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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14744 ***
+
+DIFFERENT GIRLS
+
+Harper's Novelettes
+
+Edited by
+
+WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS and HENRY MILLS ALDEN
+
+Harper & Brothers Publishers
+New York and London
+
+1895, 1896, 1897, 1904, 1905, 1906
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
+"THE LITTLE JOYS OF MARGARET"
+
+ELIZABETH JORDAN
+"KITTIE'S SISTER JOSEPHINE"
+
+ALICE BROWN
+"THE WIZARD'S TOUCH"
+
+CHARLES B. DE CAMP
+"THE BITTER CUP"
+
+MARY APPLEWHITE BACON
+"HIS SISTER"
+
+ELEANOR A. HALLOWELL
+"THE PERFECT YEAR"
+
+WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+"EDITHA"
+
+OCTAVE THANET
+"THE STOUT MISS HOPKINS'S BICYCLE"
+
+MARY M. MEARS
+"THE MARRYING OF ESTHER"
+
+JULIAN RALPH
+"CORDELIA'S NIGHT OF ROMANCE"
+
+E. A. ALEXANDER
+"THE PRIZE-FUND BENEFICIARY"
+
+
+
+
+
+Introduction
+
+
+It is many years now since the American Girl began to engage the
+consciousness of the American novelist. Before the expansive period
+following the Civil War, in the later eighteen-sixties and the earlier
+eighteen-seventies, she had of course been his heroine, unless he went
+abroad for one in court circles, or back for one in the feudal ages.
+Until the time noted, she had been a heroine and then an American girl.
+After that she was an American girl, and then a heroine; and she was
+often studied against foreign backgrounds, in contrast with other
+international figures, and her value ascertained in comparison with
+their valuelessness, though sometimes she was portrayed in those poses
+of flirtation of which she was born mistress. Even in these her
+superiority to all other kinds of girls was insinuated if not asserted.
+
+The young ladies in the present collection are all American girls but
+one, if we are to suppose Mr. Le Gallienne's winning type to be of the
+same English origin as himself. We can be surer of him than of her,
+however; but there is no question of the native Americanness of Mrs.
+Alexander's girl, who is done so strikingly to the life, with courage to
+grapple a character and a temperament as uncommon as it is true, which
+we have rarely found among our fictionists. Having said this, we must
+hedge in favor of Miss Jordan's most autochthonic Miss Kittie, so young
+a girl as to be still almost a little girl, and with a head full of the
+ideals of little-girlhood concerning young-girlhood. The pendant to her
+pretty picture is the study of elderly girlhood by Octave Thanet, or
+that by Miss Alice Brown, the one with its ideality, and the other with
+its humor. The pathos of "The Perfect Year" is as true as either in its
+truth to the girlhood which "never knew an earthly close," and yet had
+its fill of rapture. Julian Ralph's strong and free sketch contributes a
+fresh East Side flower, hollyhock-like in its gaudiness, to the garden
+of American girls, Irish-American in this case, but destined to be
+companioned hereafter by blossoms of our Italian-American,
+Yiddish-American, and Russian-American civilization, as soon as our
+nascent novelists shall have the eye to see and the art to show them.
+Meantime, here are some of our Different Girls as far as they or their
+photographers have got, and their acquaintance is worth having.
+
+     W.D.H.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Little Joys of Margaret
+
+BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
+
+
+Margaret had seen her five sisters one by one leave the family nest, to
+set up little nests of their own. Her brother, the eldest child of a
+family of seven, had left the old home almost beyond memory, and settled
+in London. Now and again he made a flying visit to the small provincial
+town of his birth, and sometimes he sent two little daughters to
+represent him--for he was already a widowed man, and relied occasionally
+on the old roof-tree to replace the lost mother. Margaret had seen what
+sympathetic spectators called her "fate" slowly approaching for some
+time--particularly when, five years ago, she had broken off her
+engagement with a worthless boy. She had loved him deeply, and, had she
+loved him less, a refined girl in the provinces does not find it easy to
+replace a discarded suitor--for the choice of young men is not
+excessive. Her sisters had been more fortunate, and so, as I have said,
+one by one they left their father's door in bridal veils. But Margaret
+stayed on, and at length, as had been foreseen, became the sole nurse of
+a beautiful old invalid mother, a kind of lay sister in the nunnery of
+home.
+
+She came of a beautiful family. In all the big family of seven there was
+not one without some kind of good looks. Two of her sisters were
+acknowledged beauties, and there were those who considered Margaret the
+most beautiful of all. It was all the harder, such sympathizers said,
+that her youth should thus fade over an invalid's couch, the bloom of
+her complexion be rubbed out by arduous vigils, and the lines
+prematurely etched in her skin by the strain of a self-denial proper, no
+doubt, to homely girls and professional nurses, but peculiarly wanton
+and wasteful in the case of a girl so beautiful as Margaret.
+
+There are, alas! a considerable number of women predestined by their
+lack of personal attractiveness for the humbler tasks of life.
+Instinctively we associate them with household work, nursing, and the
+general drudgery of existence. One never dreams of their having a life
+of their own. They have no accomplishments, nor any of the feminine
+charms. Women to whom an offer of marriage would seem as terrifying as a
+comet, they belong to the neutrals of the human hive, and are,
+practically speaking, only a little higher than the paid domestic.
+Indeed, perhaps their one distinction is that they receive no wages.
+
+Now for so attractive a girl as Margaret to be merged in so dreary,
+undistinguished a class was manifestly preposterous. It was a stupid
+misapplication of human material. A plainer face and a more homespun
+fibre would have served the purpose equally well.
+
+Margaret was by no means so much a saint of self-sacrifice as not to
+have realized her situation with natural human pangs. Youth only comes
+once--especially to a woman; and
+
+    No hand can gather up the withered fallen
+        petals of the Rose of youth.
+
+Petal by petal, Margaret had watched the rose of her youth fading and
+falling. More than all her sisters, she was endowed with a zest for
+existence. Her superb physical constitution cried out for the joy of
+life. She was made to be a great lover, a great mother; and to her,
+more than most, the sunshine falling in muffled beams through the
+lattices of her mother's sick-room came with a maddening summons
+to--live. She was so supremely fitted to play a triumphant part in the
+world outside there, so gay of heart, so victoriously vital.
+
+At first, therefore, the renunciation, accepted on the surface with so
+kind a face, was a source of secret bitterness and hidden tears. But
+time, with its mercy of compensation, had worked for her one of its many
+mysterious transmutations, and shown her of what fine gold her
+apparently leaden days were made. She was now thirty-three; though, for
+all her nursing vigils, she did not look more than twenty-nine, and was
+now more than resigned to the loss of the peculiar opportunities of
+youth--if, indeed, they could be said to be lost already. "An old maid,"
+she would say, "who has cheerfully made up her mind to be an old maid,
+is one of the happiest, and, indeed, most enviable, people in all the
+world."
+
+Resent the law as we may, it is none the less true that renunciation
+brings with it a mysterious initiation, a finer insight. Its discipline
+would seem to refine and temper our organs of spiritual perception, and
+thus make up for the commoner experience lost by a rarer experience
+gained. By dedicating herself to her sick mother, Margaret undoubtedly
+lost much of the average experience of her sex and age, but almost
+imperceptibly it had been borne in upon her that she made some important
+gains of a finer kind. She had been brought very close to the mystery of
+human life, closer than those who have nothing to do beyond being
+thoughtlessly happy can ever come. The nurse and the priest are
+initiates of the same knowledge. Each alike is a sentinel on the
+mysterious frontier between this world and the next. The nearer we
+approach that frontier, the more we understand not only of that world on
+the other side, but of the world on this. It is only when death throws
+its shadow over the page of life that we realize the full significance
+of what we are reading. Thus, by her mother's bedside, Margaret was
+learning to read the page of life under the illuminating shadow of
+death.
+
+But, apart from any such mystical compensation, Margaret's great reward
+was that she knew her beautiful old mother better than any one else in
+the world knew her. As a rule, and particularly in a large family,
+parents remain half mythical to their children, awe-inspiring presences
+in the home, colossal figures of antiquity, about whose knees the
+younger generation crawls and gropes, but whose heads are hidden in the
+mists of prehistoric legend. They are like personages in the Bible. They
+impress our imagination, but we cannot think of them as being quite
+real. Their histories smack of legend. And this, of course, is natural,
+for they had been in the world, had loved and suffered, so long before
+us that they seem a part of that antenatal mystery out of which we
+sprang. When they speak of their old love-stories, it is as though we
+were reading Homer. It sounds so long ago. We are surprised at the
+vividness with which they recall happenings and personalities, past and
+gone before, as they tell us, we were born. Before we were born! Yes!
+They belong to that mysterious epoch of time--"before we were born"; and
+unless we have a taste for history, or are drawn close to them by some
+sympathetic human exigency, as Margaret had been drawn to her mother, we
+are too apt, in the stress of making our own, to regard the history of
+our parents as dry-as-dust.
+
+As the old mother sits there so quiet in her corner, her body worn to a
+silver thread, and hardly anything left of her but her indomitable eyes,
+it is hard, at least for a young thing of nineteen, all aflush and
+aflurry with her new party gown, to realize that that old mother is
+infinitely more romantic than herself. She has sat there so long,
+perhaps, as to have come to seem part of the inanimate furniture of home
+rather than a living being. Well! the young thing goes to her party, and
+dances with some callow youth who pays her clumsy compliments, and
+Margaret remains at home with the old mother in her corner. It is hard
+on Margaret! Yes; and yet, as I have said, it is thus she comes to know
+her old mother better than any one else knows her--society perhaps not
+so poor an exchange for that of smart, immature young men of one's own
+age.
+
+As the door closes behind the important rustle of youthful laces, and
+Margaret and her mother are left alone, the mother's old eyes light up
+with an almost mischievous smile. If age seems humorous to youth, youth
+is even more humorous to age.
+
+"It is evidently a great occasion, Peg," the old voice says, with the
+suspicion of a gentle mockery. "Don't you wish you were going?"
+
+"You naughty old mother!" answers Margaret, going over and kissing her.
+
+The two understand each other.
+
+"Well, shall we go on with our book?" says the mother, after a while.
+
+"Yes, dear, in a moment. I have first to get you your diet, and then we
+can begin."
+
+"Bother the diet!" says the courageous old lady; "for two pins I'd go to
+the ball myself. That old taffeta silk of mine is old enough to be in
+fashion again. What do you say, Peg, if you and I go to the ball
+together ..."
+
+"Oh, it's too much trouble dressing, mother. What do you think?"
+
+"Well, I suppose it is," answers the mother. "Besides, I want to hear
+what happens next to those two beautiful young people in our book. So be
+quick with my old diet, and come and read ..."
+
+There is perhaps nothing so lovely or so well worth having as the
+gratitude of the old towards the young that care to give them more than
+the perfunctory ministrations to which they have long since grown sadly
+accustomed. There was no reward in the world that Margaret would have
+exchanged for the sweet looks of her old mother, who, being no merely
+selfish invalid, knew the value and the cost of the devotion her
+daughter was giving her.
+
+"I can give you so little, my child, for all you are giving me," her
+mother would sometimes say; and the tears would spring to Margaret's
+eyes.
+
+Yes! Margaret had her reward in this alone--that she had cared to
+decipher the lined old document of her mother's face. Her other sisters
+had passed it by more or less impatiently. It was like some ancient
+manuscript in a museum, which only a loving and patient scholar takes
+the trouble to read. But the moment you begin to pick out the words, how
+its crabbed text blossoms with beautiful meanings and fascinating
+messages! It is as though you threw a dried rose into some magic water,
+and saw it unfold and take on bloom, and fill with perfume, and bring
+back the nightingale that sang to it so many years ago. So Margaret
+loved her mother's old face, and learned to know the meaning of every
+line on it. Privileged to see that old face in all its private moments
+of feeling, under the transient revivification of deathless memories,
+she was able, so to say, to reconstruct its perished beauty, and
+realize the romance of which it was once the alluring candle. For her
+mother had been a very great beauty, and if, like Margaret, you are able
+to see it, there is no history so fascinating as the bygone love-affairs
+of old people. How much more fascinating to read one's mother's
+love-letters than one's own!
+
+Even in the history of the heart recent events have a certain crudity,
+and love itself seems the more romantic for having lain in lavender for
+fifty years. A certain style, a certain distinction, beyond question, go
+with antiquity, and to spend your days with a refined old mother is no
+less an education in style and distinction than to spend them in the air
+of old cities, under the shadow of august architecture and in the sunset
+of classic paintings.
+
+The longer Margaret lived with her old mother, the less she valued the
+so-called "opportunities" she had missed. Coming out of her mother's
+world of memories, there seemed something small, even common, about the
+younger generation to which she belonged,--something lacking in
+significance and dignity.
+
+For example, it had been her dream, as it is the dream of every true
+woman, to be a mother herself: and yet, somehow--though she would not
+admit it in so many words--when her young married sisters came with
+their babies, there was something about their bustling and complacent
+domesticity that seemed to make maternity bourgeois. She had not dreamed
+of being a mother like that. She was convinced that her old mother had
+never been a mother like that. "They seem more like wet-nurses than
+mothers," she said to herself, with her wicked wit.
+
+Was there, she asked herself, something in realization that inevitably
+lost you the dream? Was to incarnate an ideal to materialize it? Did the
+finer spirit of love necessarily evaporate like some volatile essence
+with marriage? Was it better to remain on idealistic spectator such as
+she--than to run the risks of realization?
+
+She was far too beautiful, and had declined too many offers of
+commonplace marriage, for such questioning to seem the philosophy of
+disappointment. Indeed, the more she realized her own situation, the
+more she came to regard what others considered her sacrifice to her
+mother as a safeguard against the risk of a mediocre domesticity.
+Indeed, she began to feel a certain pride, as of a priestess, in the
+conservation of the dignity of her nature. It is better to be a vestal
+virgin than--some mothers.
+
+And, after all, the maternal instinct of her nature found an ideal
+outlet in her brother's children--the two little motherless girls who
+came every year to spend their holidays with their grandmother and their
+aunt Margaret.
+
+Margaret had seen but little of their mother, but her occasional
+glimpses of her had left her with a haloed image of a delicate,
+spiritual face that grew more and more Madonna-like with memory. The
+nimbus of the Divine Mother, as she herself had dreamed of her, had
+seemed indeed to illumine that grave young face.
+
+It pleased her imagination to take the place of that phantom mother,
+herself--a phantom mother. And who knows but that such dream-children,
+as she called those two little girls, were more satisfactory in the end
+than real children? They represented, so to say, the poetry of children.
+Had Margaret been a real mother, there would have been the prose of
+children as well. But here, as in so much else, Margaret's seclusion
+from the responsible activities of the outside world enabled her to
+gather the fine flower of existence without losing the sense of it in
+the cares of its cultivation. I think that she comprehended the wonder
+and joy of children more than if she had been a real mother.
+
+Seclusion and renunciation are great sharpeners and refiners of the
+sense of joy, chiefly because they encourage the habit of attentiveness.
+
+"Our excitements are very tiny," once said the old mother to Margaret,
+"therefore we make the most of them."
+
+"I don't agree with you, mother," Margaret had answered. "I think it is
+theirs that are tiny--trivial indeed, and ours that are great. People in
+the world lose the values of life by having too much choice; too much
+choice--of things not worth having. This makes them miss the real
+things--just as any one living in a city cannot see the stars for the
+electric lights. But we, sitting quiet in our corner, have time to watch
+and listen, when the others must hurry by. We have time, for instance,
+to watch that sunset yonder, whereas some of our worldly friends would
+be busy dressing to go out to a bad play. We can sit here and listen to
+that bird singing his vespers, as long as he will sing--and personally I
+wouldn't exchange him for a prima donna. Far from being poor in
+excitements, I think we have quite as many as are good for us, and those
+we have are very beautiful and real."
+
+"You are a brave child," answered her mother. "Come and kiss me," and
+she took the beautiful gold head into her hands and kissed her daughter
+with her sweet old mouth, so lost among wrinkles that it was sometimes
+hard to find it.
+
+"But am I not right, mother?" said Margaret.
+
+"Yes! you are right, dear, but you seem too young to know such wisdom."
+
+"I have to thank you for it, darling," answered Margaret, bending down
+and kissing her mother's beautiful gray hair.
+
+"Ah! little one," replied the mother, "it is well to be wise, but it is
+good to be foolish when we are young--and I fear I have robbed you of
+your foolishness."
+
+"I shall believe you have if you talk like that," retorted Margaret,
+laughingly taking her mother into her arms and gently shaking her, as
+she sometimes did When the old lady was supposed to have been "naughty."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So for Margaret and her mother the days pass, and at first, as we have
+said, it may seem a dull life, and even a hard one, for Margaret. But
+she herself has long ceased to think so, and she dreads the inevitable
+moment when the divine friendship between her and her old mother must
+come to an end. She knows, of course, that it must come, and that the
+day cannot be far off when the weary old limbs will refuse to make the
+tiny journeys from bedroom to rocking-chair, which have long been all
+that has been demanded of them; when the brave, humorous old eyes will
+be so weary that they cannot keep open any more in this world. The
+thought is one that is insupportably lonely, and sometimes she looks at
+the invalid-chair, at the cup and saucer in which she serves her
+mother's simple food, at the medicine-bottle and the measuring-glass, at
+the knitted shawl which protects the frail old form against draughts,
+and at all such sad furniture of an invalid's life, and pictures the day
+when the homely, affectionate use of all these things will be gone
+forever; for so poignant is humanity that it sanctifies with endearing
+associations even objects in themselves so painful and prosaic. And it
+seems to Margaret that when that day comes it would be most natural for
+her to go on the same journey with her mother.
+
+For who shall fill for her her mother's place on earth--and what
+occupation will be left for Margaret when her "beautiful old _raison
+d'être_," as she sometimes calls her mother, has entered into the sleep
+of the blessed? She seldom thinks of that, for the thought is too
+lonely, and, meanwhile, she uses all her love and care to make this
+earth so attractive and cozy that the beautiful mother-spirit who has
+been so long prepared for her short journey to heaven may be tempted to
+linger here yet a little while longer. These ministrations, which began
+as a kind of renunciation, have now turned into an unselfish
+selfishness. Margaret began by feeling herself necessary to her mother;
+now her mother becomes more and more necessary to Margaret. Sometimes
+when she leaves her alone for a few moments in her chair, she laughingly
+bends over and says, "Promise me that you won't run away to heaven while
+my back is turned."
+
+And the old mother smiles one of those transfigured smiles which seem
+only to light up the faces of those that are already half over the
+border of the spiritual world.
+
+Winter is, of course, Margaret's time of chief anxiety, and then her
+loving efforts are redoubled to detain her beloved spirit in an
+inclement world. Each winter passed in safety seems a personal victory
+over death. How anxiously she watches for the first sign of the
+returning spring, how eagerly she brings the news of early blade and
+bud, and with the first violet she feels that the danger is over for
+another year. When the spring is so afire that she is able to fill her
+mother's lap with a fragrant heap of crocus and daffodil, she dares at
+last to laugh and say,
+
+"Now confess, mother, that you won't find sweeter flowers even in
+heaven."
+
+And when the thrush is on the apple bough outside the window, Margaret
+will sometimes employ the same gentle raillery.
+
+"Do you think, mother," she will say, "that an angel could sing sweeter
+than that thrush?"
+
+"You seem very sure, Margaret, that I am going to heaven," the old
+mother will sometimes say, with one of her arch old smiles; "but do you
+know that I stole two peppermints yesterday?"
+
+"You did!" says Margaret.
+
+"I did indeed! and they have been on my conscience ever since."
+
+"Really, mother! I don't know what to say," answers Margaret. "I had no
+idea that you are so wicked."
+
+Many such little games the two play together, as the days go by; and
+often at bedtime, as Margaret tucks her mother into bed, she asks her:
+
+"Are you comfortable, dear? Do you really think you would be much more
+comfortable in heaven?"
+
+Or sometimes she will draw aside the window-curtains and say:
+
+"Look at the stars, mother.... Don't you think we get the best view of
+them down here?"
+
+So it is that Margaret persuades her mother to delay her journey a
+little while.
+
+
+
+
+Kittie's Sister Josephine
+
+BY ELIZABETH JORDAN
+
+
+Kittie James told me this story about her sister Josephine, and when she
+saw my eye light up the way the true artist's does when he hears a good
+plot, she said I might use it, if I liked, the next time I "practised
+literature."
+
+I don't think that was a very nice way to say it, especially when one
+remembers that Sister Irmingarde read three of my stories to the class
+in four months; and as I only write one every week, you can see yourself
+what a good average that was. But it takes noble souls to be humble in
+the presence of the gifted, and enthusiastic over their success, so only
+two of my classmates seemed really happy when Sister Irmingarde read my
+third story aloud. It is hardly necessary to mention the names of these
+beautiful natures, already so well known to my readers, but I will do
+it. They were Maudie Joyce and Mabel Blossom, and they are my dearest
+friends at St. Catharine's. And some day, when I am a real writer and
+the name of May Iverson shines in gold letters on the tablets of fame,
+I'll write a book and dedicate it to them. Then, indeed, they will be
+glad they knew me in my schoolgirl days, and recognized real merit when
+they saw it, and did not mind the queer things my artistic temperament
+often makes me do. Oh, what a slave is one to this artistic, emotional
+nature, and how unhappy, how misunderstood! I don't mean that I am
+unhappy all the time, of course, but I have Moods. And when I have them
+life seems so hollow, so empty, so terrible! At such times natures that
+do not understand me are apt to make mistakes, the way Sister Irmingarde
+did when she thought I had nervous dyspepsia and made me walk three
+miles every day, when it was just Soul that was the matter with me.
+Still, I must admit the exercise helped me. It is so soothing, so
+restful, so calming to walk on dear nature's breast. Maudie Joyce and
+Mabel Blossom always know the minute an attack of artistic temperament
+begins in me. Then they go away quietly and reverently, and I write a
+story and feel better.
+
+So this time I am going to tell about Kittie James's sister Josephine.
+In the very beginning I must explain that Josephine James used to be a
+pupil at St. Catharine's herself, ages and ages ago, and finally she
+graduated and left, and began to go into society and look around and
+decide what her life-work should be. That was long, long before our
+time--as much as ten years, I should think, and poor Josephine must be
+twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old now. But Kittie says she is just
+as nice as she can be, and not a bit poky, and so active and interested
+in life you'd think she was young. Of course I know such things can be,
+for my own sister Grace, Mrs. George E. Verbeck, is perfectly lovely and
+the most popular woman in the society of our city. But Grace is married,
+and perhaps that makes a difference. It is said that love keeps the
+spirit young. However, perhaps I'd better go on about Josephine and not
+dwell on that. Experienced as we girls are, and drinking of life in deep
+draughts though we do, we still admit--Maudie, Mabel, and I--that we do
+not yet know much about love. But one cannot know everything at fifteen,
+and, as Mabel Blossom always says, "there is yet time." We all know
+just the kind of men they're going to be, though. Mine will be a brave
+young officer, of course, for a general's daughter should not marry out
+of the army, and he will die for his country, leaving me with a broken
+heart. Maudie Joyce says hers must be a man who will rule her with a rod
+of iron and break her will and win her respect, and then be gentle and
+loving and tender. And Mabel Blossom says she's perfectly sure hers will
+be fat and have a blond mustache and laugh a great deal. Once she said
+maybe none of us would ever get _any_; but the look Maudie Joyce and I
+turned upon her checked her thoughtless words. Life is bitter enough as
+it is without thinking of dreadful things in the future. I sometimes
+fear that underneath her girlish gayety Mabel Blossom conceals a morbid
+nature. But I am forgetting Josephine James. This story will tell why,
+with all her advantages of wealth and education and beauty, she remained
+a maiden lady till she was twenty-eight; and she might have kept on,
+too, if Kittie had not taken matters in hand and settled them for her.
+
+Kittie says Josephine was always romantic and spent long hours of her
+young life in girlish reveries and dreams. Of course that isn't the way
+Kittie said it, but if I should tell this story in her crude, unformed
+fashion, you wouldn't read very far. What Kittie really said was that
+Josephine used to "moon around the grounds a lot and bawl, and even try
+to write poetry." I understand Josephine's nature, so I will go on and
+tell this story in my own way, but you must remember that some of the
+credit belongs to Kittie and Mabel Blossom; and if Sister Irmingarde
+reads it in class, they can stand right up with me when the author is
+called for.
+
+Well, when Josephine James graduated she got a lot of prizes and things,
+for she was a clever girl, and had not spent all her time writing poetry
+and thinking deep thoughts about life. She realized the priceless
+advantages of a broad and thorough education and of association with the
+most cultivated minds. That sentence comes out of our prospectus. Then
+she went home and went out a good deal, and was very popular and stopped
+writing poetry, and her dear parents began to feel happy and hopeful
+about her, and think she would marry and have a nice family, which is
+indeed woman's highest, noblest mission in life. But Josephine cherished
+an ideal.
+
+A great many young men came to see her, and Kittie liked one of them
+very much indeed--better than all the others. He was handsome, and he
+laughed and joked a good deal, and always brought Kittie big boxes of
+candy and called her his little sister. He said she was going to be that
+in the end, anyhow, and there was no use waiting to give her the title
+that his heart dictated. He said it just that way. When he took
+Josephine out in his automobile he'd say, "Let's take the kid, too," and
+they would, and it did not take Kittie long to understand how things
+were between George Morgan--for that was indeed his name--and her
+sister. Little do grown-up people realize how intelligent are the minds
+of the young, and how keen and penetrating their youthful gaze! Clearly
+do I recall some things that happened at home, and it would startle papa
+and mamma to know I know them, but I will not reveal them here. Once I
+would have done so, in the beginning of my art; but now I have learned
+to finish one story before I begin another.
+
+Little did Mr. Morgan and Josephine wot that every time she refused him
+Kittie's young heart burned beneath its sense of wrong, for she did
+refuse him almost every time they went out together, and yet she kept
+right on going. You would think she wouldn't, but women's natures are
+indeed inscrutable. Some authors would stop here and tell what was in
+Josephine's heart, but this is not that kind of a story. Kittie was only
+twelve then, and they used big words and talked in a queer way they
+thought she would not understand; but she did, every time, and she never
+missed a single word they said. Of course she wasn't _listening_
+exactly, you see, because they knew she was there. That makes it
+different and quite proper. For if Kittie was more intelligent than her
+elders it was not the poor child's fault.
+
+Things went on like that and got worse and worse, and they had been
+going on that way for five years. One day Kittie was playing tennis with
+George at the Country Club, and he had been very kind to her, and all of
+a sudden Kittie told him she knew all, and how sorry she was for him,
+and that if he would wait till she grew up she would marry him herself.
+The poor child was so young, you see, that she did not know how
+unmaidenly this was. And of course at St. Catharine's when they taught
+us how to enter and leave rooms and how to act in society and at the
+table, they didn't think to tell us not to ask young men to marry us. I
+can add with confidence that Kittie James was the only girl who ever
+did. I asked the rest afterwards, and they were deeply shocked at the
+idea.
+
+Well, anyhow, Kittie did it, and she said George was just as nice as he
+could be. He told her he had "never listened to a more alluring
+proposition" (she remembered just the words he used), and that she was
+"a little trump"; and then he said he feared, alas! it was impossible,
+as even his strong manhood could not face the prospect of the long and
+dragging years that lay between. Besides, he said, his heart was already
+given, and he guessed he'd better stick to Josephine, and would his
+little sister help him to get her? Kittie wiped her eyes and said she
+would. She had been crying. It must indeed be a bitter experience to
+have one's young heart spurned! But George took her into the club-house
+and gave her tea and lots of English muffins and jam, and somehow Kittie
+cheered up, for she couldn't help feeling there were still some things
+in life that were nice.
+
+Of course after that she wanted dreadfully to help George, but there
+didn't seem to be much she could do. Besides, she had to go right back
+to school in September, and being a studious child, I need hardly add
+that her entire mind was then given to her studies. When she went home
+for the Christmas holidays she took Mabel Blossom with her. Mabel was
+more than a year older, but Kittie looked up to her, as it is well the
+young should do to us older girls. Besides, Kittie had had her
+thirteenth birthday in November, and she was letting down her skirts a
+little and beginning to think of putting up her hair. She said when she
+remembered that she asked George to wait till she grew up it made her
+blush, so you see she was developing very fast.
+
+As I said before, she took Mabel Blossom home for Christmas, and Mr. and
+Mrs. James were lovely to her, and she had a beautiful time. But
+Josephine was the best of all. She was just fine. Mabel told me with her
+own lips that if she hadn't seen Josephine James's name on the catalogue
+as a graduate in '93, she never would have believed she was so old.
+Josephine took the two girls to matinées and gave a little tea for them,
+and George Morgan was as nice as she was. He was always bringing them
+candy and violets, exactly as if they were young ladies, and he treated
+them both with the greatest respect, and stopped calling them the kids
+when he found they didn't like it. Mabel got as fond of him as Kittie
+was, and they were both wild to help him to get Josephine to marry him;
+but she wouldn't, though Kittie finally talked to her long and
+seriously. I asked Kittie what Josephine said when she did that, and she
+confessed that Josephine had laughed so she couldn't say anything. That
+hurt the sensitive child, of course, but grown-ups are all too
+frequently thoughtless of such things. Had Josephine but listened to
+Kittie's words on that occasion, it would have saved Kittie a lot of
+trouble.
+
+Now I am getting to the exciting part of the story. I am always so glad
+when I get to that. I asked Sister Irmingarde why one couldn't just make
+the story out of the exciting part, and she took a good deal of time to
+explain why, but she did not convince me; for besides having the
+artistic temperament I am strangely logical for one so young. Some day I
+shall write a story that is all climax from beginning to end. That will
+show her! But at present I must write according to the severe and
+cramping rules which she and literature have laid down.
+
+One night Mrs. James gave a large party for Josephine, and of course
+Mabel and Kittie, being thirteen and fourteen, had to go to bed. It is
+such things as this that embitter the lives of schoolgirls. But they
+were allowed to go down and see all the lights and flowers and
+decorations before people began to come, and they went into the
+conservatory because that was fixed up with little nooks and things.
+They got away in and off in a kind of wing of it, and they talked and
+pretended they were _débutantes_ at the ball, so they stayed longer than
+they knew. Then they heard voices, and they looked and saw Josephine and
+Mr. Morgan sitting by the fountain. Before they could move or say they
+were there, they heard him say this--Kittie remembers just what it was:
+
+"I have spent six years following you, and you've treated me as if I
+were a dog at the end of a string. This thing must end. I must have you,
+or I must learn to live without you, and I must know now which it is to
+be. Josephine, you must give me my final answer to-night."
+
+Wasn't it embarrassing for Kittie and Mabel? They did not want to
+listen, but some instinct told them Josephine and George might not be
+glad to see them then, so they crept behind a lot of tall palms, and
+Mabel put her fingers in her ears so she wouldn't hear. Kittie didn't.
+She explained to me afterwards that she thought it being her sister made
+things kind of different. It was all in the family, anyhow. So Kittie
+heard Josephine tell Mr. Morgan that the reason she did not marry him
+was because he was an idler and without an ambition or a purpose in
+life. And she said she must respect the man she married as well as love
+him. Then George jumped up quickly and asked if she loved him, and she
+cried and said she did, but that she would never, never marry him until
+he did something to win her admiration and prove he was a man. You can
+imagine how exciting it was for Kittie to see with her own innocent eyes
+how grown-up people manage such things. She said she was so afraid she'd
+miss something that she opened them so wide they hurt her afterwards.
+But she didn't miss anything. She saw him kiss Josephine, too, and then
+Josephine got up, and he argued and tried to make her change her mind,
+and she wouldn't, and finally they left the conservatory. After that
+Kittie and Mabel crept out and rushed up-stairs.
+
+The next morning Kittie turned to Mabel with a look on her face which
+Mabel had never seen there before. It was grim and determined. She said
+she had a plan and wanted Mabel to help her, and not ask any questions,
+but get her skates and come out. Mabel did, and they went straight to
+George Morgan's house, which was only a few blocks away. He was very
+rich and had a beautiful house. An English butler came to the door.
+Mabel said she was so frightened her teeth chattered, but he smiled when
+he saw Kittie, and said yes, Mr. Morgan was home and at breakfast, and
+invited them in. When George came in he had a smoking-jacket on, and
+looked very pale and sad and romantic, Mabel thought, but he smiled,
+too, when he saw them, and shook hands and asked them if they had
+breakfasted.
+
+Kittie said yes, but they had come to ask him to take them skating, and
+they were all ready and had brought their skates. His face fell, as real
+writers say, and he hesitated a little, but at last he said he'd go, and
+he excused himself, just as if they had been grown up, and went off to
+get ready.
+
+When they were left alone a terrible doubt assailed Mabel, and she asked
+Kittie if she was going to ask George again to marry her. Kittie
+blushed and said she was not, of course, and that she knew better now.
+For it is indeed true that the human heart is not so easily turned from
+its dear object. We know that if once one truly loves it lasts forever
+and ever and ever, and then one dies and is buried with things the loved
+one wore.
+
+Kittie said she had a plan to help George, and all Mabel had to do was
+to watch and keep on breathing. Mabel felt better then, and said she
+guessed she could do that. George came back all ready, and they started
+off. Kittie acted rather dark and mysterious, but Mabel conversed with
+George in the easy and pleasant fashion young men love. She told him all
+about school and how bad she was in mathematics; and he said he had been
+a duffer at it too, but that he had learned to shun it while there was
+yet time. And he advised her very earnestly to have nothing to do with
+it. Mabel didn't, either, after she came back to St. Catharine's; and
+when Sister Irmingarde reproached her, Mabel said she was leaning on the
+judgment of a strong man, as woman should do. But Sister Irmingarde made
+her go on with the arithmetic just the same.
+
+By and by they came to the river, and it was so early not many people
+were skating there. When George had fastened on their skates--he did it
+in the nicest way, exactly as if they were grown up--Kittie looked more
+mysterious than ever, and she started off as fast as she could skate
+toward a little inlet where there was no one at all. George and Mabel
+followed her. George said he didn't know whether the ice was smooth in
+there, but Kittie kept right on, and George did not say any more. I
+guess he did not care much where he went. I suppose it disappoints a man
+when he wants to marry a woman and she won't. Now that I am beginning to
+study deeply this question of love, many things are clear to me.
+
+Kittie kept far ahead, and all of a sudden Mabel saw that a little
+distance further on, and just ahead, there was a big black hole in the
+ice, and Kittie was skating straight toward it. Mabel tried to scream,
+but she says the sound froze on her pallid lips. Then George saw the
+hole, too, and rushed toward Kittie, and quicker than I can write it
+Kittie went in that hole and down.
+
+Mabel says George was there almost as soon, calling to Mabel to keep
+back out of danger. Usually when people have to rescue others,
+especially in stories, they call to some one to bring a board, and some
+one does, and it is easy. But very often in real life there isn't any
+board or any one to bring it, and this was indeed the desperate
+situation that confronted my hero. There was nothing to do but plunge in
+after Kittie, and he plunged, skates and all. Then Mabel heard him gasp
+and laugh a little, and he called out: "It's all right, by Jove! The
+water isn't much above my knees." And even as he spoke Mabel saw Kittie
+rise in the water and sort of hurl herself at him and pull him down into
+the water, head and all. When they came up they were both half
+strangled, and Mabel was terribly frightened; for she thought George was
+mistaken about the depth, and they would both drown before her eyes; and
+then she would see that picture all her life, as they do in stories, and
+her hair would turn gray. She began to run up and down on the ice and
+scream; but even as she did so she heard these extraordinary words come
+from between Kittie James's chattering teeth:
+
+"_Now you are good and wet_!"
+
+George did not say a word. He confessed to Mabel afterwards that he
+thought poor Kittie had lost her mind through fear. But he tried the ice
+till he found a place that would hold him, and he got out and pulled
+Kittie out. As soon as Kittie was out she opened her mouth and uttered
+more remarkable words.
+
+"Now," she said, "I'll skate till we get near the club-house. Then you
+must pick me up and carry me, and I'll shut my eyes and let my head hang
+down. And Mabel must cry--good and hard. Then you must send for
+Josephine and let her see how you've saved the life of her precious
+little sister."
+
+Mabel said she was sure that Kittie was crazy, and next she thought
+George was crazy, too. For he bent and stared hard into Kittie's eyes
+for a minute, and then he began to laugh, and he laughed till he cried.
+He tried to speak, but he couldn't at first; and when he did the words
+came out between his shouts of boyish glee.
+
+"Do you mean to say, you young monkey," he said, "that this is a put-up
+job?"
+
+Kittie nodded as solemnly as a fair young girl can nod when her clothes
+are dripping and her nose is blue with cold. When she did that, George
+roared again; then, as if he had remembered something, he caught her
+hands and began to skate very fast toward the club-house. He was a
+thoughtful young man, you see, and he wanted her to get warm. Perhaps he
+wanted to get warm, too. Anyhow, they started off, and as they went,
+Kittie opened still further the closed flower of her girlish heart. I
+heard that expression once, and I've always wanted to get it into one of
+my stories. I think this is a good place.
+
+She told George she knew the hole in the ice, and that it wasn't deep;
+and she said she had done it all to make Josephine admire him and marry
+him.
+
+"She will, too," she said. "Her dear little sister--the only one she's
+got." And Kittie went on to say what a terrible thing it would have been
+if she had died in the promise of her young life, till Mabel said she
+almost felt sure herself that George had saved her. But George
+hesitated. He said it wasn't "a square deal," whatever that means, but
+Kittie said no one need tell any lies. She had gone into the hole and
+George had pulled her out. She thought they needn't explain how deep it
+was, and George admitted thoughtfully that "no truly loving family
+should hunger for statistics at such a moment." Finally he said: "By
+Jove! I'll do it. All's fair in love and war." Then he asked Mabel if
+she thought she could "lend intelligent support to the star performers,"
+and she said she could. So George picked Kittie up in his arms, and
+Mabel cried--she was so excited it was easy, and she wanted to do it all
+the time--and the sad little procession "homeward wended its weary way,"
+as the poet says.
+
+Mabel told me Kittie did her part like a real actress. She shut her eyes
+and her head hung over George's arm, and her long, wet braid dripped as
+it trailed behind them. George laughed to himself every few minutes till
+they got near the club-house. Then he looked very sober, and Mabel
+Blossom knew her cue had come, the way it does to actresses, and she let
+out a wail that almost made Kittie sit up. It was 'most too much of a
+one, and Mr. Morgan advised her to "tone it down a little," because, he
+said, if she didn't they'd probably have Kittie buried before she could
+explain. But of course Mabel had not been prepared and had not had any
+practice. She muffled her sobs after that, and they sounded lots better.
+People began to rush from the club-house, and get blankets and whiskey,
+and telephone for doctors and for Kittie's family, and things got so
+exciting that nobody paid any attention to Mabel. All she had to do was
+to mop her eyes occasionally and keep a sharp lookout for Josephine; for
+of course, being an ardent student of life, like Maudie and me, she did
+not want to miss what came next.
+
+Pretty soon a horse galloped up, all foaming at the mouth, and he was
+pulled back on his haunches, and Josephine and Mr. James jumped out of
+the buggy and rushed in, and there was more excitement. When George saw
+them coming he turned pale, Mabel said, and hurried off to change his
+clothes. One woman looked after him and said, "As modest as he is
+brave," and cried over it. When Josephine and Mr. James came in there
+was more excitement, and Kittie opened one eye and shut it again right
+off, and the doctor said she was all right except for the shock, and her
+father and Josephine cried, so Mabel didn't have to any more. She was
+glad, too, I can tell you.
+
+They put Kittie to bed in a room at the club, for the doctor said she
+was such a high-strung child it would be wise to keep her perfectly
+quiet for a few hours and take precautions against pneumonia. Then
+Josephine went around asking for Mr. Morgan.
+
+By and by he came down, in dry clothes but looking dreadfully
+uncomfortable. Mabel said she could imagine how he felt. Josephine was
+standing by the open fire when he entered the room, and no one else was
+there but Mabel. Josephine went right to him and put her arms around his
+neck.
+
+"Dearest, dearest!" she said. "How can I ever thank you?" Her voice was
+very low, but Mabel heard it. George said right off, "There is a way."
+That shows how quick and clever he is, for some men might not think of
+it. Then Mabel Blossom left the room, with slow, reluctant feet, and
+went up-stairs to Kittie.
+
+That's why Mabel has just gone to Kittie's home for a few days. She and
+Kittie are to be flower-maids at Josephine's wedding. I hope it is not
+necessary for me to explain to my intelligent readers that her husband
+will be George Morgan. Kittie says he confessed the whole thing to
+Josephine, and she forgave him, and said she would marry him anyhow; but
+she explained that she only did it on Kittie's account. She said she did
+not know to what lengths the child might go next.
+
+So my young friends have gone to mingle in scenes of worldly gayety,
+and I sit here in the twilight looking at the evening star and writing
+about love. How true it is that the pen is mightier than the sword!
+Gayety is well in its place, but the soul of the artist finds its
+happiness in work and solitude. I hope Josephine will realize, though,
+why I cannot describe her wedding. Of course no artist of delicate
+sensibilities could describe a wedding when she hadn't been asked to it.
+
+Poor Josephine! It seems very, very sad to me that she is marrying thus
+late in life and only on Kittie's account. Why, oh, why could she not
+have wed when she was young and love was in her heart!
+
+
+
+
+The Wizard's Touch
+
+BY ALICE BROWN
+
+
+Jerome Wilmer sat in the garden, painting in a background, with the
+carelessness of ease. He seemed to be dabbing little touches at the
+canvas, as a spontaneous kind of fun not likely to result in anything
+serious, save, perhaps, the necessity of scrubbing them off afterwards,
+like a too adventurous child. Mary Brinsley, in her lilac print, stood a
+few paces away, the sun on her hair, and watched him.
+
+"Paris is very becoming to you," she said at last.
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Wilmer, glancing up, and then beginning to
+consider her so particularly that she stepped aside, her brows knitted,
+with an admonishing,
+
+"Look out! you'll get me into the landscape."
+
+"You're always in the landscape. What do you mean about Paris?"
+
+"You look so--so travelled, so equal to any place, and Paris in
+particular because it's the finest."
+
+Other people also had said that, in their various ways. He had the
+distinction set by nature upon a muscular body and a rather small head,
+well poised. His hair, now turning gray, grew delightfully about the
+temples, and though it was brushed back in the style of a man who never
+looks at himself twice when once will do, it had a way of seeming
+entirely right. His brows were firm, his mouth determined, and the close
+pointed beard brought his face to a delicate finish. Even his clothes,
+of the kind that never look new, had fallen into lines of easy use.
+
+"You needn't guy me," he said, and went on painting. But he flashed his
+sudden smile at her. "Isn't New England becoming to me, too?"
+
+"Yes, for the summer. It's over-powered. In the winter Aunt Celia calls
+you 'Jerry Wilmer.' She's quite topping then. But the minute you appear
+with European labels on your trunks and that air of speaking foreign
+lingo, she gives out completely. Every time she sees your name in the
+paper she forgets you went to school at the Academy and built the fires.
+She calls you 'our boarder' then, for as much as a week and a half."
+
+"Quit it, Mary," said he, smiling at her again.
+
+"Well," said Mary, yet without turning, "I must go and weed a while."
+
+"No," put in Wilmer, innocently; "he won't be over yet. He had a big
+mail. I brought it to him."
+
+Mary blushed, and made as if to go. She was a woman of thirty-five, well
+poised, and sweet through wholesomeness. Her face had been cut on a
+regular pattern, and then some natural influence had touched it up
+beguilingly with contradictions. She swung back, after her one tentative
+step, and sobered.
+
+"How do you think he is looking?" she asked.
+
+"Prime."
+
+"Not so--"
+
+"Not so morbid as when I was here last summer," he helped her out. "Not
+by any means. Are you going to marry him, Mary?" The question had only a
+civil emphasis, but a warmer tone informed it. Mary grew pink under the
+morning light, and Jerome went on: "Yes, I have a perfect right to talk
+about it, I don't travel three thousand miles every summer to ask you to
+marry me without earning some claim to frankness. I mentioned that to
+Marshby himself. We met at the station, you remember, the day I came. We
+walked down together. He spoke about my sketching, and I told him I had
+come on my annual pilgrimage, to ask Mary Brinsley to marry me."
+
+"Jerome!"
+
+"Yes, I did. This is my tenth pilgrimage. Mary, will you marry me?"
+
+"No," said Mary, softly, but as if she liked him very much. "No,
+Jerome."
+
+Wilmer squeezed a tube on his palette and regarded the color frowningly.
+"Might as well, Mary," said he. "You'd have an awfully good time in
+Paris."
+
+She was perfectly still, watching him, and he went on:
+
+"Now you're thinking if Marshby gets the consulate you'll be across the
+water anyway, and you could run down to Paris and see the sights. But it
+wouldn't be the same thing. It's Marshby you like, but you'd have a
+better time with me."
+
+"It's a foregone conclusion that the consulship will be offered him,"
+said Mary. Her eyes were now on the path leading through the garden and
+over the wall to the neighboring house where Marshby lived.
+
+"Then you will marry and go with him. Ah, well, that's finished. I
+needn't come another summer. When you are in Paris, I can show you the
+boulevards and cafés."
+
+"It is more than probable he won't accept the consulship."
+
+"Why?" He held his palette arrested in mid-air and stared at her.
+
+"He is doubtful of himself--doubtful whether he is equal to so
+responsible a place."
+
+"Bah! it's not an embassy."
+
+"No; but he fancies he has not the address, the social gifts--in fact,
+he shrinks from it." Her face had taken on a soft distress; her eyes
+appealed to him. She seemed to be confessing, for the other man,
+something that might well be misunderstood. Jerome, ignoring the flag of
+her discomfort, went on painting, to give her room for confidence.
+
+"Is it that old plague-spot?" he asked. "Just what aspect does it bear
+to him? Why not talk freely about it?"
+
+"It is the old remorse. He misunderstood his brother when they two were
+left alone in the world. He forced the boy out of evil associations when
+he ought to have led him. You know the rest of it. The boy was
+desperate. He killed himself."
+
+"When he was drunk. Marshby wasn't responsible."
+
+"No, not directly. But you know that kind of mind. It follows hidden
+causes. That's why his essays are so good. Anyway, it has crippled him.
+It came when he was too young, and it marked him for life. He has an
+inveterate self-distrust."
+
+"Ah, well," said Winner, including the summer landscape in a wave of his
+brush, "give up the consulship. Let him give it up. It isn't as if he
+hadn't a roof. Settle down in his house there, you two, and let him
+write his essays, and you--just be happy."
+
+She ignored her own part in the prophecy completely and finally. "It
+isn't the consulship as the consulship," she responded. "It is the life
+abroad I want for him. It would give him--well, it would give him what
+it has given you. His work would show it." She spoke hotly, and at once
+Jerome saw himself envied for his brilliant cosmopolitan life, the
+bounty of his success fairly coveted for the other man. It gave him a
+curious pang. He felt, somehow, impoverished, and drew his breath more
+meagrely. But the actual thought in his mind grew too big to be
+suppressed, and he stayed his hand to look at her.
+
+"That's not all," he said.
+
+"All what?"
+
+"That's not the main reason why you want him to go. You think if he
+really asserted himself, really knocked down the spectre of his old
+distrust and stamped on it, he would be a different man. If he had once
+proved himself, as we say of younger chaps, he could go on proving."
+
+"No," she declared, in nervous loyalty. She was like a bird fluttering
+to save her nest. "No! You are wrong. I ought not to have talked about
+him at all. I shouldn't to anybody else. Only, you are so kind."
+
+"It's easy to be kind," said Jerome, gently, "when there's nothing else
+left us."
+
+She stood wilfully swaying a branch of the tendrilled arbor, and, he
+subtly felt, so dissatisfied with herself for her temporary disloyalty
+that she felt alien to them both: Marshby because she had wronged him by
+admitting another man to this intimate knowledge of him, and the other
+man for being her accomplice.
+
+"Don't be sorry," he said, softly. "You haven't been naughty."
+
+But she had swung round to some comprehension of what he had a right to
+feel.
+
+"It makes one selfish," she said, "to want--to want things to come out
+right."
+
+"I know. Well, can't we make them come out right? He is sure of the
+consulship?"
+
+"Practically."
+
+"You want to be assured of his taking it."
+
+She did not answer; but her face lighted, as if to a new appeal. Jerome
+followed her look along the path. Marshby himself was coming. He was no
+weakling. He swung along easily with the stride of a man accustomed to
+using his body well. He had not, perhaps, the urban air, and yet there
+was nothing about him which would not have responded at once to a more
+exacting civilization. Jerome knew his face,--knew it from their college
+days together and through these annual visits of his own; but now, as
+Marshby approached, the artist rated him not so much by the friendly as
+the professional eye. He saw a man who looked the scholar and the
+gentleman, keen though not imperious of glance. His visage, mature even
+for its years, had suffered more from emotion than from deeds or the
+assaults of fortune. Marshby had lived the life of thought, and,
+exaggerating action, had failed to fit himself to any form of it. Wilmer
+glanced at his hands, too, as they swung with his walk, and then
+remembered that the professional eye had already noted them and laid
+their lines away for some suggestive use. As he looked, Marshby stopped
+in his approach, caught by the singularity of a gnarled tree limb. It
+awoke in him a cognizance of nature's processes, and his face lighted
+with the pleasure of it.
+
+"So you won't marry me?" asked Wilmer, softly, in that pause.
+
+"Don't!" said Mary.
+
+"Why not, when you won't tell whether you're engaged to him or not? Why
+not, anyway? If I were sure you'd be happier with me, I'd snatch you out
+of his very maw. Yes, I would. Are you sure you like him, Mary?"
+
+The girl did not answer, for Marshby had started again. Jerome got the
+look in her face, and smiled a little, sadly.
+
+"Yes," he said, "you're sure."
+
+Mary immediately felt unable to encounter them together. She gave
+Marshby a good-morning, and, to his bewilderment, made some excuse about
+her weeding and flitted past him on the path. His eyes followed her, and
+when they came back to Wilmer the artist nodded brightly.
+
+"I've just asked her," he said.
+
+"Asked her?" Marshby was about to pass him, pulling out his glasses and
+at the same time peering at the picture with the impatience of his
+near-sighted look.
+
+"There, don't you do that!" cried Jerome, stopping, with his brush in
+air. "Don't you come round and stare over my shoulder. It makes me
+nervous ad the devil. Step back there--there by that mullein. So! I've
+got to face my protagonist. Yes, I've been asking her to marry me."
+
+Marshby stiffened. His head went up, his jaw tightened. He looked the
+jealous ire of the male.
+
+"What do you want me to stand here for?" he asked, irritably.
+
+"But she refused me," said Wilmer, cheerfully. "Stand still, that's a
+good fellow. I'm using you."
+
+Marshby had by an effort pulled himself together. He dismissed Mary from
+his mind, as he wished to drive her from the other man's speech.
+
+"I've been reading the morning paper on your exhibition," he said,
+bringing out the journal from his pocket. "They can't say enough about
+you."
+
+"Oh, can't they! Well, the better for me. What are they pleased to
+discover?"
+
+"They say you see round corners and through deal boards. Listen." He
+struck open the paper and read: "'A man with a hidden crime upon his
+soul will do well to elude this greatest of modern magicians. The man
+with a secret tells it the instant he sits down before Jerome Wilmer.
+Wilmer does not paint faces, brows, hands. He paints hopes, fears, and
+longings. If we could, in our turn, get to the heart of his mystery! If
+we could learn whether he says to himself: "I see hate in that face,
+hypocrisy, greed. I will paint them. That man is not man, but cur. He
+shall fawn on my canvas." Or does he paint through a kind of inspired
+carelessness, and as the line obeys the eye and hand, so does the
+emotion live in the line?'"
+
+"Oh, gammon!" snapped Wilmer.
+
+"Well, do you?" said Marshby, tossing the paper to the little table
+where Mary's work-box stood.
+
+"Do I what? Spy and then paint, or paint and find I've spied? Oh, I
+guess I plug along like any other decent workman. When it comes to that,
+how do you write your essays?"
+
+"I! Oh! That's another pair of sleeves. Your work is colossal. I'm still
+on cherry-stones."
+
+"Well," said Wilmer, with slow incisiveness, "you've accomplished one
+thing I'd sell my name for. You've got Mary Brinsley bound to you so
+fast that neither lure nor lash can stir her. I've tried it--tried Paris
+even, the crudest bribe there is. No good! She won't have me."
+
+At her name, Marshby straightened again, and there was fire in his eye.
+Wilmer, sketching him in, seemed to gain distinct impulse from the pose,
+and worked the faster.
+
+"Don't move," he ordered. "There, that's right. So, you see, you're the
+successful chap. I'm the failure. She won't have me." There was such
+feeling in his tone that Marshby's expression softened comprehendingly.
+He understood a pain that prompted even such a man to rash avowal.
+
+"I don't believe we'd better speak of her," he said, in awkward
+kindliness.
+
+"I want to," returned Wilmer. "I want to tell you how lucky you are."
+
+Again that shade of introspective bitterness clouded Marshby's face.
+"Yes," said he, involuntarily. "But how about her? Is _she_ lucky?"
+
+"Yes," replied Jerome, steadily. "She's got what she wants. She won't
+worship you any the less because you don't worship yourself. That's the
+mad way they have--women. It's an awful challenge. You've got a fight
+before you, if you don't refuse it.".
+
+"God!" groaned Marshby to himself, "it is a fight. I can't refuse it."
+
+Wilmer put his question without mercy. "Do you want to?"
+
+"I want her to be happy," said Marshby, with a simple humility afar from
+cowardice. "I want her to be safe. I don't see how anybody could be
+safe--with me."
+
+"Well," pursued Wilmer, recklessly, "would she be safe with me?"
+
+"I think so," said Marshby, keeping an unblemished dignity. "I have
+thought that for a good many years."
+
+"But not happy?"
+
+"No, not happy. She would--We have been together so long."
+
+"Yes, she'd miss you. She'd die of homesickness. Well!" He sat
+contemplating Marshby with his professional stare; but really his mind
+was opened for the first time to the full reason for Mary's unchanging
+love. Marshby stood there so quiet, so oblivious of himself in
+comparison with unseen things, so much a man from head to foot, that he
+justified the woman's loyal passion as nothing had before. "Shall you
+accept the consulate?" Wilmer asked, abruptly.
+
+Brought face to face with fact, Marshby's pose slackened. He drooped
+perceptibly. "Probably not," he said. "No, decidedly not."
+
+Wilmer swore under his breath, and sat, brows bent, marvelling at the
+change in him. The man's infirmity of will had blighted him. He was so
+truly another creature that not even a woman's unreasoning championship
+could pull him into shape again.
+
+Mary Brinsley came swiftly down the path, trowel in one hand and her
+basket of weeds in the other. Wilmer wondered if she had been glancing
+up from some flowery screen and read the story of that altered posture.
+She looked sharply anxious, like a mother whose child is threatened.
+Jerome shrewdly knew that Marshby's telltale attitude was no unfamiliar
+one.
+
+"What have you been saying?" she asked, in laughing challenge, yet with
+a note of anxiety underneath.
+
+"I'm painting him in," said Wilmer; but as she came toward him he turned
+the canvas dexterously. "No," said he, "no. I've got my idea from this.
+To-morrow Marshby's going to sit."
+
+That was all he would say, and Mary put it aside as one of his
+pleasantries made to fit the hour. But next day he set up a big canvas
+in the barn that served him as workroom, and summoned Marshby from his
+books. He came dressed exactly right, in his every-day clothes that had
+comfortable wrinkles in them, and easily took his pose. For all his
+concern over the inefficiency of his life, as a life, he was entirely
+without self-consciousness in his personal habit. Jerome liked that, and
+began to like him better as he knew him more. A strange illuminative
+process went on in his mind toward the man as Mary saw him, and more and
+more he nursed a fretful sympathy with her desire to see Marshby tuned
+up to some pitch that should make him livable to himself. It seemed a
+cruelty of nature that any man should so scorn his own company and yet
+be forced to keep it through an allotted span. In that sitting Marshby
+was at first serious and absent-minded. Though his body was obediently
+there, the spirit seemed to be busy somewhere else.
+
+"Head up!" cried Jerome at last, brutally. "Heavens, man, don't skulk!"
+
+Marshby straightened under the blow. It hit harder, as Jerome meant it
+should, than any verbal rallying. It sent the man back over his own
+life to the first stumble in it.
+
+"I want you to look as if you heard drums and fife," Jerome explained,
+with one of his quick smiles, that always wiped out former injury.
+
+But the flush was not yet out of Marshby's face, and he answered,
+bitterly, "I might run."
+
+"I don't mind your looking as if you'd like to run and knew you
+couldn't," said Jerome, dashing in strokes now in a happy certainty.
+
+"Why couldn't I?" asked Marshby, still from that abiding scorn of his
+own ways.
+
+"Because you can't, that's all. Partly because you get the habit of
+facing the music. I should like--" Wilmer had an unconsidered way of
+entertaining his sitters, without much expenditure to himself; he
+pursued a fantastic habit of talk to keep their blood moving, and did it
+with the eye of the mind unswervingly on his work. "If I were you, I'd
+do it. I'd write an essay on the muscular habit of courage. Your coward
+is born weak-kneed. He shouldn't spill himself all over the place trying
+to put on the spiritual make-up of a hero. He must simply strengthen
+his knees. When they'll take him anywhere he requests, without buckling,
+he wakes up and finds himself a field-marshal. _Voilà!_"
+
+"It isn't bad," said Marshby, unconsciously straightening. "Go ahead,
+Jerome. Turn us all into field-marshals."
+
+"Not all," objected Wilmer, seeming to dash his brush at the canvas with
+the large carelessness that promised his best work. "The jobs wouldn't
+go round. But I don't feel the worse for it when I see the recruity
+stepping out, promotion in his eye."
+
+After the sitting, Wilmer went yawning forward, and with a hand on
+Marshby's shoulder, took him to the door.
+
+"Can't let you look at the thing," he said, as Marshby gave one backward
+glance. "That's against the code. Till it's done, no eye touches it but
+mine and the light of heaven."
+
+Marshby had no curiosity. He smiled, and thereafter let the picture
+alone, even to the extent of interested speculation. Mary had
+scrupulously absented herself from that first sitting; but after it was
+over and Marshby had gone home, Wilmer found her in the garden, under an
+apple-tree, shelling pease. He lay down on the ground, at a little
+distance, and watched her. He noted the quick, capable turn of her
+wrist and the dexterous motion of the brown hands as they snapped out
+the pease, and he thought how eminently sweet and comfortable it would
+be to take this bit of his youth back to France with him, or even to
+give up France and grow old with her at home.
+
+"Mary," said he, "I sha'n't paint any picture of you this summer."
+
+Mary laughed, and brushed back a yellow lock with the back of her hand.
+"No," said she, "I suppose not. Aunt Celia spoke of it yesterday. She
+told me the reason."
+
+"What is Aunt Celia's most excellent theory?"
+
+"She said I'm not so likely as I used to be."
+
+"No," said Jerome, not answering her smile in the community of mirth
+they always had over Aunt Celia's simple speech. He rolled over on the
+grass and began to make a dandelion curl. "No, that's not it. You're a
+good deal likelier than you used to be. You're all possibilities now. I
+could make a Madonna out of you, quick as a wink. No, it's because I've
+decided to paint Marshby instead."
+
+Mary's hands stilled themselves, and she looked at him anxiously. "Why
+are you doing that?" she asked.
+
+"Don't you want the picture?"
+
+"What are you going to do with it?"
+
+"Give it to you, I guess. For a wedding-present, Mary."
+
+"You mustn't say those things," said Mary, gravely. She went on working,
+but her face was serious.
+
+"It's queer, isn't it," remarked Wilmer, after a pause, "this notion
+you've got that Marshby's the only one that could possibly do? I began
+asking you first."
+
+"Please!" said Mary. Her eyes were full of tears. That was rare for her,
+and Wilmer saw it meant a shaken poise. She was less certain to-day of
+her own fate. It made her more responsively tender toward his. He sat up
+and looked at her.
+
+"No," he said. "No. I won't ask you again. I never meant to. Only I have
+to speak of it once in a while. We should have such a tremendously good
+time together."
+
+"We have a tremendously good time now," said Mary, the smile coming
+while she again put up the back of her hand and brushed her eyes. "When
+you're good."
+
+"When I help all the other little boys at the table, and don't look at
+the nice heart-shaped cake I want myself? It's frosted, and got little
+pink things all over the top. There! don't drop the corners of your
+mouth. If I were asked what kind of a world I'd like to live in, I'd say
+one where the corners of Mary's mouth keep quirked up all the time.
+Let's talk about Marshby's picture. It's going to be your Marshby."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Not Marshby's Marshby--yours."
+
+"You're not going to play some dreadful joke on him?" Her eyes were
+blazing under knotted brows.
+
+"Mary!" Wilmer spoke gently, and though the tone recalled her, she could
+not forbear at once, in her hurt pride and loyalty.
+
+"You're not going to put him into any masquerade?--to make him anything
+but what he is?"
+
+"Mary, don't you think that's a little hard on an old chum?"
+
+"I can't help it." Her cheeks were hot, though now it was with shame.
+"Yes, I am mean, jealous, envious. I see you with everything at your
+feet--"
+
+"Not quite everything," said Jerome. "I know it makes you hate me."
+
+"No! no!" The real woman had awakened in her, and she turned to him in a
+whole-hearted honesty. "Only, they say you do such wizard things when
+you paint. I never saw any of your pictures, you know, except the ones
+you did of me. And they're not _me_. They're lovely--angels with women's
+clothes on. Aunt Celia says if I looked like that I'd carry all before
+me. But, you see, you've always been--partial to me."
+
+"And you think I'm not partial to Marshby?"
+
+"It isn't that. It's only that they say you look inside people and drag
+out what is there. And inside him--oh, you'd see his hatred of himself!"
+The tears were rolling unregarded down her face.
+
+"This is dreadful," said Wilmer, chiefly to himself. "Dreadful."
+
+"There!" said Mary, drearily, emptying the pods from her apron into the
+basket at her side. "I suppose I've done it now. I've spoiled the
+picture."
+
+"No," returned Jerome, thoughtfully, "you haven't spoiled the picture.
+Really I began it with a very definite conception of what I was going to
+do. It will be done in that way or not at all."
+
+"You're very kind," said Mary, humbly. "I didn't mean to act like
+this."
+
+"No,"--he spoke out of a maze of reflection, not looking at her. "You
+have an idea he's under the microscope with me. It makes you nervous."
+
+She nodded, and then caught herself up.
+
+"There's nothing you mightn't see," she said, proudly, ignoring her
+previous outburst. "You or anybody else, even with a microscope."
+
+"No, of course not. Only you'd say microscopes aren't fair. Well,
+perhaps they're not. And portrait-painting is a very simple matter. It's
+not the black art. But if I go on with this, you are to let me do it in
+my own way. You're not to look at it."
+
+"Not even when you're not at work?"
+
+"Not once, morning, noon, or night, till I invite you to. You were
+always a good fellow, Mary. You'll keep your word."
+
+"No, I won't look at it," said Mary.
+
+Thereafter she stayed away from the barn, not only when he was painting,
+but at other times, and Wilmer missed her. He worked very fast, and made
+his plans for sailing, and Aunt Celia loudly bemoaned his stinginess in
+cutting short the summer. One day, after breakfast, he sought out Mary
+again in the garden. She was snipping Coreopsis for the dinner table,
+but she did it absently, and Jerome noted the heaviness of her eyes.
+
+"What's the trouble?" he asked, abruptly, and she was shaken out of her
+late constraint. She looked up at him with a piteous smile.
+
+"Nothing much," she said. "It doesn't matter. I suppose it's fate. He
+has written his letter."
+
+"Marshby?"
+
+"You knew he got his appointment?"
+
+"No; I saw something had him by the heels, but he's been still as a
+fish."
+
+"It came three days ago. He has decided not to take it. And it will
+break his heart."
+
+"It will break your heart," Wilmer opened his lips to say; but he dared
+not jostle her mood of unconsidered frankness.
+
+"I suppose I expected it," she went on. "I did expect it. Yet he's been
+so different lately, it gave me a kind of hope."
+
+Jerome started. "How has he been different?" he asked.
+
+"More confident, less doubtful of himself. It's not anything he has
+said. It's in his speech, his walk. He even carries his head
+differently, as if he had a right to. Well, we talked half the night
+last night, and he went home to write the letter. He promised me not to
+mail it till he'd seen me once more; but nothing will make any
+difference."
+
+"You won't beseech him?"
+
+"No. He is a man. He must decide."
+
+"You won't tell him what depends on it!"
+
+"Nothing depends on it," said Mary, calmly. "Nothing except his own
+happiness. I shall find mine in letting him accept his life according to
+his own free will."
+
+There was something majestic in her mental attitude. Wilmer felt how
+noble her maturity was to be, and told himself, with a thrill of pride,
+that he had done well to love her.
+
+"Marshby is coming," he said. "I want to show you both the picture."
+
+Mary shook her head. "Not this morning," she told him, and he could see
+how meagre canvas and paint must seem to her after her vision of the
+body of life. But he took her hand.
+
+"Come," he said, gently; "you must."
+
+Still holding her flowers, she went with him, though her mind abode with
+her lost cause. Marshby halted when he saw them coming, and Jerome had
+time to look at him. The man held himself wilfully erect, but his face
+betrayed him. It was haggard, smitten. He had not only met defeat; he
+had accepted it. Jerome nodded to him and went on before them to the
+barn. The picture stood there in a favoring light. Mary caught her
+breath sharply, and then all three were silent. Jerome stood there
+forgetful of them, his eyes on his completed work, and for the moment he
+had in it the triumph of one who sees intention, brought to fruitage
+under perfect auspices. It meant more to him, that recognition, than any
+glowing moment of his youth. The scroll of his life unrolled before him,
+and he saw his past, as other men acclaimed it, running into the future
+ready for his hand to make. A great illumination touched the days to
+come. Brilliant in promise, they were yet barren of hope. For as surely
+as he had been able to set this seal on Mary's present, he saw how the
+thing itself would separate them. He had painted her ideal of Marshby;
+but whenever in the future she should nurse the man through the mental
+sickness bound always to delay his march, she would remember this moment
+with a pang, as something Jerome had dowered him with, not something he
+had attained unaided. Marshby faced them from the canvas, erect,
+undaunted, a soldier fronting the dawn, expectant of battle, yet with no
+dread of its event. He was not in any sense alien to himself. He
+dominated, not by crude force, but through the sustained inward strength
+of him. It was not youth Jerome had given him. There was maturity in the
+face. It had its lines--the lines that are the scars of battle; but
+somehow not one suggested, even to the doubtful mind, a battle lost.
+Jerome turned from the picture to the man himself, and had his own
+surprise. Marshby was transfigured. He breathed humility and hope. He
+stirred at Wilmer's motion.
+
+"Am I"--he glowed--"could I have looked like that?" Then in the
+poignancy of the moment he saw how disloyal to the moment it was even to
+hint at what should have been, without snapping the link now into the
+welding present. He straightened himself and spoke brusquely, but to
+Mary:
+
+"I'll go back and write that letter. Here is the one I wrote last
+night."
+
+He took it from his pocket, tore it in two, and gave it to her. Then he
+turned away and walked with the soldier's step home. Jerome could not
+look at her. He began moving back the picture.
+
+"There!" he said, "it's finished. Better make up your mind where you'll
+have it put. I shall be picking up my traps this morning."
+
+Then Mary gave him his other surprise. Her hands were on his shoulders.
+Her eyes, full of the welling gratitude that is one kind of love, spoke
+like her lips.
+
+"Oh!" said she, "do you think I don't know what you've done? I couldn't
+take it from anybody else. I couldn't let him take it. It's like
+standing beside him in battle; like lending him your horse, your sword.
+It's being a comrade. It's helping him fight. And he _will_ fight.
+That's the glory of it!"
+
+
+
+
+The Bitter Cup
+
+BY CHARLES B. DE CAMP
+
+
+Clara Leeds sat by the open window of her sitting-room with her fancy
+work. Her hair was done up in an irreproachable style, and her
+finger-nails were carefully manicured and pink like little shells. She
+had a slender waist, and looked down at it from time to time with
+satisfied eyes. At the back of her collar was a little burst of chiffon;
+for chiffon so arranged was the fashion. She cast idle glances at the
+prospect from the window. It was not an alluring one--a row of brick
+houses with an annoying irregularity of open and closed shutters.
+
+There was the quiet rumble of a carriage in the street, and Clara Leeds
+leaned forward, her eyes following the vehicle until to look further
+would have necessitated leaning out of the window. There were two women
+in the carriage, both young and soberly dressed. To certain eyes they
+might have appeared out of place in a carriage, and yet, somehow, it was
+obvious that it was their own. Clara Leeds resumed her work, making
+quick, jerky stitches.
+
+"Clara Leeds," she murmured, as if irritated. She frowned and then
+sighed. "If only--if only it was something else; if it only had two
+syllables...." She put aside her work and went and stood before the
+mirror of her dresser. She looked long at her face. It was fresh and
+pretty, and her blue eyes, in spite of their unhappy look, were clear
+and shining. She fingered a strand of hair, and then cast critical
+sidelong glances at her profile. She smoothed her waist-line with a
+movement peculiar to women. Then she tilted the glass and regarded the
+reflection from head to foot.
+
+"Oh, what is it?" she demanded, distressed, of herself in the glass. She
+took up her work again.
+
+"They don't seem to care how they look and ... they do wear shabby
+gloves and shoes." So her thoughts ran. "But they are the Rockwoods and
+they don't have to care. It must be so easy for them; they only have to
+visit the Day Nursery, and the Home for Incurables, and some old, poor,
+sick people. They never have to meet them and ask them to dinner. They
+just say a few words and leave some money or things in a nice way, and
+they can go home and do what they please." Clara Leeds's eyes rested
+unseeingly on the house opposite. "It must be nice to have a rector ...
+he is such an intellectual-looking man, so quiet and dignified; just the
+way a minister should be, instead of like Mr. Copple, who tries to be
+jolly and get up sociables and parlor meetings." There were tears in the
+girl's eyes.
+
+A tea-bell rang, and Clara went down-stairs to eat dinner with her
+father. He had just come in and was putting on a short linen coat.
+Clara's mother was dead. She was the only child at home, and kept house
+for her father.
+
+"I suppose you are all ready for the lawn-tennis match this afternoon?"
+said Mr. Leeds to his daughter. "Mr. Copple said you were going to play
+with him. My! that young man is up to date. Think of a preacher getting
+up a lawn-tennis club! Why, when I was a young man that would have
+shocked people out of their boots. But it's broad-minded, it's
+broad-minded," with a wave of the hand. "I like to see a man with ideas,
+and if lawn-tennis will help to keep our boys out of sin's pathway,
+why, then, lawn-tennis is a strong, worthy means of doing the Lord's
+work."
+
+"Yes," said Clara. "Did Mr. Copple say he would call for me? It isn't
+necessary."
+
+"Oh yes, yes," said her father; "he said to tell you he would be around
+here at two o'clock. I guess I'll have to go over myself and see part of
+the athletics. We older folks ain't quite up to taking a hand in the
+game, but we can give Copple our support by looking in on you and
+cheering on the good work."
+
+After dinner Mr. Leeds changed the linen coat for a cutaway and started
+back to his business. Clara went up-stairs and put on a short skirt and
+tennis shoes. She again surveyed herself in the mirror. The skirt
+certainly hung just like the model. She sighed and got out her
+tennis-racquet. Then she sat down and read in a book of poems that she
+was very fond of.
+
+At two o'clock the bell jangled, and Clara opened the door for Mr.
+Copple herself. The clergyman was of slight build, and had let the hair
+in front of his ears grow down a little way on his cheeks. He wore a
+blue yachting-cap, and white duck trousers which were rolled up and
+displayed a good deal of red and black sock. For a moment Clara imaged a
+clear-cut face with grave eyes above a length of clerical waistcoat, on
+which gleamed a tiny gold cross suspended from a black cord.
+
+"I guess we might as well go over," she said. "I'm all ready."
+
+The clergyman insisted on carrying Clara's racquet. "You are looking
+very well," he said, somewhat timidly, but with admiring eyes. "But
+perhaps you don't feel as much like playing as you look."
+
+"Oh yes, I do indeed," replied Clara, inwardly resenting the solicitude
+in his tone.
+
+They set out, and the clergyman appeared to shake his mind free of a
+preoccupation.
+
+"I hope all the boys will be around," he said, with something of
+anxiety. "They need the exercise. All young, active fellows ought to
+have it. I spoke to Mr. Goodloe and Mr. Sharp and urged them to let Tom
+and Fred Martin off this afternoon. I think they will do it. Ralph
+Carpenter, I'm afraid, can't get away from the freight-office, but I am
+in hopes that Mr. Stiggins can take his place. Did you know that Mrs.
+Thompson has promised to donate some lemonade?"
+
+"That's very nice," said Clara. "It's a lovely day for the match." She
+was thinking, "What short steps he takes!"
+
+After some silent walking the clergyman said: "I don't believe you know,
+Miss Leeds, how much I appreciate your taking part in these tennis
+matches. Somehow I feel that it is asking a great deal of you, for I
+know that you have--er--so many interests of your own--that is, you are
+different in many ways from most of our people. I want you to know that
+I am grateful for the influence--your cooperation, you know--"
+
+"Please, Mr. Copple, don't mention it," said Clara, hurriedly. "I
+haven't so many interests as you imagine, and I am not any different
+from the rest of the people. Not at all." If there was any hardness in
+the girl's tone the clergyman did not appear to notice it. They had
+reached their destination.
+
+The tennis-court was on the main street just beyond the end of the
+business section. It was laid out on a vacant lot between two brick
+houses. A wooden sign to one side of the court announced, "First ----
+Church Tennis Club." When Clara and Mr. Copple arrived at the court
+there were a number of young people gathered in the lot. Most of them
+had tennis-racquets, those of the girls being decorated with bows of
+yellow, black, and lavender ribbon. Mr. Copple shook hands with
+everybody, and ran over the court several times, testing the consistency
+of the earth.
+
+"Everything is capital!" he cried.
+
+Clara Leeds bowed to the others, shaking hands with only one or two.
+They appeared to be afraid of her. The finals in the men's singles were
+between Mr. Copple and Elbert Dunklethorn, who was called "Ellie." He
+wore a very high collar, and as his shoes had heels, he ran about the
+court on his toes.
+
+Clara, watching him, recalled her father's words at dinner. "How will
+this save that boy from sin's pathway?" she thought. She regarded the
+clergyman; she recognized his zeal. But why, why must she be a part of
+this--what was it?--this system of saving people and this kind of
+people? If she could only go and be good to poor and unfortunate people
+whom she wouldn't have to know. Clara glanced toward the street. "I hope
+they won't come past," she said to herself.
+
+The set in which Clara and the clergyman were partners was the most
+exciting of the afternoon. The space on either side of the court was
+quite filled with spectators. Some of the older people who had come with
+the lengthening shadows sat on chairs brought from the kitchens of the
+adjoining houses. Among them was Mr. Leeds, his face animated. Whenever
+a ball went very high up or very far down the lot, he cried, "Hooray!"
+Clara was at the net facing the street, when the carriage she had
+observed in the morning stopped in view, and the two soberly dressed
+women leaned forward to watch the play. Clara felt her face burn, and
+when they cried "game," she could not remember whether the clergyman and
+she had won it or lost it. She was chiefly conscious of her father's
+loud "hoorays." With the end of the play the carriage was driven on.
+
+Shortly before supper-time that evening Clara went to the drug-store to
+buy some stamps. One of the Misses Rockwood was standing by the
+show-case waiting for the clerk to wrap up a bottle. Clara noted the
+scantily trimmed hat and the scuffed gloves. She nodded in response to
+Miss Rockwood's bow. They had met but once.
+
+"That was a glorious game of tennis you were having this afternoon,"
+said Miss Rockwood, with a warm smile. "My sister and I should like to
+have seen more of it. You all seemed to be having such a good time."
+
+"_You all_--"
+
+Clara fumbled her change. "It's--it's good exercise," she said. That
+night she cried herself to sleep.
+
+
+II
+
+The rector married the younger Miss Rockwood. To Clara Leeds the match
+afforded painfully pleasurable feeling. It was so eminently fitting; and
+yet it was hard to believe that any man could see anything in Miss
+Rockwood. His courtship had been in keeping with the man, dignified and
+yet bold. Clara had met them several times together. She always hurried
+past. The rector bowed quietly. He seemed to say to all the world, "I
+have chosen me a woman." His manner defied gossip; there was none that
+Clara heard. This immunity of theirs distilled the more bitterness in
+her heart because gossip was now at the heels of her and Mr. Copple,
+following them as chickens do the feed-box. She knew it from such
+transmissions as, "But doubtless Mr. Copple has already told you," or,
+"You ought to know, if any one does."
+
+It had been some time apparent to Clara that the minister held her in a
+different regard from the other members of his congregation. His talks
+with her were more personal; his manner was bashfully eager. He sought
+to present the congeniality of their minds. Mr. Copple had a nice taste
+in poetry, but somehow Clara, in after-reading, skipped those poems that
+he had read aloud to her. On several occasions she knew that a
+declaration was imminent. She extricated herself with a feeling of
+unspeakable relief. It would not be a simple matter to refuse him. Their
+relations had been peculiar, and to tell him that she did not love him
+would not suffice in bringing them to an end. Mr. Copple was odious to
+her. She could not have explained why clearly, yet she knew. And she
+would have blushed in the attempt to explain why; it would have revealed
+a detestation of her lot. Clara had lately discovered the meaning of the
+word "plebeian"; more, she believed she comprehended its applicableness.
+The word was a burr in her thoughts. Mr. Copple was the personification
+of the word. Clara had not repulsed him. You do not do that sort of
+thing in a small town. She knew intuitively that the clergyman would
+not be satisfied with the statement that he was not loved. She also knew
+that he would extract part, at least, of the real reason from her. It is
+more painful for a lover to learn that he is not liked than that he is
+not loved. Clara did not wish to cause him pain.
+
+She was spared the necessity. The minister fell from a scaffolding on
+the new church and was picked up dead.
+
+Clara's position was pitiful. Sudden death does not grow less shocking
+because of its frequency. Clara shared the common shock, but not the
+common grief. Fortunately, as hers was supposed to be a peculiar grief,
+she could manifest it in a peculiar way. She chose silence. The shock
+had bereft her of much thought. Death had laid a hand over the mouth of
+her mind. But deep down a feeling of relief swam in her heart. She gave
+it no welcome, but it would take no dismissal.
+
+About a week after the funeral, Clara, who walked out much alone, was
+returning home near the outskirts of town. The houses were far apart,
+and between them stretched deep lots fringed with flowered weeds
+man-high. A level sun shot long golden needles through the blanched
+maple-trees, and the street beneath them was filled with lemon-colored
+light. The roll of a light vehicle approaching from behind grew distinct
+enough to attract Clara's attention. "It is Mrs. Custer coming back from
+the Poor Farm," she thought. It was Mrs. Everett Custer, who was
+formerly the younger Miss Rockwood, and she was coming from the Poor
+Farm. The phaeton came into Clara's sight beside her at the curb. As she
+remarked it, Mrs. Custer said, in her thin, sympathetic voice, "Miss
+Leeds, won't you drive with me back to town? I wish you would."
+
+An excuse rose instinctively to Clara's lips. She was walking for
+exercise. But suddenly a thought came to her, and after a moment's
+hesitation, she said: "You are very kind. I am a little tired." She got
+into the phaeton, and the sober horse resumed his trot down the yellow
+street.
+
+Clara's thought was: "Why shouldn't I accept? She is too well bred to
+sympathize with me, and perhaps, now that I am free, I can get to know
+her and show her that I am not just the same as all the rest, and
+perhaps I'll get to going with her sort of people."
+
+She listened to the rhythm of the horse's hoof-beats, and was not a
+little uneasy. Mrs. Custer remarked the beauty of the late afternoon,
+the glorious symphonies of color in sky and tree, in response to which
+Clara said, "Yes, indeed," and, "Isn't it?" between long breaths. She
+was about to essay a question concerning the Poor Farm, when Mrs. Custer
+began to speak, at first faltering, in a tone that sent the blood out of
+Clara's face and drew a sudden catching pain down her breast.
+
+"I--really, Miss Leeds, I want to say something to you and I don't quite
+know how to say it, and yet it is something I want very much for you to
+know." Mrs. Custer's eyes looked the embarrassment of unencouraged
+frankness. "I know it is presumptuous for me, almost a stranger, to
+speak to you, but I feel so deeply on the matter--Everett--Mr. Custer
+feels so deeply--My dear Miss Leeds, I want you to know what a grief his
+loss was to us. Oh, believe me, I am not trying to sympathize with you.
+I have no right to do that. But if you could know how Mr. Custer always
+regarded Mr. Copple! It might mean something to you to know that. I
+don't think there was a man for whom he expressed greater
+admiration--than what, I mean, he expressed to me. He saw in him all
+that he lacked himself. I am telling you a great deal. It is difficult
+for my husband to go among men in that way--in the way _he_ did. And
+yet he firmly believes that the Kingdom of God can only be brought to
+men by the ministers of God going among them and being of them. He
+envied Mr. Copple his ability to do that, to know his people as one of
+them, to take part in their--their sports and all that. You don't know
+how he envied him and admired him. And his admiration was my admiration.
+He brought me to see it. I envied you, too--your opportunity to help
+your people in an intimate, real way which seemed so much better than
+mine. I don't know why it is my way, but I mean going about as I do, as
+I did to-day to the Poor Farm. It seems so perfunctory.
+
+"Don't misunderstand me, Miss Leeds," and Mrs. Custer laid a hand on
+Clara's arm. "There is no reason why you should care what Mr. Custer and
+I think about your--about our--all our very great loss. But I felt that
+it must be some comfort for you to know that we, my husband and I, who
+might seem indifferent--not that--say unaffected by what has
+happened,--feel it very, very deeply; and to know that his life, which I
+can't conceive of as finished, has left a deep, deep print on ours."
+
+The phaeton was rolling through frequented streets. It turned a corner
+as Mrs. Custer ceased speaking.
+
+"I--I must get out here," said Clara Leeds. "You needn't drive me. It is
+only a block to walk."
+
+"Miss Leeds, forgive me--" Mrs. Custer's lips trembled with compassion.
+
+"Oh, there isn't anything--it isn't that--good night." Clara backed down
+to the street and hurried off through the dusk. And as she went tears
+dropped slowly to her cheeks--cold, wretched tears.
+
+
+
+
+His Sister
+
+BY MARY APPLEWHITE BACON
+
+
+"But you couldn't see me leave, mother, anyway, unless I was there to
+go."
+
+It was characteristic of the girl adjusting her new travelling-hat
+before the dim little looking-glass that, while her heart was beating
+with excitement which was strangely like grief, she could give herself
+at once to her stepmother's inquietude and turn it aside with a jest.
+
+Mrs. Morgan, arrested in her anxious movement towards the door, stood
+for a moment taking in the reasonableness of Stella's proposition, and
+then sank back to the edge of her chair. "The train gets here at two
+o'clock," she argued.
+
+Lindsay Cowart came into the room, his head bent over the satchel he had
+been mending. "You had better say good-by to Stella here at the house,
+mother," he suggested; "there's no use for you to walk down to the depot
+in the hot sun." And then he noticed that his stepmother had on her
+bonnet with the veil to it--she had married since his father's death and
+was again a widow,--and, in extreme disregard of the September heat, was
+dressed in the black worsted of a diagonal weave which she wore only on
+occasions which demanded some special tribute to their importance.
+
+She began smoothing out on her knees the black gloves which, in her
+nervous haste to be going, she had been holding squeezed in a tight ball
+in her left hand. "I can get there, I reckon," she answered with mild
+brevity, and as if the young man's words had barely grazed her
+consciousness.
+
+A moment later she went to the window and, with her back to Lindsay,
+poured the contents of a small leather purse into one hand and began to
+count them softly.
+
+He looked up again. "I am going to pay for Stella's ticket, mother. You
+must not do it," he said.
+
+She replaced the money immediately, but without impatience, and as
+acquiescing in his assumption of his sister's future. "You have done so
+much already," he apologized; but he knew that she was hurt, and chafed
+to feel that only the irrational thing on his part would have seemed to
+her the kind one.
+
+Stella turned from the verdict of the dim looking-glass upon her
+appearance to that of her brother's face. As she stood there in that
+moment of pause, she might have been the type of all innocent and
+budding life. The delicacy of floral bloom was in the fine texture of
+her skin, the purple of dewy violets in her soft eyes; and this new
+access of sadness, which was as yet hardly conscious of itself, had
+thrown over the natural gayety of her young girlhood something akin to
+the pathetic tenderness which veils the earth in the dawn of a summer
+morning.
+
+He felt it to be so, but dimly; and, young himself and already strained
+by the exactions of personal desires, he answered only the look of
+inquiry in her face,--"Will the merchants here never learn any taste in
+dry-goods?"
+
+Instantly he was sick with regret. Of what consequence was the too
+pronounced blue of her dress in comparison with the light of happiness
+in her dear face? How impossible for him to be here for even these few
+hours without running counter to some cherished illusion or dear habit
+of speech or manner.
+
+"I tell you it's time we were going," Mrs. Morgan appealed, her anxiety
+returning.
+
+"We have thirty-five minutes yet," Lindsay said, looking at his watch;
+but he gathered up the bags and umbrellas and followed as she moved
+ponderously to the door.
+
+Stella waited until they were out in the hall, and then looked around
+the room, a poignant tenderness in her eyes. There was nothing congruous
+between its shabby walls and cheap worn furniture and her own beautiful
+young life; but the heart establishes its own relations, and tears rose
+suddenly to her eyes and fell in quick succession. Even so brief a
+farewell was broken in upon by her stepmother's call, and pressing her
+wet cheek for a moment against the discolored door-facing, she hurried
+out to join her.
+
+Lindsay did not at first connect the unusual crowd in and around the
+little station with his sister's departure; but the young people at once
+formed a circle around her, into which one and another older person
+entered and retired again with about the same expressions of
+affectionate regret and good wishes. He had known them all so long! But,
+except for the growing up of the younger boys and girls during his five
+years of absence, they were to him still what they had been since he was
+a child, affecting him still with the old depressing sense of distance
+and dislike. The grammarless speech of the men, the black-rimmed nails
+of Stella's schoolmaster--a good classical scholar, but heedless as he
+was good-hearted,--jarred upon him, indeed, with the discomfort of a new
+experience. Upon his own slender, erect figure, clothed in poor but
+well-fitting garments, gentleman was written as plainly as in words,
+just as idealist was written on his forehead and the other features
+which thought had chiselled perhaps too finely for his years.
+
+The brightness had come back to Stella's face, and he could not but feel
+grateful to the men who had left their shops and dingy little stores to
+bid her good-by, and to the placid, kindly-faced women ranged along the
+settees against the wall and conversing in low tones about how she would
+be missed; but the noisy flock of young people, who with their chorus of
+expostulations, assurances, and prophecies seemed to make her one of
+themselves, filled him with strong displeasure. He knew how foolish it
+would be for him to show it, but he could get no further in his effort
+at concealment than a cold silence which was itself significant enough.
+A tall youth with bold and handsome features and a pretty girl in a
+showy red muslin ignored him altogether, with a pride which really quite
+overmatched his own; but the rest shrank back a little as he passed
+looking after the checks and tickets, either cutting short their
+sentences at his approach or missing the point of what they had to say.
+The train seemed to him long in coming.
+
+His stepmother moved to the end of the settee and made a place for him
+at her side. "Lindsay," she said, under cover of the talk and laughter,
+and speaking with some difficulty, "I hope you will be able to carry out
+all your plans for yourself and Stella; but while you're making the
+money, she will have to make the friends. Don't you ever interfere with
+her doing it. From what little I have seen of the world, it's going to
+take both to carry you through."
+
+His face flushed a little, but he recognized her faithfulness and did it
+honor. "That is true, mother, and I will remember what you say. But I
+have some friends," he added, in enforced self-vindication, "in Vaucluse
+if not here."
+
+A whistle sounded up the road. She caught his hand with a swift
+accession of tenderness towards his youth. "You've done the best you
+could, Lindsay," she said. "I wish you well, my son, I wish you well."
+There were tears in her eyes.
+
+George Morrow and the girl in red followed Stella into the car, not at
+all disconcerted at having to get off after the train was in motion.
+"Don't forget me, Stella," the girl called back. "Don't you ever forget
+Ida Brand!"
+
+There was a waving of hands and handkerchiefs from the little station,
+aglare in the early afternoon sun. A few moments later the train had
+rounded a curve, shutting the meagre village from sight, and, to Lindsay
+Cowart's thought, shutting it into a remote past as well.
+
+He arose and began rearranging their luggage. "Do you want these?" he
+inquired, holding up a bouquet of dahlias, scarlet sage, and purple
+petunias, and thinking of only one answer as possible.
+
+"I will take them," she said, as he stood waiting her formal consent to
+drop them from the car window. Her voice was quite as usual, but
+something in her face suggested to him that this going away from her
+childhood's home might be a different thing to her from what he had
+conceived it to be. He caught the touch of tender vindication in her
+manner as she untied the cheap red ribbon which held the flowers
+together and rearranged them into two bunches so that the jarring colors
+might no longer offend, and felt that the really natural thing for her
+to do was to weep, and that she only restrained her tears for his sake.
+Sixteen was so young! His heart grew warm and brotherly towards her
+youth and inexperience; but, after all, how infinitely better that she
+should have cause for this passing sorrow.
+
+He left her alone, but not for long. He was eager to talk with her of
+the plans about which he had been writing her the two years since he
+himself had been a student at Vaucluse, of the future which they should
+achieve together. It seemed to him only necessary for him to show her
+his point of view to have her adopt it as her own; and he believed,
+building on her buoyancy and responsiveness of disposition, that nothing
+he might propose would be beyond the scope of her courage.
+
+"It may be a little lonely for you at first," he told her. "There are
+only a handful of women students at the college, and all of them much
+older than you; but it is your studies at last that are the really
+important thing, and I will help you with them all I can. Mrs. Bancroft
+will have no other lodgers and there will be nothing to interrupt our
+work."
+
+"And the money, Lindsay?" she asked, a little anxiously.
+
+"What I have will carry us through this year. Next summer we can teach
+and make almost enough for the year after. The trustees are planning to
+establish a fellowship in Greek, and if they do and I can secure it--and
+Professor Wayland thinks I can,--that will make us safe the next two
+years until you are through."
+
+"And then?"
+
+He straightened up buoyantly. "Then your two years at Vassar and mine at
+Harvard, with some teaching thrown in along the way, of course. And then
+Europe--Greece--all the great things!"
+
+She smiled with him in his enthusiasm. "You are used to such bold
+thoughts. It is too high a flight for me all at once."
+
+"It will not be, a year from now," he declared, confidently.
+
+A silence fell between them, and the noise of the train made a pleasant
+accompaniment to his thoughts as he sketched in detail the work of the
+coming months. But always as a background to his hopes was that
+honorable social position which he meant eventually to achieve, the
+passion for which was a part of his Southern inheritance. Little as he
+had yet participated in any interests outside his daily tasks, he had
+perceived in the old college town its deeply grained traditions of birth
+and custom, perceived and respected them, and discounted the more their
+absence in the sorry village he had left. Sometime when he should assail
+it, the exclusiveness of his new environment might beat him back
+cruelly, but thus far it existed for him only as a barrier to what was
+ultimately precious and desirable. One day the gates would open at his
+touch, and he and the sister of his heart should enter their rightful
+heritage.
+
+The afternoon waned. He pointed outside the car window. "See how
+different all this is from the part of the State which we have left," he
+said. "The landscape is still rural, but what mellowness it has; because
+it has been enriched by a larger, more generous human life. One can
+imagine what this whole section must have been in those old days, before
+the coming of war and desolation. And Vaucluse was the flower, the
+centre of it all!" His eye kindled. "Some day external prosperity will
+return, and then Vaucluse and her ideals will be needed more than ever;
+it is she who must hold in check the commercial spirit, and dominate, as
+she has always done, the material with the intellectual." There was a
+noble emotion in his face, reflecting itself in the younger countenance
+beside his own. Poor, young, unknown, their hearts thrilled with pride
+in their State, with the possibility that they also should give to her
+of their best when the opportunity should be theirs.
+
+"It is a wonderful old town," Lindsay went on again. "Even Wayland says
+so,--our Greek professor, you know." His voice thrilled with the
+devotion of the hero-worshipper as he spoke the name. "He is a Harvard
+man, and has seen the best of everything, and even he has felt the charm
+of the place; he told me so. You will feel it, too. It is just as if the
+little town and the college together had preserved in amber all that was
+finest in our Southern life. And now to think you and I are to share in
+all its riches!"
+
+His early consecration to such a purpose, the toil and sacrifice by
+which it had been achieved, came movingly before her; yet, mingled with
+her pride in him, something within her pleaded for the things which he
+rated so low. "It used to be hard for you at home, Lindsay," she said,
+softly.
+
+"Yes, it was hard." His face flushed. "I never really lived till I left
+there. I was like an animal caught in a net, like a man struggling for
+air. You can't know what it is to me now to be with people who are
+thinking of something else than of how to make a few dollars in a
+miserable country store."
+
+"But they were good people in Bowersville, Lindsay," she urged, with
+gentle loyalty.
+
+"I am sure they were, if you say so," he agreed. "But at any rate we are
+done with it all now." He laid his hand over hers. "At last I am going
+to take you into our own dear world."
+
+It was, after all, a very small world as to its actual dimensions, but
+to the brother it had the largeness of opportunity, and to Stella it
+seemed infinitely complex. She found security at first only in following
+minutely the programme which Lindsay had laid out for her. It was his
+own as well, and simple enough. Study was the supreme thing; exercise
+came in as a necessity, pleasure only as the rarest incident. She took
+all things cheerfully, after her nature, but after two or three months
+the color began to go from her cheeks, the elasticity from her step; nor
+was her class standing, though creditable, quite what her brother had
+expected it to be.
+
+Wayland detained him one day in his class-room. "Do you think your
+sister is quite happy here, Cowart?" he asked.
+
+The boy thrilled, as he always did at any special evidence of interest
+from such a source, but he had never put this particular question to
+himself and had no reply at hand.
+
+"I have never thought this absolute surrender to books the wisest thing
+for you," Wayland went on; "but for your sister it is impossible. She
+was formed for companionship, for happiness, not for the isolation of
+the scholar. Why did you not put her into one of the girls' schools of
+the State, where she would have had associations more suited to her
+years?" he asked, bluntly.
+
+Lindsay could scarcely believe that he was listening to the young
+professor whose scholarly attainments seemed to him the sum of what was
+most desirable in life. "Our girls' colleges are very superficial," he
+answered; "and even if they were not, she could get no Greek in any of
+them."
+
+"My dear boy," Wayland said, "the amount of Greek which your sister
+knows or doesn't know will always be a very unimportant matter; she has
+things that are so infinitely more valuable to give to the world. And
+deserves so much better things for herself," he added, drawing together
+his texts for the next recitation.
+
+Lindsay returned to Mrs. Bancroft's quiet, old-fashioned house in a sort
+of daze. "Stella," he said, "do you think you enter enough into the
+social side of our college life?"
+
+"No," she answered. "But I think neither of us does."
+
+"Well, leave me out of the count. If I get through my Junior year as I
+ought, I am obliged to grind; and when there is any time left, I feel
+that I must have it for reading in the library. But it needn't be so
+with you. Didn't an invitation come to you for the reception Friday
+evening?"
+
+Her face grew wistful. "I don't care to go to things, Lindsay, unless
+you will go with me," she said.
+
+Nevertheless, he had his way, and when once she made it possible,
+opportunities for social pleasures poured in upon her. As Wayland had
+said, she was formed for friendship, for joy; and that which was her own
+came to her unsought. She was by nature too simple and sweet to be
+spoiled by the attention she received; the danger perhaps was the less
+because she missed in it all the comradeship of her brother, without
+which in her eyes the best things lost something of their charm. It was
+not merely personal ambition which kept him at his books; the passion of
+the scholar was upon him and made him count all moments lost that were
+spent away from them. Sometimes Stella sought him as he pored over them
+alone, and putting her arm shyly about him, would beg that he would go
+with her for a walk, or a ride on the river; but almost always his
+answer was the same: "I am so busy, Stella dear; if you knew how much I
+have to do you would not even ask me."
+
+There was one interruption, indeed, which the young student never
+refused. Sometimes their Greek professor dropped in at Mrs. Bancroft's
+to bring or to ask for a book; sometimes, with the lovely coming of the
+spring, he would join them as they were leaving the college grounds, and
+lead them away into some of the woodland walks, rich in wild flowers,
+that environed the little town. Such hours seemed to both brother and
+sister to have a flavor, a brightness, quite beyond what ordinary life
+could give. Wayland, too, must have found in them his own share of
+pleasure, for he made them more frequent as the months went by.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was in the early spring of her second year at Vaucluse that the
+accident occurred. The poor lad who had taken her out in the boat was
+almost beside himself with grief and remorse.
+
+"We had enjoyed the afternoon so much," he said, trying to tell how it
+had happened. "I thought I had never seen her so happy, so gay,--but you
+know she was that always. It was nearly sunset, and I remember how she
+spoke of the light as we saw it through the open spaces of the woods and
+as it slanted across the water. Farther down the river the yellow
+jasmine was beginning to open. A beech-tree that leaned out over the
+water was hung with it. She wanted some, and I guided the boat under the
+branches. I meant to get it for her myself, but she was reaching up
+after it almost before I knew it. The bough that had the finest blossoms
+on it was just beyond her reach, and while I steadied the boat, she
+pulled it towards her by one of the vines hanging from it. She must have
+put too much weight on it--
+
+"It all happened so quickly. I called to her to be careful, but while I
+was saying the words the vine snapped and she fell back with such force
+that the boat tipped, and in a second we were both in the water. I knew
+I could not swim, but I hoped that the water so near the bank would be
+shallow; and it was, but there was a deep hole under the roots of the
+tree."
+
+He could get no further. Poor lad! the wonder was that he had not been
+drowned himself. A negro ploughing in the field near by saw the accident
+and ran to his help, catching him as he was sinking for the third time.
+Stella never rose after she went down; her clothing had been entangled
+in the roots of the beech.
+
+Sorrow for the young life cut off so untimely was deep and universal,
+and sought to manifest itself in tender ministrations to the brother so
+cruelly bereaved. But Lindsay shrank from all offices of sympathy, and
+except for seeking now and then Wayland's silent companionship, bore his
+grief alone.
+
+The college was too poor to establish the fellowship in Greek, but the
+adjunct professor in mathematics resigned, and young Cowart was elected
+to his place, with the proviso that he give two months further study to
+the subject in the summer school of some university. Wayland decided
+which by taking him back with him to Cambridge, where he showed the boy
+an admirable friendship.
+
+Lindsay applied himself to his special studies with the utmost
+diligence. It was impossible, moreover, that his new surroundings should
+not appeal to his tastes in many directions; but in spite of his
+response to these larger opportunities, his friend discerned that the
+wound which the young man kept so carefully hidden had not, after all
+these weeks, begun even slightly to heal.
+
+Late on an August night, impelled as he often was to share the solitude
+which Lindsay affected, he sought him at his lodgings, and not finding
+him, followed what he knew was a favorite walk with the boy, and came
+upon him half hidden under the shadows of an elm in the woods that
+skirted Mount Auburn. "I thought you might be here," he said, taking the
+place that Lindsay made for him on the seat. Many words were never
+necessary between them.
+
+The moon was full and the sky cloudless, and for some time they sat in
+silence, yielding to the tranquil loveliness of the scene and to that
+inner experience of the soul brooding over each, and more inscrutable
+than the fathomless vault above them.
+
+"I suppose we shall never get used to a midnight that is still and at
+the same time lustrous, as this is to-night," Wayland said. "The sense
+of its uniqueness is as fresh whenever it is spread before us as if we
+had never seen it before."
+
+It was but a part of what he meant. He was thinking how sorrow, the wide
+sense of personal loss, was in some way like the pervasiveness, the
+voiceless speech, of this shadowed radiance around them.
+
+He drew a little nearer the relaxed and slender figure beside his own.
+"It is of _her_ you are thinking, Lindsay," he said, gently, and
+mentioning for the first time the young man's loss. "All that you see
+seems saturated with her memory. I think it will always be so--scenes of
+exceptional beauty, moments of high emotion, will always bring her
+back."
+
+The boy's response came with difficulty: "Perhaps so. I do not know. I
+think the thought of her is always with me."
+
+"If so, it should be for strength, for comfort," his friend pleaded.
+"She herself brought only gladness wherever she came."
+
+There was something unusual in his voice, something that for a moment
+raised a vague questioning in Lindsay's mind; but absorbed as he was in
+his own sadness, it eluded his feeble inquiry. To what Wayland had said
+he could make no reply.
+
+"Perhaps it is the apparent waste of a life so beautiful that seems to
+you so intolerable--" He felt the strong man's impulse to arrest an
+irrational grief, and groped for the assurance he desired. "Yet,
+Lindsay, we know things are not wasted; not in the natural world, not in
+the world of the spirit." But on the last words his voice lapsed
+miserably, and he half rose to go.
+
+Lindsay caught his arm and drew him back. "Don't go yet," he said,
+brokenly. "I know you think it would help me if I would talk
+about--Stella; if I should tell it all out to you. I thank you for being
+willing to listen. Perhaps it will help me."
+
+He paused, seeking for some words in which to express the sense of
+poverty which scourged him. Of all who had loved his sister, he himself
+was left poorest! Others had taken freely of her friendship, had
+delighted themselves in her face, her words, her smile, had all these
+things for memories. He had been separated from her, in part by the hard
+conditions of their youth, and at the last, when they had been together,
+by his own will. Oh, what had been her inner life during these last two
+years, when it had gone on beside his own, while he was too busy to
+attend?
+
+But the self-reproach was too bitter for utterance to even the kindest
+of friends. "I thought I could tell you," he said at last, "but I can't.
+Oh, Professor Wayland," he cried, "there is an element in my grief that
+is peculiar to itself, that no one else in sorrow ever had!"
+
+"I think every mourner on earth would say that, Lindsay." Again the
+younger man discerned the approach of a mystery, but again he left it
+unchallenged.
+
+The professor rose to his feet. "Good night," he said; "unless you will
+go back with me. Even with such moonlight as this, one must sleep." He
+had dropped to that kind level of the commonplace by which we spare
+ourselves and one another.
+
+    "'Where the love light never, never dies,'"
+
+The boy's voice ringing out blithely through the drip and dampness of
+the winter evening marked his winding route across the college grounds.
+Lindsay Cowart, busy at his study table, listened without definite
+effort and placed the singer as the lad newly come from the country. He
+could have identified any other of the Vaucluse students by connections
+as slight--Marchman by his whistling, tender, elusive sounds, flute
+notes sublimated, heard only when the night was late and the campus
+still; others by tricks of voice, fragments of laughter, by their
+footfalls, even, on the narrow brick walk below his study window. Such
+the easy proficiency of affection.
+
+Attention to the lad's singing suddenly was lifted above the
+subconscious. The simple melody had entangled itself in some forgotten
+association of the professor's boyhood, seeking to marshal which before
+him, he received the full force of the single line sung in direct
+ear-shot. Like the tune, the words also became a challenge; pricked
+through the unregarded heaviness in which he was plying his familiar
+task, and demanded that he should name its cause.
+
+For him the love light of his marriage had been dead so long! No, not
+dead; nothing so dignified, so tragic. Burnt down, smoldered;
+suffocated by the hateful dust of the commonplace. There was a touch of
+contempt in the effort with which he dismissed the matter from his mind
+and turned back to his work. And yet, he stopped a moment longer to
+think, for him life without the light of love fell so far below its best
+achievement!
+
+The front of his desk was covered with the papers in mathematics over
+which he had spent his evenings for more than a week. Most of them had
+been corrected and graded, with the somewhat full comment or elucidation
+here and there which had made his progress slow. He examined a
+half-dozen more, and then in sheer mental revolt against the subject,
+slipped them under the rubber bands with others of their kind and
+dropped the neat packages out of his sight into one of the drawers of
+the desk. Wayland's book on Greece, the fruit of eighteen months'
+sojourn there, had come through the mail on the same day when the
+calculus papers had been handed in, and he had read it through at once,
+not to be teased intolerably by its invitation. He had mastered the
+text, avid through the long winter night, but he picked it up again now,
+and for a little while studied the sumptuous illustrations. How long
+Wayland had been away from Vaucluse, how much of enrichment had come to
+him in the years since he had left! He himself might have gone also, to
+larger opportunities--he had chosen to remain, held by a sentiment! The
+professor closed the book with a little sigh, and taking it to a small
+shelf on the opposite side of the room, stood it with a half-dozen
+others worthy of such association.
+
+Returning, he got together before him the few Greek authors habitually
+in hand's reach, whether handled or not, and from a compartment of his
+desk took out several sheets of manuscript, metrical translations from
+favorite passages in the tragedists or the short poems of the Anthology.
+Like the rest of the Vaucluse professors--a mere handful they were,--he
+was straitened by the hard exactions of class-room work, and the book
+which he hoped sometime to publish grew slowly. How far he was in actual
+miles from the men who were getting their thoughts into print, how much
+farther in environment! Things which to them were the commonplaces of a
+scholar's life were to him impossible luxuries; few even of their books
+found their way to his shelves. At least the original sources of
+inspiration were his, and sometimes he felt that his verses were not
+without spirit, flavor.
+
+He took up a little volume of Theocritus, which opened easily at the
+Seventh Idyl, and began to read aloud. Half-way through the poem the
+door opened and his wife entered. He did not immediately adjust himself
+to the interruption, and she remained standing a few moments in the
+centre of the room.
+
+"Thank you; I believe I will be seated," she said, the sarcasm in her
+words carefully excluded from her voice.
+
+He wondered that she should find interest in so sorry a game. "I thought
+you felt enough at home in here to sit down without being asked," he
+said, rising, and trying to speak lightly.
+
+She took the rocking-chair he brought for her and leaned back in it
+without speaking. Her maroon-colored evening gown suggested that whoever
+planned it had been somewhat straitened by economy, but it did well by
+her rich complexion and creditable figure. Her features were creditable
+too, the dark hair a little too heavy, perhaps, and the expression,
+defined as it is apt to be when one is thirty-five, not wholly
+satisfying. In truth, the countenance, like the gown, suffered a little
+from economy, a sparseness of the things one loves best in a woman's
+face. Half the sensitiveness belonging to her husband's eyes and mouth
+would have made her beautiful.
+
+"It is a pity the Barkers have such a bad night for their party," Cowart
+said.
+
+"The reception is at the Fieldings';" and again he felt himself rebuked.
+
+"I'm afraid I didn't think much about the matter after you told me the
+Dillinghams were coming by for you in their carriage. Fortunately
+neither family holds us college people to very strict social account."
+
+"They have their virtues, even if they are so vulgar as to be rich."
+
+"Why, I believe I had just been thinking, before you came in, that it is
+only the rich who have any virtues at all." He managed to speak
+genially, but the consciousness that she was waiting for him to make
+conversation, as she had waited for the chair, stiffened upon him like
+frost.
+
+He cast about for something to say, but the one interest which he would
+have preferred to keep to himself was all that presented itself to his
+grasp. "I have often thought," he suggested, "that if only we were in
+sight of the Gulf, our landscape in early summer might not be very
+unlike that of ancient Greece." She looked at him a little blankly, and
+he drew one of his books nearer and began turning its leaves.
+
+"I thought you were correcting your mathematics papers."
+
+"I am, or have been; but I am reading Theocritus, too."
+
+"Well, I don't see anything in a day like this to make anybody think of
+summer. The dampness goes to your very marrow."
+
+"It isn't the day; it's the poetry. That's the good of there being
+poetry."
+
+She skipped his parenthesis. "And you keep this room as cold as a
+vault." Not faultfinding, but a somewhat irritating concern for his
+comfort was in the complaint.
+
+She went to the hearth and in her efficient way shook down the ashes
+from the grate and heaped it with coal. A cabinet photograph of a girl
+in her early teens, which had the appearance of having just been put
+there, was supported against a slender glass vase. Mrs. Cowart took it
+up and examined it critically. "I don't think this picture does
+Arnoldina justice," she said. "One of the eyes seems to droop a little,
+and the mouth looks sad. Arnoldina never did look sad."
+
+They were on common ground now, and he could speak without constraint.
+"I hadn't observed that it looked sad. She seems somehow to have got a
+good deal older since September."
+
+"She is maturing, of course." All a mother's pride and approbation, were
+in the reserve of the speech. To have put more definitely her estimate
+of the sweet young face would have been a clumsy thing in comparison.
+
+Lindsay's countenance lighted up. He arose, and standing by his wife,
+looked over her shoulder as she held the photograph to the light. "Do
+you know, Gertrude," he said, "there is something in her face that
+reminds me of Stella?"
+
+"I don't know that I see it," she answered, indifferently, replacing the
+photograph and returning to her chair. The purpose which had brought her
+to the room rose to her face. "I stopped at the warehouse this
+afternoon," she said, "and had a talk with father. Jamieson really goes
+to Mobile--the first of next month. The place is open to you if you want
+it."
+
+"But, Gertrude, how should I possibly want it?" he expostulated.
+
+"You would be a member of the firm. You might as well be making money as
+the rest of them."
+
+He offered no comment.
+
+"It is not now like it was when you were made professor. The town has
+become a commercial centre and its educational interests have declined.
+The professors will always have their social position, of course, but
+they cannot hope for anything more."
+
+"It is not merely Vaucluse, but the South, that is passing into this
+phase. But economic independence has become a necessity. When once it is
+achieved, our people will turn to higher things."
+
+"Not soon enough to benefit you and me."
+
+"Probably not."
+
+"Then why waste your talents on the college, when the best years of your
+life are still before you?"
+
+"I am not teaching for money, Gertrude." He hated putting into the bald
+phrase his consecration to his ideals for the young men of his State; he
+hated putting it into words at all; but something in his voice told her
+that the argument was finished.
+
+There was a sound of carriage wheels on the drive. He arose and began to
+assist her with her wraps. "It is too bad for you to be dependent on
+even such nice escorts as the Dillinghams are," he solaced, recovering
+himself. "We college folk are a sorry lot."
+
+But when she was gone, the mood for composition which an hour before had
+seemed so near had escaped him, and he put away his books and
+manuscript, standing for a while, a little chilled in mind and body,
+before the grate and looking at the photograph on the mantel. While he
+did so the haunting likeness he had seen grew more distinct and by
+degrees another face overspread that of his young daughter, the face of
+the sister he had loved and lost.
+
+With a sudden impulse he crossed the room to an old-fashioned mahogany
+secretary, opened its slanting lid, and unlocking with some difficulty a
+small inner drawer, returned with it to his desk. Several packages of
+letters tied with faded ribbon filled the small receptacle, but they
+struck upon him with the strangeness of something utterly forgotten. The
+pieces of ribbon had once held for him each its own association of time
+or place; now he could only remember, looking down upon them with tender
+gaze, that they had been Stella's, worn in her hair, or at her throat or
+waist. Simple and inexpensive he saw they were. Arnoldina would not have
+looked at them.
+
+Overcoming something of reluctance, he took one of the packages from its
+place. It contained the letters he had found in her writing-table after
+her death, most of them written after she had come to Vaucluse by her
+stepmother and the friends she had left in the village. He knew there
+was nothing in any of them she would have withheld from him; in reading
+them he was merely taking back something from the vanished years which,
+if not looked at now, would perish utterly from earth. How affecting
+they were--these utterances of true and humble hearts, written to one
+equally true and good! His youth and hers in the remote country village
+rose before him; not now, as once, pinched and narrow, but as salutary,
+even gracious. He could but feel how changed his standards had become
+since then, how different his measure of the great and the small of
+life.
+
+Suddenly, as he was thus borne back into the past, the old sorrow sprang
+upon him, and he bowed before it. The old bitter cry which he had been
+able to utter to no human consoler swept once more to his lips: "Oh,
+Stella, Stella, you died before I really knew you; your brother, who
+should have known and loved you best! And now it is too late, too
+late."
+
+He sent out as of old his voiceless call to one afar off, in some land
+where her whiteness, her budding soul, had found their rightful place;
+but even as he did so, his thought of her seemed to be growing clearer.
+From that far, reverenced, but unimagined sphere she was coming back to
+the range of his apprehension, to comradeship in the life which they
+once had shared together.
+
+He trembled with the hope of a fuller attainment, lifting his bowed head
+and taking another package of the letters from their place. Her letters!
+He had begged them of her friends in his desperate sense of ignorance,
+his longing to make good something of all that he had lost in those last
+two years of her life. What an innocent life it was that was spread
+before him; and how young,--oh, how young! And it was a happy life. He
+was astonished, after all his self-reproach, to realize how happy; to
+find himself smiling with her in some girlish drollery such as used to
+come so readily to her lips. He could detect, too, how the note of
+gladness, how her whole life, indeed, had grown richer in the larger
+existence of Vaucluse. At last he could be comforted that, however it
+had ended, it was he who had made it hers.
+
+He had been feeding eagerly, too eagerly, and under the pressure of
+emotion was constrained to rise and walk the floor, sinking at last into
+his armchair and gazing with unseeing eyes upon the ruddy coals in the
+grate. That lovely life, which he had thought could never in its
+completeness be his, was rebuilt before his vision from the materials
+which she herself had left. What he had believed to be loss, bitter,
+unspeakable even to himself, had in these few hours of the night become
+wealth.
+
+His quickened thought moved on from plane to plane. He scanned the
+present conditions of his life, and saw with clarified vision how good
+they were. What it was given him to do for his students, at least what
+he was trying to do for them; the preciousness of their regard; the long
+friendship with his colleagues; the associations with the little
+community in which his lot was cast, limited in some directions as they
+might be; the fair demesne of Greek literature in which his feet were so
+much at home; his own literary gift, even if a slender one; his dear,
+dear child.
+
+And Gertrude? Under the invigoration of his mood a situation which had
+long seemed unamenable to change resolved itself into new and simpler
+proportions. The worthier aspects of his home life, the finer traits of
+his wife's character, stood before him as proofs of what might yet be.
+His memory had kept no record of the fact that when in the first year of
+his youthful sorrow, sick for comfort and believing her all tenderness,
+he had married her, to find her impatient of his grief, nor of the many
+times since when she had appeared almost wilfully blind to his ideals
+and purposes. His judgment held only this, that she had never understood
+him. For this he had seldom blamed her; but to-night he blamed himself.
+Instead of shrinking away sensitively, keeping the vital part of his
+life to himself and making what he could of it alone, he should have set
+himself steadily to create a place for it in her understanding and
+sympathy. Was not a perfect married love worth the minor sacrifices as
+well as the supreme surrender from which he believed that neither of
+them would have shrunk?
+
+He returned to his desk and began to rearrange the contents of the
+little drawer. Among them was a small sandalwood box which had been
+their mother's, and which Stella had prized with special fondness. He
+had never opened it since her death, but as he lifted it now the frail
+clasp gave way, the lid fell back, and the contents slipped upon the
+desk. They were few: a ring, a thin gold locket containing the
+miniatures of their father and mother, a small tintype of himself taken
+when he first left home, and two or three notes addressed in a
+handwriting which he recognized as Wayland's. He replaced them with
+reverent touch, turning away even in thought from what he had never
+meant to see.
+
+By and by he heard in the distance the roll of carriages returning from
+the Fieldings' reception. He replenished the fire generously, found a
+long cloak in the closet at the end of the hall, and waited the sound of
+wheels before his own door. "The rain has grown heavier," he said,
+drawing the cloak around his wife as she descended from the carriage.
+Something in his manner seemed to envelop her. He brought her into the
+study and seated her before the fire. She had expected to find the house
+silent; the glow and warmth of the room were grateful after the chill
+and darkness outside, her husband's presence after that vague sense of
+futility which the evening's gayety had left upon her.
+
+"I suppose I ought to tell you about the party," she said, a little
+wearily; "but if you don't mind, I will wait till breakfast. Everybody
+was there, of course, and it was all very fine, as we all knew it would
+be. I hope you've enjoyed your Latin poets more."
+
+"They are Greek, dear," he said. "I have been making translations from
+some of them now and then. Some day we will take a day off and then I'll
+read them to you. But neither the party nor the poets to-night. See, it
+is almost two o'clock."
+
+"I knew it must be late. But you look as fresh as a child that has just
+waked from sleep."
+
+"Perhaps I have just waked."
+
+They rose to go up-stairs. "I will go in front and make a light in our
+room while you turn off the gas in the hall."
+
+He paused for a moment after she had gone out and turned to a page in
+the Greek Anthology for a single stanza. Shelley's translation was
+written in pencil beside it:
+
+    Thou wert the morning star among the living,
+      Ere thy fair light had fled;
+    Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus giving
+      New splendor to the dead.
+
+
+
+
+The Perfect Year
+
+BY ELEANOR A. HALLOWELL
+
+
+When Dolly Leonard died, on the night of my _débutante_ party, our
+little community was aghast. If I live to be a thousand, I shall never
+outgrow the paralyzing shock of that disaster. I think that the girls in
+our younger set never fully recovered from it.
+
+It was six o'clock when we got the news. Things had been jolly and
+bustling all the afternoon. The house was filled with florists and
+caterers, and I had gone to my room to escape the final responsibilities
+of the occasion. There were seven of us girl chums dressing in my room,
+and we were lolling round in various stages of lace and ruffles when the
+door-bell rang. Partly out of consideration for the tired servants, and
+partly out of nervous curiosity incited by the day's influx of presents
+and bouquets, I slipped into my pink eider-down wrapper and ran down to
+the door. The hall was startlingly sweet with roses. Indeed, the whole
+house was a perfect bower of leaf and blossom, and I suppose I did look
+elfish as I ran, for a gruff old workman peered up at me and smiled, and
+muttered something about "pinky-posy"--and I know it did not seem
+impertinent to me at the time.
+
+At the door, in the chill blast of the night, stood our little old gray
+postman with some letters in his hand. "Oh!" I said, disappointed, "just
+letters."
+
+The postman looked at me a trifle queerly--I thought it was my pink
+wrapper,--and he said, "Don't worry about 'just letters'; Dolly Leonard
+is dead!"
+
+"Dead?" I gasped. "Dead?" and I remember how I reeled back against the
+open door and stared out with horror-stricken eyes across the common to
+Dolly Leonard's house, where every window was blazing with calamity.
+
+"Dead?" I gasped again. "Dead? What happened?"
+
+The postman eyed me with quizzical fatherliness. "Ask your mother," he
+answered, reluctantly, and I turned and groped my way leaden-footed up
+the stairs, muttering, "Oh, mother, mother, I don't _need_ to ask you."
+
+When I got back to my room at last through a tortuous maze of gaping
+workmen and sickening flowers, three startled girls jumped up to catch
+me as I staggered across the threshold. I did not faint, I did not cry
+out. I just sat huddled on the floor rocking myself to and fro, and
+mumbling, as through a mouthful of sawdust: "Dolly Leonard is dead.
+Dolly Leonard is dead. Dolly Leonard is dead."
+
+I will not attempt to describe too fully the scene that followed. There
+were seven of us, you know, and we were only eighteen, and no young
+person of our acquaintance had ever died before. Indeed, only one aged
+death had ever disturbed our personal life history, and even that remote
+catastrophe had sent us scampering to each other's beds a whole winter
+long, for the individual fear of "seeing things at night."
+
+"Dolly Leonard is dead." I can feel myself yet in that huddled news-heap
+on the floor. A girl at the mirror dropped her hand-glass with a
+shivering crash. Some one on the sofa screamed. The only one of us who
+was dressed began automatically to unfasten her lace collar and strip
+off her silken gown, and I can hear yet the soft lush sound of a folded
+sash, and the strident click of the little French stays that pressed too
+close on a heaving breast.
+
+Then some one threw wood on the fire with a great bang, and then more
+wood and more wood, and we crowded round the hearth and scorched our
+faces and hands, but we could not get warm enough.
+
+Dolly Leonard was not even in our set. She was an older girl by several
+years. But she was the belle of the village. Dolly Leonard's gowns,
+Dolly Leonard's parties, Dolly Leonard's lovers, were the envy of all
+womankind. And Dolly Leonard's courtship and marriage were to us the
+fitting culmination of her wonderful career. She was our ideal of
+everything that a girl should be. She was good, she was beautiful, she
+was irresistibly fascinating. She was, in fact, everything that we
+girlishly longed to be in the revel of a ballroom or the white sanctity
+of a church.
+
+And now she, the bright, the joyous, the warm, was colder than we were,
+and _would never be warm again_. Never again ... And there were garish
+flowers down-stairs, and music and favors and ices--nasty shivery
+ices,--and pretty soon a brawling crowd of people would come and
+_dance_ because I was eighteen--and still alive.
+
+Into our hideous brooding broke a husky little voice that had not yet
+spoken:
+
+"Dolly Leonard told my big sister a month ago that she wasn't a bit
+frightened,--that she had had one perfect year, and a perfect year was
+well worth dying for--if one had to. Of course she hoped she wouldn't
+die, but if she did, it was a wonderful thing to die happy. Dolly was
+queer about it; I heard my big sister telling mother. Dolly said, 'Life
+couldn't always be at high tide--there was only one high tide in any
+one's life, and she thought it was beautiful to go in the full flush
+before the tide turned.'"
+
+The speaker ended with a harsh sob.
+
+Then suddenly into our awed silence broke my mother in full evening
+dress. She was a very handsome mother.
+
+As she looked down on our huddled group there were tears in her eyes,
+but there was no shock. I noticed distinctly that there was no shock.
+"Why, girls," she exclaimed, with a certain terse brightness, "aren't
+you dressed yet? It's eight o'clock and people are beginning to arrive."
+She seemed so frivolous to me. I remember that I felt a little ashamed
+of her.
+
+"We don't want any party," I answered, glumly. "The girls are going
+home."
+
+"Nonsense!" said my mother, catching me by the hand and pulling me
+almost roughly to my feet. "Go quickly and call one of the maids to come
+and help you dress. Angeline, I'll do your hair. Bertha, where are your
+shoes? Gertrude, that's a beautiful gown--just your color. Hurry into
+it. There goes the bell. Hark! the orchestra is beginning."
+
+And so, with a word here, a touch there, a searching look everywhere,
+mother marshalled us into line. I had never heard her voice raised
+before.
+
+The color came back to our cheeks, the light to our eyes. We bubbled
+over with spirits--nervous spirits, to be sure, but none the less
+vivacious ones.
+
+When the last hook was fastened, the last glove buttoned, the last curl
+fluffed into place, mother stood for an instant tapping her foot on the
+floor. She looked like a little general.
+
+"Girls," she said, "there are five hundred people coming to-night from
+all over the State, and fully two-thirds of them never heard of Dolly
+Leonard. We must never spoil other people's pleasures by flaunting our
+own personal griefs. I expect my daughter to conduct herself this
+evening with perfect cheerfulness and grace. She owes it to her guests;
+and"--mother's chin went high up in the air--"I refuse to receive in my
+house again any one of you girls who mars my daughter's _débutante_
+party by tears or hysterics. You may go now."
+
+We went, silently berating the brutal harshness of grown people. We
+went, airily, flutteringly, luminously, like a bunch of butterflies. At
+the head of the stairs the music caught us up in a maelstrom of
+excitement and whirled us down into the throng of pleasure. And when we
+reached the drawing-room and found mother we felt as though we were
+walking on air. We thought it was self-control. We were not old enough
+to know it was mostly "youth."
+
+My _débutante_ party was the gayest party ever given in our town. We
+seven girls were like sprites gone mad. We were like fairy torches that
+kindled the whole throng. We flitted among the palms like
+will-o'-the-wisps. We danced the toes out of our satin slippers. We led
+our old boy-friends a wild chase of young love and laughter, and
+because our hearts were like frozen lead within us we sought, as it
+were, "to warm both hands at the fires of life." We trifled with older
+men. We flirted, as it were, with our fathers.
+
+My _débutante_ party turned out a revel. I have often wondered if my
+mother was frightened. I don't know what went on in the other girls'
+brains, but mine were seared with the old-world recklessness--"Eat,
+drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." _We_ die!
+
+I had a lover--a boy lover. His name was Gordon. He was twenty-one years
+old, and he had courted me with boyish seriousness for three years.
+Mother had always pooh-poohed his love-story and said: "Wait, wait. Why,
+my daughter isn't even _out_ yet. Wait till she's out."
+
+And Gordon had narrowed his near-sighted eyes ominously and shut his
+lips tight. "Very well," he had answered, "I will wait till she is
+out--but no longer."
+
+He was rich, he was handsome, he was well-born, he was strong, but more
+than all that he held my fancy with a certain thrilling tenacity that
+frightened me while it lured me. And I had always looked forward to my
+_débutante_ party on my eighteenth birthday with the tingling
+realization, half joy, half fear, that on that day I should have to
+settle once and forever with--_man_.
+
+I had often wondered how Gordon would propose. He was a proud,
+high-strung boy. If he was humble, and pleaded and pleaded with the hurt
+look in his eyes that I knew so well, I thought I would accept him; and
+if we could get to mother in the crowd, perhaps we could announce the
+engagement at supper-time. It seemed to me that it would be a very
+wonderful thing to be engaged on one's eighteenth birthday. So many
+girls were not engaged till nineteen or even twenty. But if he was
+masterful and high-stepping, as he knew so well how to be, I had decided
+to refuse him scornfully with a toss of my head and a laugh. I could
+break his heart with the sort of laugh I had practised before my mirror.
+
+It is a terrible thing to have a long-anticipated event finally overtake
+you. It is the most terrible thing of all to have to settle once and
+forever with _man_.
+
+Gordon came for me at eleven o'clock. I was flirting airily at the time
+with our village Beau Brummel, who was old enough to be my grandfather.
+
+Gordon slipped my little hand through his arm and carried me off to a
+lonely place in the conservatory. For a second it seemed a beautiful
+relief to be out of the noise and the glare--and alone with Gordon. But
+instantly my realization of the potential moment rushed over me like a
+flood, and I began to tremble violently. All the nervous strain of the
+evening reacted suddenly on me.
+
+"What's the matter with you to-night?" asked Gordon, a little sternly.
+"What makes you so wild?" he persisted, with a grim little attempt at a
+laugh.
+
+At his words, my heart seemed to turn over within me and settle heavily.
+It was before the days when we discussed life's tragedies with our best
+men friends. Indeed, it was so long before that I sickened and grew
+faint at the very thought of the sorrowful knowledge which I kept secret
+from him.
+
+Again he repeated, "What's the matter with you?" but I could find no
+answer. I just sat shivering, with my lace scarf drawn close across my
+bare shoulders.
+
+Gordon took hold of a white ruffle on my gown and began to fidget with
+it. I could see the fine thoughts go flitting through his eyes, but when
+he spoke again it was quite commonplacely.
+
+"Will you do me a favor?" he asked. "Will you do me the favor of
+marrying me?" And he laughed. Good God! he _laughed_!
+
+"A favor" to marry him! And he asked it as he might have asked for a
+posie or a dance. So flippantly--with a laugh. "_A favor!_" And Dolly
+Leonard lay dead of _her_ favor!
+
+I jumped to my feet--I was half mad with fear and sex and sorrow and
+excitement. Something in my brain snapped. And I struck Gordon--struck
+him across the face with my open hand. And he turned as white as the
+dead Dolly Leonard, and went away--oh, very far away.
+
+Then I ran back alone to the hall and stumbled into my father's arms.
+
+"Are you having a good time?" asked my father, pointing playfully at my
+blazing cheeks.
+
+I went to my answer like an arrow to its mark. "I am having the most
+wonderful time in the world," I cried; "_I have settled with man_."
+
+My father put back his head and shouted. He thought it was a fine joke.
+He laughed about it long after my party was over. He thought my head was
+turned. He laughed about it long after other people had stopped
+wondering why Gordon went away.
+
+I never told any one why Gordon went away. I might under certain
+circumstances have told a girl, but it was not the sort of thing one
+could have told one's mother. This is the first time I have ever told
+the story of Dolly Leonard's death and my _débutante_ party.
+
+Dolly Leonard left a little son behind her--a joyous, rollicking little
+son. His name is Paul Yardley. We girls were pleased with the
+initials--P.Y. They stand to us for "Perfect Year."
+
+Dolly Leonard's husband has married again, and his wife has borne him
+safely three daughters and a son. Each one of my six girl chums is the
+mother of a family. Now and again in my experience some woman has
+shirked a duty. But I have never yet met a woman who dared to shirk a
+happiness. Duties repeat themselves. There is no duplicate of happiness.
+
+I am fifty-eight years old. I have never married. I do not say whether I
+am glad or sorry. I only know that I have never had a Perfect Year. I
+only know that I have never been warm since the night that Dolly Leonard
+died.
+
+
+
+
+Editha
+
+BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+
+
+The air was thick with the war I feeling, like the electricity of a
+storm which has not yet burst. Editha sat looking out into the hot
+spring afternoon, with her lips parted, and panting with the intensity
+of the question whether she could let him go. She had decided that she
+could not let him stay, when she saw him at the end of the still
+leafless avenue, making slowly up toward the house, with his head down,
+and his figure relaxed. She ran impatiently out on the veranda, to the
+edge of the steps, and imperatively demanded greater haste of him with
+her will before she called aloud to him, "George!"
+
+He had quickened his pace in mystical response to her mystical urgence,
+before he could have heard her; now he looked up and answered, "Well?"
+
+"Oh, how united we are!" she exulted, and then she swooped down the
+steps to him. "What is it?" she cried.
+
+"It's war," he said, and he pulled her up to him, and kissed her.
+
+She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion,
+and uttered from deep in her throat, "How glorious!"
+
+"It's war," he repeated, without consenting to her sense of it; and she
+did not know just what to think at first. She never knew what to think
+of him; that made his mystery, his charm. All through their courtship,
+which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling, she had
+been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it. He seemed to despise
+it even more than he abhorred it. She could have understood his
+abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have been a survival of his
+old life when he thought he would be a minister, and before he changed
+and took up the law. But making light of a cause so high and noble
+seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his being. Not but
+that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that
+sort, and make his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps the
+miracle was already wrought in him, In the presence of the tremendous
+fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gone out of him;
+she began to feel that. He sank down on the top step, and wiped his
+forehead with his handkerchief, while she poured out upon him her
+question of the origin and authenticity of his news.
+
+All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was aware that now at the
+very beginning she must put a guard upon herself against urging him, by
+any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to
+take, for the completion of her ideal of him. He was very nearly perfect
+as he was, and he must be allowed to perfect himself. But he was
+peculiar, and he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity.
+Before her reasoning went her emotioning: her nature pulling upon his
+nature, her womanhood upon his manhood, without her knowing the means
+she was using to the end she was willing. She had always supposed that
+the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not
+know what, but something. George Gearson had simply asked her for her
+love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him,
+without, as it were, thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could
+do something worthy to _have_ won her--be a hero, _her_ hero--it would
+be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be
+grander. Besides, she had believed in the war from the beginning.
+
+"But don't you see, dearest," she said, "that it wouldn't have come to
+this, if it hadn't been in the order of Providence? And I call any war
+glorious that is for the liberation of people who have been struggling
+for years against the cruelest oppression. Don't you think so too?"
+
+"I suppose so," he returned, languidly. "But war! Is it glorious to
+break the peace of the world?"
+
+"That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame
+at our very gates." She was conscious of parroting the current phrases
+of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words. She
+must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for him, and after a
+good deal of rapid argument she ended with the climax: "But now it
+doesn't matter about the how or why. Since the war has come, all that is
+gone. There are no two sides, any more. There is nothing now but our
+country."
+
+He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back against the veranda,
+and he said with a vague smile, as if musing aloud, "Our country--right
+or wrong."
+
+"Yes, right or wrong!" she returned fervidly. "I'll go and get you some
+lemonade." She rose rustling, and whisked away; when she came back with
+two tall glasses of clouded liquid, on a tray, and the ice clucking in
+them, he still sat as she had left him, and she said as if there had
+been no interruption: "But there is no question of wrong in this case. I
+call it a sacred war. A war for liberty, and humanity, if ever there was
+one. And I know you will see it just as I do, yet."
+
+He took half the lemonade at a gulp, and he answered as he set the glass
+down: "I know you always have the highest ideal. When I differ from you,
+I ought to doubt myself."
+
+A generous sob rose in Editha's throat for the humility of a man, so
+very nearly perfect, who was willing to put himself below her.
+
+Besides, she felt that he was never so near slipping through her fingers
+as when he took that meek way.
+
+"You shall not say that! Only, for once I happen to be right." She
+seized his hand in her two hands, and poured her soul from her eyes into
+his. "Don't you think so?" she entreated him.
+
+He released his hand and drank the rest of his lemonade, and she added,
+"Have mine, too," but he shook his head in answering, "I've no business
+to think so, unless I act so, too."
+
+Her heart stopped a beat before it pulsed on with leaps that she felt in
+her neck. She had noticed that strange thing in men; they seemed to feel
+bound to do what they believed, and not think a thing was finished when
+they said it, as girls did. She knew what was in his mind, but she
+pretended not, and she said, "Oh, I am not sure."
+
+He went on as if to himself without apparently heeding her. "There's
+only one way of proving one's faith in a thing like this."
+
+She could not say that she understood, but she did understand.
+
+He went on again. "If I believed--if I felt as you do about this war--Do
+you wish me to feel as you do?"
+
+Now she was really not sure; so she said, "George, I don't know what you
+mean."
+
+He seemed to muse away from her as before. "There is a sort of
+fascination in it. I suppose that at the bottom of his heart every man
+would like at times to have his courage tested; to see how he would
+act."
+
+"How can you talk in that ghastly way!"
+
+"It _is_ rather morbid. Still, that's what it comes to, unless you're
+swept away by ambition, or driven by conviction. I haven't the
+conviction or the ambition, and the other thing is what it comes to with
+me. I ought to have been a preacher, after all; then I couldn't have
+asked it of myself, as I must, now I'm a lawyer. And you believe it's a
+holy war, Editha?" he suddenly addressed her. "Or, I know you do! But
+you wish me to believe so, too?"
+
+She hardly knew whether he was mocking or not, in the ironical way he
+always had with her plainer mind. But the only thing was to be outspoken
+with him.
+
+"George, I wish you to believe whatever you think is true, at any and
+every cost. If I've tried to talk you into anything, I take it all
+back."
+
+"Oh, I know that, Editha. I know how sincere you are, and how--I wish I
+had your undoubting spirit! I'll think it over; I'd like to believe as
+you do. But I don't, now; I don't, indeed. It isn't this war alone;
+though this seems peculiarly wanton and needless; but it's every war--so
+stupid; it makes me sick. Why shouldn't this thing have been settled
+reasonably?"
+
+"Because," she said, very throatily again, "God meant it to be war."
+
+"You think it was God? Yes, I suppose that is what people will say."
+
+"Do you suppose it would have been war if God hadn't meant it?"
+
+"I don't know. Sometimes it seems as if God had put this world into
+men's keeping to work it as they pleased."
+
+"Now, George, that is blasphemy."
+
+"Well, I won't blaspheme. I'll try to believe in your pocket
+Providence," he said, and then he rose to go.
+
+"Why don't you stay to dinner?" Dinner at Balcom's Works was at one
+o'clock.
+
+"I'll come back to supper, if you'll let me. Perhaps I shall bring you a
+convert."
+
+"Well, you may come back, on that condition."
+
+"All right. If I don't come, you'll understand?"
+
+He went away without kissing her, and she felt it a suspension of their
+engagement. It all interested her intensely; she was undergoing a
+tremendous experience, and she was being equal to it. While she stood
+looking after him, her mother came out through one of the long windows,
+on to the veranda, with a catlike softness and vagueness.
+
+"Why didn't he stay to dinner?"
+
+"Because--because--war has been declared," Editha pronounced, without
+turning.
+
+Her mother said, "Oh, my!" and then said nothing more until she had sat
+down in one of the large Shaker chairs, and rocked herself for some
+time. Then she closed whatever tacit passage of thought there had been
+in her mind with the spoken words, "Well, I hope _he_ won't go."
+
+"And _I_ hope he _will_" the girl said, and confronted her mother with a
+stormy exaltation that would have frightened any creature less
+unimpressionable than a cat.
+
+Her mother rocked herself again for an interval of cogitation. What she
+arrived at in speech was, "Well, I guess you've done a wicked thing,
+Editha Balcom."
+
+The girl said, as she passed indoors through the same window her mother
+had come out by, "I haven't done anything--yet."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In her room, she put together all her letters and gifts from Gearson,
+down to the withered petals of the first flower he had offered, with
+that timidity of his veiled in that irony of his. In the heart of the
+packet she enshrined her engagement ring which she had restored to the
+pretty box he had brought it her in. Then she sat down, if not calmly
+yet strongly, and wrote:
+
+     "GEORGE: I understood--when you left me. But I think we had
+     better emphasize your meaning that if we cannot be one in
+     everything we had better be one in nothing. So I am sending
+     these things for your keeping till you have made up your mind.
+
+     "I shall always love you, and therefore I shall never marry any
+     one else. But the man I marry must love his country first of
+     all, and be able to say to me,
+
+        "'I could not love thee, dear, so much,
+        Loved I not honor more.'
+
+     "There is no honor above America with me. In this great hour
+     there is no other honor.
+
+     "Your heart will make my words clear to you. I had never
+     expected to say so much, but it has come upon me that I must
+     say the utmost.
+
+                         "EDITHA."
+
+She thought she had worded her letter well, worded it in a way that
+could not be bettered; all had been implied and nothing expressed.
+
+She had it ready to send with the packet she had tied with red, white,
+and blue ribbon, when it occurred to her that she was not just to him,
+that she was not giving him a fair chance. He had said he would go and
+think it over, and she was not waiting. She was pushing, threatening,
+compelling. That was not a woman's part. She must leave him free, free,
+free. She could not accept for her country or herself a forced
+sacrifice.
+
+In writing her letter she had satisfied the impulse from which it
+sprang; she could well afford to wait till he had thought it over. She
+put the packet and the letter by, and rested serene in the consciousness
+of having done what was laid upon her by her love itself to do, and yet
+used patience, mercy, justice.
+
+She had her reward. Gearson did not come to tea, but she had given him
+till morning, when, late at night there came up from the village the
+sound of a fife and drum with a tumult of voices, in shouting, singing,
+and laughing. The noise drew nearer and nearer; it reached the Street
+end of the avenue; there it silenced itself, and one voice, the voice
+she knew best, rose over the silence. It fell; the air was filled with
+cheers; the fife and drum struck up, with the shouting, singing, and
+laughing again, but now retreating; and a single figure came hurrying up
+the avenue.
+
+She ran down to meet her lover and clung to him. He was very gay, and he
+put his arm round her with a boisterous laugh. "Well, you must call me
+Captain, now; or Cap, if you prefer; that's what the boys call me. Yes,
+we've had a meeting at the town hall, and everybody has volunteered; and
+they selected me for captain, and I'm going to the war, the big war, the
+glorious war, the holy war ordained by the pocket Providence that
+blesses butchery. Come along; let's tell the whole family about it. Call
+them from their downy beds, father, mother, Aunt Hitty, and all the
+folks!"
+
+But when they mounted the veranda steps he did not wait for a larger
+audience; he poured the story out upon Editha alone.
+
+"There was a lot of speaking, and then some of the fools set up a shout
+for me. It was all going one way, and I thought it would be a good joke
+to sprinkle a little cold water on them. But you can't do that with a
+crowd that adores you. The first thing I knew I was sprinkling hell-fire
+on them, 'Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.' That was the style.
+Now that it had come to the fight, there were no two parties; there was
+one country, and the thing was to fight the fight to a finish as quick
+as possible. I suggested volunteering then and there, and I wrote my
+name first of all on the roster. Then they elected me--that's all. I
+wish I had some ice-water!"
+
+She left him walking up and down the veranda, while she ran for the
+ice-pitcher and a goblet, and when she came back he was still walking up
+and down, shouting the story he had told her to her father and mother,
+who had come out more sketchily dressed than they commonly were by day.
+He drank goblet after goblet of the ice-water without noticing who was
+giving it, and kept on talking, and laughing through his talk wildly.
+"It's astonishing," he said, "how well the worse reason looks when you
+try to make it appear the better. Why, I believe I was the first convert
+to the war in that crowd to-night! I never thought I should like to kill
+a man; but now, I shouldn't care; and the smokeless powder lets you see
+the man drop that you kill. It's all for the country! What a thing it is
+to have a country that _can't_ be wrong, but if it is, is right anyway!"
+
+Editha had a great, vital thought, an inspiration. She set down the
+ice-pitcher on the veranda floor, and ran up-stairs and got the letter
+she had written him. When at last he noisily bade her father and mother,
+"Well, good night. I forgot I woke you up; I sha'n't want any sleep
+myself," she followed him down the avenue to the gate. There, after the
+whirling words that seemed to fly away from her thoughts and refuse to
+serve them, she made a last effort to solemnize the moment that seemed
+so crazy, and pressed the letter she had written upon him.
+
+"What's this?" he said. "Want me to mail it?"
+
+"No, no. It's for you. I wrote it after you went this morning. Keep
+it--keep it--and read it sometime--" She thought, and then her
+inspiration came: "Read it if ever you doubt what you've done, or fear
+that I regret your having done it. Read it after you've started."
+
+They strained each other in embraces that seemed as ineffective as their
+words, and he kissed her face with quick, hot breaths that were so
+unlike him, that made her feel as if she had lost her old lover and
+found a stranger in his place. The stranger said, "What a gorgeous
+flower you are, with your red hair, and your blue eyes that look black
+now, and your face with the color painted out by the white moonshine!
+Let me hold you under my chin, to see whether I love blood, you
+tiger-lily!" Then he laughed Gearson's laugh, and released her, scared
+and giddy. Within her wilfulness she had been frightened by a sense of
+subtler force in him, and mystically mastered as she had never been
+before.
+
+She ran all the way back to the house, and mounted the steps panting.
+Her mother and father were talking of the great affair. Her mother said:
+"Wa'n't Mr. Gearson in rather of an excited state of mind? Didn't you
+think he acted curious?"
+
+"Well, not for a man who'd just been elected captain and had to set 'em
+up for the whole of Company A," her father chuckled back.
+
+"What in the world do you mean, Mr. Balcom? Oh! There's Editha!" She
+offered to follow the girl indoors.
+
+"Don't come, mother!" Editha called, vanishing.
+
+Mrs. Balcom remained to reproach her husband. "I don't see much of
+anything to laugh at."
+
+"Well, it's catching. Caught it from Gearson. I guess it won't be much
+of a war, and I guess Gearson don't think so, either. The other fellows
+will back down as soon as they see we mean it. I wouldn't lose any sleep
+over it. I'm going back to bed, myself."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gearson came again next afternoon, looking pale, and rather sick, but
+quite himself, even to his languid irony. "I guess I'd better tell you,
+Editha, that I consecrated myself to your god of battles last night by
+pouring too many libations to him down my own throat. But I'm all right,
+now. One has to carry off the excitement, somehow."
+
+"Promise me," she commanded, "that you'll never touch it again!"
+
+"What! Not let the cannikin clink? Not let the soldier drink? Well, I
+promise."
+
+"You don't belong to yourself now; you don't even belong to _me_. You
+belong to your country, and you have a sacred charge to keep yourself
+strong and well for your country's sake. I have been thinking, thinking
+all night and all day long."
+
+"You look as if you had been crying a little, too," he said with his
+queer smile.
+
+"That's all past. I've been thinking, and worshipping _you_. Don't you
+suppose I know all that you've been through, to come to this? I've
+followed you every step from your old theories and opinions."
+
+"Well, you've had a long row to hoe."
+
+"And I know you've done this from the highest motives--"
+
+"Oh, there won't be much pettifogging to do till this cruel war is--"
+
+"And you haven't simply done it for my sake. I couldn't respect you if
+you had."
+
+"Well, then we'll say I haven't. A man that hasn't got his own respect
+intact wants the respect of all the other people he can corner. But we
+won't go into that. I'm in for the thing now, and we've got to face our
+future. My idea is that this isn't going to be a very protracted
+struggle; we shall just scare the enemy to death before it conies to a
+fight at all. But we must provide for contingencies, Editha. If anything
+happens to me--"
+
+"Oh, George!" She clung to him sobbing.
+
+"I don't want you to feel foolishly bound to my memory. I should hate
+that, wherever I happened to be."
+
+"I am yours, for time and eternity--time and eternity." She liked the
+words; they satisfied her famine for phrases.
+
+"Well, say eternity; that's all right; but time's another thing; and I'm
+talking about time. But there is something! My mother! If anything
+happens--"
+
+She winced, and he laughed. "You're not the bold soldier-girl of
+yesterday!" Then he sobered. "If anything happens, I want you to help my
+mother out. She won't like my doing this thing. She brought me up to
+think war a fool thing as well as a bad thing. My father was in the
+civil war; all through it; lost his arm in it." She thrilled with the
+sense of the arm round her; what if that should be lost? He laughed as
+if divining her: "Oh, it doesn't run in the family, as far as I know!"
+Then he added, gravely, "He came home with misgivings about war, and
+they grew on him. I guess he and mother agreed between them that I was
+to be brought up in his final mind about it; but that was before my
+time. I only knew him from my mother's report of him and his opinions; I
+don't know whether they were hers first; but they were hers last. This
+will be a blow to her. I shall have to write and tell her--"
+
+He stopped, and she asked, "Would you like me to write too, George?"
+
+"I don't believe that would do. No, I'll do the writing. She'll
+understand a little if I say that I thought the way to minimize it was
+to make war on the largest possible scale at once--that I felt I must
+have been helping on the war somehow if I hadn't helped keep it from
+coming, and I knew I hadn't; when it came, I had no right to stay out of
+it."
+
+Whether his sophistries satisfied him or not, they satisfied her. She
+clung to his breast, and whispered, with closed eyes and quivering lips,
+"Yes, yes, yes!"
+
+"But if anything should happen, you might go to her, and see what you
+could do for her. You know? It's rather far off; she can't leave her
+chair--"
+
+"Oh, I'll go, if it's the ends of the earth! But nothing will happen!
+Nothing _can_! I--"
+
+She felt herself lifted with his rising, and Gearson was saying, with
+his arm still round her, to her father: "Well, we're off at once, Mr.
+Balcom. We're to be formally accepted at the capital, and then bunched
+up with the rest somehow; and sent into camp somewhere, and got to the
+front as soon as possible. We all want to be in the van, of course;
+we're the first company to report to the Governor. I came to tell
+Editha, but I hadn't got round to it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She saw him again for a moment at the capital, in the station, just
+before the train started southward with his regiment. He looked well, in
+his uniform, and very soldierly, but somehow girlish, too, with his
+clean-shaven face and slim figure. The manly eyes and the strong voice
+satisfied her, and his preoccupation with some unexpected details of
+duty flattered her. Other girls were weeping, but she felt a sort of
+noble distinction in the abstraction with which they parted. Only at the
+last moment he said, "Don't forget my mother. It mayn't be such a
+walk-over as I supposed," and he laughed at the notion.
+
+He waved his hand to her, as the train moved off--she knew it among a
+score of hands that were waved to other girls from the platform of the
+car, for it held a letter which she knew was hers. Then he went inside
+the car to read it, doubtless, and she did not see him again. But she
+felt safe for him through the strength of what she called her love. What
+she called her God, always speaking the name in a deep voice and with
+the implication of a mutual understanding, would watch over him and keep
+him and bring him back to her. If with an empty sleeve, then he should
+have three arms instead of two, for both of hers should be his for life.
+She did not see, though, why she should always be thinking of the arm
+his father had lost.
+
+There were not many letters from him, but they were such as she could
+have wished, and she put her whole strength into making hers such as she
+imagined he could have wished, glorifying and supporting him. She wrote
+to his mother, but the brief answer she got was merely to the effect
+that Mrs. Gearson was not well enough to write herself, and thanking her
+for her letter by the hand of some one who called herself "Yrs truly,
+Mrs. W.J. Andrews."
+
+Editha determined not to be hurt, but to write again quite as if the
+answer had been all she expected. But before it seemed as if she could
+have written, there came news of the first skirmish, and in the list of
+the killed which was telegraphed as a trifling loss on our side, was
+Gearson's name. There was a frantic time of trying to make out that it
+might be, must be, some other Gearson; but the name, and the company and
+the regiment, and the State were too definitely given.
+
+Then there was a lapse into depths out of which it seemed as if she
+never could rise again; then a lift into clouds far above all grief,
+black clouds, that blotted out the sun, but where she soared with him,
+with George, George! She had the fever that she expected of herself, but
+she did not die in it; she was not even delirious, and it did not last
+long. When she was well enough to leave her bed, her one thought was of
+George's mother, of his strangely worded wish that she should go to her
+and see what she could do for her. In the exaltation of the duty laid
+upon her--it buoyed her up instead of burdening her--she rapidly
+recovered.
+
+Her father went with her on the long railroad journey from northern New
+York to western Iowa; he had business out at Davenport, and he said he
+could just as well go then as any other time; and he went with her to
+the little country town where George's mother lived in a little house on
+the edge of illimitable corn-fields, under trees pushed to a top of the
+rolling prairie. George's father had settled there after the civil war,
+as so many other old soldiers had done; but they were Eastern people,
+and Editha fancied touches of the East in the June rose overhanging the
+front door, and the garden with early summer flowers stretching from the
+gate of the paling fence.
+
+It was very low inside the house, and so dim, with the closed blinds,
+that they could scarcely see one another: Editha tall and black in her
+crapes which filled the air with the smell of their dyes; her father
+standing decorously apart with his hat on his forearm, as at funerals; a
+woman rested in a deep armchair, and the woman who had let the strangers
+in stood behind the chair.
+
+The seated woman turned her head round and up, and asked the woman
+behind her chair, "_Who_ did you say?"
+
+Editha, if she had done what she expected of herself, would have gone
+down on her knees at the feet of the seated figure and said, "I am
+George's Editha," for answer.
+
+But instead of her own voice she heard that other woman's voice, saying,
+"Well, I don't know as I _did_ get the name just right. I guess I'll
+have to make a little more light in here," and she went and pushed two
+of the shutters ajar.
+
+Then Editha's father said in his public will-now-address-a-few-remarks
+tone, "My name is Balcom, ma'am; Junius H. Balcom, of Balcom's Works,
+New York; my daughter--"
+
+"Oh!" The seated woman broke in, with a powerful voice, the voice that
+always surprised Editha from Gearson's slender frame. "Let me see you!
+Stand round where the light can strike on your face," and Editha dumbly
+obeyed. "So, you're Editha Balcom," she sighed.
+
+"Yes," Editha said, more like a culprit than a comforter.
+
+"What did you come for?"
+
+Editha's face quivered, and her knees shook. "I came--because--because
+George--" She could go no farther.
+
+"Yes," the mother said, "he told me he had asked you to come if he got
+killed. You didn't expect that, I suppose, when you sent him."
+
+"I would rather have died myself than done it!" Editha said with more
+truth in her deep voice than she ordinarily found in it. "I tried to
+leave him free--"
+
+"Yes, that letter of yours, that came back with his other things, left
+him free."
+
+Editha saw now where George's irony came from.
+
+"It was not to be read before--unless--until--I told him so," she
+faltered.
+
+"Of course, he wouldn't read a letter of yours, under the circumstances,
+till he thought you wanted him to. Been sick?" the woman abruptly
+demanded.
+
+"Very sick," Editha said, with self-pity.
+
+"Daughter's life," her father interposed, "was almost despaired of, at
+one time."
+
+Mrs. Gearson gave him no heed. "I suppose you would have been glad to
+die, such a brave person as you! I don't believe _he_ was glad to die.
+He was always a timid boy, that way; he was afraid of a good many
+things; but if he was afraid he did what he made up his mind to. I
+suppose he made up his mind to go, but I knew what it cost him, by what
+it cost me when I heard of it. I had been through _one_ war before. When
+you sent him you didn't expect he would get killed."
+
+The voice seemed to compassionate Editha, and it was time. "No," she
+huskily murmured.
+
+"No, girls don't; women don't, when they give their men up to their
+country. They think they'll come marching back, somehow, just as gay as
+they went, or if it's an empty sleeve, or even an empty pantaloon, it's
+all the more glory, and they're so much the prouder of them, poor
+things."
+
+The tears began to run down Editha's face; she had not wept till then;
+but it was now such a relief to be understood that the tears came.
+
+"No, you didn't expect him to get killed," Mrs. Gearson repeated in a
+voice which was startlingly like George's again. "You just expected him
+to kill some one else, some of those foreigners, that weren't there
+because they had any say about it, but because they had to be there,
+poor wretches--conscripts, or whatever they call 'em. You thought it
+would be all right for my George, _your_ George, to kill the sons of
+those miserable mothers and the husbands of those girls that you would
+never see the faces of." The woman lifted her powerful voice in a
+psalmlike note. "I thank my God he didn't live to do it! I thank my God
+they killed him first, and that he ain't livin' with their blood on his
+hands!" She dropped her eyes which she had raised with her voice, and
+glared at Editha. "What you got that black on for?" She lifted herself
+by her powerful arms so high that her helpless body seemed to hang limp
+its full length. "Take it off, take it off, before I tear it from your
+back!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The lady who was passing the summer near Balcom's Works was sketching
+Editha's beauty, which lent itself wonderfully to the effects of a
+colorist. It had come to that confidence which is rather apt to grow
+between artist and sitter, and Editha had told her everything.
+
+"To think of your having such a tragedy in your life!" the lady said.
+She added: "I suppose there are people who feel that way about war. But
+when you consider how much this war has done for the country! I can't
+understand such people, for my part. And when you had come all the way
+out there to console her--got up out of a sick bed! Well!"
+
+"I think," Editha said, magnanimously, "she wasn't quite in her right
+mind; and so did papa."
+
+"Yes," the lady said, looking at Editha's lips in nature and then at her
+lips in art, and giving an empirical touch to them in the picture. "But
+how dreadful of her! How perfectly--excuse me--how _vulgar_!"
+
+A light broke upon Editha in the darkness which she felt had been
+without a gleam of brightness for weeks and months. The mystery that had
+bewildered her was solved by the word; and from that moment she rose
+from grovelling in shame and self-pity, and began to live again in the
+ideal.
+
+
+
+
+The Stout Miss Hopkins's Bicycle
+
+BY OCTAVE THANET
+
+
+There was a skeleton in Mrs. Margaret Ellis's closet; the same skeleton
+abode also in the closet of Miss Lorania Hopkins.
+
+The skeleton--which really does not seem a proper word--was the dread of
+growing stout. They were more afraid of flesh than of sin. Yet they were
+both good women. Mrs. Ellis regularly attended church, and could always
+be depended on to show hospitality to convention delegates, whether
+clerical or lay; she was a liberal subscriber to every good work; she
+was almost the only woman in the church aid society that never lost her
+temper at the soul-vexing time of the church fair; and she had a larger
+clientele of regular pensioners than any one in town, unless it were her
+friend Miss Hopkins, who was "so good to the poor" that never a tramp
+slighted her kitchen. Miss Hopkins was as amiable as Mrs. Ellis, and
+always put her name under that of Mrs. Ellis, with exactly the same
+amount, on the subscription papers. She could have given more, for she
+had the larger income; but she had no desire to outshine her friend,
+whom she admired as the most charming of women.
+
+Mrs. Ellis, indeed, was agreeable as well as good, and a pretty woman to
+the bargain, if she did not choose to be weighed before people. Miss
+Hopkins often told her that she was not really stout; she merely had a
+plump, trig little figure. Miss Hopkins, alas! was really stout. The two
+waged a warfare against the flesh equal to the apostle's in vigor,
+although so much less deserving of praise.
+
+Mrs. Ellis drove her cook to distraction with divers dieting systems,
+from Banting's and Dr. Salisbury's to the latest exhortations of some
+unknown newspaper prophet. She bought elaborate gymnastic appliances,
+and swung dumb-bells and rode imaginary horses and propelled imaginary
+boats. She ran races with a professional trainer, and she studied the
+principles of Delsarte, and solemnly whirled on one foot and swayed her
+body and rolled her head and hopped and kicked and genuflected in
+company with eleven other stout and earnest matrons and one slim and
+giggling girl who almost choked at every lesson. In all these exercises
+Miss Hopkins faithfully kept her company, which was the easier as Miss
+Hopkins lived in the next house, a conscientious Colonial mansion with
+all the modern conveniences hidden beneath the old-fashioned pomp.
+
+And yet, despite these struggles and self-denials, it must be told that
+Margaret Ellis and Lorania Hopkins were little thinner for their
+warfare. Still, as Shuey Cardigan, the trainer, told Mrs. Ellis, there
+was no knowing what they might have weighed had they not struggled.
+
+"It ain't only the fat that's _on_ ye, moind ye," says Shuey, with a
+confidential sympathy of mien; "it's what ye'd naturally be getting in
+addition. And first ye've got to peel off that, and then ye come down to
+the other."
+
+Shuey was so much the most successful of Mrs. Ellis's reducers that his
+words were weighty. And when at last Shuey said, "I got what you need,"
+Mrs. Ellis listened. "You need a bike, no less," says Shuey.
+
+"But I never could ride one!" said Margaret, opening her pretty brown
+eyes and wrinkling her Grecian forehead.
+
+"You'd ride in six lessons."
+
+"But how would I _look_, Cardigan?"
+
+"You'd look noble, ma'am!"
+
+"What do you consider the best wheel, Cardigan?"
+
+The advertising rules of magazines prevent my giving Cardigan's answer;
+it is enough that the wheel glittered at Mrs. Ellis's door the very next
+day, and that a large pasteboard box was delivered by the expressman the
+very next week. He went on to Miss Hopkins's, and delivered the twin of
+the box, with a similar yellow printed card bearing the impress of the
+same great firm on the inside of the box cover.
+
+For Margaret had hied her to Lorania Hopkins the instant Shuey was gone.
+She presented herself breathless, a little to the embarrassment of
+Lorania, who was sitting with her niece before a large box of
+cracker-jack.
+
+"It's a new kind of candy; I was just _tasting_ it, Maggie," faltered
+she, while the niece, a girl of nineteen, with the inhuman spirits of
+her age, laughed aloud.
+
+"You needn't mind me," said Mrs. Ellis, cheerfully; "I'm eating
+potatoes now!"
+
+"Oh, Maggie!" Miss Hopkins breathed the words between envy and
+disapproval.
+
+Mrs. Ellis tossed her brown head airily, not a whit abashed. "And I had
+beer for luncheon, and I'm going to have champagne for dinner."
+
+"Maggie, how do you dare? Did they--did they taste good?"
+
+"They tasted _heavenly_, Lorania. Pass me the candy. I am going to try
+something new--the thinningest thing there is. I read in the paper of
+one woman who lost forty pounds in three months, and is losing still!"
+
+"If it is obesity pills, I--"
+
+"It isn't; it's a bicycle. Lorania, you and I must ride! Sibyl Hopkins,
+you heartless child, what are you laughing at?"
+
+Lorania rose; in the glass over the mantel her figure returned her gaze.
+There was no mistake (except that, as is often the case with stout
+people, _that_ glass always increased her size), she was a stout lady.
+She was taller than the average of women, and well proportioned, and
+still light on her feet; but she could not blink away the records; she
+was heavy on the scales. Did she stand looking at herself squarely, her
+form was shapely enough, although larger than she could wish; but the
+full force of the revelation fell when she allowed herself a profile
+view, she having what is called "a round waist," and being almost as
+large one way as another. Yet Lorania was only thirty-three years old,
+and was of no mind to retire from society, and have a special phaeton
+built for her use, and hear from her mother's friends how much her
+mother weighed before her death.
+
+"How should _I_ look on a wheel?" she asked, even as Mrs. Ellis had
+asked before; and Mrs. Ellis stoutly answered, "You'd look _noble_!"
+
+"Shuey will teach us," she went on, "and we can have a track made in
+your pasture, where nobody can see us learning. Lorania, there's nothing
+like it. Let me bring you the bicycle edition of _Harper's Bazar_."
+
+Miss Hopkins capitulated at once, and sat down to order her costume,
+while Sibyl, the niece, revelled silently in visions of a new bicycle
+which should presently revert to her. "For it's ridiculous, auntie's
+thinking of riding!" Miss Sibyl considered. "She would be a figure of
+fun on a wheel; besides, she can never learn in this world!"
+
+Yet Sibyl was attached to her aunt, and enjoyed visiting Hopkins Manor,
+as Lorania had named her new house, into which she moved on the same day
+that she joined the Colonial Dames, by right of her ancestor the great
+and good divine commemorated by Mrs. Stowe. Lorania's friends were all
+fond of her, she was so good-natured and tolerant, with a touch of dry
+humor in her vision of things, and not the least a Puritan in her frank
+enjoyment of ease and luxury. Nevertheless, Lorania had a good,
+able-bodied, New England conscience, capable of staying awake nights
+without flinching; and perhaps from her stanch old Puritan forefathers
+she inherited her simple integrity so that she neither lied nor
+cheated--even in the small, whitewashed manner of her sex--and valued
+loyalty above most of the virtues. She had an innocent pride in her
+godly and martial ancestry, which was quite on the surface, and led
+people who did not know her to consider her haughty.
+
+For fifteen years she had been an orphan, the mistress of a very large
+estate. No doubt she had been sought often in marriage, but never until
+lately had Lorania seriously thought of marrying. Sibyl said that she
+was too unsentimental to marry. Really she was too romantic. She had a
+longing to be loved, not in the quiet, matter-of-fact manner of her
+suitors, but with the passion of the poets. Therefore the presence of
+another skeleton in Mrs. Ellis's closet, because she knew about a
+certain handsome Italian marquis who at this period was conducting an
+impassioned wooing by mail. Margaret did not fancy the marquis. He was
+not an American. He would take Lorania away. She thought his very virtue
+florid, and suspected that he had learned his love-making in a bad
+school. She dropped dark hints that frightened Lorania, who would
+sometimes piteously demand, "Don't you think he _could_ care for
+me--for--for myself?" Margaret knew that she had an overweening distrust
+of her own appearance. How many tears she had shed first and last over
+her unhappy plumpness it would be hard to reckon. She made no account of
+her satin skin, or her glossy black hair, or her lustrous violet eyes
+with their long, black lashes, or her flashing white teeth; she glanced
+dismally at her shape and scornfully at her features, good, honest,
+irregular American features, that might not satisfy a Greek critic, but
+suited each other and pleased her countrymen. And then she would sigh
+heavily over her figure. Her friend had not the heart to impute the
+marquis's beautiful, artless compliments to mercenary motives. After
+all, the Italian was a good fellow, according to the point of view of
+his own race, if he did intend to live on his wife's money, and had a
+very varied assortment of memories of women.
+
+But Margaret dreaded and disliked him all the more for his good
+qualities. To-day this secret apprehension flung a cloud over the
+bicycle enthusiasm. She could not help wondering whether at this moment
+Lorania was not thinking of the marquis, who rode a wheel and a horse
+admirably.
+
+"Aunt Lorania," said Sibyl, "there comes Mr. Winslow. Shall I run out
+and ask him about those cloth-of-gold roses? The aphides are eating them
+all up."
+
+"Yes, to be sure, dear; but don't let Ferguson suspect what you are
+talking of; he might feel hurt."
+
+Ferguson was the gardener. Miss Hopkins left her note to go to the
+window. Below she saw a mettled horse, with tossing head and silken
+skin, restlessly fretting on his bit and pawing the dust in front of
+the fence, while his rider, hat in hand, talked with the young girl. He
+was a little man, a very little man, in a gray business suit of the best
+cut and material. An air of careful and dainty neatness was diffused
+about both horse and rider. He bent towards Miss Sibyl's charming person
+a thin, alert, fair face. His head was finely shaped, the brown hair
+worn away a little on the temples. He smiled gravely at intervals; the
+smile told that he had a dimple in his cheek.
+
+"I wonder," said Mrs. Ellis, "whether Mr. Winslow can have a penchant
+for Sibyl?"
+
+Lorania opened her eyes. At this moment Mr. Winslow had caught sight of
+her at the window, and he bowed almost to his saddle-bow; Sibyl was
+saying something at which she laughed, and he visibly reddened. It was a
+peculiarity of his that his color turned easily. In a second his hat was
+on his head and his horse bounded half across the road.
+
+"Hardly, I think," said Lorania. "How well he rides! I never knew any
+one ride better--in this country."
+
+"I suppose Sibyl would ridicule such a thing," said Mrs. Ellis,
+continuing her own train of thought, and yet vaguely disturbed by the
+last sentence.
+
+"Why should she?"
+
+"Well, he is so little, for one thing, and she is so tall. And then
+Sibyl thinks a great deal of social position."
+
+"He is a Winslow," said Lorania, archin her neck unconsciously--"a
+lineal descendant from Kenelm Winslow, who came over in the _May_--"
+
+"But his mother--"
+
+"I don't know anything about his mother before she came here. Oh, of
+course I know the gossip that she was a niece of the overseer at a
+village poor-house, and that her husband quarrelled with all his family
+and married her in the poor-house, and I know that when he died here she
+would not take a cent from the Winslows, nor let them have the boy. She
+is the meekest-looking little woman, but she must have an iron streak in
+her somewhere, for she was left without enough money to pay the funeral
+expenses, and she educated the boy and accumulated money enough to pay
+for this place they have.
+
+"She used to run a laundry, and made money; but when Cyril got a place
+in the bank she sold out the laundry and went into chickens and
+vegetables; she told somebody that it wasn't so profitable as the
+laundry, but it was more genteel, and Cyril being now in a position of
+trust at the bank, she must consider _him_. Cyril swept out the bank.
+People laughed about it, but, do you know, I rather liked Mrs. Winslow
+for it. She isn't in the least an assertive woman. How long have we been
+up here, Maggie? Isn't it four years? And they have been our next-door
+neighbors, and she has never been inside the house. Nor he either, for
+that matter, except once when it took fire, you know, and he came in
+with that funny little chemical engine tucked under his arm, and took
+off his hat in the same prim, polite way that he takes it off when he
+talks to Sibyl, and said, 'If you'll excuse me offering advice, Miss
+Hopkins, it is not necessary to move anything; it mars furniture very
+much to move it at a fire. I think, if you will allow me, I can
+extinguish this.' And he did, too, didn't he, as neatly and as coolly as
+if it were only adding up a column of figures. And offered me the engine
+as a souvenir."
+
+"Lorania, you never told me that!"
+
+"It seemed like making fun of him, when he had been so kind. I declined
+as civilly as I could. I hope I didn't hurt his feelings. I meant to pay
+a visit to his mother and ask them to dinner, but you know I went to
+England that week, and somehow when I came back it was difficult. It
+seems a little odd we never have seen more of the Winslows, but I fancy
+they don't want either to intrude or to be intruded on. But he is
+certainly very obliging about the garden. Think of all the slips and
+flowers he has given us, and the advice--"
+
+"All passed over the fence. It is funny our neighborly good offices
+which we render at arm's-length. How long have you known him?"
+
+"Oh, a long time. He is cashier of my bank, you know. First he was
+teller, then assistant cashier, and now for five years he has been
+cashier. The president wants to resign and let him be president, but he
+hardly has enough stock for that. But Oliver says" (Oliver was Miss
+Hopkins's brother) "that there isn't a shrewder or straighter banker in
+the state. Oliver knows him. He says he is a sandy little fellow."
+
+"Well, he is," assented Mrs. Ellis. "It isn't many cashiers would let
+robbers stab them and shoot them and leave them for dead rather than
+give up the combination of the safe!"
+
+"He wouldn't take a cent for it, either, and he saved ever so many
+thousand dollars. Yes, he _is_ brave. I went to the same school with him
+once, and saw him fight a big boy twice his size--such a nasty boy, who
+called me 'Fatty,' and made a kissing noise with his lips just to scare
+me--and poor little Cyril Winslow got awfully beaten, and when I saw him
+on the ground, with his nose bleeding and that big brute pounding him, I
+ran to the water-bucket, and poured the whole bucket on that big,
+bullying boy and stopped the fight, just as the teacher got on the
+scene. I cried over little Cyril Winslow. He was crying himself. 'I
+ain't crying because he hurt me,' he sobbed; 'I'm crying because I'm so
+mad I didn't lick him!' I wonder if he remembers that episode?"
+
+"Perhaps," said Mrs. Ellis.
+
+"Maggie, what makes you think he is falling in love with Sibyl?"
+
+Mrs. Ellis laughed. "I dare say he _isn't_ in love with Sibyl," said
+she. "I think the main reason was his always riding by here instead of
+taking the shorter road down the other street."
+
+"Does he always ride by here? I hadn't noticed."
+
+"Always!" said Mrs. Ellis. "_I_ have noticed."
+
+"I am sorry for him," said Lorania, musingly. "I think Sibyl is very
+much taken with that young Captain Carr at the Arsenal. Young girls
+always affect the army. He is a nice fellow, but I don't think he is
+the man Winslow is. Now, Maggie, advise me about the suit. I don't want
+to look like the escaped fat lady of a museum."
+
+Lorania thought no more of Sibyl's love-affairs. If she thought of the
+Winslows, it was to wish that Mrs. Winslow would sell or rent her
+pasture, which, in addition to her own and Mrs. Ellis's pastures thrown
+into one, would make such a delightful bicycle-track.
+
+The Winslow house was very different from the two villas that were the
+pride of Fairport. A little story-and-a-half cottage peeped out on the
+road behind the tall maples that were planted when Winslow was a boy.
+But there was a wonderful green velvet lawn, and the tulips and
+sweet-peas and pansies that blazed softly nearer the house were as
+beautiful as those over which Miss Lorania's gardener toiled and
+worried.
+
+Mrs. Winslow was a little woman who showed the fierce struggle of her
+early life only in the deeper lines between her delicate eyebrows and
+the expression of melancholy patience in her brown eyes.
+
+She always wore a widow's cap and a black gown. In the mornings she
+donned a blue figured apron of stout and serviceable stuff; in the
+afternoon an apron of that sheer white lawn used by bishops and smart
+young waitresses. Of an afternoon, in warm weather, she was accustomed
+to sit on the eastern piazza, next to the Hopkins place, and rock as she
+sewed. She was thus sitting and sewing when she beheld an extraordinary
+procession cross the Hopkins lawn. First marched the tall trainer, Shuey
+Cardigan, who worked by day in the Lossing furniture-factory, and gave
+bicycle lessons at the armory evenings. He was clad in a white sweater
+and buff leggings, and was wheeling a lady's bicycle. Behind him walked
+Miss Hopkins in a gray suit, the skirt of which only came to her
+ankles--she always so dignified in her toilets.
+
+"Land's sakes!" gasped Mrs. Winslow, "if she ain't going to ride a bike!
+Well, what next?"
+
+What really happened next was the sneaking (for no other word does
+justice to the cautious and circuitous movements of her) of Mrs. Winslow
+to the stable, which had one window facing the Hopkins pasture. No cows
+were grazing in the pasture. All around the grassy plateau twinkled a
+broad brownish-yellow track. At one side of this track a bench had been
+placed, and a table, pleasing to the eye, with jugs and glasses. Mrs.
+Ellis, in a suit of the same undignified brevity and ease as Miss
+Hopkins's, sat on the bench supporting her own wheel. Shuey Cardigan was
+drawn up to his full six feet of strength, and, one arm in the air, was
+explaining the theory of the balance of power. It was an uncanny moment
+to Lorania. She eyed the glistening, restless thing that slipped beneath
+her hand, and her fingers trembled. If she could have fled in secret she
+would. But since flight was not possible, she assumed a firm expression.
+Mrs. Ellis wore a smile of studied and sickly cheerfulness.
+
+"Don't you think it very _high_?" said Lorania. "I can _never_ get up on
+it!"
+
+"It will be by the block at first," said Shuey, in the soothing tones of
+a jockey to a nervous horse; "it's easy by the block. And I'll be
+steadying it, of course."
+
+"Don't they have any with larger saddles? It is a _very_ small saddle."
+
+"They're all of a size. It wouldn't look sporty larger; it would look
+like a special make. Yous wouldn't want a special make."
+
+Lorania thought that she would be thankful for a special make, but she
+suppressed the unsportsmanlike thought. "The pedals are very small too,
+Cardigan. Are you _sure_ they can hold me?"
+
+"They would hold two of ye, Miss Hopkins. Now sit aisy and graceful as
+ye would on your chair at home, hold the shoulders back, and toe in a
+bit on the pedals--ye won't be skinning your ankles so much then--and
+hold your foot up ready to get the other pedal. Hold light on the
+steering-bar. Push off hard. _Now!_"
+
+"Will you hold me? I am going--Oh, it's like riding an earthquake!"
+
+Here Shuey made a run, letting the wheel have its own wild way--to reach
+the balance. "Keep the front wheel under you!" he cried, cheerfully.
+"Niver mind _where_ you go. Keep a-pedalling; whatever you do, keep
+a-pedalling!"
+
+"But I haven't got but one pedal!" gasped the rider.
+
+"Ye lost it?"
+
+"No; I _never had_ but one! Oh, don't let me fall!"
+
+"Oh, ye lost it in the beginning; now, then, I'll hold it steady, and
+you get both feet right. Here we go!"
+
+Swaying frightfully from side to side, and wrenched from capsizing the
+wheel by the full exercise of Shuey's great muscles, Miss Hopkins reeled
+over the track. At short intervals she lost her pedals, and her feet,
+for some strange reason, instead of seeking the lost, simply curled up
+as if afraid of being hit. She gripped the steering-handles with an iron
+grasp, and her turns were such as an engine makes. Nevertheless, Shuey
+got her up the track for some hundred feet, and then by a herculean
+sweep turned her round and rolled her back to the block. It was at this
+painful moment, when her whole being was concentrated on the effort to
+keep from toppling against Shuey, and even more to keep from toppling
+away from him, that Lorania's strained gaze suddenly fell on the
+frightened and sympathetic face of Mrs. Winslow. The good woman saw no
+fun in the spectacle, but rather an awful risk to life and limb. Their
+eyes met. Not a change passed over Miss Hopkins's features; but she
+looked up as soon as she was safe on the ground, and smiled. In a
+moment, before Mrs. Winslow could decide whether to run or to stand her
+ground, she saw the cyclist approaching--on foot.
+
+"Won't you come in and sit down?" she said, smiling. "We are trying our
+new wheels."
+
+And because she did not know how to refuse, Mrs. Winslow suffered
+herself to be handed over the fence. She sat on the bench beside Miss
+Hopkins in the prim attitude which had pertained to gentility in her
+youth, her hands loosely clasping each other, her feet crossed at the
+ankles.
+
+"It's an awful sight, ain't it?" she breathed, "those little shiny
+things; I don't see how you ever git on them."
+
+"I don't get on them," said Miss Hopkins. "The only way I shall ever
+learn to start off is to start without the pedals. Does your son ride,
+Mrs. Winslow?"
+
+"No, ma'am," said Mrs. Winslow; "but he knows how. When he was a boy
+nothing would do but he must have a bicycle, one of those things most as
+big as a mill wheel, and if you fell off you broke yourself somewhere,
+sure. I always expected he'd be brought home in pieces. So I don't think
+he'd have any manner of difficulty. Why, look at your friend; she's
+'most riding alone!"
+
+"She could always do everything better than I," cried Lorania, with
+ungrudging admiration. "See how she jumps off! Now I can't jump off any
+more than I can jump on. It seems so ridiculous to be told to press hard
+on the pedal on the side where you want to jump, and swing your further
+leg over first, and cut a kind of a figure eight with your legs, and
+turn your wheel the way you don't want to go--all at once. While I'm
+trying to think of all those directions I always fall off. I got that
+wheel only yesterday, and fell before I even got away from the block.
+One of my arms looks like a Persian ribbon."
+
+Mrs. Winslow cried out in unfeigned sympathy. She wished Miss Hopkins
+would use her liniment that she used for Cyril when he was hurt by the
+burglars at the bank; he was bruised "terrible."
+
+"That must have been an awful time to you," said Lorania, looking with
+more interest than she had ever felt on the meek little woman; and she
+noticed the tremble in the decorously clasped hands.
+
+"Yes, ma'am," was all she said.
+
+"I've often looked over at you on the piazza, and thought how cosey you
+looked. Mr. Winslow always seems to be at home evenings."
+
+"Yes, ma'am. We sit a great deal on the piazza. Cyril's a good boy; he
+wa'n't nine when his father died; and he's been like a man helping me.
+There never was a boy had such willing little feet. And he'd set right
+there on the steps and pat my slipper and say what he'd git me when he
+got to earning money; and he's got me every last thing, foolish and all,
+that he said. There's that black satin gown, a sin and a shame for a
+plain body like me, but he would git it. Cyril's got a beautiful
+disposition too, jest like his pa's, and he's a handy man about the
+house, and prompt at his meals. I wonder sometimes if Cyril was to git
+married if his wife would mind his running over now and then and setting
+with me awhile."
+
+She was speaking more rapidly, and her eyes strayed wistfully over to
+the Hopkins piazza, where Sibyl was sitting with the young soldier.
+Lorania looked at her pityingly.
+
+"Why, surely," said she.
+
+"Mothers have kinder selfish feelings," said Mrs. Winslow, moistening
+her lips and drawing a quick breath, still watching the girl on the
+piazza. "It's so sweet and peaceful for them, they forget their sons may
+want something more. But it's kinder hard giving all your little
+comforts up at once when you've had him right with you so long, and
+could cook just what he liked, and go right into his room nights if he
+coughed. It's all right, all right, but it's kinder hard. And beautiful
+young ladies that have had everything all their lives might--might not
+understand that a homespun old mother isn't wanting to force herself on
+them at all when they have company, and they have no call to fear it."
+
+There was no doubt, however obscure the words seemed, that Mrs. Winslow
+had a clear purpose in her mind, nor that she was tremendously in
+earnest. Little blotches of red dabbled her cheeks, her breath came more
+quickly, and she swallowed between her words. Lorania could see the
+quiver in the muscles of her throat. She clasped her hands tight lest
+they should shake. "He's in love with Sibyl," thought Lorania. "The poor
+woman!" She felt sorry for her, and she spoke gently and reassuringly:
+
+"No girl with a good heart can help feeling tenderly towards her
+husband's mother."
+
+Mrs. Winslow nodded. "You're real comforting," said she. She was silent
+a moment, and then said, in a different tone: "You 'ain't got a large
+enough track. Wouldn't you like to have our pasture too?"
+
+Lorania expressed her gratitude, and invited the Winslows to see the
+practice.
+
+"My niece will come out to-morrow," she said, graciously.
+
+"Yes? She's a real fine-appearing young lady," said Mrs. Winslow.
+
+Both the cyclists exulted. Neither of them, however, was prepared to
+behold the track made and the fence down the very next morning when
+they came out, about ten o'clock, to the west side of Miss Hopkins's
+boundaries.
+
+"As sure as you live, Maggie," exclaimed Lorania, eagerly, "he's got it
+all done! Now that is something like a lover. I only hope his heart
+won't be bruised as black and blue as I am with the wheel!"
+
+"Shuey says the only harm your falls do you is to take away your
+confidence," said Mrs. Ellis.
+
+"He wouldn't say so if he could see my _knees_!" retorted Miss Hopkins.
+
+Mrs. Ellis, it will be observed, sheered away from the love-affairs of
+Mr. Cyril Winslow. She had not yet made up her mind. And Mrs. Ellis, who
+had been married, did not jump at conclusions regarding the heart of man
+so rapidly as her spinster friend. She preferred to talk of the bicycle.
+Nor did Miss Hopkins refuse the subject. To her at this moment the most
+important object on the globe was the shining machine which she would
+allow no hand but hers to oil and dust. Both Mrs. Ellis and she were
+simply prostrated (as to their mental powers) by this new sport. They
+could not think nor talk nor read of anything but _the wheel_. This is a
+peculiarity of the bicyclist. No other sport appears to make such havoc
+with the mind.
+
+One can learn to swim without describing his sensations to every casual
+acquaintance or hunting up the natatorial columns in the newspapers. One
+may enjoy riding a horse and yet go about his ordinary business with an
+equal mind. One learns to play golf and still remains a peaceful citizen
+who can discuss politics with interest. But the cyclist, man or woman,
+is soaked in every pore with the delight and the perils of wheeling. He
+talks of it (as he thinks of it) incessantly. For this fatuous passion
+there is one excuse. Other sports have the fearful delight of danger and
+the pleasure of the consciousness of dexterity and the dogged
+Anglo-Saxon joy of combat and victory; but no other sport restores to
+middle age the pure, exultant, muscular intoxication of childhood. Only
+on the wheel can an elderly woman feel as she felt when she ran and
+leaped and frolicked amid the flowers as a child.
+
+Lorania, of course, no longer jumped or ran; she kicked in the Delsarte
+exercises, but it was a measured, calculated, one may say cold-blooded
+kick, which limbered her muscles but did not restore her youthful glow
+of soul. Her legs and not her spirits pranced. The same thing may be
+said for Margaret Ellis. Now, between their accidents, they obtained
+glimpses of an exquisite exhilaration. And there was also to be counted
+the approval of their consciences, for they felt that no Turkish bath
+could wring out moisture from their systems like half an hour's pumping
+at the bicycle treadles. Lorania during the month had ridden through one
+bottle of liniment and two of witch-hazel, and by the end of the second
+bottle could ride a short distance alone. But Lorania could not yet
+dismount unassisted, and several times she had felled poor Winslow to
+the earth when he rashly adventured to stop her. Captain Carr had a
+peculiar, graceful fling of the arm, catching the saddle-bar with one
+hand while he steadied the handles with the other. He did not hesitate
+in the least to grab Lorania's belt if necessary. But poor modest
+Winslow, who fell upon the wheel and dared not touch the hem of a lady's
+bicycle skirt, was as one in the path of a cyclone, and appeared daily
+in a fresh pair of white trousers.
+
+"Yous have now," Shuey remarked, impressively, one day--"yous have now
+arrived at the most difficult and dangerous period in learning the
+wheel. It's similar to a baby when it's first learned to walk but
+'ain't yet got sense in walking. When it was little it would stay put
+wherever ye put it, and it didn't know enough to go by itself, which is
+similar to you. When I was holding ye you couldn't fall, but now you're
+off alone depindent on yourself, object-struck by every tree, taking
+most of the pasture to turn in, and not able to git off save by
+falling--"
+
+"Oh, couldn't you go with her somehow?" exclaimed Mrs. Winslow, appalled
+at the picture. "Wouldn't a rope round her be some help? I used to put
+it round Cyril when he was learning to walk."
+
+"Well, no, ma'am," said Shuey, patiently. "Don't you be scared; the
+riding will come; she's getting on grandly. And ye should see Mr.
+Winslow. 'Tis a pleasure to teach him. He rode in one lesson. I ain't
+learning him nothing but tricks now."
+
+"But, Mr. Winslow, why don't you ride here--with us?" said Sibyl, with
+her coquettish and flattering smile. "We're always hearing of your
+beautiful riding. Are we never to see it?"
+
+"I think Mr. Winslow is waiting for that swell English cycle suit that I
+hear about," said the captain, grinning; and Winslow grew red to his
+eyelids.
+
+Lorania gave an indignant side glance at Sibyl. Why need the girl make
+game of an honest man who loved her? Sibyl was biting her lips and
+darting side glances at the captain. She called the pasture practice
+slow, but she seemed, nevertheless, to enjoy herself sitting on the
+bench, the captain on one side and Winslow on the other, rattling off
+her girlish jokes, while her aunt and Mrs. Ellis, with the anxious, set
+faces of the beginner, were pedalling frantically after Cardigan.
+Lorania began to pity Winslow, for it was growing plain to her that
+Sibyl and the captain understood each other. She thought that even if
+Sibyl did care for the soldier, she need not be so careless of Winslow's
+feelings. She talked with the cashier herself, trying to make amends for
+Sibyl's absorption in the other man, and she admired the fortitude that
+concealed the pain that he must feel. It became quite the expected thing
+for the Winslows to be present at the practice; but Winslow had not yet
+appeared on his wheel. He used to bring a box of candy with him, or
+rather three boxes--one for each lady, he said--and a box of peppermints
+for his mother. He was always very attentive to his mother.
+
+"And fancy, Aunt Margaret," laughed Sibyl, "he has asked both auntie
+and me to the theatre. He is not going to compromise himself by singling
+one of us out. He's a careful soul. By the way, Aunt Margaret, Mrs.
+Winslow was telling me yesterday that I am the image of auntie at my
+age. Am I? Do I look like her? Was she as slender as I?"
+
+"Almost," said Mrs. Ellis, who was not so inflexibly truthful as her
+friend.
+
+"No, Sibyl," said Lorania, with a deep, deep sigh, "I was always plump;
+I was a chubby _child_! And oh, what do you think I heard in the crowd
+at Manly's once? One woman said to another, 'Miss Hopkins has got a
+wheel.' 'Miss Sibyl?' said the other. 'No; the stout Miss Hopkins,' said
+the first creature; and the second--" Lorania groaned.
+
+"What _did_ she say to make you feel that way?"
+
+"She said--she said, 'Oh my!'" answered Lorania, with a dying look.
+
+"Well, she was horrid," said Mrs. Ellis; "but you know you have grown
+thin. Come on; let's ride!"
+
+"I _never_ shall be able to ride," said Lorania, gloomily. "I can get
+on, but I can't get off. And they've taken off the brake, so I can't
+stop. And I'm object-struck by everything I look at. Some day I shall
+look down-hill. Well, my will's in the lower drawer of the mahogany
+desk."
+
+Perhaps Lorania had an occult inkling of the future. For this is what
+happened: That evening Winslow rode on to the track in his new English
+bicycle suit, which had just come. He hoped that he didn't look like a
+fool in those queer clothes. But the instant he entered the pasture he
+saw something that drove everything else out of his head, and made him
+bend over the steering-bar and race madly across the green; Miss
+Hopkins's bicycle was running away down-hill! Cardigan, on foot, was
+pelting obliquely, in the hopeless thought to intercept her, while Mrs.
+Ellis, who was reeling over the ground with her own bicycle, wheeled as
+rapidly as she could to the brow of the hill, where she tumbled off, and
+abandoning the wheel, rushed on foot to her friend's rescue.
+
+She was only in time to see a flash of silver and ebony and a streak of
+brown dart before her vision and swim down the hill like a bird. Lorania
+was still in the saddle, pedalling from sheer force of habit, and
+clinging to the handle bars. Below the hill was a stone wall, and
+farther was a creek. There was a narrow opening in the wall where the
+cattle went down to drink; if she could steer through that she would
+have nothing worse than soft water and mud; but there was not one chance
+in a thousand that she could pass that narrow space. Mrs. Winslow,
+horror-stricken, watched the rescuer, who evidently was cutting across
+to catch the bicycle.
+
+"He's riding out of sight!" thought Shuey, in the rear. He himself did
+not slacken his speed, although he could not be in time for the
+catastrophe. Suddenly he stiffened; Winslow was close to the runaway
+wheel.
+
+"Grab her!" yelled Shuey. "Grab her by the belt! _Oh, Lord!_"
+
+The exclamation exploded like the groan of a shell. For while Winslow's
+bicycling was all that could be wished, and he flung himself in the path
+of the on-coming wheel with marvellous celerity and precision, he had
+not the power to withstand the never yet revealed number of pounds
+carried by Miss Lorania, impelled by the rapid descent and gathering
+momentum at every whirl. They met; he caught her; but instantly he was
+rolling down the steep incline and she was doubled up on the grass. He
+crashed sickeningly against the stone wall; she lay stunned and still
+on the sod; and their friends, with beating hearts, slid down to them.
+Mrs. Winslow was on the brow of the hill. She blesses Shuey to this day
+for the shout he sent up, "Nobody killed, and I guess no bones broken."
+
+When Margaret went home that evening, having seen her friend safely in
+bed, not much the worse for her fall, she was told that Cardigan wished
+to see her. Shuey produced something from his pocket, saying: "I picked
+this up on the hill, ma'am, after the accident. It maybe belongs to him,
+or it maybe belongs to her; I'm thinking the safest way is to just give
+it to you." He handed Mrs. Ellis a tiny gold-framed miniature of Lorania
+in a red leather case.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The morning was a sparkling June morning, dewy and fragrant, and the
+sunlight burnished handle and pedal of the friends' bicycles standing on
+the piazza unheeded. It was the hour for morning practice, but Miss
+Hopkins slept in her chamber, and Mrs. Ellis sat in the little parlor
+adjoining, and thought.
+
+She did not look surprised at the maid's announcement that Mrs. Winslow
+begged to see her for a few moments. Mrs. Winslow was pale. She was a
+good sketch of discomfort on the very edge of her chair, clad in the
+black silk which she wore Sundays, her head crowned with her bonnet of
+state, and her hands stiff in a pair of new gloves.
+
+"I hope you'll excuse me not sending up a card," she began. "Cyril got
+me some going on a year ago, and I _thought_ I could lay my hand right
+on 'em, but I'm so nervous this morning I hunted all over, and they
+wasn't anywhere. I won't keep you. I just wanted to ask if you picked up
+anything--a little red Russia-leather case--"
+
+"Was it a miniature--a miniature of my friend Miss Hopkins?"
+
+"I thought it all over, and I came to explain. You no doubt think it
+strange; and I can assure you that my son never let any human being look
+at that picture. I never knew about it myself till it was lost and he
+got out of his bed--he ain't hardly able to walk--and staggered over
+here to look for it, and I followed him; and so he _had_ to tell me. He
+had it painted from a picture that came out in the papers. He felt it
+was an awful liberty. But--you don't know how my boy feels, Mrs. Ellis;
+he has worshipped that woman for years. He 'ain't never had a thought
+of anybody but her since they was children in school; and yet he's been
+so modest and so shy of pushing himself forward that he didn't do a
+thing until I put him on to help you with this bicycle."
+
+Margaret Ellis did not know what to say. She thought of the marquis; and
+Mrs. Winslow poured out her story: "He 'ain't never said a word to me
+till this morning. But don't I _know_? Don't I know who looked out so
+careful for her investments? Don't I know who was always looking out for
+her interest, silent, and always keeping himself in the background? Why,
+she couldn't even buy a cow that he wa'n't looking round to see that she
+got a good one! 'Twas him saw the gardener, and kept him from buying
+that cow with tuberculosis, 'cause he knew about the herd. He knew by
+finding out. He worshipped the very cows she owned, you may say, and
+I've seen him patting and feeding up her dogs; it's to our house that
+big mastiff always goes every night. Mrs. Ellis, it ain't often that a
+woman gits love such as my son is offering, only he da'sn't offer it,
+and it ain't often a woman is loved by such a good man as my son. He
+'ain't got any bad habits; he'll die before he wrongs anybody; and he
+has got the sweetest temper you ever see; and he's the tidiest man
+about the house you could ask, and the promptest about meals."
+
+Mrs. Ellis looked at her flushed face, and sent another flood of color
+into it, for she said, "Mrs. Winslow, I don't know how much good I may
+be able to do, but I am on your side."
+
+Her eyes followed the little black figure when it crossed the lawn. She
+wondered whether her advice was good, for she had counselled that
+Winslow come over in the evening.
+
+"Maggie," said a voice. Lorania was in the doorway. "Maggie," she said,
+"I ought to tell you that I heard every word."
+
+"Then _I_ can tell _you_," cried Mrs. Ellis, "that he is fifty times
+more of a man than the marquis, and loves you fifty thousand times
+better!"
+
+Lorania made no answer, not even by a look. What she felt, Mrs. Ellis
+could not guess. Nor was she any wiser when Winslow appeared at her
+gate, just as the sun was setting.
+
+"I didn't think I would better intrude on Miss Hopkins," said he, "but
+perhaps you could tell me how she is this evening. My mother told me how
+kind you were, and perhaps you--you would advise if I might venture to
+send Miss Hopkins some flowers."
+
+Out of the kindness of her heart Mrs. Ellis averted her eyes from his
+face; thus she was able to perceive Lorania saunter out of the Hopkins
+gate. So changed was she by the bicycle practice that, wrapped in her
+niece's shawl, she made Margaret think of the girl. An inspiration
+flashed to her; she knew the cashier's dependence on his eye-glasses,
+and he was not wearing them.
+
+"If you want to know how Miss Hopkins is, why not speak to her niece
+now?" said she.
+
+He started. He saw Miss Sibyl, as he supposed, and he went swiftly down
+the street. "Miss Sibyl!" he began, "may I ask how is your aunt?"--and
+then she turned.
+
+She blushed, then she laughed aloud. "Has the bicycle done so much for
+me?" said she.
+
+"The bicycle didn't need to do _anything_ for you!" he cried, warmly.
+
+Mrs. Ellis, a little distance in the rear, heard, turned, and walked
+thoughtfully away. "They're off," said she--she had acquired a sporting
+tinge of thought from Shuey Cardigan. "If with that start he can't make
+the running, it's a wonder."
+
+"I have invited Mr. Winslow and his mother to dinner," said Miss
+Hopkins, in the morning. "Will you come too, Maggie?"
+
+"I'll back him against the marquis," thought Margaret, gleefully.
+
+A week later Lorania said: "I really think I must be getting thinner.
+Fancy Mr. Winslow, who is so clear-sighted, mistaking me for Sibyl! He
+says--I told him how I had suffered from my figure--he says it can't be
+what he has suffered from his. Do you think him so very short, Maggie?
+Of course he isn't tall, but he has an elegant figure, I think, and I
+never saw anywhere such a rider!"
+
+Mrs. Ellis answered, heartily, "He isn't very small, and he is a
+beautiful figure on the wheel!" And added to herself, "I know what was
+in that letter she sent yesterday to the marquis! But to think of its
+all being due to the bicycle!"
+
+
+
+
+The Marrying of Esther
+
+BY MARY M. MEARS
+
+
+"Set there and cry; it's so sensible; and I 'ain't said that a June
+weddin' wouldn't be a little nicer. But what you goin' to live on? Joe
+can't git his money that soon."
+
+"He--said he thought he could manage. But I won't be married at all if I
+can't have it--right."
+
+"Well, you can have it right. All is, there are some folks in this town
+that if they don't calculate doin' real well by you, I don't feel called
+upon to invite."
+
+"I don't know what you mean," sobbed the girl. She sat by the kitchen
+table, her face hidden in her arms. Her mother stood looking at her
+tenderly, and yet with a certain anger.
+
+"I mean about the presents. You've worked in the church, you've sung in
+the choir for years, and now it's a chance for folks to show that they
+appreciate it, and without they're goin' to--Boxes of cake would be
+plenty if they wa'n't goin' to serve you any better than they did Ella
+Plummet."
+
+Esther Robinson lifted her head. She was quite large, in a soft young
+way, and her skin was as pure as a baby's. "But you can't know
+beforehand how they're going to treat me!"
+
+"Yes, I can know beforehand, too, and if you're set on next month, it's
+none too soon to be seein' about it. I've a good mind to step over to
+Mis' Lawrence's and Mis' Stetson's this afternoon."
+
+"Mother! You--wouldn't ask 'em anything?"
+
+Mrs. Robinson hung away her dishtowel; then she faced Esther. "Of course
+I wouldn't _ask_ 'em; there's other ways of findin' out besides
+_asking_. I'd bring the subject round by saying I hoped there wouldn't
+be many duplicates, and I'd git out of 'em what they intended givin'
+without seemin' to." Esther looked at her mother with a sort of
+fascination. "Then we could give some idea about the refreshments; for I
+ain't a-goin' to have no elaborate layout without I _do_ know; and it
+ain't because I grudge the money, either," she added, in swift
+self-defence.
+
+Mrs. Robinson was a good manager of the moderate means her husband had
+left her, but she was not parsimonious or inhospitable. Now she was
+actuated by a fierce maternal jealousy. Esther, despite her pleasant
+ways and her helpfulness, was often overlooked in a social way. This was
+due to her mother. The more pretentious laughed about Mrs. Robinson, and
+though the thrifty, contented housewife never missed the amenities which
+might have been extended to her, she was keenly alive to any slights put
+upon her daughter. And so it was now.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence, a rich, childless old lady, lived next door, and about
+four o'clock she went over there. The girl watched her departure
+doubtfully, but the possibility of not having a large wedding kept her
+from giving a full expression to her feelings.
+
+Esther had always dreamed of her wedding; she had looked forward to it
+just as definitely before she met Joe Elsworth as after her engagement
+to him. There would be flowers and guests and feasting, and she would be
+the centre of it all in a white dress and veil.
+
+She had never thought about there being any presents. Now for the first
+time she thought of them as an added glory, but her imagination did not
+extend to the separate articles or to their givers. Esther never
+pictured her uncle Jonas at the wedding, yet he would surely be in
+attendance in his rough farmer clothes, his grizzled, keen old face
+towering above the other guests. She did not picture her friends as she
+really knew them; the young men would be fine gentlemen, and the girls
+ladies in wonderful toilets. As for herself and Joe, hidden away in a
+bureau drawer Esther had a poster of one of Frohman's plays. It
+represented a bride and groom standing together in a drift of orange
+blossoms.
+
+Mrs. Robinson did not return at supper-time, and Esther ate alone. At
+eight o'clock Joe Elsworth came. She met him at the door, and they
+kissed in the entry. Then Joe preceded her in, and hung up his cap on a
+projecting knob of the what-not--that was where he always put it. He
+glanced into the dining-room and took in the waiting table.
+
+"Haven't you had supper yet!"
+
+"Mother isn't home."
+
+He came towards her swiftly; his eyes shone with a sudden elated
+tenderness. She raised her arms and turned away her face, but he swept
+aside the ineffectual barrier. When he let her go she seated herself on
+the farther side of the room. Her glance was full of a soft rebuke. He
+met it, then looked down smilingly and awkwardly at his shoes.
+
+"Where did you say your ma had gone?"
+
+"She's gone to Mis' Lawrence's, and a few other places."
+
+"Oh, calling. Old Mis' Norton goes about twice a year, and I ask her
+what it amounts to."
+
+"I guess you'll find ma's calls'll amount to something."
+
+"How's that?" he demanded.
+
+"She's--going to try and find out what they intend giving."
+
+"What they intend giving?"
+
+"Yes. And without they intend giving something worth while, she says she
+won't invite 'em, and maybe we won't have a big wedding at all," she
+finished, pathetically.
+
+Joe did not answer. Esther stole an appealing glance at him.
+
+"Does it seem a queer thing to do?"
+
+"Well, yes, rather."
+
+Her face quivered. "She said I'd done so much for Mis' Lawrence--"
+
+"Well, you have, and I've wished a good many times that you wouldn't.
+I'm sure I never knuckled to her, though she is my great-aunt."
+
+"I never knuckled to her, either," protested Esther.
+
+"You've done a sight more for her than I would have done, fixin' her
+dresses and things, and she with more money than anybody else in town.
+But your mother ain't going to call on everybody, is she?" he asked,
+anxiously.
+
+"Of course she ain't. Only she said, if it was going to be in June--but
+I don't want it to be ever," she added, covering her face.
+
+"Oh, it's all right," said Joe, penitently. He went over and put his arm
+around her. Nevertheless, his eyes held a worried look.
+
+Joe's father had bound him out to a farmer by the name of Norton until
+his majority, when the sum of seven hundred dollars, all the little
+fortune the father had left, together with three hundred more from
+Norton, was to be turned over to him. But Joe would not be twenty-one
+until October. It was going to be difficult for him to arrange for the
+June wedding Esther desired. He was very much in love, however, and
+presently he lifted his boyish cheek from her hair.
+
+"I think I'll take that cottage of Lanham's; it's the only vacant house
+in the village, and he's promised to wait for the rent, so that
+confounded old Norton needn't advance me a cent."
+
+Esther flushed. "What do you suppose makes him act so?" she questioned,
+though she knew.
+
+Joe blushed too. "He don't like it because I'm going to work in the
+factory when it opens. But Mis' Norton and Sarah have done everything
+for me," he added, decidedly.
+
+Up to the time of his engagement Joe had been in the habit of showing
+Sarah Norton an occasional brotherly attention, and he would have
+continued to do so had not Esther and Mrs. Robinson interfered--Esther
+from girlish jealousy, and her mother because she did not approve of the
+family, she said. She could not say she did not approve of Sarah, for
+there was not a more upright, self-respecting girl in the village. But
+Sarah, because of her father's miserliness, often went out for extra
+work when the neighbors needed help, and this was the real cause of Mrs.
+Robinson's feeling. Unconsciously she made the same distinction between
+Sarah Norton and Esther that some of the more ambitious of the village
+mothers made between their girls and her own daughter. Then it was
+common talk that old Jim Norton, for obvious reasons, was displeased
+with Joe's matrimonial plans, but Mrs. Robinson professed to believe
+that the wife and daughter were really the ones disappointed. Now Esther
+began twisting a button of Joe's coat.
+
+"I don't believe mother'll ask either of 'em to the wedding," said she.
+
+When Mrs. Robinson entered, Esther stood expectant and fearful by the
+table. Her mother drew up a chair and reached for the bread.
+
+"I didn't stop anywhere for supper. You've had yours, 'ain't you?"
+
+The girl nodded.
+
+"Joe come?"
+
+"He just left."
+
+But Mrs. Robinson was not to be hurried into divulging the result of her
+calls. She remained massively mysterious. Esther began to wish she had
+not hurried Joe off so unceremoniously. After her first cup of tea,
+however, her mother asked for a slip of paper and a pencil. "I want that
+pencil in my machine drawer, that writes black, and any kind of paper'll
+do," she said.
+
+Esther brought them; then she took up her sewing. She was not without a
+certain self-restraint. Mrs. Robinson, between her sips of tea, wrote.
+The soft gurgle of her drinking annoyed Esther, and she had a tingling
+desire to snatch the paper. After a last misdirected placing of her cup
+in her plate, however, her mother looked up and smiled triumphantly.
+
+"I guess we'll have to plan something different than boxes of cake.
+Listen to this; Mis' Lawrence--No, I won't read that yet. Mis'
+Manning--I went in there because I thought about her not inviting you
+when she gave that library party--one salt and pepper with rose-buds
+painted on 'em."
+
+Esther leaned forward; her face was crimson.
+
+"You needn't look so," remonstrated her mother. "It was all I could do
+to keep from laughing at the way she acted. I just mentioned that we
+were only goin' to invite those you were indebted to, and she went and
+fetched out that salt and pepper. I believe she said they was intended
+in the first place for some relative that didn't git married in the
+end."
+
+The girl made an inarticulate noise in her throat. Her mother continued,
+in a loud, impressive tone:
+
+"Mis' Stetson--something worked. She hasn't quite decided what, but
+she's goin' to let me know about it. Jane Watson--"
+
+"You didn't go _there_, mother!"
+
+Mrs. Robinson treated her daughter to a contemptuous look. "I guess I've
+got sense. Jane was at Mis' Stetson's, and when I came away she went
+along with me, and insisted that I should stop and see some
+lamp-lighters she'd got to copy from--those paper balls. She seemed
+afraid a string of those wouldn't be enough, but I told her how pretty
+they was, and how much you'd be pleased."
+
+"I guess I'll think a good deal more of 'em than I will of Mis'
+Manning's salt and pepper." Esther was very near tears.
+
+"Next I went to the Rogerses, and they've about concluded to give you a
+lamp; and they can afford to. Then that's all the places I've been,
+except to Mis' Lawrence's, and she"--Mrs. Robinson paused for
+emphasis--"she's goin' to give you a silver _tea-set_!"
+
+Esther looked at her mother, her red lips apart.
+
+"That was the first place I called, and I said pretty plain what I was
+gittin' at; but after I knew about the water-set, that settled what kind
+of weddin' we'd have."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the next morning the world looked different. Her rheumatic foot
+ached, and that always affected her temper; but when they sat down to
+sew, the real cause of her irascibleness came out.
+
+"Mis' Lawrence wa'n't any more civil than she need be," she remarked. "I
+guess she'd decided she'd got to do something, being related to Joe. She
+said she supposed you were expecting a good many presents; and I said
+no, you didn't look for many, and there were some that you'd done a good
+deal for that you knew better than to expect anything from. I was mad.
+Then she turned kind of red, and mentioned about the water-set."
+
+And in the afternoon a young girl acquaintance added to Esther's
+perturbation. "I just met Susan Rogers," she confided to the other, "and
+she said they hated to give that lamp, but they supposed they were in
+for it."
+
+Esther was not herself for some days. All her pretty dreams were blotted
+out, and a morbid embarrassment took hold of her; but she was roused to
+something like her old interest when the presents began to come in and
+she saw her mother's active preparations for the wedding--the more so as
+over the village seemed to have spread a pleasant excitement concerning
+the event. Presents arrived from unexpected sources, so that
+invitations had to be sent afterwards to the givers. Women who had
+never crossed the Robinson threshold came now like Hindoo gift-bearers
+before some deity whom they wished to propitiate. Meeting there, they
+exchanged droll, half-deprecating glances. Mrs. Robinson's calls had
+formed the subject of much laughing comment; but weddings were not
+common in Marshfield, and the desire to be bidden to this one was
+universal; it spread like an epidemic.
+
+Mrs. Robinson was at first elated. She overlooked the matter of
+duplicates, and accepted graciously every article that was
+tendered--from a patch-work quilt to a hem-stitched handkerchief. "You
+can't have too many of some things," she remarked to Esther. But later
+she reversed this statement. Match-safes, photograph-frames, and pretty
+nothings accumulated to an alarming extent.
+
+"Now that's the last pin-cushion you're goin' to take," she declared, as
+she returned from answering a call at the door one evening. "There's
+fourteen in the parlor now. Some folks seem to have gone crazy on
+pin-cushions."
+
+She grew confused, and the next day she went into the parlor, which,
+owing to the nature of the display, resembled a booth at a church fair,
+and made an accurate list of the articles received. When she emerged,
+her large, handsome face was quite flushed.
+
+"Little wabbly, fall-down things, most of 'em. It'll take you a week to
+dust your house if you have all those things standin' round."
+
+"Well, I ain't goin' to put none of 'em away," declared Esther. "I like
+ornaments."
+
+"Glad you do; you've got enough of 'em, land knows. _Ornaments!_" The
+very word seemed to incense her. "I guess you'll find there's something
+needed besides _ornaments_ when you come right down to livin'. For one
+thing, you're awful short of dishes and bedding, and you can't ever have
+no company--unless," she added, with withering sarcasm, "you give 'em
+little vases to drink out of, and put 'em to bed under a picture-drape,
+with a pin-cushion or a scent-bag for a piller."
+
+And from that time Mrs. Robinson accepted no gift without first
+consulting her list. It became known that she looked upon useful
+articles with favor, and brooms and flat-irons and bright tinware
+arrived constantly. Then it was that the heterogeneous collection began
+to pall upon Esther. The water-set had not yet been presented, but its
+magnificence grew upon her, and she persuaded Joe to get a
+spindle-legged stand on which to place it, although he could not furnish
+the cottage until October, and had gone in debt for the few necessary
+things. She pictured the combination first in one corner of the little
+parlor, then another, finally in a window where it could be seen, from
+the road.
+
+Esther's standards did not vary greatly from her mother's, but she had a
+bewildered sense that they were somehow stepping from the beaten track
+of custom. On one or two points, however, she was firm. The few novels
+that had come within her reach she had conned faithfully. Thus, even
+before she had a lover, she had decided that the most impressive hour
+for a wedding was sunrise, and had arranged the procession which was to
+wend its way towards the church. And in these matters her mother,
+respecting her superior judgment, stood stanchly by her.
+
+Nevertheless, when the eventful morning arrived she was bitterly
+disappointed. She had set her heart on having the church bell rung, and
+overlooked the fact that the meeting-house bell was cracked, till Joe
+reminded her. Then the weather was unexpectedly chilly. A damp fog, not
+yet dispersed by the sun, hung over the barely awakened village, and the
+little flower-girl shivered. She had a shawl pinned about her, and when
+the procession was fairly started she tripped over it, and there was a
+halt while she gathered up the roses and geraniums in her little
+trembling hands and thrust them back into the basket. Celia Smith
+tittered. Celia was the bridesmaid, and was accompanied by Joe's friend,
+red-headed Harry Baker; and Mrs. Robinson and Uncle Jonas, who were far
+behind, made the most of the delay. Mrs. Robinson often explained that
+she was not a "good walker," and her brother-in-law tried jocularly to
+help her along, although he used a cane himself. His weather-beaten old
+face was beaming, but it was as though the smiles were set between the
+wrinkles, for he kept his mouth sober. He had a flower in his
+button-hole, which gave him a festive air, despite the fact that his
+clothes were distinctly untidy. Several buttons were off: he had no wife
+to keep them sewed on.
+
+Esther had given but one glance at him. Her head under its lace veil
+bent lower and lower. The flounces of her skirt stood out about her
+like the delicate bell of a hollyhock; she followed the way falteringly.
+Joe, his young eyes radiant, inclined his curly head towards her, but
+she did not heed him. The little procession was as an awkward garment
+which hampered and abashed her; but just as they reached the church the
+sun crept above the tree-tops, and from the bleakness of dawn the whole
+scene warmed into the glorious beauty of a June day. The guests lost
+their aspect of chilled waiting; Esther caught their admiring glances.
+For one brief moment her triumph was complete; the next she had
+overstepped its bounds. She went forward scarcely touching Joe's arm.
+Her great desire became a definite purpose. She whispered to a member of
+her Sunday-school class, a little fellow. He looked at her wonderingly
+at first, then darted forward and grasped the rope which dangled down in
+a corner of the vestibule. He pulled with a will, but even as the old
+bell responded with a hoarse clank, his arms jerked upward, and with
+curls flying and fat legs extended he ascended straight to the ceiling.
+
+"Oh, suz, the Lord's taking him right up!" shrieked an old woman, the
+sepulchral explanation of the broken bell but serving to intensify her
+terror; and there were others who refused to understand, even when his
+sister caught him by the heels. She was very white, and she shook him
+before she set him down. Too scared to realize where he was, he fought
+her, his little face quite red, and his blouse strained up so that it
+revealed the girth of his round little body in its knitted undershirt.
+
+"Le' me go," he whimpered; "she telled me to do it."
+
+His words broke through the general amazement like a stone through the
+icy surface of a stream. The guests gave way to mirth. Some of the young
+girls averted their faces; they could not look at Esther. The matrons
+tilted their bonneted heads towards one another and shook softly. "I
+thought at first it might be a part of the show," whispered one, "but I
+guess it wasn't planned."
+
+Esther was conscious of every whisper and every glance; shame seemed to
+engulf her, but she entered the church holding her head high. When they
+emerged into the sunshine again, she would have been glad to run away,
+but she was forced to pause while her mother made an announcement.
+
+"The refreshments will be ready by ten," she said, "and as we calculate
+to keep the tables runnin' all day, those that can't come one time can
+come another."
+
+After which there was a little rice-throwing, and the young couple
+departed. The frolic partly revived Esther's spirits; but her mother,
+toiling heavily along with a hard day's work before her, was inclined to
+speak her mind. Her brother-in-law, however, restrained her.
+
+"Seems to me I never seen anything quite so cute as that little feller
+a-ringin' that bell for the weddin'. Who put him up to it, anyhow?"
+
+"Why, Esther. She was so set on havin' a 'chime,' as she called it."
+
+"Well, it was a real good idee! A _real_ good idee!" and he kept
+repeating the phrase as though in a perfect ecstasy of appreciation.
+
+When Esther reached home, she and Joe arranged the tables in the side
+yard, but when the first guest turned in at the gate her mother sent her
+to the house. "Now you go into the parlor and rest. You can just as well
+sit under that dove as stand under it," she said.
+
+The girl started listlessly to obey, but the next words revived her like
+wine:
+
+"I declare it's Mis' Lawrence, and she's bringing that water-set; she
+hung on to it till the last minit."
+
+Esther flew to her chamber and donned her veil, which she had laid
+aside, then sped down-stairs; but when she passed through the parlor she
+put her hands over her eyes: she wanted to look at the water-set first
+with Joe. He was no longer helping her mother, and she fluttered about
+looking for him. The rooms would soon be crowded, and then there would
+be no opportunity to examine the wonderful gift.
+
+She darted down a foot-path that crossed the yard diagonally. It led to
+a gap in the stone-wall which opened on a lane. Esther and Joe had been
+in the habit of walking here of an evening. It was scarcely more than a
+grassy way overhung by leaning branches of old fruit trees, but it was a
+short-cut to the cottage Joe had rented. Now Esther's feet, of their own
+volition, carried her here. She slid through the opening. "Joe!" she
+called, and her voice had the tremulous cadence of a bird summoning its
+mate; but it died away in a little smothered cry, for not a rod away was
+Joe, and sitting on a large stone was Sarah Norton. They had their backs
+towards her, and were engaged in such an earnest conversation that they
+did not hear her. Sarah's shoulders moved with her quick breathing; she
+had a hand on Joe's arm. Esther stood staring, her thin draperies
+circling about her, and her childish face pale. Then she turned, with a
+swift impulse to escape, but again she paused, her eyes riveted in the
+opposite direction. From where she stood the back door of her future
+home was visible, and two men were carrying out furniture. Involuntarily
+she opened her lips to call Joe, but no sound came. Yes, they had the
+bureau; they would probably take the spindle-legged stand next. A strong
+protective instinct is part of possession, and to Esther that sight was
+as a magnet to steel. Down the grassy lane she sped, but so lightly that
+the couple by the wall were as unobservant of her as they were of the
+wind stirring the long grass.
+
+Sarah Norton rose. "I run every step of the way to get here in time.
+Please, Joe!" she panted.
+
+He shook his head. "It's real kind of you and your mother, Sarah, but I
+guess I ain't going to touch any of the money you worked for and earned,
+and I can't help but think, when I talk to Lanham--"
+
+"I tell you, you can't reason with him in his state!"
+
+"Well, I'll raise it somehow."
+
+"You'll have to be quick about it, then," she returned, concisely.
+"He'll be here in a few minutes, and it's cash down for the first three
+months, or he'll let the other party have it."
+
+"But he promised--"
+
+"That don't make any difference. He's drunk, and he thought father'd
+offer to make you an advance; but father just told him to come down
+here, that you were being married, and say he'd poke all your things out
+in the road without you paid."
+
+The young man turned. Sarah blocked his way. She was a tall,
+good-looking girl, somewhat older than Joe, and she looked straight up
+into his face.
+
+"See here, Joe; you know what makes father act so, and so do I, and so
+does mother, and mother and I want you should take this money; it'll
+make us feel better." Sarah flushed, but she looked at him as directly
+as if she had been his sister.
+
+Joe felt an admiration for her that was almost reverence. It carried him
+for the moment beyond the consideration of his own predicament.
+
+"No, I don't know what makes him act so either," he cried, hotly. "Oh
+Lord, Sarah, you sha'n't say such a thing!"
+
+She interrupted him. "Won't you take it?"
+
+He turned again: "You're just as good as you can be, but I can manage
+some way."
+
+"I'll watch for Lanham," she answered, quietly, "and keep him talking as
+long as I can. He's just drunk enough to make a scene."
+
+Half-way to the house, Joe met Harry Barker.
+
+"What did she want?" he inquired, curiously.
+
+When Joe told him he plunged into his pocket and drew out two dollars,
+then offered to go among the young fellows and collect the balance of
+the amount, but Joe caught hold of him.
+
+"Think of something else."
+
+"I could explain to the boys--"
+
+"You go and ask Mrs. Lawrence if she won't step out on the porch," the
+other commanded; "she's my great-aunt, and I never asked anything of her
+before."
+
+But Mrs. Lawrence was not sympathetic. She told Joe flatly that she
+never lent money, and that the water-set was as much as she could afford
+to give. "It ain't paid for, though," she added; "and if you'd rather
+have the money, I suppose I can send it back. But seems to me I
+shouldn't have been in such an awful hurry to git married; I should 'a'
+waited a month or so, till I had something to git married on. But you're
+just like your father--never had no calculation. Do you want I should
+return that silver?"
+
+Joe hesitated. It was an easy way out of the difficulty. Then a vision
+of Esther rose before him, and the innocent preparations she had been
+making for the display of the gift; "No," he answered, shortly. And Mrs.
+Lawrence, with a shake of the shoulders as though she threw off all
+responsibility in her young relative's affairs, bustled away. "I'm going
+to keep that water-set if everything else has to go," he declared to the
+astonished Harry. "Let 'em set me out in the road; I guess I'll git
+along." He had a humorous vision of himself and Esther trudging forth,
+with the water-set between them, to seek their fortune.
+
+He flung himself from the porch, and was confronted by Jonas Ingram. The
+old fellow emerged from behind a lilac-bush with a guilty yet excited
+air.
+
+"Young man, I ain't given to eaves-dropping, but I was strollin' along
+here and I heered it all; and as I was calculatin' to give my niece a
+present--" He broke off and laid a hand on Joe's arm. "Where is that
+dod-blasted fool of a Lanham? I'll pay him; then I'll break every bone
+in his dum body!" he exclaimed, waxing profane. "Come here disturbin'
+decent folks' weddin's! Where is he?"
+
+He started off down the path, striking out savagely with his stick. Joe
+watched him a moment, then put after him, and Harry Barker followed.
+
+"If this ain't the liveliest weddin'!"
+
+Nevertheless, he was disappointed in his expectations of an encounter.
+When the trio emerged through the gap in the wall they found only Sarah
+Norton awaiting them.
+
+"Lanham's come and gone," she announced. "No, I didn't give him a thing,
+except a piece of my mind," she answered, in response to a look from
+Joe. "I told him that he was acting like a fool; that father was in for
+a thousand dollars to you in the fall, and that you would pay then, as
+you promised, and that he'd better clear out."
+
+"Oh, if I could jest git a holt of him!" muttered Jonas Ingram.
+
+"That seemed to sober him," continued the girl; "but he said he wasn't
+the only one that had got scared; that Merrill was going for his tables
+and chairs; but Lanham said he'd run up to the cottage, and if he was
+there, he'd send him off. You see, father threw out as if he wasn't
+owing you anything," she added, in a lower voice, "and that's what
+stirred 'em up."
+
+Joe turned white, in a sudden heat of anger--the first he had shown,
+"I'll stir him--" he began; then his eyes met hers. He reddened. "Oh,
+Sarah, I'm ever so much obliged to you!"
+
+"It was nothing. I guess it was lucky I wasn't invited to the wedding,
+though." She laughed, and started away, leaving Joe abashed. She glanced
+back. "I hope none of this foolishness'll reach Mis' Elsworth's ears,"
+she called, in a friendly voice.
+
+"I hope it won't," muttered Joe, fervently, and stood watching her till
+the old man pulled his sleeve.
+
+"Lanham may not keep his word to the girl. Best go down there, hadn't
+we?"
+
+The young man made no answer, but turned and ran. He longed for some one
+to wreak vengeance on. The other two had difficulty in keeping up with
+him. The first object that attracted their attention was the bureau. It
+was standing beside the back steps. Joe tried the door; it was
+fastened. He drew forth the key and fitted it into the lock, but still
+the door did not yield. He turned and faced the others. "_Some one's in
+there!_"
+
+Jonas Ingram broke forth into an oath. He shook his cane at the house.
+
+"Some one's in there, and they've got the door bolted on the inside,"
+continued Joe. His voice had a strange sound even to himself. He seemed
+to be looking on at his own wrath. He strode around to a window, but the
+blinds were closed; the blinds were closed all over the house; every
+door was barred. Whoever was inside was in utter darkness. Joe came back
+and gave the door a violent shake; then they all listened, but only the
+pecking of a hen along the walk broke the silence.
+
+"I'll get a crowbar," suggested Harry, scowling in the fierce sunlight.
+Jonas Ingram stood with his hair blowing out from under his hat and his
+stick grasped firmly in his gnarled old hand. He was all ready to
+strike. His chin was thrust out rigidly. They both pressed close to Joe,
+but he did not heed them. He put one shoulder against a panel; every
+muscle was set.
+
+"Whoever you are, if I have to break this door down--"
+
+There was a soft commotion on the inside and the bolt was drawn. Joe,
+with the other two at his heels, fairly burst into the darkened place,
+just in time to see a white figure dart across the room and cast itself
+in a corner. For an instant they could only blink. The figure wrapped
+its white arms about some object.
+
+"You can have everything but this table; you can't have--this." The
+words ended in a frightened sob.
+
+"_Esther!_"
+
+"_Oh, Joe!_" She struggled to her feet, then shrank back against the
+wall. "Oh, I didn't know it was you. Go 'way! go 'way!"
+
+"Why, Esther, what do you mean?" He started towards her, but she turned
+on him.
+
+"Where is she?"
+
+"Where's who?"
+
+She did not reply, but standing against the wall, she stared at him with
+a passionate scorn.
+
+"You don't mean Sarah Norton?" asked Joe, slowly. Esther quivered. "Why,
+she came to tell me of the trouble her father was trying to get me into.
+But how did you come here, Esther? How did you know anything about it?"
+
+She did not answer. Her head sank.
+
+"How did you, Esther?"
+
+"I saw--you in the lane," she faltered, then caught up her veil as
+though it had been a pinafore. Joe went up to her, and Jonas Ingram took
+hold of Harry Barker, and the two stepped outside, but not out of
+ear-shot; they were still curious. They could hear Esther's sobbing
+voice at intervals. "I tried to make 'em stop, but they wouldn't, and I
+slipped in past 'em and bolted the door; and when you came, I thought it
+was them--and, oh! ain't they our things, Joe?"
+
+The old man thrust his head in at the door. "Yes," he roared, then
+withdrew.
+
+"And won't they take the table away?"
+
+"No," he roared again. "I'd just like to see 'em!"
+
+Esther wept harder. "Oh, I wish they would; I ought to give 'em up. I
+didn't care for them after I thought--that. It was just that I had to
+have something I wouldn't let go, and I tried to think only of saving
+the table for the water-set."
+
+"Come mighty near bein' no water-set," muttered Jonas to himself; then
+he turned to his companion. "Young man, I guess they don't need us no
+more," he said.
+
+When he regained his sister-in-law's, he encountered that lady carrying
+a steaming dish. Guests stood about under the trees or sat at the long
+tables.
+
+"For mercy sakes, Jonas, have you seen Esther? She made fuss enough
+about havin' that dove fixed up in the parlor, and she and Joe ain't
+stood under it a minit yet."
+
+"That's a fact," chuckled the old fellow. "They ain't stood under no
+dove of peace yet; they're just about ready to now, I reckon."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And up through the lane, all oblivious, the lovers were walking slowly.
+Just before they reached the gap in the wall, they paused by common
+consent. Cherry and apple trees drooped over the wall; these had ceased
+blossoming, but a tangle of wild-rose bushes was all ablush. It dropped
+a thick harvest of petals on the ground. Joe bent his head; and Esther,
+resting against his shoulder, lifted her eyes to his face. All
+unconsciously she took the pose of the woman in the Frohman poster. They
+kissed, and then went on slowly.
+
+
+
+
+Cordelia's Night of Romance
+
+BY JULIAN RALPH
+
+
+Cordelia Angeline Mahoney was dressing, as she would say, "to keep a
+date" with a beau, who would soon be waiting on the corner nearest her
+home in the Big Barracks tenement-house. She smiled as she heard the
+shrill catcall of a lad in Forsyth Street. She knew it was Dutch
+Johnny's signal to Chrissie Bergen to come down and meet him at the
+street doorway. Presently she heard another call--a birdlike
+whistle--and she knew which boy's note it was, and which girl it called
+out of her home for a sidewalk stroll. She smiled, a trifle sadly, and
+yet triumphantly. She had enjoyed herself when she was no wiser and
+looked no higher than the younger Barracks girls, who took up the boys
+of the neighborhood as if there were no others.
+
+She was in her own little dark inner room, which she shared with only
+two others of the family, arranging a careful toilet by kerosene-light.
+The photograph of herself in trunks and tights, of which we heard in the
+story of Elsa Muller's hopeless love, was before her, among several
+portraits of actresses and salaried beauties. She had taken them out
+from under the paper in the top drawer of the bureau. She always kept
+them there, and always took them out and spread them in the lamp-light
+when she was alone in her room. She glanced approvingly at the portrait
+of herself as a picture of which she had said to more than one girlish
+confidante that it showed as neat a figure and as perfectly shaped limbs
+as any actress's she had ever seen. But the suggestion of a frown
+flitted across her brow as she thought how silly she was to have once
+been "stage-struck"--how foolish to have thought that mere beauty could
+quickly raise a poor girl to a high place on the stage. Julia Fogarty's
+case proved that. Julia and she were stage-struck together, and where
+was Julia--or Corynne Belvedere, as she now called herself? She started
+well as a figurante in a comic opera company up-town, but from that she
+dropped to a female minstrel troupe in the Bowery, and now, Lewy Tusch
+told Cordelia, she was "tooing ter skirt-tance in ter pickernic parks
+for ter sick-baby fund, ant passin' ter hat arount afterwarts." And evil
+was being whispered of her--a pretty high price to pay for such small
+success; and it must be true, because she sometimes came home late at
+night in cabs, which are devilish, except when used at funerals.
+
+It was Cordelia who attracted Elsa Muller's sweetheart, Yank Hurst, to
+her side, and left Elsa to die yearning for his return. And it was
+Cordelia who threw Hurst aside when he took to drink and stabbed the
+young man who, during a mere walk from church, took his place beside
+Cordelia. And yet Cordelia was only ambitious, not wicked. Few men live
+who would not look twice at her. She was not of the stunted tenement
+type, like her friends Rosie Mulvey and Minnie Bechman and Julia
+Moriarty. She was tall and large and stately, and yet plump in every
+outline. Moreover, she had the "style" of an American girl, and looked
+as well in five dollars' worth of clothes--all home-made, except her
+shoes and stockings--as almost any girl in richer circles. It was too
+bad that she was called a flirt by the young men, and a stuck-up thing
+by the girls, when in fact she was merely more shrewd and calculating
+than the others, who were content to drift out of the primary schools
+into the shops, and out of the shops into haphazard matrimony. Cordelia
+was not lovable, but not all of us are who may be better than she. She
+was monopolized by the hope of getting a man; but a mere alliance with
+trousers was not the sum of her hope; they must jingle with coin.
+
+It was strange, then, that she should be dressing to meet Jerry Donahue,
+who was no better than gilly to the Commissioner of Public Works,
+drawing a small salary from a clerkship he never filled, while he served
+the Commissioner as a second left hand. But if we could see into
+Cordelia's mind we would be surprised to discover that she did not
+regard herself as flesh-and-blood Mahoney, but as romantic Clarice
+Delamour, and she only thought of Jerry as James the butler. The
+voracious reader of the novels of to-day will recall the story of
+_Clarice, or Only a Lady's-Maid,_ which many consider the best of the
+several absorbing tales that Lulu Jane Tilley has written. Cordelia had
+read it twenty times, and almost knew it by heart. Her constant dream
+was that she could be another Clarice, and shape her life like hers.
+The plot of the novel needs to be briefly told, since it guided
+Cordelia's course.
+
+Clarice was maid to a wealthy society dowager. James the butler fell in
+love with Clarice when she first entered the household, and she, hearing
+the servants' gossip about James's savings and salary, had encouraged
+his attentions. He pressed her to marry him. But young Nicholas
+Stuyvesant came home from abroad to find his mother ill and Clarice
+nursing her. Every day he noticed the modest rosy maid moving
+noiselessly about like a sunbeam. Her physical perfection profoundly
+impressed him. In her presence he constantly talked to his mother about
+his admiration for healthy women. Each evening Clarice reported to him
+the condition of the mother, and on one occasion mentioned that she had
+never known ache, pain, or malady in her life. The young man often
+chatted with her in the drawing-room, and James the butler got his
+_congé_. Mr. Stuyvesant induced his mother to make Clarice her companion,
+and then he met her at picture exhibitions, and in Central Park by
+chance, and next--every one will recall the exciting scene--he paid
+passionate court to her "in the pink sewing-room, where she had
+reclined on soft silken sofa pillows, with her tiny slippers upon the
+head of a lion whose skin formed a rug before her." Clarice thought him
+unprincipled, and repulsed him. When the widow recovered her health and
+went to Newport, the former maid met all society there. A gifted lawyer
+fell a victim to Clarice's charms, and, on a moonlit porch overlooking
+the sea, warned her against young Stuyvesant. On learning that the
+_roué_ had already attempted to weaken the girl's high principles, to
+rescue her he made her his wife. He was soon afterward elected Mayor of
+New York, but remained a suitor for his beautiful wife's approbation,
+waiting upon her in gilded halls with the fidelity of a knight of old.
+
+Cordelia adored Clarice and fancied herself just like her--beautiful,
+ambitious, poor, with a future of her own carving. Of course such a case
+is phenomenal. No other young woman was ever so ridiculous.
+
+"You have on your besht dresh, Cordalia," said her mother. "It'll soon
+be wore out, an' ye'll git no other, wid your father oidle, an' no wan
+airnin' a pinny but you an' Johnny an' Sarah Rosabel. Fwhere are ye
+goin'?"
+
+"I won't be gone long," said Cordelia, half out of the hall door.
+
+"Cordalia Angeline, darlin'," said her mother, "mind, now, doan't let
+them be talkin' about ye, fwherever ye go--shakin' yer shkirts an'
+rollin' yer eyes. It doan't luk well for a gyurl to be makin' hersel'
+attractive."
+
+"Oh, mother, I'm not attractive, and you know it."
+
+With her head full of meeting Jerry Donahue, Cordelia tripped down the
+four flights of stairs to the street door. As Clarice, she thought of
+Jerry as James the butler; in fact, all the beaux she had had of late
+were so many repetitions of the unfortunate James in her mind. All the
+other characters in her acquaintance were made to fit more or less
+loosely into her romance life, and she thought of everything she did as
+if it all happened in Lulu Jane Tilley's beautiful novel. Let the reader
+fancy, if possible, what a feat that must have been for a tenement girl
+who had never known what it was to have a parlor, in our sense of the
+word, who had never known courtship to be carried on indoors, except in
+a tenement hallway, and who had to imagine that the sidewalk flirtations
+of actual life were meetings in private parks, that the wharves and
+public squares and tenement roofs where she had seen all the young men
+and women making love were heavily carpeted drawing-rooms, broad manor,
+house verandas, and the fragrant conservatories of luxurious mansions!
+But Cordelia managed all this mental necromancy easily, to her own
+satisfaction. And now she was tripping down the bare wooden stairs
+beside the dark greasy wall, and thinking of her future husband, the
+rich Mayor, who must be either the bachelor police captain of the
+precinct, or George Fletcher, the wealthy and unmarried factory-owner
+near by, or, perhaps, Senator Eisenstone, the district leader, who, she
+was forced to reflect, was an unlikely hero for a Catholic girl, since
+he was a Hebrew. But just as she reached the street door and decided
+that Jerry would do well enough as a mere temporary James the butler,
+and while Jerry was waiting for her on the corner, she stepped from the
+stoop directly in front of George Fletcher.
+
+"Good evening," said the wealthy, young employer.
+
+"Good evening, Mr. Fletcher."
+
+"It's very embarrassing," said Mr. Fletcher: "I know your given
+name--Cordelia, isn't it?--but your last na--Oh, thank you--Miss
+Mahoney, of course. You know we met at that very queer wedding in the
+home of my little apprentice, Joe--the line-man's wedding, you know."
+
+"Te he!" Cordelia giggled. "Wasn't that a terrible strange wedding? I
+think it was just terrible."
+
+"Were you going somewhere?"
+
+"Oh, not at all, Mr. Fletcher," with another nervous giggle or two. "I
+have no plans on me mind, only to get out of doors. It's terrible hot,
+ain't it?"
+
+"May I take a walk with you, Miss Mahoney?"
+
+It seemed to her that if he had called her Clarice the whole novel would
+have come true then and there.
+
+"I can't be out very late, Mr. Fletcher," said she, with a giggle of
+delight.
+
+"Are you sure I am not disarranging your plans? Had you no engagements?"
+
+"Oh no," said she; "I was only going out with me lonely."
+
+"Let us take just a short walk, then," said Fletcher; "only you must be
+the man and take me in charge, Miss Mahoney, for I never walked with a
+young lady in my life."
+
+"Oh, certainly not; you never did--I _don't_ think."
+
+"Upon my honor, Miss Mahoney, I know only one woman in this city--Miss
+Whitfield, the doctor's daughter, who lives in the same house with you;
+and only one other in the world--my aunt, who brought me up, in
+Vermont."
+
+Well indeed did Cordelia know this. All the neighborhood knew it, and
+most of the other girls were conscious of a little flutter in their
+breasts when his eyes fell upon them in the streets, for it was the
+gossip of all who knew his workmen that the prosperous ladder-builder
+lived in his factory, where his had spent the life of a monk, without
+any society except of his canaries, his books, and his workmen.
+
+"Well, I declare!" sighed Cordelia. "How terrible cunning you men are,
+to get up such a story to make all the girls think you're romantic!"
+
+But, oh, how happy Cordelia was! At last she had met her prince--the
+future Mayor--her Sultan of the gilded halls. In that humid, sticky,
+midsummer heat among the tenements, every other woman dragged along as
+if she weighed a thousand pounds, but Cordelia felt like a feather
+floating among clouds.
+
+The babel--did the reader ever walk up Forsyth Street on a hot night,
+into Second Avenue, and across to Avenue A, and up to Tompkins Park?
+The noise of the tens of thousands on the pavements makes a babel that
+drowns the racket of the carts and cars. The talking of so many persons,
+the squalling of so many babies, the mothers scolding and slapping every
+third child, the yelling of the children at play, the shouts and loud
+repartee of the men and women--all these noises rolled together in the
+air makes a steady hum and roar that not even the breakers on a hard
+sea-beach can equal. You might say that the tenements were empty, as
+only the very sick, who could not move, were in them. For miles and
+miles they were bare of humanity, each flat unguarded and unlocked, with
+the women on the sidewalks, with the youngest children in arms or in
+perambulators, while those of the next sizes romped in the streets; with
+the girls and boys of fourteen giggling in groups in the doorways (the
+age and places where sex first asserts itself), and only the young men
+and women missing; for they were in the parks, on the wharves, and on
+the roofs, all frolicking and love-making.
+
+And every house front was like a Russian stove, expending the heat it
+had sucked from the all-day sun. And every door and window breathed bad
+air--air without oxygen, rich and rank and stifling.
+
+But Cordelia was Clarice, the future Mayoress. She did not know she was
+picking a tiresome way around the boys at leap-frog, and the mothers and
+babies and baby-carriages. She did not notice the smells, or feel the
+bumps she got from those who ran against her. She thought she was in the
+blue drawing-room at Newport, where a famous Hungarian count was
+trilling the soft prelude to a _csárdás_ on the piano, and Mr.
+Stuyvesant had just introduced her to the future Mayor, who was
+spellbound by her charms, and was by her side, a captive. She reached
+out her hand, and it touched Mr. Fletcher's arm (just as a ragamuffin
+propelled himself head first against her), and Mr. Fletcher bent his
+elbow, and her wrist rested in the crook of his arm. Oh, her dream was
+true; her dream was true!
+
+Mr. Fletcher, on the other hand, was hardly in a more natural relation.
+He was trying to think how the men talked to women in all the literature
+he had read. The myriad jokes about the fondness of girls for ice-cream
+recurred to him, and he risked everything on their fidelity to fact.
+
+"Are you fond of ice-cream?" he inquired.
+
+"Oh no; I _don't_ think," said Cordelia. "What'll you ask next? What
+girl ain't crushed on ice-cream, I'd like to know?"
+
+"Do you know of a nice place to get some?"
+
+"Do I? The Dutchman's, on the av'noo, another block up, is the finest in
+the city. You get mo--that is, you get everything 'way up in G there,
+with cakes on the side, and it don't cost no more than anywhere else."
+
+So to the German's they went, and Clarice fancied herself at the Casino
+in Newport. All the girls around her, who seemed to be trying to swallow
+the spoons, took on the guise of blue-blooded belles, while the noisy
+boys and young men (calling out, "Hully gee, fellers! look at Nifty
+gittin' out der winder widout payin'!" and, "Say, Tilly, what kind er
+cream is dat you're feedin' your face wid?") seemed to her so many
+millionaires and the exquisite sons thereof. To Mr. Fletcher the
+German's back-yard saloon, with its green lattice walls, and its rusty
+dead Christmas trees in painted butter-kegs, appeared uncommonly
+brilliant and fine. The fact that whenever he took a swallow of water
+the ice-cream turned to cold candle-grease in his mouth made no
+difference. He was happy, and Cordelia was in an ecstasy by the time he
+had paid a shock-headed, bare-armed German waiter, and they were again
+on the avenue side by side. She put out her hand and rested it on his
+arm again--to make sure she was Clarice.
+
+One would like to know whether, in the breasts of such as these,
+familiar environment exerts any remarkable influence. If so, it could
+have been in but one direction. For that part of town was one vast
+nursery. Everywhere, on every side, were the swarming babies--a baby for
+every flag-stone in the pavements. Babies and babies, and little besides
+babies, except larger children and the mothers. Perambulators with two,
+even three, baby passengers; mothers with as many as five children
+trailing after them; babies in broad baggy laps, babies at the breast,
+babies creeping, toppling, screaming, overflowing into the gutters. Such
+was the unbroken scene from the Big Barracks to Tompkins Square; ay, to
+Harlem and to the East River, and almost to Broadway. In the park, as if
+the street scenes had been merely preliminary, the paths were alive,
+wriggling, with babies of every age, from the new-born to the children
+in pigtails and knickerbockers--and, lo! these were already paired and
+practising at courtship. The walk that Cordelia was taking was amid a
+fever, a delirium, of maternity--a rhapsody, a baby's opera, if one
+considered its noise. In that vast region no one inquired whether
+marriage was a failure. Nothing that is old and long-beloved and human
+is a failure there.
+
+In Tompkins Park, while they dodged babies and stepped around babies and
+over them, they saw many happy couples on the settees, and they noticed
+that often the men held their arms around the waists of their
+sweethearts. Girls, too, in other instances, leaned loving heads against
+the young men's breasts, blissfully regardless of publicity. They passed
+a young man and a woman kissing passionately, as kissing is described by
+unmarried girl novelists. Cordelia thought it no harm to nudge Mr.
+Fletcher and whisper:
+
+"Sakes alive! They're right in it, ain't they. 'It's funny when you feel
+that way,' ain't it?"
+
+As many another man who does not know the frankness and simplicity of
+the plain people might have done, Mr. Fletcher misjudged the girl. He
+thought her the sort of girl he was far from seeking. He grew instantly
+cold and reserved, and she knew, vaguely, that she had displeased him.
+
+"I think people who make love in public should be locked up," said he.
+
+"Some folks wants everybody put away that enjoys themselves," said
+Cordelia. Then, lest she had spoken too strongly, she added, "Present
+company not intended, Mr. Fletcher, but you said that like them mission
+folks that come around praising themselves and tellin' us all we're
+wicked."
+
+"And do you think a girl can be good who behaves so in public?"
+
+"I know plenty that's done it," said she; "and I don't know any girls
+but what's good. They 'ain't got wings, maybe, but you don't want to
+monkey with 'em, neither."
+
+He recollected her words for many a year afterward and pondered them,
+and perhaps they enlarged his understanding. She also often thought of
+his condemnation of love-making out-of-doors. Kissing in public,
+especially promiscuous kissing, she knew to be a debatable pastime, but
+she also knew that there was not a flat in the Big Barracks in which a
+girl could carry on a courtship. Fancy her attempting it in her front
+room, with the room choked with people, with the baby squalling, and her
+little brothers and sisters quarrelling, with her mother entertaining
+half a dozen women visitors with tea or beer, and with a man or two
+dropping in to smoke with her father! Parlor courtship was to her, like
+precise English, a thing only known in novels. The thought of novels
+floated her soul back into the dream state.
+
+"I think Cordelia's a pretty name," said Fletcher, cold at heart but
+struggling to be companionable.
+
+"I don't," said Cordelia. "I'm not at all crushed on it. Your name's
+terrible pretty. I think my three names looks like a map of Ireland when
+they're written down. I know a killin' name for a girl. It's Clarice.
+Maybe some day I'll give you a dare. I'll double dare you, maybe, to
+call me Clarice."
+
+Oh, if he only would, she thought--if he would only call her so now! But
+she forgot how unelastic his strange routine of life must have left him,
+and she did not dream how her behavior in the park had displeased him.
+
+"Cordelia is a pretty name," he repeated. "At any rate, I think we
+should try to make the most and best of whatever name has come to us. I
+wouldn't sail under false colors for a minute."
+
+"Oh!" said she, with a giggle to hide her disappointment; "you're so
+terrible wise! When you talk them big words you can pass me in a walk."
+
+Anxious to display her great conquest to the other girls of the Barracks
+neighborhood, Cordelia persuaded Mr. Fletcher to go to what she called
+"the dock," to enjoy the cool breath of the river. All the piers and
+wharves are called "docks" by the people. Those which are semi-public
+and are rented to miscellaneous excursion and river steamers are crowded
+nightly.
+
+The wharf to which our couple strolled was a mere flooring above the
+water, edged with a stout string-piece, which formed a bench for the
+mothers. They were there in groups, some seated on the string-piece with
+babes in arms or with perambulators before them, and others, facing
+these, standing and joining in the gossip, and swaying to and fro to
+soothe their little ones. Those who gave their offspring the breast did
+so publicly, unembarrassed by a modesty they would have considered
+false. A few youthful couples, boy by girl and girl by boy, sat on the
+string-piece and whispered, or bandied fun with those other lovers who
+patrolled the flooring of the wharf. A "gang" of rude young
+men--toughs--walked up and down, teasing the girls, wrestling,
+scuffling, and roaring out bad language. Troops of children played at
+leap-frog, high-spy, jack-stones, bean-bag, hop-scotch, and tag. At the
+far end of the pier some young men and women waltzed, while a lad on the
+string-piece played for them on his mouth-organ. A steady, cool,
+vivifying breeze from the bay swept across the wharf and fanned all the
+idlers, and blew out of their heads almost all recollection of the
+furnacelike heat of the town.
+
+Cordelia forgot her desire to display her conquest. She forgot her true
+self. She likened the wharf to that "lordly veranda overlooking the
+sea," where the future Mayor begged Clarice to be his bride. She knew
+just what she would say when her prince spoke his lines. She and Mr.
+Fletcher were just about to seat themselves on the great rim of the
+wharf, when an uproar of the harsh, froglike voices of half-grown men
+caused them to turn around. They saw Jerry Donahue striding towards
+them, but with difficulty, because half a dozen lads and youths were
+endeavoring to hold him back.
+
+"Dat's Mr. Fletcher," they said. "It ain't his fault, Jerry. He's dead
+square; he's a gent, Jerry."
+
+The politician's gilly tore himself away from his friends. The gang of
+toughs gathered behind the others. Jerry planted himself in front of
+Cordelia. Evidently he did not know the submissive part he should have
+played in Cordelia's romance. James the butler made no out-break, but
+here was Jerry angry through and through.
+
+"You didn't keep de date wid me," he began.
+
+"Oh, Jerry, I did--I tried to, but you--" Cordelia was red with shame.
+
+"The hell you did! Wasn't I--"
+
+"Here!" said Mr. Fletcher; "you can't swear at this lady."
+
+"Why wouldn't I?" Jerry asked. "What would you do?"
+
+"He's right, Jerry. Leave him be--see?" said the chorus of Jerry's
+friends.
+
+"A-a-a-h!" snarled Jerry. "Let him leave me be, then. Cordelia, I heard
+you was a dead fraud, an' now I know it, and I'm a-tellin' you so,
+straight--see? I was a-waitin' 'cross der street, an' I seen you come
+out an' meet dis mug, an' you never turned yer head to see was I on me
+post. I seen dat, an' I'm a-tellin' yer friend just der kind of a racket
+you give me, der same's you've give a hundred other fellers. Den, if he
+likes it he knows what he's gittin'."
+
+Jerry was so angry that he all but pushed his distorted face against
+that of the humiliated girl as he denounced her. Mr. Fletcher gently
+moved her backward a step or two, and advanced to where she had stood.
+
+"That will do," he said to Jerry. "I want no trouble, but you've said
+enough. If there's more, say it to me."
+
+"A-a-a-h!" exclaimed the gilly, expectorating theatrically over his
+shoulder. "Me friends is on your side, an' I ain't pickin' no muss wid
+you. But she's got der front of der City Hall to do me like she done.
+And say, fellers, den she was goin' ter give me a song an' dance 'bout
+lookin' fer me. Ba-a-a! She knows my 'pinion of her--see?"
+
+The crowd parted to let Mr. Fletcher finish his first evening's
+gallantry to a lady by escorting Cordelia to her home. It was a chilly
+and mainly a silent journey. Cordelia falteringly apologized for Jerry's
+misbehavior, but she inferred from what Mr. Fletcher said that he did
+not fully join her in blaming the angry youth. Mr. Fletcher touched her
+fingertips in bidding her good-night, and nothing was said of a meeting
+in the future. Clarice was forgotten, and Cordelia was not only herself
+again, but quite a miserable self, for her sobs awoke the little brother
+and sister who shared her bed.
+
+
+
+
+The Prize-Fund Beneficiary
+
+BY E.A. ALEXANDER
+
+
+Miss Snell began to apologize for interrupting the work almost before
+she came in. The Painter, who grudgingly opened one half of the
+folding-door wide enough to let her pass into the studio, was annoyed to
+observe that, in spite of her apologies, she was loosening the furs
+about her throat as if in preparation for a lengthy visit. Then for the
+first time, behind her tall, black-draped figure, he caught sight of her
+companion, who was shorter, and whose draperies were of a less ample
+character--for Miss Snell, being tall and thin, resorted to voluminous
+garments to conceal her slimness of person. A large plumed hat
+accentuated, her sallowness and sharpness of feature, and her dark eyes,
+set under heavy black brows, intensified her look of unhealthy pallor.
+
+She was perfectly at her ease, and introduced her companion, Miss
+Price, in a few words, explaining that the latter had come over for a
+year or so to study, and was anxious to have the best advice about it.
+
+"So I brought her straight here," Miss Snell announced, triumphantly.
+
+Miss Price seemed a trifle overcome by the novelty of her surroundings,
+but managed to say, in a high nasal voice, that she had already begun to
+work at Julian's, but did not find it altogether satisfactory.
+
+The Painter, looking at her indifferently, was roused to a sudden
+interest by her face. Her features and complexion were certainly
+pleasing, but the untidy mass of straggling hair topped by a battered
+straw sailor hat diverted the attention of a casual observer from her
+really unusual delicacy of feature and coloring. She was tall and slim,
+although now she was dwarfed by Miss Snell's gaunt figure. A worn dress
+and shabby green cape fastened at the neck by a button hanging
+precariously on its last thread completed her very unsuitable winter
+attire. Outside the great studio window a cold December twilight was
+settling down over roofs covered with snow and icicles, and the Painter
+shivered involuntarily as he noticed the insufficiency of her wraps for
+such weather, and got up to stir the fire which glowed in the big stove.
+
+In one corner his model waited patiently for the guests to depart, and
+he now dismissed her for the day, eliciting faint protestations from
+Miss Snell, who, however, was settling down comfortably in an easy-chair
+by the fire, with an evident intention of staying indefinitely. Miss
+Price's large, somewhat expressionless blue eyes were taking in the
+whole studio, and the Painter could feel that she was distinctly
+disappointed by her inspection. She had evidently anticipated something
+much grander, and this bare room was not the ideal place she had fancied
+the studio of a world-renowned painter would prove to be.
+
+Bare painted walls, a peaked roof with a window reaching far overhead, a
+polished floor, one or two chairs and a divan, the few necessary
+implements of his profession, and many canvases faced to the wall, but
+little or no bric-à-brac or delightful studio properties. The Painter
+was also conscious that her inspection included him personally, and was
+painfully aware that she was regarding him with the same feeling of
+disappointment; she quite evidently thought him too young and
+insignificant looking for a person of his reputation.
+
+Miss Snell had not given him time to reply to Miss Price's remark about
+her study at Julian's, but prattled on about her own work and the
+unsurmountable difficulties that lay in the way of a woman's successful
+career as a painter.
+
+"I have been studying for years under ----," said Miss Snell, "and
+really I have no time to lose. It will end by my simply going to him and
+saying, quite frankly: 'Now, Monsieur ----, I have been in your atelier
+for four years, and I can't afford to waste another minute. There are no
+two ways about it. You positively must tell me how to do it. You really
+must not keep me waiting any longer. I insist upon it.' How discouraging
+it is!" she sighed. "It seems quite impossible to find any one who is
+willing to give the necessary information."
+
+Miss Price's wandering eyes had at last found a resting-place on a
+large, half-finished canvas standing on an easel. Something attractive
+in the pose and turn of her head made the Painter watch her as he lent a
+feeble attention to Miss Snell's conversation.
+
+Miss Price's lips were very red, and the clear freshness of extreme
+youth bloomed in her cheeks; she was certainly charming. During one of
+Miss Snell's rare pauses she spoke, and her thin high voice came with
+rather a shock from between her full lips.
+
+"May I look?" was her unnecessary question, for her eyes had never left
+the canvas on the easel since they had first rested there. She rose as
+she spoke, and went over to the painting.
+
+The Painter pulled himself out of the cushions on the divan where he had
+been lounging, and went over to push the big canvas into a better light.
+Then he stood, while the girl gazed at it, saying nothing, and
+apparently oblivious to everything but the work before him.
+
+He was roused, not by Miss Price, who remained admiringly silent, but by
+the enraptured Miss Snell, who had also risen, gathering furs and wraps
+about her, and was now ecstatically voluble in her admiration. English
+being insufficient for the occasion, she had to resort to French for the
+expression of her enthusiasm.
+
+The Painter said nothing, but watched the younger girl, who turned away
+at last with a sigh of approbation. He was standing under the window,
+leaning against a table littered with paints and brushes.
+
+"Stay where you are!" exclaimed Miss Snell, excitedly. "Is he not
+charming, Cora, in that half-light? You must let me paint you just so
+some day--you must indeed." She clutched Miss Price and turned her
+forcibly in his direction.
+
+The Painter, confused by this unexpected onslaught, moved hastily away
+and busied himself with a pretence of clearing the table.
+
+"I--I should be delighted," he stammered, in his embarrassment, and he
+caught Miss Price's eye, in which he fancied a smile was lurking.
+
+"But you have not given Miss Price a word of advice about her work,"
+said Miss Snell, as she fastened her wraps preparatory to departure. She
+seemed quite oblivious to the fact that she had monopolized all the
+conversation herself.
+
+He turned politely to Miss Price, who murmured something about Julian's
+being so badly ventilated, but gave him no clew as to her particular
+branch of the profession. Miss Snell, however, supplied all details. It
+seemed Miss Price was sharing Miss Snell's studio, having been sent over
+by the Lynxville, Massachusetts, Sumner Prize Fund, for which she had
+successfully competed, and which provided a meagre allowance for two
+years' study abroad.
+
+"She wants to paint heads," said Miss Snell; and in reply to a remark
+about the great amount of study required to accomplish this desire,
+surprised him by saying, "Oh, she only wants to paint them well enough
+to teach, not well enough to sell."
+
+"I'll drop in and see your work some afternoon," promised the Painter,
+warmed by their evident intention of leaving; and he escorted them to
+the landing, warning them against the dangerous steepness of his
+stairway, which wound down in almost murky darkness.
+
+Ten minutes later the centre panel of his door displayed a card bearing
+these words: "At home only after six o'clock."
+
+"I wonder I never thought of doing this before," he reflected, as he lit
+a cigarette and strolled off to a neighboring restaurant; "I am always
+out by that hour."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Several weeks elapsed before he saw Miss Price again, for he promptly
+forgot his promise to visit her studio and inspect her work. His own
+work was very absorbing just then, and the short winter days all too
+brief for its accomplishment. He was struggling to complete the large
+canvas that Miss Snell had so volubly admired during her visit, and it
+really seemed to be progressing. But the weather changed suddenly from
+frost to thaw, and he woke one morning to find little runnels of dirty
+water coursing down his window and dismally dripping into the muddy
+street below. It made him feel blue, and his big picture, which had
+seemed so promising the day before, looked hopelessly bad in this new
+mood. So he determined to take a day off, and, after his coffee,
+strolled out into the Luxembourg Gardens. There the statues were green
+with mouldy dampness, and the paths had somewhat the consistency of very
+thin oatmeal porridge. Suddenly the sun came out brightly, and he found
+a partially dry bench, where he sat down to brood upon the utter
+worthlessness of things in general and the Luxembourg statuary in
+particular. The sunny façade of the palace glittered in the brightness.
+One of his own pictures hung in its gallery. "It is bad," he said to
+himself, "hopelessly bad," and he gloomily felt the strongest proof of
+its worthlessness was its popularity with the public. He would probably
+go on thinking this until the weather or his mood changed.
+
+As his eyes strayed from the palace, he glanced up a long vista between
+leafless trees and muddy grass-plats. A familiar figure in a battered
+straw hat and scanty green cloak was advancing in his direction; the
+wind, blowing back the fringe of disfiguring short hair, disclosed a
+pure unbroken line of delicate profile, strangely simple, and recalling
+the profiles in Botticelli's lovely fresco in the Louvre. Miss Price,
+for it was she, carried a painting-box, and under one arm a stretcher
+that gave her infinite trouble whenever the wind caught it. As she
+passed, the Painter half started up to join her, but she gave him such a
+cold nod that his intention was nipped in the bud. He felt snubbed, and
+sank back on his bench, taking a malicious pleasure in observing that,
+womanlike, she ploughed through all the deepest puddles in her path,
+making great splashes about the hem of her skirt, that fluttered out
+behind her as she walked, for her hands were filled, and she had no
+means of holding it up.
+
+The Painter resented his snubbing. He was used to the most humble
+deference from the art students of the quarter, who hung upon his
+slightest word, and were grateful for every stray crumb of his
+attention.
+
+He now lost what little interest he had previously taken in his
+surroundings. Just before him in a large open space reserved for the
+boys to play handball was a broken sheet of glistening water reflecting
+the blue sky, the trees rattled their branches about in the wind, and
+now and then a tardy leaf fluttered down from where it had clung
+desperately late into the winter. The gardens were almost deserted. It
+was too early for the throng of beribboned nurses and howling infants
+who usually haunt its benches. One or two pedestrians hurried across the
+garden, evidently taking the route to make shortcuts to their
+destinations, and not for the pleasure of lounging among its blustery
+attractions.
+
+After idling an hour on his bench, he went to breakfast with a friend
+who chanced to live conveniently near, and where he made himself very
+disagreeable by commenting unfavorably on the work in progress and
+painting in particular. Then he brushed himself up and started off for
+the rue Notre Dame des Champs, where Miss Snell's studio was situated.
+It was one of a number huddled together in an old and rather dilapidated
+building, and the porter at the entrance gave him minute directions as
+to its exact location, but after stumbling up three flights of dark
+stairs he had no trouble in finding it, for Miss Snell's name, preceded
+by a number of initials, shone out from a door directly in front of him
+as he reached the landing.
+
+He knocked, and for several minutes there was a wild scurrying within
+and a rattle and clash of crockery. Then Miss Snell appeared at the
+door, and exclaimed, in delighted surprise:
+
+"How _do_ you do? We had quite given you up."
+
+She looked taller and longer than ever swathed in a blue painting-apron
+and grasping her palette and brushes. She had to apologize for not
+shaking hands with him, because her fingers were covered with paint that
+had been hastily but ineffectually wiped off on a rag before she
+answered his knock.
+
+He murmured something about not coming before because of his work, but
+she would not let him finish, saying, intensely,
+
+"We know how precious every minute is to you."
+
+Miss Price came reluctantly forward and shook hands; she had evidently
+not been painting, for her fingers were quite clean. Short ragged hair
+once more fell over her forehead, and the Painter felt a shock of
+disappointment, and wondered why he had thought her so fine when she
+passed him in the morning.
+
+"I was just going to paint Cora," announced Miss Snell. "She is taking a
+holiday this afternoon, and we were hunting for a pose when you
+knocked."
+
+"Don't let me interrupt you," he said, smiling. "Perhaps I can help."
+
+Miss Snell was in a flutter at once, and protested that she should be
+almost afraid to work while he was there.
+
+"In that case I shall leave at once," he said; but his chair was
+comfortable, and he made no motion to go.
+
+"What a queer little place it is!" he reflected, as he looked about.
+"All sorts of odds and ends stuck about helter-skelter, and the
+house-keeping things trying to masquerade as bric-à-brac."
+
+Cora Price looked decidedly sulky when she realized that the Painter
+intended to stay, and seeing this he became rooted in his intention. He
+wondered why she took this particular attitude towards him, and
+concluded she was piqued because of his delay in calling. She acted like
+a spoiled child, and caused Miss Snell, who was overcome by his
+condescension in staying, no little embarrassment.
+
+It was quite evident from her behavior that Miss Price was impressed
+with her own importance as the beneficiary of the Lynxville Prize Fund,
+and would require the greatest deference from her acquaintances in
+consequence.
+
+"Here, Cora, try this," said Miss Snell, planting a small three-legged
+stool on a rickety model-stand.
+
+"Might I make a suggestion?" said the Painter, coolly. "I should push
+back all the hair on her forehead; it gives a finer line."
+
+"Why, of course!" said Miss Snell. "I wonder we never thought of that
+before. Cora dear, you are much better with your hair back."
+
+Cora said nothing, but the Botticelli profile glowered ominously against
+a background of sage-green which Miss Snell was elaborately draping
+behind it.
+
+"If I might advise again," the Painter said, "I would take that down and
+paint her quite simply against the gray wall."
+
+Miss Snell was quite willing to adopt every suggestion. She produced her
+materials and a fresh canvas, and began making a careful drawing, which,
+as it progressed, filled the Painter's soul with awe.
+
+"I feel awfully like trying it myself," he said, after watching her for
+a few moments. "Can I have a bit of canvas?"
+
+"Take anything," exclaimed Miss Snell; and he helped himself, refusing
+the easel which she wanted to force upon him, and propping his little
+stretcher up on a chair. Miss Snell stopped her drawing to watch him
+commence. It made her rather nervous to see how much paint he squeezed
+out on the palette; it seemed to her a reckless prodigality.
+
+He eyed her assortment of brushes dubiously, selecting three from the
+draggled limp collection.
+
+Cora was certainly a fine subject, in spite of her sulkiness, and he
+grew absorbed in his work, and painted away, with Miss Snell at his
+elbow making little staccato remarks of admiration as the sketch
+progressed. Suddenly he jumped up, realizing how long he had kept the
+young model.
+
+"Dear me," he cried, "you must be exhausted!" and he ran to help her
+down from the model-stand.
+
+She did look tired, and Miss Snell suggested tea, which he stayed to
+share. Cora became less and less sulky, and when at last he remembered
+that he had come to see her work, she produced it with less
+unwillingness than he had expected.
+
+He was rather floored by her productions. As far as he could judge from
+what she showed him, she was hopelessly without talent, and he could
+only wonder which of these remarkably bad studies had won for her the
+Lynxville Sumner Prize Fund.
+
+He tried to give her some advice, and was thanked when she put her
+things away.
+
+Then they all looked at his sketch, which Miss Snell pronounced "too
+charming," and Cora plainly thought did not do her justice.
+
+"I wish you would pose a few times for me, Miss Price," he said, before
+leaving. "I should like very much to paint you, and it would be doing me
+a great favor."
+
+The girl did not respond to this request with any eagerness. He fancied
+he could see she was feeling huffy again at his meagre praise of her
+work.
+
+Miss Snell, however, did not allow her to answer, but rapturously
+promised that Cora should sit as often as he liked, and paid no
+attention to the girl's protest that she had no time to spare.
+
+"This has been simply in-spiring!" said Miss Snell, as she bade him
+good-bye, and he left very enthusiastic about Cora's profile, and with
+his hand covered with paint from Miss Snell's door-knob.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In spite of Miss Snell's assurance that Cora would pose, the Painter was
+convinced that she would not, if a suitable excuse could be invented.
+Feeling this, he wrote her a most civil note about it. The answer came
+promptly, and did not surprise him.
+
+She was very sorry indeed, but she had no leisure hours at her disposal,
+and although she felt honored, she really could not do it. This was
+written on flimsy paper, in a big unformed handwriting, and it caused
+him to betake himself once more to Miss Snell's studio, where he found
+her alone--Cora was at Julian's.
+
+She promised to beg Cora to pose, and accepted an invitation for them to
+breakfast with him in his studio on the following Sunday morning.
+
+He carefully explained to her that his whole winter's work depended upon
+Cora's posing for him. He half meant it, having been seized with the
+notion that her type was what he needed to realize a cherished ideal,
+and he told this to Miss Snell, and enlarged upon it until he left her
+rooted in the conviction that he was hopelessly in love with Cora--a
+fact she imparted to that young woman on her return from Julian's.
+
+Cora listened very placidly, and expressed no astonishment. He was not
+the first by any means; other people had been in love with her in
+Lynxville, Massachusetts, and she confided the details of several of
+these love-affairs to Miss Snell's sympathetic ears during the evening.
+
+Meanwhile, the Painter did nothing, and a fresh canvas stood on his
+easel when the girls arrived for breakfast on Sunday morning. The big
+unfinished painting was turned to the wall; he had lost all interest in
+it.
+
+"When I fancy doing a thing I am good for nothing else," he explained to
+Cora, after she had promised him a few sittings. "So you are really
+saving me from idleness by posing."
+
+Cora laughed, and was silent. The Painter blessed her for not being
+talkative; her nasal voice irritated him, although her beautiful
+features were a constant delight.
+
+Miss Snell had succeeded in permanently eliminating the disfiguring
+bang, and her charming profile was left unmarred.
+
+"I want to paint you just as you are," he said, and noticing that she
+looked rather disdainfully at her shabby black cashmere, added, "The
+black of your dress could not be better."
+
+"We thought," said Miss Snell, deprecatingly, "that you might like a
+costume. We could easily arrange one."
+
+"Not in the least necessary," said the Painter. "I have set my heart on
+painting her just as she is."
+
+The girls were disappointed in his want of taste. They had had visions
+of a creation in which two Liberty scarfs and a velveteen table cover
+were combined in a felicitous harmony of color.
+
+"When can I have the first sitting?" he asked.
+
+"Tuesday, I think," said Miss Snell, reflectively.
+
+"Heavens!" thought the Painter. "Is Miss Snell coming with her?" And the
+possibility kept him in a state of nervousness until Tuesday afternoon,
+when Cora appeared, accompanied by the inevitable Miss Snell.
+
+It turned out, however, that the latter could not stay. She would call
+for Cora later; just now her afternoons were occupied. She was doing a
+pastel portrait in the Champs Elysées quarter, so she reluctantly left,
+to the Painter's great relief.
+
+He did not make himself very agreeable during the sittings which
+followed. He was apt to get absorbed in his work and to forget to say
+anything. Then Miss Snell would appear to fetch her friend, and he would
+apologize for being so dull, and Cora would remark that she enjoyed
+sitting quietly, it rested her after the noise and confusion at
+Julian's.
+
+"If she talked much I could not paint her, her voice is so irritating,"
+he confided to a friend who was curious and asked all sorts of questions
+about his new sitter.
+
+The work went well but slowly, for Cora sat only twice a week. She felt
+obliged to devote the rest of her time to study, as she was living on
+the prize fund, and she even had qualms of conscience about the two
+afternoons she gave up to the sittings.
+
+During all this time Miss Snell continued to weave chapters of romance
+about Cora and the Painter, and the girls talked things over after each
+sitting when they were alone together.
+
+Spring had appeared very early in the year, and the public gardens and
+boulevards were richly green. Chestnut-trees blossomed and gaudy
+flower-beds bloomed in every square. The Salons opened, and were
+thronged with an enthusiastic public, although the papers as usual
+denounced them as being the poorest exhibitions ever given.
+
+The Painter had sent nothing, being completely absorbed in finishing
+Cora's portrait, to the utter exclusion of everything else.
+
+Cora did the exhibitions faithfully. It was one of the duties she owed
+to the Lynxville fund, and which she diligently carried out. The Painter
+bothered and confused her by many things; he persistently admired all
+the pictures she liked least, and praised all those she did not care
+for. She turned pale with suppressed indignation when he differed from
+her opinion, and resented his sweeping contempt of her criticisms.
+
+On the strength of a remittance from the prize fund, and in honor of the
+season, she discarded the sailor hat for a vivid ready-made creation
+smacking strongly of the Bon Marché. The weather was warm, and Cora wore
+mitts, which the Painter thought unpardonable in a city where gloves are
+particularly cheap. The mitts were probably fashionable in Lynxville,
+Massachusetts. Miss Snell, who rustled about in stiff black silk and
+bugles, seemed quite oblivious to her friend's want of taste; she was
+all excitement, for her pastel portrait--by some hideous mistake--had
+been accepted and hung in one of the exhibitions, and the girls went
+together on varnishing-day to see it. There they met the Painter
+prowling aimlessly about, and Miss Snell was delighted to note his
+devotion to Cora. It was a strong proof of his attachment to her, she
+thought. The truth was he felt obliged to be civil after her kindness in
+posing. He wished he could repay her in some fashion, but since his
+first visit to Miss Snell's she had never offered to show him her work
+again, or asked his advice in any way, and he felt a delicacy about
+offering his services as a teacher when she gave him so little
+encouragement. He fancied, too, that she did not take much interest in
+his work, and knew she did not appreciate his portrait of her, which was
+by far the best thing he had ever done.
+
+Her lack of judgment vexed him, for he knew the value of his work, and
+every day his fellow-painters trooped in to see it, and were loud in
+their praises. It would certainly be the _clou_ of any exhibition in
+which it might be placed.
+
+During one sitting Cora ventured to remark that she thought it a pity he
+did not intend to make the portrait more complete, and suggested the
+addition of various accessories which in her opinion would very much
+improve it.
+
+"It's by far the most complete thing I have ever done," he said. "I
+sha'n't touch it again," and he flung down his brushes in a fit of
+temper.
+
+She looked at him contemptuously, and putting on her hat, left the
+studio without another word; and for several weeks he did not see her
+again.
+
+Then he met her in the street, and begged her to come and pose for a
+head in his big picture, which he had taken up once more. His apologies
+were so abject that she consented, but she ceased to be punctual, and he
+never could feel quite sure that she would keep her appointments.
+
+Sometimes he would wait a whole afternoon in vain, and one day when she
+failed to appear at the promised hour he shut up his office and strolled
+down to the Seine. There he caught sight of her with a gay party who
+were about to embark on one of the little steamers that ply up and down
+the river.
+
+He shook his fist at her from the quay where he stood, and watched her
+and her party step into the boat from the pier.
+
+"She thinks little enough of the Lynxville Prize Fund when she wants an
+outing," he said to himself, scornfully.
+
+After fretting a little over his wasted afternoon, he forgot all about
+her, and set to work with other models. Then he left Paris for the
+summer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few hours after his return, early in the fall, there came a knock at
+his door. He had been admiring Cora's portrait, which to his fresh eye
+looked exceptionally good.
+
+Miss Snell, with eyes red and tearful, stood on his door-mat when he
+answered the tap.
+
+"Poor dear Cora," she said, had received a notice from the Lynxville
+committee that they did not consider her work sufficiently promising to
+continue the fund another year.
+
+"She will have to go home," sobbed Miss Snell, but said: "I am forced to
+admit that Cora has wasted a good deal of time this summer. She is so
+young, and needs a little distraction, now and then," and she appealed
+to the Painter for confirmation of this undoubted fact.
+
+He was absent-minded, but assented to all she said. In his heart he
+thought it a fortunate thing that the prize fund should be withdrawn.
+One female art student the less: he grew pleased with the idea. Cora had
+ceased to interest him as an individual, and he considered her only as
+one of an obnoxious class.
+
+"I thought you ought to be the first to know about it," said Miss Snell,
+confidentially, "because you might have some plan for keeping her over
+here." Miss Snell looked unutterable things that she did not dare to put
+into words.
+
+She made the Painter feel uncomfortable, she looked so knowing, and he
+became loud in his advice to send Cora home at once.
+
+"Pack her off," he cried. "She is wasting time and money by staying. She
+never had a particle of talent, and the sooner she goes back to
+Lynxville the better."
+
+Miss Snell shrank from his vehemence, and wished she had not insisted
+upon coming to consult him. She had assured Cora that the merest hint
+would bring matters to a crisis. Cora would imagine that she had bungled
+matters terribly, and she was mortified at the thought of returning with
+the news of a repulse.
+
+As soon as she had gone, the Painter felt sorry he had been so hasty. He
+had bundled her unceremoniously out of the studio, pleading important
+work.
+
+He called twice in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, but the porter would
+never let him pass her lodge, and he at last realized that she had been
+given orders to that effect. A judicious tip extracted from her the fact
+that Miss Price expected to leave for America the following Saturday,
+and, armed with an immense bouquet, he betook himself to the St. Lazare
+station at the hour for the departure of the Havre express.
+
+He arrived with only a minute to spare before the guard's whistle was
+answered by the mosquitolike pipe that sets the train in motion.
+
+The Botticelli profile was very haughty and cold. Miss Snell was there,
+of course, bathed in tears. He had just time enough to hand in his huge
+bouquet through the open window before the train started. He caught one
+glimpse of an angry face within, when suddenly his great nosegay came
+flying out of the compartment, and striking him full in the face, spread
+its shattered paper and loosened flowers all over the platform at his
+feet.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14744 ***