruction of
+higher forms by masses of inert and conscienceless matter. She thought
+gloomily: "I have lost the vision--there is no hope either for me or for
+America except in the clear vision of the future." And while she spoke
+there passed over her the vague feeling of loss, of something missing,
+as if a precious possession had slipped from her grasp.
+
+Her morning's work was unusually trying, and at one o'clock, when she
+put on her hat before going out to lunch, she asked herself dejectedly:
+"What can be the matter with me? Before I go home I'll take a taxicab
+and drive up Riverside for an hour. If only the children were here, I
+should not feel so depressed." She remembered regretfully that Archibald
+and Fanny would be away all summer; and then from thinking of her
+children, she passed by almost insensible degrees of despondency to
+meditating pensively about Arthur Peyton. What a wreck, what an
+inconceivably stupid wreck she had made of her happiness!
+
+As she entered the outer showroom on her way to the street, she heard
+the voice of Miss Murphy attuned to a cooing pitch, and glancing around
+a little, painted cabinet, filled with useless ornaments, which stood in
+the centre of the floor, she beheld a dazzling head of reddish gold
+before one of the elaborately decorated French mirrors. While she
+advanced the red-gold waves, worn with extreme flatness over a forehead
+of pearly whiteness, were submerged for a minute in the smallest and
+roundest hat in the shop, and from a fashionable figure, reminding her
+vaguely of an ambulatory dressmaker's model, there issued a high,
+fluting note of delighted ejaculation.
+
+"This is just exactly what I've been looking all over New York for! Now,
+isn't it too funny for anything that I should have found it right here
+the very minute I came in?" As Gabriella's face flashed back from the
+mirror the fashionable figure sprang suddenly to life, and the voice,
+still fluting delightedly, exclaimed:
+
+"Why, Gabriella! Where on earth did you come from?"
+
+For a minute sheer amazement kept Gabriella clinging helplessly to the
+ridiculous cabinet, from the top of which an artificial rose-bush seemed
+to shower artificial pink petals down on her head. Then, recovering
+herself, with a sharp effort of will, she went forward a few steps
+beyond the shelter of the cabinet, and said composedly:
+
+"How do you do, Florrie? I did not recognize you at first."
+
+For it was Florrie herself, Florrie in the flesh, Florrie, glowing,
+sparkling, prosperous, victorious. Her figure, conforming to the latest
+mode, had lost its pinched protuberances, and was long, slender, sinuous
+in its perfection of line. Beneath the small round hat, her hair, glossy
+with brilliantine, was like melted gold in the large loose waves which
+revealed the rosy tips of her ears. She was thirty-nine, and she looked
+scarcely a day over twenty-five. The peach-blossom texture of her skin
+was as unlined by care or pain as if she had spent the last ten years
+immured in a convent; for in this case, at least, Gabriella realized
+while she looked at her, the retribution which awaits upon sinners had
+been tardy in its fulfilment.
+
+As she moved toward her, without noticing the friendly hand that Florrie
+held out, Gabriella was conscious of an ironical inclination to laugh.
+Though she felt no bitter personal resentment against Florrie--for,
+after all, Florrie had not been able to hurt her--there struggled in her
+bosom an indignation more profound, more moving, than any merely
+personal emotion could be. Her resentment was directed not against
+Florrie, but against some abstract destiny which had permitted Florrie
+to have her way without paying the price. For on the pinnacle of a
+destructive career, unsinged by the conflagration she had so carelessly
+started, Florrie was poised securely, crowned, triumphant, rejoicing. On
+her dazzling height, successful and happy, she was as far removed as one
+could imaginably be from the repentant Magdalen of tradition. The memory
+of George's face as it looked in death, floated before the austere
+mental vision of Gabriella, and she reflected grimly that tradition was
+not always the mirror of life. For in this one case at least, the man,
+not the woman, had been the victim of natural law, and Florrie, fool
+though she was, had shown herself at the hour of requital to be stronger
+than fate. By that instinctive wisdom, which is so much older, so much
+truer than civilization, she had triumphed over the ordination of life.
+In refusing to suffer she had blunted every weapon with which Nature
+might have punished her in the end. Not by virtue, since she had none,
+but by pure insensibility, she had escaped the wages of sin. She was a
+sensualist whose sensuality, hard, metallic, glittering, encased her
+like armour.
+
+At Gabriella's approach Miss Murphy fluttered off cooingly in the
+direction of a fresh customer, and only the festively garlanded French
+mirror witnessed the meeting of the two who had been schoolgirls
+together. Swift as an arrow there shot through Gabriella's mind, "I
+wonder what Ben O'Hara would think of her?" Then she checked the
+dangerous flight of her fancy, for she remembered that O'Hara's thoughts
+about anything no longer concerned her.
+
+"Are you buying a hat?" inquired Florrie curiously.
+
+"No, I belong here. I am Madame Dinard."
+
+"You don't mean it! I never should have believed it! The idea of your
+being a dressmaker. That's why you look so smart, I suppose. You're the
+smartest thing I've seen anywhere, but you look older, Gabriella."
+
+"Well, you don't." It was perfectly true. Except for the gaudy
+decorations and the twanging accents of the arrogant young women,
+Gabriella might have imagined herself in the last century atmosphere of
+Broad Street in the middle 'nineties.
+
+"I must tell you about the things I use." Florrie was always generous.
+"But, I declare if I'd known this place was yours, I'd have got my hats
+here ages ago. Of course I knew it was dreadfully swell, but I thought
+the prices were beyond anything."
+
+"They are," responded Gabriella with business-like brevity, while she
+glanced about for the flitting Miss Murphy.
+
+"Look here, Gabriella, I hope you don't bear me any malice," Florrie
+burst out solicitously, for her frankness, like her sensuality, was
+elemental in its audacity. "You oughtn't to if you know what I saved you
+from," she proceeded convincingly. "Anyway, we were chums long before
+either of us ever thought about a man, and I didn't really do you a bit
+of harm. It wasn't as if you cared about George, was it?"
+
+"No, it wasn't as if I'd cared about him." Gabriella was answering the
+appeal as truthfully as if Florrie had been the most excellent of her
+sex. "You didn't harm me in any way--not in any way," she repeated with
+firmness.
+
+"That's just the way I told mother you'd look at it. I knew you were
+always so broad-minded even as a girl. Then there isn't any reason we
+shouldn't be friends just as we used to be."
+
+Gabriella shook her head, polite but implacable in her refusal. "It
+isn't what you did to me, Florrie," she answered gently, "it's what you
+are that I can't forgive. I can imagine that a good woman might do
+almost anything--might even run off with another woman's husband, but
+you aren't good. You wouldn't be good if you'd spent your life in a
+convent."
+
+A quick flush--the flush of temper--stained the pearly whiteness of
+Florrie's skin. "Oh, of course, if you don't want to," she retorted, a
+little shrilly, though she tried to subdue her rebellious voice to the
+pitch of Fifth Avenue. "I only thought that being a working woman, you
+wouldn't have so very many friends, and you might get lonely. I had
+seats at the opera every night last winter, and time and again I'd have
+been glad to have given them to you. Then, too, I might have been able
+to bring you some custom. I know any number of rich women who don't
+think anything of paying a thousand dollars for a dress--"
+
+Her insolence was so evidently the result of anger that Gabriella,
+without interrupting the flow, waited courteously until she paused.
+
+"No, you cannot do anything for me, Florrie." Though Gabriella's voice
+was crisp and firm, her face looked suddenly older, and little lines,
+stamped by weariness and regret, appeared at the corners of her still
+brilliant eyes. "I don't wish you any harm," she went on more softly.
+"If you were in trouble I'd do what I could for you, but somehow I don't
+seem able to forgive you for being what you are. Would you like to look
+at anything else?" she inquired in her professional tone. "Miss Murphy
+is waiting to show you some hats."
+
+Her cheeks were burning when she passed out of the ivory and gold door,
+saluted deferentially by the attendant in livery. "The effrontery!" she
+thought, "the barefaced effrontery!" and then, as her eyes fell on
+Florrie's trim little electric coupé beside the curb, she exclaimed
+mentally, recalling George's animated perplexity about the pearl
+necklace, "I wonder how in the world she does it?"
+
+The meeting with Florrie appeared to her, as she walked home that
+afternoon, to be the last touch needed to push her into a state of utter
+despondency. The oppressive languor of the day had exhausted her
+strength, and when she left Dinard's she felt too indifferent, too
+spiritless even for the drive in the Park. It was still light when she
+got out of the stage at Twenty-third Street, and while she strolled
+listlessly down the blocks on the West Side, she had again that curious
+sensation of smothering which had come to her after her talk with
+O'Hara.
+
+At the corner of Sixth Avenue a young Italian, with the face of a poet,
+was roasting peanuts in a little kerosene stove beside a flickering
+torch which enkindled the romantic youth in his eyes. Farther away some
+ragged children were dancing to the music of a hand-organ, which ground
+out a melancholy waltz; and from a tiny flower stall behind the stand of
+a bootblack there drifted the intense sweetness of hyacinths. An old
+negro, carrying a basket of clothes, passed her in the middle of the
+block, and she thought: "That might have been in Richmond--that and the
+hand-organ and the perfume of hyacinths." A vision of Hill Street
+floated before her--the long straight street, with the sudden drop of
+ragged hill at the end; the old houses, with crumbling porches and
+countless signs: "Boarders Wanted" in the windows between the patched
+curtains; the irregular rows of tulip poplar, elm, or sycamore trees
+throwing their crooked shadows over the cobblestones; the blades of
+grass sprouting along the edges of the brick pavement--the vision of
+Hill Street as she remembered it twenty years ago in her girlhood; and
+then the image of her mother's face gazing out beneath the creamy
+blossoms and the dark shining leaves of the old magnolia tree.
+"Everything must have changed, I'd hardly recognize it," she thought.
+"Nobody we know lives on that side now, mother says. Yes, it has been a
+long time." She sighed, and then a little laugh broke from her lips, as
+she remembered that Charley, who had recently been West on a business
+trip, had brought home the good news that Richmond was as progressive as
+Denver. "At least it seems so to Charley," Mrs. Carr had hastened to
+add, "but you know how proud Charley is of all our newness. He says
+there is not a street in the West that looks fresher or more beautiful
+than Monument Avenue, and I am sure that is a great comfort. Cousin
+Jimmy says it shows what the South can do when it tries."
+
+"I'd like to go back," mused Gabriella, walking more and more slowly. "I
+haven't been home for eighteen years, and I am thirty-eight to-day."
+With the fugitive sweetness of the hyacinths there rushed over her again
+the feeling that life was slipping, slipping, and that she was missing
+something infinitely precious, something infinitely desirable. It was
+the panic of fleeting youth, of youth unsatisfied, denied, and still
+insatiable.
+
+As she entered the gate she saw that O'Hara's windows were dark, and
+while a sigh of relief escaped her, she felt a swift contraction of her
+throat as if she had become suddenly paralyzed and was unable to
+swallow. "I hope he has gone," she said to herself in a whisper. "If he
+has gone, everything will be so much easier." But even to herself she
+could not explain what it was that would be made easier. Her relief was
+so vague that when she endeavoured to put it into words it seemed to
+dissolve and evaporate.
+
+Miss Polly was watering the flowers in the window box, and turning, with
+the green watering-pot in her hand, she stared at Gabriella in silence
+for a minute before she exclaimed anxiously: "Mercy on us, Gabriella,
+what on earth, is the matter?"
+
+"Nothing. I've had a hard day, and I'm tired."
+
+"Well, you lie right straight down as soon as you take off your hat. I
+declare you look ten years older than you did this morning."
+
+"I have seen Florrie for a minute."
+
+"I reckon that was enough to upset anybody. Did she say she was sorry?"
+
+"Sorry! She looked as if she had never been sorry for anything in her
+life. She was handsomer than ever--don't you remember how much you
+always admired her figure?--and she didn't look a day over twenty-five.
+I don't believe she has ever known what it is to feel a regret."
+
+"Well, you just wait, honey," responded Miss Polly consolingly, "you
+just wait. She'll be punished yet as sure as you're born."
+
+"Oh, I'm not waiting for that. I don't wish her to be punished. Why
+should I? She is what she is."
+
+"Do you s'pose she knows about George?"
+
+"I doubt it. She didn't speak of his death. She is quite capable of
+forgetting that she ever knew him, and if she does, think of him, it is
+probably as a man who betrayed her innocence. You may be sure she has
+twisted it all about until every shred of the blame rests on somebody
+else. Florrie isn't the only woman who is made like that, but I
+believe," she reasoned it out coolly, "that it is her way of keeping her
+youth."
+
+Miss Polly had put down the watering-pot, and she came presently with a
+bottle of camphor to the sofa where Gabriella was lying. "Are you sure
+you wouldn't like me to rub your head?" she inquired. "Dinner will be
+ready in a minute, but I shouldn't change my dress if I were you."
+
+Gabriella rose slowly to a sitting position, and then stood up while she
+pushed the camphor away. "I hate the smell of it," she answered; "it
+makes me think of one of Jane's attacks. And, besides, I don't need it.
+There is nothing in the world the matter with me." A moment later, to
+Miss Polly's unspeakable amazement, she sank down again, flung her arms
+over the back of the sofa, and burst into tears.
+
+"Well, I never!" ejaculated Miss Polly, rooted to the spot. "Well, I
+never!" In the ten years she had lived with Gabriella she had never seen
+her cry--not even after George's flight--and she felt as if the solid
+ground on which she stood had crumbled without warning, and left her
+insecurely balanced in space. "Something certainly must be wrong, for it
+ain't like you to give way. Are you real sure you ain't got a pain
+somewhere?"
+
+Shaking her head, and swallowing her sobs with an effort, Gabriella rose
+to her feet. "I'm just tired out, that's all," she said, strangely
+humble and deprecating.
+
+"You must have been working too hard. It ain't right." For a minute or
+two the little seamstress brooded anxiously; then guided by an
+infallible instinct, she added decisively: "It's been a long time since
+you've seen your ma, and she's gettin' right smart along. Why don't you
+run down home for a few days while the flowers are blooming?"
+
+A change passed over Gabriella's face, and drying her eyes, she looked
+down on Miss Polly with a lovely enigmatical smile.
+
+"I wonder if I might?" she said doubtfully.
+
+"There ain't any earthly reason why you shouldn't. To-morrow's Friday,
+and they can get along without you at Dinard's perfectly well till the
+first of the week."
+
+"Oh, yes, they can get along. I was only wondering"--a faint breeze
+stole in through the window, wafting toward her the scent of wet
+flowers--"I was only wondering"--her eyes grew suddenly radiant, and
+lifting her arms, she made a gesture as of one escaping from bondage--"I
+was only wondering if I might go to-morrow," she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE DREAM AND THE REALITY
+
+
+At the upper station a little group stood awaiting her, and as the train
+pulled slowly to the platform, Gabriella distinguished her mother's
+pallid face framed in the hanging crape of her veil; Jane, thin,
+anxious, anæmic, with her look of pinched sweetness; Chancy, florid,
+portly, and virtuously middle-aged, and their eldest daughter Margaret,
+a blooming, beautiful girl. Alighting, Gabriella was embraced by Mrs.
+Carr, who shed a few gentle tears on her shoulders.
+
+"Gabriella, my child, I thought you would never come back to us," she
+lamented; "and now everything is so changed that you will hardly
+recognize it as home."
+
+"Well, if she can find a change that isn't for the better, I hope she'll
+point it out and let me make a note of it," boasted Charley, with
+hilarity. "I tell you what, Gabriella, my dear, we're becoming a number
+one city. Everything's new. We haven't left so much as an old brick
+lying around if we could help it. If you were to go back there to Hill
+Street, you'd scarcely know it for the hospitals and schools we've got
+there, and as for this part of the town--well, I reckon the apartment
+houses will fairly take your breath away. Apartment houses! Well, that's
+what I call progress--apartment houses and skyscrapers, and we've got
+them, too, down on Main Street. I'll show them to you to-morrow. Yes,
+by George, we're progressing so fast you can hardly see how we grow.
+Why, there wasn't a skyscraper or an apartment house in the city when
+you left here, and precious few hospitals. But now--well, I'll show you!
+We're the hospital city of the South, and more than that, we're becoming
+a metropolis. Yes, that's the word--we're becoming a metropolis. If you
+don't believe me, just watch as we go up Franklin Street to Monument
+Avenue. I suppose you thought of us still as a poor folksy little
+Southern city, with a lot of ground going to waste in gardens and green
+stuff. Well, you just wait till you see Monument Avenue. It's the
+handsomest boulevard south of Washington. It's all new, every brick of
+it. There's not a house the whole way up that isn't as fresh as paint,
+and the avenue is just as straight as if you'd drawn it with a ruler--"
+
+But the change in the city, Gabriella reflected while she embraced Jane,
+was as nothing compared to the incredible change in Charley himself.
+Middle-age had passed over him like some fattening and solidifying
+process. He was healthy, he was corpulent, he was prosperous,
+conventional, and commonplace. If Gabriella had been seeking, with
+Hogarthian humour, to portray the evils of torpid and self-satisfied
+respectability, she could scarcely have found a better picture of the
+condition than Charley presented. And the more Charley expanded, the
+more bloodless and wan Jane appeared at his side. Her small, flat face
+with its yellowish and unhealthy tinge, its light melancholy eyes, and
+its look of lifeless and inhuman sanctification, exhaled the dried
+fragrance of a pressed flower. So disheartening was her appearance to
+Gabriella that it was a relief to turn from her to the freshness of
+Margaret, handsome, athletic, with cheeks like roses and the natural
+grace of a young animal.
+
+"Oh, Aunt Gabriella, I hadn't any idea you were like this!" cried the
+girl with naïve enthusiasm.
+
+"You thought of me as gray-haired and wearing a bonnet and mantle?"
+
+"No, not that, but I didn't dream you were so handsome. I thought mother
+was the beauty of the family. But what a wonderful dress you have on!
+Are they wearing all those flounces around the hips?"
+
+"There is no doubt about it, you are getting a lot better looking as you
+grow older," observed Charley, with genial pleasantry.
+
+"She keeps herself up. There is a great deal in that," remarked Jane,
+and the speech was so characteristic of her that Gabriella tossed back
+gaily:
+
+"Well, I'm not old, you know. I am only thirty-eight."
+
+"She married so young," said Mrs. Carr mournfully. "I hope none of your
+girls will marry young, Jane. Gabriella must be a warning to them and to
+clear little Fanny."
+
+"But you married young, mother, and so did I," replied Jane, a trifle
+tartly.
+
+For some incommunicable reason Jane's sweetness had become decidedly
+prickly. Charley's reformation had left her with the hurt and
+incredulous air of a missionary whose heathen have been converted under
+his eyes by a rival denomination: and obeying an entirely natural
+impulse, she appeared ever so slightly, and in the most refined manner
+possible to revenge herself on the other members of her family. Though
+she had of late devoted her attention to the Associated Charities and
+the Confederate Museum, neither of these worthy objects provided so
+agreeable an opportunity for the exercise of her benevolent instincts as
+did the presence of a wayward husband in the household. For there could
+be no question of the thoroughness of Charley's redemption. The very cut
+of his clothes, the very colour of his necktie, proclaimed a triumph,
+for the prohibition party.
+
+At last they were packed tightly in the touring car, and Charley, after
+imparting directions with the manner of a man who regards himself as the
+fount of wisdom, began expounding the noisy gospel of progress to
+Gabriella. Mrs. Carr, who had never been active, and was now over
+seventy, was visibly excited by the suddenness with which she had been
+whisked from the platform, and while they shot away from the station,
+she clutched her crape veil despairingly to the sides of her face, and
+fixed her blank and terrified stare on her son-in-law. After a whispered
+conference with Jane, Gabriella discovered that her mother was less
+afraid of an accident than she was of fresh air. "She's afraid of
+neuralgia," whispered Jane, "but the doctor says the air can't possibly
+do her any harm."
+
+In Franklin Street the trees were in full leaf, and the charming vista
+through which Gabriella looked at the sunset, softened mercifully the
+impending symbols of the ironic Spirit of Progress. It was modern; it
+was progressive; yet there was the ancient lassitude of spring in the
+faint sunshine; and the women passing under the vivid green of the elms
+and maples moved with a flowing walk which one did not see in Fifth
+Avenue. On the porches, too, groups were assembled in chairs after the
+Southern fashion, while children, in white frocks and gay sashes,
+accompanied by negro nurses wheeling perambulators, made a spring
+pageant in the parks. Though the gardens had either disappeared or
+dwindled to mere emerald patches of grass, a few climbing roses, of
+modern varieties, lent brightness and fragrance to the solid, if
+undistinguished, architecture of the houses.
+
+"That's the finest apartment house in the city!" exclaimed Charley, with
+enthusiasm. "Looks pretty tall, doesn't it? But it's nothing to the
+height of some of the buildings downtown. As for changes--well, I hope
+Jane will take you on Broad Street to-morrow, and then you'll see what
+we're doing. Why, there's not a shop left there now where you used to
+deal. Brandywine's--you recollect old Brandywine & Plummer's, don't
+you?--isn't there any longer. Got a new department store, with a
+restaurant and a basement in the very spot where it used to be. Look
+sharp now, we're coming to a hospital. That belongs to Dr. Browning. You
+don't remember Dr. Browning. After your day, I reckon. He's a young
+chap, but he's got his hospital like all the rest, and every bed
+filled--he told me so yesterday. But they've all got their hospitals.
+Darrow--you recollect Darrow who used to be old Dr. Walker's
+assistant--well, he's got his, too, just around the corner on the next
+street. They say he cuts up more people than any man in the South except
+Spendlow--".
+
+"I miss the old-fashioned flowers," said Gabriella to her mother in one
+of Charley's plethoric pauses. "The microphylla roses and snowballs."
+
+"Everybody is planting crimson ramblers and hydrangeas now," responded
+Mrs. Carr, with something of her son-in-law's pride in the onward
+movement of her surroundings.
+
+"Here are the monuments!" cried Charley, who had treated each apartment
+house or hospital as if it were a bright, inestimable jewel in the
+city's crown. "You don't see many streets finer than this in New York,
+do you?"
+
+"It looks very pretty and attractive," answered Gabriella, as they swung
+dangerously round a statue, and then started in a race up the avenue,
+"but I miss the shrubs and the flowers."
+
+"Oh, there are flowers enough. You just wait till you get on a bit.
+We've got some urns filled with hydrangeas, that queer new sort between
+blue and pink. But what do you want with shrubs? All they're good for is
+to get in your way whenever you want to look out into the street. Mrs.
+Madison was telling me only yesterday that she cut down the lilac bushes
+in her front yard because they kept her from recognizing the people in
+motor cars. Look at that house now, that's one of the finest, in the
+city. Rushington built it--he made his money in fertilizers, and the one
+next with the green tiles belongs to Hanly, the tobacco trust fellow,
+you know, and this whopper on the next square is where Albertson lives.
+He made his pile out of railroad stocks--he's one of the banking firm of
+Albertson, Jacobstein, Moss & Company. Awfully clever fellows, but too
+tricky for me, I give them a wide berth when I go out to do business--"
+
+"But where are the old people--the people I used to know?"
+
+"Oh, they're scattered about everywhere, but they haven't got most of
+the money. A lot of 'em live up here, and a lot are down in Franklin
+Street in the same old houses."
+
+"Tell me about Cousin Jimmy."
+
+"He's up here, too. Pussy planned that red brick house with the green
+shutters next door to us. I reckon Jimmy is about as prosperous as is
+good for him, but he's getting on. He must be over seventy now. He has a
+son who is a chip of the old block, and his youngest daughter was the
+prettiest girl who ever came out here. Margaret will tell you about
+her."
+
+"And the Peytons?" Her voice trembled, and she looked hastily away from
+the keen eyes of Margaret.
+
+"They are still in the old home--at least Arthur lives there with his
+Cousin Nelly. You know Mrs Peyton died about nine or ten years ago?"
+
+"Yes, I heard it."
+
+"She was getting on, but it was a great loss to Arthur. Somehow, I could
+never make up my mind about Arthur. He was bright enough as a young
+chap, and we used to think he would have a brilliant future; but when
+the time came, he never seemed to catch on. He wasn't progressive, and
+he has never amounted to much more than he did when he left college.
+What I say about him is that he had the wrong ideas--Yes, Jane, I mean
+exactly what I say, he had the wrong ideas. He doesn't know what he is
+driving at. No progress, no push, no punch in him."
+
+"Why, Charley," murmured Mrs. Carr reproachfully, while Jane, recovering
+her nagging manner with an accession of spirit, remonstrated feelingly:
+"Charley, you really must be more careful what you say."
+
+"Oh, fudge!" retorted Charley, with playful rudeness. "You see she's at
+it still, Gabriella," he pursued, winking audaciously. "If it isn't one
+thing, it's another, but she wouldn't be satisfied with perfection.
+Well, here we are. There are the hydrangeas. I hope you're pleased."
+
+"I declare, those waste papers have blown right back again on the grass,
+and I had them picked up the last thing before I left," said Jane in a
+tone of annoyance.
+
+"Never mind the papers; Gabriella isn't looking for papers," returned
+Charley, while he helped Mrs. Carr out of the motor and up the steps.
+"So here you are, mother, and the air didn't kill you."
+
+"I may have neuralgia to-morrow. You never can tell," replied Mrs. Carr.
+"I shouldn't worry about the papers, Jane. Nobody can help the way they
+blow about. I want Gabriella to see the children the first thing."
+
+As they entered the house Jane's children, a flock of five girls and two
+boys, fluttered up to be introduced, and among them Gabriella discovered
+the composed baby of Jane's tragic flight. It seemed an age ago, and she
+felt not thirty-eight, but a thousand.
+
+After dinner Charley, who had eaten immoderately, unfolded the evening
+paper under the electric lamp in the library, and dozed torpidly while
+the girls plied their aunt with innumerable questions about New York and
+the spring fashions. "It will be lovely to have Fanny with us at the
+White Sulphur. I know her clothes will be wonderful," they chirped
+happily, clustering eagerly about the sofa on which Gabriella was
+sitting. Jane's children, deriving from some hardy stock of an earlier
+generation, were handsome, vigorous, optimistic in blood and fibre, and
+so uncompromisingly modern that Gabriella wondered how Mrs. Carr, with
+her spiritual neuralgia and her perpetual mourning, had survived the
+unceasing currents of fresh air with which they surrounded her.
+
+"Yes, things have changed. It is the age," thought Gabriella; and
+presently, when Cousin Jimmy and Cousin Pussy came in to welcome her,
+she repeated: "Yes, it is the age. There is no escaping it."
+
+"Why, my dear child, you are looking splendidly," trilled Cousin Pussy,
+with her old delightful manner and her flattering vision so different
+from Florrie's. She was still trim, plump, and rosy, though her hair was
+now snow white and her pretty face was covered with cheerful wrinkles.
+"You're handsomer than you ever were in your life, and the dash of gray
+on your temples doesn't make you look, a day older--not a day. Some
+people turn gray so very young. I remember Cousin Becky Bollingbroke's
+hair was almost white by the time she was thirty-five. It runs like that
+in some families. But you look just as girlish as ever. It's wonderful,
+isn't it, Cousin Fanny, the way the women of this generation stay girls
+until they are fifty? I don't believe you'll ever look any older,
+Gabriella, than you do now. Of course, I suppose your business has
+something to do with it, but if I met you for the first time, it would
+never cross my mind that you were a day over twenty-five."
+
+"Well, well, so little Gabriella went to New York and became a
+dressmaker," observed Jimmy, who was seldom original, "and she's the
+same Gabriella, too. I always said, you know, that she was the sort you
+could count on."
+
+Age, though it had not entirely passed him by, had, on the whole,
+treated him with great gentleness. He was a remarkably handsome old man,
+with a distinguished and courtly presence, a head of wonderful white
+hair, which looked as if it had been powdered, a ruddy unwrinkled face,
+and the dark shining eyes of the adventurous youth he had never lost.
+
+"Of course, she couldn't have been a dressmaker here where everybody
+knows her," purred Cousin Pussy, with her arm about Gabriella, "but in
+New York it is different, and they tell me that even titled women are
+dressmakers in London."
+
+"Well, she has pluck," declared Cousin Jimmy, as he had declared
+eighteen years ago at the family council. "There's nothing like pluck
+when it comes to getting along in the world."
+
+Then they sat down in Jane's library, which, contained most of the
+things Gabriella associated with the old parlour in Hill Street, and
+Cousin Pussy asked if Gabriella had found many changes.
+
+"A great many. Everything, looks new to me except this room. The only
+thing I miss here is the horsehair sofa."
+
+"I keep that in the back hall," said Jane. "The town does look different
+up here, but the Peytons' house is just as you remember it--even the
+scarlet sage is in the garden. Miss Nelly plants it still every summer."
+
+A lovely light shone in Gabriella's eyes, and Cousin Pussy watched it
+tenderly, while a smile hovered about the corners of her shrewd though
+still pretty mouth.
+
+"It has been such a disappointment that Arthur hasn't done more in his
+profession," she said presently, "but, as I was saying to Mr. Wrenn only
+the other day, I have always felt that dear Gabriella was to blame for
+it."
+
+"The trouble with Arthur," observed Charley, awaking truculently from
+his doze, "is that he's got the wrong ideas. When a man has the wrong
+ideas in these days, he might as well go out and hang himself."
+
+"Well, I don't know that I'd call his ideas wrong exactly," reasoned
+Cousin Jimmy, with the judicial manner befitting the best judge of
+tobacco in Virginia; "I shouldn't call them wrong, but they're out of
+date. They belong to the last century."
+
+"I always say that dear Arthur is a perfect gentleman of the old
+school," remonstrated Mrs. Carr, meekly obstinate. "There aren't many of
+them left now, so I tell myself regretfully whenever I see him."
+
+"And there'll be fewer than ever by the time you Suffragists get your
+rights," remarked Charley, with bitterness, while Mrs. Carr, incensed by
+the word, which she associated with various indelicacies, stared at him
+with an indignant expression.
+
+"Charley, be careful what you say," nagged Jane acridly from her corner.
+"Now that so many of our relatives have gone in for suffrage, you
+mustn't be intolerant."
+
+"I cannot help it, Jane. I shall never knowingly bow to one even if she
+is related to me," announced Mrs. Carr more assertively than Gabriella
+would have believed possible.
+
+"Well, for my part, Cousin Fanny, I can't feel that it hurts me to bow
+to anybody," said Pussy, with her unfailing kindness of heart. "Why, I
+even bowed to Florrie Spencer last winter. I wanted to cut her, but I
+just couldn't bring myself to do it when I met her face to face. I hope
+you don't mind, dear," she whispered to Gabriella. "I suppose I oughtn't
+to have mentioned her, but I forgot."
+
+"Oh, it doesn't matter in the least," responded Gabriella cheerfully. "I
+bowed to her myself the day before I left New York."
+
+Though she tried to be independent, to be advanced and resolute, she
+felt the last eighteen years receding slowly from her consciousness. The
+family point of view, the family soul, had enveloped her again, and, in
+spite of her experience and her success, she seemed inwardly as young
+and ignorant as on the evening when she broke her engagement to Arthur.
+The spirit of the place had defeated her individual endeavour. Except
+for the wall paper of pale gray, and the Persian rugs on the floor,
+Jane's library might have been the old front parlour in Hill Street, and
+it was as if the French mirror, the crystal candelabra, the rosewood
+bookcases, with their diamond-shaped panes lined with fluted magenta
+silk, the family portraits, the speckled engravings of the Burial of
+Latané and of the groups of amiable children feeding chickens and
+fish--it was as if these inanimate objects exuded a spiritual anodyne
+which enfeebled the will. Across the hall, in the modern pink and gray
+drawing-room, the five girls were playing bridge with several young men
+whom Gabriella remembered as babies, and the sounds of their voices
+floated to her now and then as thinly as if they had come out of a
+phonograph. "There is nothing better than peace, after all," she
+thought, while her, eyes rested tenderly on the simple, affectionate
+face of Cousin Jimmy. "Goodness and peace, these things are really worth
+while."
+
+Then the telephone rang gently, and after a minute Margaret, who had
+gone to answer it, came in with a roguish smile on her lips. "Aunt
+Gabriella, Mr. Peyton wishes to come to-morrow at five," she said; and
+the roguish smile flitted from her lips to the lips of Cousin Pussy, and
+from Cousin Pussy to each sympathetic and watchful face in the group.
+
+"You may say what you please," argued Charley, still truculent, "the
+whole trouble with Arthur is that he has got the wrong ideas."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At five o'clock the next day the family crowded into the touring car for
+an excursion, and left Gabriella in a deserted house to receive the
+lover of her girlhood. Before going Mrs. Carr had embraced her
+sentimentally; Charley had dropped one of his broad jokes on the subject
+of the reunion; Jane had murmured sweetly that there was no man on earth
+she admired as much as she did Arthur; and the girls had effusively
+complimented Gabriella on her appearance. Even Willy, the baby of
+eighteen years ago, had prophesied with hilarity that "Old Arthur Peyton
+wasn't coming for nothing." One and all they appeared to take her part
+in the romance for granted; and while she waited in the drawing-room,
+gazing through the interstices of Jane's new lace curtains into the
+avenue, where beyond the flying motor cars the grassy strip in the
+middle of the street was dappled with shadows, she wondered if she also
+were taking Arthur's devotion for granted. She had not seen him for
+eighteen years, and yet she was awaiting him as expectantly as if he
+were still her lover. Would his presence really quiet this strange new
+restlessness in her heart--this restlessness which had come to her so
+suddenly after her meeting with Florrie? Was it true that her youth was
+slipping from her before she had grasped all the happiness that life
+offered? Or was it only the stirring of the spring winds, of the young
+green against the blue sky, of the mating birds, of the roving,
+provocative scents of flowers, of the checkered light and shade on the
+grassy strip under the maples? Was it all these things, or was it none
+of them, that awoke this longing, so vague and yet so unquenchable, in
+her heart?
+
+A car stopped in the street outside, the bell rang, and she watched the
+figure of a trim mulatto maid flit through the hall to the door. An
+instant later Arthur's name was announced, and Gabriella, with her hands
+in his clasp, stood looking into his face. It had been eighteen years
+since they parted, and in those eighteen years she had carried his image
+like some sacred talisman in her breast.
+
+"How little you've changed, Gabriella," he said after a moment of
+silence in which she told herself that he was far better looking, far
+more distinguished than she had remembered him. "You are larger than you
+used to be, but your face is as girlish as ever."
+
+"And I have two children nearly grown," she replied with a trembling
+little laugh; "a daughter who is already thinking of the White Sulphur."
+
+They sat down in the pink chairs on the gray carpet, and leaned forward,
+looking into each other's faces as tenderly as they had done when they
+were lovers.
+
+"It's hard to believe it," he answered a little stiffly, in his dry and
+gentle voice, which held a curious note of finality, of failure. For the
+first time, while he spoke, she let her eyes rest frankly upon him, and
+there came to her, as she did so, a vivid realization of the emptiness
+and aimlessness of his life. He looked handsomer than ever; he looked
+stately and formal and impressive; but he looked old--though he was only
+forty-five--he looked old and ineffectual and acquiescent. The fighting
+strength, such as it was, had gone out of him, and the stamp of failure
+was on him, from his high, pale, intellectual forehead, where the fine
+brown hair had retreated to the crown of his head, to his narrow
+features, and his relaxed slender limbs, with their slow and indolent
+movements. He was one of those, she felt intuitively, who had stood
+aloof from the rewards as well as from the strains of the struggle, who
+had withered to the core, not from age, but from an inherent distrust of
+all effort, of all endeavour. For his immobility went deeper than any
+physical habit: it attacked, like an incurable malady, the very fibre
+and substance of his nature. With his intellect, his training, his
+traditions, she discerned, with a flash of insight, that he had failed
+because he lacked the essential faith in the future. He had lost, not
+because he had risked, but because he had hesitated, not because he had
+loved ease, but because he had feared effort. For fear of a misstep, he
+had not dared to go forward; from dread of pain, he had refused the
+opportunity of happiness. She knew now why he had never come to her, why
+he had let her slip from his grasp. All that was a part of his failure,
+of his distrust of life, of his profound negation of spirit.
+
+"Yes, it is hard," she assented; and there came over her like a sudden
+sense of discomfort, of physical hardship, the knowledge that, in the
+very beginning, she was trying to make conversation. Meeting his
+sympathetic smile--the smile that still delighted the impressionable
+hearts of old ladies--she told herself obstinately, with desperate
+determination, that she was not disappointed, that he was just as she
+had remembered him, dear and lovable and kind and conventional. When she
+recalled what he had been at twenty-seven, it appeared inevitable to her
+that at forty-five he should have settled a little more firmly into the
+mould of the past, that his opinions should have crystallized and
+imprisoned his mind immovably in the centre of them.
+
+She told him what she could about Archibald and Fanny--about her choice
+of schools, her maternal pride in Archibald's intellect and Fanny's
+appearance, her hopeful plans for the future--and he listened
+attentively, with his manner of slightly pompous consideration, while he
+passed one of his long narrow hands over his forehead. When she had
+finished her vivacious recital, he began to talk slowly and gravely
+about himself, with the tolerant and impersonal detachment of one who
+has reduced life to a gesture, a manner. "I wonder if he has ever really
+cared about anything--even about me?" she questioned, after a minute;
+but while the thought was still in her mind, he mentioned his mother's
+name, and it was impossible to doubt the sincerity of his sorrow and his
+tenderness. "I have seemed only half alive since I lost her," he said;
+and the words were like a searchlight which flashed over his character
+and illumined its obscurities. Did his whole attitude of immobility and
+negation result from the depth and the intensity of his feeling, from
+the exquisite reticence and sensitiveness of his soul?
+
+"I know, I know," she murmured in a voice of sympathy. After all, she
+was not disappointed in him. He was as tender, as chivalrous, as noble
+as she had believed him to be. The Dream was true; and yet in spite of
+its truthfulness, it seemed to evaporate slowly while she sat there in
+Jane's pink satin chair and looked out at the sunlight. Only the
+restlessness, the inappeasable longing in her heart had not changed.
+Looking across the hall into the library she could see the old French
+mirror reflecting the bronze candelabra, with crystal pendants, and the
+thought flitted into her brain: "It is all real. I am here, talking to
+Arthur. It is every bit true." But her words failed to convince her, and
+she had a curious sensation of vagueness and thinness, as if their low,
+gentle voices were issuing from shadows.
+
+"I should like to show you some of our improvements," he said presently,
+with a faintly perceptible ripple of animation. "I wonder if you would
+care to come out in my car? We might go up Monument Avenue into the
+country."
+
+The idea was delightful, she told him with convincing enthusiasm; and
+while she ran upstairs to put on her hat, he went out to the car, which
+was standing in front of the house. So preoccupied was he with his
+reflections, that when Gabriella appeared, he started almost as if he
+had forgotten that he was waiting for her.
+
+The air was as soft and fragrant as summer; the grassy strip under the
+young maples was diapered with sunlight, and an edge of rosy gold was
+tinting the far horizon. As they sped up the avenue Arthur pointed out
+the houses to her as possessively as Charley had done the afternoon
+before, and in the pride with which he told her the cost of them she
+recognized an admirable freedom from envy or bitterness. If, he had not
+achieved things, his attitude seemed to say, it was because he had never
+been in the race, because he had preferred to stand aside and enjoy the
+reposeful entertainment of the spectator.
+
+The avenue, which swept on indefinitely after the houses had stopped,
+dwindled at last to two straight and narrow walks binding the town to
+the country with bands of concrete. The pines had fallen in blackened
+ruins, and where Gabriella remembered thickets of wildflowers there were
+masses of red clay furrowed by cart wheels.
+
+"You see, we're developing all this property now," observed Arthur, in a
+gratified tone as they whirled past an old field intersected by a
+concrete walk which informed the curious that it was "Arlington Avenue."
+"Honeysuckle Lane has gone, too, and we're grading a street there now in
+front of the old Berkeley place."
+
+"The growth has been wonderful," said Gabriella, a little pensively;
+"but do you remember how lovely Honeysuckle Lane used to be? That's
+where we went for wild honeysuckle in the spring."
+
+"Oh, we'll find plenty of honeysuckle farther out. I gathered a big
+bunch of it for Cousin Nelly yesterday."
+
+For a while they sped on in silence. Arthur was intent on the wheel, and
+Gabriella could think of nothing to say to him that she had not said in
+Jane's drawing-room. When at last they left the desolation of
+improvement, and came out into the natural country, the sun was already
+low, and the forest of pines along the glowing, horizon was like an
+impending storm. Once Arthur stopped, and they got out to gather wild
+honeysuckle by the roadside; then with the sticky, heavily scented
+blossoms in her lap, they went on again toward the sunset, still silent,
+still separated by an impalpable barrier. "He is just what I thought he
+would be," she thought sadly. "He is just where I left him eighteen
+years ago, and yet it is different. In some inexplicable way it is
+different from what I expected." And she told herself that the fault was
+her own--that she had changed, hardened, and become hopelessly
+matter-of-fact--that she had lost her youth and her sentiment.
+
+Suddenly, as if the action had been forced upon him by the steady
+pressure of some deep conviction, some inner necessity, Arthur turned
+his face toward her, and asked gently: "Gabriella, do you ever think of
+the past?"
+
+Facing the rosy sunset, his features looked wan and colourless, and she
+noticed again that he seemed to have dried through and through, like
+some rare fruit that has lain wrapped in tissue paper too long.
+
+She looked at him with wistful and sombre eyes. Now that the desired
+moment had come, she felt only that she would have given her whole
+future to escape before it overtook her, to avoid the inevitable,
+crowning hour of her destiny.
+
+"I think of it very often," she answered truthfully, while she buried
+her face in the intoxicating bloom of the honeysuckle.
+
+"Do you remember my telling you once that I'd never give you up--that
+I'd never stop caring?"
+
+"Yes, I remember--but, oh, Arthur, you mustn't--" She sat up with a
+start, gazing straight ahead into the rose and gold of the afterglow.
+From the deserted road, winding flat and dun-coloured in the soft
+light, she heard another voice--the strong and buoyant voice of
+O'Hara--saying: "I'm not the sort to change--" and then over again, "I'm
+not the sort to change--"
+
+"I suppose it's too late," Arthur went on, with his patient tenderness.
+"Things usually come too late for me or else I miss them altogether.
+That's been the way always--and now--" With his left hand he made a
+large, slow, commemorative gesture.
+
+"You're the best--the kindest--" An urgent desire moved her to stop him
+before he put into words the feeling she could see in his face. Though
+she knew that it was but the ghost of a feeling, the habit of a desire,
+which had become interwoven with his orderly and unchangeable custom of
+life, she realized nevertheless that its imaginary vividness might cause
+him great suffering. A vision of what might have been eighteen years
+ago--of their possible marriage--rose before her while she struggled for
+words. How could her energetic nature have borne with his philosophy of
+hesitation, her imperative affirmation of life with his denial of
+effort, her unconquered optimism with his deeply rooted mistrust of
+happiness?
+
+There was beauty in his face, in his ascetic and over-refined features,
+in his sympathetic smile and his cultured voice; but it was the beauty
+of resignation, of defeat nobly borne, of a spirit confirmed in the
+bitter sweetness of renouncement. "It would make an old woman of me to
+marry him," she thought, "an old, patient, resigned woman."
+
+"Most things have slipped by me," he resumed presently, while they raced
+down a long hill toward the black pines and the fading red of the
+afterglow. In a marshy pond near the roadside frogs were croaking,
+while from the darkening fields, encircled with webs of mist, there
+floated the mingled scents of freshly mown grass, of dewy flowers, of
+trodden weeds, of ploughed earth, of ancient mould--all the fugitive and
+immemorially suggestive odours of the country at twilight. And at the
+touch of these scents, some unforgotten longing seemed to stir in her
+brain as if it had slept there, covered by clustering memories, from
+another lifetime. She wanted something with an unbearable intensity; the
+vague and elusive yearning for happiness had become suddenly poignant
+and definite. In that instant she knew unerringly that she was in love
+not with a dream, but with a fact, that she was in love not with Arthur,
+but with O'Hara. For days, weeks, months, she had been blindly groping
+toward the knowledge; and now, in a flash of intuition, it had come to
+her like one of those discoveries of science, which baffle investigators
+for years, and then miraculously reveal themselves in a moment of
+insight. Her first antagonism, her injustice, her unreasonable
+resentments and suspicions, she recognized now, in the piercing light of
+this discovery, as the inexplicable disguises of love. And she was not
+old--she was not even middle-aged--she was as young as Fanny, as young
+as the eternal, ageless spirit of romance, of adventure. This was life
+in her pulses, in her brain, in her heart--life, not pale, not bitter
+sweet, but sparkling, glowing, bubbling like wine.
+
+At the foot of the long hill Arthur turned the car, and they flew back
+between the dim fields where the croaking of frogs sounded louder in the
+darkness. Ahead of them the lights of the car flitted like golden moths
+over the dust of the road, and in the sky, beyond the thin veil of mist,
+the stars were shining over the city. Spring, which possessed the earth,
+bloomed in Gabriella's heart with a wonderful colour, a wonderful
+fragrance. She was young again with the imperishable youth of magic, of
+enchantment. To love, to hope, to strive, this was both romance and
+adventure.
+
+"Is it too late, then, Gabriella?" asked Arthur, after a long silence,
+and in his voice there was the sound of suffering acquiescence.
+
+"I'm afraid it is, dear Arthur," she answered softly, and they did not
+speak again until the lights blazed over them, and they ran into
+Monument Avenue. After all, it was too late. What could she have added
+to the answer she had given him?
+
+When they reached the house, he did not come in with her, and tears
+stained her face while she went slowly up the steps, and stood beside
+Jane's hydrangeas with her hand on the bell. Then, as the door opened
+quickly, she saw her mother waiting, with an eager, expectant look, at
+the door of the library, and heard her excited voice murmur: "Well,
+dear?"
+
+"We had a lovely drive, mother. Arthur is just as I remembered him,
+except that he has grown so much older."
+
+A disappointed expression crossed Mrs. Carr's face. "Is that all?" she
+asked regretfully.
+
+Gabriella laughed happily. "That is all--only I found out exactly what I
+wanted to know."
+
+For the rest of the week she devoted herself to her mother with a
+solicitude which aroused in the brain of that melancholy lady serious
+apprehensions of a hastening decline; and when her visit was over, she
+packed her trunks, with girlish, delicious thrills of happiness, and
+started back to New York.
+
+"Do you really think I am failing so rapidly, Gabriella?" Mrs. Carr
+inquired anxiously while they waited for the train on the platform of
+the upper station.
+
+"Failing? Why, no, mother. You look splendidly," Gabriella assured her,
+a little surprised, a little startled. "Why should you ask me such a
+thing?"
+
+"Oh, nothing, dear. I had a fancy," murmured Mrs. Carr meekly; and then
+as the train rushed into view, she kissed her daughter reproachfully,
+and stood gazing after her until the last coach and the last white
+jacket of the dining-car attendants vanished in the smoky sunshine of
+the distance.
+
+Through the long day, lying back in her chair, with her eyes on the
+flying green landscape, Gabriella thought of the discovery she had made
+while she was driving with Arthur. The restlessness, the uncertainty,
+the vague yet poignant longing for an indefinite good, had passed out of
+her happy and exultant heart. In obedience to the law of her nature,
+which decreed that she should move swiftly and directly toward the end
+of her destiny, she was returning to O'Hara as resolutely, as
+unswervingly, as she had fled from him.
+
+"It's strange how little I've ever understood, how little I've ever
+known myself," she thought, staring vacantly at a severe spinster, with
+crimped hair and a soured expression, who sat before the opposite
+window. "I've gone on in the dark, making mistakes and discoveries from
+the very beginning, undoing and doing over again, creating illusions and
+then destroying them--always moving, always changing, always growing in
+new directions. A year ago I'd have laughed at the idea that I could
+love any man but Arthur--that of all men I could love Ben O'Hara; and
+to-day I know that he is the future for me--that he is the beginning
+again of my youth. A year ago I thought only how I might change him, how
+I might make him over, and now I realize that I shall never change him,
+that I shall never make him over, and that it doesn't really matter. It
+isn't the vital thing. The vital thing is character, and I wouldn't
+change that if I could. For the rest, I shall probably always wish him
+different in some ways, just as I wish myself different. I'd like to
+have him more like Arthur on the surface, just as I'd like to have
+myself more like Fanny. I'd like to give him Arthur's manner just as I'd
+like to give myself Fanny's complexion. But it isn't possible. He will
+always be what he is now, and, after all, it is what he is--it is not
+something else that I want--"
+
+With a glimmer of the clairvoyant insight which had come to her on the
+country road, she understood that O'Hara was for her an embodied symbol
+of life--that she must either take him or leave him completely and
+without reserve or evasion. He was not an ideal. In the love she felt
+for him there was none of the sentimental glamour of her passion for
+George. She saw his imperfections, but she saw that the man was bigger
+than any attributes, that his faults were as nothing compared to the
+abundance of his virtues, and that, perfect or imperfect, the tremendous
+fact remained that she loved him.
+
+In the opposite chair, the severe spinster had taken a strip of knitted
+silk out of her bag, and was working industriously on a man's necktie of
+blue and gray. From her intent and preoccupied look, from the nervous
+twitching of her thin lips, the close peering of her near-sighted eyes,
+through rimless glasses which she wore attached by a gold chain to her
+hair, she might have found in the act of knitting a supreme consolation
+for the inexorable denials of destiny. "I wonder if it satisfies her,
+just knitting?" thought Gabriella. "Has she submitted like Arthur to
+chance, to the way things happen when one no longer resists? Is she
+really contented merely to knit, or is she knitting as a condemned
+prisoner might knit while he is waiting for the scaffold?" And while she
+watched the patient fingers, she added: "One must either conquer or be
+conquered, and I will never be conquered."
+
+It was eight o'clock when she reached New York, and as she drove the
+short distance to West Twenty-third Street she began to wonder when she
+should see O'Hara, and what she should say to him. In the end she
+decided that she would wait for a chance meeting, that she would let it
+happen when it would without moving a step or lifting a hand. Before
+many days they would be obliged to meet in the yard or the hall, and
+some obscure, consecrated tradition of sex, some secret strain of her
+mother's ineradicable feminine instinct, opposed the direct and sensible
+way. "As soon as I meet him--and in the end I shall surely meet
+him--everything will be right," she thought, with her eyes on the
+streets where the spring multitude of children were swarming. And from
+this multitude of children, of young, ardent, and adventurous life,
+there seemed to emanate a colossal and irresistible will--the will to
+be, to live, to love, to create, and to conquer.
+
+The taxicab turned swiftly into Twenty-third Street, and while it
+stopped beside the pavement, she saw that Mrs. Squires was standing,
+with her arms on the gate, staring into the street. As Gabriella
+alighted, the woman came forward and said, with suppressed emotion,
+while she wiped her eyes on the back of her hand: "You came just a
+minute too late to say good-bye to Mr. O'Hara."
+
+"Good-bye? But where has he gone?"
+
+"He has gone to Washington to-night. To-morrow he is starting to the
+West."
+
+"When is he coming back? Did he tell you?"
+
+At this Mrs. Squires broke down. "He ain't ever coming back, that's what
+I'm crying for. He's given up his rooms, and his furniture all went to
+the auction yesterday. He says he's going to live out in Colorado or
+Wyoming for the rest of his life, and he didn't even tell me where I
+could write to him. It's a great loss to me, Mrs. Carr. I'd got used to
+him and his ways, and when you've once got used to a man, it ain't easy
+to give him up."
+
+She sobbed audibly as she finished; and it seemed to Gabriella that a
+lifetime of experience passed in the instant while she stood there, with
+her pulses drumming in her ears, her throat contracting until she
+struggled for breath, and the lights of the city swimming in a nebulous
+blur before her eyes. Yet in that instant, as in every crisis of her
+life, she turned instinctively to action, to movement, to exertion,
+however futile. While she walked across the pavement to the waiting cab,
+for the crowning and ultimate choice of her life, she abandoned forever
+the authority and guide of tradition. Tradition, she knew, bade her sit
+and wait on destiny until she withered, like Arthur, to the vital core
+of her nature; but something mightier than tradition, something which
+she shared with the swarming multitude of children in the streets--the
+will to live, to strive, and to conquer--this had risen superior to the
+empty rules of the past. With her hand on the door of the taxicab, she
+spoke rapidly to the driver: "Drive back to the station as fast as you
+can, there is not a minute to lose."
+
+When the cab started, she leaned forward, with her hands clasped on her
+knees, and her eyes on the street, where the children were playing.
+Because of the children, they drove very slowly, and once, when the
+traffic held them up for a few minutes, she felt an impulse to scream.
+Suppose she missed him, after all! Suppose she lost him in the station!
+Suppose she never saw him again! And beside this possibly it seemed to
+her that all the other suffering of her life--George's desertion, her
+humiliation, her struggle to make a living for her children, the
+loneliness of the long summers, her poverty and hunger and
+self-denial--that all these things were merely superficial annoyances.
+"If we don't go on, I shall die," she said aloud suddenly; "if we don't
+go on, I shall die," and when at last the cab started again, she heard
+the words like an undercurrent beneath the innumerable noises of the
+street, "If we don't go on, I shall die."
+
+The taxicab stopped; a porter ran forward to take her bag, and while she
+thrust the money into the driver's hand, she heard her voice coolly and
+calmly giving directions.
+
+"I must catch the next train to Washington."
+
+"Have you got your ticket, Miss?"
+
+She stared back at him blankly. Though she saw his lips moving, it was
+impossible for her to distinguish the words because she was still
+hearing in a muffled undercurrent the roar of the streets.
+
+"Have you got your ticket?" They were passing through the station now,
+and he explained hurriedly: "You can't go through the gate without a
+ticket."
+
+She drew out her purse, and panic seized her afresh while she waited
+before the window behind a bald-headed man who counted his change twice
+before he would move aside, and let her step into his place. Then, when
+the ticket was given to her, she turned and ran after the porter through
+the gate and down the steps to the platform. As she ran, her eyes
+wavered to the long platform, and the little groups gathered beside the
+waiting train, which seemed to shake like a moving black and white
+picture.
+
+"Suppose I miss him, after all! Suppose I never see him again!" she
+thought, and all that was young in her, all that was vital and alive,
+strained forward as her feet touched the platform. Except for several
+coloured porters and a woman holding a child by the hand, the place was
+deserted. Then a man stepped quickly out of one of the last coaches, and
+by his bigness and the red of his hair, she knew that it was O'Hara. At
+the first sight of him the panic died suddenly in her heart, and the old
+peace, the old sense of security and protection swept over her. Her
+face, which had been lowered, was lifted like a flower that revives, and
+her feet, which had stumbled, became the swift, flying feet of a girl.
+It was as if both her spirit and her body sprang toward him.
+
+At the sound of his name, he turned and stood motionless, as if hardly
+believing his vision.
+
+"I came back because I couldn't help it," she said.
+
+But he was always hard to convince, and he waited now, still transfixed,
+still incredulous.
+
+"I came back because I wanted you more than anything else," she added.
+
+"You came back to me?" he asked, slowly, as if doubting her.
+
+"I came back to you. I wanted you," she repeated, and her voice did not
+quaver, her eyes did not drop from his questioning gaze. It was all so
+simple at last; it was all as natural as the joyous beating of her
+heart.
+
+"And you'll marry me now--to-night?"
+
+It was the ultimate test, she knew, the test not only of her love for
+O'Hara, but of her strength, her firmness, her courage, and of her
+belief in life. The choice was hers that comes to all men and women
+sooner or later--the choice between action and inaction, between
+endeavour and relinquishment, between affirmation and denial, between
+adventure and deliberation, between youth and age. One thought only made
+her hesitate, and she almost whispered the words:
+
+"But the children?"
+
+He laughed softly. "Oh, the children are always there. We're not
+quitters," and in a graver tone, he asked for the second time: "Will you
+come with me now--to-night, Gabriella?"
+
+At the repeated question she stretched out her hands, while she watched
+the light break on his face.
+
+"I'll come with you now--anywhere--toward the future," she answered.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Life and Gabriella, by Ellen Glasgow
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