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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30023 ***
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:--
+
+1. Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
+
+2. Printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation,
+   and ligature usage have been retained except the following:
+     Pg. 117, Ch. VII: Changed comma to period in (relation to life,)
+     Pg. 255, Ch. XVI: Removed ending quote in (the highest sense.")
+
+
+
+
+                      THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
+
+                         WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+
+
+
+
+                             THE DAUGHTER
+                            OF THE STORAGE
+
+                           AND OTHER THINGS
+                          IN PROSE AND VERSE
+
+                            W. D. HOWELLS
+
+
+                     HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+                         NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+             Copyright, 1915, 1916, by Harper & Brothers
+               Printed in the United States of America
+                        Published April, 1916
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+                                                        PAGE
+              I. THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE               3
+             II. A PRESENTIMENT                           45
+            III. CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP              67
+             IV. THE RETURN TO FAVOR                      81
+              V. SOMEBODY'S MOTHER                        93
+             VI. THE FACE AT THE WINDOW                  107
+            VII. AN EXPERIENCE                           117
+           VIII. THE BOARDERS                            127
+             IX. BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL               141
+              X. THE MOTHER-BIRD                         151
+             XI. THE AMIGO                               161
+            XII. BLACK CROSS FARM                        173
+           XIII. THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE                  185
+            XIV. A FEAST OF REASON                       227
+             XV. CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL            243
+            XVI. TABLE TALK                              253
+           XVII. THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER           269
+          XVIII. SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY         285
+            XIX. THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS              319
+
+
+
+
+                     THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
+
+
+                                  I
+
+They were getting some of their things out to send into the country,
+and Forsyth had left his work to help his wife look them over and
+decide which to take and which to leave. The things were mostly trunks
+that they had stored the fall before; there were some tables and
+Colonial bureaus inherited from his mother, and some mirrors and
+decorative odds and ends, which they would not want in the furnished
+house they had taken for the summer. There were some canvases which
+Forsyth said he would paint out and use for other subjects, but which,
+when he came to look at again, he found really not so bad. The rest,
+literally, was nothing but trunks; there were, of course, two or three
+boxes of books. When they had been packed closely into the five-dollar
+room, with the tables and bureaus and mirrors and canvases and
+decorative odds and ends put carefully on top, the Forsyths thought
+the effect very neat, and laughed at themselves for being proud of it.
+
+They spent the winter in Paris planning for the summer in America, and
+now it had come May, a month which in New York is at its best, and in
+the Constitutional Storage Safe-Deposit Warehouse is by no means at
+its worst. The Constitutional Storage is no longer new, but when the
+Forsyths were among the first to store there it was up to the latest
+moment in the modern perfections of a safe-deposit warehouse. It was
+strictly fire-proof; and its long, white, brick-walled, iron-doored
+corridors, with their clean concrete floors, branching from a central
+avenue to the tall windows north and south, offered perspectives
+sculpturesquely bare, or picturesquely heaped with arriving or
+departing household stuff.
+
+When the Forsyths went to look at it a nice young fellow from the
+office had gone with them; running ahead and switching on rows of
+electrics down the corridors, and then, with a wire-basketed electric
+lamp, which he twirled about and held aloft and alow, showing the
+dustless, sweet-smelling spaciousness of a perfect five-dollar room.
+He said it would more than hold their things; and it really held them.
+
+Now, when the same young fellow unlocked the iron door and set it
+wide, he said he would get them a man, and he got Mrs. Forsyth a gilt
+armchair from some furniture going into an adjoining twenty-dollar
+room. She sat down in it, and "Of course," she said, "the pieces I
+want will be at the very back and the very bottom. Why don't you get
+yourself a chair, too, Ambrose? What are you looking at?"
+
+With his eyes on the neighboring furniture he answered, "Seems to be
+the wreck of a millionaire's happy home; parlor and kitchen utensils
+and office furniture all in white and gold."
+
+"Horrors, yes!" Mrs. Forsyth said, without turning her head from
+studying her trunks, as if she might divine their contents from their
+outside.
+
+"Tata and I," her husband said, "are more interested in the
+millionaire's things." Tata, it appeared, was not a dog, but a child;
+the name was not the diminutive of her own name, which was Charlotte,
+but a generic name for a doll, which Tata had learned from her Italian
+nurse to apply to all little girls and had got applied to herself by
+her father. She was now at a distance down the corridor, playing a
+drama with the pieces of millionaire furniture; as they stretched away
+in variety and splendor they naturally suggested personages of
+princely quality, and being touched with her little forefinger tip
+were capable of entering warmly into Tata's plans for them.
+
+Her mother looked over her shoulder toward the child. "Come here,
+Tata," she called, and when Tata, having enjoined some tall mirrors to
+secrecy with a frown and a shake of the head, ran to her, Mrs. Forsyth
+had forgotten why she had called her. "Oh!" she said, recollecting,
+"do you know which your trunk is, Tata? Can you show mamma? Can you
+put your hand on it?"
+
+The child promptly put her hand on the end of a small box just within
+her tiptoe reach, and her mother said, "I do believe she knows
+everything that's in it, Ambrose! That trunk has got to be opened the
+very first one!"
+
+The man that the young fellow said he would send showed at the far end
+of the corridor, smaller than human, but enlarging himself to the
+average Irish bulk as he drew near. He was given instructions and
+obeyed with caressing irony Mrs. Forsyth's order to pull out Tata's
+trunk first, and she found the key in a large tangle of keys, and
+opened it, and had the joy of seeing everything recognized by the
+owner: doll by doll, cook-stove, tin dishes, small brooms, wooden
+animals on feet and wheels, birds of various plumage, a toy piano, a
+dust-pan, alphabet blocks, dog's-eared linen Mother Goose books, and
+the rest. Tata had been allowed to put the things away herself, and
+she took them out with no apparent sense of the time passed since she
+saw them last. In the changing life of her parents all times and
+places were alike to her. She began to play with the things in the
+storage corridor as if it were yesterday when she saw them last in the
+flat. Her mother and father left her to them in the distraction of
+their own trunks. Mrs. Forsyth had these spread over the space toward
+the window and their lids lifted and tried to decide about them. In
+the end she had changed the things in them back and forth till she
+candidly owned that she no longer knew where anything at all was.
+
+As she raised herself for a moment's respite from the problem she saw
+at the far end of the corridor a lady with two men, who increased in
+size like her own man as they approached. The lady herself seemed to
+decrease, though she remained of a magnificence to match the
+furniture, and looked like it as to her dress of white picked out in
+gold when she arrived at the twenty-dollar room next the Forsyths'. In
+her advance she had been vividly played round by a little boy, who ran
+forward and back and easily doubled the length of the corridor before
+he came to a stand and remained with his brown eyes fixed on Tata.
+Tata herself had blue eyes, which now hovered dreamily above the
+things in her trunk.
+
+The two mothers began politely to ignore each other. She of the
+twenty-dollar room directed the men who had come with her, and in a
+voice of authority and appeal at once commanded and consulted them in
+the disposition of her belongings. At the sound of the mixed tones
+Mrs. Forsyth signaled to her husband, and, when he came within
+whispering, murmured: "Pittsburg, _or_ Chicago. Did you _ever_ hear
+such a Mid-Western accent!" She pretended to be asking him about
+repacking the trunk before her, but the other woman was not deceived.
+She was at least aware of criticism in the air of her neighbors, and
+she put on greater severity with the workmen. The boy came up and
+caught her skirt. "What?" she said, bending over. "No, certainly not.
+I haven't time to attend to you. Go off and play. Don't I tell you no?
+Well, there, then! Will you get that trunk out where I can open it?
+That small one there," she said to one of the men, while the other
+rested for both. She stooped to unlock the trunk and flung up the lid.
+"Now if you bother me any more I will surely--" But she lost herself
+short of the threat and began again to seek counsel and issue orders.
+
+The boy fell upon the things in the trunk, which were the things of a
+boy, as those in Tata's trunk were the things of a girl, and to run
+with them, one after another, to Tata and to pile them in gift on the
+floor beside her trunk. He did not stop running back and forth as fast
+as his short, fat legs could carry him till he had reached the bottom
+of his box, chattering constantly and taking no note of the effect
+with Tata. Then, as she made no response whatever to his munificence,
+he began to be abashed and to look pathetically from her to her
+father.
+
+"Oh, really, young man," Forsyth said, "we can't let you impoverish
+yourself at this rate. What have you said to your benefactor, Tata?
+What are you going to give _him_?"
+
+The children did not understand his large words, but they knew he was
+affectionately mocking them.
+
+"Ambrose," Mrs. Forsyth said, "you mustn't let him."
+
+"I'm trying to think how to hinder him, but it's rather late," Forsyth
+answered, and then the boy's mother joined in.
+
+"Indeed, indeed, if you can, it's more than I can. You're just
+worrying the little girl," she said to the boy.
+
+"Oh no, he isn't, dear little soul," Mrs. Forsyth said, leaving her
+chair and going up to the two children. She took the boy's hand in
+hers. "What a kind boy! But you know my little girl mustn't take all
+your playthings. If you'll give her _one_ she'll give _you_ one, and
+that will be enough. You can both play with them all for the present."
+She referred her suggestion to the boy's mother, and the two ladies
+met at the invisible line dividing the five-dollar room from the
+twenty-dollar room.
+
+"Oh yes, indeed," the Mid-Westerner said, willing to meet the
+New-Yorker half-way. "You're taking things out, I see. I hardly know
+which is the worst: taking out or putting in."
+
+"Well, we are just completing the experience," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I
+shall be able to say better how I feel in half an hour."
+
+"You don't mean this is the first time you've stored? I suppose
+_we've_ been in and out of storage twenty times. Not in this warehouse
+exactly; we've never been here before."
+
+"It seems very nice," Mrs. Forsyth suggested.
+
+"They all do at the beginning. I suppose if we ever came to the end
+they would seem nicer still. Mr. Bream's business is always taking him
+away" (it appeared almost instantly that he was the international
+inspector of a great insurance company's agencies in Europe and South
+America), "and when I don't go with him it seems easier to break up
+and go into a hotel than to go on housekeeping. I don't know that it
+is, though," she questioned. "It's so hard to know what to do with the
+child in a hotel."
+
+"Yes, but he seems the sort that you could manage with anywhere," Mrs.
+Forsyth agreed and disagreed.
+
+His mother looked at him where he stood beaming upon Tata and again
+joyfully awaiting some effect with her. But the child sat back upon
+her small heels with her eyes fixed on the things in her trunk and
+made no sign of having seen the heaps of his gifts.
+
+The Forsyths had said to each other before this that their little girl
+was a queer child, and now they were not so much ashamed of her
+apparent selfishness or rude indifference as they thought they were.
+They made a joke of it with the boy's mother, who said she did not
+believe Tata was anything but shy. She said she often told Mr. Bream
+that she did wish Peter--yes, that was his name; she didn't like it
+much, but it was his grandfather's; was Tata a Christian name? Oh,
+just a pet name! Well, it _was_ pretty--could be broken of _his_
+ridiculous habit; most children--little boys, that was--held onto
+their things so.
+
+Forsyth would have taken something from Tata and given it to Peter;
+but his wife would not let him; and he had to content himself with
+giving Peter a pencil of his own that drew red at one end and blue at
+the other, and that at once drew a blue boy, that looked like Peter,
+on the pavement. He told Peter not to draw a boy now, but wait till he
+got home, and then be careful not to draw a blue boy with the red end.
+He helped him put his things back into his trunk, and Peter seemed to
+enjoy that, too.
+
+Tata, without rising from her seat on her heels, watched the
+restitution with her dreamy eyes; she paid no attention to the blue
+boy on the pavement; pictures from her father were nothing new to her.
+The mothers parted with expressions of mutual esteem in spite of their
+difference of accent and fortune. Mrs. Forsyth asked if she might not
+kiss Peter, and did so; he ran to his mother and whispered to her;
+then he ran back and gave Tata so great a hug that she fell over from
+it.
+
+Tata did not cry, but continued as if lost in thought which she could
+not break from, and that night, after she had said her prayers with
+her mother, her mother thought it was time to ask her: "Tata, dear,
+why did you act so to that boy to-day? Why didn't you give him
+something of yours when he brought you all his things? Why did you act
+so oddly?"
+
+Tata said something in a voice so low that her mother could not make
+it out.
+
+"What did you say?"
+
+"I couldn't tell which," the child still whispered; but now her
+mother's ear was at her lips.
+
+"How, which?"
+
+"To give him. The more I looked," and the whisper became a quivering
+breath, "the more I couldn't tell which. And I wanted to give them
+_all_ to him, but I couldn't tell whether it would be right, because
+you and papa gave them to me for birthday and Christmas," and the
+quivering breath broke into a sobbing grief, so that the mother had to
+catch the child up to her heart.
+
+"Dear little tender conscience!" she said, still wiping her eyes when
+she told the child's father, and they fell into a sweet, serious talk
+about her before they slept. "And I was ashamed of her before that
+woman! I know she misjudged her; but _we_ ought to have remembered how
+fine and precious she is, and _known_ how she must have suffered,
+trying to decide."
+
+"Yes, conscience," the father said. "And temperament, the temperament
+to which decision is martyrdom."
+
+"And she will always have to be deciding! She'll have to decide for
+you, some day, as I do now; you are very undecided, Ambrose--she gets
+it from you."
+
+
+                                  II
+
+The Forsyths were afraid that Tata might want to offer Peter some gift
+in reparation the next morning, and her father was quite ready, if she
+said so, to put off their leaving town, and go with her to the
+Constitutional Storage, which was the only address of Mrs. Bream that
+he knew. But the child had either forgotten or she was contented with
+her mother's comforting, and no longer felt remorse.
+
+One does not store the least of one's personal or household gear
+without giving a hostage to storage, a pledge of allegiance impossible
+to break. No matter how few things one puts in, one never takes
+everything out; one puts more things in. Mrs. Forsyth went to the
+warehouse with Tata in the fall before they sailed for another winter
+in Paris, and added some old bits she had picked up at farm-houses in
+their country drives, and they filled the room quite to the top. She
+told her husband how Tata had entered into the spirit of putting back
+her trunk of playthings with the hope of seeing it again in the
+spring; and she added that she had now had to take a seven-fifty room
+without consulting him, or else throw away the things they had brought
+home.
+
+During the ten or twelve years that followed, the Forsyths sometimes
+spent a whole winter in a hotel; sometimes they had a flat; sometimes
+they had a separate dwelling. If their housing was ample, they took
+almost everything out of storage; once they got down to a two-dollar
+bin, and it seemed as if they really were leaving the storage
+altogether. Then, if they went into a flat that was nearly all studio,
+their furniture went back in a cataclysmal wave to the warehouse,
+where a ten-dollar room, a twelve-dollar room, would not dam the
+overflow.
+
+Tata, who had now outgrown her pet name, and was called Charlotte
+because her mother felt she ought to be, always went with her to the
+storage to help look the things over, to see the rooms emptied down to
+a few boxes, or replenished to bursting. In the first years she played
+about, close to her mother; as she grew older she ventured further,
+and began to make friends with other little girls who had come with
+their mothers. It was quite safe socially to be in the Constitutional
+Storage; it gave standing; and Mrs. Forsyth fearlessly chanced
+acquaintance with these mothers, who would sometimes be there whole
+long mornings or afternoons, taking trunks out or putting them in.
+With the trunks set into the corridors and opened for them, they would
+spend the hours looking the contents over, talking to their neighbors,
+or rapt in long silences when they hesitated with things held off or
+up, and, after gazing absently at them, putting them back again.
+Sometimes they varied the process by laying things aside for sending
+home, and receipting for them at the office as "goods selected."
+
+They were mostly hotel people or apartment people, as Mrs. Forsyth
+oftenest was herself, but sometimes they were separate-house people.
+Among these there was one family, not of great rank or wealth, but
+distinguished, as lifelong New-Yorkers, in a world of comers and goers
+of every origin. Mrs. Forsyth especially liked them for a certain
+quality, but what this quality was she could not very well say. They
+were a mother with two daughters, not quite old maids, but on the way
+to it, and there was very intermittently the apparently bachelor
+brother of the girls; at the office Mrs. Forsyth verified her
+conjecture that he was some sort of minister. One could see they were
+all gentlefolks, though the girls were not of the last cry of fashion.
+They were very nice to their mother, and you could tell that they must
+have been coming with her for years.
+
+At this point in her study of them for her husband's amusement she
+realized that Charlotte had been coming to the storage with her nearly
+all her life, and that more and more the child had taken charge of the
+uneventual inspection of the things. She was shocked to think that she
+had let this happen, and now she commanded her husband to say whether
+Charlotte would grow into a storage old maid like those good girls.
+
+Forsyth said, Probably not before her time; but he allowed it was a
+point to be considered.
+
+Very well, then, Mrs. Forsyth said, the child should never go again;
+that was all. She had strongly confirmed herself in this resolution
+when one day she not only let the child go again, but she let her go
+alone. The child was now between seventeen and eighteen, rather tall,
+grave, pretty, with the dull brown hair that goes so well with
+dreaming blue eyes, and of a stiff grace. She had not come out yet,
+because she had always been out, handing cakes at her father's studio
+teas long before she could remember not doing it, and later pouring
+for her mother with rather a quelling air as she got toward fifteen.
+During these years the family had been going and coming between Europe
+and America; they did not know perfectly why, except that it was
+easier than not.
+
+More and more there was a peculiarity in the goods selected by
+Charlotte for sending home, which her mother one day noted. "How is
+it, Charlotte, that you always send exactly the things I want, and
+when you get your own things here you don't know whether they are what
+you wanted or not?"
+
+"Because I don't know when I send them. I don't choose them; I can't."
+
+"But you choose the right things for me?"
+
+"No, I don't, mother. I just take what comes first, and you always
+like it."
+
+"Now, that is nonsense, Charlotte. I can't have you telling me such a
+thing as that. It's an insult to my intelligence. Do you think I don't
+know my own mind?"
+
+"I don't know _my_ mind," the girl said, so persistently, obstinately,
+stubbornly, that her mother did not pursue the subject for fear of
+worse.
+
+She referred it to her husband, who said: "Perhaps it's like poets
+never being able to remember their own poetry. I've heard it's because
+they have several versions in their minds when they write and can't
+remember which they've written. Charlotte has several choices in her
+mind, and can't choose between her choices."
+
+"Well, we ought to have broken her of her indecision. Some day it will
+make her very unhappy."
+
+"Pretty hard to break a person of her temperament," Forsyth suggested.
+
+"I know it!" his wife admitted, with a certain pleasure in realizing
+the fact. "I don't know what we _shall_ do."
+
+
+                                 III
+
+Storage society was almost wholly feminine; in rare instances there
+was a man who must have been sent in dearth of women or in an hour of
+their disability. Then the man came hastily, with a porter, and either
+pulled all the things out of the rooms so that he could honestly say
+he had seen them, and that the thing wanted was not there; or else
+merely had the doors opened, and after a glance inside resolved to
+wait till his wife, or mother, or daughter could come. He agreed in
+guilty eagerness with the workmen that this was the only way.
+
+The exception to the general rule was a young man who came one bright
+spring morning when all nature suggested getting one's stuff out and
+going into the country, and had the room next the Forsyths' original
+five-dollar room opened. As it happened, Charlotte was at the moment
+visiting this room upon her mother's charge to see whether certain old
+scrim sash-curtains, which they had not needed for ages but at last
+simply _must_ have, were not lurking there in a chest of general
+curtainings. The Forsyths now had rooms on other floors, but their
+main room was at the end of the corridor branching northward from that
+where the five-dollar room was. Near this main room that nice New York
+family had their rooms, and Charlotte had begun the morning in their
+friendly neighborhood, going through some chests that might perhaps
+have the general curtainings in them and the scrim curtains among the
+rest. It had not, and she had gone to what the Forsyths called their
+old ancestral five-dollar room, where that New York family continued
+to project a sort of wireless chaperonage over her. But the young man
+had come with a porter, and, with her own porter, Charlotte could not
+feel that even a wireless chaperonage was needed, though the young man
+approached with the most beaming face she thought she had ever seen,
+and said he hoped he should not be in her way. She answered with a
+sort of helpless reverberation of his glow, Not at all; she should
+only be a moment. She wanted to say she hoped she would not be in
+_his_ way, but she saved herself in time, while, with her own eyes
+intent upon the façade of her room and her mind trying to lose itself
+in the question which curtain-trunk the scrims might be in, she kept
+the sense of his sweet eyes, the merriest eyes she had ever seen,
+effulgent with good-will and apology and reverent admiration. She
+blushed to think it admiration, though she liked to think it so, and
+she did not snub him when the young man jumped about, neglecting his
+own storage, and divining the right moments for his offers of help.
+She saw that he was a little shorter than herself, that he was very
+light and quick on his feet, and had a round, brown face,
+clean-shaven, and a round, brown head, close shorn, from which in the
+zeal of his attentions to her he had shed his straw hat onto the
+window-sill. He formed a strong contrast to the contents of his
+store-room, which was full, mainly, of massive white furniture picked
+out in gold, and very blond. He said casually that it had been there,
+off and on, since long before he could remember, and at these words an
+impression, vague, inexplicable, deepened in Charlotte's mind.
+
+"Mother," she said, for she had now disused the earlier "mamma" in
+deference to modern usage, "how old was I when we first took that
+five-dollar room?"
+
+She asked this question after she had shown the scrim curtains she had
+found and brought home with her.
+
+"Why? I don't know. Two or three; three or four. I should have to
+count up. What makes you ask?"
+
+"Can a person recollect what happened when they were three or four?"
+
+"I should say not, decidedly."
+
+"Or recollect a face?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"Then of course it wasn't. Mother, do you remember ever telling me
+what the little boy was like who gave me all his playthings and I
+couldn't decide what to give him back?"
+
+"What a question! Of course not! He was very brown and funny, with the
+beamingest little face in the world. Rather short for his age, I
+should say, though I haven't the least idea what his age was."
+
+"Then it was the very same little boy!" Charlotte said.
+
+"Who was the very same little boy?" her mother demanded.
+
+"The one that was there to-day; the young man, I mean," Charlotte
+explained, and then she told what had happened with a want of fullness
+which her mother's imagination supplied.
+
+"Did he say who he was? Is he coming back to-morrow or this afternoon?
+Did you inquire who he was or where?"
+
+"What an idea, mother!" Charlotte said, grouping the several
+impossibilities under one head in her answer.
+
+"You had a perfect right to know, if you thought he was the one."
+
+"But I didn't _think_ he was the one, and I don't _know_ that he is
+now; and if he was, what could I do about it?"
+
+"That is true," Mrs. Forsyth owned. "But it's very disappointing. I've
+always felt as if they ought to know it was your undecidedness and not
+ungenerousness."
+
+Charlotte laughed a little forlornly, but she only said, "Really,
+mother!"
+
+Mrs. Forsyth was still looking at the curtains. "Well, these are not
+the scrims I wanted. You must go back. I believe I will go with you.
+The sooner we have it over the better," she added, and she left the
+undecided Charlotte to decide whether she meant the scrim curtains or
+the young man's identity.
+
+It was very well, for one reason, that she decided to go with
+Charlotte that afternoon. The New-Yorkers must have completed the
+inspection of their trunks, for they had not come back. Their failure
+to do so was the more important because the young man had come back
+and was actively superintending the unpacking of his room. The
+palatial furniture had all been ranged up and down the corridor, and
+as fast as a trunk was got out and unlocked he went through it with
+the help of the storage-men, listed its contents in a note-book with a
+number, and then transferred the number and a synopsis of the record
+to a tag and fastened it to the trunk, which he had put back into the
+room.
+
+When the Forsyths arrived with the mistaken scrim curtains, he
+interrupted himself with apologies for possibly being in their way;
+and when Mrs. Forsyth said he was not at all in their way, he got
+white-and-gold arm-chairs for her and Charlotte and put them so
+conveniently near the old ancestral room that Mrs. Forsyth scarcely
+needed to move hand or foot in letting Charlotte restore the wrong
+curtains and search the chests for the right ones. His politeness made
+way for conversation and for the almost instant exchange of
+confidences between himself and Mrs. Forsyth, so that Charlotte was
+free to enjoy the silence to which they left her in her labors.
+
+"Before I say a word," Mrs. Forsyth said, after saying some hundreds
+in their mutual inculpation and exculpation, "I want to ask something,
+and I hope you will excuse it to an old woman's curiosity and not
+think it rude."
+
+At the words "old woman's" the young man gave a protesting "Oh!" and
+at the word "rude" he said, "Not at all."
+
+"It is simply this: how long have your things been here? I ask because
+we've had this room thirteen or fourteen years, and I've never seen
+your room opened in that whole time."
+
+The young man laughed joyously. "Because it hasn't been opened in that
+whole time. I was a little chap of three or four bothering round here
+when my mother put the things in; I believe it was a great frolic for
+me, but I'm afraid it wasn't for her. I've been told that my
+activities contributed to the confusion of the things and the things
+in them that she's been in ever since, and I'm here now to make what
+reparation I can by listing them."
+
+"She'll find it a great blessing," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I wish we had
+ours listed. I suppose you remember it all very vividly. It must have
+been a great occasion for you seeing the things stored at that age."
+
+The young man beamed upon her. "Not so great as now, I'm afraid. The
+fact is, I don't remember anything about it. But I've been told that I
+embarrassed with my personal riches a little girl who was looking over
+her doll's things."
+
+"Oh, indeed!" Mrs. Forsyth said, stiffly, and she turned rather
+snubbingly from him and said, coldly, to Charlotte: "I think they are
+in that green trunk. Have you the key?" and, stooping as her daughter
+stooped, she whispered, "Really!" in condemnation and contempt.
+
+Charlotte showed no signs of sharing either, and Mrs. Forsyth could
+not very well manage them alone. So when Charlotte said, "No, I
+haven't the key, mother," and the young man burst in with, "Oh, do let
+me try my master-key; it will unlock anything that isn't a Yale," Mrs.
+Forsyth sank back enthroned and the trunk was thrown open.
+
+She then forgot what she had wanted it opened for. Charlotte said,
+"They're not here, mother," and her mother said, "No, I didn't suppose
+they were," and began to ask the young man about his mother. It
+appeared that his father had died twelve years before, and since then
+his mother and he had been nearly everywhere except at home, though
+mostly in England; now they had come home to see where they should go
+next or whether they should stay.
+
+"That would never suit my daughter," Mrs. Forsyth lugged in, partly
+because the talk had gone on away from her family as long as she could
+endure, and partly because Charlotte's indecision always amused her.
+"She can't bear to choose."
+
+"Really?" the young man said. "I don't know whether I like it or not,
+but I have had to do a lot of it. You mustn't think, though, that I
+chose this magnificent furniture. My father bought an Italian palace
+once, and as we couldn't live in it or move it we brought the
+furniture here."
+
+"It _is_ magnificent," Mrs. Forsyth said, looking down the long
+stretches of it and eying and fingering her specific throne. "I wish
+my husband could see it--I don't believe he remembers it from fourteen
+years ago. It looks--excuse me!--very studio."
+
+"Is he a painter? Not Mr. Forsyth the painter?"
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Forsyth eagerly admitted, but wondering how he should know
+her name, without reflecting that a score of trunk-tags proclaimed it
+and that she had acquired his by like means.
+
+"I like his things so much," he said. "I thought his three portraits
+were the best things in the Salon last year."
+
+"Oh, you _saw_ them?" Mrs. Forsyth laughed with pleasure and pride.
+"Then," as if it necessarily followed, "you must come to us some
+Sunday afternoon. You'll find a number of his new portraits and some
+of the subjects; they like to see themselves framed." She tried for a
+card in her hand-bag, but she had none, and she said, "Have you one
+of my cards, my dear?" Charlotte had, and rendered it up with a
+severity lost upon her for the moment. She held it toward him. "It's
+Mr. _Peter_ Bream?" she smiled upon him, and he beamed back.
+
+"Did you remember it from our first meeting?"
+
+In their cab Mrs. Forsyth said, "I don't know whether he's what you
+call rather fresh or not, Charlotte, and I'm not sure that I've been
+very wise. But he is so nice, and he looked so _glad_ to be asked."
+
+Charlotte did not reply at once, and her silent severity came to the
+surface of her mother's consciousness so painfully that it was rather
+a relief to have her explode, "Mother, I will thank you not to discuss
+my temperament with people."
+
+She gave Mrs. Forsyth her chance, and her mother was so happy in being
+able to say, "I won't--your _temper_, my dear," that she could add
+with sincere apology: "I'm sorry I vexed you, and I won't do it
+again."
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+The next day was Sunday; Peter Bream took it for some Sunday, and came
+to the tea on Mrs. Forsyth's generalized invitation. She pulled her
+mouth down and her eyebrows up when his card was brought in, but as
+he followed hard she made a lightning change to a smile and gave him a
+hand of cordial welcome. Charlotte had no choice but to welcome him,
+too, and so the matter was simple for her. She was pouring, as usual,
+for her mother, who liked to eliminate herself from set duties and
+walk round among the actual portraits in fact and in frame and talk
+about them to the potential portraits. Peter, qualified by long
+sojourn in England, at once pressed himself into the service of
+handing about the curate's assistant; Mrs. Forsyth electrically
+explained that it was one of the first brought to New York, and that
+she had got it at the Stores in London fifteen years before, and it
+had often been in the old ancestral room, and was there on top of the
+trunks that first day. She did not recur to the famous instance of
+Charlotte's infant indecision, and Peter was safe from a snub when he
+sat down by the girl's side and began to make her laugh. At the end,
+when her mother asked Charlotte what they had been laughing about, she
+could not tell; she said she did not know they were laughing.
+
+The next morning Mrs. Forsyth was paying for her Sunday tea with a
+Monday headache, and more things must be got out for the country.
+Charlotte had again no choice but to go alone to the storage, and yet
+again no choice but to be pleasant to Peter when she found him next
+door listing the contents of his mother's trunks and tagging them as
+before. He dropped his work and wanted to help her. Suddenly they
+seemed strangely well acquainted, and he pretended to be asked which
+pieces she should put aside as goods selected, and chose them for her.
+She hinted that he was shirking his own work; he said it was an
+all-summer's job, but he knew her mother was in a hurry. He found the
+little old trunk of her playthings, and got it down and opened it and
+took out some toys as goods selected. She made him put them back, but
+first he catalogued everything in it and synopsized the list on a tag
+and tagged the trunk. He begged for a broken doll which he had not
+listed, and Charlotte had so much of her original childish difficulty
+in parting with that instead of something else that she refused it.
+
+It came lunch-time, and he invited her to go out to lunch with him;
+and when she declined with dignity he argued that if they went to the
+Woman's Exchange she would be properly chaperoned by the genius of the
+place; besides, it was the only place in town where you got real
+strawberry shortcake. She was ashamed of liking it all; he besought
+her to let him carry her hand-bag for her, and, as he already had it,
+she could not prevent him; she did not know, really, how far she
+might successfully forbid him in anything. At the street door of the
+apartment-house they found her mother getting out of a cab, and she
+asked Peter in to lunch; so that Charlotte might as well have lunched
+with him at the Woman's Exchange.
+
+At all storage warehouses there is a season in autumn when the
+corridors are heaped with the incoming furniture of people who have
+decided that they cannot pass another winter in New York and are
+breaking up housekeeping to go abroad indefinitely. But in the spring,
+when the Constitutional Safe-Deposit offered ample space for
+thoughtful research, the meetings of Charlotte and Peter could recur
+without more consciousness of the advance they were making toward the
+fated issue than in so many encounters at tea or luncheon or dinner.
+Mrs. Forsyth was insisting on rather a drastic overhauling of her
+storage that year. Some of the things, by her command, were shifted to
+and fro between the more modern rooms and the old ancestral room, and
+Charlotte had to verify the removals. In deciding upon goods selected
+for the country she had the help of Peter, and she helped him by
+interposing some useful hesitations in the case of things he had put
+aside from his mother's possessions to be sold for her by the
+warehouse people.
+
+One day he came late and told Charlotte that his mother had suddenly
+taken her passage for England, and they were sailing the next morning.
+He said, as if it logically followed, that he had been in love with
+her from that earliest time when she would not give him the least of
+her possessions, and now he asked her if she would not promise him the
+greatest. She did not like what she felt "rehearsed" in his proposal;
+it was not her idea of a proposal, which ought to be spontaneous and
+unpremeditated in terms; at the same time, she resented his
+precipitation, which she could not deny was inevitable.
+
+She perceived that they were sitting side by side on two of those
+white-and-gold thrones, and she summoned an indignation with the
+absurdity in refusing him. She rose and said that she must go; that
+she must be going; that it was quite time for her to go; and she would
+not let him follow her to the elevator, as he made some offer of
+doing, but left him standing among his palatial furniture like a
+prince in exile.
+
+By the time she reached home she had been able to decide that she must
+tell her mother at once. Her mother received the fact of Peter's
+proposal with such transport that she did not realize the fact of
+Charlotte's refusal. When this was connoted to her she could scarcely
+keep her temper within the bounds of maternal tenderness. She said
+she would have nothing more to do with such a girl; that there was but
+one such pearl as Peter in the universe, and for Charlotte to throw
+him away like that! Was it because she could not decide? Well, it
+appeared that she could decide wrong quickly enough when it came to
+the point. Would she leave it now to her mother?
+
+That Charlotte would not do, but what she did do was to write a letter
+to Peter taking him back as much as rested with her; but delaying so
+long in posting it, when it was written, that it reached him among the
+letters sent on board and supplementarily delivered by his room
+steward after all the others when the ship had sailed. The best Peter
+could do in response was a jubilant Marconigram of unequaled cost and
+comprehensiveness.
+
+His mother had meant to return in the fall, after her custom, to find
+out whether she wished to spend the winter in New York or not. Before
+the date for her sailing she fell sick, and Peter came sadly home
+alone in the spring. Mrs. Bream's death brought Mrs. Forsyth a vain
+regret; she was sorry now that she had seen so little of Mrs. Bream;
+Peter's affection for her was beautiful and spoke worlds for both of
+them; and they, the Forsyths, must do what they could to comfort him.
+
+Charlotte felt the pathos of his case peculiarly when she went to make
+provision for goods selected for the summer from the old ancestral
+room, and found him forlorn among his white-and-gold furniture next
+door. He complained that he had no association with it except the
+touching fact of his mother's helplessness with it, which he had now
+inherited. The contents of the trunks were even less intimately of his
+experience; he had performed a filial duty in listing their contents,
+which long antedated him, and consisted mostly of palatial bric-à-brac
+and the varied spoils of travel.
+
+He cheered up, however, in proposing to her that they should buy a
+Castle in Spain and put them into it. The fancy pleased her, but
+visibly she shrank from a step which it involved, so that he was, as
+it were, forced to say, half jokingly, half ruefully, "I can imagine
+your not caring for this rubbish or what became of it, Charlotte, but
+what about the owner?"
+
+"The owner?" she asked, as it were somnambulantly.
+
+"Yes. Marrying him, say, sometime soon."
+
+"Oh, Peter, I couldn't."
+
+"Couldn't? You know that's not playing the game exactly."
+
+"Yes; but not--not right away?"
+
+"Well, I don't know much about it in my own case, but isn't it usual
+to fix some approximate date? When should you think?"
+
+"Oh, Peter, I _can't_ think."
+
+"Will you let me fix it? I must go West and sell out and pull up, you
+know, preparatory to never going again. We can fix the day now or we
+can fix it when I come back."
+
+"Oh, when you come back," she entreated so eagerly that Peter said:
+
+"Charlotte, let me ask you one thing. Were you ever sorry you wrote me
+that taking-back letter?"
+
+"Why, Peter, you know how I am. When I have decided something I have
+undecided it. That's all."
+
+From gay he turned to grave. "I ought to have thought. I haven't been
+fair; _I_ haven't played the game. I ought to have given you another
+chance; and I haven't, have I?"
+
+"Why, I suppose a girl can always change," Charlotte said,
+suggestively.
+
+"Yes, but you won't always be a girl. I've never asked you if you
+wanted to change. I ask you now. Do you?"
+
+"How can I tell? Hadn't we better let it go as it is? Only not hurry
+about--about--marrying?"
+
+"Certainly not hurry about marrying. I've wondered that a girl could
+make up her mind to marry any given man. Haven't you ever wished that
+you had not made up your mind about me?"
+
+"Hundreds of times. But I don't know that I meant anything by it."
+
+He took her hand from where it lay in her lap as again she sat on one
+of the white-and-gold thrones beside him and gently pressed it. "Well,
+then, let's play we have never been engaged. I'm going West to-night
+to settle things up for good, and I won't be back for three or four
+months, and when I come back we'll start new. I'll ask you, and you
+shall say yes or no just as if you had never said either before."
+
+"Peter, when you talk like that!" She saw his brown, round face dimly
+through her wet eyes, and she wanted to hug him for pity of him and
+pride in him, but she could not decide to do it. They went out to
+lunch at the Woman's Exchange, and the only regret Peter had was that
+it was so long past the season of strawberry shortcake, and that
+Charlotte seemed neither to talk nor to listen; she ought to have done
+one or the other.
+
+They had left the Vaneckens busy with their summer trunks at the far
+end of the northward corridor, where their wireless station had been
+re-established for Charlotte's advantage, though she had not thought
+of it the whole short morning long. When she came back from lunch the
+Vaneckens were just brushing away the crumbs of theirs, which the son
+and brother seemed to have brought in for them in a paper box; at any
+rate, he was now there, making believe to help them.
+
+Mrs. Forsyth had promised to come, but she came so late in the
+afternoon that she owned she had been grudgingly admitted at the
+office, and she was rather indignant about it. By this time, without
+having been West for three months, Peter had asked a question which
+had apparently never been asked before, and Charlotte had as newly
+answered it. "And now, mother," she said, while Mrs. Forsyth passed
+from indignant to exultant, "I want to be married right away, before
+Peter changes his mind about taking me West with him. Let us go home
+at once. You always said I should have a home wedding."
+
+"What a ridiculous idea!" Mrs. Forsyth said, more to gain time than
+anything else. She added, "Everything is at sixes and sevens in the
+flat. There wouldn't be standing-room." A sudden thought flashed upon
+her, which, because it was sudden and in keeping with her character,
+she put into tentative words. "You're more at home _here_ than
+anywhere else. You were almost born here. You've played about here
+ever since you were a child. You first met Peter here. He proposed to
+you here, and you rejected him here. He's proposed here again, and
+you've accepted him, you say--"
+
+"Mother!" Charlotte broke in terribly upon her. "Are you suggesting
+that I should be married in a storage warehouse? Well, I haven't
+fallen quite so low as that yet. If I can't have a _home_ wedding, I
+will have a _church_ wedding, and I will wait till doomsday for it if
+necessary."
+
+"I don't know about doomsday," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but as far as
+to-day is concerned, it's too late for a church wedding. Peter, isn't
+there something about canonical hours? And isn't it past them?"
+
+"That's in the Episcopal Church," Peter said, and then he asked, very
+politely, "Will you excuse me for a moment?" and walked away as if he
+had an idea. It was apparently to join the Vaneckens, who stood in a
+group at the end of their corridor, watching the restoration of the
+trunks which they had been working over the whole day. He came back
+with Mr. Vanecken and Mr. Vanecken's mother. He was smiling radiantly,
+and they amusedly.
+
+"It's all right," he explained. "Mr. Vanecken is a Presbyterian
+minister, and he will marry us now."
+
+"But not here!" Charlotte cried, feeling herself weaken.
+
+"No, certainly not," the dominie reassured her. "I know a church in
+the next block that I can borrow for the occasion. But what about the
+license?"
+
+It was in the day before the parties must both make application in
+person, and Peter took a paper from his breast pocket. "I thought it
+might be needed, sometime, and I got it on the way up, this morning."
+
+"Oh, how thoughtful of you, Peter!" Mrs. Forsyth moaned in admiration
+otherwise inexpressible, and the rest laughed, even Charlotte, who
+laughed hysterically. At the end of the corridor they met the Misses
+Vanecken waiting for them, unobtrusively expectant, and they all went
+down in the elevator together. Just as they were leaving the building,
+which had the air of hurrying them out, Mrs. Forsyth had an
+inspiration. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed, and then, in deference to
+Mr. Vanecken, said, "Good gracious, I _mean_. My husband! Peter, go
+right into the office and telephone Mr. Forsyth."
+
+"Perhaps," Mr. Vanecken said, "I had better go and see about having my
+friend's church opened, in the meanwhile, and--"
+
+"By all means!" Mrs. Forsyth said from her mood of universal
+approbation.
+
+But Mr. Vanecken came back looking rather queer and crestfallen. "I
+find my friend has gone into the country for a few days; and I don't
+quite like to get the sexton to open the church without his authority,
+and-- But New York is full of churches, and we can easily find another,
+with a little delay, if--"
+
+He looked at Peter, who looked at Charlotte, who burst out with
+unprecedented determination. "No, we can't wait. I shall never marry
+Peter if we do. Mother, you are right. But _must_ it be in the old
+ancestral five-dollar room?"
+
+They all laughed except Charlotte, who was more like crying.
+
+"Certainly not," Mr. Vanecken said. "I've no doubt the manager--"
+
+He never seemed to end his sentences, and he now left this one broken
+off while he penetrated the railing which fenced in the manager alone
+among a group of vacated desks, frowning impatient. At some murmured
+words from the dominie, he shouted, "_What!_" and then came out
+radiantly smiling, and saying, "Why, certainly." He knew all the group
+as old storers in the Constitutional, and called them each by name as
+he shook them each by the hand. "Everything else has happened here,
+and I don't see why this shouldn't. Come right into the
+reception-room."
+
+With some paintings of biblical subjects, unclaimed from the storage,
+on the walls, the place had a religious effect, and the manager
+significantly looked out of it a lingering stenographer, who was
+standing before a glass with two hatpins crossed in her mouth
+preparatory to thrusting them through the straw. She withdrew, visibly
+curious and reluctant, and then the manager offered to withdraw
+himself.
+
+"No," Charlotte said, surprisingly initiative in these junctures, "I
+don't know how it is in Mr. Vanecken's church, but, if father doesn't
+come, perhaps you'll have to give me away. At any rate, you're an old
+friend of the family, and I should be hurt if you didn't stay."
+
+She laid her hand on the manager's arm, and just as he had
+protestingly and politely consented, her father arrived in a taxicab,
+rather grumbling from having been obliged to cut short a sitting. When
+it was all over, and the Vaneckens were eliminated, when, in fact, the
+Breams had joined the Forsyths at a wedding dinner which the bride's
+father had given them at Delmonico's and had precipitated themselves
+into a train for Niagara ("So banal," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but I
+suppose they had to go somewhere, and _we_ went to Niagara, come to
+think of it, and it's on their way West"), the bride's mother remained
+up late talking it all over. She took credit to herself for the whole
+affair, and gave herself a great deal of just praise. But when she
+said, "I do believe, if it hadn't been for me, at the last, Charlotte
+would never have made up her mind," Forsyth demurred.
+
+"I should say Peter had a good deal to do with making up her mind for
+her."
+
+"Yes, you might say that."
+
+"And for once in her life Charlotte seems to have had her mind ready
+for making up."
+
+"Yes, you might say that, too. I believe she is going to turn out a
+decided character, after all. I _never_ saw anybody so determined not
+to be married in a storage warehouse."
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                            A PRESENTIMENT
+
+
+Over our coffee in the Turkish room Minver was usually a censor of our
+several foibles rather than a sharer in our philosophic speculations
+and metaphysical conjectures. He liked to disable me as one
+professionally vowed to the fabulous, and he had unfailing fun with
+the romantic sentimentality of Rulledge, which was in fact so little
+in keeping with the gross super-abundance of his person, his habitual
+gluttony, and his ridiculous indolence. Minver knew very well that
+Rulledge was a good fellow withal, and would willingly do any kind
+action that did not seriously interfere with his comfort, or make too
+heavy a draft upon his pocket. His self-indulgence, which was quite
+blameless, unless surfeit is a fault, was the basis of an interest in
+occult themes, which was the means of even higher diversion to Minver.
+He liked to have Rulledge approach Wanhope from this side, in the
+invincible persuasion that the psychologist would be interested in
+these themes by the law of his science, though he had been assured
+again and again that in spite of its misleading name psychology did
+not deal with the soul as Rulledge supposed the soul; and Minver's
+eyes lighted up with a prescience of uncommon pleasure when, late one
+night, after we had vainly tried to hit it off in talk, now of this,
+now of that, Rulledge asked Wanhope, abruptly as if it followed from
+something before:
+
+"Wasn't there a great deal more said about presentiments forty or
+fifty years ago than there is now?"
+
+Wanhope had been lapsing deeper and deeper into the hollow of his
+chair; but he now pulled himself up, and turned quickly toward
+Rulledge. "What made you think of that?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know. Why?"
+
+"Because I was thinking of it myself." He glanced at me, and I shook
+my head.
+
+"Well," Minver said, "if it will leave Acton out in the cold, I'll own
+that I was thinking of it, too. I was going back in my mind, for no
+reason that I know of, to my childhood, when I first heard of such a
+thing as a presentiment, and when I was afraid of having one. I had
+the notion that presentiments ran in the family."
+
+"Why had you that notion?" Rulledge demanded.
+
+"I don't know that I proposed telling," the painter said, giving
+himself to his pipe.
+
+"Perhaps you didn't have it," Rulledge retaliated.
+
+"Perhaps," Minver assented.
+
+Wanhope turned from the personal aspect of the matter. "It's rather
+curious that we should all three have had the same thing in mind just
+now; or, rather, it is not very curious. Such coincidences are really
+very common. Something must have been said at dinner which suggested
+it to all of us."
+
+"All but Acton," Minver demurred.
+
+"I mightn't have heard what was said," I explained. "I suppose the
+passing of all that sort of sub-beliefs must date from the general
+lapse of faith in personal immortality."
+
+"Yes, no doubt," Wanhope assented. "It is very striking how sudden the
+lapse was. Everyone who experienced it in himself could date it to a
+year, if not to a day. The agnosticism of scientific men was of course
+all the time undermining the fabric of faith, and then it fell in
+abruptly, reaching one believer after another as fast as the ground
+was taken wholly or partly from under his feet. I can remember how
+people once disputed whether there were such beings as guardian
+spirits or not. That minor question was disposed of when it was
+decided that there were no spirits at all."
+
+"Naturally," Minver said. "And the decay of the presentiment must have
+been hastened by the failure of so many presentiments to make good."
+
+"The great majority of them have failed to make good, from the
+beginning of time," Wanhope replied.
+
+"There are two kinds of presentiments," Rulledge suggested, with a
+philosophic air. "The true and the untrue."
+
+"Like mushrooms," Minver said. "Only, the true presentiment kills, and
+the true mushroom nourishes. Talking of mushrooms, they have a way in
+Switzerland of preserving them in walnut oil, and they fill you with
+the darkest forebodings, after you've filled yourself with the
+mushrooms. There's some occult relation between the two. Think it out,
+Rulledge!"
+
+Rulledge ignored him in turning to Wanhope. "The trouble is how to
+distinguish the true from the untrue presentiment."
+
+"It would be interesting," Wanhope began, but Minver broke in upon him
+maliciously.
+
+"To know how much the dyspepsia of our predecessors had to with the
+prevalence of presentimentalism? I agree with you, that a better diet
+has a good deal to do with the decline of the dark foreboding among
+us. What I can't understand is, how a gross and reckless feeder, like
+Rulledge here, doesn't go about like ancestral voices prophesying all
+sorts of dreadful things."
+
+"That's rather cheap talk, even for you, Minver," Rulledge said. "Why
+did you think presentiments ran in _your_ family?"
+
+"Well, there you have me, Rulledge. That's where my theory fails. I
+can remember," Minver continued soberly, "the talk there used to be
+about them among my people. They were serious people in an unreligious
+way, or rather an unecclesiastical way. They were never spiritualists,
+but I don't think there was one of them who doubted that he should
+live hereafter; he might doubt that he was living here, but there was
+no question of the other thing. I must say it gave a dignity to their
+conversation which, when they met, as they were apt to do at one
+another's houses on Sunday nights, was not of common things. One of my
+uncles was a merchant, another a doctor; my father was a
+portrait-painter by profession, and a sign-painter by practice. I
+suppose that's where I got my knack, such as it is. The merchant was
+an invalid, rather, though he kept about his business, and our people
+merely recognized him as being out of health. He was what we could
+call, for that day and region--the Middle West of the early fifties--a
+man of unusual refinement. I suppose this was temperamental with him
+largely; but he had cultivated tastes, too. I remember him as a
+peculiarly gentle person, with a pensive cast of face, and the
+melancholy accomplishment of playing the flute."
+
+"I wonder why nobody plays the flute nowadays," I mused aloud.
+
+"Yes, it's quite obsolete," Minver said. "They only play the flute in
+the orchestras now. I always look at the man who plays it and think of
+my uncle. He used to be very nice to me as a child; and he was very
+fond of my father, in a sort of filial way; my father was so much
+older. I can remember my young aunt; and how pretty she was as she sat
+at the piano, and sang and played to his fluting. When she looked
+forward at the music, her curls fell into her neck; they wore curls
+then, grown-up women; and though I don't think curls are beautiful, my
+aunt's beauty would have been less without them; in fact, I can't
+think of her without them.
+
+"She was delicate, too; they were really a pair of invalids; but she
+had none of his melancholy. They had had several children, who died,
+one after another, and there was only one left at the time I am
+speaking of. I rather wonder, now, that the thought of those poor
+little ghost-cousins didn't make me uncomfortable. I was a very
+superstitious boy, but I seem not to have thought of them. I played
+with the little girl who was left, and I liked going to my uncle's
+better than anywhere else. I preferred going in the daytime and in the
+summer-time. Then my cousin and I sat in a nook of the garden and
+fought violets, as we called it; hooked the wry necks of the flowers
+together and twitched to see which blossom would come off first. She
+was a sunny little thing, like her mother, and she had curls, like
+her. I can't express the feeling I had for my aunt; she seemed the
+embodiment of a world that was at once very proud and very good. I
+suppose she dressed fashionably, as things went then and there; and
+her style as well as her beauty fascinated me. I would have done
+anything to please her, far more than to please my cousin. With her I
+used to squabble, and sometimes sent her crying to her mother. Then I
+always ran off home, but when I sneaked back, or was sent for to come
+and play with my cousin, I was not scolded for my wickedness.
+
+"My uncle was more prosperous than his brothers; he lived in a much
+better house than ours, and I used to be quite awe-struck by its
+magnificence. He went East, as we said, twice a year to buy goods,
+and he had things sent back for his house such as we never saw
+elsewhere; those cask-shaped seats of blue china for the verandas, and
+bamboo chairs. There were cane-bottom chairs in the sitting-room, such
+as we had in our best room; in the parlor the large pieces were of
+mahogany veneer, upholstered in black hair-cloth; they held me in awe.
+The piano filled half the place; the windows came down to the ground,
+and had Venetian blinds and lace curtains.
+
+"We all went in there after the Sunday night supper, and then the
+fathers and mothers were apt to begin talking of those occult things
+that gave me the creeps. It was after the Rochester Knockings, as they
+were called, had been exposed, and so had spread like an infection
+everywhere. It was as if people were waiting to have the fraud shown
+up in order to believe in it."
+
+"That sort of thing happens," Wanhope agreed. "It's as if the seeds of
+the ventilated imposture were carried atmospherically into the human
+mind broadcast and a universal crop of self-delusion sprang up."
+
+"At any rate," Minver resumed, "instead of the gift being confined to
+a few persons--a small sisterhood with detonating knee-joints--there
+were rappings in every well-regulated household; all the tables
+tipped; people went to sleep to the soft patter of raps on the
+headboards of their beds; and girls who could not spell were occupied
+in delivering messages from Socrates, Ben Franklin and Shakespeare.
+Besides the physical demonstrations, there were all sorts of psychical
+intimations from the world which we've now abolished."
+
+"Not permanently, perhaps," I suggested.
+
+"Well, that remains to be seen," Minver said. "It was this sort of
+thing which my people valued above the other. Perhaps they were
+exclusive in their tastes, and did not care for an occultism which the
+crowd could share with them; though this is a conjecture too long
+after the fact to have much value. As far as I can now remember, they
+used to talk of the double presence of living persons, like their
+being where they greatly wished to be as well as where they really
+were; of clairvoyance; of what we call mind-transference, now; of
+weird coincidences of all kinds; of strange experiences of their own
+and of others; of the participation of animals in these experiences,
+like the testimony of cats and dogs to the presence of invisible
+spirits; of dreams that came true, or came near coming true; and,
+above everything, of forebodings and presentiments.
+
+"I dare say they didn't always talk of such things, and I'm giving
+possibly a general impression from a single instance; everything
+remembered of childhood is as if from large and repeated occurrence.
+But it must have happened more than once, for I recall that when it
+came to presentiments my aunt broke it up, perhaps once only. My
+cousin used to get very sleepy on the rug before the fire, and her
+mother would carry her off to bed, very cross and impatient of being
+kissed good night, while I was left to the brunt of the occult alone.
+I could not go with my aunt and cousin, and I folded myself in my
+mother's skirt, where I sat at her feet, and listened in an anguish of
+drowsy terror. The talk would pass into my dreams, and the dreams
+would return into the talk; and I would suffer a sort of double
+nightmare, waking and sleeping."
+
+"Poor little devil!" Rulledge broke out. "It's astonishing how people
+will go on before children, and never think of the misery they're
+making for them."
+
+"I believe my mother thought of it," Minver returned, "but when that
+sort of talk began, the witchery of it was probably too strong for
+her. 'It held her like a two years' child'; I was eight that winter. I
+don't know how long my suffering had gone on, when my aunt came back
+and seemed to break up the talk. It had got to presentiments, and,
+whether they knew that this was forbidden ground with her, or whether
+she now actually said something about it, they turned to talk of other
+things. I'm not telling you all this from my own memory, which deals
+with only a point or two. My father and mother used to recur to it
+when I was older, and I am piecing out my story from their memories.
+
+"My uncle, with all his temperamental pensiveness, was my aunt's stay
+and cheer in the fits of depression which she paid with for her usual
+gaiety. But these fits always began with some uncommon depression of
+his--some effect of the forebodings he was subject to. Her opposition
+to that kind of thing was purely unselfish, but certainly she dreaded
+it for him as well as herself. I suppose there was a sort of conscious
+silence in the others which betrayed them to her. 'Well,' she said,
+laughing, 'have you been at it again? That poor child looks frightened
+out of his wits.'
+
+"They all laughed then, and my father said, hypocritically, 'I was
+just going to ask Felix whether he expected to start East this week or
+next.'
+
+"My uncle tried to make light of what was always a heavy matter with
+him. 'Well, yesterday,' he answered, 'I should have said next week;
+but it's this week, now. I'm going on Wednesday.'
+
+"'By stage or packet?' my father asked.
+
+"'Oh, I shall take the canal to the lake, and get the boat for Buffalo
+there,' my uncle said.
+
+"They went on to speak of the trip to New York, and how much easier it
+was then than it used to be when you had to go by stage over the
+mountains to Philadelphia and on by stage again. Now, it seemed, you
+got the Erie Canal packet at Buffalo and the Hudson River steamboat at
+Albany, and reached New York in four or five days, in great comfort
+without the least fatigue. They had all risen and my aunt had gone out
+with her sisters-in-law to help them get their wraps. When they
+returned, it seemed that they had been talking of the journey, too,
+for she said to my mother, laughing again, 'Well, Richard may think
+it's easy; but somehow Felix never expects to get home alive.'
+
+"I don't think I ever heard my uncle laugh, but I can remember how he
+smiled at my aunt's laughing, as he put his hand on her shoulder; I
+thought it was somehow a very sad smile. On Wednesday I was allowed to
+go with my aunt and cousin to see him off on the packet, which came up
+from Cincinnati early in the morning; I had lain awake most of the
+night, and then nearly overslept myself, and then was at the canal in
+time. We made a gay parting for him, but when the boat started, and I
+was gloating on the three horses making up the tow-path at a spanking
+trot, under the snaky spirals of the driver's smacking whip-lash, I
+caught sight of my uncle standing on the deck and smiling that sad
+smile of his. My aunt was waving her handkerchief, but when she turned
+away she put it to her eyes.
+
+"The rest of the story, such as it is, I know, almost to the very end,
+from what I heard my father and mother say from my uncle's report
+afterward. He told them that, when the boat started, the stress to
+stay was so strong upon him that if he had not been ashamed he would
+have jumped ashore and followed us home. He said that he could not
+analyze his feelings; it was not yet any definite foreboding, but
+simply a depression that seemed to crush him so that all his movements
+were leaden, when he turned at last, and went down to breakfast in the
+cabin below. The stress did not lighten with the little changes and
+chances of the voyage to the lake. He was never much given to making
+acquaintance with people, but now he found himself so absent-minded
+that he was aware of being sometimes spoken to by friendly strangers
+without replying until it was too late even to apologize. He was not
+only steeped in this gloom, but he had the constant distress of the
+effort he involuntarily made to trace it back to some cause or follow
+it forward to some consequence. He kept trying at this, with a mind so
+tensely bent to the mere horror that he could not for a moment strain
+away from it. He would very willingly have occupied himself with other
+things, but the anguish which the double action of his mind gave him
+was such that he could not bear the effort; all he could do was to
+abandon himself to his obsession. This would ease him only for a
+while, though, and then he would suffer the misery of trying in vain
+to escape from it.
+
+"He thought he must be going mad, but insanity implied some definite
+delusion or hallucination, and, so far as he could make out, he had
+none. He was simply crushed by a nameless foreboding. Something
+dreadful was to happen, but this was all he felt; knowledge had no
+part in his condition. He could not say whether he slept during the
+two nights that passed before he reached Toledo, where he was to take
+the lake steamer for Buffalo. He wished to turn back again, but the
+relentless pressure which had kept him from turning back at the start
+was as strong as ever with him. He tried to give his presentiment
+direction by talking with the other passengers about a recent accident
+to a lake steamer, in which several hundred lives were lost; there
+had been a collision in rough weather, and one of the boats had gone
+down in a few minutes. There was a sort of relief in that, but the
+double action of the mind brought the same intolerable anguish again,
+and he settled back for refuge under the shadow of his impenetrable
+doom. This did not lift till he was well on his way from Albany to New
+York by the Hudson River. The canal-boat voyage from Buffalo to Albany
+had been as eventless as that to Toledo, and his lake steamer had
+reached Buffalo in safety, for which it had seemed as if those lost in
+the recent disaster had paid.
+
+"He tried to pierce his heavy cloud by argument from the security in
+which he had traveled so far, but the very security had its
+hopelessness. If something had happened--some slight accident--to
+interrupt it, his reason, or his unreason, might have taken it for a
+sign that the obscure doom, whatever it was, had been averted.
+
+"Up to this time he had not been able to connect his foreboding with
+anything definite, and he was not afraid for himself. He was simply
+without the formless hope that helps us on at every step, through good
+and bad, and it was a mortal peril, which he came through safely while
+scores of others were lost, that gave his presentiment direction. He
+had taken the day boat from Albany, and about the middle of the
+afternoon the boat, making way under a head-wind, took fire. The pilot
+immediately ran her ashore, and her passengers, those that had the
+courage for it, ran aft, and began jumping from the stern, but a great
+many women and children were burned. My uncle was one of the first of
+those who jumped, and he stood in the water, trying to save those who
+came after from drowning; it was not very deep. Some of the women lost
+courage for the leap, and some turned back into the flames,
+remembering children they had left behind. One poor creature stood
+hesitating wildly, and he called up to her to jump. At last she did
+so, almost into his arms, and then she clung about him as he helped
+her ashore. 'Oh,' she cried out between her sobs, 'if you have a wife
+and children at home, God will take you safe back to them; you have
+saved my life for my husband and little ones.' 'No,' he was conscious
+of saying, 'I shall never see my wife again,' and now his foreboding
+had the direction that it had wanted before.
+
+"From that on he simply knew that he should not get home alive, and he
+waited resignedly for the time and form of his disaster. He had a sort
+of peace in that. He went about his business intelligently, and from
+habit carefully, but it was with a mechanical action of the mind,
+something, he imagined, like the mechanical action of his body in
+those organs which do their part without bidding from the will. He was
+only a few days in New York, but in the course of them he got several
+letters from his wife telling him that all was going well with her and
+their daughter. It was before the times when you can ask and answer
+questions by telegraph, and he started back, necessarily without
+having heard the latest news from home.
+
+"He made the return trip in a sort of daze, talking, reading, eating,
+and sleeping in the calm certainty of doom, and only wondering how it
+would be fulfilled, and what hour of the night or day. But it is no
+use my eking this out; I heard it, as I say, when I was a child, and I
+am afraid that if I should try to give it with the full detail I
+should take to inventing particulars." Minver paused a moment, and
+then he said: "But there was one thing that impressed itself indelibly
+on my memory. My uncle got back perfectly safe and well."
+
+"Oh!" Rulledge snorted in rude dissatisfaction.
+
+"What was it impressed itself on your memory?" Wanhope asked, with
+scientific detachment from the story as a story.
+
+Minver continued to address Wanhope, without regarding Rulledge. "My
+uncle told my father that some sort of psychical change, which he
+could not describe, but which he was as conscious of as if it were
+physical, took place within him as he came in sight of his house--"
+
+"Yes," Wanhope prompted.
+
+"He had driven down from the canal-packet in the old omnibus which
+used to meet passengers and distribute them at their destinations in
+town. All the way to his house he was still under the doom as regarded
+himself, but bewildered that he should be getting home safe and well,
+and he was refusing his escape, as it were, and then suddenly, at the
+sight of the familiar house, the change within him happened. He looked
+out of the omnibus window and saw a group of neighbors at his gate. As
+he got out of the omnibus, my father took him by the hand, as if to
+hold him back a moment. Then he said to my father, very quietly, 'You
+needn't tell me: my wife is dead.'"
+
+There was an appreciable pause, in which we were all silent, and then
+Rulledge demanded, greedily, "And was she?"
+
+"Really, Rulledge!" I could not help protesting.
+
+Minver asked him, almost compassionately and with unwonted gentleness,
+as from the mood in which his reminiscence had left him: "You
+suspected a hoax? She had died suddenly the night before while she and
+my cousin were getting things ready to welcome my uncle home in the
+morning. I'm sorry you're disappointed," he added, getting back to his
+irony.
+
+"Whatever," Rulledge pursued, "became of the little girl?"
+
+"She died rather young; a great many years ago; and my uncle soon
+after her."
+
+Rulledge went away without saying anything, but presently returned
+with the sandwich which he had apparently gone for, while Wanhope was
+remarking: "That want of definition in the presentiment at first, and
+then its determination in the new direction by, as it were,
+propinquity--it is all very curious. Possibly we shall some day
+discover a law in such matters."
+
+Rulledge said: "How was it your boyhood was passed in the Middle West,
+Minver? I always thought you were a Bostonian."
+
+"I was an adoptive Bostonian for a good while, until I decided to
+become a native New-Yorker, so that I could always be near to you,
+Rulledge. You can never know what a delicate satisfaction you are."
+
+Minver laughed, and we were severally restored to the wonted relations
+which his story had interrupted.
+
+
+
+
+                                 III
+
+                     CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
+
+
+  It was against the law, in such case made and provided,
+  Of the United States, but by the good will of the pilots
+  That we would some of us climb to the pilot-house after our breakfast
+  For a morning smoke, and find ourselves seats on the benching
+  Under the windows, or in the worn-smooth arm-chairs. The pilot,
+  Which one it was did not matter, would tilt his head round and say,
+          "All right!"
+  When he had seen who we were, and begin, or go on as from stopping
+  In the midst of talk that was leading up to a story,
+  Just before we came in, and the story, begun or beginning,
+  Always began or ended with some one, or something or other,
+  Having to do with the river. If one left the wheel to the other,
+  Going off watch, he would say to his partner standing behind him
+  With his hands stretched out for the spokes that were not given up yet,
+  "Captain, you can tell them the thing I was going to tell them
+  Better than I could, I reckon," and then the other would answer,
+  "Well, I don't know as I feel so sure of that, captain," and having
+  Recognized each other so by that courtesy title of captain
+  Never officially failed of without offense among pilots,
+  One would subside into Jim and into Jerry the other.
+
+  It was on these terms, at least, Captain Dunn relieved Captain Davis
+  When we had settled ourselves one day to listen in comfort,
+  After some psychological subtleties we had indulged in at breakfast
+  Touching that weird experience every one knows when the senses
+  Juggle the points of the compass out of true orientation,
+  Changing the North to the South, and the East to the West. "Why, Jerry,
+          what was it
+  You was going to tell them?" "Oh, never _you_ mind what it _was_, Jim.
+  _You_ tell them something else," and so Captain Davis submitted,
+  While Captain Dunn, with a laugh, got away beyond reach of his protest.
+  Then Captain Davis, with fitting, deprecatory preamble,
+  Launched himself on a story that promised to be all a story
+  Could be expected to be, when one of those women--you know them--
+  Who interrupt on any occasion or none, interrupted,
+  Pointed her hand, and asked, "Oh, what is that island there, captain?"
+  "That one, ma'am?" He gave her the name, and then the woman persisted,
+  "Don't say you know them all by sight!" "Yes, by sight or by feeling."
+  "What do you mean by feeling?" "Why, just that by daylight we see them,
+  And in the dark it's like as if somehow we felt them, I reckon.
+  Every foot of the channel and change in it, wash-out and cave-in,
+  Every bend and turn of it, every sand-bar and landmark,
+  Every island, of course, we have got to see them, or feel them."
+  "But if you don't?" "But we've got to." "But aren't you ever mistaken?"
+  "Never the second time." "Now, what do you mean, Captain Davis?
+  Never the second time." "Well, let me tell you a story.
+  It's not the one I begun, but that island you asked about yonder
+  Puts me in mind of it, happens to be the place where it happened,
+  Three years ago. I suppose no man ever knew the Ohio
+  Better than Captain Dunlevy, if any one else knew it like him.
+  Man and boy he had been pretty much his whole life on the river:
+  Cabin-boy first on a keelboat before the day of the steamboats,
+  Back in the pioneer times; and watchman then on a steamboat;
+  Then second mate, and then mate, and then pilot and captain and owner--
+  But he was proudest, I reckon, of being about the best pilot
+  On the Ohio. He knew it as well as he knew his own Bible,
+  And I don't hardly believe that ever Captain Dunlevy
+  Let a single day go by without reading a chapter."
+
+  While the pilot went on with his talk, and in regular, rhythmical motion
+  Swayed from one side to the other before his wheel, and we listened,
+  Certain typical facts of the picturesque life of the river
+  Won their way to our consciousness as without help of our senses.
+  It was along about the beginning of March, but already
+  In the sleepy sunshine the budding maples and willows,
+  Where they waded out in the shallow wash of the freshet,
+  Showed the dull red and the yellow green of their blossoms and catkins,
+  And in their tops the foremost flocks of blackbirds debated
+  As to which they should colonize first. The indolent house-boats
+  Loafing along the shore, sent up in silvery spirals
+  Out of their kitchen pipes the smoke of their casual breakfasts.
+  Once a wide tow of coal-barges, loaded clear down to the gunwales,
+  Gave us the slack of the current, with proper formalities shouted
+  By the hoarse-throated stern-wheeler that pushed the black barges
+          before her,
+  And as she passed us poured a foamy cascade from her paddles.
+  Then, as a raft of logs, which the spread of the barges had hidden,
+  River-wide, weltered in sight, with a sudden jump forward the pilot
+  Dropped his whole weight on the spokes of the wheel just in time to
+          escape it.
+
+  "Always give those fellows," he joked, "all the leeway they ask for;
+  Worst kind of thing on the river you want your boat to run into.
+  Where had I got about Captain Dunlevy? Oh yes, I remember.
+  Well, when the railroads began to run away from the steamboats,
+  Taking the carrying trade in the very edge of the water,
+  It was all up with the old flush times, and Captain Dunlevy
+  Had to climb down with the rest of us pilots till he was only
+  Captain the same as any and every pilot is captain,
+  Glad enough, too, to be getting his hundred and twenty-five dollars
+  Through the months of the spring and fall while navigation was open.
+  Never lowered himself, though, a bit from captain and owner,
+  Knew his rights and yours, and never would thought of allowing
+  Any such thing as a liberty _from_ you or taking one _with_ you.
+  I had been his cub, and all that I knew of the river
+  Captain Dunlevy had learnt me; and if you know what the feeling
+  Is of a cub for the pilot that learns him the river, you'll trust me
+  When I tell you I felt it the highest kind of an honor
+  Having him for my partner; and when I came up to relieve him,
+  One day, here at the wheel, and actu'lly thought that I found him
+  Taking that island there on the left, I thought I was crazy.
+  No, I couldn't believe my senses, and yet I couldn't endure it.
+  Seeing him climb the spokes of the wheel to warp the _Kanawha_,
+  With the biggest trip of passengers ever she carried,
+  Round on the bar at the left that fairly stuck out of the water.
+  Well, as I said, he learnt me all that I knew of the river,
+  And was I to learn _him_ now which side to take of an island
+  When I knew he knew it like his right hand from his left hand?
+  My, but I hated to speak! It certainly seemed like my tongue clove,
+  Like the Bible says, to the roof of my mouth! But I had to.
+  'Captain,' I says, and it seemed like another person was talking,
+  'Do you usu'lly take that island there on the eastward?'
+  'Yes,' he says, and he laughed, 'and I thought I had learnt you to do it,
+  When you was going up.' 'But not going _down_, did you, captain?'
+  'Down?' And he whirled at me, and, without ever stopping his laughing,
+  Turned as white as a sheet, and his eyes fairly bulged from their
+          sockets.
+  Then he whirled back again, and looked up and down on the river,
+  Like he was hunting out the shape of the shore and the landmarks.
+  Well, I suppose the thing has happened to every one sometime,
+  When you find the points of the compass have swapped with each other,
+  And at the instant you're looking, the North and the South have changed
+          places.
+  _I_ knew what was in his mind as well as Dunlevy himself did.
+  Neither one of us spoke a word for nearly a minute.
+  Then in a kind of whisper he says, 'Take the wheel, Captain Davis!'
+  Let the spokes fly, and while I made a jump forwards to catch them,
+  Staggered into that chair--well, the very one you are in, ma'am.
+  Set there breathing quick, and, when he could speak, all he said was,
+  'This is the end of it for me on the river, Jim Davis,'
+  Reached up over his head for his coat where it hung by that window,
+  Trembled onto his feet, and stopped in the door there a second,
+  Stared in hard like as if for good-by to the things he was used to,
+  Shut the door behind him, and never come back again through it."
+  While we were silent, not liking to prompt the pilot with questions,
+  "Well," he said, at last, "it was no use to argue. We tried it,
+  In the half-hearted way that people do that don't mean it.
+  Every one was his friend here on the _Kanawha_, and _we_ knew
+  It was the first time he ever had lost his bearings, but _he_ knew,
+  In such a thing as that, that the first and the last are the same time.
+  When we had got through trying our worst to persuade him, he only
+  Shook his head and says, 'I am done for, boys, and you know it,'
+  Left the boat at Wheeling, and left his life on the river--
+  Left his life on the earth, you may say, for I don't call it living,
+  Setting there homesick at home for the wheel he can never go back to.
+  Reads the river-news regular; knows just the stage of the water
+  Up and down the whole way from Cincinnati to Pittsburg;
+  Follows every boat from the time she starts out in the spring-time
+  Till she lays up in the summer, and then again in the winter;
+  Wants to talk all about her and who is her captain and pilot;
+  Then wants to slide away to that everlastingly puzzling
+  Thing that happened to him that morning on the _Kanawha_
+  When he lost his bearings and North and South had changed places--
+  No, I don't call that living, whatever the rest of you call it."
+  We were silent again till that woman spoke up, "And what was it,
+  Captain, that kept him from going back and being a pilot?"
+  "Well, ma'am," after a moment the pilot patiently answered,
+  "_I_ don't hardly believe that I could explain it exactly."
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                          THE RETURN TO FAVOR
+
+
+He never, by any chance, quite kept his word, though there was a
+moment in every case when he seemed to imagine doing what he said, and
+he took with mute patience the rakings which the ladies gave him when
+he disappointed them.
+
+Disappointed is not just the word, for the ladies did not really
+expect him to do what he said. They pretended to believe him when he
+promised, but at the bottom of their hearts they never did or could.
+He was gentle-mannered and soft-spoken, and when he set his head on
+one side, and said that a coat would be ready on Wednesday, or a dress
+on Saturday, and repeated his promise upon the same lady's expressed
+doubt, she would catch her breath and say that now she absolutely must
+have it on the day named, for otherwise she would not have a thing to
+put on. Then he would become very grave, and his soft tenor would
+deepen to a bass of unimpeachable veracity, and he would say, "Sure,
+lady, you have it."
+
+The lady would depart still doubting and slightly sighing, and he
+would turn to the customer who was waiting to have a button sewed on,
+or something like that, and ask him softly what it was he could do for
+him. If the customer offered him his appreciation of the case in hand,
+he would let his head droop lower, and in a yet deeper bass deplore
+the doubt of the ladies as an idiosyncrasy of their sex. He would make
+the customer feel that he was a favorite customer whose rights to a
+perfect fidelity of word and deed must by no means be tampered with,
+and he would have the button sewed on or the rip sewed up at once, and
+refuse to charge anything, while the customer waited in his
+shirt-sleeves in the small, stuffy shop opening directly from the
+street. When he tolerantly discussed the peculiarities of ladies as a
+sex, he would endure to be laughed at, "for sufferance was the badge
+of all his tribe," and possibly he rather liked it.
+
+The favorite customer enjoyed being there when some lady came back on
+the appointed Wednesday or Saturday, and the tailor came soothingly
+forward and showed her into the curtained alcove where she was to try
+on the garments, and then called into the inner shop for them. The
+shirt-sleeved journeyman, with his unbuttoned waistcoat-front all
+pins and threaded needles, would appear in his slippers with the
+things barely basted together, and the tailor would take them, with an
+airy courage, as if they were perfectly finished, and go in behind the
+curtain where the lady was waiting in a dishabille which the favorite
+customer, out of reverence for the sex, forbore to picture to himself.
+Then sounds of volcanic fury would issue from the alcove. "Now, Mr.
+Morrison, you have lied to me again, deliberately _lied_. Didn't I
+tell you I _must_ have the things perfectly ready to-day? You see
+yourself that it will be another week before I can have my things."
+
+"A week? Oh, madam! But I assure you--"
+
+"Don't talk to me any more! It's the last time I shall ever come to
+you, but I suppose I can't take the work away from you as it is.
+_When_ shall I have it?"
+
+"To-morrow. Yes, to-morrow noon. Sure!"
+
+"Now you know you are always out at noon. I should think you would be
+ashamed."
+
+"If it hadn't been for sickness in the family I would have finished
+your dress with my own hands. Sure I would. If you come here to-morrow
+noon you find your dress all ready for you."
+
+"I know I won't, but I will come, and you'd _better_ have it ready."
+
+"Oh, sure."
+
+The lady then added some generalities of opprobrium with some
+particular criticisms of the garments. Her voice sank into
+dispassionate murmurs in these, but it rose again in her renewed sense
+of the wrong done her, and when she came from the alcove she went out
+of the street door purple. She reopened it to say, "Now, remember!"
+before she definitely disappeared.
+
+"Rather a stormy session, Mr. Morrison," the customer said.
+
+"Something fierce," Mr. Morrison sighed. But he did not seem much
+troubled, and he had one way with all his victims, no matter what mood
+they came or went in.
+
+One day the customer was by when a kind creature timidly upbraided
+him. "This is the third time you've disappointed me, Mr. Morrison. I
+really wish you wouldn't promise me unless you mean to do it. I don't
+think it's right for you."
+
+"Oh, but sure, madam! The things will be done, sure. We had a strike
+on us."
+
+"Well, I will trust you once more," the kind creature said.
+
+"You can depend on me, madam, sure."
+
+When she was gone the customer said: "I wonder you do that sort of
+thing, Mr. Morrison. You can't be surprised at their behaving rustily
+with you if you never keep your word."
+
+"Why, I assure you there are times when I don't know where to look,
+the way they go on. It is something awful. You ought to hear them
+once. And now they want the wote." He rearranged some pieces of
+tumbled goods at the table where the customer sat, and put together
+the disheveled leaves of the fashion-papers which looked as if the
+ladies had scattered them in their rage.
+
+One day the customer heard two ladies waiting for their
+disappointments in the outer room while the tailor in the alcove was
+trying to persuade a third lady that positively her things would be
+sent home the next day before dark. The customer had now formed the
+habit of having his own clothes made by the tailor, and his system in
+avoiding disappointment was very simple. In the early fall he ordered
+a spring suit, and in the late spring it was ready. He never had any
+difficulty, but he was curious to learn how the ladies managed, and he
+listened with all his might while these two talked.
+
+"I always wonder we keep coming," one of them said.
+
+"I'll tell you why," the other said. "Because he's cheap, and we get
+things from a fourth to a third less than we can get them anywhere
+else. The quality is first rate, and he's absolutely honest. And,
+besides, he's a genius. The wretch has _touch_. The things have a
+style, a look, a hang! Really it's something wonderful. Sure it iss,"
+she ended in the tailor's accent, and then they both laughed and
+joined in a common sigh.
+
+"Well, I don't believe he means to deceive any one."
+
+"Oh, neither do I. I believe he expects to do everything he says. And
+one can't help liking him even when he doesn't."
+
+"He's a good while getting through with her," the first lady said,
+meaning the unseen lady in the alcove.
+
+"She'll be a good while longer getting through with _him_, if he
+hasn't them ready the next time," the second lady said.
+
+But the lady in the alcove issued from it with an impredicable smile,
+and the tailor came up to the others, and deferred to their wishes
+with a sort of voiceless respect.
+
+He gave the customer a glance of good-fellowship, and said to him,
+radiantly: "Your things all ready for you, this morning. As soon as
+I--"
+
+"Oh, no hurry," the customer responded.
+
+"I won't be a minute," the tailor said, pulling the curtain of the
+alcove aside, and then there began those sounds of objurgation and
+expostulation, although the ladies had seemed so amiable before.
+
+The customer wondered if they did not all enjoy it; the ladies in
+their patience under long trial, and the tailor in the pleasure of
+practising upon it. But perhaps he did believe in the things he
+promised. He might be so much a genius as to have no grasp of facts;
+he might have thought that he could actually do what he said.
+
+The customer's question on these points found answer when one day the
+tailor remarked, as it were out of a clear sky, that he had sold his
+business; sold it to the slippered journeyman who used to come in his
+shirt-sleeves, with his vest-front full of pins and needles, bringing
+the basted garments to be tried on the ladies who had been promised
+them perfectly finished.
+
+"He will do your clothes all right," he explained to the customer. "He
+is a first-rate cutter and fitter; he knows the whole business."
+
+"But why--why--" the customer began.
+
+"I couldn't stand it. The way them ladies would talk to a person, when
+you done your best to please them; it's something fierce."
+
+"Yes, I know. But I thought you liked it, from the way you always
+promised them and never kept your word."
+
+"And if I hadn't promised them?" the tailor returned with some show of
+feeling. "They _wanted_ me to promise them--they made me--they
+wouldn't have gone away without it. Sure. Every one wanted her things
+before every one. You had got to think of that."
+
+"But you had to think of what they would say."
+
+"Say? Sometimes I thought they would _hit_ me. One lady said she had a
+notion to slap me once. It's no way to talk."
+
+"But you didn't seem to mind it."
+
+"I didn't mind it for a good while. Then I couldn't stand it. So I
+sold."
+
+He shook his head sadly; but the customer had no comfort to offer him.
+He asked when his clothes would be done, and the tailor told him when,
+and then they were not. The new proprietor tried them on, but he would
+not say just when they would be finished.
+
+"We have a good deal of work already for some ladies that been
+disappointed. Now we try a new way. We tell people exactly what we
+do."
+
+"Well, that's right," the customer said, but in his heart he was not
+sure he liked the new way.
+
+The day before his clothes were promised he dropped in. From the
+curtained alcove he heard low murmurs, the voice of the new proprietor
+and the voice of some lady trying on, and being severely bidden not to
+expect her things at a time she suggested. "No, madam. We got too much
+work on hand already. These things, they will not be done before next
+week."
+
+"I told you to-morrow," the same voice said to another lady, and the
+new proprietor came out with an unfinished coat in his hand.
+
+"I know you did, but I thought you would be better than your word, and
+so I came to-day. Well, then, to-morrow."
+
+"Yes, to-morrow," the new proprietor said, but he did not seem to have
+liked the lady's joke. He did not look happy.
+
+A few weeks after that the customer came for some little alterations
+in his new suit.
+
+In the curtained alcove he heard the murmurs of trying on, much
+cheerfuller murmurs than before; the voice of a lady lifted in
+gladness, in gaiety, and an incredible voice replying, "Oh, sure,
+madam."
+
+Then the old proprietor came out in his shirt-sleeves and slippers,
+with his waistcoat-front full of pins and needles, just like the new
+proprietor in former days.
+
+"Why!" the customer exclaimed. "Have you bought back?"
+
+"No. I'm just here like a journeyman already. The new man he want me
+to come. He don't get along very well with his way. He's all right;
+he's a good man and a first-class tailor. But," and the former
+proprietor looked down at the basted garment hanging over his arm, and
+picked off an irrelevant thread from it, "he thinks I get along better
+with the ladies."
+
+
+
+
+                                  V
+
+                          SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
+
+
+The figure of a woman sat crouched forward on one of the lowermost
+steps of the brownstone dwelling which was keeping a domestic
+tradition in a street mostly gone to shops and small restaurants and
+local express-offices. The house was black behind its closed shutters,
+and the woman remained sitting there because no one could have come
+out of its door for a year past to hunt her away. The neighborhood
+policeman faltered in going by, and then he kept on. The three people
+who came out of the large, old-fashioned hotel, half a block off, on
+their way for dinner to a French _table d'hôte_ which they had heard
+of, stopped and looked at the woman. They were a father and his son
+and daughter, and it was something like a family instinct that
+controlled them, in their pause before the woman crouching on the
+steps.
+
+It was the early dusk of a December day, and the day was very chilly.
+"She seems to be sick or something," the father vaguely surmised. "Or
+asleep."
+
+The three looked at the woman, but they did nothing for a moment. They
+would rather have gone on, but they waited to see if anything would
+happen to release them from the spell that they seemed to have laid
+upon themselves. They were conditional New-Yorkers of long sojourn,
+and it was from no apparent motive that the son wore evening dress,
+which his unbuttoned overcoat discovered, and an opera-hat. He would
+not have dressed so for that problematical French _table d'hôte_;
+probably he was going on later to some society affair. He now put in
+effect the father's impulse to go closer and look at the woman.
+
+"She seems to be asleep," he reported.
+
+"Shouldn't you think she would take cold? She will get her death
+there. Oughtn't we to do something?" the daughter asked, but she left
+it to the father, and he said:
+
+"Probably somebody will come by."
+
+"That we could leave her to?" the daughter pursued.
+
+"We could do that without waiting," the son commented.
+
+"Well, yes," the father assented; but they did not go on. They waited,
+helplessly, and then somebody came by. It was a young girl, not very
+definite in the dusk, except that she was unmistakably of the working
+class; she was simply dressed, though with the New York instinct for
+clothes. Their having stopped there seemed to stay her involuntarily,
+and after a glance in the direction of their gaze she asked the
+daughter:
+
+"Is she sick, do you think?"
+
+"We don't know what's the matter. But she oughtn't to stay there."
+
+Something velvety in the girl's voice had made its racial quality
+sensible to the ear; as she went up to the crouching woman and bent
+forward over her and then turned to them, a street lamp threw its
+light on her face, and they saw that she was a light shade of colored
+girl.
+
+"She seems to be sleeping."
+
+"Perhaps," the son began, "she's not quite--" But he did not go on.
+
+The girl looked round at the others and suggested, "She must be
+somebody's mother!"
+
+The others all felt abashed in their several sorts and degrees, but in
+their several sorts and degrees they all decided that there was
+something romantic, sentimental, theatrical in the girl's words, like
+something out of some cheap story-paper story.
+
+The father wondered if that kind of thing was current among that kind
+of people. He had a sort of esthetic pleasure in the character and
+condition expressed by the words.
+
+"Well, yes," he said, "if she has children, or has had." The girl
+looked at him uncertainly, and then he added, "But, of course--"
+
+The son went up to the woman again, and asked: "Aren't you well? Can
+we do anything for you? It won't do to stay here, you know." The woman
+only made a low murmur, and he said to his sister, "Suppose we get her
+up."
+
+His sister did not come forward promptly, and the colored girl said,
+"I'll help you."
+
+She took one arm of the woman and the son took the other, and they
+lifted her, without her connivance, to her feet and kept her on them.
+Then they walked her down the steps. On the level below she showed
+taller than either of them; she was bundled up in different incoherent
+wraps; her head was muffled, and she wore a battered bonnet at an
+involuntary slant.
+
+"I don't know exactly what we shall do with her," the son said.
+
+"We ought to get her home somehow," the daughter said.
+
+The father proposed nothing, but the colored girl said, "If we keep
+walking her along, we'll come to a policeman and we can--"
+
+A hoarse rumble of protest came from the muffled head of the woman,
+and the girl put her ear closer. "Want to go home? Well, the policeman
+will take you. We don't know where you live, and we haven't the time."
+
+The woman seemed to have nothing to say further, and they began
+walking her westward; the colored girl supported her on one hand, and
+the son, in his evening dress and opera-hat, on the other.
+
+The daughter followed in a vague anxiety, but the father went along,
+enjoying the anomaly, and happy in his relish of that phrase, "She
+must be somebody's mother." It now sounded to him like a catch from
+one of those New York songs, popular in the order of life where the
+mother represents what is best and holiest. He recalled a vaudeville
+ballad with the refrain of "A Boy's Best Friend is his Mother," which,
+when he heard it in a vaudeville theater, threatened the gallery floor
+under the applauding feet of the frenzied audience. Probably this
+colored girl belonged to that order of life; he wished he could know
+her social circumstance and what her outlook on the greater world
+might be. She seemed a kind creature, poor thing, and he respected
+her. "Somebody's mother"--he liked that.
+
+They all walked westward, aimlessly, except that the _table d'hôte_
+where they had meant to dine was in that direction; they had heard of
+it as an amusingly harmless French place, and they were fond of such
+mild adventures.
+
+The old woman contributed nothing to the definition of their progress.
+She stumbled and mumbled along, but between Seventh Avenue and Eighth
+she stubbornly arrested her guardians. "She says"--the colored girl
+translated some obscure avowal across her back--"she says she wants to
+go home, and she lives up in Harlem."
+
+"Oh, well, that's good," the father said, with an optimistic
+amiability. "We'd better help walk her across to Ninth Avenue and put
+her on a car, and tell the conductor where to let her off."
+
+He was not helping walk her himself, but he enjoyed his son's doing it
+in evening dress and opera-hat, with that kind colored girl on the
+other side of the mother; the composition was agreeably droll. The
+daughter did not like it, and she cherished the ideal of a passing
+policeman to take the old woman in charge.
+
+No policeman passed, though great numbers of other people met them
+without apparently finding anything noticeable in the spectacle which
+their group presented. Among the crowds going and coming on the
+avenues which they crossed scarcely any turned to look at them, or was
+moved by the sense of anything odd in them.
+
+The old woman herself did nothing to attract public notice till they
+were midway between Seventh and Eighth avenues. She mumbled something
+from time to time which the colored girl interpreted to the rest as
+her continued wish to go home. She was now clearer about her street
+and number. The girl, as if after question of her own generous spirit,
+said she did not see how _she_ could go with her; she was expected at
+home herself.
+
+"Oh, you won't have to go with her; we'll just put her aboard the
+Ninth Avenue car," the father encouraged her. He would have encouraged
+any one; he was enjoying the whole affair.
+
+At a certain moment, for no apparent reason, the mother decided to sit
+down on a door-step. It proved to be the door-step of a house where
+from time to time colored people--sometimes of one sex, sometimes of
+another--went in or came out. The door seemed to open directly into a
+large room where dancing and dining were going on concurrently. At a
+long table colored people sat eating, and behind their chairs on both
+sides of the room and at the ends of the table colored couples were
+waltzing.
+
+The effect was the more curious because, except for some almost
+inaudible music, the scene passed in silence. Those who were eating
+were not visibly incommoded by those revolving at their backs; the
+waltzers turned softly around and around, untempted by the table now
+before them, now behind them. When some of the diners or dancers came
+out, they stumbled over the old woman on the door-step without minding
+or stopping to inquire. Those outside, when they went in, fell over
+her with like equanimity and joined the strange company within.
+
+The father murmured to himself the lines,
+
+          "'Vast forms that move fantastically
+             To a discordant melody--'"
+
+with a remote trouble of mind because the words were at once so
+graphic and yet so imperfectly applicable. The son and daughter
+exchanged a silent wonder as long as they could bear it; then the
+daughter asked the colored girl:
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's a boarding-house," the girl answered, simply.
+
+"Oh," the daughter said.
+
+Sounds of more decided character than before now came from the figure
+on the door-step.
+
+"She seems to be saying something," the daughter suggested in general
+terms. "What is she saying?" she asked the colored girl.
+
+The girl stooped over and listened. Then she answered, "She's swearing."
+
+"Swearing? What about? Whom is she swearing at?"
+
+"At me, I reckon. She says, why don't I take her home."
+
+"Well, why doesn't she get up, then?"
+
+"She says she won't."
+
+"We can't carry her to the car," the daughter noted.
+
+"Oh, why not?" the father merrily demanded.
+
+The daughter turned to her brother. They were both very respectful to
+their father, but the son agreed with his sister when she said: "Papa
+would joke about anything. But this has passed a joke. We must get
+this old thing up and start her off."
+
+Upon experiment they could not get the old thing up, even with the
+help of the kind colored girl. They had to let her be, and the colored
+girl reported, after stooping over her again, "She says she can't
+walk."
+
+"She walked here well enough," the daughter said.
+
+"Not _very_ well," the father amended.
+
+His daughter did not notice him. She said to her brother: "Well, now
+you must go and find a policeman. It's strange none has gone by."
+
+It was also strange that still their group remained without attracting
+the notice of the passers. Nobody stopped to speak or even stare;
+perhaps the phenomena of that boarding-house had ceased to have
+surprises for the public of the neighborhood, and they in their
+momentary relation to it would naturally be without interest.
+
+The brother went away, leaving his sister with their father and that
+kind colored creature in charge of the old woman, now more and more
+quiescent on the door-step; she had ceased to swear, or even to speak.
+The brother came back after a time that seemed long, and said that he
+could not find a policeman anywhere, and at the same moment, as if the
+officer had been following at his heels, a policeman crossed the
+street from just behind him.
+
+The daughter ran after him, and asked if he would not come and look at
+the old woman who had so steadfastly remained in their charge, and she
+rapidly explained.
+
+"Sure, lady," the policeman said, and he turned from crossing the
+street and went up to the old woman. He laid his hand on her shoulder,
+and his touch seemed magical. "What's the matter? Can't you stand up?"
+She stood up as if at something familiar in the voice of authority.
+"Where do you live?" She gave an address altogether different from
+that she had given before--a place on the next avenue, within a block
+or two. "You'd better go home. You can walk, can't you?"
+
+"I can walk well enough," she answered in a tone of vexation, and she
+made her word good by walking quite actively away in the direction she
+had given.
+
+The kind colored girl became a part of the prevalent dark after
+refusing the thanks of the others. The daughter then fervently offered
+them to the policeman.
+
+"That's all right, lady," he said, and the incident had closed except
+for her emotion at seeing him enter a police-station precisely across
+the street, where they could have got a dozen policemen in a moment.
+
+"Well," the father said, "we might as well go to our French _table
+d'hôte_ now."
+
+"Oh," the son said, as if that reminded him, "the place seems to be
+shut."
+
+"Well, then, we might as well go back to the hotel," the father
+decided. "I dare say we shall do quite as well there."
+
+On the way the young people laughed over the affair and their escape
+from it, especially at the strange appearance and disappearance of the
+kind colored girl, with her tag of sentiment, and at the instant
+compliance of the old woman with the suggestion of the policeman.
+
+The father followed, turning the matter over in his mind. Did mere
+motherhood hallow that old thing to the colored girl and her sort and
+condition? Was there a superstition of motherhood among such people
+which would endear this disreputable old thing to their affection and
+reverence? Did such people hold mothers in tenderer regard than people
+of larger means? Would a mother in distress or merely embarrassment
+instantly appeal to their better nature as a case of want or sickness
+in the neighborhood always appealed to their compassion? Would her
+family now welcome the old thing home from her aberration more fondly
+than the friends of one who had arrived in a carriage among them in a
+good street? But, after all, how little one knew of other people! How
+little one knew of one self, for that matter! How next to nothing one
+knew of Somebody's Mother! It did not necessarily follow from anything
+they knew of her that she was a mother at all. Her motherhood might be
+the mere figment of that kind colored girl's emotional fancy. She
+might be Nobody's Mother.
+
+When it came to this the father laughed, too. Why, anyhow, were
+mothers more sacred than fathers? If they had found an old man in that
+old woman's condition on those steps, would that kind colored girl
+have appealed to them in his behalf as Somebody's Father?
+
+
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                        THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
+
+
+  He had gone down at Christmas, where our host
+  Had opened up his house on the Maine coast,
+  For the week's holidays, and we were all,
+  On Christmas night, sitting in the great hall,
+  About the corner fireplace, while we told
+  Stories like those that people, young and old,
+  Have told at Christmas firesides from the first,
+  Till one who crouched upon the hearth, and nursed
+  His knees in his claspt arms, threw back his head,
+  And fixed our host with laughing eyes, and said,
+  "This is so good, here--with your hickory logs
+  Blazing like natural-gas ones on the dogs,
+  And sending out their flicker on the wall
+  And rafters of your mock-baronial hall,
+  All in fumed-oak, and on your polished floor,
+  And the steel-studded panels of your door--
+  I think you owe the general make-believe
+  Some sort of story that will somehow give
+  A more ideal completeness to our case,
+  And make each several listener in his place--
+  Or hers--sit up, with a real goose-flesh creeping
+  All over him--or her--in proper keeping
+  With the locality and hour and mood.
+  Come!" And amid the cries of "Yes!" and "Good!"
+  Our host laughed back; then, with a serious air,
+  Looked around him on our hemicycle, where
+  He sat midway of it. "Why," he began,
+  But interrupted by the other man,
+  He paused for him to say: "Nothing remote,
+  But something with the actual Yankee note
+  Of here and now in it!" "I'll do my best,"
+  Our host replied, "to satisfy a guest.
+  What do you say to Barberry Cove? And would
+  Five years be too long past?" "No, both are good.
+  Go on!" "You noticed that big house to-day
+  Close to the water, and the sloop that lay,
+  Stripped for the winter, there, beside the pier?
+  Well, there she has lain just so, year after year;
+  And she will never leave her pier again;
+  But once, each spring she sailed in sun or rain,
+  For Bay Chaleur--or Bay Shaloor, as they
+  Like better to pronounce it down this way."
+
+  "I like Shaloor myself rather the best.
+  But go ahead," said the exacting guest.
+  And with a glance around at us that said,
+  "Don't let me bore you!" our host went ahead.
+
+  "Captain Gilroy built the big house, and he
+  Still lives there with his aging family.
+  He built the sloop, and when he used to come
+  Back from the Banks he made her more his home,
+  With his two boys, than the big house. The two
+  Counted with him a good half of her crew,
+  Until it happened, on the Banks, one day
+  The oldest boy got in a steamer's way,
+  And went down in his dory. In the fall
+  The others came without him. That was all
+  That showed in either one of them except
+  That now the father and the brother slept
+  Ashore, and not on board. When the spring came
+  They sailed for the old fishing-ground the same
+  As ever. Yet, not quite the same. The brother,
+  If you believed what folks say, kissed his mother
+  Good-by in going; and by general rumor,
+  The father, so far yielding as to humor
+  His daughters' weakness, rubbed his stubbly cheek
+  Against their lips. Neither of them would speak,
+  But the dumb passion of their love and grief
+  In so much show at parting found relief.
+
+  "The weeks passed and the months. Sometimes they heard
+  At home, by letter, from the sloop, or word
+  Of hearsay from the fleet. But by and by
+  Along about the middle of July,
+  A time in which they had no news began,
+  And holding unbrokenly through August, ran
+  Into September. Then, one afternoon,
+  While the world hung between the sun and moon,
+  And while the mother and her girls were sitting
+  Together with their sewing and their knitting,--
+  Before the early-coming evening's gloom
+  Had gathered round them in the living-room,
+  Helplessly wondering to each other when
+  They should hear something from their absent men,--
+  They saw, all three, against the window-pane,
+  A face that came and went, and came again,
+  Three times, as though for each of them, about
+  As high up from the porch's floor without
+  As a man's head would be that stooped to stare
+  Into the room on their own level there.
+  Its eyes dwelt on them wistfully as if
+  Longing to speak with the dumb lips some grief
+  They could not speak. The women did not start
+  Or scream, though each one of them, in her heart,
+  Knew she was looking on no living face,
+  But stared, as dumb as it did, in her place."
+
+  Here our host paused, and one sigh broke from all
+  Our circle whom his tale had held in thrall.
+  But he who had required it of him spoke
+  In what we others felt an ill-timed joke:
+  "Well, this is something like!" A girl said, "Don't!"
+  As if it hurt, and he said, "Well, I won't.
+  Go on!" And in a sort of muse our host
+  Said: "I suppose we all expect a ghost
+  Will sometimes come to us. But I doubt if we
+  Are moved by its coming as we thought to be.
+  At any rate, the women were not scared,
+  But, as I said, they simply sat and stared
+  Till the face vanished. Then the mother said,
+  'It was your father, girls, and he is dead.'
+  But both had known him; and now all went on
+  Much as before till three weeks more were gone,
+  When, one night sitting as they sat before,
+  Together with their mother, at the door
+  They heard a fumbling hand, and on the walk
+  Up from the pier, the tramp and muffled talk
+  Of different wind-blown voices that they knew
+  For the hoarse voices of their father's crew.
+  Then the door opened, and their father stood
+  Before them, palpably in flesh and blood.
+  The mother spoke for all, her own misgiving:
+  'Father, is this your ghost? Or are you living?'
+  'I am alive!' 'But in this very place
+  We saw your face look, like a spirit's face,
+  There through that window, just three weeks ago,
+  And now you are alive!' 'I did not know
+  That I had come; all I know is that then
+  I wanted to tell you folks here that our Ben
+  Was dying of typhoid fever. He raved of you
+  So that I could not think what else to do.
+  He's there in Bay Shaloor!'
+
+                        "Well, that's the end."
+  And rising up to mend the fire our friend
+  Seemed trying to shun comment; but in vain:
+  The exacting guest came at him once again;
+  "You must be going to fall down, I thought,
+  There at the climax, when your story brought
+  The skipper home alive and well. But no,
+  You saved yourself with honor." The girl said, "Oh,"
+  Who spoke before, "it's wonderful! But you,
+  How could you think of anything so true,
+  So delicate, as the father's wistful face
+  Coming there at the window in the place
+  Of the dead son's! And then, that quaintest touch,
+  Of half-apology--that he felt so much,
+  He _had_ to come! How perfectly New England! Well,
+  I hope nobody will undertake to tell
+  A common or garden ghost-story to-night."
+
+  Our host had turned again, and at her light
+  And playful sympathy he said, "My dear,
+  I hope that no one will imagine here
+  I have been inventing in the tale that's done.
+  My little story's charm if it has one
+  Is from no skill of mine. One does not change
+  The course of fable from its wonted range
+  To such effect as I have seemed to do:
+  Only the fact could make my story true."
+
+
+
+
+                                 VII
+
+                            AN EXPERIENCE
+
+
+For a long time after the event my mind dealt with the poor man in
+helpless conjecture, and it has now begun to do so again for no reason
+that I can assign. All that I ever heard about him was that he was
+some kind of insurance man. Whether life, fire, or marine insurance I
+never found out, and I am not sure that I tried to find out.
+
+There was something in the event which discharged him of all
+obligation to define himself of this or that relation to life. He must
+have had some relation to it such as we all bear, and since the
+question of him has come up with me again I have tried him in several
+of those relations--father, son, brother, husband--without identifying
+him very satisfyingly in either.
+
+As I say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the debt we
+owe in that kind to one another's curiosity, sympathy, or whatever. I
+cannot say what errand it was that brought him to the place, a
+strange, large, indeterminate open room, where several of us sat
+occupied with different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me now,
+by only a provisional right to the place. Certainly the corner
+allotted to my own editorial business was of temporary assignment; I
+was there until we could find a more permanent office. The man had
+nothing to do with me or with the publishers; he had no manuscript, or
+plan for an article which he wished to propose and to talk himself
+into writing, so that he might bring it with a claim to acceptance, as
+though he had been asked to write it. In fact, he did not even look of
+the writing sort; and his affair with some other occupant of that
+anomalous place could have been in no wise literary. Probably it was
+some kind of insurance business, and I have been left with the
+impression of fussiness in his conduct of it; he had to my involuntary
+attention an effect of conscious unwelcome with it.
+
+After subjectively dealing with this impression, I ceased to notice
+him, without being able to give myself to my own work. The day was
+choking hot, of a damp that clung about one, and forbade one so much
+effort as was needed to relieve one of one's discomfort; to pull at
+one's wilted collar and loosen the linen about one's reeking neck
+meant exertion which one willingly forbore; it was less suffering to
+suffer passively than to suffer actively. The day was of the sort
+which begins with a brisk heat, and then, with a falling breeze,
+decays into mere swelter. To come indoors out of the sun was no escape
+from the heat; my window opened upon a shaded alley where the air was
+damper without being cooler than the air within.
+
+At last I lost myself in my work with a kind of humid interest in the
+psychological inquiry of a contributor who was dealing with a matter
+rather beyond his power. I did not think that he was fortunate in
+having cast his inquiry in the form of a story; I did not think that
+his contrast of love and death as the supreme facts of life was what a
+subtler or stronger hand could have made it, or that the situation
+gained in effectiveness from having the hero die in the very moment of
+his acceptance. In his supposition that the reader would care more for
+his hero simply because he had undergone that tremendous catastrophe,
+the writer had omitted to make him interesting otherwise; perhaps he
+could not.
+
+My mind began to wander from the story and not very relevantly to
+employ itself with the question of how far our experiences really
+affect our characters. I remembered having once classed certain
+temperaments as the stuff of tragedy, and others as the stuff of
+comedy, and of having found a greater cruelty in the sorrows which
+light natures undergo, as unfit and disproportionate for them.
+Disaster, I tacitly decided, was the fit lot of serious natures; when
+it befell the frivolous it was more than they ought to have been made
+to bear; it was not of their quality. Then by the mental zigzagging
+which all thinking is I thought of myself and whether I was of this
+make or that. If it was more creditable to be of serious stuff than
+frivolous, though I had no agency in choosing, I asked myself how I
+should be affected by the sight of certain things, like the common
+calamities reported every day in the papers which I had hitherto
+escaped seeing. By another zigzag I thought that I had never known a
+day so close and stifling and humid. I then reflected upon the
+comparative poverty of the French language, which I was told had only
+that one word for the condition we could call by half a dozen
+different names, as humid, moist, damp, sticky, reeking, sweltering,
+and so on. I supposed that a book of synonyms would give even more
+English adjectives; I thought of looking, but my book of synonyms was
+at the back of my table, and I would have to rise for it. Then I
+questioned whether the French language was so destitute of adjectives,
+after all; I preferred to doubt it rather than rise.
+
+With no more logic than those other vagaries had, I realized that the
+person who had started me in them was no longer in the room. He must
+have gone outdoors, and I visualized him in the street pushing about,
+crowded hither and thither, and striking against other people as he
+went and came. I was glad I was not in his place; I believed I should
+have fallen in a faint from the heat, as I had once almost done in New
+York on a day like that. From this my mind jumped to the thought of
+sudden death in general. Was it such a happy thing as people
+pretended? For the person himself, yes, perhaps; but not for those
+whom he had left at home, say, in the morning, and who were expecting
+him at home in the evening. I granted that it was generally accepted
+as the happiest death, but no one that had tried it had said so. To be
+sure, one was spared a long sickness, with suffering from pain and
+from the fear of death. But one had no time for making one's peace
+with God, as it used to be said, and after all there might be
+something in death-bed repentance, although cultivated people no
+longer believed in it. Then I reverted to the family unprepared for
+the sudden death: the mother, the wife, the children. I struggled to
+get away from the question, but the vagaries which had lightly
+dispersed themselves before clung persistently to the theme now. I
+felt that it was like a bad dream. That was a promising diversion. Had
+one any sort of volition in the quick changes of dreams? One was aware
+of finding a certain nightmare insupportable, and of breaking from it
+as by main force, and then falling into a deep, sweet sleep. Was death
+something like waking from a dream such as that, which this life
+largely was, and then sinking into a long, restful slumber, and
+possibly never waking again?
+
+Suddenly I perceived that the man had come back. He might have been
+there some time with his effect of fussing and his pathetic sense of
+unwelcome. I had not noticed; I only knew that he stood at the
+half-open door with the knob of it in his hand looking into the room
+blankly.
+
+As he stood there he lifted his hand and rubbed it across his forehead
+as if in a sort of daze from the heat. I recognized the gesture as one
+very characteristic of myself; I had often rubbed my hand across my
+forehead on a close, hot day like that. Then the man suddenly vanished
+as if he had sunk through the floor.
+
+People who had not noticed that he was there noticed now that he was
+not there. Some made a crooked rush toward the place where he had
+been, and one of those helpful fellow-men who are first in all needs
+lifted his head and mainly carried him into the wide space which the
+street stairs mounted to, and laid him on the floor. It was darker, if
+not cooler there, and we stood back to give him the air which he drew
+in with long, deep sighs. One of us ran down the stairs to the street
+for a doctor, wherever he might be found, and ran against a doctor at
+the last step.
+
+The doctor came and knelt over the prostrate figure and felt its
+pulse, and put his ear down to its heart. It, which has already in my
+telling ceased to be he, drew its breath in those long suspirations
+which seemed to search each more profoundly than the last the lurking
+life, drawing it from the vital recesses and expelling it in those
+vast sighs.
+
+They went on and on, and established in our consciousness the
+expectation of indefinite continuance. We knew that the figure there
+was without such consciousness as ours, unless it was something so
+remotely withdrawn that it could not manifest itself in any signal to
+our senses. There was nothing tragical in the affair, but it had a
+surpassing dignity. It was as if the figure was saying something to
+the life in each of us which none of us would have words to interpret,
+speaking some last message from the hither side of that bourne from
+which there is no returning.
+
+There was a clutch upon my heart which tightened with the slower and
+slower succession of those awful breaths. Then one was drawn and
+expelled and then another was not drawn. I waited for the breathing to
+begin again, and it did not begin. The doctor rose from kneeling over
+the figure that had been a man, and uttered, with a kind of
+soundlessness, "Gone," and mechanically dusted his fingers with the
+thumbs of each hand from their contact with what had now become all
+dust forever.
+
+That helpfulest one among us laid a cloth over the face, and the rest
+of us went away. It was finished. The man was done with the sorrow
+which, in our sad human order, must now begin for those he loved and
+who loved him. I tried vaguely to imagine their grief for not having
+been uselessly with him at the last, and I could not. The incident
+remained with me like an experience, something I had known rather than
+seen. I could not alienate it by my pity and make it another's. They
+whom it must bereave seemed for the time immeasurably removed from the
+fact.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+                             THE BOARDERS
+
+
+The boarder who had eloped was a student at the theological seminary,
+and he had really gone to visit his family, so that he had a fairly
+good conscience in giving this color to the fact that he was leaving
+the place permanently because he could not bear it any longer. It was
+a shade of deceit to connive with his room-mate for the custody of his
+carpet-bag and the few socks and collars and the one shirt and summer
+coat which did not visibly affect its lankness when gathered into it
+from his share of the bureau-drawers; but he did not know what else to
+do, and he trusted to a final forgiveness when all the facts were
+considered by a merciful providence. His board was fully paid, and he
+had suffered long. He argued with his room-mate that he could do no
+good by remaining, and that he would have stayed if he could have
+believed there was any use. Besides, the food was undermining his
+health, and the room with that broken window had given him a cold
+already. He had a right to go, and it was his duty to himself and the
+friends who were helping him through the seminary not to get sick.
+
+He did not feel that he had convinced his room-mate, who took charge
+of his carpet-bag and now sat with it between his feet waiting the
+signal of the fugitive's surreptitious return for it. He was a
+vague-looking young man, presently in charge of the "Local and
+Literary" column of the one daily paper of the place, and he had just
+explained to the two other boarders who were watching with him for the
+event that he was not certain whether it was the supper, or the
+anxiety of the situation, or just what it was that was now affecting
+his digestion.
+
+The fellow-boarders, who sat on the edge of the bed, in default of the
+one unbroken chair which their host kept for himself, as easier than a
+mattress to get up from suddenly, did not take sides for or against
+him in his theories of his discomfort. One of them glanced at the
+broken window.
+
+"How do you glaze that in the daytime? You can't use the bolster
+then?"
+
+"I'm not in, much, in the daytime."
+
+It was a medical student who had spoken, but he was now silent, and
+the other said, after they had listened to the twitter of a piano in
+the parlor under the room, "That girl's playing will be the death of
+me."
+
+"Not if her mother's cooking isn't," the medical student, whose name
+was Wallace, observed with a professional effect.
+
+"Why don't you prescribe something for it?" the law student suggested.
+
+"Which?" Wallace returned.
+
+"I don't believe anything could cure the playing. I must have meant
+the cooking."
+
+"You're a promising young jurist, Blakeley. What makes you think I
+could cure the cooking?"
+
+"Oh, I just wondered. The sick one gets paler every day. I wonder what
+ails her."
+
+"She's not my patient."
+
+"Oh! Hippocratic oath. Rather fine of you, Wallace. But if she's not
+your patient--"
+
+"Listen!" their host interrupted, sharply. After a joint silence he
+added: "No. It must have been the sleet."
+
+"Well, Briggs," the law student said, "if it must have been the sleet,
+what mustn't it have been?"
+
+"Oh!" Briggs explained, "I thought it was Phillips. He was to throw a
+handful of gravel at the window."
+
+"And then you were to run down with his bag and help him to make his
+escape from a friendless widow. Well, I don't know that I blame him.
+If I didn't owe two weeks' board, I'd leave myself--though I hope I
+shouldn't sneak away. And if Mrs. Betterson didn't owe Wallace, here,
+two weeks' board, we'd walk off together arm-in-arm at high noon. I
+can't understand how he ever came to advance her the money."
+
+Wallace rose from the bed, and kicked each leg out to dislodge the
+tight trousers of the middle eighteen-fifties which had caught on the
+tops of his high boots. "You're a tonguey fellow, Blakeley. But you'll
+find, as you live long, that there are several things you can't
+explain."
+
+"I'll tell you what," Blakeley said. "We'll get Mrs. Betterson to take
+your loan for my debt, and we'll go at once."
+
+"You can propose something like that before the justice of the peace
+in your first pettifogging case."
+
+"I believe Wallace likes to stay. And yet he must know from his
+anatomical studies, better than the animals themselves, what cuts of
+meat the old lady gives us. I shouldn't be so fastidious about the
+cuts, if she didn't treat them all with pork gravy. Well, I mustn't be
+too hard on a lone widow that I owe board to. I don't suppose his diet
+had anything to do with the deep damnation of the late Betterson's
+taking off. Does that stove of yours smoke, Briggs?"
+
+"Not when there isn't a fire in it."
+
+"I just asked. Wallace's stove smokes, fire or no fire. It takes
+advantage of the old lady's indebtedness to him. There seem," he
+added, philosophically, "to be just two occupations open to widows who
+have to support themselves: millinery business for young ones,
+boarding-housing for old ones. It _is_ rather restricted. What do you
+suppose she puts into the mince-pies? Mince-pies are rather a mystery
+at the best."
+
+Wallace was walking up and down the room still in some difficulty with
+his trousers-legs, and kicking out from time to time to dislodge them.
+"How long should you say Blakeley had been going on?" he asked Briggs.
+
+"You never can tell," Briggs responded. "I think he doesn't know
+himself."
+
+"Well said, youthful scribe! With such listeners as you two, I could
+go on forever. Consider yourselves clapped jovially on the back, my
+gentle Briggs; I can't get up to do it from the hollow of your bed
+here. As you were saying, the wonder about these elderly widows who
+keep boarding-houses is the domestic dilapidation they fall into. If
+they've ever known how to cook a meal or sweep a room or make a bed,
+these arts desert them in the presence of their boarders. Their only
+aim in life seems to be preventing the escape of their victims, and
+they either let them get into debt for their board or borrow money
+from them. But why do they always have daughters, and just two of
+them: one beautiful, fashionable, and devoted to the piano; the other
+willing to work, but pale, pathetic, and incapable of the smallest
+achievement with the gridiron or the wash-board? It's a thing to make
+a person want to pay up and leave, even if he's reading law. If
+Wallace, here, had the spirit of a man, he would collect the money
+owing him, and--"
+
+"Oh, stop it, Blakeley!" Wallace stormed. "I should think you'd get
+tired of your talk yourself."
+
+"Well, as you insist--"
+
+Blakeley began again, but Briggs jumped to his feet and caught up
+Phillips's carpet-bag, and looked wildly around. "It's gravel, this
+time."
+
+"Well, take your hat, Briggs. It may be a prolonged struggle. But
+remember that Phillips's cause is just. He's paid his board, and he
+has a perfect right to leave. She has no right to prevent him. Think
+of that when the fray is at its worst. But try to get him off quietly,
+if you can. Deal gently with the erring, while you stand firm for
+boarders' rights. Remember that Phillips is sneaking off in order to
+spare her feelings and has come pretty near prevarication in the
+effort. Have you got your shoes off? No; it's your rubbers on. That's
+better."
+
+Briggs faltered with the carpet-bag in his hand. "Boys, I don't like
+this. It feels--clandestine."
+
+"It _looks_ that way, too," Blakeley admitted. "It has an air of
+conspiracy."
+
+"I've got half a mind to let Phillips come in and get his bag
+himself."
+
+"It would serve him right, though I don't know why, exactly. He has a
+right to spare his own feelings if he's sparing hers at the same time.
+Of course he's afraid she'll plead with him to stay, and he'll have to
+be inexorable with her; and if I understand the yielding nature of
+Phillips he doesn't like to be inexorable."
+
+There came another sharp rattle of small pebbles at the window.
+
+"Oh, confound him!" Briggs cried under his breath, and he shuffled out
+of the room and crept noiselessly down the stairs to the front door.
+The door creaked a little in opening, and he left it ajar. The current
+of cold air that swept up to the companions he had left behind at his
+room door brought them the noise of his rush down the gravel walk to
+the gate and a noise there as of fugitive steps on the pavement
+outside.
+
+A weak female tread made itself heard in the hallway, followed by a
+sharp voice from a door in the rear. "Was it the cat, Jenny?"
+
+"No; the door just seems to have blown open. The catch is broken."
+
+Swift, strong steps advanced with an effect of angry suspicion. "I
+don't believe it blew open. More likely the cat clawed it open."
+
+The steps which the voice preceded seemed to halt at the open door, as
+if falling back from it, and Wallace and Blakeley, looking down, saw
+by the dim flare of the hall lamp the face of Briggs confronting the
+face of Mrs. Betterson from the outer darkness. They saw the sick
+girl, whose pallor they could not see, supporting herself by the
+stairs-post with one hand and pressing the other to her side.
+
+"Oh! It's _you_, Mr. Briggs," the landlady said, with a note of
+inculpation. "What made you leave the door open?"
+
+The spectators could not see the swift change in Briggs's face from
+terror to savage desperation, but they noted it in his voice.
+"Yes--yes! It's me. I just--I was just-- No I won't, either! You'd
+better know the truth. I was taking Phillips's bag out to him. He was
+afraid to come in for it, because he didn't want to see you, the
+confounded coward! He's left."
+
+"Left? And he said he would stay till spring! Didn't he, Jenny?"
+
+"I don't remember--" the girl weakly gasped, but her mother did not
+heed her in her mounting wrath.
+
+"A great preacher _he'll_ make. What'd he say he left for?"
+
+"He didn't say. Will you let me up-stairs?"
+
+"No, I won't, till you tell me. You know well enough, between you."
+
+"Yes, I do know," Briggs answered, savagely. "He left because he was
+tired of eating sole-leather for steak, and fire-salt pork, and tar
+for molasses, and butter strong enough to make your nose curl, and
+drinking burnt-rye slops for coffee and tea-grounds for tea. And so am
+I, and so are all of us, and--and-- Will you let me go up-stairs now,
+Mrs. Betterson?"
+
+His voice had risen, not so high but that another voice from the
+parlor could prevail over it: a false, silly, girl voice, with the
+twitter of piano-keys as from hands swept over the whole board to help
+drown the noise of the quarrel in the hall. "Oh yes, I'll sing it
+again, Mr. Saunders, if you sa-a-a-y."
+
+Then this voice lifted itself in a silly song, and a silence followed
+the voices in the hall, except for the landlady's saying, brokenly:
+"Well, all right, Mr. Briggs. You can go up to your room for all me.
+I've tried to be a mother to you boys, but if _this_ is what I get for
+it!"
+
+The two at the threshold of Briggs's room retreated within, as he
+bounded furiously upon them and slammed the door after him. It started
+open again, from the chronic defect of the catch, but he did not care.
+
+"Well, Briggs, I hope you feel better now," Blakeley began. "You
+certainly told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing _but_ the
+truth. But I wonder you had the heart to do it before that sick girl."
+
+"I _didn't_ have the heart," Briggs shouted. "But I had the courage,
+and if you say one word more, Blakeley, I'll throw you out of the
+room. I'm going to leave! _My_ board's paid if yours isn't."
+
+He went wildly about, catching things down here and there from nails
+and out of drawers. The tears stood in his eyes. But suddenly he
+stopped and listened to the sounds from below--the sound of the silly
+singing in the parlor, and the sound of sobbing in the dining-room,
+and the sound of vain entreating between the sobs.
+
+"Oh, I don't suppose I'm fit to keep a boarding-house. I never was a
+good manager; and everybody imposes on me, and everything is so dear,
+and I don't know what's good from what's bad. Your poor father used
+to look after all that."
+
+"Well, don't you cry, now, mother! It'll all come right, you'll see.
+I'm getting so I can go and do the marketing now; and if Minervy would
+only help a little--"
+
+"No, no!" the mother's voice came anxiously up. "We can get along
+without her; we always have. I know he likes her, and I want to give
+her every chance. _We_ can get along. If she was on'y married, once,
+we could all live--" A note of self-comforting gradually stole into
+the mother's voice, and the sound of a nose violently blown seemed to
+note a period in her suffering.
+
+"Oh, mother, I wish I was well!" The girl's voice came with a burst of
+wild lamenting.
+
+"'Sh, 'sh, deary!" her mother entreated. "He'll _hear_ you, and
+then--"
+
+"'Hazel Dell'?" the silly voice came from the parlor, with a sound of
+fright in it. "I can sing it without the music." The piano keys
+twittered the prelude and the voice sang:
+
+          "In the Hazel Dell my Nelly's sleeping,
+            Nelly loved so long!"
+
+Wallace went forward and shut the door. "It's a shame to overhear
+them! What are you going to do, you fellows?"
+
+"I'm going to stay," Briggs said, "if it kills me. At least I will
+till Minervy's married. _I_ don't care what the grub's like. I can
+always get a bite at the restaurant."
+
+"If anybody will pay up my back board, I'll stay, too," Blakeley
+followed. "I should like to make a virtue of it, and, as things stand,
+I can't."
+
+"All right," Wallace said, and he went out and down the stairs. Then
+from the dining-room below his heavy voice offering encouragement came
+up, in terms which the others could not make out.
+
+"I'll bet he's making her another advance," Blakeley whispered, as if
+he might be overheard by Wallace.
+
+"I wish _I_ could have made to do it," Briggs whispered back. "I feel
+as mean as pursley. Would you like to kick me?"
+
+"I don't see how that would do any good. I may want to borrow money of
+you, and you can't ask a loan from a man you've kicked. Besides, I
+think what you said may do her good."
+
+
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+                      BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL
+
+
+                                  I
+
+  Breakfast is my best meal, and I reckon it's always been
+  Ever since I was old enough to know what breakfast could mean.
+  I mind when we lived in the cabin out on the Illinoy,
+  Where father had took up a quarter-section when I was a boy,
+  I used to go for the cows as soon as it was light;
+  And when I started back home, before I come in sight,
+  I come in _smell_ of the cabin, where mother was frying the ham,
+  And boiling the coffee, that reached through the air like a mile o' ba'm,
+  'N' I bet you I didn't wait to see what it was that the dog
+  Thought he'd got under the stump or inside o' the hollow log!
+  But I made the old cows canter till their hoof-joints cracked--you know
+  That dry, funny kind of a noise that the cows make when they go--
+  And I never stopped to wash when I got to the cabin door;
+  I pulled up my chair and e't like I never had e't before.
+  And mother she set there and watched me eat, and eat, and eat,
+  Like as if she couldn't give her old eyes enough of the treat;
+  And she split the shortened biscuit, and spread the butter between,
+  And let it lay there and melt, and soak and soak itself in;
+  And she piled up my plate with potato and ham and eggs,
+  Till I couldn't hold any more, or hardly stand on my legs;
+  And she filled me up with coffee that would float an iron wedge,
+  And never give way a mite, or spill a drop at the edge.
+
+
+                                  II
+
+  What? Well, yes, this is good coffee, too. If they don't know much,
+  They do know how to make coffee, I _will_ say that for these Dutch.
+  But my--oh, my! It ain't the kind of coffee my mother made,
+  And the coffee my wife used to make would throw it clear in the shade;
+  And the brand of sugar-cured, canvased ham that she always used--
+  Well, this Westphalia stuff would simply have made her amused!
+  That so, heigh? I saw that you was United States as soon
+  As ever I heard you talk; I reckon I know the tune!
+  Pick it out anywhere; and _you_ understand how I feel
+  About these here foreign breakfasts: breakfast is my best meal.
+
+
+                                 III
+
+  My! but my wife was a cook; and the breakfasts she used to get
+  The first years we was married, I can smell 'em and taste 'em yet:
+  Corn cake light as a feather, and buckwheat thin as lace
+  And crisp as cracklin'; and steak that you couldn't have the face
+  To compare any steak over here to; and chicken fried
+  Maryland style--I couldn't get through the bill if I tried.
+  And then, her waffles! My! She'd kind of slip in a few
+  Between the ham and the chicken--you know how women'll do--
+  For a sort of little surprise, and, if I was running light,
+  To take my fancy and give an edge to my appetite.
+  Done it all herself as long as we was poor, and I tell _you_
+  _She_ liked to see me eat as well as mother used to do;
+  I reckon she went ahead of mother some, if the truth was known,
+  And everything she touched she give a taste of her own.
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+  _She_ was a cook, I can tell you! And after we got ahead,
+  And she could 'a' had a girl to do the cookin' instead,
+  I had the greatest time to get Momma to leave the work;
+  She said it made her feel like a mis'able sneak and shirk.
+  She didn't want daughter, though, when we did begin to keep girls,
+  To come in the kitchen and cook, and smell up her clo'es and curls;
+  But you couldn't have stopped the child, whatever you tried to do--
+  I reckon the gift of the cookin' was born in Girly, too.
+  Cook she would from the first, and we just had to let her alone;
+  And after she got married, and had a house of her own,
+  She tried to make me feel, when I come to live with her,
+  Like it was my house, too; and I tell you she done it, sir!
+  She remembered that breakfast was my best meal, and she tried
+  To have all I used to have, and a good deal more beside;
+  Grape-fruit to begin with, or melons or peaches, at least--
+  Husband's business took him there, and they had went to live East--
+  Then a Spanish macker'l, or a soft-shell crab on toast,
+  Or a broiled live lobster! Well, sir, I don't want to seem to boast,
+  But I don't believe you could have got in the whole of New York
+  Any such an oyster fry or sausage of country pork.
+
+
+                                  V
+
+  Well, I don't know what-all it means; I always lived just so--
+  Never drinked or smoked, and yet, here about two years ago,
+  I begun to run down; I ain't as young as I used to be;
+  And the doctors all said Carlsbad, and I reckon this is me.
+  But it's more like some one I've dreamt of, with all three of 'em gone!
+  Believe in ghosts? Well, _I_ do. I _know_ there are ghosts. I'm _one_.
+  Maybe I mayn't look it--I was always inclined to fat;
+  The doctors say that's the trouble, and very likely it's that.
+  This is my little grandson, and this is the oldest one
+  Of Girly's girls; and for all that the whole of us said and done,
+  She must come with grandpa when the doctors sent me off here,
+  To see that they didn't starve him. Ain't that about so, my dear?
+  _She_ can cook, I tell you; and when we get home again
+  We're goin' to have something to _eat_; I'm just a-livin' till then.
+  But when I set here of a morning, and think of them that's gone--
+  Mother and Momma and Girly--well, I wouldn't like to let on
+  Before the children, but I can almost seem to see
+  All of 'em lookin' down, like as if they pitied me,
+  After the breakfasts they give me, to have me have to put up
+  With nothing but bread and butter, and a little mis'able cup
+  Of this here weak-kneed coffee! I can't tell how _you_ feel,
+  But it fairly makes me sick! Breakfast is my best meal.
+
+
+
+
+                                  X
+
+                           THE MOTHER-BIRD
+
+
+She wore around the turned-up brim of her bolero-like toque a band of
+violets not so much in keeping with the gray of the austere November
+day as with the blue of her faded autumnal eyes. Her eyes were
+autumnal, but it was not from this, or from the lines of maturity
+graven on the passing prettiness of her little face, that the notion
+and the name of Mother-Bird suggested itself. She became known as the
+Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the earliest, if not the
+latest, of her friends, because she was slight and small, and like a
+bird in her eager movements, and because she spoke so instantly and so
+constantly of her children in Dresden: before you knew anything else
+of her you knew that she was going out to them.
+
+She was quite alone, and she gave the sense of claiming their
+protection, and sheltering herself in the fact of them. When she
+mentioned her daughters she had the effect of feeling herself
+chaperoned by them. You could not go behind them and find her wanting
+in the social guarantees which women on steamers, if not men, exact of
+lonely birds of passage who are not mother-birds. One must respect the
+convention by which she safeguarded herself and tried to make good her
+standing; yet it did not lastingly avail her with other birds of
+passage, so far as they were themselves mother-birds, or sometimes
+only maiden-birds. The day had not ended before they began to hold her
+off by slight liftings of their wings and rufflings of their feathers,
+by quick, evasive flutterings, by subtle ignorances of her approach,
+which convinced no one but themselves that they had not seen her. She
+sailed with the sort of acquaintance-in-common which every one shares
+on a ship leaving port, when people are confused by the kindness of
+friends coming to see them off after sending baskets of fruit and
+sheaves of flowers, and scarcely know what they are doing or saying.
+But when the ship was abreast of Fire Island, and the pilot had gone
+over the side, these provisional intimacies of the parting hour began
+to restrict themselves. Then the Mother-Bird did not know half the
+women she had known at the pier, or quite all the men.
+
+It was not that she did anything obvious to forfeit this knowledge.
+Her behavior was if anything too exemplary; it might be thought to
+form a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the unseasonable band of
+violets around her hat-brim; perhaps it was the vernal gaiety of her
+dress; perhaps it was the uncertainty of her anxious eyes, which
+presumed while they implored. A mother-bird must not hover too
+confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose preoccupations she
+does not share. It might have been her looking and dressing younger
+than nature justified; at forty one must not look thirty; in November
+one must not, even involuntarily, wear the things of May if one would
+have others believe in one's devotion to one's children in Dresden;
+one alleges in vain one's impatience to join them as grounds for
+joining groups or detached persons who have begun to write home to
+their children in New York or Boston.
+
+The very readiness of the Mother-Bird to give security by the mention
+of well-known names, to offer proof of her social solvency by the
+eager correctness of her behavior, created reluctance around her. Some
+would not have her at all from the first; others, who had partially or
+conditionally accepted her, returned her upon her hands and withdrew
+from the negotiation. More and more she found herself outside that
+hard woman-world, and trying less and less to beat her way into it.
+
+The women may have known her better even than she knew herself, and it
+may have been through ignorance greater than her own that the men were
+more acquiescent. But the men too were not so acquiescent, or not at
+all, as time passed.
+
+It would be hard to fix the day, the hour, far harder the moment, when
+the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear
+in the smoking-room, or say whether she passed from the one to the
+other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women's unwritten
+law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship,
+after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and
+sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her
+poor, pretty little face, with its faded blue eyes and wistful mouth.
+There she passed by quick transition from the conversation of the
+graver elderly smokers to the loud laughter of two birds of prey who
+became her comrades, or such friends as birds like them can be to
+birds like her.
+
+From anything she had said or done there was no reason for her lapse
+from the women and the better men to such men; for her transition from
+the better sort of women there was no reason except that it happened.
+Whether she attached herself to the birds of prey, or they to her, by
+that instinct which enables birds of all kinds to know themselves of a
+feather remained a touching question.
+
+There remained to the end the question whether she was of a feather
+with them, or whether it was by some mischance, or by some such stress
+of the elements as drives birds of any feather to flock with birds of
+any other. To the end there remained a distracted and forsaken
+innocence in her looks. It was imaginable that she had made overtures
+to the birds of prey because she had made overtures to every one else;
+she was always seeking rather than sought, and her acceptance with
+them was as deplorable as her refusal by better birds. Often they were
+seen without her, when they had that look of having escaped, which
+others wore; but she was not often seen without them.
+
+There is not much walking-weather on a November passage, and she was
+seen less with them in the early dark outdoors than in the late light
+within, by which she wavered a small form through the haze of their
+cigars in the smoking-room, or in the grill-room, where she showed in
+faint eclipse through the fumes of the broiling and frying, or
+through the vapors of the hot whiskies. The birds of prey were then
+heard laughing, but whether at her or with her it must have been
+equally sorrowful to learn.
+
+Perhaps they were laughing at the maternal fondness which she had used
+for introduction to the general acquaintance lost almost in the moment
+of winning it. She seemed not to resent their laughter, though she
+seemed not to join in it. The worst of her was the company she kept;
+but since no better would allow her to keep it, you could not
+confidently say she would not have liked the best company on board. At
+the same time you could not have said she would; you could not have
+been sure it would not have bored her. Doubtless these results are not
+solely the sport of chance; they must be somewhat the event of choice
+if not of desert.
+
+For anything you could have sworn, the Mother-Bird would have liked to
+be as good as the best. But since it was not possible for her to be
+good in the society of the best, she could only be good in that of the
+worst. It was to be hoped that the birds of prey were not cruel to
+her; that their mockery was never unkind if ever it was mockery. The
+cruelty which must come came when they began to be seen less and less
+with her, even at the late suppers, through the haze of their cigars
+and the smoke of the broiling and frying, and the vapors of the hot
+whiskies. Then it was the sharpest pang of all to meet her wandering
+up and down the ship's promenades, or leaning on the rail and looking
+dimly out over the foam-whitened black sea. It is the necessity of
+birds of prey to get rid of other birds when they are tired of them,
+and it had doubtless come to that.
+
+One night, the night before getting into port, when the curiosity
+which always followed her with grief failed of her in the heightened
+hilarity of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the ship's run
+were making, it found her alone beside a little iron table, of those
+set in certain nooks outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one
+near, where the light from within fell palely upon her. The boon birds
+of prey, with whom she had been supping, had abandoned her, and she
+was supporting her cheek on the small hand of the arm that rested on
+the table. She leaned forward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the
+violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vibrations of the
+machinery. She was asleep, poor Mother-Bird, and it would have been
+impossible not to wish her dreams were kind.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XI
+
+                              THE AMIGO
+
+
+His name was really Perez Armando Aldeano, but in the end everybody
+called him the _amigo_, because that was the endearing term by which
+he saluted all the world. There was a time when the children called
+him "Span-yard" in their games, for he spoke no tongue but Spanish,
+and though he came from Ecuador, and was no more a Spaniard than they
+were English, he answered to the call of "Span-yard!" whenever he
+heard it. He came eagerly in the hope of fun, and all the more eagerly
+if there was a hope of mischief in the fun. Still, to discerning
+spirits, he was always the _amigo_, for, when he hailed you so, you
+could not help hailing him so again, and whatever mock he put upon you
+afterward, you were his secret and inalienable friend.
+
+The moment of my own acceptance in this quality came in the first
+hours of expansion following our getting to sea after long detention
+in the dock by fog. A small figure came flying down the dock with
+outspread arms, and a joyful cry of "Ah, _amigo_!" as if we were now
+meeting unexpectedly after a former intimacy in Bogotá; and the
+_amigo_ clasped me round the middle to his bosom, or more strictly
+speaking, his brow, which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was clad in
+a long black overcoat, and a boy's knee-pants, and under the peak of
+his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a
+smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was more and more, with the
+thinness of his small black legs, and his habit of hopping up and
+down, and dancing threateningly about, with mischief latent in every
+motion, like a crow which in being tamed has acquired one of the worst
+traits of civilization. He began babbling and gurgling in Spanish, and
+took my hand for a stroll about the ship, and from that time we were,
+with certain crises of disaffection, firm allies.
+
+There were others whom he hailed and adopted his friends, whose legs
+he clung about and impeded in their walks, or whom he required to toss
+him into the air as they passed, but I flattered myself that he had a
+peculiar, because a primary, esteem for myself. I have thought it
+might be that, Bogotá being said to be a very literary capital, as
+those things go in South America, he was mystically aware of a common
+ground between us, wider and deeper than that of his other
+friendships. But it may have been somewhat owing to my inviting him to
+my cabin to choose such portion as he would of a lady-cake sent us on
+shipboard at the last hour. He prattled and chuckled over it in the
+soft gutturals of his parrot-like Spanish, and rushed up on deck to
+eat the frosting off in the presence of his small companions, and to
+exult before them in the exploitation of a novel pleasure. Yet it
+could not have been the lady-cake which lastingly endeared me to him,
+for by the next day he had learned prudence and refused it without
+withdrawing his amity.
+
+This, indeed, was always tempered by what seemed a constitutional
+irony, and he did not impart it to any one without some time making
+his friend feel the edge of his practical humor. It was not long
+before the children whom he gathered to his heart had each and all
+suffered some fall or bump or bruise which, if not of his intention,
+was of his infliction, and which was regretted with such winning
+archness that the very mothers of them could not resist him, and his
+victims dried their tears to follow him with glad cries of "Span-yard,
+Span-yard!" Injury at his hands was a favor; neglect was the only real
+grievance. He went about rolling his small black head, and darting
+roguish lightnings from under his thick-fringed eyes, and making more
+trouble with a more enticing gaiety than all the other people on the
+ship put together.
+
+The truth must be owned that the time came, long before the end of the
+voyage, when it was felt that in the interest of the common welfare,
+something must be done about the _amigo_. At the conversational end of
+the doctor's table, where he was discussed whenever the racks were not
+on, and the talk might have languished without their inspiration, his
+badness was debated at every meal. Some declared him the worst boy in
+the world, and held against his half-hearted defenders that something
+ought to be done about him; and one was left to imagine all the darker
+fate for him because there was nothing specific in these convictions.
+He could not be thrown overboard, and if he had been put in irons
+probably his worst enemies at the conversational end of the table
+would have been the first to intercede for him. It is not certain,
+however, that their prayers would have been effective with the
+captain, if that officer, framed for comfort as well as command, could
+have known how accurately the _amigo_ had dramatized his personal
+presence by throwing himself back, and clasping his hands a foot in
+front of his small stomach, and making a few tilting paces forward.
+
+The _amigo_ had a mimic gift which he liked to exercise when he could
+find no intelligible language for the expression of his ironic spirit.
+Being forbidden visits in and out of season to certain staterooms
+whose inmates feigned a wish to sleep, he represented in what
+grotesque attitudes of sonorous slumber they passed their day, and he
+spared neither age nor sex in these graphic shows. When age refused
+one day to go up on deck with him and pleaded in such Spanish as it
+could pluck up from its past studies that it was too old, he laughed
+it to scorn. "You are not old," he said. "Why?" the flattered dotard
+inquired. "Because you smile," and that seemed reason enough for one's
+continued youth. It was then that the _amigo_ gave his own age,
+carefully telling the Spanish numerals over, and explaining further by
+holding up both hands with one finger shut in. But he had the subtlety
+of centuries in his nine years, and he penetrated the ship everywhere
+with his arch spirit of mischief. It was mischief always in the
+interest of the good-fellowship which he offered impartially to old
+and young; and if it were mere frolic, with no ulterior object, he did
+not care at all how old or young his playmate was. This endeared him
+naturally to every age; and the little blond German-American boy
+dried his tears from the last accident inflicted on him by the _amigo_
+to recall him by tender entreaties of "Span-yard, Span-yard!" while
+the eldest of his friends could not hold out against him more than two
+days in the strained relations following upon the _amigo's_ sweeping
+him down the back with a toy broom employed by the German-American boy
+to scrub the scuppers. This was not so much an injury as an indignity,
+but it was resented as an indignity, in spite of many demure glances
+of propitiation from the _amigo's_ ironical eyes and murmurs of
+inarticulate apology as he passed.
+
+He was, up to a certain point, the kindest and truest of _amigos_;
+then his weird seizure came, and the baby was spilled out of the
+carriage he had been so benevolently pushing up and down; or the
+second officer's legs, as he walked past with the prettiest girl on
+board, were hit with the stick that the _amigo_ had been innocently
+playing shuffle-board with; or some passenger was taken unawares in
+his vanity or infirmity and made to contribute to the _amigo's_
+passion for active amusement.
+
+At this point I ought to explain that the _amigo_ was not traveling
+alone from Ecuador to Paris, where it was said he was to rejoin his
+father. At meal-times, and at other rare intervals, he was seen to be
+in the charge of a very dark and very silent little man, with
+intensely black eyes and mustache, clad in raven hues from his head to
+the delicate feet on which he wore patent-leather shoes. With him the
+_amigo_ walked gravely up and down the deck, and behaved decorously at
+table; and we could not reconcile the apparent affection between the
+two with a theory we had that the _amigo_ had been found impossible in
+his own country, and had been sent out of Ecuador by a decree of the
+government, or perhaps a vote of the whole people. The little, dark,
+silent man, in his patent-leather boots, had not the air of conveying
+a state prisoner into exile, and we wondered in vain what the tie
+between him and the _amigo_ was. He might have been his tutor, or his
+uncle. He exercised a quite mystical control over the _amigo_, who was
+exactly obedient to him in everything, and would not look aside at you
+when in his keeping. We reflected with awe and pathos that, as they
+roomed together, it was his privilege to see the _amigo_ asleep, when
+that little, very kissable black head rested innocently on the pillow,
+and the busy brain within it was at peace with the world which formed
+its pleasure and its prey in waking.
+
+It would be idle to represent that the _amigo_ played his pranks upon
+that shipload of long-suffering people with final impunity. The time
+came when they not only said something must be done, but actually did
+something. It was by the hand of one of the _amigo's_ sweetest and
+kindest friends, namely, that elderly captain, off duty, who was going
+out to be assigned his ship in Hamburg. From the first he had shown
+the affectionate tenderness for the _amigo_ which was felt by all
+except some obdurate hearts at the conversational end of the table;
+and it must have been with a loving interest in the _amigo's_ ultimate
+well-being that, taking him in an ecstasy of mischief, he drew the
+_amigo_ face downward across his knees, and bestowed the chastisement
+which was morally a caress. He dismissed him with a smile in which the
+_amigo_ read the good understanding that existed unimpaired between
+them, and accepted his correction with the same affection as that
+which had given it. He shook himself and ran off with an enjoyment of
+the joke as great as that of any of the spectators and far more
+generous.
+
+In fact there was nothing mean in the _amigo_. Impish he was, or might
+be, but only in the sort of the crow or the parrot; there was no
+malevolence in his fine malice. One fancied him in his adolescence
+taking part in one of the frequent revolutions of his continent, but
+humorously, not homicidally. He would like to alarm the other
+faction, and perhaps drive it from power, or overset it from its
+official place, but if he had the say there would be no bringing the
+vanquished out into the plaza to be shot. He may now have been on his
+way to France ultimately to study medicine, which seems to be
+preliminary to a high political career in South America; but in the
+mean time we feared for him in that republic of severely regulated
+subordinations.
+
+We thought with pathos of our early parting with him, as we approached
+Plymouth and tried to be kodaked with him, considering it an honor and
+pleasure. He so far shared our feeling as to consent, but he insisted
+on wearing a pair of glasses which had large eyes painted on them, and
+on being taken in the act of inflating a toy balloon. Probably,
+therefore, the likeness would not be recognized in Bogotá, but it will
+always be endeared to us by the memory of the many mockeries suffered
+from him. There were other friends whom we left on the ship, notably
+those of the conversational end of the table, who thought him simply a
+bad boy; but there were none of such peculiar appeal as he, when he
+stood by the guard, opening and shutting his hand in ironical adieu,
+and looking smaller and smaller as our tender drifted away and the
+vast liner loomed immense before us. He may have contributed to its
+effect of immensity by the smallness of his presence, or it may have
+dwarfed him. No matter; he filled no slight space in our lives while
+he lasted. Now that he is no longer there, was he really a bad little
+boy, merely and simply? Heaven knows, which alone knows good boys from
+bad.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XII
+
+                           BLACK CROSS FARM
+
+                              (To F. S.)
+
+
+  After full many a mutual delay
+  My friend and I at last fixed on a day
+  For seeing Black Cross Farm, which he had long
+  Boasted the fittest theme for tale or song
+  In all that charming region round about:
+  Something that must not really be left out
+  Of the account of things to do for me.
+  It was a teasing bit of mystery,
+  He said, which he and his had tried in vain,
+  Ever since they had found it, to explain.
+  The right way was to happen, as they did,
+  Upon it in the hills where it was hid;
+  But chance could not be always trusted, quite,
+  You might not happen on it, though you might;
+  Encores were usually objected to
+  By chance. The next best thing that we could do
+  Was in his carryall, to start together,
+  And trust that somehow favoring wind and weather,
+  With the eccentric progress of his horse,
+  Would so far drift us from our settled course
+  That we at least could lose ourselves, if not
+  Find the mysterious object that we sought.
+  So one blithe morning of the ripe July
+  We fared, by easy stages, toward the sky
+  That rested one rim of its turquoise cup
+  Low on the distant sea, and, tilted up,
+  The other on the irregular hilltops. Sweet
+  The sun and wind that joined to cool and heat
+  The air to one delicious temperature;
+  And over the smooth-cropt mowing-pieces pure
+  The pine-breath, borrowing their spicy scent
+  In barter for the balsam that it lent!
+  And when my friend handed the reins to me,
+  And drew a fuming match along his knee,
+  And, lighting his cigar, began to talk,
+  I let the old horse lapse into a walk
+  From his perfunctory trot, content to listen,
+  Amid that leafy rustle and that glisten
+  Of field, and wood, and ocean, rapt afar,
+  From every trouble of our anxious star.
+  From time to time, between effect and cause
+  In this or that, making a questioning pause,
+  My friend peered round him while he feigned a gay
+  Hope that we might have taken the wrong way
+  At the last turn, and then let me push on,
+  Or the old horse rather, slanting hither and yon,
+  And never in the middle of the track,
+  Except when slanting off or slanting back.
+  He talked, I listened, while we wandered by
+  The scanty fields of wheat and oats and rye,
+  With patches of potatoes and of corn,
+  And now and then a garden spot forlorn,
+  Run wild where once a house had stood, or where
+  An empty house yet stood, and seemed to stare
+  Upon us blindly from the twisted glass
+  Of windows that once let no wayfarer pass
+  Unseen of children dancing at the pane,
+  And vanishing to reappear again,
+  Pulling their mother with them to the sight.
+  Still we kept on, with turnings left and right,
+  Past farmsteads grouped in cheerful neighborhoods,
+  Or solitary; then through shadowy woods
+  Of pine or birch, until the road, grass-grown,
+  Had given back to Nature all her own
+  Save a faint wheel-trace, that along the slope,
+  Rain-gullied, seemed to stop and doubt and grope,
+  And then quite ceased, as if 't had turned and fled
+  Out of the forest into which it led,
+  And left us at the gate whose every bar
+  Was nailed against us. But, "Oh, here we are!"
+  My friend cried joyously. "At last, at last!"
+  And making our horse superfluously fast,
+  He led the way onward by what had been
+  A lane, now hid by weeds and briers between
+  Meadows scarce worth the mowing, to a space
+  Shaped as by Nature for the dwelling-place
+  Of kindly human life: a small plateau
+  Open to the heaven that seemed bending low
+  In liking for it. There beneath a roof
+  Still against winter and summer weather-proof,
+  With walls and doors and windows perfect yet,
+  Between its garden and its graveyard set,
+  Stood the old homestead, out of which had perished
+  The home whose memory it dumbly cherished,
+  And which, when at our push the door swung wide,
+  We might have well imagined to have died
+  And had its funeral the day before:
+  So clean and cold it was from floor to floor,
+  So lifelike and so deathlike, with the thrill
+  Of hours when life and death encountered still
+  Passionate in it. They that lay below
+  The tangled grasses or the drifted snow,
+  Husband and wife, mother and little one,
+  From that sad house less utterly were gone
+  Than they that living had abandoned it.
+  In moonless nights their Absences might flit,
+  Homesick, from room to room, or dimly sit
+  Around its fireless hearths, or haunt the rose
+  And lily in the neglected garden close;
+  But they whose feet had borne them from the door
+  Would pass the footworn threshold nevermore.
+  We read the moss-grown names upon the tombs,
+  With lighter melancholy than the glooms
+  Of the dead house shadowed us with, and thence
+  Turning, my heart was pierced with more intense
+  Suggestion of a mystical dismay,
+  As in the brilliance of the summer day
+  We faced the vast gray barn. The house was old,
+  Though so well kept, as age by years is told
+  In our young land; but the barn, gray and vast,
+  Stood new and straight and strong--all battened fast
+  At every opening; and where once the mow
+  Had yawned wide-windowed, on the sheathing now
+  A Cross was nailed, the bigness of a man,
+  Aslant from left to right, athwart the span,
+  And painted black as paint could make it. Hushed,
+  I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed
+  To this point and to that point, and then burst
+  In the impotent questionings rejected first.
+  What did it mean? Ah, that no one could tell.
+  Who put it there? That was unknown as well.
+  Was there no legend? My friend knew of none.
+  No neighborhood story? He had sought for one
+  In vain. Did he imagine it accident,
+  With nothing really implied or meant
+  By the boards set in that way? It might be,
+  But I could answer that as well as he.
+  Then (desperately) what did he guess it was:
+  Something of purpose, or without a cause
+  Other than chance? He slowly shook his head,
+  And with his gaze fixed on the symbol said:
+  "We have quite ceased from guessing or surmising,
+  For all our several and joint devising
+  Has left us finally where I must leave you.
+  But now I think it is your part to do
+  Yourself some guessing. I hoped you might bring
+  A fresh mind to the riddle's unraveling.
+  Come!"
+
+        And thus challenged I could not deny
+  The sort of right he had to have me try;
+  And yielding, I began--instinctively
+  Proceeding by exclusion: "We agree
+  It was not put there as a pious charm
+  To keep the abandoned property from harm?
+  The owner could have been no Catholic;
+  And yet it was no sacrilegious trick
+  To make folks wonder; and it was not chance
+  Assuredly that set those boards askance
+  In that shape, or before or after, so
+  Painted them to that coloring of woe.
+  Do you suppose, then, that it could have been
+  Some secret sorrow or some secret sin,
+  That tried to utter or to expiate
+  Itself in that way: some unhappy hate
+  Turned to remorse, or some life-rending grief
+  That could not find in years or tears relief?
+  Who lived here last?"
+
+                        "Ah," my friend made reply,
+  "You know as much concerning that as I.
+  All I could tell is what those gravestones tell,
+  And they have told it all to you as well.
+  The names, the dates, the curious epitaphs
+  At whose quaint phrase one either sighs or laughs,
+  Just as one's heart or head happens to be
+  Hollow or not, are there for each to see.
+  But I believe they have nothing to reveal:
+  No wrong to publish, no shame to conceal."
+
+    "And yet that Cross!" I turned at his reply,
+  Fixing the silent symbol with my eye,
+  Insistently. "And you consent," I said,
+  "To leave the enigma uninterpreted?"
+
+    "Why, no," he faltered, then went on: "Suppose
+  That some one that had known the average woes
+  Of human nature, finding that the load
+  Was overheavy for him on life's road,
+  Had wished to leave some token in this Cross,
+  Of what had been his gain and been his loss,
+  Of what had been his suffering and of what
+  Had also been the solace of his lot?
+  Whoever that unknown brother-man might be,
+  I think he must have been like you and me,
+  Who bear our Cross, and when we fail at length,
+  Bow down and pray to it for greater strength."
+
+    I mused, and as I mused, I seemed to find
+  The fancy more and still more to my mind.
+
+    "Well, let it go at that! I think, for me,
+  I like that better than some tragedy
+  Of clearer physiognomy, which were
+  In being more definite the vulgarer.
+  For us, what, after all, would be the gain
+  Of making the elusive meaning plain?
+  I really think, if I were you and yours,
+  I would not lift the veil that now obscures
+  The appealing fact, lest I should spoil the charm
+  Deeding me for my own the Black Cross Farm."
+
+    "A good suggestion! I am glad," said he,
+  "We have always practised your philosophy."
+
+    He smiled, we laughed; we sighed and turned away,
+  And left the mystery to the summer day
+  That made as if it understood, and could
+  Have read the riddle to us if it would:
+  The wide, wise sky, the clouds that on the grass
+  Let their vague shadows dreamlike trail and pass;
+  The conscious woods, the stony meadows growing
+  Up to birch pastures, where we heard the lowing
+  Of one disconsolate cow. All the warm afternoon,
+  Lulled in a reverie by the myriad tune
+  Of insects, and the chirp of songless birds,
+  Forgetful of the spring-time's lyric words,
+  Drowsed round us while we tried to find the lane
+  That to our coming feet had been so plain,
+  And lost ourselves among the sweetfern's growth,
+  And thickets of young pine-trees, nothing loath,
+  Amidst the wilding loveliness to stray,
+  And spend, if need were, looking for the way,
+  Whole hours; but blundered into the right course
+  Suddenly, and came out upon our horse,
+  Where we had left him--to our great surprise,
+  Stamping and switching at the pestering flies,
+  But not apparently anxious to depart,
+  When nearly overturning at the start,
+  We followed down that evanescent trace
+  Which, followed up, had brought us to the place.
+
+    Then, all the wayside scenes reversing, we
+  Dropped to the glimpses of the distant sea,
+  Content as if we brought, returning thus,
+  The secret of the Black Cross back with us.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIII
+
+                        THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
+
+
+It had long been the notion of Frederick Erlcort, who held it
+playfully, held it seriously, according to the company he was in, that
+there might be a censorship of taste and conscience in literary
+matters strictly affiliated with the retail commerce in books. When he
+first began to propose it, playfully, seriously, as his listener
+chose, he said that he had noticed how in the great department stores
+where nearly everything to supply human need was sold, the shopmen and
+shopwomen seemed instructed by the ownership or the management to deal
+in absolute good faith with the customers, and not to misrepresent the
+quality, the make, or the material of any article in the slightest
+degree. A thing was not to be called silk or wool when it was partly
+cotton; it was not to be said that it would wash when it would not
+wash, or that the color would not come off when it would come off, or
+that the stuff was English or French when it was American.
+
+When Erlcort once noted his interest in the fact to a floor-walker
+whom he happened to find at leisure, the floor-walker said, Yes, that
+was so; and the house did it because it was business, good business,
+the only good business. He was instantly enthusiastic, and he said
+that just in the same way, as an extension of its good faith with the
+public, the house had established the rule of taking back any article
+which a customer did not like, or did not find what she had supposed
+when she got it home, and refunding the money. This was the best sort
+of business; it held custom; the woman became a customer for life. The
+floor-walker laughed, and after he had told an anxious applicant,
+"Second aisle to the left, lady; three counters back," he concluded to
+Erlcort, "I say she because a man never brings a thing back when he's
+made a mistake; but a woman can always blame it on the house. That
+so?"
+
+Erlcort laughed with him, and in going out he stopped at the
+book-counter. Rather it was a bookstore, and no small one, with ranks
+of new books covering the large tables and mounting to their level
+from the floor, neatly piled, and with shelves of complete editions
+and soberer-looking volumes stretching along the wall as high as the
+ceiling. "Do you happen to have a good book--a book that would read
+good, I mean--in your stock here?" he asked the neat blonde behind
+the literary barricade.
+
+"Well, here's a book that a good many are reading," she answered, with
+prompt interest and a smile that told in the book's favor; it was a
+protectingly filial and guardedly ladylike smile.
+
+"Yes, but is it a book worth reading--worth the money?"
+
+"Well, I don't know as I'm a judge," the kind little blonde replied.
+She added, daringly, "All I can say is, I set up till two last night
+to finish it."
+
+"And you advise me to buy it?"
+
+"Well, we're not allowed to do that, exactly. I can only tell you what
+I know."
+
+"But if I take it, and it isn't what I expected, I can return it and
+get my money back?"
+
+"That's something I never was asked before. Mr. Jeffers! Mr. Jeffers!"
+she called to a floor-walker passing near; and when he stopped and
+came up to the counter, she put the case to him.
+
+He took the book from Erlcort's hand and examined the outside of it
+curiously if not critically. Then he looked from it to Erlcort, and
+said, "Oh, how do you do again! Well, no, sir; I don't know as we
+could do that. You see, you would have to read it to find out that you
+didn't want it, and that would be like using or wearing an article,
+wouldn't it? We couldn't take back a thing that had been used or
+worn--heigh?"
+
+"But you might have some means of knowing whether a book is good or
+not?"
+
+"Well, yes, we might. That's a point we have never had raised before.
+Miss Prittiman, haven't we any means of knowing whether a book's
+something we can guarantee or not?"
+
+"Well, Mr. Jeffers, there's the publisher's advertisement."
+
+"Why, yes, so there is! And a respectable publisher wouldn't indorse a
+book that wasn't the genuine article, would he now, sir?"
+
+"He mightn't," Erlcort said, as if he felt the force of the argument.
+
+"And there are the notices in the newspapers. They ought to tell,"
+Miss Prittiman added, more convincingly. "I don't know," she said, as
+from a sensitive conscience, "whether there have been any about this
+book yet, but I should think there would be."
+
+"And in the mean time, as you won't guarantee the book so that I can
+bring it back and get my money if I find it worthless, I must accept
+the publisher's word?" Erlcort pressed further.
+
+"I should think you could do that," the floor-walker suggested, with
+the appearance of being tired.
+
+"Well, I think I will, for once," Erlcort relented. "But wait! What
+does the publisher say?"
+
+"It's all printed on this slip inside," the blonde said, and she
+showed it as she took the book from him. "Shall I send it? Or will
+you--"
+
+"No, no, thank you, I'll take it with me. Let me--"
+
+He kept the printed slip and began to read it. The blonde wrapped the
+book up and laid it with a half-dollar in change on the counter before
+Erlcort. The floor-walker went away; Erlcort heard him saying, "No,
+madam; toys on the fifth floor, at the extreme rear, left," while he
+lost himself in the glowing promises of the publisher. It appeared
+that the book he had just bought was by a perfectly new author, an old
+lady of seventy who had never written a novel before, and might
+therefore be trusted for an entire freshness of thought and feeling.
+The plot was of a gripping intensity; the characters were painted with
+large, bold strokes, and were of an unexampled virility; the story was
+packed with passion from cover to cover; and the reader would be held
+breathless by the author's skill in working from the tragic conditions
+to an all-round happy conclusion.
+
+From time to time Erlcort heard the gentle blonde saying such things
+as, "Oh yes; it's the best-seller, all right," and, "All I can say is
+I set up till two o'clock in the morning to finish it," and, "Yes,
+ma'am; it's by a new writer; a very old lady of seventy who is just
+beginning to write; well, that's what I _heard_."
+
+On his way up-town in the Subway he clung to the wonted strap,
+unsupported by anything in the romance which he had bought; and yet he
+could not take the book back and get his money, or even exchange it
+for some article of neckwear or footwear. In his extremity he thought
+he would try giving it to the trainman just before he reached his
+stop.
+
+"You want to _give_ it to me? Well, that's something that never
+happened to me on _this_ line before. I guess my wife will like it.
+I--_1009th Street! Change for East Brooklyn and the Bronx!_" the guard
+shouted, and he let Erlcort out of the car, the very first of the tide
+that spilled itself forth at the station. He called after him, "Do as
+much for you some time."
+
+The incident first amused Erlcort, and then it began to trouble him;
+but he appeased his remorse by toying with his old notion of a
+critical bookstore. His mind was still at play with it when he stopped
+at the bell-pull of an elderly girl of his acquaintance who had a
+studio ten stories above, and the habit of giving him afternoon tea in
+it if he called there about five o'clock. She had her ugly
+painting-apron still on, and her thumb through the hole in her
+palette, when she opened her door to him.
+
+"Too soon?" he asked.
+
+She answered as well as she could with the brush held horizontally in
+her mouth while she glared inhospitably at him. "Well, not much," and
+then she let him in, and went and lighted her spirit-lamp.
+
+He began at once to tell her of his strange experience, and went on
+till she said: "Well, there's your tea. _I_ don't know what you've
+been driving at, but I suppose you do. Is it the old thing?"
+
+"It's my critical bookstore, if that's what you call the old thing."
+
+"Oh! _That!_ I thought it had failed 'way back in the dark ages."
+
+"The dark ages are not _back_, please; they're all 'round, and you
+know very well that my critical bookstore has never been tried yet.
+But tell me one thing: should you wish to live with a picture, even
+for a few hours, which had been painted by an old lady of seventy who
+had never tried to paint before?"
+
+"If I intended to go crazy, yes. What has all that got to do with it?"
+
+"That's the joint commendation of the publisher and the kind little
+blonde who united to sell me the book I just gave to that poor Subway
+trainman. Do you ever buy a new book?"
+
+"No; I always borrow an old one."
+
+"But if you _had_ to buy a new one, wouldn't you like to know of a
+place where you could be sure of getting a good one?"
+
+"I shouldn't mind. Or, yes, I should, rather. Where's it to be?"
+
+"Oh, I know. I've had my eye on the place for a good while. It's a
+funny old place in Sixth Avenue--"
+
+"Sixth _Avenue_!"
+
+"Don't interrupt--where the dearest old codger in the world is just
+going out of the house-furnishing business in a small way. It's kept
+getting smaller and smaller--I've watched it shrink--till now it can't
+stand up against the big shops, and the old codger told me the other
+day that it was no use."
+
+"Poor fellow!"
+
+"No. He's not badly off, and he's going back up-state where he came
+from about forty years ago, and he can live--or die--very well on what
+he's put by. I've known him rather a good while, and we've been
+friends ever since we've been acquainted."
+
+"Go on," the elderly girl said.
+
+Erlcort was not stopping, but she spoke so as to close her mouth,
+which she was apt to let hang open in a way that she did not like; she
+had her intimates pledged to tell her when she was doing it, but she
+could not make a man promise, and she had to look after her mouth
+herself with Erlcort. It was not a bad mouth; her eyes were large, and
+it was merely large to match them.
+
+"When shall you begin--open shop?" she asked.
+
+"My old codger's lease expires in the fall," he answered, "but he
+would be glad to have me take it off his hands this spring. I could
+give the summer to changing and decorating, and begin my campaign in
+the fall--the first of October, say. Wouldn't you like to come some
+day and see the old place?"
+
+"I should love it. But you're not supposing I shall be of the least
+use, I hope? I'm not decorational, you know. Easel pictures, and small
+ones at that."
+
+"Of course. But you are a woman, and have ideas of the cozy. I mean
+that the place shall be made attractive."
+
+"Do you think the situation will be--on Sixth Avenue?"
+
+"It will be quaint. It's in a retarded region of low buildings, with a
+carpenter's shop two doors off. The L roars overhead and the surface
+cars squeal before, but that is New York, you know, and it's very
+central. Besides, at the back of the shop, with the front door shut,
+it is very quiet."
+
+The next day the friends lunched together at an Italian restaurant
+very near the place, and rather hurried themselves away to the old
+codger's store.
+
+"He _is_ a dear," Margaret whispered to Erlcort in following him about
+to see the advantages of the place.
+
+"Oh, mine's setting-hen's time," he justified his hospitality in
+finally asking them to take seats on a nail-keg apiece. "You mustn't
+think you're interruptin'. Look 'round all ye want to, or set down and
+rest ye."
+
+"That would be a good motto for your bookstore," she screamed to
+Erlcort, when they got out into the roar of the avenue. "'Look 'round
+all ye want to, or set down and rest ye.' Wasn't he sweet? And I don't
+wonder you're taken with the place: it _has_ such capabilities. You
+might as well begin imagining how you will arrange it."
+
+They were walking involuntarily up the avenue, and when they came to
+the Park they went into it, and in the excitement of their planning
+they went as far as the Ramble, where they sat down on a bench and
+disappointed some squirrels who supposed they had brought peanuts with
+them.
+
+They decided that the front of the shop should be elaborately simple;
+perhaps the door should be painted black, with a small-paned sash and
+a heavy brass latch. On each side should be a small-paned show-window,
+with books laid inside on an inclined shelving; on the door should be
+a modest bronze plate, reading, "The Critical Bookstore." They
+rejected _shop_ as an affectation, and they hooted the notion of "Ye
+Critical Bookstore" as altogether loathsome. The door and window would
+be in a rather belated taste, but the beautiful is never out of date,
+and black paint and small panes might be found rococo in their
+old-fashionedness now. There should be a fireplace, or perhaps a
+Franklin stove, at the rear of the room, with a high-shouldered,
+small-paned sash on each side letting in the light from the yard of
+the carpenter-shop. On the chimneypiece should be lettered, "Look
+'round all ye want to, or set down and rest ye."
+
+The genius of the place should be a refined hospitality, such as the
+gentle old codger had practised with them, and to facilitate this
+there should be a pair of high-backed settles, one under each window.
+The book-counter should stretch the whole length of the store, and at
+intervals beside it, against the book-shelving, should be set
+old-fashioned chairs, but not too old-fashioned. Against the lower
+book-shelves on a deeper shelf might be stood against the books a few
+sketches in water-color, or even oil.
+
+This was Margaret Green's idea.
+
+"And would you guarantee the quality?" Erlcort asked.
+
+"Perhaps they wouldn't be for sale, though if any one insisted--"
+
+"I see. Well, pass the sketches. What else?"
+
+"Well, a few little figures in plaster, or even marble or bronze, very
+Greek, or very American; things in low relief."
+
+"Pass the little figures and low reliefs. But don't forget it's a
+_bookstore_."
+
+"Oh, I won't. The sketches of all kinds would be strictly subordinated
+to the books. If I had a tea-room handy here, with a table and the
+backs of some menus to draw on, I could show you just how it would
+look."
+
+"What's the matter with the Casino?"
+
+"Nothing; only it's rather early for tea yet."
+
+"It isn't for soda-lemonade."
+
+She set him the example of instantly rising, and led the way back
+along the lake to the Casino, resting at that afternoon hour among its
+spring flowers and blossoms innocent of its lurid after-dark
+frequentation. He got some paper from the waiter who came to take
+their order. She began to draw rapidly, and by the time the waiter
+came again she was giving Erlcort the last scrap of paper.
+
+"Well," he said, "I had no idea that I had imagined anything so
+charming! If this critical bookstore doesn't succeed, it'll be because
+there are no critics. But what--what are these little things hung
+against the partitions of the shelves?"
+
+"Oh--mirrors. Little round ones."
+
+"But why mirrors of any shape?"
+
+"Nothing; only people like to see themselves in a glass of any shape.
+And when," Margaret added, in a burst of candor, "a woman looks up and
+sees herself with a book in her hand, she will feel so intellectual
+she will never put it down. She will buy it."
+
+"Margaret Green, this is immoral. Strike out those mirrors, or I will
+smash them every one!"
+
+"Oh, very well!" she said, and she rubbed them out with the top of her
+pencil. "If you want your place a howling wilderness."
+
+He looked at the ruin her rubber had wrought. "They _were_ rather
+nice. Could--could you rub them in again?"
+
+"Not if I tried a hundred years. Besides, they _were_ rather impudent.
+What time is it?"
+
+"No time at all. It's half-past three."
+
+"Dear me! I must be going. And if you're really going to start that
+precious critical bookstore in the fall, you must begin work on it
+right away."
+
+"Work?"
+
+"Reading up for it. If you're going to guarantee the books, you must
+know what's in them, mustn't you?"
+
+He realized that he must do what she said; he must know from his own
+knowledge what was in the books he offered for sale, and he began
+reading, or reading _at_, the new books immediately. He was a good
+deal occupied by day with the arrangement of his store, though he left
+it mainly with the lively young decorator who undertook for a lump sum
+to realize Margaret Green's ideas. It was at night that he did most of
+his reading in the spring books which the publishers were willing to
+send him gratis, when they understood he was going to open a
+bookstore, and only wanted sample copies. As long as she remained in
+town Margaret Green helped him read, and they talked the books over,
+and mostly rejected them. By the time she went to Europe in August
+with another elderly girl they had not chosen more than eight or ten
+books; but they hoped for better things in the fall.
+
+Word of what he was doing had gone out from Margaret, and a great many
+women of their rather esthetic circle began writing to him about the
+books they were reading, and commending them to him or warning him
+against them. The circle of his volunteer associates enlarged itself
+in the nature of an endless chain, and before society quite broke up
+for the summer a Sympathetic Tea was offered to Erlcort by a Leading
+Society Woman at the Intellectual Club, where he was invited to
+address the Intellectuals in explanation of his project. This was
+before Margaret sailed, and he hurried to her in horror.
+
+"Why, of course you must accept. You're not going to hide your
+Critical Bookstore under a bushel; you can't have too much publicity."
+
+The Leading Society Woman flowed in fulsome gratitude at his
+acceptance, and promised no one but the club should be there; he had
+hinted his reluctance. She kept her promise, but among the
+Intellectuals there was a girl who was a just beginning journalist,
+and who pumped Erlcort's whole scheme out of him, unsuspicious of what
+she was doing, till he saw it all, with his picture, in the Sunday
+Supplement. She rightly judged that the intimacy of an interview would
+be more popular with her readers than the cold and distant report of
+his formal address, which she must give, though she received it so
+ardently with all the other Intellectuals. They flocked flatteringly,
+almost suffocatingly, around him at the end. His scheme was just what
+every one had vaguely thought of: something must be done to stem the
+tide of worthless fiction, which was so often shocking as well as
+silly, and they would only be too glad to help read for him. They were
+nearly all just going to sail, but they would each take a spring book
+on the ship, and write him about it from the other side; they would
+each get a fall book coming home, and report as soon as they got back.
+
+His scheme was discussed seriously and satirically by the press; it
+became a joke with many papers, and a byword quickly worn out, so that
+people thought that it had been dropped. But Erlcort gave his days and
+nights to preparation for his autumnal campaign. He studied in careful
+comparison the reviews of the different literary authorities, and was
+a little surprised to find, when he came to read the books they
+reviewed, how honest and adequate they often were. He was obliged to
+own to himself that if people were guided by them, few worthless books
+would be sold, and he decided that the immense majority of the
+book-buyers were not guided by the critics. The publishers themselves
+seemed not so much to blame when he went to see them and explained his
+wish to deal with them on the basis of a critical bookseller. They
+said they wished all the booksellers were like him, for they would ask
+nothing better than to publish only good books. The trouble, they
+said, lay with the authors; they wrote such worthless books. Or if now
+and then one of them did write a good book and they were over-tempted
+to publish it, the public united in refusing to buy it. So he saw? But
+if the booksellers persisted in selling none but good books, perhaps
+something might be done. At any rate they would like to see the
+experiment tried.
+
+Erlcort felt obliged to read the books suggested to him by the endless
+chain of readers who volunteered to read for him, on both sides of the
+ocean, or going and coming on the ocean. Mostly the books they praised
+were abject rubbish, but it took time to find this out, and he formed
+the habit of reading far into the night, and if he was very much vexed
+at discovering that the book recommended to him was trash, he could
+not sleep unless he took veronal, and then he had a ghastly next day.
+
+He did not go out of town except for a few brief sojourns at places
+where he knew cultivated people were staying, and could give him their
+opinions of the books he was reading. When the publishers began, as
+they had agreed, to send him their advance sheets, the stitched but
+unbound volumes roused so much interest by the novelty of their form
+that his readers could not give an undivided attention to their
+contents. He foresaw that in the end he should have to rely upon the
+taste of mercenaries in his warfare against rubbish, and more and more
+he found it necessary to expend himself in it, to read at second hand
+as well as at first. His greatest relief was in returning to town and
+watching the magical changes which the decorator was working in his
+store. This was consolation, this was inspiration, but he longed for
+the return of Margaret Green, that she might help him enjoy the
+realization of her ideas in the equipment of the place; and he held
+the decorator to the most slavish obedience through the carpenters and
+painters who created at his bidding a miraculous interior, all white,
+or just off-white, such as had never been imagined of a bookstore in
+New York before. It was actually ready by the end of August, though
+smelling a little of turpentine still, and Erlcort, letting himself in
+at the small-paned black door, and ranging up and down the long,
+beautiful room, and round and round the central book-table, and in and
+out between the side tables, under the soft, bright shelving of the
+walls, could hardly wait the arrival of the _Minnedingdong_ in which
+the elderly girl had taken her passage back. One day, ten days ahead
+of time, she blew in at the front door in a paroxysm of explanation;
+she had swapped passages home with another girl who wanted to come
+back later, while she herself wanted to come back earlier. She had no
+very convincing reason for this as she gave it, but Erlcort did not
+listen to her reason, whatever it was. He said, between the raptures
+with the place that she fell in and out of, that now she was just in
+time for the furnishing, which he never could have dared to undertake
+alone.
+
+In the gay September weather they visited all the antiquity shops in
+Fourth Avenue, and then threw themselves frankly upon reproductions,
+which they bought in the native wood and ordered painted, the settles
+and the spindle-backed chairs in the cool gray which she decided was
+the thing. In the same spirit they bought new brass fire-irons and new
+shovel and tongs, but all very tall and antique-looking, and then they
+got those little immoral mirrors, which Margaret Green attached with
+her own hands to the partitions of the shelving. She also got soft
+green silk curtains for the chimney windows and for the sash of the
+front door; even the front windows she curtained, but very low, so
+that a salesman or a saleswoman could easily reach over from the
+interior and get a book that any customer had seen from the outside.
+
+One day when all this was done, and Erlcort had begun ordering in a
+stock of such books as he had selected to start with, she said:
+"You're looking rather peakéd, aren't you?"
+
+"Well, I've been _feeling_ rather peakéd, until lately, keeping awake
+to read and read _after_ the volunteer readers."
+
+"You mean you've lost sleep?"
+
+"Something like that."
+
+"Well, you mustn't. How many books do you start with?"
+
+"About twenty-five."
+
+"Good ones? It's a lot, isn't it? I didn't suppose there were so
+many."
+
+"Well, to fill our shelves I shall have to order about a thousand of
+each."
+
+"You'll never sell them in the world! You'll be ruined."
+
+"Oh no; the publishers will take them back."
+
+"How nice of them! But that's only what painters have to do when the
+dealers can't sell their pictures."
+
+A month off, the prospect was brilliant, and when the shelves and
+tables were filled and the sketches and bas-reliefs were stuck about
+and the little immoral mirrors were hung, the place was charming. The
+chairs and settles were all that could be asked; Margaret Green helped
+put them about; and he let her light the low fire on the hearth of
+the Franklin stove; he said he should not always burn hickory, but he
+had got twenty-four sticks for two dollars from an Italian in a cellar
+near by, and he meant to burn that much. She upbraided him for his
+extravagance while touching the match to the paper under the kindling;
+but October opened cold, and he needed the fire.
+
+The enterprise seemed rather to mystify the neighborhood, and some old
+customers of the old codger's came in upon one fictitious errand and
+another to see about it, and went away without quite making it out. It
+was a bookstore, all right, they owned in conference, but what did he
+mean by "critical"?
+
+The first _bona fide_ buyer appeared in a little girl who could just
+get her chin on the counter, and who asked for an egg-beater. Erlcort
+had begun with only one assistant, the young lady who typed his
+letters and who said she guessed she could help him when she was not
+working. She leaned over and tried to understand the little girl, and
+then she called to Erlcort where he stood with his back to the fire
+and the morning paper open before his face.
+
+"Mr. Erlcort, have we got a book called _The Egg-beater_?"
+
+"_The Egg-beater?_" he echoed, letting his paper drop below his face.
+
+"No, no!" the little girl shouted, angrily. "It _ain't_ a book. It's a
+thing to beat eggs with. Mother said to come here and get it."
+
+"Well, she's sent you to the wrong place, little girl. You want to go
+to a hardware-store," the young lady argued.
+
+"Ain't this No. 1232?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, this is the _right_ place. Mother said to go to 1232. I guess
+she knows. She's an old customer."
+
+"_The Egg-beater! The Egg-beater!_" the blithe young novelist to whom
+Erlcort told the story repeated. He was still happy in his original
+success as a best-seller, and he had come to the Critical Bookstore to
+spy out the stock and see whether his last novel was in it; but though
+it was not, he joyously extended an acquaintance with Erlcort which
+had begun elsewhere. "_The Egg-beater?_ What a splendid title for a
+story of adventure! Keep the secret of its applicability to the last
+word, or perhaps never reveal it at all, and leave the reader
+worrying. That's one way; makes him go and talk about the book to all
+the girls he knows and get them guessing. Best ad. in the world. _The
+Egg-beater!_ Doesn't it suggest desert islands and penguins' nests in
+the rocks? Fellow and girl shipwrecked, and girl wants to make an
+omelette after they've got sick of plain eggs, and can't for want of
+an egg-beater. Heigh? He invents one--makes it out of some wire that
+floats off from the wreck. See? When they are rescued, she brings it
+away, and doesn't let him know it till their Iron Wedding Day. They
+keep it over his study fireplace always."
+
+This author was the first to stretch his legs before Erlcort's fire
+from his seat on one of the reproductions. He could not say enough of
+the beauty of the place, and he asked if he might sit there and watch
+for the old codger's old customers coming to buy hardware. There might
+be copy in it.
+
+But the old customers did not come so often as he hoped and Erlcort
+feared. Instead there came _bona fide_ book-buyers, who asked some for
+a book and some for a particular book. The first were not satisfied
+with the books that Erlcort or his acting saleslady recommended, and
+went away without buying. The last were indignant at not finding what
+they wanted in Erlcort's selection.
+
+"Why don't you stock it?" they demanded.
+
+"Because I don't think it's worth reading."
+
+"Oh, indeed!" The sarcastic customers were commonly ladies. "I
+thought you let the public judge of that!"
+
+"There are bookstores where they do. This is a critical bookstore. I
+sell only the books that _I_ think worth reading. If you had noticed
+my sign--"
+
+"Oh!" the customer would say, and she, too, would go away without
+buying.
+
+There were other ladies who came, links of the endless chain of
+volunteer readers who had tried to help Erlcort in making his
+selection, and he could see them slyly looking his stock over for the
+books they had praised to him. Mostly they went away without comment,
+but with heads held high in the offense which he felt even more than
+saw. One, indeed, did ask him why he had not stocked her chosen book,
+and he had to say, "Well, when I came to go through it carefully, I
+didn't think it quite--"
+
+"But here is _The Green Bay Tree_, and _The Biggest Toad in the
+Puddle_, and--"
+
+"I know. For one reason and another I thought them worth stocking."
+
+Then another head went away high in the air, with its plumes
+quivering. One afternoon late a lady came flying in with all the
+marks, whatever they are, of transatlantic travel upon her.
+
+"I'm just through the customs, and I've motored up here the first
+thing, even before I went home, to stop you from selling that book I
+recommended. It's dreadful; and, horrors! horrors! here it is by the
+hundreds! Oh, Mr. Erlcort! You mustn't sell that dreadful book! You
+see, I had skipped through it in my berth going out, and posted my
+letter the first thing; and just now, coming home, I found it in the
+ship's library and came on that frightful episode. You know!
+Where-- How _could_ you order it without reading it, on a mere say-so?
+It's utterly immoral!"
+
+"I don't agree with you," Erlcort answered, dryly. "I consider that
+passage one of the finest in modern fiction--one of the most ennobling
+and illumining--"
+
+"Ennobling!" The lady made a gesture of horror. "Very well! If _that_
+is your idea of a critical bookstore, all I've got to say is--"
+
+But she had apparently no words to say it in, and she went out banging
+but failing to latch the door which let through the indignant snort of
+her car as it whirled her away. She left Erlcort and his assistant to
+a common silence, but he imagined somehow a resolution in the
+stenographer not to let the book go unsearched till she had grasped
+the full iniquity of that episode and felt all its ennobling force. He
+was not consoled when another lady came in and, after drifting
+unmolestedly about (it was the primary rule of the place not to
+follow people up), stopped before the side shelf where the book was
+ranged in dozens and scores. She took a copy from the neat ranks, and
+opened it; then she lifted her head by chance and caught sight of her
+plume in one of the little mirrors. She stealthily lifted herself on
+tiptoe till she could see her face, and then she turned to the
+assistant and said, gently, "I believe I should like _this_ book,
+please," and paid for it and went out.
+
+It was now almost on the stroke of six, and Erlcort said to his
+assistant: "I'll close the store, Miss Pearsall. You needn't stay any
+longer."
+
+"All right, sir," the girl said, and went into the little closet at
+the rear for her hat and coat. Did she contrive to get a copy of that
+book under her coat as she passed the shelf where it lay?
+
+When she was gone, he turned the key in the door and went back and sat
+down before the fire dying on the hearth of the Franklin stove. It was
+not a very cheerful moment with him, but he could not have said that
+the day had been unprofitable, either spiritually or pecuniarily. In
+its experiences it had been a varied day, and he had really sold a
+good many books. More people than he could have expected had taken him
+seriously and even intelligently. It is true that he had been somewhat
+vexed by the sort of authority the president of the Intellectual Club
+had shown in the way she swelled into the store and patronized him and
+it, as if she had invented them both, and blamed him in a high, sweet
+voice for having so many _old_ books. "My idea was that it would be a
+place where one could come for the best of the _new_ books. But here!
+Why, half of them I saw in June before I sailed!" She chided him
+merrily, and she acted as if it were quite part of the joke when he
+said that he did not think a good book could age much in four months.
+She laughed patronizingly at his conceit of getting in the fall books
+by Thanksgiving; but even for the humor of it she could not let him
+say he should not do anything in holiday books. "I had expected to get
+_all_ my Christmas books of you, Mr. Erlcort," she crowed, but for the
+present she bought nothing. In compensation he recalled the gratitude,
+almost humble gratitude, of a lady (she was a lady!) who had come that
+day, bringing her daughter to get a book, any book in his stock, and
+to thank him for his enterprise, which she had found worked perfectly
+in the case of the book she had got the week before; the book had been
+an unalloyed delight, and had left a sense of heightened self-respect
+with her: that book of the dreadful episode.
+
+He wished Margaret Green had been there; but she had been there only
+once since his opening; he could not think why. He heard a rattling at
+the door-latch, and he said before he turned to look, "What if it
+should be she _now_?" But when he went to peer through the
+door-curtain it was only an old fellow who had spent the better part
+of the afternoon in the best chair, reading a book. Erlcort went back
+to the fire and let him rattle, which he did rather a long time, and
+then went away, Erlcort hoped, in dudgeon. He was one of a number of
+customers who had acted on the half of his motto asking them to sit
+down and rest them, after acting on the other half to look round all
+they wanted. Most of them did not read, even; they seemed to know one
+another, and they talked comfortably together. Erlcort recognized a
+companionship of four whom he had noticed in the Park formerly; they
+were clean-enough-looking elderly men, but occupied nearly all the
+chairs and settles, so that lady customers did not like to bring books
+and look over them in the few places left, and Erlcort foresaw the
+time when he should have to ask the old fellows to look around more
+and rest them less. In resuming his own place before the fire he felt
+the fleeting ache of a desire to ask Margaret Green whether it would
+not be a good plan to remove the motto from the chimneypiece. He would
+not have liked to do it without asking her; it had been her notion to
+put it there, and her other notion of the immoral mirrors had
+certainly worked well. The thoughtful expression they had reflected on
+the faces of lady customers had sold a good many books; not that
+Erlcort wished to sell books that way, though he argued with himself
+that his responsibility ought strictly to end with the provision of
+books which he had critically approved before offering them for sale.
+
+His conscience was not wholly at peace as to his stock, not only the
+books which he had included, but also those he had excluded. Some of
+these tacitly pleaded against his severity; in one case an author came
+and personally protested. This was the case of a book by the
+ex-best-seller, who held that his last book was so much better than
+his first that it ought certainly to be found in any critical
+bookstore. The proceeds of his best-seller had enabled him to buy an
+electric runabout, and he purred up to Erlcort's door in it to argue
+the matter with him. He sat down in a reproduction and proved, gaily,
+that Erlcort was quite wrong about it. He had the book with him, and
+read passages from it; then he read passages from some of the books on
+sale and defied Erlcort to say that his passages were not just as
+good, or, as he put it merrily, the same as. He held that his marked
+improvement entitled him to the favor of a critical bookstore;
+without this, what motive had he in keeping from a reversion to the
+errors which had won him the vicious prosperity of his first venture?
+Hadn't Erlcort a duty to perform in preventing his going back to the
+bad? Refuse this markedly improved fiction, and you drove him to
+writing nothing but best-sellers from now on. He urged Erlcort to
+reflect.
+
+They had a jolly time, and the ex-best-seller went away in high
+spirits, prophesying that Erlcort would come to his fiction yet.
+
+There were authors who did not leave Erlcort so cheerful when they
+failed to see their books on his shelves or tables. Some of them were
+young authors who had written their worthless books with a devout
+faith in their worth, and they went away more in sorrow than in anger,
+and yet more in bewilderment. Some were old authors who had been all
+their lives acceptably writing second-rate books and trying to make
+them unacceptably first-rate. If he knew them he kept out of their
+way, but the dejection of their looks was not less a pang to him if he
+saw them searching his stock for their books in vain.
+
+He had his own moments of dejection. The interest of the press in his
+enterprise had flashed through the Sunday issues of a single week, and
+then flashed out in lasting darkness. He wondered vaguely if he had
+counted without the counting-house in hoping for their continued
+favor; he could not realize that nothing is so stale as old news, and
+that no excess of advertising would have relumed those fitful fires.
+
+He would have liked to talk the case over with Margaret Green. After
+his first revolt from the easy publicity the reporters had first given
+him, he was aware of having enjoyed it--perhaps vulgarly enjoyed it.
+But he hoped not quite that; he hoped that in his fleeting celebrity
+he had cared for his scheme rather than himself. He had really
+believed in it, and he liked having it recognized as a feature of
+modern civilization, an innovation which did his city and his country
+credit. Now and then an essayist of those who wrote thoughtful
+articles in the Sunday or Saturday-evening editions had dropped in,
+and he had opened his heart to them in a way he would not have minded
+their taking advantage of. Secretly he hoped they would see a topic in
+his enterprise and his philosophy of it. But they never did, and he
+was left to the shame of hopes which had held nothing to support
+defeat. He would have liked to confess his shame and own the justice
+of his punishment to Margaret Green, but she seemed the only friend
+who never came near. Other friends came, and many strangers, the
+friends to look and the strangers to buy. He had no reason to
+complain of his sales; the fame of his critical bookstore might have
+ceased in New York, because it had gone abroad to Chicago and St.
+Louis and Pittsburg; people who were clearly from these commercial
+capitals and others came and bought copiously of his criticized stock,
+and they praised the notion of it in telling him that he ought to open
+branches in their several cities.
+
+They were all women, and it was nearly all women who frequented the
+Critical Bookstore, but in their multitude Margaret Green was not. He
+thought it the greater pity because she would have enjoyed many of
+them with him, and would have divined such as hoped the culture
+implicated by a critical bookstore would come off on them without
+great effort of their own; she would have known the sincere spirits,
+too, and could have helped direct their choice of the best where all
+was so good. He smiled to find that he was invoking her help, which he
+had no right to.
+
+His longing had no effect upon her till deep in January, when the
+weather was engaged late one afternoon in keeping the promise of a
+January thaw in the form of the worst snow-storm of the winter. Then
+she came thumping with her umbrella-handle at his door as if, he
+divined, she were too stiff-handed or too package-laden to press the
+latch and let herself in, and she almost fell in, but saved herself
+by spilling on the floor some canvases and other things which she had
+been getting at the artist's-materials store near by. "Don't bother
+about them," she said, "but take me to the fire as fast as you can,"
+and when she had turned from snow to rain and had dripped partially
+dry before the Franklin stove, she asked, "Where have you been all the
+time?"
+
+"Waiting here for you," he answered.
+
+"Well, you needn't. I wasn't going to come--or at least not till you
+sent for me, or said you wanted my advice."
+
+"I don't want your advice now."
+
+"I didn't come to give it. I just dropped in because if I hadn't I
+should have just dropped outside. How have you been getting along with
+your ridiculous critical bookstore?"
+
+"Well, things are rather quiet with us just now, as the publishers say
+to the authors when they don't want to publish their books."
+
+"Yes, I know that saying. Why didn't you go in for the holiday books?"
+
+"How did you know I didn't?"
+
+"Lots of people told me."
+
+"Well, then, I'll tell you why. I would have had to read them first,
+and no human being could do that--not even a volunteer link in an
+endless chain."
+
+"I see. But since Christmas?"
+
+"You know very well that after Christmas the book market drops dead."
+
+"Yes, so I've been told." She had flung her wet veil back over her
+shoulders, and he thought she had never looked so adorably plain
+before; if she could have seen herself in a glass she would have found
+her whole face out of drawing. It seemed as if his thinking had put
+her in mind of them, and she said, "Those immoral mirrors are
+shameful."
+
+"They've sold more of the best books than anything else."
+
+"No matter. As soon as I get a little drier I shall take them down."
+
+"Very well. _I_ didn't put them up." He laid a log of hickory on the
+fire. "I'm not doing it to dry you quicker."
+
+"Oh, I know. I'll tell you one thing. You ought to keep the magazines,
+or at least the Big Four. You could keep them with a good conscience,
+and you could sell them without reading; they're always good."
+
+"There's an idea in that. I believe I'll try it."
+
+Margaret Green was now dry enough, and she rose and removed the
+mirrors. In doing this she noticed that Erlcort had apparently sold a
+good many of his best books, and she said: "Well! I don't see why
+_you_ should be discouraged."
+
+"Who said I was? I'm exultant."
+
+"Then you were exulting with the corners of your mouth down just now.
+Well, I must be going. Will you get a taxi to flounder over to the
+Subway with me?" While Erlcort was telephoning she was talking to him.
+"I believe the magazines will revive public interest in your scheme.
+Put them in your window. Try to get advance copies for it."
+
+"You have a commercial genius, Margaret Green."
+
+"When it comes to selling literature, I have. Selling art is where I
+fall down."
+
+"That's because you always try to sell your own art. I should fall
+down, too, if I tried to sell my own literature."
+
+They got quite back to their old friendliness; the coming of the taxi
+gave them plenty of time. The electric lights were turned brilliantly
+on, but there, at the far end of the store, before the Franklin stove,
+they had a cozy privacy. At the moment of parting she said:
+
+"If I were you I should take out these settles. They simply invite
+loafing."
+
+"I've noticed that they seem to do that."
+
+"And better paint out that motto."
+
+"I've sometimes fancied I'd better. _That_ invites loafing, too;
+though some nice people like it."
+
+"Nice people? Why haven't some of them bought a picture?" He perceived
+that she had taken in the persistent presence of the sketches when
+removing the mirrors, and he shared the indignation she expressed:
+"Shabby things!"
+
+She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and he asked what she was
+going to do with them, as he followed her to the door with her other
+things.
+
+"Put them around the studio. But you needn't come to see the effect."
+
+"No. I shall come to see you."
+
+But when he came in a lull of February, and he could walk part of the
+way up through the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said:
+
+"I suppose you've come to pour out some more of your griefs. Well,
+pour away! Has the magazine project failed?"
+
+"On the contrary, it has been a _succès fou_. But I don't feel
+altogether easy in my mind about it. The fact is, they seem to print
+much more rubbish than I supposed."
+
+"Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their
+nostrils."
+
+She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut and getting very close
+to her picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her
+mouth hang open. He wondered why she was so charming; but when she
+stepped back rhythmically, tilting her pretty head this way and that,
+he saw why: it was her unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her
+mouth and shut it to say, "Well?"
+
+"Well, some people have come back at me. They've said, What a rotten
+number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in
+all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What's
+to be done about it? I can't ask people to buy truck or read truck
+because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the
+first quality."
+
+"No. You can't. Why," she asked, drifting up to her picture again,
+"don't you tear the bad out, and sell the good?"
+
+Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot be spelled in English.
+"Do you know how defiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the
+magazines? They're wired together, and you could no more tear out the
+bad and leave the good than you could part vice from virtue in human
+nature."
+
+"I see," Margaret Green said, but she saw no further, and she had to
+let him go disconsolate. After waiting a decent time she went to find
+him in his critical bookstore. It was late in an afternoon of the days
+that were getting longer, and only one electric was lighted in the
+rear of the room, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Franklin
+stove, so busy at something that he scarcely seemed aware of her.
+
+"What in the world are you doing?" she demanded.
+
+He looked up. "Who? I? Oh, it's you! Why, I'm merely censoring the
+truck in the May number of this magazine." He held up a little roller,
+as long as the magazine was wide, blacked with printer's ink, which he
+had been applying to the open periodical. "I've taken a hint from the
+way the Russian censorship blots out seditious literature before it
+lets it go to the public."
+
+"And _what_ a mess you're making!"
+
+"Of course it will have to dry before it's put on sale."
+
+"I should think so. Listen to me, Frederick Erlcort: you're going
+crazy."
+
+"I've sometimes thought so: crazy with conceit and vanity and
+arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical
+bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast,
+benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or
+a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him?
+Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is
+it universal suffrage?"
+
+"Now," Margaret Green said, "you are talking sense. Why didn't you
+think of this in the beginning?"
+
+"Is it a world, a whole earth," he went on, "where the weeds mostly
+outflourish the flowers, or is it a wretched little florist's
+conservatory where the watering-pot assumes to better the instruction
+of the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust? What is all the
+worthy family of asses to do if there are no thistles to feed them?
+Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the
+finer organisms, are the coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made a
+mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the
+gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the
+gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the
+pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have
+their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the
+rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural
+selection become to certain of them. But let there be no artificial
+selection, no survival of the fittest by main force--the force of the
+spectator, who thinks he knows better than the creator of the ugly and
+the beautiful, the fair and foul, the evil and good."
+
+"Oh, _now_ if the Intellectual Club could hear you!" Margaret Green
+said, with a long, deep, admiring suspiration. "And what are you
+going to do with your critical bookstore?"
+
+"I'm going to sell it. I've had an offer from the author of that
+best-seller--I've told you about him. I was just trying to censor that
+magazine while I was thinking it over. He's got an idea. He's going to
+keep it a critical bookstore, but the criticism is to be made by
+universal suffrage and the will of the majority. The latest books will
+be put to a vote; and the one getting the greatest number of votes
+will be the first offered for sale, and the author will receive a free
+passage to Europe by the southern route."
+
+"The southern route!" Margaret mused. "I've never been that way. It
+must be delightful."
+
+"Then come with _me_! _I'm_ going."
+
+"But how can I?"
+
+"By marrying me!"
+
+"I never thought of that," she said. Then, with the conscientious
+resolution of an elderly girl who puts her fate to the touch of any
+risk the truth compels, she added: "Or, yes! I _have_. But I never
+supposed you would ask me." She stared at him, and she was aware she
+was letting her mouth hang open. While she was trying for some word to
+close it with he closed it for her.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIV
+
+                          A FEAST OF REASON
+
+
+Florindo and Lindora had come to the end of another winter in town,
+and had packed up for another summer in the country. They were sitting
+together over their last breakfast until the taxi should arrive to
+whirl them away to the station, and were brooding in a joint gloom
+from the effect of the dinner they had eaten at the house of a friend
+the night before, and, "Well, thank goodness," she said, "there is an
+end to that sort of thing for _one_ while."
+
+"An end to _that_ thing," he partially assented, "but not that _sort_
+of thing."
+
+"What do you mean?" she demanded excitedly, almost resentfully.
+
+"I mean that the lunch is of the nature of the dinner, and that in the
+country we shall begin lunching where we left off dining."
+
+"Not instantly," she protested shrilly. "There will be nobody there
+for a while--not for a whole month, nearly."
+
+"They will be there before you can turn round, almost; and then you
+women will begin feeding one another there before you have well left
+off here."
+
+"We women!" she protested.
+
+"Yes, you--you women. You give the dinners. Can you deny it?"
+
+"It's because we can't get you to the lunches."
+
+"In the country you can; and so you will give the lunches."
+
+"We would give dinners if it were not for the distance, and the
+darkness on those bad roads."
+
+"I don't see where your reasoning is carrying you."
+
+"No," she despaired, "there is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of
+it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time before it is all
+going on again."
+
+They computed the number of dinners they had given during the winter;
+that was not hard, and the sum was not great: six or seven at the
+most, large and small. When it came to the dinners they had received,
+it was another thing; but still she considered, "Were they really so
+few? It's nothing to what the English do. They never dine alone at
+home, and they never dine alone abroad--of course not! I wonder they
+can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept kind, is always
+loathsome: the everlasting soup, if there aren't oysters first, or
+grape-fruit, or melon, and the fish, and the entrée, and the roast and
+salad, and the ice-cream and the fruit nobody touches, and the coffee
+and cigarettes and cigars--how I hate it all!"
+
+Lindora sank back in her chair and toyed desperately with the fragment
+of bacon on her plate.
+
+"And yet," Florindo said, "there is a charm about the first dinner of
+autumn, after you've got back."
+
+"Oh, yes," she assented; "it's like a part of our lost youth. We think
+all the dinners of the winter will be like that, and we come away
+beaming."
+
+"But when it keeps on and there's more and more of our lost youth,
+till it comes to being the whole--"
+
+"Florindo!" she stopped him. He pretended that he was not going to
+have said it, and she resumed, dreamily, "I wonder what it is makes it
+so detestable as the winter goes on."
+
+"All customs are detestable, the best of them," he suggested, "and I
+should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner, that the society
+dinner was an unlovely rite. You try to carry if off with china and
+glass, and silver and linen, and if people could fix their minds on
+these, or even on the dishes of the dinner as they come successively
+on, it would be all very well; but the diners, the diners!"
+
+"Yes," she said, "the old men are hideous, certainly; and the young
+ones--I try not to look at them, poking things into the hollows of
+their faces with spoons and forks--"
+
+"Better than when it was done with knives! Still, it's a horror! A
+veteran diner-out in full action is certainly a hideous spectacle.
+Often he has few teeth of his own, and the dentists don't serve him
+perfectly. He is in danger of dropping things out of his mouth, both
+liquids and solids: better not look! His eyes bulge and roll in his
+head in the stress of mastication and deglutition; his color rises and
+spreads to his gray hair or over his baldness; his person seems to
+swell vividly in his chair, and when he laughs--"
+
+"Don't, Florindo! It _is_ awful."
+
+"Well, perhaps no worse than the sight of a middle-aged matron tending
+to overweight and bulking above her plate--"
+
+"Yes, yes! That's dreadful, too. But when people are young--"
+
+"Oh, when people are young!" He said this in despair. Then he went on
+in an audible muse. "When people are young they are not only in their
+own youth; they are in the youth of the world, the race. They dine,
+but they don't think of the dinner or the unpleasantness of the
+diners, and the grotesqueness of feeding in common. They think--" he
+broke off in defect of other ideas, and concluded with a laugh, "they
+think of themselves. And they don't think of how they are looking."
+
+"They needn't; they are looking very well. Don't keep harping on that!
+I remember when we first began going to dinners, I thought it was the
+most beautiful thing in the world. I don't mean when I was a girl; a
+girl only goes to a dinner because it comes before a dance. I mean
+when we were young married people; and I pinned up my dress and we
+went in the horse-cars, or even walked. I enjoyed every instant of it:
+the finding who was going to take me in and who you were; and the
+going in; and the hovering round the table to find our places from the
+cards; and the seeing how you looked next some one else, and wondering
+how you thought I looked; and the beads sparkling up through the
+champagne and getting into one's nose; and the laughing and joking and
+talking! Oh, the talking! What's become of it? The talking, last
+night, it bored me to death! And what good stories people used to
+tell, women as well as men! You can't deny it was beautiful."
+
+"I don't; and I don't deny that the forms of dining are still
+charming. It's the dining itself that I object to."
+
+"That's because your digestion is bad."
+
+"Isn't yours?"
+
+"Of course it is. What has that got to do with it?"
+
+"It seems to me that we have arrived at what is called an _impasse_ in
+French." He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she gave a little
+jump in her chair. "Oh, there's plenty of time. The taxi won't be here
+for half an hour yet. Is there any heat left in that coffee?"
+
+"There will be," she said, and she lighted the lamp under the pot.
+"But I don't like being scared out of half a year's growth."
+
+"I'm sorry. I won't look at the clock any more; I don't care if we're
+left. Where were we? Oh, I remember--the objection to dining itself.
+If we could have the forms without the facts, dining would be all
+right. Our superstition is that we can't be gay without gorging; that
+society can't be run without meat and drink. But don't you remember
+when we first went to Italy there was no supper at Italian houses
+where we thought it such a favor to be asked?"
+
+"I remember that the young Italian swells wouldn't go to the American
+and English houses where they weren't sure of supper. They didn't
+give supper at the Italian houses because they couldn't afford it."
+
+"I know that. I believe they do, now. But--
+
+          'Sweet are the uses of adversity,'
+
+and the fasting made for beauty then more than the feasting does now.
+It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses
+conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed--the
+sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out to supper."
+
+"I wonder," Lindora said, "whether the same sort of thing goes on at
+evening parties still--it's so long since I've been at one. It was
+awful standing jammed up in a corner or behind a door and eating
+_vis-à-vis_ with a man who brought you a plate; and it wasn't much
+better when you sat down and he stood over you gabbling and gobbling,
+with his plate in one hand and his fork in the other. I was always
+afraid of his dropping things into my lap; and the sight of his jaws
+champing as you looked up at them from below!"
+
+"Yes, ridiculous. But there was an element of the grotesque in a
+bird's-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and
+trying to smile and look _spirituelle_ between the shots."
+
+Lindora as she laughed bowed her forehead on the back of her hand in
+the way Florindo thought so pretty when they were both young. "Yes,"
+she said, "awful, awful! Why _should_ people want to flock together
+when they feed? Do you suppose it's a survival of the primitive
+hospitality when those who had something to eat hurried to share it
+with those who had nothing?"
+
+"Possibly," Florindo said, flattered into consequence by her momentary
+deference, or show of it. "But the people who mostly meet to feed
+together now are not hungry; they are already so stuffed that they
+loathe the sight of the things. Some of them shirk the consequences by
+frankly dining at home first, and then openly or covertly dodging the
+courses."
+
+"Yes, and you hear that praised as a mark of high civilization, or
+social wisdom. I call it wicked, and an insult to the very genius of
+hospitality."
+
+"Well, I don't know. It must give the faster a good chance of seeing
+how funny the feeders all look."
+
+"I wonder, I _do_ wonder, how the feeding in common came to be the
+custom," she said, thoughtfully. "Of course where it's done for
+convenience, like hotels or in boarding-houses--but to do it wantonly,
+as people do in society, it ought to be stopped."
+
+"We might call art to our aid--have a large tableful of people kodaked
+in the moments of ingulfing, chewing, or swallowing, as the act varied
+from guest to guest; might be reproduced as picture postals, or from
+films for the movies. That would give the ten and twenty cent
+audiences a chance to see what life in the exclusive circles was."
+
+She listened in dreamy inattention. "It was a step in the right
+direction when people began to have afternoon teas. To be sure, there
+was the biting and chewing sandwiches, but you needn't take _them_,
+and most women could manage their teacups gracefully."
+
+"Or hide their faces in them when they couldn't."
+
+"Only," she continued, "the men wouldn't come after the first go off.
+It was as bad as lunches. Now that the English way of serving tea to
+callers has come in, it's better. You really get the men, and it keeps
+them from taking cocktails so much."
+
+"They're rather glad of that. But still, still, there's the guttling
+and guzzling."
+
+"It's reduced to a minimum."
+
+"But it's there. And the first thing you know you've loaded yourself
+up with cake or bread-and-butter and spoiled your appetite for dinner.
+No, afternoon tea must go with the rest of it, if we're going to be
+truly civilized. If people could come to one another's tables with
+full minds instead of stomachs, there would be some excuse for
+hospitality. Perhaps if we reversed the practice of the professional
+diner-out, and read up at home as he now eats at home, and-- No, I
+don't see how it could be done. But we might take a leaf from the book
+of people who are not in society. They never ask anybody to meals if
+they can possibly help it; if some one happens in at meal-times they
+tell him to pull up a chair--if they have to, or he shows no signs
+first of going. But even among these people the instinct of
+hospitality--the feeding form of it--lurks somewhere. In our
+farm-boarding days--"
+
+"Don't speak of them!" she implored.
+
+"We once went to an evening party," he pursued, "where raw apples and
+cold water were served."
+
+"I thought I should die of hunger. And when we got home to our own
+farmer's we ravaged the pantry for everything left from supper. It
+wasn't much. There!" Lindora screamed. "There _is_ the taxi!" And the
+shuddering sound of the clock making time at their expense penetrated
+from the street. "Come!"
+
+"How the instinct of economy lingers in us, too, long after the use
+of it is outgrown. It's as bad as the instinct of hospitality. We
+could easily afford to pay extra for the comfort of sitting here over
+these broken victuals--"
+
+"I tell you we shall be left," she retorted; and in the thirty-five
+minutes they had at the station before their train started she
+outlined a scheme of social reform which she meant to put in force as
+soon as people began to gather in summer force at Lobster Cove.
+
+He derided the notion; but she said, "You will see!" and in rather
+more time than it takes to tell it they were settled in their cottage,
+where, after some unavoidable changes of cook and laundress, they were
+soon in perfect running order.
+
+By this time Lobster Cove was in the full tide of lunching and being
+lunched. The lunches were almost exclusively ladies' lunches, and the
+ladies came to them with appetites sharpened by the incomparable air
+of those real Lobster Cove days which were all cloudless skies and
+west winds, and by the vigorous automobile exercise of getting to one
+another's cottages. They seized every pretext for giving these feasts,
+marked each by some vivid touch of invention within the limits of the
+graceful convention which all felt bound not to transcend. It was some
+surprising flavor in the salad, or some touch of color appealing to
+the eye only; or it was some touch in the ice-cream, or some daring
+substitution of a native dish for it, as strawberry or peach
+shortcake; or some bold transposition in the order of the courses; or
+some capricious arrangement of the decoration, or the use of wild
+flowers, or even weeds (as meadow-rue or field-lilies), for the local
+florist's flowers, which set the ladies screaming at the moment and
+talking of it till the next lunch. This would follow perhaps the next
+day, or the next but one, according as a new cottager's claims
+insisted or a lady had a change of guests, or three days at the
+latest, for no reason.
+
+In their rapid succession people scarcely noticed that Lindora had not
+given a lunch, and she had so far abandoned herself to the enjoyment
+of the others' lunches that she had half forgotten her high purposes
+of reform, when she was sharply recalled to them by a lunch which had
+not at all agreed with her; she had, in fact, had to have the doctor,
+and many people had asked one another whether they had heard how she
+was. Then she took her good resolution in both hands and gave an
+afternoon, asking people by note or 'phone simply whether they would
+not come in at four sharp. People were a good deal mystified, but for
+this very reason everybody came. Some of them came from somebody's
+lunch, which had been so nice that they lingered over it till four,
+and then walked, partly to fill in the time and partly to walk off the
+lunch, as there would be sure to be something at Lindora's later on.
+
+It would be invidious to say what the nature of Lindora's
+entertainment was. It was certainly to the last degree original, and
+those who said the worst of it could say no worse than that it was
+queer. It quite filled the time till six o'clock, and may be perhaps
+best described as a negative rather than a positive triumph, though
+what Lindora had aimed at she had undoubtedly achieved. Whatever it
+was, whether original or queer, it was certainly novel.
+
+A good many men had come, one at least to every five ladies, but as
+the time passed and a certain blankness began to gather over the
+spirits of all, they fell into different attitudes of the despair
+which the ladies did their best to pass off for rapture. At each
+unscheduled noise they started in a vain expectation, and when the end
+came, it came so without accent, so without anything but the clock to
+mark it as the close, that they could hardly get themselves together
+for going away. They did what was nice and right, of course, in
+thanking Lindora for her fascinating afternoon, but when they were
+well beyond hearing one said to another: "Well, I shall certainly
+have an appetite for my dinner _to-night_! Why, if there had only been
+a cup of the weakest kind of tea, or even of cold water!"
+
+Then those who had come in autos gathered as many pedestrians into
+them as they would hold in leaving the house, or caught them up
+fainting by the way.
+
+Lindora and Florindo watched them from their veranda.
+
+"Well, my dear," he said, "it's been a wonderful afternoon; an immense
+stride forward in the cause of anti-eating--or--"
+
+"Don't _speak_ to me!" she cried.
+
+"But it leaves one rather hungry, doesn't it?"
+
+"_Hungry!_" she hurled back at him. "I could eat a--I don't know
+what!"
+
+
+
+
+                                  XV
+
+                     CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL
+
+                       A Long-distance Eclogue
+
+                                 1902
+
+
+  _Morrison._ Hello! Hello! Is that you, Wetherbee?
+
+  _Wetherbee._ Yes. Who are you? What do you want with me?
+
+  _Morrison._ Oh, nothing much. It's Morrison, you know;
+  Morrison--down at Clamhurst Shortsands.
+
+  _Wetherbee._                             Oh!
+  Why, Morrison, of course! Of course, I know!
+  How are you, Morrison? And, by the way,
+  _Where_ are you? What! You never mean to say
+  You are down there _yet_? Well, by the Holy Poker!
+  What are you doing there, you ancient joker?
+
+  _Morrison._ Sticking it out over Thanksgiving Day.
+  I said I would. I tell you, it is gay
+  Down here. You ought to see the Hunter's Moon,
+  These silver nights, prinking in our lagoon.
+  You ought to see our sunsets, glassy red,
+  Shading to pink and violet overhead.
+  You ought to see our mornings, still and clear,
+  White silence, far as you can look and hear.
+  You ought to see the leaves--our oaks and ashes
+  Crimson and yellow, with those gorgeous splashes,
+  Purple and orange, against the bluish green
+  Of the pine woods; and scattered in between
+  The scarlet of the maples; and the blaze
+  Of blackberry-vines, along the dusty ways
+  And on the old stone walls; the air just balm,
+  And the crows cawing through the perfect calm
+  Of afternoons all gold and turquoise. Say,
+  You ought to have been with wife and me to-day,
+  A drive we took--it would have made you sick:
+  The pigeons and the partridges so thick;
+  And on the hill just beyond Barkin's lane,
+  Before you reach the barn of Widow Payne,
+  Showing right up against the sky, as clear
+  And motionless as sculpture, stood a deer!
+  Say, does that jar you just a little? Say,
+  How have you found things up there, anyway,
+  Since you got back? Air like a cotton string
+  To breathe? The same old dust on everything,
+  And in your teeth, and in your eyes? The smoke
+  From the soft coal, got long beyond a joke?
+  The trolleys rather more upon your curves,
+  And all the roar and clatter in your nerves?
+  Don't you wish you had stayed here, too?
+
+  _Wetherbee._                          Well, yes,
+  I do at certain times, I must confess.
+  I swear it is enough at times to make you swear
+  You would almost rather be anywhere
+  Than here. The building up and pulling down,
+  The getting to and fro about the town,
+  The turmoil underfoot and overhead,
+  Certainly make you wish that you were dead,
+  At first; and all the mean vulgarity
+  Of city life, the filth and misery
+  You see around you, make you want to put
+  Back to the country anywhere, hot-foot.
+  Yet--there are compensations.
+
+  _Morrison._                    Such as?
+
+  _Wetherbee._                           Why,
+  There is the club.
+
+  _Morrison._         The club I can't deny.
+  Many o' the fellows back there?
+
+  _Wetherbee._                     Nearly all.
+  Over the twilight cocktails there are tall
+  Stories and talk. But you would hardly care;
+  You have the natives to talk with down there,
+  And always find them meaty.
+
+  _Morrison._                  Well, so-so.
+  Their words outlast their ideas at times, you know,
+  And they have _staying_ powers. The theaters
+  All open now?
+
+  _Wetherbee._    Yes, all. And it occurs
+  To me: there's one among the things that you
+  Would have enjoyed; an opera with the new--
+  Or at least the last--music by Sullivan,
+  And words, though not Gilbertian, that ran
+  Trippingly with it. Oh, I tell you what,
+  I'd rather that you had been there than not.
+
+  _Morrison._ Thanks ever so!
+
+  _Wetherbee._                Oh, there is nothing mean
+  About your early friend. That deer and autumn scene
+  Were kind of you! And, say, I think you like
+  Afternoon teas when good. I have chanced to strike
+  Some of the best of late, where people said
+  They had sent you cards, but thought you must be dead.
+  I told them I left you down there by the sea,
+  And then they sort of looked askance at me,
+  As if it were a joke, and bade me get
+  Myself some bouillon or some chocolate,
+  And turned the subject--did not even give
+  Me time to prove it is not life to live
+  In town as long as you can keep from freezing
+  Beside the autumn sea. A little sneezing,
+  At Clamhurst Shortsands, since the frosts set in?
+
+  _Morrison._ Well, not enough to make a true friend grin.
+  Slight colds, mere nothings. With our open fires
+  We've all the warmth and cheer that heart desires.
+  Next year we'll have a furnace in, and stay
+  Not till Thanksgiving, but till Christmas Day.
+  It's glorious in these roomy autumn nights
+  To sit between the firelight and the lights
+  Of our big lamps, and read aloud by turns
+  As long as kerosene or hickory burns.
+  We hate to go to bed.
+
+  _Wetherbee._           Of course you do!
+  And hate to get up in the morning, too--
+  To pull the coverlet from your frost-bit nose,
+  And touch the glary matting with your toes!
+  Are you beginning yet to break the ice
+  In your wash-pitchers? No? Well, that is nice.
+  I always hate to do it--seems as if
+  Summer was going; but when your hand is stiff
+  With cold, it can be done. Still, I prefer
+  To wash and dress beside my register,
+  When summer gets a little on, like this.
+  But some folks find the other thing pure bliss--
+  Lusty young chaps, like you.
+
+  _Morrison._                   And some folks find
+  A sizzling radiator to their mind.
+  What else have you, there, you could recommend
+  To the attention of a country friend?
+
+  _Wetherbee._ Well, you know how it is in Madison Square,
+  Late afternoons, now, if the day's been fair--
+  How all the western sidewalk ebbs and flows
+  With pretty women in their pretty clo'es:
+  I've never seen them prettier than this year.
+  Of course, I know a dear is not a deer,
+  But still, I think that if I had to meet
+  One or the other in the road, or street,
+  All by myself, I am not sure but that
+  I'd choose the dear that wears the fetching hat.
+
+  _Morrison._ Get out! What else?
+
+  _Wetherbee._                Well, it is not so bad,
+  If you are feeling a little down, or sad,
+  To walk along Fifth Avenue to the Park,
+  When the day thinks perhaps of getting dark,
+  And meet that mighty flood of vehicles
+  Laden with all the different kinds of swells,
+  Homing to dinner, in their carriages--
+  Victorias, landaus, chariots, coupés--
+  There's nothing like it to lift up the heart
+  And make you realize yourself a part,
+  Sure, of the greatest show on earth.
+
+  _Morrison._                           Oh, yes,
+  I know. I've felt that rapture more or less.
+  But I would rather put it off as long
+  As possible. I suppose you like the song
+  Of the sweet car-gongs better than the cry
+  Of jays and yellowhammers when the sky
+  Begins to redden these October mornings,
+  And the loons sound their melancholy warnings;
+  Or honk of the wild-geese that write their A
+  Along the horizon in the evening's gray.
+  Or when the squirrels look down on you and bark
+  From the nut trees--
+
+  _Wetherbee._           We have them in the Park
+  Plenty enough. But, say, you aged sinner,
+  Have you been out much recently at dinner?
+
+  _Morrison._ What do you mean? You know there's no one here
+  That dines except ourselves now.
+
+  _Wetherbee._                Well, that's queer!
+  I thought the natives-- But I recollect!
+  It was not reasonable to expect--
+
+  _Morrison._ What are you driving at?
+
+  _Wetherbee._              Oh, nothing much.
+  But I was thinking how you come in touch
+  With life at the first dinner in the fall,
+  When you get back, first, as you can't at all
+  Later along. But you, of course, won't care
+  With your idyllic pleasures.
+
+  _Morrison._                   _Who was there?_
+
+  _Wetherbee._ Oh--ha, ha! What d'you mean by _there_?
+
+  _Morrison._                              Come off!
+
+  _Wetherbee._ What! you remain to pray that came to scoff!
+
+  _Morrison._ You know what I am after.
+
+  _Wetherbee._                         Yes, that dinner.
+  Just a round dozen: Ferguson and Binner
+  For the fine arts; Bowyer the novelist;
+  Dr. Le Martin; the psychologist
+  Fletcher; the English actor Philipson;
+  The two newspaper Witkins, Bob and John;
+  A nice Bostonian, Bane the archæologer,
+  And a queer Russian amateur astrologer;
+  And Father Gray, the jolly ritualist priest,
+  And last your humble servant, but not least.
+  The food was not so filthy, and the wine
+  Was not so poison. We made out to dine
+  From eight till one A.M. One could endure
+  The dinner. But, oh say! _The talk was poor!_
+  Your natives down at Clamhurst--
+
+  _Morrison._                      Look ye here!
+  What date does Thanksgiving come on this year?
+
+  _Wetherbee._ Why, I suppose--although I don't remember
+  Certainly--the usual 28th November.
+
+  _Morrison._ Novem-- You should have waited to get sober!
+  It comes on the 11th of October!
+  And that's to-morrow; and if you happen down
+  Later, you'd better look for us in town.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XVI
+
+                              TABLE TALK
+
+
+They were talking after dinner in that cozy moment when the
+conversation has ripened, just before the coffee, into mocking guesses
+and laughing suggestions. The thing they were talking of was something
+that would have held them apart if less happily timed and placed, but
+then and there it drew these together in what most of them felt a
+charming and flattering intimacy. Not all of them took part in the
+talk, and of those who did, none perhaps assumed to talk with
+authority or finality. At first they spoke of the subject as _it_,
+forbearing to name it, as if the name of it would convey an unpleasant
+shock, out of temper with the general feeling.
+
+"I don't suppose," the host said, "that it's really so much commoner
+than it used to be. But the publicity is more invasive and explosive.
+That's perhaps because it has got higher up in the world and has
+spread more among the first circles. The time was when you seldom
+heard of it there, and now it is scarcely a scandal. I remember that
+when I went abroad, twenty or thirty years ago, and the English
+brought me to book about it, I could put them down by saying that I
+didn't know a single divorced person."
+
+"And of course," a bachelor guest ventured, "a person of that sort
+_must_ be single."
+
+At first the others did not take the joke; then they laughed, but the
+women not so much as the men.
+
+"And you couldn't say that now?" the lady on the right of the host
+inquired.
+
+"Why, I don't know," he returned, thoughtfully, after a little
+interval. "I don't just call one to mind."
+
+"Then," the bachelor said, "that classes you. If you moved in our best
+society you would certainly know some of the many smart people whose
+disunions alternate with the morning murders in the daily papers."
+
+"Yes, the fact seems to rank me rather low; but I'm rather proud of
+the fact."
+
+The hostess seemed not quite to like this arrogant humility. She said,
+over the length of the table (it was not very long), "I'm sure you
+know some very nice people who have not been."
+
+"Well, yes, I do. But are they really smart people? They're of very
+good family, certainly."
+
+"You mustn't brag," the bachelor said.
+
+A husband on the right of the hostess wondered if there were really
+more of the thing than there used to be.
+
+"Qualitatively, yes, I should say. Quantitatively, I'm not convinced,"
+the host answered. "In a good many of the States it's been made
+difficult."
+
+The husband on the right of the hostess was not convinced, he said, as
+to the qualitative increase. The parties to the suits were rich
+enough, and sometimes they were high enough placed and far enough
+derived. But there was nearly always a leak in them, a social leak
+somewhere, on one side or the other. They could not be said to be
+persons of quality in the highest sense.
+
+"Why, persons of quality seldom can be," the bachelor contended.
+
+The girl opposite, who had been invited to balance him in the scale of
+celibacy by the hostess in her study of her dinner-party, first
+smiled, and then alleged a very distinguished instance of divorce in
+which the parties were both of immaculate origin and unimpeachable
+fashion. "Nobody," she said, "can accuse _them_ of a want of quality."
+She was good-looking, though no longer so young as she could have
+wished; she flung out her answer to the bachelor defiantly, but she
+addressed it to the host, and he said that was true; certainly it was
+a signal case; but wasn't it exceptional? The others mentioned like
+cases, though none quite so perfect, and then there was a lull till
+the husband on the left of the hostess noted a fact which renewed the
+life of the discussion.
+
+"There was a good deal of agitation, six or eight years ago, about it.
+I don't know whether the agitation accomplished anything."
+
+The host believed it had influenced legislation.
+
+"For or against?" the bachelor inquired.
+
+"Oh, against."
+
+"But in other countries it's been coming in more and more. It seems to
+be as easy in England now as it used to be in Indiana. In France it's
+nothing scandalous, and in Norwegian society you meet so many
+disunited couples in a state of quadruplicate reunion that it is very
+embarrassing. It doesn't seem to bother the parties to the new
+relation themselves."
+
+"It's very common in Germany, too," the husband on the right of the
+hostess said.
+
+The husband on her left side said he did not know just how it was in
+Italy and Spain, and no one offered to disperse his ignorance.
+
+In the silence which ensued the lady on the left of the host created a
+diversion in her favor by saying that she had heard they had a very
+good law in Switzerland.
+
+Being asked to tell what it was, she could not remember, but her
+husband, on the right of the hostess, saved the credit of his family
+by supplying her defect. "Oh, yes. It's very curious. We heard of it
+when we were there. When people want to be put asunder, for any reason
+or other, they go before a magistrate and declare their wish. Then
+they go home, and at the end of a certain time--weeks or months--the
+magistrate summons them before him with a view to reconciliation. If
+they come, it is a good sign; if they don't come, or come and persist
+in their desire, then they are summoned after another interval, and
+are either reconciled or put asunder, as the case may be, or as they
+choose. It is not expensive, and I believe it isn't scandalous."
+
+"It seems very sensible," the husband on the left of the hostess said,
+as if to keep the other husband in countenance. But for an interval no
+one else joined him, and the mature girl said to the man next her that
+it seemed rather cold-blooded. He was a man who had been entreated to
+come in, on the frank confession that he was asked as a stop-gap, the
+original guest having fallen by the way. Such men are apt to abuse
+their magnanimity, their condescension. They think that being there
+out of compassion, and in compliance with a hospitality that had not
+at first contemplated their presence, they can say anything; they are
+usually asked without but through their wives, who are asked to "lend"
+them, and who lend them with a grudge veiled in eager acquiescence;
+and the men think it will afterward advantage them with their wives,
+when they find they are enjoying themselves, if they will go home and
+report that they said something vexing or verging on the offensive to
+their hostess. This man now addressed himself to the lady at the head
+of the table.
+
+"Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce was an unquestionable
+evil?"
+
+The hostess looked with a frightened air to the right and left, and
+then down the table to her husband. But no one came to her rescue, and
+she asked feebly, as if foreboding trouble (for she knew she had taken
+a liberty with this man's wife), "Why, don't we?"
+
+"About one in seven of us doesn't," the stop-gap said.
+
+"Oh!" the girl beside him cried out, in a horror-stricken voice which
+seemed not to interpret her emotion truly. "Is it so bad as that?"
+
+"Perhaps not quite, even if it is bad at all," he returned, and the
+hostess smiled gratefully at the girl for drawing his fire. But it
+appeared she had not, for he directed his further speech at the
+hostess again: really the most inoffensive person there, and the least
+able to contend with adverse opinions.
+
+"No, I don't believe we do think it an unquestionable evil, unless we
+think marriage is so." Everybody sat up, as the stop-gap had intended,
+no doubt, and he "held them with his glittering eye," or as many as he
+could sweep with his glance. "I suppose that the greatest hypocrite at
+this table, where we are all so frankly hypocrites together, will not
+deny that marriage is the prime cause of divorce. In fact, divorce
+couldn't exist without it."
+
+The women all looked bewilderedly at one another, and then appealingly
+at the men. None of these answered directly, but the bachelor softly
+intoned out of Gilbert and Sullivan--he was of that date:
+
+          "'A paradox, a paradox;
+            A most ingenious paradox!'"
+
+"Yes," the stop-gap defiantly assented. "A paradox; and all aboriginal
+verities, all giant truths, are paradoxes."
+
+"Giant truths is good," the bachelor noted, but the stop-gap did not
+mind him.
+
+He turned to the host: "I suppose that if divorce is an evil, and we
+wish to extirpate it, we must strike at its root, at marriage?"
+
+The host laughed. "I prefer not to take the floor. I'm sure we all
+want to hear what you have to say in support of your mammoth idea."
+
+"Oh yes, indeed," the women chorused, but rather tremulously, as not
+knowing what might be coming.
+
+"Which do you mean? That all truth is paradoxical, or that marriage is
+the mother of divorce?"
+
+"Whichever you like."
+
+"The last proposition is self-evident," the stop-gap said, supplying
+himself with a small bunch of the grapes which nobody ever takes at
+dinner; the hostess was going to have coffee for the women in the
+drawing-room, and to leave the men to theirs with their tobacco at the
+table. "And you must allow that if divorce is a good thing or a bad
+thing, it equally partakes of the nature of its parent. Or else
+there's nothing in heredity."
+
+"Oh, come!" one of the husbands said.
+
+"Very well!" the stop-gap submitted. "I yield the word to you." But as
+the other went no further, he continued. "The case is so clear that it
+needs no argument. Up to this time, in dealing with the evil of
+divorce, if it is an evil, we have simply been suppressing the
+symptoms; and your Swiss method--"
+
+"Oh, it isn't _mine_," the man said who had stated it.
+
+"--Is only a part of the general practice. It is another attempt to
+make divorce difficult, when it is marriage that ought to be made
+difficult."
+
+"Some," the daring bachelor said, "think it ought to be made
+impossible." The girl across the table began to laugh hysterically,
+but caught herself up and tried to look as if she had not laughed at
+all.
+
+"I don't go as far as that," the stop-gap resumed, "but as an
+inveterate enemy of divorce--"
+
+An "Oh!" varying from surprise to derision chorused up; but he did not
+mind it; he went on as if uninterrupted.
+
+"I should put every possible obstacle, and at every step, in the way
+of marriage. The attitude of society toward marriage is now simply
+preposterous, absolutely grotesque. Society? The whole human framework
+in all its manifestations, social, literary, religious, artistic, and
+civic, is perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the matter.
+Nothing is done to retard or prevent marriage; everything to
+accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue
+which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly vulgar and
+entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The blind and
+witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least with us, is
+flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and revered as
+if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse. But is it? I
+defy any one here to say that it is."
+
+As if they were afraid of worse things if they spoke, the company
+remained silent. But this did not save them.
+
+"You all know it isn't. You all know that it is the caprice of chance
+encounter, the result of propinquity, the invention of poets and
+novelists, the superstition of the victims, the unscrupulous
+make-believe of the witnesses. As an impulse it quickly wears itself
+out in marriage, and makes way for divorce. In this country
+nine-tenths of the marriages are love-matches. The old motives which
+delay and prevent marriage in other countries, aristocratic countries,
+like questions of rank and descent, even of money, do not exist. Yet
+this is the land of unhappy unions beyond all other lands, the very
+home of divorce. The conditions of marriage are ideally favorable
+according to the opinions of its friends, who are all more or less
+active in bottling husbands and wives up in its felicity and
+preventing their escape through divorce."
+
+Still the others were silent, and again the stop-gap triumphed on.
+"Now, I am an enemy of divorce, too; but I would have it begin before
+marriage."
+
+"Rather paradoxical again?" the bachelor alone had the hardihood to
+suggest.
+
+"Not at all. I am quite literal. I would have it begin with the
+engagement. I would have the betrothed--the mistress and the
+lover--come before the magistrate or the minister, and declare their
+motives in wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with
+them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to
+a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would
+quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not,
+he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think
+it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them,
+and dismiss them as before, if they continued obstinate. After three
+months more, he should call them before him and reason with them for
+the last time. If they persisted in spite of everything, he should
+marry them, and let them take the consequences."
+
+The stop-gap leaned back in his chair defiantly, and fixed the host
+with an eye of challenge. Upon the whole the host seemed not so much
+frightened. He said: "I don't see anything so original in all that.
+It's merely a travesty of the Swiss law of divorce."
+
+"And you see nothing novel, nothing that makes for the higher
+civilization in the application of that law to marriage? You all
+approve of that law because you believe it prevents nine-tenths of the
+divorces; but if you had a law that would similarly prevent
+nine-tenths of the marriages, you would need no divorce law at all."
+
+"Oh, I don't know that," the hardy bachelor said. "What about the
+one-tenth of the marriages which it didn't prevent? Would you have the
+parties hopelessly shut up to them? Would you forbid _them_ all hope
+of escape? Would you have no divorce for any cause whatever?"
+
+"Yes," the husband on the right of the hostess asked (but his wife on
+the right of the host looked as if she wished he had not mixed in),
+"wouldn't more unhappiness result from that one marriage than from all
+the marriages as we have them now?"
+
+"Aren't you both rather precipitate?" the stop-gap demanded. "I said,
+let the parties to the final marriage take the consequences. But if
+these consequences were too dire, I would not forbid them the hope of
+relief. I haven't thought the matter out very clearly yet, but there
+are one or two causes for divorce which I would admit."
+
+"Ah?" the host inquired, with a provisional smile.
+
+"Yes, causes going down into the very nature of things--the nature of
+men and of women. Incompatibility of temperament ought always to be
+very seriously considered as a cause."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"And, above all," and here the stop-gap swept the board with his eye,
+"difference of sex."
+
+The sort of laugh which expresses uncertainty of perception and
+conditional approval went up.
+
+The hostess rose with rather a frightened air. "Shall we leave them to
+their tobacco?" she said to the other women.
+
+When he went home the stop-gap celebrated his triumph to his wife. "I
+don't think she'll ask you for the loan of me again to fill a place
+without you."
+
+"Yes," she answered, remotely. "You don't suppose she'll think we live
+unhappily together?"
+
+
+
+
+                                 XVII
+
+                    THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
+
+
+"Well, what are you doing here?" the younger of the two sages asked,
+with a resolute air of bonhomie, as he dragged himself over the
+asphalt path, and sank, gasping, into the seat beside the other in the
+Park. His senior lifted his head and looked him carefully over to make
+sure of his identity, and then he said:
+
+"I suppose, to answer your fatuous question, I am waiting here to get
+my breath before I move on; and in the next place, I am watching the
+feet of the women who go by in their high-heeled shoes."
+
+"How long do you think it will take you to get your breath in the
+atmosphere of these motors?" the younger sage pursued. "And you don't
+imagine that these women are of the first fashion, do you?"
+
+"No, but I imagine their shoes are. I have been calculating that their
+average heel is from an inch and a half to two inches high, and
+touches the ground in the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece.
+As you seem to be fond of asking questions, perhaps you will like to
+answer one. Why do you think they do it?"
+
+"Wear shoes like that?" the younger returned, cheerily, and laughed as
+he added, "Because the rest do."
+
+"Mmm!" the elder grumbled, not wholly pleased, and yet not refusing
+the answer. He had been having a little touch of grippe, and was
+somewhat broken from his wonted cynicism. He said: "It's very strange,
+very sad. Just now there was such a pretty young girl, so sweet and
+fine, went tottering by as helpless, in any exigency, as the daughter
+of a thousand years of bound-feet Chinese women. While she tilted on,
+the nice young fellow with her swept forward with one stride to her
+three on the wide soles and low heels of nature-last boots, and kept
+himself from out-walking her by a devotion that made him grit his
+teeth. Probably she was wiser and better and brighter than he, but she
+didn't look it; and I, who voted to give her the vote the other day,
+had my misgivings. I think I shall satisfy myself for the next five
+years by catching cold in taking my hat off to her in elevators, and
+getting killed by automobiles in helping her off the cars, where I've
+given her my seat."
+
+"But you must allow that if her shoes are too tight, her skirts are
+not so tight as they were. Or have you begun sighing for the good old
+hobble-skirts, now they're gone?"
+
+"The hobble-skirts were prettier than I thought they were when they
+were with us, but the 'tempestuous petticoat' has its charm, which I
+find I'd been missing."
+
+"Well, at least it's a change," the younger sage allowed, "and I
+haven't found the other changes in our dear old New York which I look
+for when I come back in the fall."
+
+The sages were enjoying together the soft weather which lingered with
+us a whole month from the middle of October onward, and the afternoon
+of their meeting in the Park was now softly reddening to the dim
+sunset over the westward trees.
+
+"Yes," the elder assented. "I miss the new sky-scrapers which used to
+welcome me back up and down the Avenue. But there are more automobiles
+than ever, and the game of saving your life from them when you cross
+the street is madder and merrier than I have known it before."
+
+"The war seems to have stopped building because people can't afford
+it," the other suggested, "but it has only increased automobiling."
+
+"Well, people can't afford that, either. Nine-tenths of them are
+traveling the road to ruin, I'm told, and apparently they can't get
+over the ground too fast. Just look!" and the sages joined in the
+amused and mournful contemplation of the different types of motors
+innumerably whirring up and down the drive before them, while they
+choked in the fumes of the gasolene.
+
+The motors were not the costliest types, except in a few instances,
+and in most instances they were the cheaper types, such as those who
+could not afford them could at least afford best. The sages had found
+a bench beside the walk where the statue of Daniel Webster looks down
+on the confluence of two driveways, and the stream of motors, going
+and coming, is like a seething torrent either way.
+
+"The mystery is," the elder continued, "why they should want to do it
+in the way they do it. Are they merely going somewhere and must get
+there in the shortest time possible, or are they arriving on a wager?
+If they are taking a pleasure drive, what a droll idea of pleasure
+they must have! Maybe they are trying to escape Black Care, but they
+must know he sits beside the chauffeur as he used to sit behind the
+horseman, and they know that he has a mortgage in his pocket, and can
+foreclose it any time on the house they have hypothecated to buy their
+car. Ah!" The old man started forward with the involuntary impulse of
+rescue. But it was not one of the people who singly, or in terrorized
+groups, had been waiting at the roadside to find their way across; it
+was only a hapless squirrel of those which used to make their way
+safely among the hoofs and wheels of the kind old cabs and carriages,
+and it lay instantly crushed under the tire of a motor. "He's done
+for, poor little wretch! They can't get used to the change. Some day a
+policeman will pick _me_ up from under a second-hand motor. I wonder
+what the great Daniel from his pedestal up there would say if he came
+to judgment."
+
+"He wouldn't believe in the change any more than that squirrel. He
+would decide that he was dreaming, and would sleep on, forgetting and
+forgotten."
+
+"Forgotten," the elder sage assented. "I remember when his fame filled
+the United States, which was then the whole world to me. And now I
+don't imagine that our hyphenated citizens have the remotest
+consciousness of him. If Daniel began delivering one of his
+liberty-and-union-now-and-forever-one-and-inseparable speeches, they
+wouldn't know what he was talking about." The sage laughed and champed
+his toothless jaws together, as old men do in the effort to compose
+their countenances after an emotional outbreak.
+
+"Well, for one thing," the younger observed, "they wouldn't understand
+what he said. You will notice, if you listen to them going by, that
+they seldom speak English. That's getting to be a dead language in New
+York, though it's still used in the newspapers." He thought to hearten
+the other with his whimsicality, for it seemed to him that the elder
+sage was getting sensibly older since their last meeting, and that he
+would be the gayer for such cheer as a man on the hither side of
+eighty can offer a man on the thither. "Perhaps the Russian Jews would
+appreciate Daniel if he were put into Yiddish for them. They're the
+brightest intelligences among our hyphenates. And they have the
+old-fashioned ideals of liberty and humanity, perhaps because they've
+known so little of either."
+
+His gaiety did not seem to enliven his senior much. "Ah, the old
+ideals!" he sighed. "The old ideal of an afternoon airing was a gentle
+course in an open carriage on a soft drive. Now it's a vertiginous
+whirl on an asphalted road, round and round and round the Park till
+the victims stagger with their brains spinning after they get out of
+their cars."
+
+The younger sage laughed. "You've been listening to the pessimism of
+the dear old fellows who drive the few lingering victorias. If you'd
+believe them, all these people in the motors are chauffeurs giving
+their lady-friends joy-rides."
+
+"Few?" the elder retorted. "There are lots of them. I've counted
+twenty in a single round of the Park. I was proud to be in one of
+them, though my horse left something to be desired in the way of youth
+and beauty. But I reflected that I was not very young or beautiful
+myself."
+
+As the sages sat looking out over the dizzying whirl of the motors
+they smoothed the tops of their sticks with their soft old hands, and
+were silent oftener than not. The elder seemed to drowse off from the
+time and place, but he was recalled by the younger saying, "It is
+certainly astonishing weather for this season of the year."
+
+The elder woke up and retorted, as if in offense: "Not at all. I've
+seen the cherries in blossom at the end of October."
+
+"They didn't set their fruit, I suppose."
+
+"Well--no."
+
+"Ah! Well, I saw a butterfly up here in the sheep-pasture the other
+day. I could have put out my hand and caught it. It's the soft weather
+that brings your victorias out like the belated butterflies. Wait till
+the first cold snap, and there won't be a single victoria or butterfly
+left."
+
+"Yes," the elder assented, "we butterflies and victorias belong to the
+youth of the year and the world. And the sad thing is that we won't
+have our palingenesis."
+
+"Why not?" the younger sage demanded. "What is to prevent your coming
+back in two or three thousand years?"
+
+"Well, if we came back in a year even, we shouldn't find room, for one
+reason. Haven't you noticed how full to bursting the place seems?
+Every street is as packed as lower Fifth Avenue used to be when the
+operatives came out of the big shops for their nooning. The city's
+shell hasn't been enlarged or added to, but the life in it has
+multiplied past its utmost capacity. All the hotels and houses and
+flats are packed. The theaters, wherever the plays are bad enough,
+swarm with spectators. Along up and down every side-streets the motors
+stand in rows, and at the same time the avenues are so dense with them
+that you are killed at every crossing. There has been no building to
+speak of during the summer, but unless New York is overbuilt next year
+we must appeal to Chicago to come and help hold it. But I've an idea
+that the victorias are remaining to stay; if some sort of mechanical
+horse could be substituted for the poor old animals that remind me of
+my mortality, I should be sure of it. Every now and then I get an
+impression of permanence in the things of the Park. As long as the
+peanut-men and the swan-boats are with us I sha'n't quite despair.
+And the other night I was moved almost to tears by the sight of a
+four-in-hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue drive. There it was,
+like some vehicular phantom, but how, whence, when? It came, as if out
+of the early eighteen-nineties; two middle-aged grooms, with their
+arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it's the rumble), but of all the
+young people who ought to have flowered over the top none was left but
+the lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box. I've tried every
+evening since for that four-in-hand, but I haven't seen it, and I've
+decided it wasn't a vehicular phantom, but a mere dream of the past."
+
+"Four-horse dream," the younger sage commented, as if musing aloud.
+
+The elder did not seem quite pleased. "A joke?" he challenged.
+
+"Not necessarily. I suppose I was the helpless prey of the rhyme."
+
+"I didn't know you were a poet."
+
+"I'm not, always. But didn't it occur to you that danger for danger
+your four-in-hand was more dangerous than an automobile to the passing
+human creature?"
+
+"It might have been if it had been multiplied by ten thousand. But
+there was only one of it, and it wasn't going twenty miles an hour."
+
+"That's true," the younger sage assented. "But there was always a
+fearful hazard in horses when we had them. We supposed they were
+tamed, but, after all, they were only _trained_ animals, like
+Hagenback's."
+
+"And what is a chauffeur?"
+
+"Ah, you have me there!" the younger said, and he laughed generously.
+"Or you would have if I hadn't noticed something like amelioration in
+the chauffeurs. At any rate, the taxis are cheaper than they were, and
+I suppose something will be done about the street traffic some time.
+They're talking now about subway crossings. But I should prefer
+overhead foot-bridges at all the corners, crossing one another
+diagonally. They would look like triumphal arches, and would serve the
+purpose of any future Dewey victory if we should happen to have
+another hero to win one."
+
+"Well, we must hope for the best. I rather like the notion of the
+diagonal foot-bridges. But why not Rows along the second stories as
+they have them in Chester? I should be pretty sure of always getting
+home alive if we had them. Now if I'm not telephoned for at a hospital
+before I'm restored to consciousness, I think myself pretty lucky. And
+yet it seems but yesterday, as the people used to say in the plays,
+since I had a pride in counting the automobiles as I walked up the
+Avenue. Once I got as high as twenty before I reached Fifty-ninth
+Street. Now I couldn't count as many horse vehicles."
+
+The elder sage mocked himself in a feeble laugh, but the younger tried
+to be serious. "We don't realize the absolute change. Our streets are
+not streets any more; they are railroad tracks with locomotives let
+loose on them, and no signs up to warn people at the crossings. It's
+pathetic to see the foot-passengers saving themselves, especially the
+poor, pretty, high-heeled women, looking this way and that in their
+fright, and then tottering over as fast as they can totter."
+
+"Well, I should have said it was outrageous, humiliating, insulting,
+once, but I don't any more; it would be no use."
+
+"No; and so much depends upon the point of view. When I'm on foot I
+feel all my rights invaded, but when I'm in a taxi it amuses me to see
+the women escaping; and I boil with rage in being halted at every
+other corner by the policeman with his new-fangled semaphore, and it's
+"Go" and "Stop" in red and blue, and my taxi-clock going round all the
+time and getting me in for a dollar when I thought I should keep
+within seventy cents. Then I feel that pedestrians of every age and
+sex ought to be killed."
+
+"Yes, there's something always in the point of view; and there's some
+comfort when you're stopped in your taxi to feel that they often _do_
+get killed."
+
+The sages laughed together, and the younger said: "I suppose when we
+get aeroplanes in common use, there'll be annoying traffic
+regulations, and policemen anchored out at intervals in the central
+blue to enforce them. After all--"
+
+What he was going to add in amplification cannot be known, for a
+girlish voice, trying to sharpen itself from its native sweetness to a
+conscientious severity, called to them as its owner swiftly advanced
+upon the elder sage: "Now, see here, grandfather! This won't do at
+all. You promised not to leave that bench by the Indian Hunter, and
+here you are away down by the Falconer, and we've been looking
+everywhere for you. It's too bad! I shall be afraid to trust you at
+all after this. Why, it's horrid of you, grandfather! You might have
+got killed crossing the drive."
+
+The grandfather looked up and verified the situation, which seemed to
+include a young man, tall and beautiful, but neither so handsome nor
+so many heads high as the young men in the advertisements of
+ready-to-wear clothing, who smiled down on the young girl as if he had
+arrived with her, and were finding an amusement in her severity which
+he might not, later. She was, in fact, very pretty, and her skirt
+flared in the fashion of the last moment, as she stooped threateningly
+yet fondly over her grandfather.
+
+The younger sage silently and somewhat guiltily escaped from the
+tumult of emotion which ignored him, and shuffled slowly down the
+path. The other finally gave an "Oh!" of recognition, and then said,
+for all explanation and excuse, "I didn't know what had become of
+you," and then they all laughed.
+
+
+
+
+                                XVIII
+
+                   SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
+
+
+                                  I
+
+              MISS ISOBEL RAMSEY AND MISS ESTHER GARNETT
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And they were really understood to be engaged?" Miss
+Ramsey is a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of nearly the length of two
+lady's umbrellas and the bulk of one closely folded in its sheath. She
+stands with her elbow supported on the corner of the mantel, her
+temple resting on the knuckle of a thin, nervous hand, in an effect of
+thoughtful absent-mindedness. Miss Garnett, more or less Merovingian
+in a costume that lends itself somewhat reluctantly to a low, thick
+figure, is apparently poising for departure, as she stands before the
+chair from which she has risen beside Miss Ramsey's tea-table and
+looks earnestly up into Miss Ramsey's absent face. Both are very
+young, but aim at being much older than they are, with occasional
+lapses into extreme girlhood.
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, distinctly. I knew you couldn't know, and I
+thought you ought to." She speaks in a deep conviction-bearing and
+conviction-carrying voice. "If he has been coming here so much."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with what seems temperamental abruptness: "Sit down.
+One can always think better sitting down." She catches a chair under
+her with a deft movement of her heel, and Miss Garnett sinks
+provisionally into her seat. "And I think it needs thought, don't
+you?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "That is what I expected of you."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And have some more tea. There is nothing like _fresh_
+tea for clearing the brain, and we certainly need clear brains for
+this." She pushes a button in the wall beside her, and is silent till
+the maid appears. "More tea, Nora." She is silent again while the maid
+reappears with the tea and disappears. "I don't know that he has been
+coming here so _very_ much. But he has no right to be coming at all,
+if he is engaged. That is, in that _way_."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "No. Not unless--he wishes he wasn't."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "That would give him _less_ than no right."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "That is true. I didn't think of it in that light."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I'm trying to decide what I ought to do if he does
+want to get off. She said herself that they were engaged?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "As much as that. Conny understood her to say so. And
+Conny never makes a mistake in what people say. Emily didn't say
+_whom_ she was engaged to, but Conny felt that that was to come later,
+and she did not quite feel like asking, don't you know."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Of course. And how came she to decide that it was Mr.
+Ashley?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Simply by putting two and two together. They two were
+together the whole time last summer."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I see. Then there is only one thing for me to do."
+
+_Miss Garnett_, admiringly: "I knew you would say that."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, dreamily: "The question is what the thing is."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "That is what I wish to think over. Chocolates?" She
+offers a box, catching it with her left hand from the mantel at her
+shoulder, without rising.
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Thank you; do you think they go well with tea?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "They go well with anything. But we mustn't allow our
+minds to be distracted. The case is simply this: If Mr. Ashley is
+engaged to Emily Fray, he has no right to go round calling on other
+girls--well, as if he wasn't--and he has been calling here a great
+deal. That is perfectly evident. He must be made to feel that girls
+are not to be trifled with--that they are not mere toys."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "How splendidly you do reason! And he ought to
+understand that Emily has a right--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, I don't know that I care about _her_--or not
+_pri_marily. Or do you say pri_mar_ily?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I never know. I only use it in writing."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "It's a clumsy word; I don't know that I shall. But
+what I mean is that I must act from a general principle, and that
+principle is that when a man is engaged, it doesn't matter whether the
+girl has thrown herself at him, or not--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "She certainly did, from what Conny says."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "He must be shown that other girls won't tolerate his
+behaving as if he were _not_ engaged. It is wrong."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "We must stand together."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Yes. Though I don't infer that he has been attentive
+to other girls generally."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "No. I meant that if he has been coming here so much,
+you want to prevent his trifling with others."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Something like that. But it ought to be more definite.
+He ought to realize that if another girl cared for him, it would be
+cruel to her, paying her attentions, when he was engaged to some one
+else."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "And cruel to the girl he is engaged to."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Yes." She speaks coldly, vaguely. "But that is the
+personal ground, and I wish to avoid that. I wish to deal with him
+purely in the abstract."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, I understand that. And at the same time you wish
+to punish him. He ought to be made to feel it all the more because he
+is so severe himself."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Severe?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Not tolerating anything that's the least out of the
+way in other people. Taking you up about your ideas and showing where
+you're wrong, or even silly. Spiritually snubbing, Conny calls it."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, I like that in him. It's so invigorating. It
+braces up all your good resolutions. It makes you ashamed; and shame
+is sanative."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "That's just what I told Conny, or the same thing. Do
+you think another one would hurt me? I will risk it, anyway." She
+takes another chocolate from the box. "Go on."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, I was just wishing that I had been out longer, and
+had a little more experience of men. Then I should know how to act.
+How do you suppose people do, generally?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why, you know, if they find a man in love with them,
+after he's engaged to another girl, they make him go back to her, it
+doesn't matter whether they're in love with him themselves or not."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I'm _not_ in love with Mr. Ashley, please."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "No; I'm supposing an extreme case."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, after a moment of silent thought: "Did you ever hear of
+anybody doing it?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Not just in our set. But I know it's done
+continually."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "It seems to me as if I had read something of the
+kind."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh yes, the books are full of it. Are those mallows?
+They might carry off the effects of the chocolates." Miss Ramsey
+passes her the box of marshmallows which she has bent over the table
+to look at.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And of course they couldn't get into the books if they
+hadn't really happened. I wish I could think of a case in point."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why, there was Peg Woffington--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with displeasure: "She was an actress of some sort,
+wasn't she?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_, with meritorious candor: "Yes, she was. But she was a
+very _good_ actress."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "What did _she_ do?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Well, it's a long time since I read it; and it's
+rather old-fashioned now. But there was a countryman of some sort, I
+remember, who came away from his wife, and fell in love with Peg
+Woffington, and then the wife follows him up to London, and begs her
+to give him back to her, and she does it. There's something about a
+portrait of Peg--I don't remember exactly; she puts her face through
+and cries when the wife talks to the picture. The wife thinks it is a
+real picture, and she is kind of soliloquizing, and asking Peg to give
+her husband back to her; and Peg does, in the end. That part is
+beautiful. They become the greatest friends."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Rather silly, I should say."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, it _is_ rather silly, but I suppose the author
+thought she had to do something."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And disgusting. A married man, that way! I don't see
+any comparison with Mr. Ashley."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "No, there really isn't any. Emily has never asked you
+to give him up. And besides, Peg Woffington really liked him a
+little--loved him, in fact."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And I _don't_ like Mr. Ashley at all. Of course I
+respect him--and I admire his intellect; there's no question about his
+being handsome; but I have never thought of him for a moment in any
+other way; and now I can't even respect him."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Nobody could. I'm sure Emily would be welcome to him
+as far as _I_ was concerned. But he has never been about with me so
+much as he has with you, and I don't wonder you feel indignant."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, coldly: "I don't feel indignant. I wish to be just."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, that is what I mean. And poor Emily is so
+uninteresting! In the play that Kentucky Summers does, she is
+perfectly fascinating at first, and you can see why the poor girl's
+fiancé should be so taken with her. But I'm sure no one could say you
+had ever given Mr. Ashley the least encouragement. It would be pure
+justice on your part. I think you are grand! I shall always be proud
+of knowing what you were going to do."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, after some moments of snubbing intention: "I don't know
+what I am going to do myself, yet. Or how. What _was_ that play? I
+never heard of it."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I don't remember distinctly, but it was about a young
+man who falls in love with her, when he's engaged to another girl, and
+she determines, as soon as she finds it out, to disgust him, so that
+he will go back to the other girl, don't you know."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "That sounds rather more practical than the Peg
+Woffington plan. What does she do?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Nothing you'd like to do."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I'd like to do something in such a cause. What does
+she do?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh, when he is calling on her, Kentucky Summers
+pretends to fly into a rage with her sister, and she pulls her hair
+down, and slams everything round the room, and scolds, and drinks
+champagne, and wants him to drink with her, and I don't know what all.
+The upshot is that he is only too glad to get away."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "It's rather loathsome, isn't it?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "It _is_ rather loathsome. But it was in a good cause,
+and I suppose it was what an actress would think of."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "An actress?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I forgot. The heroine is a distinguished actress, you
+know, and Kentucky could play that sort of part to perfection. But I
+don't think a lady would like to cut up, much, in the _best_ cause."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Cut up?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "She certainly frisks about the room a good deal. How
+delicious these mallows are! Have you ever tried toasting them?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "At school. There seems an idea in it. And the hero
+isn't married. I don't like the notion of a married man."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh, I'm quite sure he isn't married. He's merely
+engaged. That makes the whole difference from the Peg Woffington
+story. And there's no portrait, I'm confident, so that you wouldn't
+have to do that part."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, haughtily: "I don't propose to do _any_ part, if the
+affair can't be arranged without some such mountebank business!"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "You can manage it, if anybody can. You have so much
+dignity that you could awe him into doing his duty by a single glance.
+I wouldn't be in his place!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I shall not give him a glance. I shall not see him
+when he comes. That will be simpler still." To Nora, at the door:
+"What is it, Nora?"
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                   NORA, MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT
+
+_Nora_: "Mr. Ashley, Miss Ramsey."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with a severity not meant for Nora: "Ask him to sit
+down in the reception-room a moment."
+
+_Nora_: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."
+
+
+                                 III
+
+                      MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT
+
+_Miss Garnett_, rising and seizing Miss Ramsey's hands: "Oh, Isobel!
+But you will be equal to it! Oh! Oh!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with state: "Why are you going, Esther? Sit down."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "If I only _could_ stay! If I could hide under the
+sofa, or behind the screen! Isn't it wonderful--providential--his
+coming at the very instant? Oh, Isobel!" She clasps her friend
+convulsively, and after a moment's resistance Miss Ramsey yields to
+her emotion, and they hide their faces in each other's neck, and
+strangle their hysteric laughter. They try to regain their composure,
+and then abandon the effort with a shuddering delight in the
+perfection of the incident. "What shall you do? Shall you trust to
+inspiration? Shall you make him show his hand first, and then act? Or
+shall you tell him at once that you know all, and-- Or no, of course
+you can't do that. He's not supposed to know that you know. Oh, I can
+imagine the freezing hauteur that you'll receive him with, and the icy
+indifference you'll let him understand that he isn't a _persona grata_
+with! If I were only as tall as you! He isn't as tall himself, and you
+can tower over him. Don't sit down, or bend, or anything; just stand
+with your head up, and glance carelessly at him under your lashes as
+if nobody was there! Then it will gradually dawn upon him that you
+know everything, and he'll simply go through the floor." They take
+some ecstatic turns about the room, Miss Ramsey waltzing as gentleman.
+She abruptly frees herself.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "No. It can't be as tacit as all that. There must be
+something explicit. As you say, I must _do_ something to cure him of
+his fancy--his perfidy--and make him glad to go back to her."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes! Do you think he deserves it?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I've no wish to punish him."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "How noble you are! I don't wonder he adores you. _I_
+should. But you won't find it so easy. You must do something drastic.
+It _is_ drastic, isn't it? or do I mean static? One of those things
+when you simply crush a person. But now I must go. How I should like
+to listen at the door! We must kiss each other very quietly, and I
+must slip out-- Oh, you dear! How I long to know what you'll do! But it
+will be perfect, whatever it is. You always _did_ do perfect things."
+They knit their fingers together in parting. "On second thoughts I
+won't kiss you. It might unman you, and you need all your strength.
+Unman isn't the word, exactly, but you can't say ungirl, can you? It
+would be ridiculous. Though girls are as brave as men when it comes to
+duty. Good-by, dear!" She catches Miss Ramsey about the neck, and
+pressing her lips silently to her cheek, runs out. Miss Ramsey rings
+and the maid appears.
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                          NORA, MISS RAMSEY
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, starting: "Oh! Is that you, Nora? Of course! Nora!"
+
+_Nora_: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Do you know where my brother keeps his cigarettes?"
+
+_Nora_: "Why, in his room, Miss Ramsey; you told him you didn't like
+the smell here."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Yes, yes. I forgot. And has he got any cocktails?"
+
+_Nora_: "He's got the whole bottle full of them yet."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Full yet?"
+
+_Nora_: "You wouldn't let him offer them to the gentlemen he had to
+lunch, last week, because you said--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "What did I say?"
+
+_Nora_: "They were vulgar."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And so they are. And so much the better! Bring the
+cigarettes and the bottle and some glasses here, Nora, and then ask
+Mr. Ashley to come." She walks away to the window, and hurriedly hums
+a musical comedy waltz, not quite in tune, as from not remembering
+exactly, and after Nora has tinkled in with a tray of glasses she
+lights a cigarette and stands puffing it, gasping and coughing a
+little, as Walter Ashley enters. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! Sorry to make you
+wait."
+
+
+                                  V
+
+                       MR. ASHLEY, MISS RAMSEY
+
+_Mr. Ashley_: "The time _has_ seemed long, but I could have waited all
+day. I couldn't have gone without seeing you, and telling you--" He
+pauses, as if bewildered at the spectacle of Miss Ramsey's resolute
+practice with the cigarette, which she now takes from her lips and
+waves before her face with innocent recklessness.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, chokingly: "Do sit down." She drops into an easy-chair
+beside the tea-table, and stretches the tips of her feet out beyond
+the hem of her skirt in extremely lady-like abandon. "Have a
+cigarette." She reaches the box to him.
+
+_Ashley_: "Thank you. I won't smoke, I believe." He stands frowning,
+while she throws her cigarette into a teacup and lights another.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I thought everybody smoked. Then have a cocktail."
+
+_Ashley_: "A what?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "A cocktail. So many people like them with their tea,
+instead of rum, you know."
+
+_Ashley_: "No, I didn't know." He regards her with amaze, rapidly
+hardening into condemnation.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I hope you don't _object_ to smoking. Englishwomen all
+smoke."
+
+_Ashley_: "I think I've heard. I didn't know that American ladies
+did."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "They don't, _all_. But they will when they find how
+nice it is."
+
+_Ashley_: "And do Englishwomen all drink cocktails?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "They will when they find how nice it is. But why do
+you keep standing? Sit down, if it's only for a moment. There is
+something I would like to talk with you about. What were you saying
+when you came in? I didn't catch it quite."
+
+_Ashley_: "Nothing--now--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And I can't persuade you to have a cocktail? I believe
+I'll have another myself." She takes up the bottle, and tries several
+times to pour from it. "I do believe Nora's forgotten to open it! That
+is a good joke on me. But I mustn't let her know. Do you happen to
+have a pocket-corkscrew with you, Mr. Ashley?"
+
+_Ashley_: "No--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Well, never mind." She tosses her cigarette into the
+grate, and lights another. "I wonder why they always have cynical
+persons smoke, on the stage? I don't see that the two things
+necessarily go together, but it does give you a kind of thrill when
+they strike a match, and it lights up their faces when they put it to
+the cigarette. You know something good and wicked is going to happen."
+She puffs violently at her cigarette, and then suddenly flings it away
+and starts to her feet. "Will you--would you--open the window?" She
+collapses into her chair.
+
+_Ashley_, springing toward her: "Miss Ramsey, are you--you are ill!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "No, no! The window! A little faint--it's so
+close-- There, it's all right now. Or it will be--when--I've
+had--another cigarette." She leans forward to take one; Ashley gravely
+watches her, but says nothing. She lights her cigarette, but, without
+smoking, throws it away. "Go on."
+
+_Ashley_: "I wasn't saying anything!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, I forgot. And I don't know what we were talking
+about myself." She falls limply back into her chair and closes her
+eyes.
+
+_Ashley_: "Sha'n't I ring for the maid? I'm afraid--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, imperiously: "Not at all. Not on any account." Far less
+imperiously: "You may pour me a cup of tea if you like. That will make
+me well. The full strength, please." She motions away the hot-water
+jug with which he has proposed qualifying the cup of tea which he
+offers her.
+
+_Ashley_: "One lump or two?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Only one, thank you." She takes the cup.
+
+_Ashley_, offering the milk: "Cream?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "A drop." He stands anxiously beside her while she
+takes a long draught and then gives back the cup. "That was perfect."
+
+_Ashley_: "Another?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "No, that is just right. Now go on. Or, I forgot. You
+were not going on. Oh dear! How much better I feel. There must have
+been something poisonous in those cigarettes."
+
+_Ashley_: "Yes, there was tobacco."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, do you think it was the tobacco? Do throw the
+whole box into the fire! I shall tell Bob never to get cigarettes with
+tobacco in them after this. Won't you have one of the chocolates? Or a
+mallow? I feel as if I should never want to eat anything again. Where
+was I?" She rests her cheek against the side of her chair cushion, and
+speaks with closed eyes, in a weak murmur. Mr. Ashley watches her at
+first with anxiety, then with a gradual change of countenance until a
+gleam of intelligence steals into his look of compassion.
+
+_Ashley_: "You asked me to throw the cigarettes into the fire. But I
+want you to let me keep them."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with wide-flung eyes: "You? You said you wouldn't
+smoke."
+
+_Ashley_, laughing: "May I change my mind? One talks better." He
+lights a cigarette. "And, Miss Ramsey, I believe I _will_ have a
+cocktail, after all."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Mr. Ashley!"
+
+_Ashley_, without noting her protest: "I had forgotten that I had a
+corkscrew in my pocket-knife. Don't trouble yourself to ring for one."
+He produces the knife and opens the bottle; then, as Miss Ramsey rises
+and stands aghast, he pours out a glass and offers it to her, with
+mock devotion. As she shakes her head and recoils: "Oh! I thought you
+liked cocktails. They are very good after cigarettes--very reviving.
+But if you won't--" He tosses off the cocktail and sets down the
+glass, smacking his lips. "Tell your brother I commend his taste--in
+cocktails and"--puffing his cigarette--"tobacco. Poison for poison,
+let me offer you one of _my_ cigarettes. They're milder than these."
+He puts his hand to his breast pocket.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with nervous shrinking: "No--"
+
+_Ashley_: "It's just as well. I find that I hadn't brought mine with
+me." After a moment: "You are so unconventional, so fearless, that I
+should like your notion of the problem in a book I've just been
+reading. Why should the mere fact that a man is married to one woman
+prevent his being in love with another, or half a dozen others; or
+_vice versa_?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Mr. Ashley, do you wish to insult me?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Dear me, no! But put the case a little differently. Suppose
+a couple are merely engaged. Does that fact imply that neither has a
+right to a change of mind, or to be fancy free to make another
+choice?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, indignantly: "Yes, it does. They are as sacredly bound
+to each other as if they were married, and if they are false to each
+other the girl is a wretch, and the man is a villain! And if you think
+anything I have said can excuse you for breaking your engagement, or
+that I don't consider you the wickedest person in the world, and the
+most barefaced hypocrite, and--and--I don't know what--you are very
+much mistaken."
+
+_Ashley_: "What in the world are you talking about?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I am talking about you and your shameless perfidy."
+
+_Ashley_: "My shameless perf-- I don't understand! I came here
+to tell you that I love you--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "How dare you! To speak to me of that, when-- Or
+perhaps you _have_ broken with her, and think you are free to hoodwink
+some other poor creature. But you will find that you have chosen the
+wrong person. And it's no excuse for you her being a little--a
+little--not so bright as some girls, and not so good-looking. Oh, it's
+enough to make any girl loathe her own looks! You mustn't suppose you
+can come here red-handed--yes, it's the same as a murder, and any true
+girl would say so--and tell me you care for me. No, Walter Ashley, I
+haven't fallen so low as that, though I _have_ the disgrace of your
+acquaintance. And I hope--I hope--if you don't like my smoking, and
+offering you cocktails, and talking the way I have, it will be a
+lesson to you. And yes!--I _will_ say it! If it will add to your
+misery to know that I did respect you very much, and thought
+everything--very highly--of you, and might have answered you very
+differently before, when you were free to tell me _that_--now
+I have nothing but the utmost abhorrence--and--disapproval of you.
+And--and-- Oh, I don't see how you can be so hateful!" She hides her
+face in her hands and rushes from the room, overturning several chairs
+in her course toward the door. Ashley remains staring after her, while
+a succession of impetuous rings make themselves heard from the street
+door. There is a sound of opening it, and then a flutter of skirts and
+anxieties, and Miss Garnett comes running into the room.
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                       MISS GARNETT, MR. ASHLEY
+
+_Miss Garnett_, to the maid hovering in the doorway: "Yes, I must have
+left it here, for I never missed it till I went to pay my fare in the
+motor-bus, and tried to think whether I had the exact dime, and if I
+hadn't whether the conductor would change a five-dollar bill or not,
+and then it rushed into my mind that I had left my purse somewhere,
+and I knew I hadn't been anywhere else." She runs from the mantel to
+the writing-desk in the corner, and then to the sofa, where, peering
+under the tea-table, she finds her purse on the shelf. "Oh, here it
+is, Nora, just where I put it when we began to talk, and I must have
+gone out and left it. I--" She starts with a little shriek, in
+encountering Ashley. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! What a fright you gave me! I was
+just looking for my purse that I missed when I went to pay my fare in
+the motor-bus, and was wondering whether I had the exact dime, or the
+conductor could change a five-dollar bill, and--" She discovers, or
+affects to discover, something strange in his manner. "What--what is
+the matter, Mr. Ashley?"
+
+_Ashley_: "I shall be glad to have you tell me--or any one."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I don't understand. Has Isobel--"
+
+_Ashley_: "Miss Garnett, did you know I was engaged?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why, yes; I was just going to congrat--"
+
+_Ashley_: "Well, don't, unless you can tell me whom I am engaged to."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why, aren't you engaged to Emily Fray?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Not the least in the world."
+
+_Miss Garnett_, in despair: "Then _what_ have I done? Oh, what a
+fatal, fatal scrape!" With a ray of returning hope: "But she told me
+_herself_ that she was engaged! And you were together so much, last
+summer!" Desperately: "Then if she isn't engaged to you, whom is she
+engaged to?"
+
+_Ashley_: "On general principles, I shouldn't know, but in this
+particular instance I happen to know that she is engaged to Owen
+Brooks. They were a great deal more together last summer."
+
+_Miss Garnett_, with conviction: "So they were!" With returning doubt:
+"But why didn't she say so?"
+
+_Ashley_: "I can't tell you; she may have had her reasons, or she may
+not. Can you possibly tell me, in return for my ignorance, why the
+fact of her engagement should involve me in the strange way it seems
+to have done with Miss Ramsey?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_, with a burst of involuntary candor: "Why, _I_ did
+that. Or, no! What's she been doing?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Really, Miss Garnett--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "How can I tell you anything, if you don't tell me
+everything? You wouldn't wish me to betray confidence?"
+
+_Ashley_: "No, certainly not. What was the confidence?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Well-- But I shall have to know first what she's been
+doing. You must see that yourself, Mr. Ashley." He is silent. "Has
+she--has Isobel--been behaving--well, out of character?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Very much indeed."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I expected she would." She fetches a thoughtful sigh,
+and for her greater emotional convenience she sinks into an easy-chair
+and leans forward. "Oh dear! It is a scrape." Suddenly and
+imperatively: "Tell me exactly what she did, if you hope for any help
+whatever."
+
+_Ashley_: "Why, she offered me a cocktail--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh, how good! I didn't suppose she would dare! Well?"
+
+_Ashley_: "And she smoked cigarettes--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "How perfectly divine! And what else?"
+
+_Ashley_, coldly: "May I ask why you admire Miss Ramsey's behaving out
+of character so much? I think the smoking made her rather faint, and--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "She would have let it _kill_ her! Never tell me that
+girls have no moral courage!"
+
+_Ashley_: "But what--what was the meaning of it all?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_, thoughtfully: "I suppose if I got her in for it, I
+ought to get her out, even if I betray confidence."
+
+_Ashley_: "It depends upon the confidence. What is it?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why-- But you're sure it's my duty?"
+
+_Ashley_: "If you care what I think of her--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh, Mr. Ashley, you mustn't think it strange of
+Isobel, on my bended knees you mustn't! Why, don't you see? She was
+just doing it to disgust you!"
+
+_Ashley_: "Disgust me?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, and drive you back to Emily Fray."
+
+_Ashley_: "Drive me ba--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "If she thought you were engaged to Emily, when you
+were coming here all the time, and she wasn't quite sure that she
+hated to have you, don't you see it would be her duty to sacrifice
+herself, and-- Oh, I suppose she's heard everything up there, and--"
+She catches herself up and runs out of the room, leaving Ashley to
+await the retarded descent of skirts which he hears on the stairs
+after the crash of the street door has announced Miss Garnett's
+escape. He stands with his back to the mantel, and faces Miss Ramsey
+as she enters the room.
+
+
+                                 VII
+
+                         MISS RAMSEY, ASHLEY
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with the effect of cold surprise: "Mr. Ashley? I
+thought I heard-- Wasn't Miss Garnett--"
+
+_Ashley_: "She was. Did you think it was the street door closing on
+_me_?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "How should I know?" Then, courageously: "No, I didn't
+think it was. Why do you ask?" She moves uneasily about the room, with
+an air of studied inattention.
+
+_Ashley_: "Because if you did, I can put you in the right, though I
+can't restore Miss Garnett's presence by my absence."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "You're rather--enigmatical." A ring is heard; the maid
+pauses at the doorway. "I'm not at home, Nora." To Mr. Ashley: "It
+seems to be very close--"
+
+_Ashley_: "It's my having been smoking."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "_Your_ having?" She goes to the window and tries to
+lift it.
+
+_Ashley_: "Let _me_." He follows her to the window, where he stands
+beside her.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Now, she's seen me! And you here with me. Of course--"
+
+_Ashley_: "I shouldn't mind. But I'm so sorry if--and I will go."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "You can't go now--till she's round the corner. She'll
+keep looking back, and she'll think I made you."
+
+_Ashley_: "But haven't you? Aren't you sending me back to Miss Fray to
+tell her that I must keep my engagement, though I care nothing for
+her, and care all the world for you? Isn't that what you want me to
+do?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "But you're not engaged to her! You just--"
+
+_Ashley_: "Just what?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, desperately: "You wish me to disgrace myself forever in
+your eyes. Well, I will; what does it matter now? I heard you telling
+Esther you were not engaged. I _overheard_ you."
+
+_Ashley_: "I fancied you must."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I _tried_ to overhear! I _eavesdropped_! I wish you to
+know that."
+
+_Ashley_: "And what do you wish me to do about it?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I should think any self-respecting person would know.
+I'm _not_ a self-respecting person." Her wandering gaze seems to fall
+for the first time upon the tray with the cocktails and glasses and
+cigarettes; she flies at the bell-button and presses it impetuously.
+As the maid appears: "Take these things away, Nora, please!" To Ashley
+when the maid has left the room: "Don't be afraid to say what you
+think of me!"
+
+_Ashley_: "I think all the world of you. But I should merely like to
+ask--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, you can ask anything of me now!"
+
+_Ashley_, with palpable insincerity: "I should like to ask why you
+don't respect yourself?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Was that what you were going to ask? I know it wasn't.
+But I will tell you. Because I have been a fool."
+
+_Ashley_: "Thank you. Now I will tell you what I was really going to
+ask. Why did you wish to drive me back to Miss Fray when you knew that
+I would be false to her a thousand times if I could only once be true
+to you?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Now you _are_ insulting me! And that is just the
+point. You may be a very clever lawyer, Mr. Ashley, and everybody says
+you are--very able, and talented, and all that, but you can't get
+round that point. You may torture any meaning you please out of my
+words, but I shall always say you brought it on yourself."
+
+_Ashley_: "Brought what on?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Mr. Ashley! I won't be cross-questioned."
+
+_Ashley_: "Was that why you smoked, and poured cocktails out of an
+unopened bottle? Was it because you wished me to hate you, and
+remember my duty, and go back to Miss Fray? Well, it was a dead
+failure. It made me love you more than ever. I am a fool too, as you
+call it."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Say anything you please. I have given you the right. I
+shall not resent it. Go on."
+
+_Ashley_: "I should only repeat myself. You must have known how much I
+care for you, Isobel. Do you mind my calling you Isobel?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Not in the least if you wish to humiliate me by it. I
+should like you to trample on me in every way you can."
+
+_Ashley_: "Trample on you? I would rather be run over by a
+steam-roller than tread on the least of your outlying feelings,
+dearest. Do you mind my saying dearest?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I have told you that you can say anything you like. I
+deserve it. But oh, if you have a spark of pity--"
+
+_Ashley_: "I'm a perfect conflagration of compassion, darling. Do you
+object to darling?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with starting tears: "It doesn't matter now." She has
+let her lovely length trail into the corner of the sofa, where she
+desperately reclines, supporting her elbow on the arm of it, and
+resting her drooping head on her hand. He draws a hassock up in front
+of her, and sits on it.
+
+_Ashley_: "This represents kneeling at your feet. One doesn't do it
+literally any more, you know."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, in a hollow voice: "I should despise you if you did,
+and"--deeply murmurous--"I don't _wish_ to despise you."
+
+_Ashley_: "No, I understand that. You merely wish _me_ to despise
+_you_. But why?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, nervously: "You know."
+
+_Ashley_: "But I don't know--Isobel, dearest, darling, if you will
+allow me to express myself so fully. _How_ should I know?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I've told you."
+
+_Ashley_: "May I take your hand? For good-by!" He possesses himself of
+it. "It seems to go along with those expressions."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, self-contemptuously: "Oh yes."
+
+_Ashley_: "Thank you. Where were we?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, sitting up and recovering her hand: "You were saying
+good-by--"
+
+_Ashley_: "Was I? But not before I had told you that I knew you were
+doing all that for my best good, and I wish--I _wish_ you could have
+seen how exemplary you looked when you were trying to pour a cocktail
+out of a corked bottle, between your remarks on passionate fiction and
+puffs of the insidious cigarette! When the venomous tobacco began to
+get in its deadly work, and you turned pale and reeled a little, and
+called for air, it made me mentally vow to go back to Miss Fray
+instantly, whether I was engaged to her or not, and cut out poor old
+Brooks--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Was it Mr. Brooks? I didn't hear the name exactly."
+
+_Ashley_: "When I was telling Miss Garnett? I ought to have spoken
+louder, but I wasn't sure at the time you were listening. Though as
+you were saying, what does it matter now?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Did I say that?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Words to that effect. And they have made me feel how
+unworthy of you I am. I'm not heroic--by nature. But I could be, if
+you made me--by art--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, springing to her feet indignantly: "Now, you are
+ridiculing me--you are making fun of me."
+
+_Ashley_, gathering himself up from his hassock with difficulty, and
+confronting her: "Do I look like a man who would dare to make fun of
+you? I am half a head shorter than you, and in moral grandeur you
+overtop me so that I would always have to wear a high hat when I was
+with you."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, thoughtfully: "Plenty of girls are that way, now. But
+if you are ashamed of my being tall--" Flashingly, and with starting
+tears.
+
+_Ashley_: "Ashamed! I can always look up to you, you can always stoop
+to me!" He stretches his arms toward her.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, recoiling bewildered: "Wait! We haven't got to that
+yet."
+
+_Ashley_: "Oh, Isobel--dearest--darling! We've got past it! We're on
+the home stretch, now."
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIX
+
+                      THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
+
+                              A MORALITY
+
+
+                                  I
+
+                    MR. AND MRS. CLARENCE FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Clarence Fountain_, backing into the room, and closing the door
+noiselessly before looking round: "Oh, you poor thing! I can see that
+you are dead, at the first glance. I'm dead myself, for that matter."
+She is speaking to her husband, who clings with one hand to the
+chimney-piece, and supports his back with the other; from this hand a
+little girl's long stocking lumpily dangles; Mrs. Fountain, turning
+round, observes it. "Not finished yet? But I don't wonder! I wonder
+you've even begun. Well, now, _I_ will take hold with you." In token
+of the aid she is going to give, Mrs. Fountain sinks into a chair and
+rolls a distracted eye over the littered and tumbled room. "It's worse
+than I thought it would be. You ought to have smoothed the papers out
+and laid them in a pile as fast as you unwrapped the things; that is
+the way I always do; and wound the strings up and put them one side.
+Then you wouldn't have had to wade round in them. I suppose I oughtn't
+to have left it to you, but if I had let _you_ put the children to bed
+you know you'd have told them stories and kept them all night over
+their prayers. And as it was each of them wanted to put in a special
+Christmas clause; I know what kind of Christmas clause _I_ should have
+put in if I'd been frank! I'm not sure it's right to keep up the
+deception. One comfort, the oldest ones don't believe in it any more
+than we do. Dear! I did think at one time this afternoon I should have
+to be brought home in an ambulance; it would have been a convenience,
+with all the packages. I simply marvel at their delivery wagons
+getting them here."
+
+_Fountain_, coming to the table, where she sits, and taking up one of
+the toys with which it is strewn: "They haven't all of them."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "What do you mean by all of them?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I mean half." He takes up a mechanical locomotive and
+stuffs it into the stocking he holds.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, staying his hand: "What are you doing? Putting
+Jimmy's engine into Susy's stocking! She'll be perfectly insulted when
+she finds it, for she'll know you weren't paying the least attention,
+and you can't blame Santa Claus for it with _her_. If that's what
+you've been doing with the other stockings-- But there _aren't_ any
+others. Don't tell me you've just begun! Well, I could simply cry."
+
+_Fountain_, dropping into the chair on the other side of the table,
+under the shelter of a tall Christmas tree standing on it: "Do you
+call unwrapping a whole car-load of truck and getting it sorted, just
+beginning? I've been slaving here from the dawn of time, and I had to
+have _some_ leisure for the ghosts of my own Christmases when I was
+little. I didn't have to wade round in the wrappings of my presents in
+those days. But it isn't the sad memories that take it out of you;
+it's the happy ones. I've never had a ghastlier half-hour than I've
+just spent in the humiliating multiplicity of these gifts. All the old
+birthdays and wedding-days and Fourth of Julys and home-comings and
+children's christenings I've ever had came trooping back. There
+oughtn't to be any gay anniversaries; they should be forbidden by law.
+If I could only have recalled a few dangerous fevers and funerals!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Clarence! Don't say such a thing; you'll be punished
+for it. I know how you suffer from those gloomy feelings, and I pity
+you. You ought to bear up against them. If _I_ gave way! You must
+think about something cheerful in the future when the happiness of the
+past afflicts you, and set one against the other; life isn't _all_ a
+vale of tears. You must keep your mind fixed on the work before you. I
+don't believe it's the number of the packages here that's broken you
+down. It's the shopping that's worn you out; I'm sure I'm a mere
+thread. And I had been at it from immediately after breakfast; and I
+lunched in one of the stores with ten thousand suburbans who had come
+pouring in with the first of their unnatural trains: I did hope I
+should have some of the places to myself; but they were every one
+jammed. And you came up from your office about four, perfectly fresh."
+
+_Fountain_: "Fresh! Yes, quite dewy from a day's fight with the beasts
+at Ephesus on the eve of Christmas week."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, don't be cynical, Clarence, on this, of all
+nights of the year. You know how sorry I always am for what you have
+to go through down there, and I suppose it's worse, as you say, at
+this season than any other time of year. It's the terrible
+concentration of everything just before Christmas that makes it so
+killing. I really don't know which of the places was the worst; the
+big department stores or the separate places for jewelry and toys and
+books and stationery and antiques; they were all alike, and all
+maddening. And the rain outside, and everybody coming in reeking;
+though I don't believe that sunshine would have been any better;
+there'd have been more of them. I declare, it made my heart ache for
+those poor creatures behind the counters, and I don't know whether I
+suffered most for them when they kept up a ghastly cheerfulness in
+their attention or were simply insulting in their indifference. I know
+they must be all dead by this time. 'Going up?' 'Going down?'
+'Ca-ish!' 'Here, boy!' I believe it will ring in my ears as long as I
+live. And the whiz of those overhead wire things, and having to wait
+ages for your change, and then drag your tatters out of the stores
+into the streets! If I hadn't had you with me at the last I should
+certainly have dropped."
+
+_Fountain_: "Yes, and what had become of your good resolutions about
+doing all your Christmas shopping in July?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "_My_ good resolutions? Really, Clarence, sometimes
+if it were not cruelty to animals I should like to hit you. _My_ good--
+You _know_ that you suggested that plan, and it wasn't even original
+with you. The papers have been talking about it for years; but when
+you brought it up as such a new idea, I fell in with it to please you--"
+
+_Fountain_: "Now, look out, Lucy!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Yes, to please you, and to help you forget the
+Christmas worry, just as I've been doing to-night. You never spare
+_me_."
+
+_Fountain_: "Stick to the record. Why didn't you do your Christmas
+shopping in July?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Why didn't I? Did you expect me to do my Christmas
+shopping down at Sculpin Beach, where I spent the whole time from the
+middle of June till the middle of September? Why didn't _you_ do the
+Christmas shopping in July? You had the stores under your nose here
+from the beginning till the end of summer, with nothing in the world
+to hinder you, and not a chick or a child to look after."
+
+_Fountain_: "Oh, I like that. You think I was leading a life of
+complete leisure here, with the thermometer among the nineties
+nine-tenths of the time?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I only know you were bragging in all your letters
+about your bath and your club, and the folly of any one going away
+from the cool, comfortable town in the summer. I suppose you'll say
+that was to keep me from feeling badly at leaving you. When it was
+only for the children's sake! I will let you take them the next time."
+
+_Fountain_: "While you look after my office? And you think the stores
+are full of Christmas things in July, I suppose."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I never thought so; and now I hope you see the folly
+of that idea. No, Clarence. We must be logical in everything. You
+can't get rid of Christmas shopping at Christmas-time."
+
+_Fountain_, shouting wrathfully: "Then I say get rid of Christmas!"
+
+
+                                  II
+
+              MR. FRANK WATKINS, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Watkins_, opening the door for himself and struggling into the room
+with an armful of parcels: "I'm with you there, Clarence. Christmas is
+at the root of Christmas shopping, and Christmas giving, and all the
+rest of it. Oh, you needn't be afraid, Lucy. I didn't hear any
+epithets; just caught the drift of your argument through the keyhole.
+I've been kicking at the door ever since you began. Where shall I dump
+these things?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Oh, you poor boy! Here--anywhere--on the floor--on
+the sofa--on the table." She clears several spaces and helps Watkins
+unload. "Clarence! I'm surprised at you. What are you thinking of?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I'm thinking that if this goes on, I'll let somebody else
+arrange the presents."
+
+_Watkins_: "If I saw a man coming into my house with a load like this
+to-night, I'd throw him into the street. But living in a ninth-story
+flat like you, it might hurt him."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, reading the inscriptions on the packages: "'For Benny
+from his uncle Frank.' Oh, how sweet of you, Frank! And here's a kiss
+for his uncle Frank." She embraces him with as little interruption as
+possible. "'From Uncle Frank to Jim.' Oh, I know what that is!" She
+feels the package over. "And this is for 'Susy from her aunt Sue.' Oh,
+I knew she would remember her namesake. 'For Maggie. Merry Christmas
+from Mrs. Watkins.' 'Bridget, with Mrs. Watkins's best wishes for a
+Merry Christmas.' Both the girls! But it's like Sue; she never forgets
+anybody. And what's this for Clarence? I _must_ know! Not a
+bath-gown?" Undoing it: "I simply _must_ see it. Blue! His very
+color!" Holding it up: "From you, Frank?" He nods. "Clarence!"
+
+_Watkins_: "If Fountain tries to kiss me, I'll--"
+
+_Fountain_: "I wouldn't kiss you for a dozen bath-gowns." Lifting it
+up from the floor where Mrs. Fountain has dropped it: "It _is_ rather
+nice."
+
+_Watkins_: "Don't overwhelm me."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, dancing about with a long, soft roll in her hand: "Oh,
+oh, oh! She saw me gloating on it at Shumaker's! I do wonder if it
+_is_."
+
+_Fountain_, reaching for it: "Why, open it--"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "You dare! No, it shall be opened the very last thing
+in the morning, now, to punish you! How is poor Sue? I saw her
+literally dropping by the way at Shumaker's."
+
+_Watkins_, making for the door: "Well, she must have got up again. I
+left her registering a vow that if ever she lived to see another
+Christmas she would leave the country months before the shopping
+began. She called down maledictions on all the recipients of her gifts
+and wished them the worst harm that can befall the wicked."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Poor Sue! She simply lives to do people good, and I
+can understand exactly how she feels toward them. I'll be round bright
+and early to-morrow to thank her. Why do you go?"
+
+_Watkins_: "Well, I can't stay here all night, and I'd better let you
+and Clarence finish up." He escapes from her detaining embrace and
+runs out.
+
+
+                                 III
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, intent upon her roll: "How funny he is! I wonder if
+he did hear anything but our scolding voices? Where were we?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I had just called you a serpent."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, with amusement: "No, really?" Feeling the parcel: "If
+it's that Spanish lace scarf I can tell her it was machine lace. I saw
+it at the first glance. But poor Sue has no taste. I suppose I must
+stand it. But I can't bear to think what she's given the girls and
+children. She means well. Did you really say serpent, Clarence? You
+never called me just _that_ before."
+
+_Fountain_: "No, but you called me a laughing hyena, and said I
+scoffed at everything sacred."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I can't remember using the word hyena, exactly,
+though I do think the way you talk about Christmas is dreadful. But I
+take back the laughing hyena."
+
+_Fountain_: "And I take back the serpent. I meant dove, anyway. But
+it's this Christmas-time when a man gets so tired he doesn't know
+what he's saying."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, _you're_ good, anyway, dearest, whatever you
+say; and now I'm going to help you arrange the things. I suppose
+there'll be lots more to-morrow, but we must get rid of these now.
+Don't you wish nobody would do anything for us? Just the
+children--dear little souls! I don't believe but what we can make Jim
+and Susy believe in Santa Claus again; Benny is firm in the faith; he
+put him into his prayer. I declare, his sweetness almost broke my
+heart." At a knock: "Who's that, I wonder? Come in! Oh, it's you,
+Maggie. Well?"
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                  THE FOUNTAINS, FOUNTAIN'S SISTERS
+
+_Maggie_: "It's Mr. Fountain's sisters just telephoned up."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Have them come up at once, Maggie, of course." As
+Maggie goes out: "Another interruption! If it's going to keep on like
+this! Shouldn't you have thought they might have _sent_ their
+presents?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I thought something like it in Frank's case; but I didn't
+say it."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And I don't know why _I_ say it, now. It's because
+I'm so tired I don't know what I _am_ saying. Do forgive me! It's this
+terrible Christmas spirit that gets into me. But now you'll see how
+nice I can be to them." At a tap on the door: "Come in! Come in!
+Don't mind our being in all this mess. So darling of you to come! You
+can help cheer Clarence up; you know his Christmas Eve dumps." She
+runs to them and clasps them in her arms with several half-open
+packages dangling from her hands and contrasting their disarray with
+the neatness of their silk-ribboned and tissue-papered parcels which
+their embrace makes meet at her back. "Minnie! Aggie! To lug here,
+when you ought to be at home in bed dying of fatigue! But it's just
+like you, both of you. Did you ever see anything like the stores
+to-day? Do sit down, or swoon on the floor, or anything. Let me have
+those wretched bundles which are simply killing you." She looks at the
+different packages. "'For Benny from Grandpa.' 'For a good girl, from
+Susy's grandmother.' 'Jim, from Aunt Minnie and Aunt Aggie.' 'Lucy,
+with love from Aggie and Minnie.' And Clarence! What hearts you _have_
+got! Well, I always say there never were such thoughtful girls, and
+you always show such taste and such originality. I long to get at the
+things." She keeps fingering the large bundle marked with her
+husband's name. "Not--not--a--"
+
+_Minnie_: "Yes, a bath-robe. Unless you give him a cigar-case it's
+about the only thing you can give a man."
+
+_Aggie_: "Minnie thought of it and I chose it. Blue, because it's his
+color. Try it on, Clarence, and if it's too long--"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Yes, do, dear! Let's see you with it on." While the
+girls are fussily opening the robe, she manages to push her brother's
+gift behind the door. Then, without looking round at her husband. "It
+isn't a bit too long. Just the very--" Looking: "Well, it can easily
+be taken up at the hem. I can do it to-morrow." She abandons him to
+his awkward isolation while she chatters on with his sisters. "Sit
+down; I insist! Don't think of going. Did you see that frightful pack
+of people when the cab horse fell down in front of Shumaker's?"
+
+_Minnie_: "See it?"
+
+_Aggie_: "We were in the midst of it! I wonder we ever got out alive.
+It's enough to make you wish never to see another Christmas as long as
+you live."
+
+_Minnie_: "A great many _won't_ live. There will be more grippe, and
+more pneumonia, and more appendicitis from those jams of people in the
+stores!"
+
+_Aggie_: "The germs must have been swarming."
+
+_Fountain_: "Lucy was black with them when we got home."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Don't pay the slightest attention to him, girls.
+He'll probably be the first to sneeze himself."
+
+_Minnie_: "I don't know about sneezing. I shall only be too glad if I
+don't have nervous prostration from it."
+
+_Aggie_: "I'm glad we got our motor-car just in time. Any one that
+goes in the trolleys now will take their life in their hand." The
+girls rise and move toward the door. "Well, we must go on now. We're
+making a regular round; you can't trust the delivery wagons at a time
+like this. Good-by. Merry Christmas to the children. They're fast
+asleep by this time, I suppose."
+
+_Minnie_: "I only wish _I_ was!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I believe you, Minnie. Good-by. Good night. Good
+night, Aggie. Clarence, go to the elevator with them! Or no, he can't
+in that ridiculous bath-gown!" Turning to Fountain as the door closes:
+"Now I've done it."
+
+
+                                  V
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Fountain_: "It isn't a thing you could have wished to phrase that
+way, exactly."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And you made me do it. Never thanking them, or
+anything, and standing there like I don't know what, and leaving the
+talk all to me. And now, making me lose my temper again, when I wanted
+to be so nice to you. Well, it is no use trying, and from this on I
+won't. _Clarence!_" She has opened the parcel addressed to herself and
+now stands transfixed with joy and wonder. "_See_ what the girls have
+given me! The very necklace I've been longing for at Planets', and
+denying myself for the last fortnight! Well, never will I say your
+sisters are mean again."
+
+_Fountain_: "You ought to have said that to them."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "It quite reconciles one to Christmas. What? Oh, that
+_was_ rather nasty. You know I didn't mean it. I was so excited I
+didn't know what I was saying. I'm sure nobody ever got on better with
+sisters-in-law, and that shows my tact; if I do make a slip, now and
+then, I can always get out of it. They will understand. Do you think
+it was very nice of them to flaunt their new motor in my face? But of
+course anything _your_ family does is perfect, and always was, though
+I must say this necklace is sweet of them. I wonder they had the
+taste." A tap on the door is heard. "Come in, Maggie!" _Sotto voce._
+"Take it off." She snatches his bath-robe and tosses it behind the
+door.
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                     WILBUR HAZARD, THE FOUNTAINS
+
+_Hazard_: "I suppose I can come in, even if I'm not Maggie. Catch,
+Fountain." He tosses a large bundle to Fountain. "It's huge, but it
+isn't hefty." He turns to go out again.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Oh, oh, oh! Don't go! Come in and help us. What have
+you brought Clarence! May I feel?"
+
+_Hazard_: "You can look, if you like. I'm rather proud of it. There's
+only one other thing you can give a man, and I said, 'No, not a
+cigar-case. Fountain smokes enough already, but if a bath-robe can
+induce him to wash--'" He goes out.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, screaming after him through the open door: "Oh, how
+good! Come back and see it on him." She throws the bath-robe over
+Fountain's shoulders.
+
+_Hazard_, looking in again: "Perfect fit, just as the Jew said, and
+the very color for Fountain." He vanishes, shutting the door behind
+him.
+
+
+                                 VII
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "How coarse! Well, my dear, I don't know where you
+picked up your bachelor friends. I hope this is the last of them."
+
+_Fountain_: "Hazard's the only one who has survived your rigorous
+treatment. But he always had a passion for cold shoulder, poor fellow.
+As bath-robes go, this isn't bad." He gets his arms into it, and walks
+up and down. "Heigh?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Yes, it is pretty good. But the worst of Christmas
+is that it rouses up all your old friends."
+
+_Fountain_: "They feel so abnormally good, confound them. I suppose
+poor old Hazard half killed himself looking this thing up and building
+the joke to go with it."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, take it off, now, and come help me with the
+children's presents. You're quite forgetting about them, and it'll be
+morning and you'll have the little wretches swarming in before you can
+turn round. Dear little souls! I can sympathize with their impatience,
+of course. But what are you going to do with these bath-robes? You
+can't wear _four_ bath-robes."
+
+_Fountain_: "I can change them every day. But there ought to be seven.
+This hood is rather a new wrinkle, though, isn't it? I suppose it's
+for a voyage, and you pull it up over your head when you come through
+the corridor back to your stateroom. We shall have to go to Europe,
+Lucy."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I would go to Asia, Africa, and Oceanica, to escape
+another Christmas. Now if there are any more bath-robes-- Come in,
+Maggie."
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+                        MAGGIE, THE FOUNTAINS
+
+_Maggie_, bringing in a bundle: "Something a District Messenger
+brought. Will you sign for it, ma'am?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "You sign, Clarence. If I know anything about the
+look and the feel of a bundle, this _is_ another bath-robe, but I
+shall soon see." While she is cutting the string and tearing the
+wrappings away, Fountain signs and Maggie goes. Mrs. Fountain shakes
+out the folds of the robe. "Well, upon my word, I should think there
+was conspiracy to insult you, Clarence. I should like to know who has
+had the effrontery-- What's on it?"
+
+_Fountain_, reading from the card which had fallen out of the garment
+to the floor: "'With Christmas greetings from Mrs. Arthur J. Gibby.'"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, dropping the robe and seizing the card: "_Mrs._
+Arthur J. Gibby! Well, upon my word, this _is_ impudence. It's not
+only impudence, it's indelicacy. And I had always thought she was the
+very embodiment of refinement, and I've gone about saying so. Now I
+shall have to take it back. The idea of a lady sending a bath-robe to
+a gentleman! What next, I wonder! What right has Mrs. Gibby to send
+you a bath-robe? Don't prevaricate! Remember that the truth is the
+only thing that can save you. Matters must have gone pretty far, when
+a woman could send you anything so--intimate. What are you staring at
+with that paper? You needn't hope to divert my mind by--"
+
+_Fountain_, giving her the paper in which the robe came: "Seems to be
+for _Mrs._ Clarence Fountain."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, snatching it from him: "What! It is, it is! Oh, poor
+dear Lilly! How can you ever forgive me? She saw me looking at it
+to-day at Shumaker's, and it must have come into her head in despair
+what else to get me. But it was a perfect inspiration--for it was just
+what I was longing for. Why"--laughing hysterically while she holds up
+the robe, and turns it this way and that--"I might have seen at a
+glance that it wasn't a man's, with this lace on and this silk hood,
+and"--she hurries into it, and pulls it forward, looking down at
+either side--"it's just the right length, and if it was made for me it
+couldn't fit me better. What a joke I _shall_ have with Lilly, when I
+tell her about it. I sha'n't spare myself a bit!"
+
+_Fountain_: "Then I hope you'll spare me. I have some little delicacy
+of feeling, and I don't like the notion of a lady's giving me a
+bath-robe. It's--intimate. I don't know where you picked up your girl
+friends."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, capering about joyfully: "Oh, how funny you are,
+darling! But go on. I don't mind it, now. And you may be glad you've
+got off so easily. Only now if there are any more bath-robes--" A
+timid rap is heard at the door. "Come in, Maggie!" The door is slowly
+set ajar, then flung suddenly wide open, and Jim and Susy in their
+night-gowns rush dancing and exulting in.
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+                       JIM, SUSY, THE FOUNTAINS
+
+_Susy_: "We've caught you, we've caught you."
+
+_Jim_: "I just bet it was you, and now I've won, haven't I, mother?"
+
+_Susy_: "And I've won, too, haven't I, father?" Arrested at sight of
+her father in the hooded bath-gown: "He does look like Santa Claus,
+doesn't he, Jimmy? But the real Santa Claus would be all over snow,
+and a long, white beard. You can't fool _us_!"
+
+_Jim_: "You can't fool _us_! We know you, we know you! And mother
+dressed up, too! There isn't any Mrs. Santa Claus, and that proves
+it!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, severely: "Dreadful little things! Who said you might
+come here? Go straight back to bed, this minute, or-- _Will_ you send
+them back, Clarence, and not stand staring so? What are you thinking of?"
+
+_Fountain_, dreamily: "Nothing. Merely wondering what we shall do when
+we've got rid of our superstitions. Shall we be the better for it, or
+even the wiser?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "What put that question into your head? Christmas, I
+suppose; and that's another reason for wishing there was no such
+thing. If I had my way, there wouldn't be."
+
+_Jim_: "Oh, mother!"
+
+_Susy_: "No Christmas?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, not for disobedient children who get out of
+bed and come in, spoiling everything. If you don't go straight back,
+it will be the last time, Santa Claus or no Santa Claus."
+
+_Jim_: "And if we go right back?"
+
+_Susy_: "And promise not to come in any more?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, we'll see how you keep your promise. If you
+don't, that's the end of Christmas in _this_ house."
+
+_Jim_: "It's a bargain, then! Come on, Susy!"
+
+_Susy_: "And we do it for you, mother. And for you, father. We just
+came in for fun, anyway."
+
+_Jim_: "We just came for a surprise."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, kissing them both: "Well, then, if it was only for
+fun, we'll excuse you this time. Run along, now, that's good children.
+_Clarence!_"
+
+
+                                  X
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Fountain_: "Well?" He looks up at her from where he has dropped into
+a chair beside the table strewn with opened and unopened gifts at the
+foot of the Christmas tree.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "What _are_ you mooning about?"
+
+_Fountain_: "What if it was all a fake? Those thousands and hundreds
+of thousands of churches that pierce the clouds with their spires;
+those millions of ministers and missionaries; those billions of
+worshipers, sitting and standing and kneeling, and singing and
+praying; those nuns and monks, and brotherhoods and sisterhoods, with
+their ideals of self-denial, and their duties to the sick and poor;
+those martyrs that died for the one true faith, and those other
+martyrs of the other true faiths whom the one true faith tortured and
+killed; those masses and sermons and ceremonies, what if they were all
+a delusion, a mistake, a misunderstanding? What if it were all as
+unlike the real thing, if there is any real thing, as this pagan
+Christmas of ours is as unlike a Christian Christmas?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, springing up: "I knew it! I knew that it was this
+Christmas giving that was making you morbid again. Can't you shake it
+off and be cheerful--like me? I'm sure I have to bear twice as much of
+it as you have. I've been shopping the whole week, and you've been
+just this one afternoon." She begins to catch her breath, and fails in
+searching for her handkerchief in the folds of her dress under the
+bath-robe.
+
+_Fountain_, offering his handkerchief: "Take mine."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, catching it from him, and hiding her face in it on
+the table: "You ought to help me bear up, and instead of that you
+fling yourself on my sympathies and break me down." Lifting her face:
+"And if it was all a fake, as you say, and an illusion, what would you
+do, what would you give people in place of it?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I don't know."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "What would you have in place of Christmas itself?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I don't know."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, then, I wouldn't set myself up to preach down
+everything--in a blue bath-gown. You've no idea how ridiculous you
+are."
+
+_Fountain_: "Oh, yes, I have. I can see you. You look like one of
+those blue nuns in Rome. But I don't remember any lace on them."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, you don't look like a blue monk, you needn't
+flatter yourself, for there are none. You look like-- What are you
+thinking about?"
+
+_Fountain_: "Oh, nothing. What do you suppose is in all these packages
+here? Useful things, that we need, that we must have? You know without
+looking that it's the superfluity of naughtiness in one form or other.
+And the givers of these gifts, they _had_ to give them, just as we've
+had to give dozens of gifts ourselves. We ought to have put on our
+cards, 'With the season's bitterest grudges,' 'In hopes of a return,'
+'With a hopeless sense of the folly,' 'To pay a hateful debt,' 'With
+impotent rage and despair.'"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I don't deny it, Clarence. You're perfectly right; I
+almost wish we _had_ put it. How it would have made them hop! But
+they'd have known it was just the way they felt themselves."
+
+_Fountain_, going on thoughtfully: "It's the cap-sheaf of the social
+barbarism we live in, the hideous hypocrisy. It's no use to put it on
+religion. The Jews keep Christmas, too, and we know what they think of
+Christianity as a belief. No, we've got to go further back, to the
+Pagan Saturnalia-- Well, I renounce the whole affair, here and now. I'm
+going to spend the rest of the night bundling these things up, and
+to-morrow I'm going to spend the day in a taxi, going round and giving
+them back to the fools that sent them."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And I'm going with you. I hate it as much as you
+do-- Come in, Maggie!"
+
+
+                                  XI
+
+                   MAGGIE, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Maggie_: "Something the elevator-boy says he forgot. It came along
+with the last one."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, taking a bundle from her: "If this is another
+bath-robe, Clarence! It _is_, as I live. Now if it is a woman sending
+it--" She picks up a card which falls out of the robe as she unfolds
+it. "'Love the Giver,' indeed! Now, Clarence, I insist, I demand--"
+
+_Fountain_: "Hold on, hold on, my dear. The last bath-robe that came
+from a woman was for _you_."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "So it was. I don't know what I was thinking about;
+and I do beg your par-- But this is a man's bath-robe!"
+
+_Fountain_, taking the card which she mechanically stretches out to
+him: "And a man sends it--old Fellows. Can't you read print? Ambrose
+J. Fellows, and a message in writing: 'It was a toss-up between this
+and a cigar-case, and the bath-robe won. Hope you haven't got any
+other thoughtful friends.'"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Oh, very brilliant, giving me a start like this! I
+shall let Mr. Fellows know-- What is it, Maggie? Open the door,
+please."
+
+_Maggie_, opening: "It's just a District Messenger."
+
+_Fountain_, ironically: "Oh, only a District Messenger." He signs the
+messenger's slip, while his wife receives from Maggie a bundle which
+she regards with suspicion.
+
+
+                                 XII
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "'From Uncle Philip for Clarence.' Well, Uncle
+Philip, if you have sent Clarence-- _Clarence!_" breaking into
+a whimper: "It is, it is! It's another."
+
+_Fountain_: "Well, that only makes the seventh, and just enough for
+every day in the week. It's quite my ideal. Now, if there's nothing
+about a cigar-case-- Hello!" He feels in the pocket of the robe and
+brings out a cigar-case, from which a slip of paper falls: "'Couldn't
+make up my mind between them, so send both. Uncle Phil.' Well, this
+is the last stroke of Christmas insanity."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "His brain simply reeled under it, and gave way. It
+shows what Christmas really comes to with a man of strong intellect
+like Uncle Phil."
+
+_Fountain_, opening the case: "Oh, I don't know! He's put some cigars
+in here--in a lucid interval, probably. There's hope yet."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, in despair: "No, Clarence, there's no hope. Don't
+flatter yourself. The only way is to bundle back all their presents
+and never, never, never give or receive another one. Come! Let's begin
+tying them up at once; it will take us the rest of the night." A knock
+at the door. "Come, Maggie."
+
+
+                                 XIII
+
+                JIM AND SUSY, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Jim and Susy_, pushing in: "We can't sleep, mother. May we have a
+pillow fight to keep us amused till we're drowsy?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, desolately: "Yes, go and have your pillow fight. It
+doesn't matter now. We're sending the presents all back, anyway." She
+begins frantically wrapping some of the things up.
+
+_Susy_: "Oh, father, are you sending them back?"
+
+_Jim_: "She's just making believe. Isn't she, father?"
+
+_Fountain_: "Well, I'm not so sure of that. If she doesn't do it, I
+will."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, desisting: "Will you go right back to bed?"
+
+_Jim and Susy_: "Yes, we will."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And to sleep, instantly?"
+
+_Jim and Susy_, in succession: "We won't keep awake a minute longer."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Very well, then, we'll see. Now be off with you." As
+they put their heads together and go out laughing: "And remember, if
+you come here another single time, back go every one of the presents."
+
+_Fountain_: "As soon as ever Santa Claus can find a moment for it."
+
+_Jim_, derisively: "Oh, yes, Santa Claus!"
+
+_Susy_: "I guess if you wait for Santa Claus to take them back!"
+
+
+                                 XIV
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Tiresome little wretches. Of course we can't expect
+them to keep up the self-deception."
+
+_Fountain_: "They'll grow to another. When they're men and women
+they'll pretend that Christmas is delightful, and go round giving
+people the presents that they've worn their lives out in buying and
+getting together. And they'll work themselves up into the notion that
+they are really enjoying it, when they know at the bottom of their
+souls that they loathe the whole job."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "There you are with your pessimism again! And I had
+just begun to feel cheerful about it!"
+
+_Fountain_: "Since when? Since I proposed sending this rubbish back to
+the givers with our curse?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "No, I was thinking what fun it would be if we could
+get up a sort of Christmas game, and do it just among relations and
+intimate friends."
+
+_Fountain_: "Ah, I wish you luck of it. Then the thing would begin to
+have some reality, and just as in proportion as people had the worst
+feelings in giving the presents, their best feeling would be hurt in
+getting them back."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Then why did you ever think of it?"
+
+_Fountain_: "To keep from going mad. Come, let's go on with this job
+of sorting the presents, and putting them in the stockings and hanging
+them up on the tree and laying them round the trunk of it. One thing:
+it's for the last time. As soon as Christmas week is over, I shall
+inaugurate an educational campaign against the whole Christmas
+superstition. It must be extirpated root and branch, and the
+extirpation must begin in the minds of the children; we old fools are
+hopeless; we must die in it; but the children can be saved. We must
+organize and make a house-to-house fight; and I'll begin in our own
+house. To-morrow, as soon as the children have made themselves
+thoroughly sick with candy and cake and midday dinner, I will appeal
+to their reason, and get them to agree to drop it; to sign the
+Anti-Christmas pledge; to--"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Clarence! I have an idea."
+
+_Fountain_: "Not a _bright_ one?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Yes, a bright one, even if you didn't originate it.
+Have Christmas confined entirely to children--to the very youngest--to
+children that believe firmly in Santa Claus."
+
+_Fountain_: "Oh, hello! Wouldn't that leave Jim and Susy out? I
+couldn't have _them_ left out."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "That's true. I didn't think of that. Well, say, to
+children that either believe or _pretend_ to believe in him. What's
+_that_?" She stops at a faint, soft sound on the door. "It's Maggie
+with her hands so full she's pushing with her elbow. Come in, Maggie,
+come in. _Come_ in! Don't you hear me? Come in, I say! Oh, it isn't
+Maggie, of course! It's those worthless, worthless little wretches,
+again." She runs to the door calling out, "Naughty, naughty, naughty!"
+as she runs. Then, flinging the door wide, with a final cry of
+"_Naughty_, I say!" she discovers a small figure on the threshold,
+nightgowned to its feet, and looking up with a frightened, wistful
+face. "Why, Benny!" She stoops down and catches the child in her arms,
+and presses him tight to her neck, and bends over, covering his head
+with kisses. "What in the world are you doing here, you poor little
+lamb? Is mother's darling walking in his sleep? What did you want, my
+pet? Tell mudda, do! Whisper it in mudda's big ear! Can't you tell
+mudda? What? Whisper a little louder, love! We're not angry with you,
+sweetness. Now, try to speak louder. Is that Santa Claus? No, dearest,
+that's just dadda. Santa Claus hasn't come yet, but he will soon.
+What? Say it again. _Is_ there any Santa Claus? Why, who else could
+have brought all these presents? Presents for Benny and Jim and Susy
+and mudda, and seven bath-gowns for dadda. Isn't that funny? Seven!
+And one for mudda. What? I can't quite hear you, pet. Are we going to
+send the presents back? Why, who ever heard of such a thing? Jim said
+so? And Susy? Well, I will settle with them, when I come to them. You
+don't want me to? Well, I won't, then, if Benny doesn't want mudda to.
+I'll just give them a kiss apiece, pop in their big ears. What? You've
+got something for Santa Claus to give them? What? Where? In your crib?
+And shall we go and get it? For mudda too? And dadda? Oh, my little
+angel!" She begins to cry over him, and to kiss him again. "You'll
+break my heart with your loveliness. He wants to kiss you too, dadda."
+She puts the boy into his father's arms; then catches him back and
+runs from the room with him. Fountain resumes the work of filling the
+long stocking he had begun with; then he takes up a very short sock.
+He has that in his hand when Mrs. Fountain comes back, wiping her
+eyes. "He'll go to sleep now, I guess; he was half dreaming when he
+came in here. I should think, when you saw how Benny believed in it,
+you'd be ashamed of saying a word against Christmas."
+
+_Fountain_: "Who's said anything against it? I've just been arguing
+for it, and trying to convince you that for the sake of little
+children like Benny it ought to be perpetuated to the end of the
+world. It began with the childhood of the race, in the rejuvenescence
+of the spirit."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Didn't you say that Christmas began with the
+pagans? How monstrously you prevaricate!"
+
+_Fountain_: "That was merely a figure of speech. And besides, since
+you've been out with Benny, I've been thinking, and I take back
+everything I've said or thought against Christmas; I didn't really
+think it. I've been going back in my mind to that first Christmas we
+had together, and it's cheered me up wonderfully."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, tenderly: "Have you, dearest? I _always_ think of it.
+If you could have seen Benny, how I left him, just now?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I shouldn't mind seeing him, and I shouldn't care if I
+gave a glance at poor old Jim and Susy. I'd like to reassure them
+about not sending back the presents." He puts his arm round her and
+presses her toward the door.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "How sweet you are! And how funny! And good!" She
+accentuates each sentiment with a kiss. "And don't you suppose I felt
+sorry for you, making you go round with me the whole afternoon, and
+then leaving you to take the brunt of arranging the presents? Now I'll
+tell you: _next_ year, I _will_ do my Christmas shopping in July. It's
+the only way."
+
+_Fountain_: "No, there's a better way. As you were saying, they don't
+have the Christmas things out. The only way is to do our Christmas
+shopping the day after Christmas; everything will be round still, and
+dog-cheap. Come, we'll begin day after to-morrow."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "We will, we will!"
+
+_Fountain_: "Do you think we will?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, we'll _say_ we will." They laugh together, and
+then he kisses her.
+
+_Fountain_: "Even if it goes on in the same old way, as long as we
+have each other--"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And the children."
+
+_Fountain_: "I forgot the children!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Oh, how delightful you are!"
+
+
+                               THE END
+
+
+
+
+                        BOOKS BY W. D. HOWELLS
+
+  Annie Kilburn. 12mo.
+  April Hopes. 12mo.
+  Between the Dark and Daylight. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Boy Life. Illustrated. 12mo.
+  Boy's Town. Illustrated. Post 8vo.
+  Certain Delightful English Towns. Illustrated. 8vo.
+    Traveller's Edition, Leather.
+  Christmas Every Day, and Other Stories. Illustrated. 12mo.
+    Holiday Edition. Illustrated. 4to.
+  Coast of Bohemia. Illustrated. 12mo.
+  Criticism and Fiction. Portrait. 16mo.
+  Day of Their Wedding. Illustrated. 12mo.
+  Familiar Spanish Travels. Illustrated. 8vo.
+  Fennel and Rue. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Flight of Pony Baker. Post 8vo.
+  Hazard of New Fortunes. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Heroines of Fiction. Illustrated. 2 vols. 8vo.
+  Imaginary Interviews. 8vo.
+  Imperative Duty. 12mo.
+    Paper.
+  Impressions and Experiences. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Kentons. 12mo.
+  Landlord at Lion's Head. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Letters Home. 12mo.
+  Library of Universal Adventure. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth.
+    Three-quarter Calf.
+  Literary Friends and Acquaintance. Illustrated. 8vo.
+  Literature and Life. 8vo.
+  Little Swiss Sojourn. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  London Films. Illustrated. 8vo.
+    Traveller's Edition, Leather.
+  Miss Bellard's Inspiration. 12mo.
+  Modern Italian Poets. Illustrated. 12mo.
+  Mother and the Father. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Mouse-Trap, A Likely Story, The Garroters, Five-o'Clock Tea.
+    Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  My Literary Passions. New Edition. 12mo.
+  My Mark Twain. Illustrated. 8vo.
+  My Year in a Log Cabin. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  Open-Eyed Conspiracy. 12mo.
+  Pair of Patient Lovers. 12mo.
+  Parting and a Meeting. Illustrated. Square 32mo.
+  Quality of Mercy. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Questionable Shapes. Ill'd. 12mo.
+  Ragged Lady. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Roman Holidays. Illustrated. 8vo.
+    Traveller's Edition, Leather.
+  Seven English Cities. Illustrated. 8vo.
+    Traveller's Edition, Leather.
+  Shadow of a Dream. 12mo.
+  Son of Royal Langbrith. 8vo.
+  Stops of Various Quills. Illustrated. 4to.
+    Limited Edition.
+  Story of a Play. 12mo.
+  The Daughter of the Storage. 8vo.
+  The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon. Crown 8vo.
+  Their Silver Wedding Journey. Illustrated. 2 vols. Crown 8vo.
+    In 1 vol. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Through the Eye of a Needle. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Traveller from Altruria. New Edition. 12mo.
+  World of Chance. 12mo.
+  Years of My Youth. Crown 8vo.
+
+
+                                FARCES:
+
+  A Letter of Introduction. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  A Likely Story. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  A Previous Engagement. 32mo.
+    Paper.
+  Evening Dress. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  Five-o'Clock Tea. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  Parting Friends. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  The Albany Depot. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  The Garroters. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  The Mouse-Trap. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  The Unexpected Guests. Illustrated. 32mo.
+
+
+               HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Daughter of the Storage, by 
+William Dean Howells
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30023 ***
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Daughter of the Storage, by William Dean Howells.
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30023 ***</div>
+
+<p><b>TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:</b></p>
+<p>Printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation,
+and ligature usage have been retained except the following:<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; Pg. 117, Ch. VII: Changed comma to period in (relation to life,)<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; Pg. 255, Ch. XVI: Removed ending quote in (the highest sense.")</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE</h1>
+
+<h2>WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS</h2>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE DAUGHTER<br />
+OF THE STORAGE</h2>
+
+<h4>AND OTHER THINGS<br />
+IN PROSE AND VERSE<br /><br /></h4>
+
+<h4>W. D. HOWELLS<br /><br /></h4>
+
+<h4>HARPER &amp; BROTHERS PUBLISHERS</h4>
+<h5>NEW YORK AND LONDON</h5>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p style='text-align:center;'><span class="smcap">The Daughter of the Storage</span></p>
+
+<p style='text-align:center;'>Copyright, 1915, 1916, by Harper &amp; Brothers<br />
+Printed in the United States of America<br />
+Published April, 1916</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" summary="Table of Contents">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#I">I</a></td><td><a href="#THE_DAUGHTER_OF_THE_STORAGE"><span class="smcap">The Daughter of the Storage</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#II">II</a></td><td><a href="#A_PRESENTIMENT"><span class="smcap">A Presentiment</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_45">45</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#III">III</a></td><td><a href="#CAPTAIN_DUNLEVYS"><span class="smcap">Captain Dunlevy's Last Trip</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#IV">IV</a></td><td><a href="#THE_RETURN_TO_FAVOR"><span class="smcap">The Return to Favor</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#V">V</a></td><td><a href="#SOMEBODYS_MOTHER"><span class="smcap">Somebody's Mother</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#VI">VI</a></td><td><a href="#THE_FACE_AT_THE_WINDOW"><span class="smcap">The Face at the Window</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#VII">VII</a></td><td><a href="#AN_EXPERIENCE"><span class="smcap">An Experience</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#VIII">VIII</a></td><td><a href="#THE_BOARDERS"><span class="smcap">The Boarders</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#IX">IX</a></td><td><a href="#BREAKFAST_IS_MY_BEST_MEAL"><span class="smcap">Breakfast Is My Best Meal</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_141">141</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#X">X</a></td><td><a href="#THE_MOTHER-BIRD"><span class="smcap">The Mother-Bird</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_151">151</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XI">XI</a></td><td><a href="#THE_AMIGO"><span class="smcap">The Amigo</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_161">161</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XII">XII</a></td><td><a href="#BLACK_CROSS_FARM"><span class="smcap">Black Cross Farm</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_173">173</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XIII">XIII</a></td><td><a href="#THE_CRITICAL_BOOKSTORE"><span class="smcap">The Critical Bookstore</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_185">185</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XIV">XIV</a></td><td><a href="#A_FEAST_OF_REASON"><span class="smcap">A Feast of Reason</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_227">227</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XV">XV</a></td><td><a href="#CITY_AND_COUNTRY_IN"><span class="smcap">City and Country in the Fall</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XVI">XVI</a></td><td><a href="#TABLE_TALK"><span class="smcap">Table Talk</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_253">253</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XVII">XVII</a></td><td><a href="#THE_ESCAPADE_OF_A"><span class="smcap">The Escapade of a Grandfather</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_269">269</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XVIII">XVIII</a></td><td><a href="#SELF-SACRIFICE_A_FARCE-TRAGEDY"><span class="smcap">Self-Sacrifice: A Farce-tragedy</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_285">285</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XIX">XIX</a></td><td><a href="#THE_NIGHT_BEFORE"><span class="smcap">The Night before Christmas</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_319">319</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_DAUGHTER_OF_THE_STORAGE" id="THE_DAUGHTER_OF_THE_STORAGE"></a>THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE</h2>
+
+<h4><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h4>
+
+<p>They were getting some of their things out to send into the country,
+and Forsyth had left his work to help his wife look them over and
+decide which to take and which to leave. The things were mostly trunks
+that they had stored the fall before; there were some tables and
+Colonial bureaus inherited from his mother, and some mirrors and
+decorative odds and ends, which they would not want in the furnished
+house they had taken for the summer. There were some canvases which
+Forsyth said he would paint out and use for other subjects, but which,
+when he came to look at again, he found really not so bad. The rest,
+literally, was nothing but trunks; there were, of course, two or three
+boxes of books. When they had been packed closely into the five-dollar room,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>
+with the tables and bureaus and mirrors and canvases and decorative
+odds and ends put carefully on top, the Forsyths thought the effect
+very neat, and laughed at themselves for being proud of it.</p>
+
+<p>They spent the winter in Paris planning for the summer in America, and
+now it had come May, a month which in New York is at its best, and in
+the Constitutional Storage Safe-Deposit Warehouse is by no means at
+its worst. The Constitutional Storage is no longer new, but when the
+Forsyths were among the first to store there it was up to the latest
+moment in the modern perfections of a safe-deposit warehouse. It was
+strictly fire-proof; and its long, white, brick-walled, iron-doored
+corridors, with their clean concrete floors, branching from a central
+avenue to the tall windows north and south, offered perspectives
+sculpturesquely bare, or picturesquely heaped with arriving or
+departing household stuff.</p>
+
+<p>When the Forsyths went to look at it a nice young fellow from the
+office had gone with them; running ahead and switching on rows of
+electrics down the corridors, and then, with a wire-basketed electric
+lamp, which he twirled about and held aloft and alow, showing the
+dustless, sweet-smelling spaciousness of a perfect five-dollar room.
+He said it would more than hold their things; and it really held them.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+Now, when the same young fellow unlocked the iron door and set it
+wide, he said he would get them a man, and he got Mrs. Forsyth a gilt
+armchair from some furniture going into an adjoining twenty-dollar
+room. She sat down in it, and "Of course," she said, "the pieces I
+want will be at the very back and the very bottom. Why don't you get
+yourself a chair, too, Ambrose? What are you looking at?"</p>
+
+<p>With his eyes on the neighboring furniture he answered, "Seems to be
+the wreck of a millionaire's happy home; parlor and kitchen utensils
+and office furniture all in white and gold."</p>
+
+<p>"Horrors, yes!" Mrs. Forsyth said, without turning her head from
+studying her trunks, as if she might divine their contents from their
+outside.</p>
+
+<p>"Tata and I," her husband said, "are more interested in the
+millionaire's things." Tata, it appeared, was not a dog, but a child;
+the name was not the diminutive of her own name, which was Charlotte,
+but a generic name for a doll, which Tata had learned from her Italian
+nurse to apply to all little girls and had got applied to herself by
+her father. She was now at a distance down the corridor, playing
+a drama with the pieces of millionaire furniture; as they
+stretched away in variety and splendor they naturally suggested
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+personages of princely quality, and being touched with her little forefinger
+tip were capable of entering warmly into Tata's plans for them.</p>
+
+<p>Her mother looked over her shoulder toward the child. "Come here,
+Tata," she called, and when Tata, having enjoined some tall mirrors to
+secrecy with a frown and a shake of the head, ran to her, Mrs. Forsyth
+had forgotten why she had called her. "Oh!" she said, recollecting,
+"do you know which your trunk is, Tata? Can you show mamma? Can you
+put your hand on it?"</p>
+
+<p>The child promptly put her hand on the end of a small box just within
+her tiptoe reach, and her mother said, "I do believe she knows
+everything that's in it, Ambrose! That trunk has got to be opened the
+very first one!"</p>
+
+<p>The man that the young fellow said he would send showed at the far end
+of the corridor, smaller than human, but enlarging himself to the
+average Irish bulk as he drew near. He was given instructions and
+obeyed with caressing irony Mrs. Forsyth's order to pull out Tata's
+trunk first, and she found the key in a large tangle of keys, and
+opened it, and had the joy of seeing everything recognized by
+the owner: doll by doll, cook-stove, tin dishes, small brooms,
+wooden animals on feet and wheels, birds of various plumage,
+a toy piano, a dust-pan, alphabet blocks, dog's-eared linen
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+Mother Goose books, and the rest. Tata had been allowed to put the
+things away herself, and she took them out with no apparent sense of
+the time passed since she saw them last. In the changing life of her
+parents all times and places were alike to her. She began to play with
+the things in the storage corridor as if it were yesterday when she
+saw them last in the flat. Her mother and father left her to them in
+the distraction of their own trunks. Mrs. Forsyth had these spread
+over the space toward the window and their lids lifted and tried to
+decide about them. In the end she had changed the things in them back
+and forth till she candidly owned that she no longer knew where
+anything at all was.</p>
+
+<p>As she raised herself for a moment's respite from the problem she saw
+at the far end of the corridor a lady with two men, who increased in
+size like her own man as they approached. The lady herself seemed to
+decrease, though she remained of a magnificence to match the
+furniture, and looked like it as to her dress of white picked out in
+gold when she arrived at the twenty-dollar room next the Forsyths'. In
+her advance she had been vividly played round by a little boy, who ran
+forward and back and easily doubled the length of the corridor before
+he came to a stand and remained with his brown eyes fixed on Tata.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+Tata herself had blue eyes, which now hovered dreamily above the
+things in her trunk.</p>
+
+<p>The two mothers began politely to ignore each other. She of the
+twenty-dollar room directed the men who had come with her, and in a
+voice of authority and appeal at once commanded and consulted them in
+the disposition of her belongings. At the sound of the mixed tones
+Mrs. Forsyth signaled to her husband, and, when he came within
+whispering, murmured: "Pittsburg, <i>or</i> Chicago. Did you <i>ever</i> hear
+such a Mid-Western accent!" She pretended to be asking him about
+repacking the trunk before her, but the other woman was not deceived.
+She was at least aware of criticism in the air of her neighbors, and
+she put on greater severity with the workmen. The boy came up and
+caught her skirt. "What?" she said, bending over. "No, certainly not.
+I haven't time to attend to you. Go off and play. Don't I tell you no?
+Well, there, then! Will you get that trunk out where I can open it?
+That small one there," she said to one of the men, while the other
+rested for both. She stooped to unlock the trunk and flung up the lid.
+"Now if you bother me any more I will surely&mdash;" But she lost herself
+short of the threat and began again to seek counsel and issue orders.</p>
+
+<p>The boy fell upon the things in the trunk, which
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+were the things of a boy, as those in Tata's trunk were the things of
+a girl, and to run with them, one after another, to Tata and to pile
+them in gift on the floor beside her trunk. He did not stop running
+back and forth as fast as his short, fat legs could carry him till he
+had reached the bottom of his box, chattering constantly and taking no
+note of the effect with Tata. Then, as she made no response whatever
+to his munificence, he began to be abashed and to look pathetically
+from her to her father.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, really, young man," Forsyth said, "we can't let you impoverish
+yourself at this rate. What have you said to your benefactor, Tata?
+What are you going to give <i>him</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>The children did not understand his large words, but they knew he was
+affectionately mocking them.</p>
+
+<p>"Ambrose," Mrs. Forsyth said, "you mustn't let him."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm trying to think how to hinder him, but it's rather late," Forsyth
+answered, and then the boy's mother joined in.</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, indeed, if you can, it's more than I can. You're just
+worrying the little girl," she said to the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, he isn't, dear little soul," Mrs. Forsyth
+said, leaving her chair and going up to the two
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>
+children. She took the boy's hand in hers. "What a kind boy! But you
+know my little girl mustn't take all your playthings. If you'll give
+her <i>one</i> she'll give <i>you</i> one, and that will be enough.
+You can both play with them all for the present." She referred her
+suggestion to the boy's mother, and the two ladies met at the
+invisible line dividing the five-dollar room from the twenty-dollar
+room.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, indeed," the Mid-Westerner said, willing to meet the
+New-Yorker half-way. "You're taking things out, I see. I hardly know
+which is the worst: taking out or putting in."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we are just completing the experience," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I
+shall be able to say better how I feel in half an hour."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean this is the first time you've stored? I suppose
+<i>we've</i> been in and out of storage twenty times. Not in this warehouse
+exactly; we've never been here before."</p>
+
+<p>"It seems very nice," Mrs. Forsyth suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"They all do at the beginning. I suppose if we ever came to the end
+they would seem nicer still. Mr. Bream's business is always taking him
+away" (it appeared almost instantly that he was the international
+inspector of a great insurance company's agencies in Europe and
+South America), "and when I don't go with him it seems easier
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+to break up and go into a hotel than to go on housekeeping. I don't
+know that it is, though," she questioned. "It's so hard to know what
+to do with the child in a hotel."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but he seems the sort that you could manage with anywhere," Mrs.
+Forsyth agreed and disagreed.</p>
+
+<p>His mother looked at him where he stood beaming upon Tata and again
+joyfully awaiting some effect with her. But the child sat back upon
+her small heels with her eyes fixed on the things in her trunk and
+made no sign of having seen the heaps of his gifts.</p>
+
+<p>The Forsyths had said to each other before this that their little girl
+was a queer child, and now they were not so much ashamed of her
+apparent selfishness or rude indifference as they thought they were.
+They made a joke of it with the boy's mother, who said she did not
+believe Tata was anything but shy. She said she often told Mr. Bream
+that she did wish Peter&mdash;yes, that was his name; she didn't like it
+much, but it was his grandfather's; was Tata a Christian name? Oh,
+just a pet name! Well, it <i>was</i> pretty&mdash;could be broken of <i>his</i>
+ridiculous habit; most children&mdash;little boys, that was&mdash;held onto
+their things so.</p>
+
+<p>Forsyth would have taken something from Tata
+and given it to Peter; but his wife would
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+not let him; and he had to content himself with giving Peter a pencil
+of his own that drew red at one end and blue at the other, and that at
+once drew a blue boy, that looked like Peter, on the pavement. He told
+Peter not to draw a boy now, but wait till he got home, and then be
+careful not to draw a blue boy with the red end. He helped him put his
+things back into his trunk, and Peter seemed to enjoy that, too.</p>
+
+<p>Tata, without rising from her seat on her heels, watched the
+restitution with her dreamy eyes; she paid no attention to the blue
+boy on the pavement; pictures from her father were nothing new to her.
+The mothers parted with expressions of mutual esteem in spite of their
+difference of accent and fortune. Mrs. Forsyth asked if she might not
+kiss Peter, and did so; he ran to his mother and whispered to her;
+then he ran back and gave Tata so great a hug that she fell over from
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Tata did not cry, but continued as if lost in thought which she could
+not break from, and that night, after she had said her prayers with
+her mother, her mother thought it was time to ask her: "Tata, dear,
+why did you act so to that boy to-day? Why didn't you give him
+something of yours when he brought you all his things? Why did you act
+so oddly?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+Tata said something in a voice so low that her mother could not make it out.</p>
+
+<p>"What did you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't tell which," the child still whispered; but now her
+mother's ear was at her lips.</p>
+
+<p>"How, which?"</p>
+
+<p>"To give him. The more I looked," and the whisper became a quivering
+breath, "the more I couldn't tell which. And I wanted to give them
+<i>all</i> to him, but I couldn't tell whether it would be right, because
+you and papa gave them to me for birthday and Christmas," and the
+quivering breath broke into a sobbing grief, so that the mother had to
+catch the child up to her heart.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear little tender conscience!" she said, still wiping her eyes when
+she told the child's father, and they fell into a sweet, serious talk
+about her before they slept. "And I was ashamed of her before that
+woman! I know she misjudged her; but <i>we</i> ought to have remembered how
+fine and precious she is, and <i>known</i> how she must have suffered,
+trying to decide."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, conscience," the father said. "And temperament, the temperament
+to which decision is martyrdom."</p>
+
+<p>"And she will always have to be deciding! She'll have to decide for you, some day, as I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+do now; you are very undecided, Ambrose&mdash;she gets it from you."</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>The Forsyths were afraid that Tata might want to offer Peter some gift
+in reparation the next morning, and her father was quite ready, if she
+said so, to put off their leaving town, and go with her to the
+Constitutional Storage, which was the only address of Mrs. Bream that
+he knew. But the child had either forgotten or she was contented with
+her mother's comforting, and no longer felt remorse.</p>
+
+<p>One does not store the least of one's personal or household gear
+without giving a hostage to storage, a pledge of allegiance impossible
+to break. No matter how few things one puts in, one never takes
+everything out; one puts more things in. Mrs. Forsyth went to the
+warehouse with Tata in the fall before they sailed for another winter
+in Paris, and added some old bits she had picked up at farm-houses in
+their country drives, and they filled the room quite to the top. She
+told her husband how Tata had entered into the spirit of putting back
+her trunk of playthings with the hope of seeing it again in the
+spring; and she added that she had now had to take a seven-fifty
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+room without consulting him, or else throw away the things they had
+brought home.</p>
+
+<p>During the ten or twelve years that followed, the Forsyths sometimes
+spent a whole winter in a hotel; sometimes they had a flat; sometimes
+they had a separate dwelling. If their housing was ample, they took
+almost everything out of storage; once they got down to a two-dollar
+bin, and it seemed as if they really were leaving the storage
+altogether. Then, if they went into a flat that was nearly all studio,
+their furniture went back in a cataclysmal wave to the warehouse,
+where a ten-dollar room, a twelve-dollar room, would not dam the
+overflow.</p>
+
+<p>Tata, who had now outgrown her pet name, and was called Charlotte
+because her mother felt she ought to be, always went with her to the
+storage to help look the things over, to see the rooms emptied down to
+a few boxes, or replenished to bursting. In the first years she played
+about, close to her mother; as she grew older she ventured further,
+and began to make friends with other little girls who had come with
+their mothers. It was quite safe socially to be in the Constitutional
+Storage; it gave standing; and Mrs. Forsyth fearlessly chanced
+acquaintance with these mothers, who would sometimes be there
+whole long mornings or afternoons, taking trunks out or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+putting them in. With the trunks set into the corridors and opened for
+them, they would spend the hours looking the contents over, talking to
+their neighbors, or rapt in long silences when they hesitated with
+things held off or up, and, after gazing absently at them, putting
+them back again. Sometimes they varied the process by laying things
+aside for sending home, and receipting for them at the office as
+"goods selected."</p>
+
+<p>They were mostly hotel people or apartment people, as Mrs. Forsyth
+oftenest was herself, but sometimes they were separate-house people.
+Among these there was one family, not of great rank or wealth, but
+distinguished, as lifelong New-Yorkers, in a world of comers and goers
+of every origin. Mrs. Forsyth especially liked them for a certain
+quality, but what this quality was she could not very well say. They
+were a mother with two daughters, not quite old maids, but on the way
+to it, and there was very intermittently the apparently bachelor
+brother of the girls; at the office Mrs. Forsyth verified her
+conjecture that he was some sort of minister. One could see they were
+all gentlefolks, though the girls were not of the last cry of fashion.
+They were very nice to their mother, and you could tell that they must
+have been coming with her for years.</p>
+
+<p>At this point in her study of them for her
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+husband's amusement she realized that Charlotte had been coming to the
+storage with her nearly all her life, and that more and more the child
+had taken charge of the uneventual inspection of the things. She was
+shocked to think that she had let this happen, and now she commanded
+her husband to say whether Charlotte would grow into a storage old
+maid like those good girls.</p>
+
+<p>Forsyth said, Probably not before her time; but he allowed it was a
+point to be considered.</p>
+
+<p>Very well, then, Mrs. Forsyth said, the child should never go again;
+that was all. She had strongly confirmed herself in this resolution
+when one day she not only let the child go again, but she let her go
+alone. The child was now between seventeen and eighteen, rather tall,
+grave, pretty, with the dull brown hair that goes so well with
+dreaming blue eyes, and of a stiff grace. She had not come out yet,
+because she had always been out, handing cakes at her father's studio
+teas long before she could remember not doing it, and later pouring
+for her mother with rather a quelling air as she got toward fifteen.
+During these years the family had been going and coming between Europe
+and America; they did not know perfectly why, except that it was
+easier than not.</p>
+
+<p>More and more there was a peculiarity in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
+goods selected by Charlotte for sending home, which her mother one day
+noted. "How is it, Charlotte, that you always send exactly the things
+I want, and when you get your own things here you don't know whether
+they are what you wanted or not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I don't know when I send them. I don't choose them; I can't."</p>
+
+<p>"But you choose the right things for me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't, mother. I just take what comes first, and you always
+like it."</p>
+
+<p>"Now, that is nonsense, Charlotte. I can't have you telling me such a
+thing as that. It's an insult to my intelligence. Do you think I don't
+know my own mind?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know <i>my</i> mind," the girl said, so persistently, obstinately,
+stubbornly, that her mother did not pursue the subject for fear of
+worse.</p>
+
+<p>She referred it to her husband, who said: "Perhaps it's like poets
+never being able to remember their own poetry. I've heard it's because
+they have several versions in their minds when they write and can't
+remember which they've written. Charlotte has several choices in her
+mind, and can't choose between her choices."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we ought to have broken her of her indecision. Some day it will
+make her very unhappy."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+"Pretty hard to break a person of her temperament," Forsyth suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"I know it!" his wife admitted, with a certain pleasure in realizing
+the fact. "I don't know what we <i>shall</i> do."</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>Storage society was almost wholly feminine; in rare instances there
+was a man who must have been sent in dearth of women or in an hour of
+their disability. Then the man came hastily, with a porter, and either
+pulled all the things out of the rooms so that he could honestly say
+he had seen them, and that the thing wanted was not there; or else
+merely had the doors opened, and after a glance inside resolved to
+wait till his wife, or mother, or daughter could come. He agreed in
+guilty eagerness with the workmen that this was the only way.</p>
+
+<p>The exception to the general rule was a young man who came one bright
+spring morning when all nature suggested getting one's stuff out and going
+into the country, and had the room next the Forsyths' original five-dollar
+room opened. As it happened, Charlotte was at the moment visiting this room
+upon her mother's charge to see whether certain old scrim sash-curtains, which
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+they had not needed for ages but at last simply <i>must</i> have, were not
+lurking there in a chest of general curtainings. The Forsyths now had
+rooms on other floors, but their main room was at the end of the
+corridor branching northward from that where the five-dollar room was.
+Near this main room that nice New York family had their rooms, and
+Charlotte had begun the morning in their friendly neighborhood, going
+through some chests that might perhaps have the general curtainings in
+them and the scrim curtains among the rest. It had not, and she had
+gone to what the Forsyths called their old ancestral five-dollar room,
+where that New York family continued to project a sort of wireless
+chaperonage over her. But the young man had come with a porter, and,
+with her own porter, Charlotte could not feel that even a wireless
+chaperonage was needed, though the young man approached with the most
+beaming face she thought she had ever seen, and said he hoped he should
+not be in her way. She answered with a sort of helpless reverberation
+of his glow, Not at all; she should only be a moment. She wanted to say
+she hoped she would not be in <i>his</i> way, but she saved herself in
+time, while, with her own eyes intent upon the fa&ccedil;ade of her room
+and her mind trying to lose itself in the question which curtain-trunk
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+the scrims might be in, she kept the sense of his sweet eyes, the
+merriest eyes she had ever seen, effulgent with good-will and apology
+and reverent admiration. She blushed to think it admiration, though
+she liked to think it so, and she did not snub him when the young man
+jumped about, neglecting his own storage, and divining the right
+moments for his offers of help. She saw that he was a little shorter
+than herself, that he was very light and quick on his feet, and had a
+round, brown face, clean-shaven, and a round, brown head, close shorn,
+from which in the zeal of his attentions to her he had shed his straw
+hat onto the window-sill. He formed a strong contrast to the contents
+of his store-room, which was full, mainly, of massive white furniture
+picked out in gold, and very blond. He said casually that it had been
+there, off and on, since long before he could remember, and at these
+words an impression, vague, inexplicable, deepened in Charlotte's mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother," she said, for she had now disused the earlier "mamma" in
+deference to modern usage, "how old was I when we first took that
+five-dollar room?"</p>
+
+<p>She asked this question after she had shown the scrim curtains she had
+found and brought home with her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+"Why? I don't know. Two or three; three or four. I should have to
+count up. What makes you ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"Can a person recollect what happened when they were three or four?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should say not, decidedly."</p>
+
+<p>"Or recollect a face?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not."</p>
+
+<p>"Then of course it wasn't. Mother, do you remember ever telling me
+what the little boy was like who gave me all his playthings and I
+couldn't decide what to give him back?"</p>
+
+<p>"What a question! Of course not! He was very brown and funny, with the
+beamingest little face in the world. Rather short for his age, I
+should say, though I haven't the least idea what his age was."</p>
+
+<p>"Then it was the very same little boy!" Charlotte said.</p>
+
+<p>"Who was the very same little boy?" her mother demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"The one that was there to-day; the young man, I mean," Charlotte
+explained, and then she told what had happened with a want of fullness
+which her mother's imagination supplied.</p>
+
+<p>"Did he say who he was? Is he coming back to-morrow or this afternoon?
+Did you inquire who he was or where?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+"What an idea, mother!" Charlotte said, grouping the several
+impossibilities under one head in her answer.</p>
+
+<p>"You had a perfect right to know, if you thought he was the one."</p>
+
+<p>"But I didn't <i>think</i> he was the one, and I don't <i>know</i> that he is
+now; and if he was, what could I do about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is true," Mrs. Forsyth owned. "But it's very disappointing. I've
+always felt as if they ought to know it was your undecidedness and not
+ungenerousness."</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte laughed a little forlornly, but she only said, "Really,
+mother!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Forsyth was still looking at the curtains. "Well, these are not
+the scrims I wanted. You must go back. I believe I will go with you.
+The sooner we have it over the better," she added, and she left the
+undecided Charlotte to decide whether she meant the scrim curtains or
+the young man's identity.</p>
+
+<p>It was very well, for one reason, that she decided to go with
+Charlotte that afternoon. The New-Yorkers must have completed the
+inspection of their trunks, for they had not come back. Their failure
+to do so was the more important because the young man had come back
+and was actively superintending the unpacking of his room. The
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+palatial furniture had all been ranged up and down the corridor, and
+as fast as a trunk was got out and unlocked he went through it with
+the help of the storage-men, listed its contents in a note-book with a
+number, and then transferred the number and a synopsis of the record
+to a tag and fastened it to the trunk, which he had put back into the
+room.</p>
+
+<p>When the Forsyths arrived with the mistaken scrim curtains, he
+interrupted himself with apologies for possibly being in their way;
+and when Mrs. Forsyth said he was not at all in their way, he got
+white-and-gold arm-chairs for her and Charlotte and put them so
+conveniently near the old ancestral room that Mrs. Forsyth scarcely
+needed to move hand or foot in letting Charlotte restore the wrong
+curtains and search the chests for the right ones. His politeness made
+way for conversation and for the almost instant exchange of
+confidences between himself and Mrs. Forsyth, so that Charlotte was
+free to enjoy the silence to which they left her in her labors.</p>
+
+<p>"Before I say a word," Mrs. Forsyth said, after saying some hundreds
+in their mutual inculpation and exculpation, "I want to ask something,
+and I hope you will excuse it to an old woman's curiosity and not
+think it rude."</p>
+
+<p>At the words "old woman's" the young man
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+gave a protesting "Oh!" and at the word "rude" he said, "Not at all."</p>
+
+<p>"It is simply this: how long have your things been here? I ask because
+we've had this room thirteen or fourteen years, and I've never seen
+your room opened in that whole time."</p>
+
+<p>The young man laughed joyously. "Because it hasn't been opened in that
+whole time. I was a little chap of three or four bothering round here
+when my mother put the things in; I believe it was a great frolic for
+me, but I'm afraid it wasn't for her. I've been told that my
+activities contributed to the confusion of the things and the things
+in them that she's been in ever since, and I'm here now to make what
+reparation I can by listing them."</p>
+
+<p>"She'll find it a great blessing," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I wish we had
+ours listed. I suppose you remember it all very vividly. It must have
+been a great occasion for you seeing the things stored at that age."</p>
+
+<p>The young man beamed upon her. "Not so great as now, I'm afraid. The
+fact is, I don't remember anything about it. But I've been told that I
+embarrassed with my personal riches a little girl who was looking over
+her doll's things."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, indeed!" Mrs. Forsyth said, stiffly, and she
+turned rather snubbingly from him and said,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+coldly, to Charlotte: "I think they are in that green trunk. Have you
+the key?" and, stooping as her daughter stooped, she whispered,
+"Really!" in condemnation and contempt.</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte showed no signs of sharing either, and Mrs. Forsyth could
+not very well manage them alone. So when Charlotte said, "No, I
+haven't the key, mother," and the young man burst in with, "Oh, do let
+me try my master-key; it will unlock anything that isn't a Yale," Mrs.
+Forsyth sank back enthroned and the trunk was thrown open.</p>
+
+<p>She then forgot what she had wanted it opened for. Charlotte said,
+"They're not here, mother," and her mother said, "No, I didn't suppose
+they were," and began to ask the young man about his mother. It
+appeared that his father had died twelve years before, and since then
+his mother and he had been nearly everywhere except at home, though
+mostly in England; now they had come home to see where they should go
+next or whether they should stay.</p>
+
+<p>"That would never suit my daughter," Mrs. Forsyth lugged in, partly
+because the talk had gone on away from her family as long as she could
+endure, and partly because Charlotte's indecision always amused her.
+"She can't bear to choose."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+"Really?" the young man said. "I don't know whether I like it or not,
+but I have had to do a lot of it. You mustn't think, though, that I
+chose this magnificent furniture. My father bought an Italian palace
+once, and as we couldn't live in it or move it we brought the
+furniture here."</p>
+
+<p>"It <i>is</i> magnificent," Mrs. Forsyth said, looking down the long
+stretches of it and eying and fingering her specific throne. "I wish
+my husband could see it&mdash;I don't believe he remembers it from fourteen
+years ago. It looks&mdash;excuse me!&mdash;very studio."</p>
+
+<p>"Is he a painter? Not Mr. Forsyth the painter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Mrs. Forsyth eagerly admitted, but wondering how he should know
+her name, without reflecting that a score of trunk-tags proclaimed it
+and that she had acquired his by like means.</p>
+
+<p>"I like his things so much," he said. "I thought his three portraits
+were the best things in the Salon last year."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you <i>saw</i> them?" Mrs. Forsyth laughed with pleasure and
+pride. "Then," as if it necessarily followed, "you must come to us
+some Sunday afternoon. You'll find a number of his new portraits
+and some of the subjects; they like to see themselves framed."
+She tried for a card in her hand-bag, but she had none, and she
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+said, "Have you one of my cards, my dear?" Charlotte had, and rendered
+it up with a severity lost upon her for the moment. She held it toward
+him. "It's Mr. <i>Peter</i> Bream?" she smiled upon him, and he beamed
+back.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you remember it from our first meeting?"</p>
+
+<p>In their cab Mrs. Forsyth said, "I don't know whether he's what you
+call rather fresh or not, Charlotte, and I'm not sure that I've been
+very wise. But he is so nice, and he looked so <i>glad</i> to be asked."</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte did not reply at once, and her silent severity came to the
+surface of her mother's consciousness so painfully that it was rather
+a relief to have her explode, "Mother, I will thank you not to discuss
+my temperament with people."</p>
+
+<p>She gave Mrs. Forsyth her chance, and her mother was so happy in being
+able to say, "I won't&mdash;your <i>temper</i>, my dear," that she could add
+with sincere apology: "I'm sorry I vexed you, and I won't do it
+again."</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>The next day was Sunday; Peter Bream took it for some Sunday,
+and came to the tea on Mrs. Forsyth's generalized invitation.
+She pulled her mouth down and her eyebrows up when his card
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+was brought in, but as he followed hard she made a lightning change to
+a smile and gave him a hand of cordial welcome. Charlotte had no
+choice but to welcome him, too, and so the matter was simple for her.
+She was pouring, as usual, for her mother, who liked to eliminate
+herself from set duties and walk round among the actual portraits in
+fact and in frame and talk about them to the potential portraits.
+Peter, qualified by long sojourn in England, at once pressed himself
+into the service of handing about the curate's assistant; Mrs. Forsyth
+electrically explained that it was one of the first brought to New
+York, and that she had got it at the Stores in London fifteen years
+before, and it had often been in the old ancestral room, and was there
+on top of the trunks that first day. She did not recur to the famous
+instance of Charlotte's infant indecision, and Peter was safe from a
+snub when he sat down by the girl's side and began to make her laugh.
+At the end, when her mother asked Charlotte what they had been
+laughing about, she could not tell; she said she did not know they
+were laughing.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning Mrs. Forsyth was paying for her Sunday tea with a Monday
+headache, and more things must be got out for the country. Charlotte had again
+no choice but to go alone to the storage, and yet again no choice but to be
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+pleasant to Peter when she found him next door listing the contents of
+his mother's trunks and tagging them as before. He dropped his work
+and wanted to help her. Suddenly they seemed strangely well
+acquainted, and he pretended to be asked which pieces she should put
+aside as goods selected, and chose them for her. She hinted that he
+was shirking his own work; he said it was an all-summer's job, but he
+knew her mother was in a hurry. He found the little old trunk of her
+playthings, and got it down and opened it and took out some toys as
+goods selected. She made him put them back, but first he catalogued
+everything in it and synopsized the list on a tag and tagged the
+trunk. He begged for a broken doll which he had not listed, and
+Charlotte had so much of her original childish difficulty in parting
+with that instead of something else that she refused it.</p>
+
+<p>It came lunch-time, and he invited her to go out to lunch with him;
+and when she declined with dignity he argued that if they went to the
+Woman's Exchange she would be properly chaperoned by the genius of the
+place; besides, it was the only place in town where you got real
+strawberry shortcake. She was ashamed of liking it all; he besought
+her to let him carry her hand-bag for her, and, as he already
+had it, she could not prevent him; she did not know, really, how
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+far she might successfully forbid him in anything. At the street door
+of the apartment-house they found her mother getting out of a cab, and
+she asked Peter in to lunch; so that Charlotte might as well have lunched
+with him at the Woman's Exchange.</p>
+
+<p>At all storage warehouses there is a season in autumn when the
+corridors are heaped with the incoming furniture of people who have
+decided that they cannot pass another winter in New York and are
+breaking up housekeeping to go abroad indefinitely. But in the spring,
+when the Constitutional Safe-Deposit offered ample space for
+thoughtful research, the meetings of Charlotte and Peter could recur
+without more consciousness of the advance they were making toward the
+fated issue than in so many encounters at tea or luncheon or dinner.
+Mrs. Forsyth was insisting on rather a drastic overhauling of her
+storage that year. Some of the things, by her command, were shifted to
+and fro between the more modern rooms and the old ancestral room, and
+Charlotte had to verify the removals. In deciding upon goods selected
+for the country she had the help of Peter, and she helped him by
+interposing some useful hesitations in the case of things he had put
+aside from his mother's possessions to be sold for her by the
+warehouse people.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+One day he came late and told Charlotte that his mother had suddenly
+taken her passage for England, and they were sailing the next morning.
+He said, as if it logically followed, that he had been in love with
+her from that earliest time when she would not give him the least of
+her possessions, and now he asked her if she would not promise him the
+greatest. She did not like what she felt "rehearsed" in his proposal;
+it was not her idea of a proposal, which ought to be spontaneous and
+unpremeditated in terms; at the same time, she resented his
+precipitation, which she could not deny was inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>She perceived that they were sitting side by side on two of those
+white-and-gold thrones, and she summoned an indignation with the
+absurdity in refusing him. She rose and said that she must go; that
+she must be going; that it was quite time for her to go; and she would
+not let him follow her to the elevator, as he made some offer of
+doing, but left him standing among his palatial furniture like a
+prince in exile.</p>
+
+<p>By the time she reached home she had been able to decide that she must
+tell her mother at once. Her mother received the fact of Peter's proposal
+with such transport that she did not realize the fact of Charlotte's
+refusal. When this was connoted to her she could scarcely keep her
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+temper within the bounds of maternal tenderness. She said she would
+have nothing more to do with such a girl; that there was but one such
+pearl as Peter in the universe, and for Charlotte to throw him away
+like that! Was it because she could not decide? Well, it appeared that
+she could decide wrong quickly enough when it came to the point. Would
+she leave it now to her mother?</p>
+
+<p>That Charlotte would not do, but what she did do was to write a letter
+to Peter taking him back as much as rested with her; but delaying so
+long in posting it, when it was written, that it reached him among the
+letters sent on board and supplementarily delivered by his room
+steward after all the others when the ship had sailed. The best Peter
+could do in response was a jubilant Marconigram of unequaled cost and
+comprehensiveness.</p>
+
+<p>His mother had meant to return in the fall, after her custom, to find
+out whether she wished to spend the winter in New York or not. Before
+the date for her sailing she fell sick, and Peter came sadly home
+alone in the spring. Mrs. Bream's death brought Mrs. Forsyth a vain
+regret; she was sorry now that she had seen so little of Mrs. Bream;
+Peter's affection for her was beautiful and spoke worlds for both of
+them; and they, the Forsyths, must do what they could to comfort him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+Charlotte felt the pathos of his case peculiarly when she went to make
+provision for goods selected for the summer from the old ancestral
+room, and found him forlorn among his white-and-gold furniture next
+door. He complained that he had no association with it except the
+touching fact of his mother's helplessness with it, which he had now
+inherited. The contents of the trunks were even less intimately of his
+experience; he had performed a filial duty in listing their contents,
+which long antedated him, and consisted mostly of palatial bric-&agrave;-brac
+and the varied spoils of travel.</p>
+
+<p>He cheered up, however, in proposing to her that they should buy a
+Castle in Spain and put them into it. The fancy pleased her, but
+visibly she shrank from a step which it involved, so that he was, as
+it were, forced to say, half jokingly, half ruefully, "I can imagine
+your not caring for this rubbish or what became of it, Charlotte, but
+what about the owner?"</p>
+
+<p>"The owner?" she asked, as it were somnambulantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Marrying him, say, sometime soon."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Peter, I couldn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't? You know that's not playing the game exactly."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but not&mdash;not right away?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+"Well, I don't know much about it in my own case, but isn't it usual
+to fix some approximate date? When should you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Peter, I <i>can't</i> think."</p>
+
+<p>"Will you let me fix it? I must go West and sell out and pull up, you
+know, preparatory to never going again. We can fix the day now or we
+can fix it when I come back."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, when you come back," she entreated so eagerly that Peter said:</p>
+
+<p>"Charlotte, let me ask you one thing. Were you ever sorry you wrote me
+that taking-back letter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Peter, you know how I am. When I have decided something I have
+undecided it. That's all."</p>
+
+<p>From gay he turned to grave. "I ought to have thought. I haven't been
+fair; <i>I</i> haven't played the game. I ought to have given you another
+chance; and I haven't, have I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I suppose a girl can always change," Charlotte said,
+suggestively.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but you won't always be a girl. I've never asked you if you
+wanted to change. I ask you now. Do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"How can I tell? Hadn't we better let it go as it is? Only not hurry
+about&mdash;about&mdash;marrying?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+"Certainly not hurry about marrying. I've wondered that a girl could
+make up her mind to marry any given man. Haven't you ever wished that
+you had not made up your mind about me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hundreds of times. But I don't know that I meant anything by it."</p>
+
+<p>He took her hand from where it lay in her lap as again she sat on one
+of the white-and-gold thrones beside him and gently pressed it. "Well,
+then, let's play we have never been engaged. I'm going West to-night
+to settle things up for good, and I won't be back for three or four
+months, and when I come back we'll start new. I'll ask you, and you
+shall say yes or no just as if you had never said either before."</p>
+
+<p>"Peter, when you talk like that!" She saw his brown, round face dimly
+through her wet eyes, and she wanted to hug him for pity of him and
+pride in him, but she could not decide to do it. They went out to
+lunch at the Woman's Exchange, and the only regret Peter had was that
+it was so long past the season of strawberry shortcake, and that
+Charlotte seemed neither to talk nor to listen; she ought to have done
+one or the other.</p>
+
+<p>They had left the Vaneckens busy with their summer trunks at the
+far end of the northward corridor, where their wireless station
+had been re-established for Charlotte's advantage, though
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+she had not thought of it the whole short morning long. When she came
+back from lunch the Vaneckens were just brushing away the crumbs of
+theirs, which the son and brother seemed to have brought in for them
+in a paper box; at any rate, he was now there, making believe to help
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Forsyth had promised to come, but she came so late in the
+afternoon that she owned she had been grudgingly admitted at the
+office, and she was rather indignant about it. By this time, without
+having been West for three months, Peter had asked a question which
+had apparently never been asked before, and Charlotte had as newly
+answered it. "And now, mother," she said, while Mrs. Forsyth passed
+from indignant to exultant, "I want to be married right away, before
+Peter changes his mind about taking me West with him. Let us go home
+at once. You always said I should have a home wedding."</p>
+
+<p>"What a ridiculous idea!" Mrs. Forsyth said, more to gain time
+than anything else. She added, "Everything is at sixes and sevens
+in the flat. There wouldn't be standing-room." A sudden thought
+flashed upon her, which, because it was sudden and in keeping
+with her character, she put into tentative words. "You're more
+at home <i>here</i> than anywhere else. You were almost born
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+here. You've played about here ever since you were a child. You first
+met Peter here. He proposed to you here, and you rejected him here.
+He's proposed here again, and you've accepted him, you say&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Mother!" Charlotte broke in terribly upon her. "Are you suggesting
+that I should be married in a storage warehouse? Well, I haven't
+fallen quite so low as that yet. If I can't have a <i>home</i> wedding, I
+will have a <i>church</i> wedding, and I will wait till doomsday for it if
+necessary."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know about doomsday," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but as far as
+to-day is concerned, it's too late for a church wedding. Peter, isn't
+there something about canonical hours? And isn't it past them?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's in the Episcopal Church," Peter said, and then he asked, very
+politely, "Will you excuse me for a moment?" and walked away as if he
+had an idea. It was apparently to join the Vaneckens, who stood in a
+group at the end of their corridor, watching the restoration of the
+trunks which they had been working over the whole day. He came back
+with Mr. Vanecken and Mr. Vanecken's mother. He was smiling radiantly,
+and they amusedly.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right," he explained. "Mr. Vanecken is a Presbyterian
+minister, and he will marry us now."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+"But not here!" Charlotte cried, feeling herself weaken.</p>
+
+<p>"No, certainly not," the dominie reassured her. "I know a church in
+the next block that I can borrow for the occasion. But what about the
+license?"</p>
+
+<p>It was in the day before the parties must both make application in
+person, and Peter took a paper from his breast pocket. "I thought it
+might be needed, sometime, and I got it on the way up, this morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, how thoughtful of you, Peter!" Mrs. Forsyth moaned in admiration
+otherwise inexpressible, and the rest laughed, even Charlotte, who
+laughed hysterically. At the end of the corridor they met the Misses
+Vanecken waiting for them, unobtrusively expectant, and they all went
+down in the elevator together. Just as they were leaving the building,
+which had the air of hurrying them out, Mrs. Forsyth had an
+inspiration. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed, and then, in deference to
+Mr. Vanecken, said, "Good gracious, I <i>mean</i>. My husband! Peter, go
+right into the office and telephone Mr. Forsyth."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," Mr. Vanecken said, "I had better go and see about having my
+friend's church opened, in the meanwhile, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"By all means!" Mrs. Forsyth said from her mood of universal
+approbation.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+But Mr. Vanecken came back looking rather queer and crestfallen. "I
+find my friend has gone into the country for a few days; and I don't
+quite like to get the sexton to open the church without his authority,
+and&mdash; But New York is full of churches, and we can easily find another,
+with a little delay, if&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at Peter, who looked at Charlotte, who burst out with
+unprecedented determination. "No, we can't wait. I shall never marry
+Peter if we do. Mother, you are right. But <i>must</i> it be in the old
+ancestral five-dollar room?"</p>
+
+<p>They all laughed except Charlotte, who was more like crying.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not," Mr. Vanecken said. "I've no doubt the manager&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He never seemed to end his sentences, and he now left this one broken
+off while he penetrated the railing which fenced in the manager alone
+among a group of vacated desks, frowning impatient. At some murmured
+words from the dominie, he shouted, "<i>What!</i>" and then came out
+radiantly smiling, and saying, "Why, certainly." He knew all the group
+as old storers in the Constitutional, and called them each by name as
+he shook them each by the hand. "Everything else has happened here,
+and I don't see why this shouldn't. Come right into the
+reception-room."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+With some paintings of biblical subjects, unclaimed from the storage,
+on the walls, the place had a religious effect, and the manager
+significantly looked out of it a lingering stenographer, who was
+standing before a glass with two hatpins crossed in her mouth
+preparatory to thrusting them through the straw. She withdrew, visibly
+curious and reluctant, and then the manager offered to withdraw
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"No," Charlotte said, surprisingly initiative in these junctures, "I
+don't know how it is in Mr. Vanecken's church, but, if father doesn't
+come, perhaps you'll have to give me away. At any rate, you're an old
+friend of the family, and I should be hurt if you didn't stay."</p>
+
+<p>She laid her hand on the manager's arm, and just as he had
+protestingly and politely consented, her father arrived in a taxicab,
+rather grumbling from having been obliged to cut short a sitting. When
+it was all over, and the Vaneckens were eliminated, when, in fact, the
+Breams had joined the Forsyths at a wedding dinner which the bride's
+father had given them at Delmonico's and had precipitated themselves into
+a train for Niagara ("So banal," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but I suppose they
+had to go somewhere, and <i>we</i> went to Niagara, come to think of it,
+and it's on their way West"), the bride's mother remained up late talking it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+all over. She took credit to herself for the whole affair, and gave
+herself a great deal of just praise. But when she said, "I do believe,
+if it hadn't been for me, at the last, Charlotte would never have made
+up her mind," Forsyth demurred.</p>
+
+<p>"I should say Peter had a good deal to do with making up her mind for
+her."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you might say that."</p>
+
+<p>"And for once in her life Charlotte seems to have had her mind ready
+for making up."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you might say that, too. I believe she is going to turn out a
+decided character, after all. I <i>never</i> saw anybody so determined not
+to be married in a storage warehouse."</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>A PRESENTIMENT</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="II" id="II">II</a></h2>
+<h2><a name="A_PRESENTIMENT" id="A_PRESENTIMENT">A PRESENTIMENT</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Over our coffee in the Turkish room Minver was usually a censor of our
+several foibles rather than a sharer in our philosophic speculations
+and metaphysical conjectures. He liked to disable me as one
+professionally vowed to the fabulous, and he had unfailing fun with
+the romantic sentimentality of Rulledge, which was in fact so little
+in keeping with the gross super-abundance of his person, his habitual
+gluttony, and his ridiculous indolence. Minver knew very well that
+Rulledge was a good fellow withal, and would willingly do any kind
+action that did not seriously interfere with his comfort, or make too
+heavy a draft upon his pocket. His self-indulgence, which was quite
+blameless, unless surfeit is a fault, was the basis of an interest in
+occult themes, which was the means of even higher diversion to Minver. He
+liked to have Rulledge approach Wanhope from this side, in the invincible
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+persuasion that the psychologist would be interested in these themes
+by the law of his science, though he had been assured again and again
+that in spite of its misleading name psychology did not deal with the
+soul as Rulledge supposed the soul; and Minver's eyes lighted up with
+a prescience of uncommon pleasure when, late one night, after we had
+vainly tried to hit it off in talk, now of this, now of that, Rulledge
+asked Wanhope, abruptly as if it followed from something before:</p>
+
+<p>"Wasn't there a great deal more said about presentiments forty or
+fifty years ago than there is now?"</p>
+
+<p>Wanhope had been lapsing deeper and deeper into the hollow of his
+chair; but he now pulled himself up, and turned quickly toward
+Rulledge. "What made you think of that?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I was thinking of it myself." He glanced at me, and I shook
+my head.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Minver said, "if it will leave Acton out in the cold, I'll own
+that I was thinking of it, too. I was going back in my mind, for no
+reason that I know of, to my childhood, when I first heard of such a
+thing as a presentiment, and when I was afraid of having one. I had
+the notion that presentiments ran in the family."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+"Why had you that notion?" Rulledge demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know that I proposed telling," the painter said, giving
+himself to his pipe.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you didn't have it," Rulledge retaliated.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," Minver assented.</p>
+
+<p>Wanhope turned from the personal aspect of the matter. "It's rather
+curious that we should all three have had the same thing in mind just
+now; or, rather, it is not very curious. Such coincidences are really
+very common. Something must have been said at dinner which suggested
+it to all of us."</p>
+
+<p>"All but Acton," Minver demurred.</p>
+
+<p>"I mightn't have heard what was said," I explained. "I suppose the
+passing of all that sort of sub-beliefs must date from the general
+lapse of faith in personal immortality."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, no doubt," Wanhope assented. "It is very striking how sudden the
+lapse was. Everyone who experienced it in himself could date it to a
+year, if not to a day. The agnosticism of scientific men was of course
+all the time undermining the fabric of faith, and then it fell in
+abruptly, reaching one believer after another as fast as the ground
+was taken wholly or partly from under his feet. I can remember how people
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+once disputed whether there were such beings as guardian spirits or
+not. That minor question was disposed of when it was decided that
+there were no spirits at all."</p>
+
+<p>"Naturally," Minver said. "And the decay of the presentiment must have
+been hastened by the failure of so many presentiments to make good."</p>
+
+<p>"The great majority of them have failed to make good, from the
+beginning of time," Wanhope replied.</p>
+
+<p>"There are two kinds of presentiments," Rulledge suggested, with a
+philosophic air. "The true and the untrue."</p>
+
+<p>"Like mushrooms," Minver said. "Only, the true presentiment kills, and
+the true mushroom nourishes. Talking of mushrooms, they have a way in
+Switzerland of preserving them in walnut oil, and they fill you with
+the darkest forebodings, after you've filled yourself with the
+mushrooms. There's some occult relation between the two. Think it out,
+Rulledge!"</p>
+
+<p>Rulledge ignored him in turning to Wanhope. "The trouble is how to
+distinguish the true from the untrue presentiment."</p>
+
+<p>"It would be interesting," Wanhope began, but Minver broke in upon him
+maliciously.</p>
+
+<p>"To know how much the dyspepsia of our predecessors had to with the prevalence of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+presentimentalism? I agree with you, that a better diet has a good
+deal to do with the decline of the dark foreboding among us. What I
+can't understand is, how a gross and reckless feeder, like Rulledge
+here, doesn't go about like ancestral voices prophesying all sorts of
+dreadful things."</p>
+
+<p>"That's rather cheap talk, even for you, Minver," Rulledge said. "Why
+did you think presentiments ran in <i>your</i> family?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, there you have me, Rulledge. That's where my theory fails. I
+can remember," Minver continued soberly, "the talk there used to be
+about them among my people. They were serious people in an unreligious
+way, or rather an unecclesiastical way. They were never spiritualists,
+but I don't think there was one of them who doubted that he should
+live hereafter; he might doubt that he was living here, but there was
+no question of the other thing. I must say it gave a dignity to their
+conversation which, when they met, as they were apt to do at one
+another's houses on Sunday nights, was not of common things. One of my
+uncles was a merchant, another a doctor; my father was a
+portrait-painter by profession, and a sign-painter by practice. I
+suppose that's where I got my knack, such as it is. The merchant was
+an invalid, rather, though he kept about his business, and our people merely
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+recognized him as being out of health. He was what we could call, for
+that day and region&mdash;the Middle West of the early fifties&mdash;a
+man of unusual refinement. I suppose this was temperamental with him
+largely; but he had cultivated tastes, too. I remember him as a
+peculiarly gentle person, with a pensive cast of face, and the
+melancholy accomplishment of playing the flute."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder why nobody plays the flute nowadays," I mused aloud.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it's quite obsolete," Minver said. "They only play the flute in
+the orchestras now. I always look at the man who plays it and think of
+my uncle. He used to be very nice to me as a child; and he was very
+fond of my father, in a sort of filial way; my father was so much
+older. I can remember my young aunt; and how pretty she was as she sat
+at the piano, and sang and played to his fluting. When she looked
+forward at the music, her curls fell into her neck; they wore curls
+then, grown-up women; and though I don't think curls are beautiful, my
+aunt's beauty would have been less without them; in fact, I can't
+think of her without them.</p>
+
+<p>"She was delicate, too; they were really a pair of invalids; but
+she had none of his melancholy. They had had several children,
+who died, one after another, and there was only one left at the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+time I am speaking of. I rather wonder, now, that the thought of those
+poor little ghost-cousins didn't make me uncomfortable. I was a very
+superstitious boy, but I seem not to have thought of them. I played
+with the little girl who was left, and I liked going to my uncle's
+better than anywhere else. I preferred going in the daytime and in the
+summer-time. Then my cousin and I sat in a nook of the garden and
+fought violets, as we called it; hooked the wry necks of the flowers
+together and twitched to see which blossom would come off first. She
+was a sunny little thing, like her mother, and she had curls, like
+her. I can't express the feeling I had for my aunt; she seemed the
+embodiment of a world that was at once very proud and very good. I
+suppose she dressed fashionably, as things went then and there; and
+her style as well as her beauty fascinated me. I would have done
+anything to please her, far more than to please my cousin. With her I
+used to squabble, and sometimes sent her crying to her mother. Then I
+always ran off home, but when I sneaked back, or was sent for to come
+and play with my cousin, I was not scolded for my wickedness.</p>
+
+<p>"My uncle was more prosperous than his brothers; he lived in a much
+better house than ours, and I used to be quite awe-struck by its
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+magnificence. He went East, as we said, twice a year to buy goods,
+and he had things sent back for his house such as we never saw
+elsewhere; those cask-shaped seats of blue china for the verandas, and
+bamboo chairs. There were cane-bottom chairs in the sitting-room, such
+as we had in our best room; in the parlor the large pieces were of
+mahogany veneer, upholstered in black hair-cloth; they held me in awe.
+The piano filled half the place; the windows came down to the ground,
+and had Venetian blinds and lace curtains.</p>
+
+<p>"We all went in there after the Sunday night supper, and then the
+fathers and mothers were apt to begin talking of those occult things
+that gave me the creeps. It was after the Rochester Knockings, as they
+were called, had been exposed, and so had spread like an infection
+everywhere. It was as if people were waiting to have the fraud shown
+up in order to believe in it."</p>
+
+<p>"That sort of thing happens," Wanhope agreed. "It's as if the seeds of
+the ventilated imposture were carried atmospherically into the human
+mind broadcast and a universal crop of self-delusion sprang up."</p>
+
+<p>"At any rate," Minver resumed, "instead of the gift being confined to a few
+persons&mdash;a small sisterhood with detonating knee-joints&mdash;there were
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+rappings in every well-regulated household; all the tables
+tipped; people went to sleep to the soft patter of raps on the
+headboards of their beds; and girls who could not spell were occupied
+in delivering messages from Socrates, Ben Franklin and Shakespeare.
+Besides the physical demonstrations, there were all sorts of psychical
+intimations from the world which we've now abolished."</p>
+
+<p>"Not permanently, perhaps," I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that remains to be seen," Minver said. "It was this sort of
+thing which my people valued above the other. Perhaps they were
+exclusive in their tastes, and did not care for an occultism which the
+crowd could share with them; though this is a conjecture too long
+after the fact to have much value. As far as I can now remember, they
+used to talk of the double presence of living persons, like their
+being where they greatly wished to be as well as where they really
+were; of clairvoyance; of what we call mind-transference, now; of
+weird coincidences of all kinds; of strange experiences of their own
+and of others; of the participation of animals in these experiences,
+like the testimony of cats and dogs to the presence of invisible
+spirits; of dreams that came true, or came near coming true; and,
+above everything, of forebodings and presentiments.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+"I dare say they didn't always talk of such things, and I'm giving
+possibly a general impression from a single instance; everything
+remembered of childhood is as if from large and repeated occurrence.
+But it must have happened more than once, for I recall that when it
+came to presentiments my aunt broke it up, perhaps once only. My
+cousin used to get very sleepy on the rug before the fire, and her
+mother would carry her off to bed, very cross and impatient of being
+kissed good night, while I was left to the brunt of the occult alone.
+I could not go with my aunt and cousin, and I folded myself in my
+mother's skirt, where I sat at her feet, and listened in an anguish of
+drowsy terror. The talk would pass into my dreams, and the dreams
+would return into the talk; and I would suffer a sort of double
+nightmare, waking and sleeping."</p>
+
+<p>"Poor little devil!" Rulledge broke out. "It's astonishing how people
+will go on before children, and never think of the misery they're
+making for them."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe my mother thought of it," Minver returned, "but when that
+sort of talk began, the witchery of it was probably too strong for
+her. 'It held her like a two years' child'; I was eight that winter. I
+don't know how long my suffering had gone on, when my aunt came back and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+seemed to break up the talk. It had got to presentiments, and,
+whether they knew that this was forbidden ground with her, or whether
+she now actually said something about it, they turned to talk of other
+things. I'm not telling you all this from my own memory, which deals
+with only a point or two. My father and mother used to recur to it
+when I was older, and I am piecing out my story from their memories.</p>
+
+<p>"My uncle, with all his temperamental pensiveness, was my aunt's stay
+and cheer in the fits of depression which she paid with for her usual
+gaiety. But these fits always began with some uncommon depression of
+his&mdash;some effect of the forebodings he was subject to. Her opposition
+to that kind of thing was purely unselfish, but certainly she dreaded
+it for him as well as herself. I suppose there was a sort of conscious
+silence in the others which betrayed them to her. 'Well,' she said,
+laughing, 'have you been at it again? That poor child looks frightened
+out of his wits.'</p>
+
+<p>"They all laughed then, and my father said, hypocritically, 'I was
+just going to ask Felix whether he expected to start East this week or
+next.'</p>
+
+<p>"My uncle tried to make light of what was always a heavy matter with
+him. 'Well, yesterday,' he answered, 'I should have said next week;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+but it's this week, now. I'm going on Wednesday.'</p>
+
+<p>"'By stage or packet?' my father asked.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, I shall take the canal to the lake, and get the boat for Buffalo
+there,' my uncle said.</p>
+
+<p>"They went on to speak of the trip to New York, and how much easier it
+was then than it used to be when you had to go by stage over the
+mountains to Philadelphia and on by stage again. Now, it seemed, you
+got the Erie Canal packet at Buffalo and the Hudson River steamboat at
+Albany, and reached New York in four or five days, in great comfort
+without the least fatigue. They had all risen and my aunt had gone out
+with her sisters-in-law to help them get their wraps. When they
+returned, it seemed that they had been talking of the journey, too,
+for she said to my mother, laughing again, 'Well, Richard may think
+it's easy; but somehow Felix never expects to get home alive.'</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I ever heard my uncle laugh, but I can remember how he
+smiled at my aunt's laughing, as he put his hand on her shoulder; I thought
+it was somehow a very sad smile. On Wednesday I was allowed to go with my
+aunt and cousin to see him off on the packet, which came up from Cincinnati
+early in the morning; I had lain awake most of the night, and then nearly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+overslept myself, and then was at the canal in time. We made a gay
+parting for him, but when the boat started, and I was gloating on the
+three horses making up the tow-path at a spanking trot, under the
+snaky spirals of the driver's smacking whip-lash, I caught sight of my
+uncle standing on the deck and smiling that sad smile of his. My aunt
+was waving her handkerchief, but when she turned away she put it to
+her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"The rest of the story, such as it is, I know, almost to the very end,
+from what I heard my father and mother say from my uncle's report
+afterward. He told them that, when the boat started, the stress to
+stay was so strong upon him that if he had not been ashamed he would
+have jumped ashore and followed us home. He said that he could not
+analyze his feelings; it was not yet any definite foreboding, but
+simply a depression that seemed to crush him so that all his movements
+were leaden, when he turned at last, and went down to breakfast in the
+cabin below. The stress did not lighten with the little changes and
+chances of the voyage to the lake. He was never much given to making
+acquaintance with people, but now he found himself so absent-minded
+that he was aware of being sometimes spoken to by friendly strangers
+without replying until it was too late even to apologize. He was not only
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+steeped in this gloom, but he had the constant distress of the
+effort he involuntarily made to trace it back to some cause or follow
+it forward to some consequence. He kept trying at this, with a mind so
+tensely bent to the mere horror that he could not for a moment strain
+away from it. He would very willingly have occupied himself with other
+things, but the anguish which the double action of his mind gave him
+was such that he could not bear the effort; all he could do was to
+abandon himself to his obsession. This would ease him only for a
+while, though, and then he would suffer the misery of trying in vain
+to escape from it.</p>
+
+<p>"He thought he must be going mad, but insanity implied some definite
+delusion or hallucination, and, so far as he could make out, he had
+none. He was simply crushed by a nameless foreboding. Something
+dreadful was to happen, but this was all he felt; knowledge had no
+part in his condition. He could not say whether he slept during the
+two nights that passed before he reached Toledo, where he was to take
+the lake steamer for Buffalo. He wished to turn back again, but the
+relentless pressure which had kept him from turning back at the start
+was as strong as ever with him. He tried to give his presentiment
+direction by talking with the other passengers about a recent
+accident to a lake steamer, in which several hundred lives
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+were lost; there had been a collision in rough weather, and one of the
+boats had gone down in a few minutes. There was a sort of relief in
+that, but the double action of the mind brought the same intolerable
+anguish again, and he settled back for refuge under the shadow of his
+impenetrable doom. This did not lift till he was well on his way from
+Albany to New York by the Hudson River. The canal-boat voyage from
+Buffalo to Albany had been as eventless as that to Toledo, and his
+lake steamer had reached Buffalo in safety, for which it had seemed as
+if those lost in the recent disaster had paid.</p>
+
+<p>"He tried to pierce his heavy cloud by argument from the security in
+which he had traveled so far, but the very security had its
+hopelessness. If something had happened&mdash;some slight accident&mdash;to
+interrupt it, his reason, or his unreason, might have taken it for a
+sign that the obscure doom, whatever it was, had been averted.</p>
+
+<p>"Up to this time he had not been able to connect his foreboding
+with anything definite, and he was not afraid for himself. He was
+simply without the formless hope that helps us on at every step,
+through good and bad, and it was a mortal peril, which he came
+through safely while scores of others were lost, that gave his
+presentiment direction. He had taken the day boat from
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+Albany, and about the middle of the afternoon the boat, making way
+under a head-wind, took fire. The pilot immediately ran her ashore,
+and her passengers, those that had the courage for it, ran aft, and
+began jumping from the stern, but a great many women and children were
+burned. My uncle was one of the first of those who jumped, and he
+stood in the water, trying to save those who came after from drowning;
+it was not very deep. Some of the women lost courage for the leap, and
+some turned back into the flames, remembering children they had left
+behind. One poor creature stood hesitating wildly, and he called up to
+her to jump. At last she did so, almost into his arms, and then she
+clung about him as he helped her ashore. 'Oh,' she cried out between
+her sobs, 'if you have a wife and children at home, God will take you
+safe back to them; you have saved my life for my husband and little
+ones.' 'No,' he was conscious of saying, 'I shall never see my wife
+again,' and now his foreboding had the direction that it had wanted
+before.</p>
+
+<p>"From that on he simply knew that he should not get home alive, and he
+waited resignedly for the time and form of his disaster. He had a sort
+of peace in that. He went about his business intelligently, and from habit
+carefully, but it was with a mechanical action of the mind, something,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+he imagined, like the mechanical action of his body in those organs
+which do their part without bidding from the will. He was only a few
+days in New York, but in the course of them he got several letters
+from his wife telling him that all was going well with her and their
+daughter. It was before the times when you can ask and answer
+questions by telegraph, and he started back, necessarily without
+having heard the latest news from home.</p>
+
+<p>"He made the return trip in a sort of daze, talking, reading, eating,
+and sleeping in the calm certainty of doom, and only wondering how it
+would be fulfilled, and what hour of the night or day. But it is no
+use my eking this out; I heard it, as I say, when I was a child, and I
+am afraid that if I should try to give it with the full detail I
+should take to inventing particulars." Minver paused a moment, and
+then he said: "But there was one thing that impressed itself indelibly
+on my memory. My uncle got back perfectly safe and well."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" Rulledge snorted in rude dissatisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>"What was it impressed itself on your memory?" Wanhope asked, with
+scientific detachment from the story as a story.</p>
+
+<p>Minver continued to address Wanhope, without
+regarding Rulledge. "My uncle told my father
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+that some sort of psychical change, which he could not describe, but
+which he was as conscious of as if it were physical, took place within
+him as he came in sight of his house&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Wanhope prompted.</p>
+
+<p>"He had driven down from the canal-packet in the old omnibus which
+used to meet passengers and distribute them at their destinations in
+town. All the way to his house he was still under the doom as regarded
+himself, but bewildered that he should be getting home safe and well,
+and he was refusing his escape, as it were, and then suddenly, at the
+sight of the familiar house, the change within him happened. He looked
+out of the omnibus window and saw a group of neighbors at his gate. As
+he got out of the omnibus, my father took him by the hand, as if to
+hold him back a moment. Then he said to my father, very quietly, 'You
+needn't tell me: my wife is dead.'"</p>
+
+<p>There was an appreciable pause, in which we were all silent, and then
+Rulledge demanded, greedily, "And was she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Really, Rulledge!" I could not help protesting.</p>
+
+<p>Minver asked him, almost compassionately and with unwonted gentleness, as
+from the mood in which his reminiscence had left him: "You suspected a hoax?
+She had died suddenly the night before while she and my cousin were getting
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+things ready to welcome my uncle home in the morning. I'm sorry you're
+disappointed," he added, getting back to his irony.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever," Rulledge pursued, "became of the little girl?"</p>
+
+<p>"She died rather young; a great many years ago; and my uncle soon
+after her."</p>
+
+<p>Rulledge went away without saying anything, but presently returned
+with the sandwich which he had apparently gone for, while Wanhope was
+remarking: "That want of definition in the presentiment at first, and
+then its determination in the new direction by, as it were,
+propinquity&mdash;it is all very curious. Possibly we shall some day
+discover a law in such matters."</p>
+
+<p>Rulledge said: "How was it your boyhood was passed in the Middle West,
+Minver? I always thought you were a Bostonian."</p>
+
+<p>"I was an adoptive Bostonian for a good while, until I decided to
+become a native New-Yorker, so that I could always be near to you,
+Rulledge. You can never know what a delicate satisfaction you are."</p>
+
+<p>Minver laughed, and we were severally restored to the wonted relations
+which his story had interrupted.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+<h1>CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S<br />
+LAST TRIP</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h2><a name="CAPTAIN_DUNLEVYS" id="CAPTAIN_DUNLEVYS"></a>CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">It was against the law, in such case made and provided,</span><br />
+    Of the United States, but by the good will of the pilots<br />
+    That we would some of us climb to the pilot-house after our breakfast<br />
+    For a morning smoke, and find ourselves seats on the benching<br />
+    Under the windows, or in the worn-smooth arm-chairs. The pilot,<br />
+    Which one it was did not matter, would tilt his head round and say, "All right!"<br />
+    When he had seen who we were, and begin, or go on as from stopping<br />
+    In the midst of talk that was leading up to a story,<br />
+    Just before we came in, and the story, begun or beginning,<br />
+    Always began or ended with some one, or something or other,<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+    Having to do with the river. If one left the wheel to the other,<br />
+    Going off watch, he would say to his partner standing behind him<br />
+    With his hands stretched out for the spokes that were not given up yet,<br />
+    "Captain, you can tell them the thing I was going to tell them<br />
+    Better than I could, I reckon," and then the other would answer,<br />
+    "Well, I don't know as I feel so sure of that, captain," and having<br />
+    Recognized each other so by that courtesy title of captain<br />
+    Never officially failed of without offense among pilots,<br />
+    One would subside into Jim and into Jerry the other.</p>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">It was on these terms, at least, Captain Dunn relieved Captain Davis</span><br />
+    When we had settled ourselves one day to listen in comfort,<br />
+    After some psychological subtleties we had indulged in at breakfast<br />
+    Touching that weird experience every one knows when the senses<br />
+    Juggle the points of the compass out of true orientation,<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+    Changing the North to the South, and the East to the West. "Why, Jerry, what was it<br />
+    You was going to tell them?" "Oh, never <i>you</i> mind what it <i>was</i>, Jim.<br />
+    <i>You</i> tell them something else," and so Captain Davis submitted,<br />
+    While Captain Dunn, with a laugh, got away beyond reach of his protest.<br />
+    Then Captain Davis, with fitting, deprecatory preamble,<br />
+    Launched himself on a story that promised to be all a story<br />
+    Could be expected to be, when one of those women&mdash;you know them&mdash;<br />
+    Who interrupt on any occasion or none, interrupted,<br />
+    Pointed her hand, and asked, "Oh, what is that island there, captain?"<br />
+    "That one, ma'am?" He gave her the name, and then the woman persisted,<br />
+    "Don't say you know them all by sight!" "Yes, by sight or by feeling."<br />
+    "What do you mean by feeling?" "Why, just that by daylight we see them,<br />
+    And in the dark it's like as if somehow we felt them, I reckon.<br />
+    Every foot of the channel and change in it, wash-out and cave-in,<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+    Every bend and turn of it, every sand-bar and landmark,<br />
+    Every island, of course, we have got to see them, or feel them."<br />
+    "But if you don't?" "But we've got to." "But aren't you ever mistaken?"<br />
+    "Never the second time." "Now, what do you mean, Captain Davis?<br />
+    Never the second time." "Well, let me tell you a story.<br />
+    It's not the one I begun, but that island you asked about yonder<br />
+    Puts me in mind of it, happens to be the place where it happened,<br />
+    Three years ago. I suppose no man ever knew the Ohio<br />
+    Better than Captain Dunlevy, if any one else knew it like him.<br />
+    Man and boy he had been pretty much his whole life on the river:<br />
+    Cabin-boy first on a keelboat before the day of the steamboats,<br />
+    Back in the pioneer times; and watchman then on a steamboat;<br />
+    Then second mate, and then mate, and then pilot and captain and owner&mdash;<br />
+    But he was proudest, I reckon, of being about the best pilot<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+    On the Ohio. He knew it as well as he knew his own Bible,<br />
+    And I don't hardly believe that ever Captain Dunlevy<br />
+    Let a single day go by without reading a chapter."</p>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">While the pilot went on with his talk, and in regular, rhythmical motion</span><br />
+    Swayed from one side to the other before his wheel, and we listened,<br />
+    Certain typical facts of the picturesque life of the river<br />
+    Won their way to our consciousness as without help of our senses.<br />
+    It was along about the beginning of March, but already<br />
+    In the sleepy sunshine the budding maples and willows,<br />
+    Where they waded out in the shallow wash of the freshet,<br />
+    Showed the dull red and the yellow green of their blossoms and catkins,<br />
+    And in their tops the foremost flocks of blackbirds debated<br />
+    As to which they should colonize first. The indolent house-boats<br />
+    Loafing along the shore, sent up in silvery spirals<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
+    Out of their kitchen pipes the smoke of their casual breakfasts.<br />
+    Once a wide tow of coal-barges, loaded clear down to the gunwales,<br />
+    Gave us the slack of the current, with proper formalities shouted<br />
+    By the hoarse-throated stern-wheeler that pushed the black barges before her,<br />
+    And as she passed us poured a foamy cascade from her paddles.<br />
+    Then, as a raft of logs, which the spread of the barges had hidden,<br />
+    River-wide, weltered in sight, with a sudden jump forward the pilot<br />
+    Dropped his whole weight on the spokes of the wheel just in time to escape it.</p>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Always give those fellows," he joked, "all the leeway they ask for;</span><br />
+    Worst kind of thing on the river you want your boat to run into.<br />
+    Where had I got about Captain Dunlevy? Oh yes, I remember.<br />
+    Well, when the railroads began to run away from the steamboats,<br />
+    Taking the carrying trade in the very edge of the water,<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+    It was all up with the old flush times, and Captain Dunlevy<br />
+    Had to climb down with the rest of us pilots till he was only<br />
+    Captain the same as any and every pilot is captain,<br />
+    Glad enough, too, to be getting his hundred and twenty-five dollars<br />
+    Through the months of the spring and fall while navigation was open.<br />
+    Never lowered himself, though, a bit from captain and owner,<br />
+    Knew his rights and yours, and never would thought of allowing<br />
+    Any such thing as a liberty <i>from</i> you or taking one <i>with</i> you.<br />
+    I had been his cub, and all that I knew of the river<br />
+    Captain Dunlevy had learnt me; and if you know what the feeling<br />
+    Is of a cub for the pilot that learns him the river, you'll trust me<br />
+    When I tell you I felt it the highest kind of an honor<br />
+    Having him for my partner; and when I came up to relieve him,<br />
+    One day, here at the wheel, and actu'lly thought that I found him<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+    Taking that island there on the left, I thought I was crazy.<br />
+    No, I couldn't believe my senses, and yet I couldn't endure it.<br />
+    Seeing him climb the spokes of the wheel to warp the <i>Kanawha</i>,<br />
+    With the biggest trip of passengers ever she carried,<br />
+    Round on the bar at the left that fairly stuck out of the water.<br />
+    Well, as I said, he learnt me all that I knew of the river,<br />
+    And was I to learn <i>him</i> now which side to take of an island<br />
+    When I knew he knew it like his right hand from his left hand?<br />
+    My, but I hated to speak! It certainly seemed like my tongue clove,<br />
+    Like the Bible says, to the roof of my mouth! But I had to.<br />
+    'Captain,' I says, and it seemed like another person was talking,<br />
+    'Do you usu'lly take that island there on the eastward?'<br />
+    'Yes,' he says, and he laughed, 'and I thought I had learnt you to do it,<br />
+    When you was going up.' 'But not going <i>down</i>, did you, captain?'<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+    'Down?' And he whirled at me, and, without ever stopping his laughing,<br />
+    Turned as white as a sheet, and his eyes fairly bulged from their sockets.<br />
+    Then he whirled back again, and looked up and down on the river,<br />
+    Like he was hunting out the shape of the shore and the landmarks.<br />
+    Well, I suppose the thing has happened to every one sometime,<br />
+    When you find the points of the compass have swapped with each other,<br />
+    And at the instant you're looking, the North and the South have changed places.<br />
+    <i>I</i> knew what was in his mind as well as Dunlevy himself did.<br />
+    Neither one of us spoke a word for nearly a minute.<br />
+    Then in a kind of whisper he says, 'Take the wheel, Captain Davis!'<br />
+    Let the spokes fly, and while I made a jump forwards to catch them,<br />
+    Staggered into that chair&mdash;well, the very one you are in, ma'am.<br />
+    Set there breathing quick, and, when he could speak, all he said was,<br />
+    'This is the end of it for me on the river, Jim Davis,'<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+    Reached up over his head for his coat where it hung by that window,<br />
+    Trembled onto his feet, and stopped in the door there a second,<br />
+    Stared in hard like as if for good-by to the things he was used to,<br />
+    Shut the door behind him, and never come back again through it."<br />
+    While we were silent, not liking to prompt the pilot with questions,<br />
+    "Well," he said, at last, "it was no use to argue. We tried it,<br />
+    In the half-hearted way that people do that don't mean it.<br />
+    Every one was his friend here on the <i>Kanawha</i>, and <i>we</i> knew<br />
+    It was the first time he ever had lost his bearings, but <i>he</i> knew,<br />
+    In such a thing as that, that the first and the last are the same time.<br />
+    When we had got through trying our worst to persuade him, he only<br />
+    Shook his head and says, 'I am done for, boys, and you know it,'<br />
+    Left the boat at Wheeling, and left his life on the river&mdash;<br />
+    Left his life on the earth, you may say, for I don't call it living,<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+    Setting there homesick at home for the wheel he can never go back to.<br />
+    Reads the river-news regular; knows just the stage of the water<br />
+    Up and down the whole way from Cincinnati to Pittsburg;<br />
+    Follows every boat from the time she starts out in the spring-time<br />
+    Till she lays up in the summer, and then again in the winter;<br />
+    Wants to talk all about her and who is her captain and pilot;<br />
+    Then wants to slide away to that everlastingly puzzling<br />
+    Thing that happened to him that morning on the <i>Kanawha</i><br />
+    When he lost his bearings and North and South had changed places&mdash;<br />
+    No, I don't call that living, whatever the rest of you call it."<br />
+    We were silent again till that woman spoke up, "And what was it,<br />
+    Captain, that kept him from going back and being a pilot?"<br />
+    "Well, ma'am," after a moment the pilot patiently answered,<br />
+    "<i>I</i> don't hardly believe that I could explain it exactly."</p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE RETURN TO FAVOR</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_RETURN_TO_FAVOR" id="THE_RETURN_TO_FAVOR"></a>THE RETURN TO FAVOR</h2>
+
+
+<p>He never, by any chance, quite kept his word, though there was a
+moment in every case when he seemed to imagine doing what he said, and
+he took with mute patience the rakings which the ladies gave him when
+he disappointed them.</p>
+
+<p>Disappointed is not just the word, for the ladies did not really
+expect him to do what he said. They pretended to believe him when he
+promised, but at the bottom of their hearts they never did or could.
+He was gentle-mannered and soft-spoken, and when he set his head on
+one side, and said that a coat would be ready on Wednesday, or
+a dress on Saturday, and repeated his promise upon the same lady's
+expressed doubt, she would catch her breath and say that now she
+absolutely must have it on the day named, for otherwise she would
+not have a thing to put on. Then he would become very grave,
+and his soft tenor would deepen to a bass of unimpeachable
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+veracity, and he would say, "Sure, lady, you have it."</p>
+
+<p>The lady would depart still doubting and slightly sighing, and he
+would turn to the customer who was waiting to have a button sewed on,
+or something like that, and ask him softly what it was he could do for
+him. If the customer offered him his appreciation of the case in hand,
+he would let his head droop lower, and in a yet deeper bass deplore
+the doubt of the ladies as an idiosyncrasy of their sex. He would make
+the customer feel that he was a favorite customer whose rights to a
+perfect fidelity of word and deed must by no means be tampered with,
+and he would have the button sewed on or the rip sewed up at once, and
+refuse to charge anything, while the customer waited in his
+shirt-sleeves in the small, stuffy shop opening directly from the
+street. When he tolerantly discussed the peculiarities of ladies as a
+sex, he would endure to be laughed at, "for sufferance was the badge
+of all his tribe," and possibly he rather liked it.</p>
+
+<p>The favorite customer enjoyed being there when some lady came back on
+the appointed Wednesday or Saturday, and the tailor came soothingly
+forward and showed her into the curtained alcove where she was to try
+on the garments, and then called into the inner shop for them. The
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+shirt-sleeved journeyman, with his unbuttoned waistcoat-front all
+pins and threaded needles, would appear in his slippers with the
+things barely basted together, and the tailor would take them, with an
+airy courage, as if they were perfectly finished, and go in behind the
+curtain where the lady was waiting in a dishabille which the favorite
+customer, out of reverence for the sex, forbore to picture to himself.
+Then sounds of volcanic fury would issue from the alcove. "Now, Mr.
+Morrison, you have lied to me again, deliberately <i>lied</i>. Didn't I
+tell you I <i>must</i> have the things perfectly ready to-day? You see
+yourself that it will be another week before I can have my things."</p>
+
+<p>"A week? Oh, madam! But I assure you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't talk to me any more! It's the last time I shall ever come to
+you, but I suppose I can't take the work away from you as it is.
+<i>When</i> shall I have it?"</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow. Yes, to-morrow noon. Sure!"</p>
+
+<p>"Now you know you are always out at noon. I should think you would be
+ashamed."</p>
+
+<p>"If it hadn't been for sickness in the family I would have finished
+your dress with my own hands. Sure I would. If you come here to-morrow
+noon you find your dress all ready for you."</p>
+
+<p>"I know I won't, but I will come, and you'd <i>better</i> have it ready."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+"Oh, sure."</p>
+
+<p>The lady then added some generalities of opprobrium with some
+particular criticisms of the garments. Her voice sank into
+dispassionate murmurs in these, but it rose again in her renewed sense
+of the wrong done her, and when she came from the alcove she went out
+of the street door purple. She reopened it to say, "Now, remember!"
+before she definitely disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>"Rather a stormy session, Mr. Morrison," the customer said.</p>
+
+<p>"Something fierce," Mr. Morrison sighed. But he did not seem much
+troubled, and he had one way with all his victims, no matter what mood
+they came or went in.</p>
+
+<p>One day the customer was by when a kind creature timidly upbraided
+him. "This is the third time you've disappointed me, Mr. Morrison. I
+really wish you wouldn't promise me unless you mean to do it. I don't
+think it's right for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but sure, madam! The things will be done, sure. We had a strike
+on us."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I will trust you once more," the kind creature said.</p>
+
+<p>"You can depend on me, madam, sure."</p>
+
+<p>When she was gone the customer said: "I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+wonder you do that sort of thing, Mr. Morrison. You can't be surprised
+at their behaving rustily with you if you never keep your word."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I assure you there are times when I don't know where to look,
+the way they go on. It is something awful. You ought to hear them
+once. And now they want the wote." He rearranged some pieces of
+tumbled goods at the table where the customer sat, and put together
+the disheveled leaves of the fashion-papers which looked as if the
+ladies had scattered them in their rage.</p>
+
+<p>One day the customer heard two ladies waiting for their
+disappointments in the outer room while the tailor in the alcove was
+trying to persuade a third lady that positively her things would be
+sent home the next day before dark. The customer had now formed the
+habit of having his own clothes made by the tailor, and his system in
+avoiding disappointment was very simple. In the early fall he ordered
+a spring suit, and in the late spring it was ready. He never had any
+difficulty, but he was curious to learn how the ladies managed, and he
+listened with all his might while these two talked.</p>
+
+<p>"I always wonder we keep coming," one of them said.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you why," the other said. "Because
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+he's cheap, and we get things from a fourth to a third less than we
+can get them anywhere else. The quality is first rate, and he's
+absolutely honest. And, besides, he's a genius. The wretch has
+<i>touch</i>. The things have a style, a look, a hang! Really it's
+something wonderful. Sure it iss," she ended in the tailor's accent,
+and then they both laughed and joined in a common sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't believe he means to deceive any one."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, neither do I. I believe he expects to do everything he says. And
+one can't help liking him even when he doesn't."</p>
+
+<p>"He's a good while getting through with her," the first lady said,
+meaning the unseen lady in the alcove.</p>
+
+<p>"She'll be a good while longer getting through with <i>him</i>, if he
+hasn't them ready the next time," the second lady said.</p>
+
+<p>But the lady in the alcove issued from it with an impredicable smile,
+and the tailor came up to the others, and deferred to their wishes
+with a sort of voiceless respect.</p>
+
+<p>He gave the customer a glance of good-fellowship, and said to him,
+radiantly: "Your things all ready for you, this morning. As soon as
+I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no hurry," the customer responded.</p>
+
+<p>"I won't be a minute," the tailor said, pulling
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+the curtain of the alcove aside, and then there began those sounds of
+objurgation and expostulation, although the ladies had seemed so
+amiable before.</p>
+
+<p>The customer wondered if they did not all enjoy it; the ladies in
+their patience under long trial, and the tailor in the pleasure of
+practising upon it. But perhaps he did believe in the things he
+promised. He might be so much a genius as to have no grasp of facts;
+he might have thought that he could actually do what he said.</p>
+
+<p>The customer's question on these points found answer when one day the
+tailor remarked, as it were out of a clear sky, that he had sold his
+business; sold it to the slippered journeyman who used to come in his
+shirt-sleeves, with his vest-front full of pins and needles, bringing
+the basted garments to be tried on the ladies who had been promised
+them perfectly finished.</p>
+
+<p>"He will do your clothes all right," he explained to the customer. "He
+is a first-rate cutter and fitter; he knows the whole business."</p>
+
+<p>"But why&mdash;why&mdash;" the customer began.</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't stand it. The way them ladies would talk to a person, when
+you done your best to please them; it's something fierce."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know. But I thought you liked it,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+from the way you always promised them and never kept your word."</p>
+
+<p>"And if I hadn't promised them?" the tailor returned with some show of
+feeling. "They <i>wanted</i> me to promise them&mdash;they made me&mdash;they
+wouldn't have gone away without it. Sure. Every one wanted her things
+before every one. You had got to think of that."</p>
+
+<p>"But you had to think of what they would say."</p>
+
+<p>"Say? Sometimes I thought they would <i>hit</i> me. One lady said she had a
+notion to slap me once. It's no way to talk."</p>
+
+<p>"But you didn't seem to mind it."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't mind it for a good while. Then I couldn't stand it. So I
+sold."</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head sadly; but the customer had no comfort to offer him.
+He asked when his clothes would be done, and the tailor told him when,
+and then they were not. The new proprietor tried them on, but he would
+not say just when they would be finished.</p>
+
+<p>"We have a good deal of work already for some ladies that been
+disappointed. Now we try a new way. We tell people exactly what we
+do."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's right," the customer said, but in his heart he was not
+sure he liked the new way.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+The day before his clothes were promised he dropped in. From the
+curtained alcove he heard low murmurs, the voice of the new proprietor
+and the voice of some lady trying on, and being severely bidden not to
+expect her things at a time she suggested. "No, madam. We got too much
+work on hand already. These things, they will not be done before next
+week."</p>
+
+<p>"I told you to-morrow," the same voice said to another lady, and the
+new proprietor came out with an unfinished coat in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I know you did, but I thought you would be better than your word, and
+so I came to-day. Well, then, to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, to-morrow," the new proprietor said, but he did not seem to have
+liked the lady's joke. He did not look happy.</p>
+
+<p>A few weeks after that the customer came for some little alterations
+in his new suit.</p>
+
+<p>In the curtained alcove he heard the murmurs of trying on, much
+cheerfuller murmurs than before; the voice of a lady lifted in
+gladness, in gaiety, and an incredible voice replying, "Oh, sure,
+madam."</p>
+
+<p>Then the old proprietor came out in his shirt-sleeves and slippers,
+with his waistcoat-front full of pins and needles, just like the new
+proprietor in former days.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+"Why!" the customer exclaimed. "Have you bought back?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. I'm just here like a journeyman already. The new man he want me
+to come. He don't get along very well with his way. He's all right;
+he's a good man and a first-class tailor. But," and the former
+proprietor looked down at the basted garment hanging over his arm, and
+picked off an irrelevant thread from it, "he thinks I get along better
+with the ladies."</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>SOMEBODY'S MOTHER</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+<h2><a name="SOMEBODYS_MOTHER" id="SOMEBODYS_MOTHER"></a>SOMEBODY'S MOTHER</h2>
+
+
+<p>The figure of a woman sat crouched forward on one of the lowermost
+steps of the brownstone dwelling which was keeping a domestic
+tradition in a street mostly gone to shops and small restaurants and
+local express-offices. The house was black behind its closed shutters,
+and the woman remained sitting there because no one could have come
+out of its door for a year past to hunt her away. The neighborhood
+policeman faltered in going by, and then he kept on. The three people
+who came out of the large, old-fashioned hotel, half a block off, on
+their way for dinner to a French <i>table d'h&ocirc;te</i> which they had heard
+of, stopped and looked at the woman. They were a father and his son
+and daughter, and it was something like a family instinct that
+controlled them, in their pause before the woman crouching on the
+steps.</p>
+
+<p>It was the early dusk of a December day, and the
+day was very chilly. "She seems to be sick or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+something," the father vaguely surmised. "Or asleep."</p>
+
+<p>The three looked at the woman, but they did nothing for a moment. They
+would rather have gone on, but they waited to see if anything would
+happen to release them from the spell that they seemed to have laid
+upon themselves. They were conditional New-Yorkers of long sojourn,
+and it was from no apparent motive that the son wore evening dress,
+which his unbuttoned overcoat discovered, and an opera-hat. He would
+not have dressed so for that problematical French <i>table d'h&ocirc;te</i>;
+probably he was going on later to some society affair. He now put in
+effect the father's impulse to go closer and look at the woman.</p>
+
+<p>"She seems to be asleep," he reported.</p>
+
+<p>"Shouldn't you think she would take cold? She will get her death
+there. Oughtn't we to do something?" the daughter asked, but she left
+it to the father, and he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Probably somebody will come by."</p>
+
+<p>"That we could leave her to?" the daughter pursued.</p>
+
+<p>"We could do that without waiting," the son commented.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes," the father assented; but they did not go on. They waited,
+helplessly, and then somebody came by. It was a young girl, not very
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+definite in the dusk, except that she was unmistakably of the working
+class; she was simply dressed, though with the New York instinct for
+clothes. Their having stopped there seemed to stay her involuntarily,
+and after a glance in the direction of their gaze she asked the
+daughter:</p>
+
+<p>"Is she sick, do you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"We don't know what's the matter. But she oughtn't to stay there."</p>
+
+<p>Something velvety in the girl's voice had made its racial quality
+sensible to the ear; as she went up to the crouching woman and bent
+forward over her and then turned to them, a street lamp threw its
+light on her face, and they saw that she was a light shade of colored
+girl.</p>
+
+<p>"She seems to be sleeping."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," the son began, "she's not quite&mdash;" But he did not go on.</p>
+
+<p>The girl looked round at the others and suggested, "She must be
+somebody's mother!"</p>
+
+<p>The others all felt abashed in their several sorts and degrees, but in
+their several sorts and degrees they all decided that there was
+something romantic, sentimental, theatrical in the girl's words, like
+something out of some cheap story-paper story.</p>
+
+<p>The father wondered if that kind of thing was current among that kind of people. He had a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+sort of esthetic pleasure in the character and condition expressed by the words.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes," he said, "if she has children, or has had." The girl
+looked at him uncertainly, and then he added, "But, of course&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The son went up to the woman again, and asked: "Aren't you well? Can
+we do anything for you? It won't do to stay here, you know." The woman
+only made a low murmur, and he said to his sister, "Suppose we get her
+up."</p>
+
+<p>His sister did not come forward promptly, and the colored girl said,
+"I'll help you."</p>
+
+<p>She took one arm of the woman and the son took the other, and they
+lifted her, without her connivance, to her feet and kept her on them.
+Then they walked her down the steps. On the level below she showed
+taller than either of them; she was bundled up in different incoherent
+wraps; her head was muffled, and she wore a battered bonnet at an
+involuntary slant.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know exactly what we shall do with her," the son said.</p>
+
+<p>"We ought to get her home somehow," the daughter said.</p>
+
+<p>The father proposed nothing, but the colored girl said, "If we keep
+walking her along, we'll come to a policeman and we can&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A hoarse rumble of protest came from the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+muffled head of the woman, and the girl put her ear closer. "Want to
+go home? Well, the policeman will take you. We don't know where you
+live, and we haven't the time."</p>
+
+<p>The woman seemed to have nothing to say further, and they began
+walking her westward; the colored girl supported her on one hand, and
+the son, in his evening dress and opera-hat, on the other.</p>
+
+<p>The daughter followed in a vague anxiety, but the father went along,
+enjoying the anomaly, and happy in his relish of that phrase, "She
+must be somebody's mother." It now sounded to him like a catch from
+one of those New York songs, popular in the order of life where the
+mother represents what is best and holiest. He recalled a vaudeville
+ballad with the refrain of "A Boy's Best Friend is his Mother," which,
+when he heard it in a vaudeville theater, threatened the gallery floor
+under the applauding feet of the frenzied audience. Probably this
+colored girl belonged to that order of life; he wished he could know
+her social circumstance and what her outlook on the greater world
+might be. She seemed a kind creature, poor thing, and he respected
+her. "Somebody's mother"&mdash;he liked that.</p>
+
+<p>They all walked westward, aimlessly, except that the
+<i>table d'h&ocirc;te</i> where they had meant to dine
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+was in that direction; they had heard of it as an amusingly harmless
+French place, and they were fond of such mild adventures.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman contributed nothing to the definition of their progress.
+She stumbled and mumbled along, but between Seventh Avenue and Eighth
+she stubbornly arrested her guardians. "She says"&mdash;the colored girl
+translated some obscure avowal across her back&mdash;"she says she wants to
+go home, and she lives up in Harlem."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, that's good," the father said, with an optimistic
+amiability. "We'd better help walk her across to Ninth Avenue and put
+her on a car, and tell the conductor where to let her off."</p>
+
+<p>He was not helping walk her himself, but he enjoyed his son's doing it
+in evening dress and opera-hat, with that kind colored girl on the
+other side of the mother; the composition was agreeably droll. The
+daughter did not like it, and she cherished the ideal of a passing
+policeman to take the old woman in charge.</p>
+
+<p>No policeman passed, though great numbers of other people met them
+without apparently finding anything noticeable in the spectacle which
+their group presented. Among the crowds going and coming on the
+avenues which they crossed scarcely any turned to look at them, or was
+moved by the sense of anything odd in them.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+The old woman herself did nothing to attract public notice till they
+were midway between Seventh and Eighth avenues. She mumbled something
+from time to time which the colored girl interpreted to the rest as
+her continued wish to go home. She was now clearer about her street
+and number. The girl, as if after question of her own generous spirit,
+said she did not see how <i>she</i> could go with her; she was expected at
+home herself.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you won't have to go with her; we'll just put her aboard the
+Ninth Avenue car," the father encouraged her. He would have encouraged
+any one; he was enjoying the whole affair.</p>
+
+<p>At a certain moment, for no apparent reason, the mother decided to sit
+down on a door-step. It proved to be the door-step of a house where
+from time to time colored people&mdash;sometimes of one sex, sometimes of
+another&mdash;went in or came out. The door seemed to open directly into a
+large room where dancing and dining were going on concurrently. At a
+long table colored people sat eating, and behind their chairs on both
+sides of the room and at the ends of the table colored couples were
+waltzing.</p>
+
+<p>The effect was the more curious because, except for some almost inaudible
+music, the scene passed in silence. Those who were eating were not
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+visibly incommoded by those revolving at their backs; the waltzers
+turned softly around and around, untempted by the table now before
+them, now behind them. When some of the diners or dancers came out,
+they stumbled over the old woman on the door-step without minding or
+stopping to inquire. Those outside, when they went in, fell over her
+with like equanimity and joined the strange company within.</p>
+
+<p>The father murmured to himself the lines,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><p><small>
+"'Vast forms that move fantastically<br />
+To a discordant melody&mdash;'"
+</small></p></div>
+
+<p>with a remote trouble of mind because the words were at once so
+graphic and yet so imperfectly applicable. The son and daughter
+exchanged a silent wonder as long as they could bear it; then the
+daughter asked the colored girl:</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's a boarding-house," the girl answered, simply.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," the daughter said.</p>
+
+<p>Sounds of more decided character than before now came from the figure
+on the door-step.</p>
+
+<p>"She seems to be saying something," the daughter suggested in general
+terms. "What is she saying?" she asked the colored girl.</p>
+
+<p>The girl stooped over and listened. Then she answered, "She's
+swearing."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+"Swearing? What about? Whom is she swearing at?"</p>
+
+<p>"At me, I reckon. She says, why don't I take her home."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, why doesn't she get up, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"She says she won't."</p>
+
+<p>"We can't carry her to the car," the daughter noted.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, why not?" the father merrily demanded.</p>
+
+<p>The daughter turned to her brother. They were both very respectful to
+their father, but the son agreed with his sister when she said: "Papa
+would joke about anything. But this has passed a joke. We must get
+this old thing up and start her off."</p>
+
+<p>Upon experiment they could not get the old thing up, even with the
+help of the kind colored girl. They had to let her be, and the colored
+girl reported, after stooping over her again, "She says she can't
+walk."</p>
+
+<p>"She walked here well enough," the daughter said.</p>
+
+<p>"Not <i>very</i> well," the father amended.</p>
+
+<p>His daughter did not notice him. She said to her brother: "Well, now
+you must go and find a policeman. It's strange none has gone by."</p>
+
+<p>It was also strange that still their group remained without
+attracting the notice of the passers. Nobody stopped to speak
+or even stare; perhaps the phenomena of that boarding-house
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+had ceased to have surprises for the public of the neighborhood, and
+they in their momentary relation to it would naturally be without
+interest.</p>
+
+<p>The brother went away, leaving his sister with their father and that
+kind colored creature in charge of the old woman, now more and more
+quiescent on the door-step; she had ceased to swear, or even to speak.
+The brother came back after a time that seemed long, and said that he
+could not find a policeman anywhere, and at the same moment, as if the
+officer had been following at his heels, a policeman crossed the
+street from just behind him.</p>
+
+<p>The daughter ran after him, and asked if he would not come and look at
+the old woman who had so steadfastly remained in their charge, and she
+rapidly explained.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure, lady," the policeman said, and he turned from crossing the
+street and went up to the old woman. He laid his hand on her shoulder,
+and his touch seemed magical. "What's the matter? Can't you stand up?"
+She stood up as if at something familiar in the voice of authority.
+"Where do you live?" She gave an address altogether different from
+that she had given before&mdash;a place on the next avenue, within a block
+or two. "You'd better go home. You can walk, can't you?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>
+"I can walk well enough," she answered in a tone of vexation, and she
+made her word good by walking quite actively away in the direction she
+had given.</p>
+
+<p>The kind colored girl became a part of the prevalent dark after
+refusing the thanks of the others. The daughter then fervently offered
+them to the policeman.</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right, lady," he said, and the incident had closed except
+for her emotion at seeing him enter a police-station precisely across
+the street, where they could have got a dozen policemen in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," the father said, "we might as well go to our French <i>table
+d'h&ocirc;te</i> now."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," the son said, as if that reminded him, "the place seems to be
+shut."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, we might as well go back to the hotel," the father
+decided. "I dare say we shall do quite as well there."</p>
+
+<p>On the way the young people laughed over the affair and their escape
+from it, especially at the strange appearance and disappearance of the
+kind colored girl, with her tag of sentiment, and at the instant
+compliance of the old woman with the suggestion of the policeman.</p>
+
+<p>The father followed, turning the matter over in
+his mind. Did mere motherhood hallow that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>
+old thing to the colored girl and her sort and condition? Was there a
+superstition of motherhood among such people which would endear this
+disreputable old thing to their affection and reverence? Did such
+people hold mothers in tenderer regard than people of larger means?
+Would a mother in distress or merely embarrassment instantly appeal to
+their better nature as a case of want or sickness in the neighborhood
+always appealed to their compassion? Would her family now welcome the
+old thing home from her aberration more fondly than the friends of one
+who had arrived in a carriage among them in a good street? But, after
+all, how little one knew of other people! How little one knew of one
+self, for that matter! How next to nothing one knew of Somebody's
+Mother! It did not necessarily follow from anything they knew of her
+that she was a mother at all. Her motherhood might be the mere figment
+of that kind colored girl's emotional fancy. She might be Nobody's
+Mother.</p>
+
+<p>When it came to this the father laughed, too. Why, anyhow, were
+mothers more sacred than fathers? If they had found an old man in that
+old woman's condition on those steps, would that kind colored girl
+have appealed to them in his behalf as Somebody's Father?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>THE FACE AT THE WINDOW</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_FACE_AT_THE_WINDOW" id="THE_FACE_AT_THE_WINDOW"></a>THE FACE AT THE WINDOW</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">He had gone down at Christmas, where our host</span><br />
+  Had opened up his house on the Maine coast,<br />
+  For the week's holidays, and we were all,<br />
+  On Christmas night, sitting in the great hall,<br />
+  About the corner fireplace, while we told<br />
+  Stories like those that people, young and old,<br />
+  Have told at Christmas firesides from the first,<br />
+  Till one who crouched upon the hearth, and nursed<br />
+  His knees in his claspt arms, threw back his head,<br />
+  And fixed our host with laughing eyes, and said,<br />
+  "This is so good, here&mdash;with your hickory logs<br />
+  Blazing like natural-gas ones on the dogs,<br />
+  And sending out their flicker on the wall<br />
+  And rafters of your mock-baronial hall,<br />
+  All in fumed-oak, and on your polished floor,<br />
+  And the steel-studded panels of your door&mdash;<br />
+  I think you owe the general make-believe<br />
+  Some sort of story that will somehow give<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+  A more ideal completeness to our case,<br />
+  And make each several listener in his place&mdash;<br />
+  Or hers&mdash;sit up, with a real goose-flesh creeping<br />
+  All over him&mdash;or her&mdash;in proper keeping<br />
+  With the locality and hour and mood.<br />
+  Come!" And amid the cries of "Yes!" and "Good!"<br />
+  Our host laughed back; then, with a serious air,<br />
+  Looked around him on our hemicycle, where<br />
+  He sat midway of it. "Why," he began,<br />
+  But interrupted by the other man,<br />
+  He paused for him to say: "Nothing remote,<br />
+  But something with the actual Yankee note<br />
+  Of here and now in it!" "I'll do my best,"<br />
+  Our host replied, "to satisfy a guest.<br />
+  What do you say to Barberry Cove? And would<br />
+  Five years be too long past?" "No, both are good.<br />
+  Go on!" "You noticed that big house to-day<br />
+  Close to the water, and the sloop that lay,<br />
+  Stripped for the winter, there, beside the pier?<br />
+  Well, there she has lain just so, year after year;<br />
+  And she will never leave her pier again;<br />
+  But once, each spring she sailed in sun or rain,<br />
+  For Bay Chaleur&mdash;or Bay Shaloor, as they<br />
+  Like better to pronounce it down this way."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"I like Shaloor myself rather the best.</span><br />
+  But go ahead," said the exacting guest.<br />
+  <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+  And with a glance around at us that said,<br />
+  "Don't let me bore you!" our host went ahead.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Captain Gilroy built the big house, and he</span><br />
+  Still lives there with his aging family.<br />
+  He built the sloop, and when he used to come<br />
+  Back from the Banks he made her more his home,<br />
+  With his two boys, than the big house. The two<br />
+  Counted with him a good half of her crew,<br />
+  Until it happened, on the Banks, one day<br />
+  The oldest boy got in a steamer's way,<br />
+  And went down in his dory. In the fall<br />
+  The others came without him. That was all<br />
+  That showed in either one of them except<br />
+  That now the father and the brother slept<br />
+  Ashore, and not on board. When the spring came<br />
+  They sailed for the old fishing-ground the same<br />
+  As ever. Yet, not quite the same. The brother,<br />
+  If you believed what folks say, kissed his mother<br />
+  Good-by in going; and by general rumor,<br />
+  The father, so far yielding as to humor<br />
+  His daughters' weakness, rubbed his stubbly cheek<br />
+  Against their lips. Neither of them would speak,<br />
+  But the dumb passion of their love and grief<br />
+  In so much show at parting found relief.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"The weeks passed and the months. Sometimes they heard</span><br />
+  At home, by letter, from the sloop, or word<br />
+  Of hearsay from the fleet. But by and by<br />
+  Along about the middle of July,<br />
+  A time in which they had no news began,<br />
+  And holding unbrokenly through August, ran<br />
+  Into September. Then, one afternoon,<br />
+  While the world hung between the sun and moon,<br />
+  And while the mother and her girls were sitting<br />
+  Together with their sewing and their knitting,&mdash;<br />
+  Before the early-coming evening's gloom<br />
+  Had gathered round them in the living-room,<br />
+  Helplessly wondering to each other when<br />
+  They should hear something from their absent men,&mdash;<br />
+  They saw, all three, against the window-pane,<br />
+  A face that came and went, and came again,<br />
+  Three times, as though for each of them, about<br />
+  As high up from the porch's floor without<br />
+  As a man's head would be that stooped to stare<br />
+  Into the room on their own level there.<br />
+  Its eyes dwelt on them wistfully as if<br />
+  Longing to speak with the dumb lips some grief<br />
+  They could not speak. The women did not start<br />
+  Or scream, though each one of them, in her heart,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+  Knew she was looking on no living face,<br />
+  But stared, as dumb as it did, in her place."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Here our host paused, and one sigh broke from all</span><br />
+  Our circle whom his tale had held in thrall.<br />
+  But he who had required it of him spoke<br />
+  In what we others felt an ill-timed joke:<br />
+  "Well, this is something like!" A girl said, "Don't!"<br />
+  As if it hurt, and he said, "Well, I won't.<br />
+  Go on!" And in a sort of muse our host<br />
+  Said: "I suppose we all expect a ghost<br />
+  Will sometimes come to us. But I doubt if we<br />
+  Are moved by its coming as we thought to be.<br />
+  At any rate, the women were not scared,<br />
+  But, as I said, they simply sat and stared<br />
+  Till the face vanished. Then the mother said,<br />
+  'It was your father, girls, and he is dead.'<br />
+  But both had known him; and now all went on<br />
+  Much as before till three weeks more were gone,<br />
+  When, one night sitting as they sat before,<br />
+  Together with their mother, at the door<br />
+  They heard a fumbling hand, and on the walk<br />
+  Up from the pier, the tramp and muffled talk<br />
+  Of different wind-blown voices that they knew<br />
+  For the hoarse voices of their father's crew.<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+  Then the door opened, and their father stood<br />
+  Before them, palpably in flesh and blood.<br />
+  The mother spoke for all, her own misgiving:<br />
+  'Father, is this your ghost? Or are you living?'<br />
+  'I am alive!' 'But in this very place<br />
+  We saw your face look, like a spirit's face,<br />
+  There through that window, just three weeks ago,<br />
+  And now you are alive!' 'I did not know<br />
+  That I had come; all I know is that then<br />
+  I wanted to tell you folks here that our Ben<br />
+  Was dying of typhoid fever. He raved of you<br />
+  So that I could not think what else to do.<br />
+  He's there in Bay Shaloor!'</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 12em;">"Well, that's the end."</span><br />
+  And rising up to mend the fire our friend<br />
+  Seemed trying to shun comment; but in vain:<br />
+  The exacting guest came at him once again;<br />
+  "You must be going to fall down, I thought,<br />
+  There at the climax, when your story brought<br />
+  The skipper home alive and well. But no,<br />
+  You saved yourself with honor." The girl said, "Oh,"<br />
+  Who spoke before, "it's wonderful! But you,<br />
+  How could you think of anything so true,<br />
+  So delicate, as the father's wistful face<br />
+  Coming there at the window in the place<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+  Of the dead son's! And then, that quaintest touch,<br />
+  Of half-apology&mdash;that he felt so much,<br />
+  He <i>had</i> to come! How perfectly New England! Well,<br />
+  I hope nobody will undertake to tell<br />
+  A common or garden ghost-story to-night."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Our host had turned again, and at her light</span><br />
+  And playful sympathy he said, "My dear,<br />
+  I hope that no one will imagine here<br />
+  I have been inventing in the tale that's done.<br />
+  My little story's charm if it has one<br />
+  Is from no skill of mine. One does not change<br />
+  The course of fable from its wonted range<br />
+  To such effect as I have seemed to do:<br />
+  Only the fact could make my story true."</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>AN EXPERIENCE</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+<h2><a name="AN_EXPERIENCE" id="AN_EXPERIENCE"></a>AN EXPERIENCE</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>For a long time after the event my mind dealt with the poor man in
+helpless conjecture, and it has now begun to do so again for no reason
+that I can assign. All that I ever heard about him was that he was
+some kind of insurance man. Whether life, fire, or marine insurance I
+never found out, and I am not sure that I tried to find out.</p>
+
+<p>There was something in the event which discharged him of all
+obligation to define himself of this or that relation to life. He must
+have had some relation to it such as we all bear, and since the
+question of him has come up with me again I have tried him in several
+of those relations&mdash;father, son, brother, husband&mdash;without identifying
+him very satisfyingly in either.</p>
+
+<p>As I say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the
+debt we owe in that kind to one another's curiosity, sympathy,
+or whatever. I cannot say what errand it was that brought
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+him to the place, a strange, large, indeterminate open room, where
+several of us sat occupied with different sorts of business, but, as
+it seems to me now, by only a provisional right to the place.
+Certainly the corner allotted to my own editorial business was of
+temporary assignment; I was there until we could find a more permanent
+office. The man had nothing to do with me or with the publishers; he
+had no manuscript, or plan for an article which he wished to propose
+and to talk himself into writing, so that he might bring it with a
+claim to acceptance, as though he had been asked to write it. In fact,
+he did not even look of the writing sort; and his affair with some
+other occupant of that anomalous place could have been in no wise
+literary. Probably it was some kind of insurance business, and I have
+been left with the impression of fussiness in his conduct of it; he
+had to my involuntary attention an effect of conscious unwelcome with
+it.</p>
+
+<p>After subjectively dealing with this impression, I ceased to
+notice him, without being able to give myself to my own work.
+The day was choking hot, of a damp that clung about one, and
+forbade one so much effort as was needed to relieve one of one's
+discomfort; to pull at one's wilted collar and loosen the linen about
+one's reeking neck meant exertion which one willingly forbore; it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+was less suffering to suffer passively than to suffer actively. The
+day was of the sort which begins with a brisk heat, and then, with a
+falling breeze, decays into mere swelter. To come indoors out of the
+sun was no escape from the heat; my window opened upon a shaded alley
+where the air was damper without being cooler than the air within.</p>
+
+<p>At last I lost myself in my work with a kind of humid interest in the
+psychological inquiry of a contributor who was dealing with a matter
+rather beyond his power. I did not think that he was fortunate in
+having cast his inquiry in the form of a story; I did not think that
+his contrast of love and death as the supreme facts of life was what a
+subtler or stronger hand could have made it, or that the situation
+gained in effectiveness from having the hero die in the very moment of
+his acceptance. In his supposition that the reader would care more for
+his hero simply because he had undergone that tremendous catastrophe,
+the writer had omitted to make him interesting otherwise; perhaps he
+could not.</p>
+
+<p>My mind began to wander from the story and not very relevantly
+to employ itself with the question of how far our experiences
+really affect our characters. I remembered having once
+classed certain temperaments as the stuff of tragedy, and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+others as the stuff of comedy, and of having found a greater cruelty
+in the sorrows which light natures undergo, as unfit and
+disproportionate for them. Disaster, I tacitly decided, was the fit
+lot of serious natures; when it befell the frivolous it was more than
+they ought to have been made to bear; it was not of their quality.
+Then by the mental zigzagging which all thinking is I thought of
+myself and whether I was of this make or that. If it was more
+creditable to be of serious stuff than frivolous, though I had no
+agency in choosing, I asked myself how I should be affected by the
+sight of certain things, like the common calamities reported every day
+in the papers which I had hitherto escaped seeing. By another zigzag I
+thought that I had never known a day so close and stifling and humid.
+I then reflected upon the comparative poverty of the French language,
+which I was told had only that one word for the condition we could
+call by half a dozen different names, as humid, moist, damp, sticky,
+reeking, sweltering, and so on. I supposed that a book of synonyms
+would give even more English adjectives; I thought of looking, but my
+book of synonyms was at the back of my table, and I would have to rise
+for it. Then I questioned whether the French language was so destitute
+of adjectives, after all; I preferred to doubt it rather than rise.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+With no more logic than those other vagaries had, I realized that the
+person who had started me in them was no longer in the room. He must
+have gone outdoors, and I visualized him in the street pushing about,
+crowded hither and thither, and striking against other people as he
+went and came. I was glad I was not in his place; I believed I should
+have fallen in a faint from the heat, as I had once almost done in New
+York on a day like that. From this my mind jumped to the thought of
+sudden death in general. Was it such a happy thing as people
+pretended? For the person himself, yes, perhaps; but not for those
+whom he had left at home, say, in the morning, and who were expecting
+him at home in the evening. I granted that it was generally accepted
+as the happiest death, but no one that had tried it had said so. To be
+sure, one was spared a long sickness, with suffering from pain and
+from the fear of death. But one had no time for making one's peace
+with God, as it used to be said, and after all there might be
+something in death-bed repentance, although cultivated people no
+longer believed in it. Then I reverted to the family unprepared
+for the sudden death: the mother, the wife, the children. I
+struggled to get away from the question, but the vagaries which
+had lightly dispersed themselves before clung persistently to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+the theme now. I felt that it was like a bad dream. That was a
+promising diversion. Had one any sort of volition in the quick changes
+of dreams? One was aware of finding a certain nightmare insupportable,
+and of breaking from it as by main force, and then falling into a
+deep, sweet sleep. Was death something like waking from a dream such
+as that, which this life largely was, and then sinking into a long,
+restful slumber, and possibly never waking again?</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly I perceived that the man had come back. He might have been
+there some time with his effect of fussing and his pathetic sense of
+unwelcome. I had not noticed; I only knew that he stood at the
+half-open door with the knob of it in his hand looking into the room
+blankly.</p>
+
+<p>As he stood there he lifted his hand and rubbed it across his forehead
+as if in a sort of daze from the heat. I recognized the gesture as one
+very characteristic of myself; I had often rubbed my hand across my
+forehead on a close, hot day like that. Then the man suddenly vanished
+as if he had sunk through the floor.</p>
+
+<p>People who had not noticed that he was there noticed now that he was not
+there. Some made a crooked rush toward the place where he had been, and one
+of those helpful fellow-men who are first in all needs lifted his head and mainly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+carried him into the wide space which the street stairs mounted to,
+and laid him on the floor. It was darker, if not cooler there, and we
+stood back to give him the air which he drew in with long, deep sighs.
+One of us ran down the stairs to the street for a doctor, wherever he
+might be found, and ran against a doctor at the last step.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor came and knelt over the prostrate figure and felt its
+pulse, and put his ear down to its heart. It, which has already in my
+telling ceased to be he, drew its breath in those long suspirations
+which seemed to search each more profoundly than the last the lurking
+life, drawing it from the vital recesses and expelling it in those
+vast sighs.</p>
+
+<p>They went on and on, and established in our consciousness the
+expectation of indefinite continuance. We knew that the figure there
+was without such consciousness as ours, unless it was something so
+remotely withdrawn that it could not manifest itself in any signal to
+our senses. There was nothing tragical in the affair, but it had a
+surpassing dignity. It was as if the figure was saying something to
+the life in each of us which none of us would have words to interpret,
+speaking some last message from the hither side of that bourne from
+which there is no returning.</p>
+
+<p>There was a clutch upon my heart which tightened
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+with the slower and slower succession of those awful breaths. Then one
+was drawn and expelled and then another was not drawn. I waited for
+the breathing to begin again, and it did not begin. The doctor rose
+from kneeling over the figure that had been a man, and uttered, with a
+kind of soundlessness, "Gone," and mechanically dusted his fingers
+with the thumbs of each hand from their contact with what had now
+become all dust forever.</p>
+
+<p>That helpfulest one among us laid a cloth over the face, and the rest
+of us went away. It was finished. The man was done with the sorrow
+which, in our sad human order, must now begin for those he loved and
+who loved him. I tried vaguely to imagine their grief for not having
+been uselessly with him at the last, and I could not. The incident
+remained with me like an experience, something I had known rather than
+seen. I could not alienate it by my pity and make it another's. They
+whom it must bereave seemed for the time immeasurably removed from the
+fact.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>THE BOARDERS</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_BOARDERS" id="THE_BOARDERS"></a>THE BOARDERS</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The boarder who had eloped was a student at the theological seminary,
+and he had really gone to visit his family, so that he had a fairly
+good conscience in giving this color to the fact that he was leaving
+the place permanently because he could not bear it any longer. It was
+a shade of deceit to connive with his room-mate for the custody of his
+carpet-bag and the few socks and collars and the one shirt and summer
+coat which did not visibly affect its lankness when gathered into it
+from his share of the bureau-drawers; but he did not know what else
+to do, and he trusted to a final forgiveness when all the facts were
+considered by a merciful providence. His board was fully paid, and he
+had suffered long. He argued with his room-mate that he could
+do no good by remaining, and that he would have stayed if he
+could have believed there was any use. Besides, the food was
+undermining his health, and the room with that broken window
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+had given him a cold already. He had a right to go, and it was his
+duty to himself and the friends who were helping him through the
+seminary not to get sick.</p>
+
+<p>He did not feel that he had convinced his room-mate, who took charge
+of his carpet-bag and now sat with it between his feet waiting the
+signal of the fugitive's surreptitious return for it. He was a
+vague-looking young man, presently in charge of the "Local and
+Literary" column of the one daily paper of the place, and he had just
+explained to the two other boarders who were watching with him for the
+event that he was not certain whether it was the supper, or the
+anxiety of the situation, or just what it was that was now affecting
+his digestion.</p>
+
+<p>The fellow-boarders, who sat on the edge of the bed, in default of the
+one unbroken chair which their host kept for himself, as easier than a
+mattress to get up from suddenly, did not take sides for or against
+him in his theories of his discomfort. One of them glanced at the
+broken window.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you glaze that in the daytime? You can't use the bolster
+then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not in, much, in the daytime."</p>
+
+<p>It was a medical student who had spoken, but he
+was now silent, and the other said, after they
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+had listened to the twitter of a piano in the parlor under the room,
+"That girl's playing will be the death of me."</p>
+
+<p>"Not if her mother's cooking isn't," the medical student, whose name
+was Wallace, observed with a professional effect.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you prescribe something for it?" the law student suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Which?" Wallace returned.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe anything could cure the playing. I must have meant
+the cooking."</p>
+
+<p>"You're a promising young jurist, Blakeley. What makes you think I
+could cure the cooking?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I just wondered. The sick one gets paler every day. I wonder what
+ails her."</p>
+
+<p>"She's not my patient."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! Hippocratic oath. Rather fine of you, Wallace. But if she's not
+your patient&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Listen!" their host interrupted, sharply. After a joint silence he
+added: "No. It must have been the sleet."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Briggs," the law student said, "if it must have been the sleet,
+what mustn't it have been?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" Briggs explained, "I thought it was Phillips. He was to throw a
+handful of gravel at the window."</p>
+
+<p>"And then you were to run down with his bag
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+and help him to make his escape from a friendless widow. Well, I don't
+know that I blame him. If I didn't owe two weeks' board, I'd leave
+myself&mdash;though I hope I shouldn't sneak away. And if Mrs.
+Betterson didn't owe Wallace, here, two weeks' board, we'd walk off
+together arm-in-arm at high noon. I can't understand how he ever came
+to advance her the money."</p>
+
+<p>Wallace rose from the bed, and kicked each leg out to dislodge the
+tight trousers of the middle eighteen-fifties which had caught on the
+tops of his high boots. "You're a tonguey fellow, Blakeley. But you'll
+find, as you live long, that there are several things you can't
+explain."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you what," Blakeley said. "We'll get Mrs. Betterson to take
+your loan for my debt, and we'll go at once."</p>
+
+<p>"You can propose something like that before the justice of the peace
+in your first pettifogging case."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe Wallace likes to stay. And yet he must know from his
+anatomical studies, better than the animals themselves, what cuts
+of meat the old lady gives us. I shouldn't be so fastidious about
+the cuts, if she didn't treat them all with pork gravy. Well, I
+mustn't be too hard on a lone widow that I owe board to. I don't
+suppose his diet had anything to do with the deep damnation
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+of the late Betterson's taking off. Does that stove of yours smoke, Briggs?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not when there isn't a fire in it."</p>
+
+<p>"I just asked. Wallace's stove smokes, fire or no fire. It takes
+advantage of the old lady's indebtedness to him. There seem," he
+added, philosophically, "to be just two occupations open to widows who
+have to support themselves: millinery business for young ones,
+boarding-housing for old ones. It <i>is</i> rather restricted. What do you
+suppose she puts into the mince-pies? Mince-pies are rather a mystery
+at the best."</p>
+
+<p>Wallace was walking up and down the room still in some difficulty with
+his trousers-legs, and kicking out from time to time to dislodge them.
+"How long should you say Blakeley had been going on?" he asked Briggs.</p>
+
+<p>"You never can tell," Briggs responded. "I think he doesn't know
+himself."</p>
+
+<p>"Well said, youthful scribe! With such listeners as you two,
+I could go on forever. Consider yourselves clapped jovially on
+the back, my gentle Briggs; I can't get up to do it from the hollow
+of your bed here. As you were saying, the wonder about these
+elderly widows who keep boarding-houses is the domestic dilapidation
+they fall into. If they've ever known how to cook a meal or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+sweep a room or make a bed, these arts desert them in the presence of
+their boarders. Their only aim in life seems to be preventing the
+escape of their victims, and they either let them get into debt for
+their board or borrow money from them. But why do they always have
+daughters, and just two of them: one beautiful, fashionable, and
+devoted to the piano; the other willing to work, but pale, pathetic,
+and incapable of the smallest achievement with the gridiron or the
+wash-board? It's a thing to make a person want to pay up and leave,
+even if he's reading law. If Wallace, here, had the spirit of a man,
+he would collect the money owing him, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, stop it, Blakeley!" Wallace stormed. "I should think you'd get
+tired of your talk yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, as you insist&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Blakeley began again, but Briggs jumped to his feet and caught up
+Phillips's carpet-bag, and looked wildly around. "It's gravel, this
+time."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, take your hat, Briggs. It may be a prolonged struggle.
+But remember that Phillips's cause is just. He's paid his board,
+and he has a perfect right to leave. She has no right to prevent
+him. Think of that when the fray is at its worst. But try to get
+him off quietly, if you can. Deal gently with the erring, while
+you stand firm for boarders' rights. Remember that Phillips is
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+sneaking off in order to spare her feelings and has come pretty near
+prevarication in the effort. Have you got your shoes off? No; it's
+your rubbers on. That's better."</p>
+
+<p>Briggs faltered with the carpet-bag in his hand. "Boys, I don't like
+this. It feels&mdash;clandestine."</p>
+
+<p>"It <i>looks</i> that way, too," Blakeley admitted. "It has an air of
+conspiracy."</p>
+
+<p>"I've got half a mind to let Phillips come in and get his bag
+himself."</p>
+
+<p>"It would serve him right, though I don't know why, exactly. He has a
+right to spare his own feelings if he's sparing hers at the same time.
+Of course he's afraid she'll plead with him to stay, and he'll have to
+be inexorable with her; and if I understand the yielding nature of
+Phillips he doesn't like to be inexorable."</p>
+
+<p>There came another sharp rattle of small pebbles at the window.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, confound him!" Briggs cried under his breath, and he shuffled out
+of the room and crept noiselessly down the stairs to the front door.
+The door creaked a little in opening, and he left it ajar. The current
+of cold air that swept up to the companions he had left behind at his
+room door brought them the noise of his rush down the gravel walk to
+the gate and a noise there as of fugitive steps on the pavement
+outside.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+A weak female tread made itself heard in the hallway, followed by a
+sharp voice from a door in the rear. "Was it the cat, Jenny?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; the door just seems to have blown open. The catch is broken."</p>
+
+<p>Swift, strong steps advanced with an effect of angry suspicion. "I
+don't believe it blew open. More likely the cat clawed it open."</p>
+
+<p>The steps which the voice preceded seemed to halt at the open door, as
+if falling back from it, and Wallace and Blakeley, looking down, saw
+by the dim flare of the hall lamp the face of Briggs confronting the
+face of Mrs. Betterson from the outer darkness. They saw the sick
+girl, whose pallor they could not see, supporting herself by the
+stairs-post with one hand and pressing the other to her side.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! It's <i>you</i>, Mr. Briggs," the landlady said, with a note of
+inculpation. "What made you leave the door open?"</p>
+
+<p>The spectators could not see the swift change in Briggs's face from
+terror to savage desperation, but they noted it in his voice.
+"Yes&mdash;yes! It's me. I just&mdash;I was just&mdash; No I won't, either! You'd
+better know the truth. I was taking Phillips's bag out to him. He was
+afraid to come in for it, because he didn't want to see you, the
+confounded coward! He's left."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+"Left? And he said he would stay till spring! Didn't he, Jenny?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't remember&mdash;" the girl weakly gasped, but her mother did not
+heed her in her mounting wrath.</p>
+
+<p>"A great preacher <i>he'll</i> make. What'd he say he left for?"</p>
+
+<p>"He didn't say. Will you let me up-stairs?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I won't, till you tell me. You know well enough, between you."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I do know," Briggs answered, savagely. "He left because he was
+tired of eating sole-leather for steak, and fire-salt pork, and tar
+for molasses, and butter strong enough to make your nose curl, and
+drinking burnt-rye slops for coffee and tea-grounds for tea. And so am
+I, and so are all of us, and&mdash;and&mdash; Will you let me go up-stairs now,
+Mrs. Betterson?"</p>
+
+<p>His voice had risen, not so high but that another voice from the
+parlor could prevail over it: a false, silly, girl voice, with the
+twitter of piano-keys as from hands swept over the whole board to help
+drown the noise of the quarrel in the hall. "Oh yes, I'll sing it
+again, Mr. Saunders, if you sa-a-a-y."</p>
+
+<p>Then this voice lifted itself in a silly song, and a silence followed the
+voices in the hall, except for the landlady's saying, brokenly: "Well, all right,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+Mr. Briggs. You can go up to your room for all me. I've tried to be a
+mother to you boys, but if <i>this</i> is what I get for it!"</p>
+
+<p>The two at the threshold of Briggs's room retreated within, as he
+bounded furiously upon them and slammed the door after him. It started
+open again, from the chronic defect of the catch, but he did not care.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Briggs, I hope you feel better now," Blakeley began. "You
+certainly told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing <i>but</i> the
+truth. But I wonder you had the heart to do it before that sick girl."</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>didn't</i> have the heart," Briggs shouted. "But I had the courage,
+and if you say one word more, Blakeley, I'll throw you out of the
+room. I'm going to leave! <i>My</i> board's paid if yours isn't."</p>
+
+<p>He went wildly about, catching things down here and there from nails
+and out of drawers. The tears stood in his eyes. But suddenly he
+stopped and listened to the sounds from below&mdash;the sound of the silly
+singing in the parlor, and the sound of sobbing in the dining-room,
+and the sound of vain entreating between the sobs.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't suppose I'm fit to keep a boarding-house. I never was a
+good manager; and everybody imposes on me, and everything is so dear,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+and I don't know what's good from what's bad. Your poor father used
+to look after all that."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, don't you cry, now, mother! It'll all come right, you'll see.
+I'm getting so I can go and do the marketing now; and if Minervy would
+only help a little&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no!" the mother's voice came anxiously up. "We can get along
+without her; we always have. I know he likes her, and I want to give
+her every chance. <i>We</i> can get along. If she was on'y married, once,
+we could all live&mdash;" A note of self-comforting gradually stole into
+the mother's voice, and the sound of a nose violently blown seemed to
+note a period in her suffering.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mother, I wish I was well!" The girl's voice came with a burst of
+wild lamenting.</p>
+
+<p>"'Sh, 'sh, deary!" her mother entreated. "He'll <i>hear</i> you, and
+then&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"'Hazel Dell'?" the silly voice came from the parlor, with a sound of
+fright in it. "I can sing it without the music." The piano keys
+twittered the prelude and the voice sang:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><p><small>
+"In the Hazel Dell my Nelly's sleeping,<br />
+Nelly loved so long!"
+</small></p></div>
+
+<p>Wallace went forward and shut the door. "It's a shame to overhear
+them! What are you going to do, you fellows?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+"I'm going to stay," Briggs said, "if it kills me. At least I will
+till Minervy's married. <i>I</i> don't care what the grub's like. I can
+always get a bite at the restaurant."</p>
+
+<p>"If anybody will pay up my back board, I'll stay, too," Blakeley
+followed. "I should like to make a virtue of it, and, as things stand,
+I can't."</p>
+
+<p>"All right," Wallace said, and he went out and down the stairs. Then
+from the dining-room below his heavy voice offering encouragement came
+up, in terms which the others could not make out.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll bet he's making her another advance," Blakeley whispered, as if
+he might be overheard by Wallace.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish <i>I</i> could have made to do it," Briggs whispered back. "I feel
+as mean as pursley. Would you like to kick me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see how that would do any good. I may want to borrow money of
+you, and you can't ask a loan from a man you've kicked. Besides, I
+think what you said may do her good."</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+<h2><a name="BREAKFAST_IS_MY_BEST_MEAL" id="BREAKFAST_IS_MY_BEST_MEAL"></a>BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL</h2>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Breakfast is my best meal, and I reckon it's always been<br />
+Ever since I was old enough to know what breakfast could mean.<br />
+I mind when we lived in the cabin out on the Illinoy,<br />
+Where father had took up a quarter-section when I was a boy,<br />
+I used to go for the cows as soon as it was light;<br />
+And when I started back home, before I come in sight,<br />
+I come in <i>smell</i> of the cabin, where mother was frying the ham,<br />
+And boiling the coffee, that reached through the air like a mile o' ba'm,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+'N' I bet you I didn't wait to see what it was that the dog<br />
+Thought he'd got under the stump or inside o' the hollow log!<br />
+But I made the old cows canter till their hoof-joints cracked&mdash;you know<br />
+That dry, funny kind of a noise that the cows make when they go&mdash;<br />
+And I never stopped to wash when I got to the cabin door;<br />
+I pulled up my chair and e't like I never had e't before.<br />
+And mother she set there and watched me eat, and eat, and eat,<br />
+Like as if she couldn't give her old eyes enough of the treat;<br />
+And she split the shortened biscuit, and spread the butter between,<br />
+And let it lay there and melt, and soak and soak itself in;<br />
+And she piled up my plate with potato and ham and eggs,<br />
+Till I couldn't hold any more, or hardly stand on my legs;<br />
+And she filled me up with coffee that would float an iron wedge,<br />
+And never give way a mite, or spill a drop at the edge.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>What? Well, yes, this is good coffee, too. If they don't know much,<br />
+They do know how to make coffee, I <i>will</i> say that for these Dutch.<br />
+But my&mdash;oh, my! It ain't the kind of coffee my mother made,<br />
+And the coffee my wife used to make would throw it clear in the shade;<br />
+And the brand of sugar-cured, canvased ham that she always used&mdash;<br />
+Well, this Westphalia stuff would simply have made her amused!<br />
+That so, heigh? I saw that you was United States as soon<br />
+As ever I heard you talk; I reckon I know the tune!<br />
+Pick it out anywhere; and <i>you</i> understand how I feel<br />
+About these here foreign breakfasts: breakfast is my best meal.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>My! but my wife was a cook; and the breakfasts she used to get<br />
+The first years we was married, I can smell 'em and taste 'em yet:<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+Corn cake light as a feather, and buckwheat thin as lace<br />
+And crisp as cracklin'; and steak that you couldn't have the face<br />
+To compare any steak over here to; and chicken fried<br />
+Maryland style&mdash;I couldn't get through the bill if I tried.<br />
+And then, her waffles! My! She'd kind of slip in a few<br />
+Between the ham and the chicken&mdash;you know how women'll do&mdash;<br />
+For a sort of little surprise, and, if I was running light,<br />
+To take my fancy and give an edge to my appetite.<br />
+Done it all herself as long as we was poor, and I tell <i>you</i><br />
+<i>She</i> liked to see me eat as well as mother used to do;<br />
+I reckon she went ahead of mother some, if the truth was known,<br />
+And everything she touched she give a taste of her own.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p><i>She</i> was a cook, I can tell you! And after we got ahead,<br />
+And she could 'a' had a girl to do the cookin' instead,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+I had the greatest time to get Momma to leave the work;<br />
+She said it made her feel like a mis'able sneak and shirk.<br />
+She didn't want daughter, though, when we did begin to keep girls,<br />
+To come in the kitchen and cook, and smell up her clo'es and curls;<br />
+But you couldn't have stopped the child, whatever you tried to do&mdash;<br />
+I reckon the gift of the cookin' was born in Girly, too.<br />
+Cook she would from the first, and we just had to let her alone;<br />
+And after she got married, and had a house of her own,<br />
+She tried to make me feel, when I come to live with her,<br />
+Like it was my house, too; and I tell you she done it, sir!<br />
+She remembered that breakfast was my best meal, and she tried<br />
+To have all I used to have, and a good deal more beside;<br />
+Grape-fruit to begin with, or melons or peaches, at least&mdash;<br />
+Husband's business took him there, and they had went to live East&mdash;<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
+Then a Spanish macker'l, or a soft-shell crab on toast,<br />
+Or a broiled live lobster! Well, sir, I don't want to seem to boast,<br />
+But I don't believe you could have got in the whole of New York<br />
+Any such an oyster fry or sausage of country pork.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<p>Well, I don't know what-all it means; I always lived just so&mdash;<br />
+Never drinked or smoked, and yet, here about two years ago,<br />
+I begun to run down; I ain't as young as I used to be;<br />
+And the doctors all said Carlsbad, and I reckon this is me.<br />
+But it's more like some one I've dreamt of, with all three of 'em gone!<br />
+Believe in ghosts? Well, <i>I</i> do. I <i>know</i> there are ghosts. I'm <i>one</i>.<br />
+Maybe I mayn't look it&mdash;I was always inclined to fat;<br />
+The doctors say that's the trouble, and very likely it's that.<br />
+This is my little grandson, and this is the oldest one<br />
+Of Girly's girls; and for all that the whole of us said and done,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+She must come with grandpa when the doctors sent me off here,<br />
+To see that they didn't starve him. Ain't that about so, my dear?<br />
+<i>She</i> can cook, I tell you; and when we get home again<br />
+We're goin' to have something to <i>eat</i>; I'm just a-livin' till then.<br />
+But when I set here of a morning, and think of them that's gone&mdash;<br />
+Mother and Momma and Girly&mdash;well, I wouldn't like to let on<br />
+Before the children, but I can almost seem to see<br />
+All of 'em lookin' down, like as if they pitied me,<br />
+After the breakfasts they give me, to have me have to put up<br />
+With nothing but bread and butter, and a little mis'able cup<br />
+Of this here weak-kneed coffee! I can't tell how <i>you</i> feel,<br />
+But it fairly makes me sick! Breakfast is my best meal.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE MOTHER-BIRD</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_MOTHER-BIRD" id="THE_MOTHER-BIRD"></a>THE MOTHER-BIRD</h2>
+
+
+<p>She wore around the turned-up brim of her bolero-like toque a band of
+violets not so much in keeping with the gray of the austere November
+day as with the blue of her faded autumnal eyes. Her eyes were
+autumnal, but it was not from this, or from the lines of maturity
+graven on the passing prettiness of her little face, that the notion
+and the name of Mother-Bird suggested itself. She became known as the
+Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the earliest, if not the
+latest, of her friends, because she was slight and small, and like a
+bird in her eager movements, and because she spoke so instantly and so
+constantly of her children in Dresden: before you knew anything else
+of her you knew that she was going out to them.</p>
+
+<p>She was quite alone, and she gave the sense of claiming their protection,
+and sheltering herself in the fact of them. When she mentioned her
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+daughters she had the effect of feeling herself chaperoned by them.
+You could not go behind them and find her wanting in the social
+guarantees which women on steamers, if not men, exact of lonely birds
+of passage who are not mother-birds. One must respect the convention
+by which she safeguarded herself and tried to make good her standing;
+yet it did not lastingly avail her with other birds of passage, so far
+as they were themselves mother-birds, or sometimes only maiden-birds.
+The day had not ended before they began to hold her off by slight
+liftings of their wings and rufflings of their feathers, by quick,
+evasive flutterings, by subtle ignorances of her approach, which
+convinced no one but themselves that they had not seen her. She sailed
+with the sort of acquaintance-in-common which every one shares on a
+ship leaving port, when people are confused by the kindness of friends
+coming to see them off after sending baskets of fruit and sheaves of
+flowers, and scarcely know what they are doing or saying. But when the
+ship was abreast of Fire Island, and the pilot had gone over the side,
+these provisional intimacies of the parting hour began to restrict
+themselves. Then the Mother-Bird did not know half the women she had
+known at the pier, or quite all the men.</p>
+
+<p>It was not that she did anything obvious to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+forfeit this knowledge. Her behavior was if anything too exemplary; it
+might be thought to form a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the
+unseasonable band of violets around her hat-brim; perhaps it was the
+vernal gaiety of her dress; perhaps it was the uncertainty of her
+anxious eyes, which presumed while they implored. A mother-bird must
+not hover too confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose
+preoccupations she does not share. It might have been her looking and
+dressing younger than nature justified; at forty one must not look
+thirty; in November one must not, even involuntarily, wear the things
+of May if one would have others believe in one's devotion to one's
+children in Dresden; one alleges in vain one's impatience to join them
+as grounds for joining groups or detached persons who have begun to
+write home to their children in New York or Boston.</p>
+
+<p>The very readiness of the Mother-Bird to give security by the mention
+of well-known names, to offer proof of her social solvency by the
+eager correctness of her behavior, created reluctance around her. Some
+would not have her at all from the first; others, who had partially or
+conditionally accepted her, returned her upon her hands and withdrew
+from the negotiation. More and more she found herself outside that hard
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+woman-world, and trying less and less to beat her way into it.</p>
+
+<p>The women may have known her better even than she knew herself, and it
+may have been through ignorance greater than her own that the men were
+more acquiescent. But the men too were not so acquiescent, or not at
+all, as time passed.</p>
+
+<p>It would be hard to fix the day, the hour, far harder the moment, when
+the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear
+in the smoking-room, or say whether she passed from the one to the
+other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women's unwritten
+law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship,
+after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and
+sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her
+poor, pretty little face, with its faded blue eyes and wistful mouth.
+There she passed by quick transition from the conversation of the
+graver elderly smokers to the loud laughter of two birds of prey who
+became her comrades, or such friends as birds like them can be to
+birds like her.</p>
+
+<p>From anything she had said or done there was no reason for her lapse
+from the women and the better men to such men; for her transition from
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+the better sort of women there was no reason except that it happened.
+Whether she attached herself to the birds of prey, or they to her, by
+that instinct which enables birds of all kinds to know themselves of a
+feather remained a touching question.</p>
+
+<p>There remained to the end the question whether she was of a feather
+with them, or whether it was by some mischance, or by some such stress
+of the elements as drives birds of any feather to flock with birds of
+any other. To the end there remained a distracted and forsaken
+innocence in her looks. It was imaginable that she had made overtures
+to the birds of prey because she had made overtures to every one else;
+she was always seeking rather than sought, and her acceptance with
+them was as deplorable as her refusal by better birds. Often they were
+seen without her, when they had that look of having escaped, which
+others wore; but she was not often seen without them.</p>
+
+<p>There is not much walking-weather on a November passage, and she was
+seen less with them in the early dark outdoors than in the late light
+within, by which she wavered a small form through the haze of their
+cigars in the smoking-room, or in the grill-room, where she showed in
+faint eclipse through the fumes of the broiling and frying, or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+through the vapors of the hot whiskies. The birds of prey were then
+heard laughing, but whether at her or with her it must have been
+equally sorrowful to learn.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps they were laughing at the maternal fondness which she had used
+for introduction to the general acquaintance lost almost in the moment
+of winning it. She seemed not to resent their laughter, though she
+seemed not to join in it. The worst of her was the company she kept;
+but since no better would allow her to keep it, you could not
+confidently say she would not have liked the best company on board. At
+the same time you could not have said she would; you could not have
+been sure it would not have bored her. Doubtless these results are not
+solely the sport of chance; they must be somewhat the event of choice
+if not of desert.</p>
+
+<p>For anything you could have sworn, the Mother-Bird would have liked to
+be as good as the best. But since it was not possible for her to be
+good in the society of the best, she could only be good in that of the
+worst. It was to be hoped that the birds of prey were not cruel to
+her; that their mockery was never unkind if ever it was mockery. The
+cruelty which must come came when they began to be seen less and less
+with her, even at the late suppers, through the haze of their cigars
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>
+and the smoke of the broiling and frying, and the vapors of the hot
+whiskies. Then it was the sharpest pang of all to meet her wandering
+up and down the ship's promenades, or leaning on the rail and looking
+dimly out over the foam-whitened black sea. It is the necessity of
+birds of prey to get rid of other birds when they are tired of them,
+and it had doubtless come to that.</p>
+
+<p>One night, the night before getting into port, when the curiosity
+which always followed her with grief failed of her in the heightened
+hilarity of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the ship's run
+were making, it found her alone beside a little iron table, of those
+set in certain nooks outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one
+near, where the light from within fell palely upon her. The boon birds
+of prey, with whom she had been supping, had abandoned her, and she
+was supporting her cheek on the small hand of the arm that rested on
+the table. She leaned forward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the
+violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vibrations of the
+machinery. She was asleep, poor Mother-Bird, and it would have been
+impossible not to wish her dreams were kind.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE AMIGO</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_AMIGO" id="THE_AMIGO"></a>THE AMIGO</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>His name was really Perez Armando Aldeano, but in the end everybody
+called him the <i>amigo</i>, because that was the endearing term by which
+he saluted all the world. There was a time when the children called
+him "Span-yard" in their games, for he spoke no tongue but Spanish,
+and though he came from Ecuador, and was no more a Spaniard than they
+were English, he answered to the call of "Span-yard!" whenever he
+heard it. He came eagerly in the hope of fun, and all the more eagerly
+if there was a hope of mischief in the fun. Still, to discerning
+spirits, he was always the <i>amigo</i>, for, when he hailed you so, you
+could not help hailing him so again, and whatever mock he put upon you
+afterward, you were his secret and inalienable friend.</p>
+
+<p>The moment of my own acceptance in this quality came in the first
+hours of expansion following our getting to sea after long detention in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+the dock by fog. A small figure came flying down the dock with
+outspread arms, and a joyful cry of "Ah, <i>amigo</i>!" as if we were now
+meeting unexpectedly after a former intimacy in Bogot&aacute;; and the
+<i>amigo</i> clasped me round the middle to his bosom, or more strictly
+speaking, his brow, which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was clad in
+a long black overcoat, and a boy's knee-pants, and under the peak of
+his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a
+smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was more and more, with the
+thinness of his small black legs, and his habit of hopping up and
+down, and dancing threateningly about, with mischief latent in every
+motion, like a crow which in being tamed has acquired one of the worst
+traits of civilization. He began babbling and gurgling in Spanish, and
+took my hand for a stroll about the ship, and from that time we were,
+with certain crises of disaffection, firm allies.</p>
+
+<p>There were others whom he hailed and adopted his friends, whose
+legs he clung about and impeded in their walks, or whom he required
+to toss him into the air as they passed, but I flattered myself that
+he had a peculiar, because a primary, esteem for myself. I have
+thought it might be that, Bogot&aacute; being said to be a very
+literary capital, as those things go in South America, he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+was mystically aware of a common ground between us, wider and deeper
+than that of his other friendships. But it may have been somewhat
+owing to my inviting him to my cabin to choose such portion as he
+would of a lady-cake sent us on shipboard at the last hour. He
+prattled and chuckled over it in the soft gutturals of his parrot-like
+Spanish, and rushed up on deck to eat the frosting off in the presence
+of his small companions, and to exult before them in the exploitation
+of a novel pleasure. Yet it could not have been the lady-cake which
+lastingly endeared me to him, for by the next day he had learned
+prudence and refused it without withdrawing his amity.</p>
+
+<p>This, indeed, was always tempered by what seemed a constitutional
+irony, and he did not impart it to any one without some time making
+his friend feel the edge of his practical humor. It was not long
+before the children whom he gathered to his heart had each and all
+suffered some fall or bump or bruise which, if not of his intention,
+was of his infliction, and which was regretted with such winning archness
+that the very mothers of them could not resist him, and his victims dried
+their tears to follow him with glad cries of "Span-yard, Span-yard!"
+Injury at his hands was a favor; neglect was the only real grievance. He
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+went about rolling his small black head, and darting roguish
+lightnings from under his thick-fringed eyes, and making more trouble
+with a more enticing gaiety than all the other people on the ship put
+together.</p>
+
+<p>The truth must be owned that the time came, long before the end of the
+voyage, when it was felt that in the interest of the common welfare,
+something must be done about the <i>amigo</i>. At the conversational end of
+the doctor's table, where he was discussed whenever the racks were not
+on, and the talk might have languished without their inspiration, his
+badness was debated at every meal. Some declared him the worst boy in
+the world, and held against his half-hearted defenders that something
+ought to be done about him; and one was left to imagine all the darker
+fate for him because there was nothing specific in these convictions.
+He could not be thrown overboard, and if he had been put in irons
+probably his worst enemies at the conversational end of the table
+would have been the first to intercede for him. It is not certain,
+however, that their prayers would have been effective with the
+captain, if that officer, framed for comfort as well as command,
+could have known how accurately the <i>amigo</i> had dramatized his
+personal presence by throwing himself back, and clasping his hands a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+foot in front of his small stomach, and making a few tilting paces forward.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>amigo</i> had a mimic gift which he liked to exercise when he could
+find no intelligible language for the expression of his ironic spirit.
+Being forbidden visits in and out of season to certain staterooms
+whose inmates feigned a wish to sleep, he represented in what
+grotesque attitudes of sonorous slumber they passed their day, and he
+spared neither age nor sex in these graphic shows. When age refused
+one day to go up on deck with him and pleaded in such Spanish as it
+could pluck up from its past studies that it was too old, he laughed
+it to scorn. "You are not old," he said. "Why?" the flattered dotard
+inquired. "Because you smile," and that seemed reason enough for one's
+continued youth. It was then that the <i>amigo</i> gave his own age,
+carefully telling the Spanish numerals over, and explaining further by
+holding up both hands with one finger shut in. But he had the subtlety
+of centuries in his nine years, and he penetrated the ship everywhere
+with his arch spirit of mischief. It was mischief always in the
+interest of the good-fellowship which he offered impartially to
+old and young; and if it were mere frolic, with no ulterior
+object, he did not care at all how old or young his playmate
+was. This endeared him naturally to every age; and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>
+the little blond German-American boy dried his tears from the last
+accident inflicted on him by the <i>amigo</i> to recall him by tender
+entreaties of "Span-yard, Span-yard!" while the eldest of his friends
+could not hold out against him more than two days in the strained
+relations following upon the <i>amigo's</i> sweeping him down the back with
+a toy broom employed by the German-American boy to scrub the scuppers.
+This was not so much an injury as an indignity, but it was resented as
+an indignity, in spite of many demure glances of propitiation from the
+<i>amigo's</i> ironical eyes and murmurs of inarticulate apology as he
+passed.</p>
+
+<p>He was, up to a certain point, the kindest and truest of <i>amigos</i>;
+then his weird seizure came, and the baby was spilled out of the
+carriage he had been so benevolently pushing up and down; or the
+second officer's legs, as he walked past with the prettiest girl on
+board, were hit with the stick that the <i>amigo</i> had been innocently
+playing shuffle-board with; or some passenger was taken unawares in
+his vanity or infirmity and made to contribute to the <i>amigo's</i>
+passion for active amusement.</p>
+
+<p>At this point I ought to explain that the <i>amigo</i> was not
+traveling alone from Ecuador to Paris, where it was said he was to
+rejoin his father. At meal-times, and at other rare intervals, he was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+seen to be in the charge of a very dark and very silent little man, with
+intensely black eyes and mustache, clad in raven hues from his head to
+the delicate feet on which he wore patent-leather shoes. With him the
+<i>amigo</i> walked gravely up and down the deck, and behaved decorously at
+table; and we could not reconcile the apparent affection between the
+two with a theory we had that the <i>amigo</i> had been found impossible in
+his own country, and had been sent out of Ecuador by a decree of the
+government, or perhaps a vote of the whole people. The little, dark,
+silent man, in his patent-leather boots, had not the air of conveying
+a state prisoner into exile, and we wondered in vain what the tie
+between him and the <i>amigo</i> was. He might have been his tutor, or his
+uncle. He exercised a quite mystical control over the <i>amigo</i>, who was
+exactly obedient to him in everything, and would not look aside at you
+when in his keeping. We reflected with awe and pathos that, as they
+roomed together, it was his privilege to see the <i>amigo</i> asleep, when
+that little, very kissable black head rested innocently on the pillow,
+and the busy brain within it was at peace with the world which formed
+its pleasure and its prey in waking.</p>
+
+<p>It would be idle to represent that the <i>amigo</i>
+played his pranks upon that shipload of long-suffering
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+people with final impunity. The time came when they not only said
+something must be done, but actually did something. It was by the hand
+of one of the <i>amigo's</i> sweetest and kindest friends, namely, that
+elderly captain, off duty, who was going out to be assigned his ship
+in Hamburg. From the first he had shown the affectionate tenderness
+for the <i>amigo</i> which was felt by all except some obdurate hearts at
+the conversational end of the table; and it must have been with a
+loving interest in the <i>amigo's</i> ultimate well-being that, taking him
+in an ecstasy of mischief, he drew the <i>amigo</i> face downward across
+his knees, and bestowed the chastisement which was morally a caress.
+He dismissed him with a smile in which the <i>amigo</i> read the good
+understanding that existed unimpaired between them, and accepted his
+correction with the same affection as that which had given it. He
+shook himself and ran off with an enjoyment of the joke as great as
+that of any of the spectators and far more generous.</p>
+
+<p>In fact there was nothing mean in the <i>amigo</i>. Impish he was, or might
+be, but only in the sort of the crow or the parrot; there was no malevolence
+in his fine malice. One fancied him in his adolescence taking part in
+one of the frequent revolutions of his continent, but humorously, not
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+homicidally. He would like to alarm the other faction, and perhaps
+drive it from power, or overset it from its official place, but if he
+had the say there would be no bringing the vanquished out into the
+plaza to be shot. He may now have been on his way to France ultimately
+to study medicine, which seems to be preliminary to a high political
+career in South America; but in the mean time we feared for him in
+that republic of severely regulated subordinations.</p>
+
+<p>We thought with pathos of our early parting with him, as we approached
+Plymouth and tried to be kodaked with him, considering it an honor and
+pleasure. He so far shared our feeling as to consent, but he insisted
+on wearing a pair of glasses which had large eyes painted on them, and
+on being taken in the act of inflating a toy balloon. Probably,
+therefore, the likeness would not be recognized in Bogot&aacute;, but it will
+always be endeared to us by the memory of the many mockeries suffered
+from him. There were other friends whom we left on the ship, notably
+those of the conversational end of the table, who thought him simply a
+bad boy; but there were none of such peculiar appeal as he, when he stood
+by the guard, opening and shutting his hand in ironical adieu, and looking
+smaller and smaller as our tender drifted away and the vast liner loomed
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+immense before us. He may have contributed to its effect of immensity
+by the smallness of his presence, or it may have dwarfed him. No
+matter; he filled no slight space in our lives while he lasted. Now
+that he is no longer there, was he really a bad little boy, merely and
+simply? Heaven knows, which alone knows good boys from bad.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>BLACK CROSS FARM</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+<h2><a name="BLACK_CROSS_FARM" id="BLACK_CROSS_FARM"></a>BLACK CROSS FARM</h2>
+
+<h4>(To F. S.)</h4>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>After full many a mutual delay<br />
+My friend and I at last fixed on a day<br />
+For seeing Black Cross Farm, which he had long<br />
+Boasted the fittest theme for tale or song<br />
+In all that charming region round about:<br />
+Something that must not really be left out<br />
+Of the account of things to do for me.<br />
+It was a teasing bit of mystery,<br />
+He said, which he and his had tried in vain,<br />
+Ever since they had found it, to explain.<br />
+The right way was to happen, as they did,<br />
+Upon it in the hills where it was hid;<br />
+But chance could not be always trusted, quite,<br />
+You might not happen on it, though you might;<br />
+Encores were usually objected to<br />
+By chance. The next best thing that we could do<br />
+Was in his carryall, to start together,<br />
+And trust that somehow favoring wind and weather,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+With the eccentric progress of his horse,<br />
+Would so far drift us from our settled course<br />
+That we at least could lose ourselves, if not<br />
+Find the mysterious object that we sought.<br />
+So one blithe morning of the ripe July<br />
+We fared, by easy stages, toward the sky<br />
+That rested one rim of its turquoise cup<br />
+Low on the distant sea, and, tilted up,<br />
+The other on the irregular hilltops. Sweet<br />
+The sun and wind that joined to cool and heat<br />
+The air to one delicious temperature;<br />
+And over the smooth-cropt mowing-pieces pure<br />
+The pine-breath, borrowing their spicy scent<br />
+In barter for the balsam that it lent!<br />
+And when my friend handed the reins to me,<br />
+And drew a fuming match along his knee,<br />
+And, lighting his cigar, began to talk,<br />
+I let the old horse lapse into a walk<br />
+From his perfunctory trot, content to listen,<br />
+Amid that leafy rustle and that glisten<br />
+Of field, and wood, and ocean, rapt afar,<br />
+From every trouble of our anxious star.<br />
+From time to time, between effect and cause<br />
+In this or that, making a questioning pause,<br />
+My friend peered round him while he feigned a gay<br />
+Hope that we might have taken the wrong way<br />
+At the last turn, and then let me push on,<br />
+Or the old horse rather, slanting hither and yon,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+And never in the middle of the track,<br />
+Except when slanting off or slanting back.<br />
+He talked, I listened, while we wandered by<br />
+The scanty fields of wheat and oats and rye,<br />
+With patches of potatoes and of corn,<br />
+And now and then a garden spot forlorn,<br />
+Run wild where once a house had stood, or where<br />
+An empty house yet stood, and seemed to stare<br />
+Upon us blindly from the twisted glass<br />
+Of windows that once let no wayfarer pass<br />
+Unseen of children dancing at the pane,<br />
+And vanishing to reappear again,<br />
+Pulling their mother with them to the sight.<br />
+Still we kept on, with turnings left and right,<br />
+Past farmsteads grouped in cheerful neighborhoods,<br />
+Or solitary; then through shadowy woods<br />
+Of pine or birch, until the road, grass-grown,<br />
+Had given back to Nature all her own<br />
+Save a faint wheel-trace, that along the slope,<br />
+Rain-gullied, seemed to stop and doubt and grope,<br />
+And then quite ceased, as if 't had turned and fled<br />
+Out of the forest into which it led,<br />
+And left us at the gate whose every bar<br />
+Was nailed against us. But, "Oh, here we are!"<br />
+My friend cried joyously. "At last, at last!"<br />
+And making our horse superfluously fast,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+He led the way onward by what had been<br />
+A lane, now hid by weeds and briers between<br />
+Meadows scarce worth the mowing, to a space<br />
+Shaped as by Nature for the dwelling-place<br />
+Of kindly human life: a small plateau<br />
+Open to the heaven that seemed bending low<br />
+In liking for it. There beneath a roof<br />
+Still against winter and summer weather-proof,<br />
+With walls and doors and windows perfect yet,<br />
+Between its garden and its graveyard set,<br />
+Stood the old homestead, out of which had perished<br />
+The home whose memory it dumbly cherished,<br />
+And which, when at our push the door swung wide,<br />
+We might have well imagined to have died<br />
+And had its funeral the day before:<br />
+So clean and cold it was from floor to floor,<br />
+So lifelike and so deathlike, with the thrill<br />
+Of hours when life and death encountered still<br />
+Passionate in it. They that lay below<br />
+The tangled grasses or the drifted snow,<br />
+Husband and wife, mother and little one,<br />
+From that sad house less utterly were gone<br />
+Than they that living had abandoned it.<br />
+In moonless nights their Absences might flit,<br />
+Homesick, from room to room, or dimly sit<br />
+Around its fireless hearths, or haunt the rose<br />
+And lily in the neglected garden close;<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+But they whose feet had borne them from the door<br />
+Would pass the footworn threshold nevermore.<br />
+We read the moss-grown names upon the tombs,<br />
+With lighter melancholy than the glooms<br />
+Of the dead house shadowed us with, and thence<br />
+Turning, my heart was pierced with more intense<br />
+Suggestion of a mystical dismay,<br />
+As in the brilliance of the summer day<br />
+We faced the vast gray barn. The house was old,<br />
+Though so well kept, as age by years is told<br />
+In our young land; but the barn, gray and vast,<br />
+Stood new and straight and strong&mdash;all battened fast<br />
+At every opening; and where once the mow<br />
+Had yawned wide-windowed, on the sheathing now<br />
+A Cross was nailed, the bigness of a man,<br />
+Aslant from left to right, athwart the span,<br />
+And painted black as paint could make it. Hushed,<br />
+I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed<br />
+To this point and to that point, and then burst<br />
+In the impotent questionings rejected first.<br />
+What did it mean? Ah, that no one could tell.<br />
+Who put it there? That was unknown as well.<br />
+Was there no legend? My friend knew of none.<br />
+No neighborhood story? He had sought for one<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+In vain. Did he imagine it accident,<br />
+With nothing really implied or meant<br />
+By the boards set in that way? It might be,<br />
+But I could answer that as well as he.<br />
+Then (desperately) what did he guess it was:<br />
+Something of purpose, or without a cause<br />
+Other than chance? He slowly shook his head,<br />
+And with his gaze fixed on the symbol said:<br />
+"We have quite ceased from guessing or surmising,<br />
+For all our several and joint devising<br />
+Has left us finally where I must leave you.<br />
+But now I think it is your part to do<br />
+Yourself some guessing. I hoped you might bring<br />
+A fresh mind to the riddle's unraveling.<br />
+Come!"</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 3em;">And thus challenged I could not deny</span><br />
+The sort of right he had to have me try;<br />
+And yielding, I began&mdash;instinctively<br />
+Proceeding by exclusion: "We agree<br />
+It was not put there as a pious charm<br />
+To keep the abandoned property from harm?<br />
+The owner could have been no Catholic;<br />
+And yet it was no sacrilegious trick<br />
+To make folks wonder; and it was not chance<br />
+Assuredly that set those boards askance<br />
+In that shape, or before or after, so<br />
+Painted them to that coloring of woe.<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+Do you suppose, then, that it could have been<br />
+Some secret sorrow or some secret sin,<br />
+That tried to utter or to expiate<br />
+Itself in that way: some unhappy hate<br />
+Turned to remorse, or some life-rending grief<br />
+That could not find in years or tears relief?<br />
+Who lived here last?"</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 8em;">"Ah," my friend made reply,</span><br />
+"You know as much concerning that as I.<br />
+All I could tell is what those gravestones tell,<br />
+And they have told it all to you as well.<br />
+The names, the dates, the curious epitaphs<br />
+At whose quaint phrase one either sighs or laughs,<br />
+Just as one's heart or head happens to be<br />
+Hollow or not, are there for each to see.<br />
+But I believe they have nothing to reveal:<br />
+No wrong to publish, no shame to conceal."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"And yet that Cross!" I turned at his reply,</span><br />
+Fixing the silent symbol with my eye,<br />
+Insistently. "And you consent," I said,<br />
+"To leave the enigma uninterpreted?"</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Why, no," he faltered, then went on: "Suppose</span><br />
+That some one that had known the average woes<br />
+Of human nature, finding that the load<br />
+Was overheavy for him on life's road,<br />
+Had wished to leave some token in this Cross,<br />
+Of what had been his gain and been his loss,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+Of what had been his suffering and of what<br />
+Had also been the solace of his lot?<br />
+Whoever that unknown brother-man might be,<br />
+I think he must have been like you and me,<br />
+Who bear our Cross, and when we fail at length,<br />
+Bow down and pray to it for greater strength."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">I mused, and as I mused, I seemed to find</span><br />
+The fancy more and still more to my mind.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Well, let it go at that! I think, for me,</span><br />
+I like that better than some tragedy<br />
+Of clearer physiognomy, which were<br />
+In being more definite the vulgarer.<br />
+For us, what, after all, would be the gain<br />
+Of making the elusive meaning plain?<br />
+I really think, if I were you and yours,<br />
+I would not lift the veil that now obscures<br />
+The appealing fact, lest I should spoil the charm<br />
+Deeding me for my own the Black Cross Farm."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"A good suggestion! I am glad," said he,</span><br />
+"We have always practised your philosophy."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">He smiled, we laughed; we sighed and turned away,</span><br />
+And left the mystery to the summer day<br />
+That made as if it understood, and could<br />
+Have read the riddle to us if it would:<br />
+The wide, wise sky, the clouds that on the grass<br />
+Let their vague shadows dreamlike trail and pass;<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+The conscious woods, the stony meadows growing<br />
+Up to birch pastures, where we heard the lowing<br />
+Of one disconsolate cow. All the warm afternoon,<br />
+Lulled in a reverie by the myriad tune<br />
+Of insects, and the chirp of songless birds,<br />
+Forgetful of the spring-time's lyric words,<br />
+Drowsed round us while we tried to find the lane<br />
+That to our coming feet had been so plain,<br />
+And lost ourselves among the sweetfern's growth,<br />
+And thickets of young pine-trees, nothing loath,<br />
+Amidst the wilding loveliness to stray,<br />
+And spend, if need were, looking for the way,<br />
+Whole hours; but blundered into the right course<br />
+Suddenly, and came out upon our horse,<br />
+Where we had left him&mdash;to our great surprise,<br />
+Stamping and switching at the pestering flies,<br />
+But not apparently anxious to depart,<br />
+When nearly overturning at the start,<br />
+We followed down that evanescent trace<br />
+Which, followed up, had brought us to the place.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Then, all the wayside scenes reversing, we</span><br />
+Dropped to the glimpses of the distant sea,<br />
+Content as if we brought, returning thus,<br />
+The secret of the Black Cross back with us.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_CRITICAL_BOOKSTORE" id="THE_CRITICAL_BOOKSTORE"></a>THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE</h2>
+
+
+<p>It had long been the notion of Frederick Erlcort, who held it
+playfully, held it seriously, according to the company he was in, that
+there might be a censorship of taste and conscience in literary
+matters strictly affiliated with the retail commerce in books. When he
+first began to propose it, playfully, seriously, as his listener
+chose, he said that he had noticed how in the great department stores
+where nearly everything to supply human need was sold, the shopmen and
+shopwomen seemed instructed by the ownership or the management to deal
+in absolute good faith with the customers, and not to misrepresent the
+quality, the make, or the material of any article in the slightest
+degree. A thing was not to be called silk or wool when it was partly
+cotton; it was not to be said that it would wash when it would not
+wash, or that the color would not come off when it would come off, or
+that the stuff was English or French when it was American.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+When Erlcort once noted his interest in the fact to a floor-walker
+whom he happened to find at leisure, the floor-walker said, Yes, that
+was so; and the house did it because it was business, good business,
+the only good business. He was instantly enthusiastic, and he said
+that just in the same way, as an extension of its good faith with the
+public, the house had established the rule of taking back any article
+which a customer did not like, or did not find what she had supposed
+when she got it home, and refunding the money. This was the best sort
+of business; it held custom; the woman became a customer for life. The
+floor-walker laughed, and after he had told an anxious applicant,
+"Second aisle to the left, lady; three counters back," he concluded to
+Erlcort, "I say she because a man never brings a thing back when he's
+made a mistake; but a woman can always blame it on the house. That
+so?"</p>
+
+<p>Erlcort laughed with him, and in going out he stopped at the
+book-counter. Rather it was a bookstore, and no small one, with
+ranks of new books covering the large tables and mounting to
+their level from the floor, neatly piled, and with shelves of
+complete editions and soberer-looking volumes stretching along
+the wall as high as the ceiling. "Do you happen to have a good
+book&mdash;a book that would read good, I mean&mdash;in your
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+stock here?" he asked the neat blonde behind the literary barricade.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, here's a book that a good many are reading," she answered, with
+prompt interest and a smile that told in the book's favor; it was a
+protectingly filial and guardedly ladylike smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but is it a book worth reading&mdash;worth the money?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know as I'm a judge," the kind little blonde replied.
+She added, daringly, "All I can say is, I set up till two last night
+to finish it."</p>
+
+<p>"And you advise me to buy it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we're not allowed to do that, exactly. I can only tell you what
+I know."</p>
+
+<p>"But if I take it, and it isn't what I expected, I can return it and
+get my money back?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's something I never was asked before. Mr. Jeffers! Mr. Jeffers!"
+she called to a floor-walker passing near; and when he stopped and
+came up to the counter, she put the case to him.</p>
+
+<p>He took the book from Erlcort's hand and examined the outside of it
+curiously if not critically. Then he looked from it to Erlcort, and
+said, "Oh, how do you do again! Well, no, sir; I don't know as we
+could do that. You see, you would have to read it to find out that you
+didn't want it, and that would be like using or wearing an article,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+wouldn't it? We couldn't take back a thing that had been used or
+worn&mdash;heigh?"</p>
+
+<p>"But you might have some means of knowing whether a book is good or
+not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes, we might. That's a point we have never had raised before.
+Miss Prittiman, haven't we any means of knowing whether a book's
+something we can guarantee or not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Mr. Jeffers, there's the publisher's advertisement."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes, so there is! And a respectable publisher wouldn't indorse a
+book that wasn't the genuine article, would he now, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"He mightn't," Erlcort said, as if he felt the force of the argument.</p>
+
+<p>"And there are the notices in the newspapers. They ought to tell,"
+Miss Prittiman added, more convincingly. "I don't know," she said, as
+from a sensitive conscience, "whether there have been any about this
+book yet, but I should think there would be."</p>
+
+<p>"And in the mean time, as you won't guarantee the book so that I can
+bring it back and get my money if I find it worthless, I must accept
+the publisher's word?" Erlcort pressed further.</p>
+
+<p>"I should think you could do that," the floor-walker suggested, with
+the appearance of being tired.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+"Well, I think I will, for once," Erlcort relented. "But wait! What
+does the publisher say?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's all printed on this slip inside," the blonde said, and she
+showed it as she took the book from him. "Shall I send it? Or will
+you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, thank you, I'll take it with me. Let me&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He kept the printed slip and began to read it. The blonde wrapped the
+book up and laid it with a half-dollar in change on the counter before
+Erlcort. The floor-walker went away; Erlcort heard him saying, "No,
+madam; toys on the fifth floor, at the extreme rear, left," while he
+lost himself in the glowing promises of the publisher. It appeared
+that the book he had just bought was by a perfectly new author, an old
+lady of seventy who had never written a novel before, and might
+therefore be trusted for an entire freshness of thought and feeling.
+The plot was of a gripping intensity; the characters were painted with
+large, bold strokes, and were of an unexampled virility; the story was
+packed with passion from cover to cover; and the reader would be held
+breathless by the author's skill in working from the tragic conditions
+to an all-round happy conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>From time to time Erlcort heard the gentle blonde saying such things
+as, "Oh yes; it's the best-seller, all right," and, "All I can say is I set
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
+up till two o'clock in the morning to finish it," and, "Yes,
+ma'am; it's by a new writer; a very old lady of seventy who is just
+beginning to write; well, that's what I <i>heard</i>."</p>
+
+<p>On his way up-town in the Subway he clung to the wonted strap,
+unsupported by anything in the romance which he had bought; and yet he
+could not take the book back and get his money, or even exchange it
+for some article of neckwear or footwear. In his extremity he thought
+he would try giving it to the trainman just before he reached his
+stop.</p>
+
+<p>"You want to <i>give</i> it to me? Well, that's something that never
+happened to me on <i>this</i> line before. I guess my wife will like it.
+I&mdash;<i>1009th Street! Change for East Brooklyn and the Bronx!</i>" the guard
+shouted, and he let Erlcort out of the car, the very first of the tide
+that spilled itself forth at the station. He called after him, "Do as
+much for you some time."</p>
+
+<p>The incident first amused Erlcort, and then it began to trouble him;
+but he appeased his remorse by toying with his old notion of a
+critical bookstore. His mind was still at play with it when he
+stopped at the bell-pull of an elderly girl of his acquaintance
+who had a studio ten stories above, and the habit of giving him
+afternoon tea in it if he called there about five o'clock. She
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+had her ugly painting-apron still on, and her thumb through the hole in her
+palette, when she opened her door to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Too soon?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>She answered as well as she could with the brush held horizontally in
+her mouth while she glared inhospitably at him. "Well, not much," and
+then she let him in, and went and lighted her spirit-lamp.</p>
+
+<p>He began at once to tell her of his strange experience, and went on
+till she said: "Well, there's your tea. <i>I</i> don't know what you've
+been driving at, but I suppose you do. Is it the old thing?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's my critical bookstore, if that's what you call the old thing."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! <i>That!</i> I thought it had failed 'way back in the dark ages."</p>
+
+<p>"The dark ages are not <i>back</i>, please; they're all 'round, and you
+know very well that my critical bookstore has never been tried yet.
+But tell me one thing: should you wish to live with a picture, even
+for a few hours, which had been painted by an old lady of seventy who
+had never tried to paint before?"</p>
+
+<p>"If I intended to go crazy, yes. What has all that got to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's the joint commendation of the publisher
+and the kind little blonde who united to sell me
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+the book I just gave to that poor Subway trainman. Do you ever buy a new book?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I always borrow an old one."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you <i>had</i> to buy a new one, wouldn't you like to know of a
+place where you could be sure of getting a good one?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't mind. Or, yes, I should, rather. Where's it to be?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know. I've had my eye on the place for a good while. It's a
+funny old place in Sixth Avenue&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Sixth <i>Avenue</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't interrupt&mdash;where the dearest old codger in the world is just
+going out of the house-furnishing business in a small way. It's kept
+getting smaller and smaller&mdash;I've watched it shrink&mdash;till now it can't
+stand up against the big shops, and the old codger told me the other
+day that it was no use."</p>
+
+<p>"Poor fellow!"</p>
+
+<p>"No. He's not badly off, and he's going back up-state where he came
+from about forty years ago, and he can live&mdash;or die&mdash;very well on what
+he's put by. I've known him rather a good while, and we've been
+friends ever since we've been acquainted."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," the elderly girl said.</p>
+
+<p>Erlcort was not stopping, but she spoke so as
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+to close her mouth, which she was apt to let hang open in a way that
+she did not like; she had her intimates pledged to tell her when she
+was doing it, but she could not make a man promise, and she had to
+look after her mouth herself with Erlcort. It was not a bad mouth; her
+eyes were large, and it was merely large to match them.</p>
+
+<p>"When shall you begin&mdash;open shop?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"My old codger's lease expires in the fall," he answered, "but he
+would be glad to have me take it off his hands this spring. I could
+give the summer to changing and decorating, and begin my campaign in
+the fall&mdash;the first of October, say. Wouldn't you like to come some
+day and see the old place?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should love it. But you're not supposing I shall be of the least
+use, I hope? I'm not decorational, you know. Easel pictures, and small
+ones at that."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course. But you are a woman, and have ideas of the cozy. I mean
+that the place shall be made attractive."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think the situation will be&mdash;on Sixth Avenue?"</p>
+
+<p>"It will be quaint. It's in a retarded region of low buildings, with a
+carpenter's shop two doors off. The L roars overhead and the surface cars
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+squeal before, but that is New York, you know, and it's very central.
+Besides, at the back of the shop, with the front door shut, it is very
+quiet."</p>
+
+<p>The next day the friends lunched together at an Italian restaurant
+very near the place, and rather hurried themselves away to the old
+codger's store.</p>
+
+<p>"He <i>is</i> a dear," Margaret whispered to Erlcort in following him about
+to see the advantages of the place.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mine's setting-hen's time," he justified his hospitality in
+finally asking them to take seats on a nail-keg apiece. "You mustn't
+think you're interruptin'. Look 'round all ye want to, or set down and
+rest ye."</p>
+
+<p>"That would be a good motto for your bookstore," she screamed to
+Erlcort, when they got out into the roar of the avenue. "'Look 'round
+all ye want to, or set down and rest ye.' Wasn't he sweet? And I don't
+wonder you're taken with the place: it <i>has</i> such capabilities. You
+might as well begin imagining how you will arrange it."</p>
+
+<p>They were walking involuntarily up the avenue, and when they came to
+the Park they went into it, and in the excitement of their planning they
+went as far as the Ramble, where they sat down on a bench and disappointed
+some squirrels who supposed they had brought peanuts with them.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+They decided that the front of the shop should be elaborately simple;
+perhaps the door should be painted black, with a small-paned sash and
+a heavy brass latch. On each side should be a small-paned show-window,
+with books laid inside on an inclined shelving; on the door should be
+a modest bronze plate, reading, "The Critical Bookstore." They
+rejected <i>shop</i> as an affectation, and they hooted the notion of "Ye
+Critical Bookstore" as altogether loathsome. The door and window would
+be in a rather belated taste, but the beautiful is never out of date,
+and black paint and small panes might be found rococo in their
+old-fashionedness now. There should be a fireplace, or perhaps a
+Franklin stove, at the rear of the room, with a high-shouldered,
+small-paned sash on each side letting in the light from the yard of
+the carpenter-shop. On the chimneypiece should be lettered, "Look
+'round all ye want to, or set down and rest ye."</p>
+
+<p>The genius of the place should be a refined hospitality, such as the
+gentle old codger had practised with them, and to facilitate this
+there should be a pair of high-backed settles, one under each
+window. The book-counter should stretch the whole length of the
+store, and at intervals beside it, against the book-shelving,
+should be set old-fashioned chairs, but not too old-fashioned.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+Against the lower book-shelves on a deeper shelf might be stood
+against the books a few sketches in water-color, or even oil.</p>
+
+<p>This was Margaret Green's idea.</p>
+
+<p>"And would you guarantee the quality?" Erlcort asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps they wouldn't be for sale, though if any one insisted&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I see. Well, pass the sketches. What else?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, a few little figures in plaster, or even marble or bronze, very
+Greek, or very American; things in low relief."</p>
+
+<p>"Pass the little figures and low reliefs. But don't forget it's a
+<i>book</i>store."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I won't. The sketches of all kinds would be strictly subordinated
+to the books. If I had a tea-room handy here, with a table and the
+backs of some menus to draw on, I could show you just how it would
+look."</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter with the Casino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing; only it's rather early for tea yet."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't for soda-lemonade."</p>
+
+<p>She set him the example of instantly rising, and led the way back along
+the lake to the Casino, resting at that afternoon hour among its spring
+flowers and blossoms innocent of its lurid after-dark frequentation. He
+got some paper from the waiter who came to take their order. She began
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+to draw rapidly, and by the time the waiter came again she was giving
+Erlcort the last scrap of paper.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, "I had no idea that I had imagined anything so
+charming! If this critical bookstore doesn't succeed, it'll
+be because there are no critics. But what&mdash;what are these little
+things hung against the partitions of the shelves?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;mirrors. Little round ones."</p>
+
+<p>"But why mirrors of any shape?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing; only people like to see themselves in a glass of any shape.
+And when," Margaret added, in a burst of candor, "a woman looks up and
+sees herself with a book in her hand, she will feel so intellectual
+she will never put it down. She will buy it."</p>
+
+<p>"Margaret Green, this is immoral. Strike out those mirrors, or I will
+smash them every one!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, very well!" she said, and she rubbed them out with the top of her
+pencil. "If you want your place a howling wilderness."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at the ruin her rubber had wrought. "They <i>were</i> rather
+nice. Could&mdash;could you rub them in again?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not if I tried a hundred years. Besides, they <i>were</i> rather impudent.
+What time is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No time at all. It's half-past three."</p>
+
+<p>"Dear me! I must be going. And if you're
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+really going to start that precious critical bookstore in the fall,
+you must begin work on it right away."</p>
+
+<p>"Work?"</p>
+
+<p>"Reading up for it. If you're going to guarantee the books, you must
+know what's in them, mustn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>He realized that he must do what she said; he must know from his own
+knowledge what was in the books he offered for sale, and he began
+reading, or reading <i>at</i>, the new books immediately. He was a good
+deal occupied by day with the arrangement of his store, though he left
+it mainly with the lively young decorator who undertook for a lump sum
+to realize Margaret Green's ideas. It was at night that he did most of
+his reading in the spring books which the publishers were willing to
+send him gratis, when they understood he was going to open a
+bookstore, and only wanted sample copies. As long as she remained in
+town Margaret Green helped him read, and they talked the books over,
+and mostly rejected them. By the time she went to Europe in August
+with another elderly girl they had not chosen more than eight or ten
+books; but they hoped for better things in the fall.</p>
+
+<p>Word of what he was doing had gone out from Margaret,
+and a great many women of their rather
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+esthetic circle began writing to him about the books they were
+reading, and commending them to him or warning him against them. The
+circle of his volunteer associates enlarged itself in the nature of an
+endless chain, and before society quite broke up for the summer a
+Sympathetic Tea was offered to Erlcort by a Leading Society Woman at
+the Intellectual Club, where he was invited to address the
+Intellectuals in explanation of his project. This was before Margaret
+sailed, and he hurried to her in horror.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, of course you must accept. You're not going to hide your
+Critical Bookstore under a bushel; you can't have too much publicity."</p>
+
+<p>The Leading Society Woman flowed in fulsome gratitude at his
+acceptance, and promised no one but the club should be there; he had
+hinted his reluctance. She kept her promise, but among the
+Intellectuals there was a girl who was a just beginning journalist,
+and who pumped Erlcort's whole scheme out of him, unsuspicious of what
+she was doing, till he saw it all, with his picture, in the Sunday
+Supplement. She rightly judged that the intimacy of an interview would
+be more popular with her readers than the cold and distant report of
+his formal address, which she must give, though she received it so
+ardently with all the other Intellectuals. They flocked flatteringly,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+almost suffocatingly, around him at the end. His scheme was just what
+every one had vaguely thought of: something must be done to stem the
+tide of worthless fiction, which was so often shocking as well as
+silly, and they would only be too glad to help read for him. They were
+nearly all just going to sail, but they would each take a spring book
+on the ship, and write him about it from the other side; they would
+each get a fall book coming home, and report as soon as they got back.</p>
+
+<p>His scheme was discussed seriously and satirically by the press; it
+became a joke with many papers, and a byword quickly worn out, so that
+people thought that it had been dropped. But Erlcort gave his days and
+nights to preparation for his autumnal campaign. He studied in careful
+comparison the reviews of the different literary authorities, and was
+a little surprised to find, when he came to read the books they
+reviewed, how honest and adequate they often were. He was obliged to
+own to himself that if people were guided by them, few worthless books
+would be sold, and he decided that the immense majority of the
+book-buyers were not guided by the critics. The publishers
+themselves seemed not so much to blame when he went to see them
+and explained his wish to deal with them on the basis of a critical
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+bookseller. They said they wished all the booksellers were like him,
+for they would ask nothing better than to publish only good books. The
+trouble, they said, lay with the authors; they wrote such worthless
+books. Or if now and then one of them did write a good book and they
+were over-tempted to publish it, the public united in refusing to buy
+it. So he saw? But if the booksellers persisted in selling none but
+good books, perhaps something might be done. At any rate they would
+like to see the experiment tried.</p>
+
+<p>Erlcort felt obliged to read the books suggested to him by the endless
+chain of readers who volunteered to read for him, on both sides of the
+ocean, or going and coming on the ocean. Mostly the books they praised
+were abject rubbish, but it took time to find this out, and he formed
+the habit of reading far into the night, and if he was very much vexed
+at discovering that the book recommended to him was trash, he could
+not sleep unless he took veronal, and then he had a ghastly next day.</p>
+
+<p>He did not go out of town except for a few brief sojourns at places
+where he knew cultivated people were staying, and could give him their
+opinions of the books he was reading. When the publishers began, as they
+had agreed, to send him their advance sheets, the stitched but unbound
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+volumes roused so much interest by the novelty of their form that his
+readers could not give an undivided attention to their contents. He
+foresaw that in the end he should have to rely upon the taste of
+mercenaries in his warfare against rubbish, and more and more he found
+it necessary to expend himself in it, to read at second hand as well
+as at first. His greatest relief was in returning to town and watching
+the magical changes which the decorator was working in his store. This
+was consolation, this was inspiration, but he longed for the return of
+Margaret Green, that she might help him enjoy the realization of her
+ideas in the equipment of the place; and he held the decorator to the
+most slavish obedience through the carpenters and painters who created
+at his bidding a miraculous interior, all white, or just off-white,
+such as had never been imagined of a bookstore in New York before. It
+was actually ready by the end of August, though smelling a little of
+turpentine still, and Erlcort, letting himself in at the small-paned
+black door, and ranging up and down the long, beautiful room, and
+round and round the central book-table, and in and out between the
+side tables, under the soft, bright shelving of the walls, could
+hardly wait the arrival of the <i>Minnedingdong</i> in which
+the elderly girl had taken her passage back. One day, ten days
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
+ahead of time, she blew in at the front door in a paroxysm of explanation;
+she had swapped passages home with another girl who wanted to come
+back later, while she herself wanted to come back earlier. She had no
+very convincing reason for this as she gave it, but Erlcort did not
+listen to her reason, whatever it was. He said, between the raptures
+with the place that she fell in and out of, that now she was just in
+time for the furnishing, which he never could have dared to undertake
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>In the gay September weather they visited all the antiquity shops in
+Fourth Avenue, and then threw themselves frankly upon reproductions,
+which they bought in the native wood and ordered painted, the settles
+and the spindle-backed chairs in the cool gray which she decided was
+the thing. In the same spirit they bought new brass fire-irons and
+new shovel and tongs, but all very tall and antique-looking, and then
+they got those little immoral mirrors, which Margaret Green attached
+with her own hands to the partitions of the shelving. She also got
+soft green silk curtains for the chimney windows and for the sash of
+the front door; even the front windows she curtained, but very low, so
+that a salesman or a saleswoman could easily reach over from the
+interior and get a book that any customer had seen from the outside.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+One day when all this was done, and Erlcort had begun ordering in a
+stock of such books as he had selected to start with, she said:
+"You're looking rather peak&eacute;d, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I've been <i>feeling</i> rather peak&eacute;d, until lately, keeping awake
+to read and read <i>after</i> the volunteer readers."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean you've lost sleep?"</p>
+
+<p>"Something like that."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you mustn't. How many books do you start with?"</p>
+
+<p>"About twenty-five."</p>
+
+<p>"Good ones? It's a lot, isn't it? I didn't suppose there were so
+many."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, to fill our shelves I shall have to order about a thousand of
+each."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll never sell them in the world! You'll be ruined."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no; the publishers will take them back."</p>
+
+<p>"How nice of them! But that's only what painters have to do when the
+dealers can't sell their pictures."</p>
+
+<p>A month off, the prospect was brilliant, and when the shelves and
+tables were filled and the sketches and bas-reliefs were stuck about and
+the little immoral mirrors were hung, the place was charming. The chairs
+and settles were all that could be asked; Margaret Green helped put them
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>
+about; and he let her light the low fire on the hearth of the Franklin
+stove; he said he should not always burn hickory, but he had got
+twenty-four sticks for two dollars from an Italian in a cellar near
+by, and he meant to burn that much. She upbraided him for his
+extravagance while touching the match to the paper under the kindling;
+but October opened cold, and he needed the fire.</p>
+
+<p>The enterprise seemed rather to mystify the neighborhood, and some old
+customers of the old codger's came in upon one fictitious errand and
+another to see about it, and went away without quite making it out. It
+was a bookstore, all right, they owned in conference, but what did he
+mean by "critical"?</p>
+
+<p>The first <i>bona fide</i> buyer appeared in a little girl who could just
+get her chin on the counter, and who asked for an egg-beater. Erlcort
+had begun with only one assistant, the young lady who typed his
+letters and who said she guessed she could help him when she was not
+working. She leaned over and tried to understand the little girl, and
+then she called to Erlcort where he stood with his back to the fire
+and the morning paper open before his face.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Erlcort, have we got a book called <i>The Egg-beater</i>?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+"<i>The Egg-beater?</i>" he echoed, letting his paper drop below his face.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no!" the little girl shouted, angrily. "It <i>ain't</i> a book. It's a
+thing to beat eggs with. Mother said to come here and get it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she's sent you to the wrong place, little girl. You want to go
+to a hardware-store," the young lady argued.</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't this No. 1232?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, this is the <i>right</i> place. Mother said to go to 1232. I guess
+she knows. She's an old customer."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>The Egg-beater! The Egg-beater!</i>" the blithe young novelist to whom
+Erlcort told the story repeated. He was still happy in his original
+success as a best-seller, and he had come to the Critical Bookstore to
+spy out the stock and see whether his last novel was in it; but though
+it was not, he joyously extended an acquaintance with Erlcort which had
+begun elsewhere. "<i>The Egg-beater?</i> What a splendid title for a story
+of adventure! Keep the secret of its applicability to the last word, or
+perhaps never reveal it at all, and leave the reader worrying. That's one
+way; makes him go and talk about the book to all the girls he knows and get
+them guessing. Best ad. in the world. <i>The Egg-beater!</i> Doesn't it suggest
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+desert islands and penguins' nests in the rocks? Fellow and girl
+shipwrecked, and girl wants to make an omelette after they've got sick
+of plain eggs, and can't for want of an egg-beater. Heigh? He invents
+one&mdash;makes it out of some wire that floats off from the wreck.
+See? When they are rescued, she brings it away, and doesn't let him
+know it till their Iron Wedding Day. They keep it over his study
+fireplace always."</p>
+
+<p>This author was the first to stretch his legs before Erlcort's fire
+from his seat on one of the reproductions. He could not say enough of
+the beauty of the place, and he asked if he might sit there and watch
+for the old codger's old customers coming to buy hardware. There might
+be copy in it.</p>
+
+<p>But the old customers did not come so often as he hoped and Erlcort
+feared. Instead there came <i>bona fide</i> book-buyers, who asked some for
+a book and some for a particular book. The first were not satisfied
+with the books that Erlcort or his acting saleslady recommended, and
+went away without buying. The last were indignant at not finding what
+they wanted in Erlcort's selection.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you stock it?" they demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Because I don't think it's worth reading."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, indeed!" The sarcastic customers were
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+commonly ladies. "I thought you let the public judge of that!"</p>
+
+<p>"There are bookstores where they do. This is a critical bookstore. I
+sell only the books that <i>I</i> think worth reading. If you had noticed
+my sign&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" the customer would say, and she, too, would go away without
+buying.</p>
+
+<p>There were other ladies who came, links of the endless chain of
+volunteer readers who had tried to help Erlcort in making his
+selection, and he could see them slyly looking his stock over for the
+books they had praised to him. Mostly they went away without comment,
+but with heads held high in the offense which he felt even more than
+saw. One, indeed, did ask him why he had not stocked her chosen book,
+and he had to say, "Well, when I came to go through it carefully, I
+didn't think it quite&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But here is <i>The Green Bay Tree</i>, and <i>The Biggest Toad in the
+Puddle</i>, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know. For one reason and another I thought them worth stocking."</p>
+
+<p>Then another head went away high in the air, with its plumes
+quivering. One afternoon late a lady came flying in with all the
+marks, whatever they are, of transatlantic travel upon her.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm just through the customs, and I've motored
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+up here the first thing, even before I went home, to stop you from
+selling that book I recommended. It's dreadful; and, horrors! horrors!
+here it is by the hundreds! Oh, Mr. Erlcort! You mustn't sell that
+dreadful book! You see, I had skipped through it in my berth going
+out, and posted my letter the first thing; and just now, coming home,
+I found it in the ship's library and came on that frightful episode.
+You know! Where&mdash; How <i>could</i> you order it without reading it, on
+a mere say-so? It's utterly immoral!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't agree with you," Erlcort answered, dryly. "I consider that
+passage one of the finest in modern fiction&mdash;one of the most ennobling
+and illumining&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ennobling!" The lady made a gesture of horror. "Very well! If <i>that</i>
+is your idea of a critical bookstore, all I've got to say is&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But she had apparently no words to say it in, and she went out banging
+but failing to latch the door which let through the indignant snort of
+her car as it whirled her away. She left Erlcort and his assistant to
+a common silence, but he imagined somehow a resolution in the
+stenographer not to let the book go unsearched till she had grasped
+the full iniquity of that episode and felt all its ennobling force. He
+was not consoled when another lady came in and, after drifting
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
+unmolestedly about (it was the primary rule of the place not to
+follow people up), stopped before the side shelf where the book was
+ranged in dozens and scores. She took a copy from the neat ranks, and
+opened it; then she lifted her head by chance and caught sight of her
+plume in one of the little mirrors. She stealthily lifted herself on
+tiptoe till she could see her face, and then she turned to the
+assistant and said, gently, "I believe I should like <i>this</i> book,
+please," and paid for it and went out.</p>
+
+<p>It was now almost on the stroke of six, and Erlcort said to his
+assistant: "I'll close the store, Miss Pearsall. You needn't stay any
+longer."</p>
+
+<p>"All right, sir," the girl said, and went into the little closet at
+the rear for her hat and coat. Did she contrive to get a copy of that
+book under her coat as she passed the shelf where it lay?</p>
+
+<p>When she was gone, he turned the key in the door and went back and sat
+down before the fire dying on the hearth of the Franklin stove. It was
+not a very cheerful moment with him, but he could not have said that
+the day had been unprofitable, either spiritually or pecuniarily.
+In its experiences it had been a varied day, and he had really
+sold a good many books. More people than he could have expected
+had taken him seriously and even intelligently. It is true that
+he had been somewhat vexed by the sort of authority
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+the president of the Intellectual Club had shown in the way she
+swelled into the store and patronized him and it, as if she had
+invented them both, and blamed him in a high, sweet voice for having
+so many <i>old</i> books. "My idea was that it would be a place where one
+could come for the best of the <i>new</i> books. But here! Why, half of
+them I saw in June before I sailed!" She chided him merrily, and she
+acted as if it were quite part of the joke when he said that he did
+not think a good book could age much in four months. She laughed
+patronizingly at his conceit of getting in the fall books by
+Thanksgiving; but even for the humor of it she could not let him say
+he should not do anything in holiday books. "I had expected to get
+<i>all</i> my Christmas books of you, Mr. Erlcort," she crowed, but for the
+present she bought nothing. In compensation he recalled the gratitude,
+almost humble gratitude, of a lady (she was a lady!) who had come that
+day, bringing her daughter to get a book, any book in his stock, and
+to thank him for his enterprise, which she had found worked perfectly
+in the case of the book she had got the week before; the book had been
+an unalloyed delight, and had left a sense of heightened self-respect
+with her: that book of the dreadful episode.</p>
+
+<p>He wished Margaret Green had been there;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
+but she had been there only once since his opening; he could not think
+why. He heard a rattling at the door-latch, and he said before he
+turned to look, "What if it should be she <i>now</i>?" But when he went to
+peer through the door-curtain it was only an old fellow who had spent
+the better part of the afternoon in the best chair, reading a book.
+Erlcort went back to the fire and let him rattle, which he did rather
+a long time, and then went away, Erlcort hoped, in dudgeon. He was one
+of a number of customers who had acted on the half of his motto asking
+them to sit down and rest them, after acting on the other half to look
+round all they wanted. Most of them did not read, even; they seemed to
+know one another, and they talked comfortably together. Erlcort
+recognized a companionship of four whom he had noticed in the Park
+formerly; they were clean-enough-looking elderly men, but occupied
+nearly all the chairs and settles, so that lady customers did not like
+to bring books and look over them in the few places left, and Erlcort
+foresaw the time when he should have to ask the old fellows to look
+around more and rest them less. In resuming his own place before the
+fire he felt the fleeting ache of a desire to ask Margaret Green
+whether it would not be a good plan to remove the motto from the
+chimneypiece. He would not have liked to do it without asking
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+her; it had been her notion to put it there, and her other notion of
+the immoral mirrors had certainly worked well. The thoughtful
+expression they had reflected on the faces of lady customers had sold
+a good many books; not that Erlcort wished to sell books that way,
+though he argued with himself that his responsibility ought strictly
+to end with the provision of books which he had critically approved
+before offering them for sale.</p>
+
+<p>His conscience was not wholly at peace as to his stock, not only the
+books which he had included, but also those he had excluded. Some of
+these tacitly pleaded against his severity; in one case an author came
+and personally protested. This was the case of a book by the
+ex-best-seller, who held that his last book was so much better than
+his first that it ought certainly to be found in any critical
+bookstore. The proceeds of his best-seller had enabled him to buy an
+electric runabout, and he purred up to Erlcort's door in it to argue
+the matter with him. He sat down in a reproduction and proved,
+gaily, that Erlcort was quite wrong about it. He had the book
+with him, and read passages from it; then he read passages from
+some of the books on sale and defied Erlcort to say that his
+passages were not just as good, or, as he put it merrily, the
+same as. He held that his marked improvement entitled him
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+to the favor of a critical bookstore; without this, what motive had he
+in keeping from a reversion to the errors which had won him the
+vicious prosperity of his first venture? Hadn't Erlcort a duty to
+perform in preventing his going back to the bad? Refuse this markedly
+improved fiction, and you drove him to writing nothing but
+best-sellers from now on. He urged Erlcort to reflect.</p>
+
+<p>They had a jolly time, and the ex-best-seller went away in high
+spirits, prophesying that Erlcort would come to his fiction yet.</p>
+
+<p>There were authors who did not leave Erlcort so cheerful when they
+failed to see their books on his shelves or tables. Some of them were
+young authors who had written their worthless books with a devout
+faith in their worth, and they went away more in sorrow than in anger,
+and yet more in bewilderment. Some were old authors who had been all
+their lives acceptably writing second-rate books and trying to make
+them unacceptably first-rate. If he knew them he kept out of their
+way, but the dejection of their looks was not less a pang to him if he
+saw them searching his stock for their books in vain.</p>
+
+<p>He had his own moments of dejection. The interest of the press
+in his enterprise had flashed through the Sunday issues of a
+single week, and then flashed out in lasting darkness. He wondered
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>
+vaguely if he had counted without the counting-house in hoping for
+their continued favor; he could not realize that nothing is so stale
+as old news, and that no excess of advertising would have relumed
+those fitful fires.</p>
+
+<p>He would have liked to talk the case over with Margaret Green. After
+his first revolt from the easy publicity the reporters had first given
+him, he was aware of having enjoyed it&mdash;perhaps vulgarly enjoyed it.
+But he hoped not quite that; he hoped that in his fleeting celebrity
+he had cared for his scheme rather than himself. He had really
+believed in it, and he liked having it recognized as a feature of
+modern civilization, an innovation which did his city and his country
+credit. Now and then an essayist of those who wrote thoughtful
+articles in the Sunday or Saturday-evening editions had dropped in,
+and he had opened his heart to them in a way he would not have minded
+their taking advantage of. Secretly he hoped they would see a topic in
+his enterprise and his philosophy of it. But they never did, and he
+was left to the shame of hopes which had held nothing to support
+defeat. He would have liked to confess his shame and own the justice
+of his punishment to Margaret Green, but she seemed the only friend who
+never came near. Other friends came, and many strangers, the friends to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+look and the strangers to buy. He had no reason to complain of his
+sales; the fame of his critical bookstore might have ceased in New
+York, because it had gone abroad to Chicago and St. Louis and
+Pittsburg; people who were clearly from these commercial capitals and
+others came and bought copiously of his criticized stock, and they
+praised the notion of it in telling him that he ought to open branches
+in their several cities.</p>
+
+<p>They were all women, and it was nearly all women who frequented the
+Critical Bookstore, but in their multitude Margaret Green was not. He
+thought it the greater pity because she would have enjoyed many of
+them with him, and would have divined such as hoped the culture
+implicated by a critical bookstore would come off on them without
+great effort of their own; she would have known the sincere spirits,
+too, and could have helped direct their choice of the best where all
+was so good. He smiled to find that he was invoking her help, which he
+had no right to.</p>
+
+<p>His longing had no effect upon her till deep in January, when the
+weather was engaged late one afternoon in keeping the promise of a
+January thaw in the form of the worst snow-storm of the winter. Then
+she came thumping with her umbrella-handle at his door as if, he
+divined, she were too stiff-handed or too package-laden to press the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+latch and let herself in, and she almost fell in, but saved herself by
+spilling on the floor some canvases and other things which she had
+been getting at the artist's-materials store near by. "Don't bother
+about them," she said, "but take me to the fire as fast as you can,"
+and when she had turned from snow to rain and had dripped partially
+dry before the Franklin stove, she asked, "Where have you been all the
+time?"</p>
+
+<p>"Waiting here for you," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you needn't. I wasn't going to come&mdash;or at least not till you
+sent for me, or said you wanted my advice."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want your advice now."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't come to give it. I just dropped in because if I hadn't I
+should have just dropped outside. How have you been getting along with
+your ridiculous critical bookstore?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, things are rather quiet with us just now, as the publishers say
+to the authors when they don't want to publish their books."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know that saying. Why didn't you go in for the holiday books?"</p>
+
+<p>"How did you know I didn't?"</p>
+
+<p>"Lots of people told me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I'll tell you why. I would have had to read them first,
+and no human being could do that&mdash;not even a volunteer link in an
+endless chain."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>
+"I see. But since Christmas?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know very well that after Christmas the book market drops dead."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, so I've been told." She had flung her wet veil back over her
+shoulders, and he thought she had never looked so adorably plain
+before; if she could have seen herself in a glass she would have found
+her whole face out of drawing. It seemed as if his thinking had put
+her in mind of them, and she said, "Those immoral mirrors are
+shameful."</p>
+
+<p>"They've sold more of the best books than anything else."</p>
+
+<p>"No matter. As soon as I get a little drier I shall take them down."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well. <i>I</i> didn't put them up." He laid a log of hickory on the
+fire. "I'm not doing it to dry you quicker."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know. I'll tell you one thing. You ought to keep the magazines,
+or at least the Big Four. You could keep them with a good conscience,
+and you could sell them without reading; they're always good."</p>
+
+<p>"There's an idea in that. I believe I'll try it."</p>
+
+<p>Margaret Green was now dry enough, and she rose and removed the
+mirrors. In doing this she noticed that Erlcort had apparently sold a
+good many of his best books, and she said: "Well! I don't see why
+<i>you</i> should be discouraged."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+"Who said I was? I'm exultant."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you were exulting with the corners of your mouth down just now.
+Well, I must be going. Will you get a taxi to flounder over to the
+Subway with me?" While Erlcort was telephoning she was talking to him.
+"I believe the magazines will revive public interest in your scheme.
+Put them in your window. Try to get advance copies for it."</p>
+
+<p>"You have a commercial genius, Margaret Green."</p>
+
+<p>"When it comes to selling literature, I have. Selling art is where I
+fall down."</p>
+
+<p>"That's because you always try to sell your own art. I should fall
+down, too, if I tried to sell my own literature."</p>
+
+<p>They got quite back to their old friendliness; the coming of the taxi
+gave them plenty of time. The electric lights were turned brilliantly
+on, but there, at the far end of the store, before the Franklin stove,
+they had a cozy privacy. At the moment of parting she said:</p>
+
+<p>"If I were you I should take out these settles. They simply invite
+loafing."</p>
+
+<p>"I've noticed that they seem to do that."</p>
+
+<p>"And better paint out that motto."</p>
+
+<p>"I've sometimes fancied I'd better. <i>That</i> invites loafing, too;
+though some nice people like it."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>
+"Nice people? Why haven't some of them bought a picture?" He perceived
+that she had taken in the persistent presence of the sketches when
+removing the mirrors, and he shared the indignation she expressed:
+"Shabby things!"</p>
+
+<p>She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and he asked what she was
+going to do with them, as he followed her to the door with her other
+things.</p>
+
+<p>"Put them around the studio. But you needn't come to see the effect."</p>
+
+<p>"No. I shall come to see you."</p>
+
+<p>But when he came in a lull of February, and he could walk part of the
+way up through the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said:</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you've come to pour out some more of your griefs. Well,
+pour away! Has the magazine project failed?"</p>
+
+<p>"On the contrary, it has been a <i>succ&egrave;s fou</i>. But I don't feel
+altogether easy in my mind about it. The fact is, they seem to print
+much more rubbish than I supposed."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their
+nostrils."</p>
+
+<p>She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut and getting very close to her
+picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her mouth hang open.
+He wondered why she was so charming; but when she stepped back rhythmically,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+tilting her pretty head this way and that, he saw why: it was her
+unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her mouth and shut it to say,
+"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, some people have come back at me. They've said, What a rotten
+number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in
+all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What's
+to be done about it? I can't ask people to buy truck or read truck
+because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the
+first quality."</p>
+
+<p>"No. You can't. Why," she asked, drifting up to her picture again,
+"don't you tear the bad out, and sell the good?"</p>
+
+<p>Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot be spelled in English.
+"Do you know how defiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the
+magazines? They're wired together, and you could no more tear out the
+bad and leave the good than you could part vice from virtue in human
+nature."</p>
+
+<p>"I see," Margaret Green said, but she saw no further, and she had to
+let him go disconsolate. After waiting a decent time she went to find him
+in his critical bookstore. It was late in an afternoon of the days that
+were getting longer, and only one electric was lighted in the rear of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+room, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Franklin stove, so busy at
+something that he scarcely seemed aware of her.</p>
+
+<p>"What in the world are you doing?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>He looked up. "Who? I? Oh, it's you! Why, I'm merely censoring the
+truck in the May number of this magazine." He held up a little roller,
+as long as the magazine was wide, blacked with printer's ink, which he
+had been applying to the open periodical. "I've taken a hint from the
+way the Russian censorship blots out seditious literature before it
+lets it go to the public."</p>
+
+<p>"And <i>what</i> a mess you're making!"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it will have to dry before it's put on sale."</p>
+
+<p>"I should think so. Listen to me, Frederick Erlcort: you're going
+crazy."</p>
+
+<p>"I've sometimes thought so: crazy with conceit and vanity and
+arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical
+bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast,
+benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or
+a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him?
+Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is
+it universal suffrage?"</p>
+
+<p>"Now," Margaret Green said, "you are talking
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
+sense. Why didn't you think of this in the beginning?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is it a world, a whole earth," he went on, "where the weeds mostly
+outflourish the flowers, or is it a wretched little florist's
+conservatory where the watering-pot assumes to better the instruction
+of the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust? What is all the
+worthy family of asses to do if there are no thistles to feed them?
+Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the
+finer organisms, are the coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made a
+mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the
+gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the
+gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the
+pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have
+their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the
+rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural
+selection become to certain of them. But let there be no artificial
+selection, no survival of the fittest by main force&mdash;the force of the
+spectator, who thinks he knows better than the creator of the ugly and
+the beautiful, the fair and foul, the evil and good."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>now</i> if the Intellectual Club could hear you!"
+Margaret Green said, with a long, deep,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+admiring suspiration. "And what are you going to do with
+your critical bookstore?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to sell it. I've had an offer from the author of that
+best-seller&mdash;I've told you about him. I was just trying to censor that
+magazine while I was thinking it over. He's got an idea. He's going to
+keep it a critical bookstore, but the criticism is to be made by
+universal suffrage and the will of the majority. The latest books will
+be put to a vote; and the one getting the greatest number of votes
+will be the first offered for sale, and the author will receive a free
+passage to Europe by the southern route."</p>
+
+<p>"The southern route!" Margaret mused. "I've never been that way. It
+must be delightful."</p>
+
+<p>"Then come with <i>me</i>! <i>I'm</i> going."</p>
+
+<p>"But how can I?"</p>
+
+<p>"By marrying me!"</p>
+
+<p>"I never thought of that," she said. Then, with the conscientious
+resolution of an elderly girl who puts her fate to the touch of any
+risk the truth compels, she added: "Or, yes! I <i>have</i>. But I never
+supposed you would ask me." She stared at him, and she was aware she
+was letting her mouth hang open. While she was trying for some word to
+close it with he closed it for her.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>A FEAST OF REASON</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+<h2><a name="A_FEAST_OF_REASON" id="A_FEAST_OF_REASON"></a>A FEAST OF REASON</h2>
+
+
+<p>Florindo and Lindora had come to the end of another winter in town,
+and had packed up for another summer in the country. They were sitting
+together over their last breakfast until the taxi should arrive to
+whirl them away to the station, and were brooding in a joint gloom
+from the effect of the dinner they had eaten at the house of a friend
+the night before, and, "Well, thank goodness," she said, "there is an
+end to that sort of thing for <i>one</i> while."</p>
+
+<p>"An end to <i>that</i> thing," he partially assented, "but not that <i>sort</i>
+of thing."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" she demanded excitedly, almost resentfully.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean that the lunch is of the nature of the dinner, and that in the
+country we shall begin lunching where we left off dining."</p>
+
+<p>"Not instantly," she protested shrilly. "There will be nobody there
+for a while&mdash;not for a whole month, nearly."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+"They will be there before you can turn round, almost; and then you
+women will begin feeding one another there before you have well left
+off here."</p>
+
+<p>"We women!" she protested.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you&mdash;you women. You give the dinners. Can you deny it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's because we can't get you to the lunches."</p>
+
+<p>"In the country you can; and so you will give the lunches."</p>
+
+<p>"We would give dinners if it were not for the distance, and the
+darkness on those bad roads."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see where your reasoning is carrying you."</p>
+
+<p>"No," she despaired, "there is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of
+it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time before it is all
+going on again."</p>
+
+<p>They computed the number of dinners they had given during the winter;
+that was not hard, and the sum was not great: six or seven at the
+most, large and small. When it came to the dinners they had received,
+it was another thing; but still she considered, "Were they really so
+few? It's nothing to what the English do. They never dine alone at
+home, and they never dine alone abroad&mdash;of course not! I
+wonder they can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
+kind, is always loathsome: the everlasting soup, if there aren't
+oysters first, or grape-fruit, or melon, and the fish, and the
+entr&eacute;e, and the roast and salad, and the ice-cream and the
+fruit nobody touches, and the coffee and cigarettes and
+cigars&mdash;how I hate it all!"</p>
+
+<p>Lindora sank back in her chair and toyed desperately with the fragment
+of bacon on her plate.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet," Florindo said, "there is a charm about the first dinner of
+autumn, after you've got back."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," she assented; "it's like a part of our lost youth. We think
+all the dinners of the winter will be like that, and we come away
+beaming."</p>
+
+<p>"But when it keeps on and there's more and more of our lost youth,
+till it comes to being the whole&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Florindo!" she stopped him. He pretended that he was not going to
+have said it, and she resumed, dreamily, "I wonder what it is makes it
+so detestable as the winter goes on."</p>
+
+<p>"All customs are detestable, the best of them," he suggested,
+"and I should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner, that
+the society dinner was an unlovely rite. You try to carry if
+off with china and glass, and silver and linen, and if people
+could fix their minds on these, or even on the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>
+dishes of the dinner as they come successively on, it
+would be all very well; but the diners, the diners!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, "the old men are hideous, certainly; and the young
+ones&mdash;I try not to look at them, poking things into the hollows of
+their faces with spoons and forks&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Better than when it was done with knives! Still, it's a horror! A
+veteran diner-out in full action is certainly a hideous spectacle.
+Often he has few teeth of his own, and the dentists don't serve him
+perfectly. He is in danger of dropping things out of his mouth, both
+liquids and solids: better not look! His eyes bulge and roll in his
+head in the stress of mastication and deglutition; his color rises and
+spreads to his gray hair or over his baldness; his person seems to
+swell vividly in his chair, and when he laughs&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't, Florindo! It <i>is</i> awful."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, perhaps no worse than the sight of a middle-aged matron tending
+to overweight and bulking above her plate&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes! That's dreadful, too. But when people are young&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, when people are young!" He said this in despair. Then
+he went on in an audible muse. "When people are young they are
+not only in their own youth; they are in the youth of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
+world, the race. They dine, but they don't think of the dinner or the
+unpleasantness of the diners, and the grotesqueness of feeding in
+common. They think&mdash;" he broke off in defect of other ideas, and
+concluded with a laugh, "they think of themselves. And they don't
+think of how they are looking."</p>
+
+<p>"They needn't; they are looking very well. Don't keep harping on that!
+I remember when we first began going to dinners, I thought it was the
+most beautiful thing in the world. I don't mean when I was a girl; a
+girl only goes to a dinner because it comes before a dance. I mean
+when we were young married people; and I pinned up my dress and we
+went in the horse-cars, or even walked. I enjoyed every instant of it:
+the finding who was going to take me in and who you were; and the
+going in; and the hovering round the table to find our places from the
+cards; and the seeing how you looked next some one else, and wondering
+how you thought I looked; and the beads sparkling up through the
+champagne and getting into one's nose; and the laughing and joking and
+talking! Oh, the talking! What's become of it? The talking, last
+night, it bored me to death! And what good stories people used to
+tell, women as well as men! You can't deny it was beautiful."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+"I don't; and I don't deny that the forms of dining are still
+charming. It's the dining itself that I object to."</p>
+
+<p>"That's because your digestion is bad."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't yours?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it is. What has that got to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me that we have arrived at what is called an <i>impasse</i> in
+French." He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she gave a little
+jump in her chair. "Oh, there's plenty of time. The taxi won't be here
+for half an hour yet. Is there any heat left in that coffee?"</p>
+
+<p>"There will be," she said, and she lighted the lamp under the pot.
+"But I don't like being scared out of half a year's growth."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry. I won't look at the clock any more; I don't care if we're
+left. Where were we? Oh, I remember&mdash;the objection to dining itself.
+If we could have the forms without the facts, dining would be all
+right. Our superstition is that we can't be gay without gorging; that
+society can't be run without meat and drink. But don't you remember
+when we first went to Italy there was no supper at Italian houses
+where we thought it such a favor to be asked?"</p>
+
+<p>"I remember that the young Italian swells wouldn't
+go to the American and English houses
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>
+where they weren't sure of supper. They didn't give supper at the
+Italian houses because they couldn't afford it."</p>
+
+<p>"I know that. I believe they do, now. But&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>'Sweet are the uses of adversity,'</small></p></div>
+
+<p>and the fasting made for beauty then more than the feasting does now.
+It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses
+conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed&mdash;the
+sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out to supper."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder," Lindora said, "whether the same sort of thing goes on at
+evening parties still&mdash;it's so long since I've been at one. It was
+awful standing jammed up in a corner or behind a door and eating
+<i>vis-&agrave;-vis</i> with a man who brought you a plate; and it wasn't much
+better when you sat down and he stood over you gabbling and gobbling,
+with his plate in one hand and his fork in the other. I was always
+afraid of his dropping things into my lap; and the sight of his jaws
+champing as you looked up at them from below!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, ridiculous. But there was an element of the grotesque in a
+bird's-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and
+trying to smile and look <i>spirituelle</i> between the shots."</p>
+
+<p>Lindora as she laughed bowed her forehead on
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+the back of her hand in the way Florindo thought so pretty when they
+were both young. "Yes," she said, "awful, awful! Why <i>should</i> people
+want to flock together when they feed? Do you suppose it's a survival
+of the primitive hospitality when those who had something to eat
+hurried to share it with those who had nothing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Possibly," Florindo said, flattered into consequence by her momentary
+deference, or show of it. "But the people who mostly meet to feed
+together now are not hungry; they are already so stuffed that they
+loathe the sight of the things. Some of them shirk the consequences by
+frankly dining at home first, and then openly or covertly dodging the
+courses."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and you hear that praised as a mark of high civilization, or
+social wisdom. I call it wicked, and an insult to the very genius of
+hospitality."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know. It must give the faster a good chance of seeing
+how funny the feeders all look."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder, I <i>do</i> wonder, how the feeding in common came to be the
+custom," she said, thoughtfully. "Of course where it's done for
+convenience, like hotels or in boarding-houses&mdash;but to do it wantonly,
+as people do in society, it ought to be stopped."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
+"We might call art to our aid&mdash;have a large tableful of people kodaked
+in the moments of ingulfing, chewing, or swallowing, as the act varied
+from guest to guest; might be reproduced as picture postals, or from
+films for the movies. That would give the ten and twenty cent
+audiences a chance to see what life in the exclusive circles was."</p>
+
+<p>She listened in dreamy inattention. "It was a step in the right
+direction when people began to have afternoon teas. To be sure, there
+was the biting and chewing sandwiches, but you needn't take <i>them</i>,
+and most women could manage their teacups gracefully."</p>
+
+<p>"Or hide their faces in them when they couldn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Only," she continued, "the men wouldn't come after the first go off.
+It was as bad as lunches. Now that the English way of serving tea to
+callers has come in, it's better. You really get the men, and it keeps
+them from taking cocktails so much."</p>
+
+<p>"They're rather glad of that. But still, still, there's the guttling
+and guzzling."</p>
+
+<p>"It's reduced to a minimum."</p>
+
+<p>"But it's there. And the first thing you know you've loaded yourself
+up with cake or bread-and-butter and spoiled your appetite for dinner.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
+No, afternoon tea must go with the rest of it, if we're going to be
+truly civilized. If people could come to one another's tables with
+full minds instead of stomachs, there would be some excuse for
+hospitality. Perhaps if we reversed the practice of the professional
+diner-out, and read up at home as he now eats at home, and&mdash; No, I
+don't see how it could be done. But we might take a leaf from the book
+of people who are not in society. They never ask anybody to meals if
+they can possibly help it; if some one happens in at meal-times they
+tell him to pull up a chair&mdash;if they have to, or he shows no signs
+first of going. But even among these people the instinct of
+hospitality&mdash;the feeding form of it&mdash;lurks somewhere. In our
+farm-boarding days&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't speak of them!" she implored.</p>
+
+<p>"We once went to an evening party," he pursued, "where raw apples and
+cold water were served."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought I should die of hunger. And when we got home to our own
+farmer's we ravaged the pantry for everything left from supper. It
+wasn't much. There!" Lindora screamed. "There <i>is</i> the taxi!" And the
+shuddering sound of the clock making time at their expense penetrated
+from the street. "Come!"</p>
+
+<p>"How the instinct of economy lingers in us,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+too, long after the use of it is outgrown. It's as bad as the instinct
+of hospitality. We could easily afford to pay extra for the comfort of
+sitting here over these broken victuals&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you we shall be left," she retorted; and in the thirty-five
+minutes they had at the station before their train started she
+outlined a scheme of social reform which she meant to put in force as
+soon as people began to gather in summer force at Lobster Cove.</p>
+
+<p>He derided the notion; but she said, "You will see!" and in rather
+more time than it takes to tell it they were settled in their cottage,
+where, after some unavoidable changes of cook and laundress, they were
+soon in perfect running order.</p>
+
+<p>By this time Lobster Cove was in the full tide of lunching and being
+lunched. The lunches were almost exclusively ladies' lunches, and the ladies
+came to them with appetites sharpened by the incomparable air of those real
+Lobster Cove days which were all cloudless skies and west winds, and by the
+vigorous automobile exercise of getting to one another's cottages. They
+seized every pretext for giving these feasts, marked each by some vivid
+touch of invention within the limits of the graceful convention which
+all felt bound not to transcend. It was some surprising flavor in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+salad, or some touch of color appealing to the eye only; or it was
+some touch in the ice-cream, or some daring substitution of a native
+dish for it, as strawberry or peach shortcake; or some bold
+transposition in the order of the courses; or some capricious
+arrangement of the decoration, or the use of wild flowers, or even
+weeds (as meadow-rue or field-lilies), for the local florist's
+flowers, which set the ladies screaming at the moment and talking of
+it till the next lunch. This would follow perhaps the next day, or the
+next but one, according as a new cottager's claims insisted or a lady
+had a change of guests, or three days at the latest, for no reason.</p>
+
+<p>In their rapid succession people scarcely noticed that Lindora had not
+given a lunch, and she had so far abandoned herself to the enjoyment
+of the others' lunches that she had half forgotten her high purposes
+of reform, when she was sharply recalled to them by a lunch which had
+not at all agreed with her; she had, in fact, had to have the doctor,
+and many people had asked one another whether they had heard how she
+was. Then she took her good resolution in both hands and gave an
+afternoon, asking people by note or 'phone simply whether they
+would not come in at four sharp. People were a good deal
+mystified, but for this very reason everybody came. Some
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>
+of them came from somebody's lunch, which had been so nice that they
+lingered over it till four, and then walked, partly to fill in the
+time and partly to walk off the lunch, as there would be sure to be
+something at Lindora's later on.</p>
+
+<p>It would be invidious to say what the nature of Lindora's
+entertainment was. It was certainly to the last degree original, and
+those who said the worst of it could say no worse than that it was
+queer. It quite filled the time till six o'clock, and may be perhaps
+best described as a negative rather than a positive triumph, though
+what Lindora had aimed at she had undoubtedly achieved. Whatever it
+was, whether original or queer, it was certainly novel.</p>
+
+<p>A good many men had come, one at least to every five ladies, but as
+the time passed and a certain blankness began to gather over the
+spirits of all, they fell into different attitudes of the despair
+which the ladies did their best to pass off for rapture. At each
+unscheduled noise they started in a vain expectation, and when the end
+came, it came so without accent, so without anything but the clock to
+mark it as the close, that they could hardly get themselves together
+for going away. They did what was nice and right, of course, in thanking
+Lindora for her fascinating afternoon, but when they were well beyond hearing
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+one said to another: "Well, I shall certainly have an appetite for my
+dinner <i>to-night</i>! Why, if there had only been a cup of the weakest
+kind of tea, or even of cold water!"</p>
+
+<p>Then those who had come in autos gathered as many pedestrians into
+them as they would hold in leaving the house, or caught them up
+fainting by the way.</p>
+
+<p>Lindora and Florindo watched them from their veranda.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my dear," he said, "it's been a wonderful afternoon; an immense
+stride forward in the cause of anti-eating&mdash;or&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't <i>speak</i> to me!" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>"But it leaves one rather hungry, doesn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Hungry!</i>" she hurled back at him. "I could eat a&mdash;I don't know
+what!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>CITY AND COUNTRY IN<br />
+THE FALL</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+<h2><a name="CITY_AND_COUNTRY_IN" id="CITY_AND_COUNTRY_IN"></a>CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL</h2>
+
+
+<h4>A Long-distance Eclogue</h4>
+
+<h4>1902</h4>
+
+<p>
+<i>Morrison.</i> Hello! Hello! Is that you, Wetherbee?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> Yes. Who are you? What do you want with me?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> Oh, nothing much. It's Morrison, you know;<br />
+Morrison&mdash;down at Clamhurst Shortsands.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;">Oh!</span><br />
+Why, Morrison, of course! Of course, I know!<br />
+How are you, Morrison? And, by the way,<br />
+<i>Where</i> are you? What! You never mean to say<br />
+You are down there <i>yet</i>? Well, by the Holy Poker!<br />
+What are you doing there, you ancient joker?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> Sticking it out over Thanksgiving Day.<br />
+I said I would. I tell you, it is gay<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
+Down here. You ought to see the Hunter's Moon,<br />
+These silver nights, prinking in our lagoon.<br />
+You ought to see our sunsets, glassy red,<br />
+Shading to pink and violet overhead.<br />
+You ought to see our mornings, still and clear,<br />
+White silence, far as you can look and hear.<br />
+You ought to see the leaves&mdash;our oaks and ashes<br />
+Crimson and yellow, with those gorgeous splashes,<br />
+Purple and orange, against the bluish green<br />
+Of the pine woods; and scattered in between<br />
+The scarlet of the maples; and the blaze<br />
+Of blackberry-vines, along the dusty ways<br />
+And on the old stone walls; the air just balm,<br />
+And the crows cawing through the perfect calm<br />
+Of afternoons all gold and turquoise. Say,<br />
+You ought to have been with wife and me to-day,<br />
+A drive we took&mdash;it would have made you sick:<br />
+The pigeons and the partridges so thick;<br />
+And on the hill just beyond Barkin's lane,<br />
+Before you reach the barn of Widow Payne,<br />
+Showing right up against the sky, as clear<br />
+And motionless as sculpture, stood a deer!<br />
+Say, does that jar you just a little? Say,<br />
+How have you found things up there, anyway,<br />
+Since you got back? Air like a cotton string<br />
+To breathe? The same old dust on everything,<br />
+And in your teeth, and in your eyes? The smoke<br />
+From the soft coal, got long beyond a joke?<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>
+The trolleys rather more upon your curves,<br />
+And all the roar and clatter in your nerves?<br />
+Don't you wish you had stayed here, too?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Well, yes,</span><br />
+I do at certain times, I must confess.<br />
+I swear it is enough at times to make you swear<br />
+You would almost rather be anywhere<br />
+Than here. The building up and pulling down,<br />
+The getting to and fro about the town,<br />
+The turmoil underfoot and overhead,<br />
+Certainly make you wish that you were dead,<br />
+At first; and all the mean vulgarity<br />
+Of city life, the filth and misery<br />
+You see around you, make you want to put<br />
+Back to the country anywhere, hot-foot.<br />
+Yet&mdash;there are compensations.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Such as?</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Why,</span><br />
+There is the club.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> The club I can't deny.</span><br />
+Many o' the fellows back there?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Nearly all.</span><br />
+Over the twilight cocktails there are tall<br />
+Stories and talk. But you would hardly care;<br />
+You have the natives to talk with down there,<br />
+And always find them meaty.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Well, so-so.</span><br />
+Their words outlast their ideas at times, you know,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>
+And they have <i>staying</i> powers. The theaters<br />
+All open now?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Yes, all. And it occurs</span><br />
+To me: there's one among the things that you<br />
+Would have enjoyed; an opera with the new&mdash;<br />
+Or at least the last&mdash;music by Sullivan,<br />
+And words, though not Gilbertian, that ran<br />
+Trippingly with it. Oh, I tell you what,<br />
+I'd rather that you had been there than not.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> Thanks ever so!<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Oh, there is nothing mean</span><br />
+About your early friend. That deer and autumn scene<br />
+Were kind of you! And, say, I think you like<br />
+Afternoon teas when good. I have chanced to strike<br />
+Some of the best of late, where people said<br />
+They had sent you cards, but thought you must be dead.<br />
+I told them I left you down there by the sea,<br />
+And then they sort of looked askance at me,<br />
+As if it were a joke, and bade me get<br />
+Myself some bouillon or some chocolate,<br />
+And turned the subject&mdash;did not even give<br />
+Me time to prove it is not life to live<br />
+In town as long as you can keep from freezing<br />
+Beside the autumn sea. A little sneezing,<br />
+At Clamhurst Shortsands, since the frosts set in?<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span><br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> Well, not enough to make a true friend grin.<br />
+Slight colds, mere nothings. With our open fires<br />
+We've all the warmth and cheer that heart desires.<br />
+Next year we'll have a furnace in, and stay<br />
+Not till Thanksgiving, but till Christmas Day.<br />
+It's glorious in these roomy autumn nights<br />
+To sit between the firelight and the lights<br />
+Of our big lamps, and read aloud by turns<br />
+As long as kerosene or hickory burns.<br />
+We hate to go to bed.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Of course you do!</span><br />
+And hate to get up in the morning, too&mdash;<br />
+To pull the coverlet from your frost-bit nose,<br />
+And touch the glary matting with your toes!<br />
+Are you beginning yet to break the ice<br />
+In your wash-pitchers? No? Well, that is nice.<br />
+I always hate to do it&mdash;seems as if<br />
+Summer was going; but when your hand is stiff<br />
+With cold, it can be done. Still, I prefer<br />
+To wash and dress beside my register,<br />
+When summer gets a little on, like this.<br />
+But some folks find the other thing pure bliss&mdash;<br />
+Lusty young chaps, like you.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 2em;"> And some folks find</span><br />
+A sizzling radiator to their mind.<br />
+What else have you, there, you could recommend<br />
+To the attention of a country friend?<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span><br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> Well, you know how it is in Madison Square,<br />
+Late afternoons, now, if the day's been fair&mdash;<br />
+How all the western sidewalk ebbs and flows<br />
+With pretty women in their pretty clo'es:<br />
+I've never seen them prettier than this year.<br />
+Of course, I know a dear is not a deer,<br />
+But still, I think that if I had to meet<br />
+One or the other in the road, or street,<br />
+All by myself, I am not sure but that<br />
+I'd choose the dear that wears the fetching hat.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> Get out! What else?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Well, it is not so bad,</span><br />
+If you are feeling a little down, or sad,<br />
+To walk along Fifth Avenue to the Park,<br />
+When the day thinks perhaps of getting dark,<br />
+And meet that mighty flood of vehicles<br />
+Laden with all the different kinds of swells,<br />
+Homing to dinner, in their carriages&mdash;<br />
+Victorias, landaus, chariots, coup&eacute;s&mdash;<br />
+There's nothing like it to lift up the heart<br />
+And make you realize yourself a part,<br />
+Sure, of the greatest show on earth.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Oh, yes,</span><br />
+I know. I've felt that rapture more or less.<br />
+But I would rather put it off as long<br />
+As possible. I suppose you like the song<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+Of the sweet car-gongs better than the cry<br />
+Of jays and yellowhammers when the sky<br />
+Begins to redden these October mornings,<br />
+And the loons sound their melancholy warnings;<br />
+Or honk of the wild-geese that write their A<br />
+Along the horizon in the evening's gray.<br />
+Or when the squirrels look down on you and bark<br />
+From the nut trees&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> We have them in the Park</span><br />
+Plenty enough. But, say, you aged sinner,<br />
+Have you been out much recently at dinner?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> What do you mean? You know there's no one here<br />
+That dines except ourselves now.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Well, that's queer!</span><br />
+I thought the natives&mdash; But I recollect!<br />
+It was not reasonable to expect&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> What are you driving at?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Oh, nothing much.</span><br />
+But I was thinking how you come in touch<br />
+With life at the first dinner in the fall,<br />
+When you get back, first, as you can't at all<br />
+Later along. But you, of course, won't care<br />
+With your idyllic pleasures.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> <i>Who was there?</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> Oh&mdash;ha, ha! What d'you mean by <i>there</i>?<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Come off!</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span><br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> What! you remain to pray that came to scoff!<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> You know what I am after.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Yes, that dinner.</span><br />
+Just a round dozen: Ferguson and Binner<br />
+For the fine arts; Bowyer the novelist;<br />
+Dr. Le Martin; the psychologist<br />
+Fletcher; the English actor Philipson;<br />
+The two newspaper Witkins, Bob and John;<br />
+A nice Bostonian, Bane the arch&aelig;ologer,<br />
+And a queer Russian amateur astrologer;<br />
+And Father Gray, the jolly ritualist priest,<br />
+And last your humble servant, but not least.<br />
+The food was not so filthy, and the wine<br />
+Was not so poison. We made out to dine<br />
+From eight till one <span class="smcap">A.M.</span> One could endure<br />
+The dinner. But, oh say! <i>The talk was poor!</i><br />
+Your natives down at Clamhurst&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Look ye here!</span><br />
+What date does Thanksgiving come on this year?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> Why, I suppose&mdash;although I don't remember<br />
+Certainly&mdash;the usual 28th November.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> Novem&mdash;You should have waited to get sober!<br />
+It comes on the 11th of October!<br />
+And that's to-morrow; and if you happen down<br />
+Later, you'd better look for us in town.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>TABLE TALK</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+<h2><a name="TABLE_TALK" id="TABLE_TALK"></a>TABLE TALK</h2>
+
+
+<p>They were talking after dinner in that cozy moment when the
+conversation has ripened, just before the coffee, into mocking guesses
+and laughing suggestions. The thing they were talking of was something
+that would have held them apart if less happily timed and placed, but
+then and there it drew these together in what most of them felt a
+charming and flattering intimacy. Not all of them took part in the
+talk, and of those who did, none perhaps assumed to talk with
+authority or finality. At first they spoke of the subject as <i>it</i>,
+forbearing to name it, as if the name of it would convey an unpleasant
+shock, out of temper with the general feeling.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't suppose," the host said, "that it's really so much commoner
+than it used to be. But the publicity is more invasive and explosive.
+That's perhaps because it has got higher up in the world and has spread
+more among the first circles. The time was when you seldom heard of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>
+it there, and now it is scarcely a scandal. I remember that when I
+went abroad, twenty or thirty years ago, and the English brought me to
+book about it, I could put them down by saying that I didn't know a
+single divorced person."</p>
+
+<p>"And of course," a bachelor guest ventured, "a person of that sort
+<i>must</i> be single."</p>
+
+<p>At first the others did not take the joke; then they laughed, but the
+women not so much as the men.</p>
+
+<p>"And you couldn't say that now?" the lady on the right of the host
+inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I don't know," he returned, thoughtfully, after a little
+interval. "I don't just call one to mind."</p>
+
+<p>"Then," the bachelor said, "that classes you. If you moved in our best
+society you would certainly know some of the many smart people whose
+disunions alternate with the morning murders in the daily papers."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, the fact seems to rank me rather low; but I'm rather proud of
+the fact."</p>
+
+<p>The hostess seemed not quite to like this arrogant humility. She said,
+over the length of the table (it was not very long), "I'm sure you
+know some very nice people who have not been."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes, I do. But are they really smart people? They're of very
+good family, certainly."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>
+"You mustn't brag," the bachelor said.</p>
+
+<p>A husband on the right of the hostess wondered if there were really
+more of the thing than there used to be.</p>
+
+<p>"Qualitatively, yes, I should say. Quantitatively, I'm not convinced,"
+the host answered. "In a good many of the States it's been made
+difficult."</p>
+
+<p>The husband on the right of the hostess was not convinced, he said, as
+to the qualitative increase. The parties to the suits were rich
+enough, and sometimes they were high enough placed and far enough
+derived. But there was nearly always a leak in them, a social leak
+somewhere, on one side or the other. They could not be said to be
+persons of quality in the highest sense.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, persons of quality seldom can be," the bachelor contended.</p>
+
+<p>The girl opposite, who had been invited to balance him in the scale of
+celibacy by the hostess in her study of her dinner-party, first
+smiled, and then alleged a very distinguished instance of divorce in
+which the parties were both of immaculate origin and unimpeachable
+fashion. "Nobody," she said, "can accuse <i>them</i> of a want of quality."
+She was good-looking, though no longer so young as she could have wished;
+she flung out her answer to the bachelor defiantly, but she addressed
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>
+it to the host, and he said that was true; certainly it was
+a signal case; but wasn't it exceptional? The others mentioned like
+cases, though none quite so perfect, and then there was a lull till
+the husband on the left of the hostess noted a fact which renewed the
+life of the discussion.</p>
+
+<p>"There was a good deal of agitation, six or eight years ago, about it.
+I don't know whether the agitation accomplished anything."</p>
+
+<p>The host believed it had influenced legislation.</p>
+
+<p>"For or against?" the bachelor inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, against."</p>
+
+<p>"But in other countries it's been coming in more and more. It seems to
+be as easy in England now as it used to be in Indiana. In France it's
+nothing scandalous, and in Norwegian society you meet so many
+disunited couples in a state of quadruplicate reunion that it is very
+embarrassing. It doesn't seem to bother the parties to the new
+relation themselves."</p>
+
+<p>"It's very common in Germany, too," the husband on the right of the
+hostess said.</p>
+
+<p>The husband on her left side said he did not know just how it was in
+Italy and Spain, and no one offered to disperse his ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>In the silence which ensued the lady on the left
+of the host created a diversion in her favor by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>
+saying that she had heard they had a very good law in Switzerland.</p>
+
+<p>Being asked to tell what it was, she could not remember, but her
+husband, on the right of the hostess, saved the credit of his family
+by supplying her defect. "Oh, yes. It's very curious. We heard of it
+when we were there. When people want to be put asunder, for any reason
+or other, they go before a magistrate and declare their wish. Then
+they go home, and at the end of a certain time&mdash;weeks or months&mdash;the
+magistrate summons them before him with a view to reconciliation. If
+they come, it is a good sign; if they don't come, or come and persist
+in their desire, then they are summoned after another interval, and
+are either reconciled or put asunder, as the case may be, or as they
+choose. It is not expensive, and I believe it isn't scandalous."</p>
+
+<p>"It seems very sensible," the husband on the left of the hostess
+said, as if to keep the other husband in countenance. But for an
+interval no one else joined him, and the mature girl said to the
+man next her that it seemed rather cold-blooded. He was a man who
+had been entreated to come in, on the frank confession that he was
+asked as a stop-gap, the original guest having fallen by the way.
+Such men are apt to abuse their magnanimity, their condescension. They
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+think that being there out of compassion, and in compliance with a
+hospitality that had not at first contemplated their presence, they
+can say anything; they are usually asked without but through their
+wives, who are asked to "lend" them, and who lend them with a grudge
+veiled in eager acquiescence; and the men think it will afterward
+advantage them with their wives, when they find they are enjoying
+themselves, if they will go home and report that they said something
+vexing or verging on the offensive to their hostess. This man now
+addressed himself to the lady at the head of the table.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce was an unquestionable
+evil?"</p>
+
+<p>The hostess looked with a frightened air to the right and left, and
+then down the table to her husband. But no one came to her rescue, and
+she asked feebly, as if foreboding trouble (for she knew she had taken
+a liberty with this man's wife), "Why, don't we?"</p>
+
+<p>"About one in seven of us doesn't," the stop-gap said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" the girl beside him cried out, in a horror-stricken voice which
+seemed not to interpret her emotion truly. "Is it so bad as that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps not quite, even if it is bad at all,"
+he returned, and the hostess smiled gratefully at
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>
+the girl for drawing his fire. But it appeared she had not, for he
+directed his further speech at the hostess again: really the most
+inoffensive person there, and the least able to contend with adverse
+opinions.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't believe we do think it an unquestionable evil, unless we
+think marriage is so." Everybody sat up, as the stop-gap had intended,
+no doubt, and he "held them with his glittering eye," or as many as he
+could sweep with his glance. "I suppose that the greatest hypocrite at
+this table, where we are all so frankly hypocrites together, will not
+deny that marriage is the prime cause of divorce. In fact, divorce
+couldn't exist without it."</p>
+
+<p>The women all looked bewilderedly at one another, and then appealingly
+at the men. None of these answered directly, but the bachelor softly
+intoned out of Gilbert and Sullivan&mdash;he was of that date:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><p><small>
+"'A paradox, a paradox;<br />
+A most ingenious paradox!'"
+</small></p></div>
+
+<p>"Yes," the stop-gap defiantly assented. "A paradox; and all aboriginal
+verities, all giant truths, are paradoxes."</p>
+
+<p>"Giant truths is good," the bachelor noted, but the stop-gap did not
+mind him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>
+He turned to the host: "I suppose that if divorce is an evil, and we
+wish to extirpate it, we must strike at its root, at marriage?"</p>
+
+<p>The host laughed. "I prefer not to take the floor. I'm sure we all
+want to hear what you have to say in support of your mammoth idea."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, indeed," the women chorused, but rather tremulously, as not
+knowing what might be coming.</p>
+
+<p>"Which do you mean? That all truth is paradoxical, or that marriage is
+the mother of divorce?"</p>
+
+<p>"Whichever you like."</p>
+
+<p>"The last proposition is self-evident," the stop-gap said, supplying
+himself with a small bunch of the grapes which nobody ever takes at
+dinner; the hostess was going to have coffee for the women in the
+drawing-room, and to leave the men to theirs with their tobacco at the
+table. "And you must allow that if divorce is a good thing or a bad
+thing, it equally partakes of the nature of its parent. Or else
+there's nothing in heredity."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come!" one of the husbands said.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well!" the stop-gap submitted. "I yield the word to you."
+But as the other went no further, he continued. "The case is so
+clear that it needs no argument. Up to this time, in dealing
+with the evil of divorce, if it is an evil, we have
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>
+simply been suppressing the symptoms; and your Swiss method&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it isn't <i>mine</i>," the man said who had stated it.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;Is only a part of the general practice. It is another attempt to
+make divorce difficult, when it is marriage that ought to be made
+difficult."</p>
+
+<p>"Some," the daring bachelor said, "think it ought to be made
+impossible." The girl across the table began to laugh hysterically,
+but caught herself up and tried to look as if she had not laughed at
+all.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't go as far as that," the stop-gap resumed, "but as an
+inveterate enemy of divorce&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>An "Oh!" varying from surprise to derision chorused up; but he did not
+mind it; he went on as if uninterrupted.</p>
+
+<p>"I should put every possible obstacle, and at every step, in the way
+of marriage. The attitude of society toward marriage is now simply
+preposterous, absolutely grotesque. Society? The whole human framework
+in all its manifestations, social, literary, religious, artistic, and
+civic, is perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the matter.
+Nothing is done to retard or prevent marriage; everything to
+accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue
+which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>
+vulgar and entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The
+blind and witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least
+with us, is flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and
+revered as if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse.
+But is it? I defy any one here to say that it is."</p>
+
+<p>As if they were afraid of worse things if they spoke, the company
+remained silent. But this did not save them.</p>
+
+<p>"You all know it isn't. You all know that it is the caprice of chance
+encounter, the result of propinquity, the invention of poets and
+novelists, the superstition of the victims, the unscrupulous
+make-believe of the witnesses. As an impulse it quickly wears itself
+out in marriage, and makes way for divorce. In this country
+nine-tenths of the marriages are love-matches. The old motives which
+delay and prevent marriage in other countries, aristocratic countries,
+like questions of rank and descent, even of money, do not exist. Yet
+this is the land of unhappy unions beyond all other lands, the very
+home of divorce. The conditions of marriage are ideally favorable
+according to the opinions of its friends, who are all more or less
+active in bottling husbands and wives up in its felicity and
+preventing their escape through divorce."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>
+Still the others were silent, and again the stop-gap triumphed on.
+"Now, I am an enemy of divorce, too; but I would have it begin before
+marriage."</p>
+
+<p>"Rather paradoxical again?" the bachelor alone had the hardihood to
+suggest.</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all. I am quite literal. I would have it begin with the
+engagement. I would have the betrothed&mdash;the mistress and the
+lover&mdash;come before the magistrate or the minister, and declare their
+motives in wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with
+them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to
+a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would
+quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not,
+he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think
+it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them,
+and dismiss them as before, if they continued obstinate. After three
+months more, he should call them before him and reason with them for
+the last time. If they persisted in spite of everything, he should
+marry them, and let them take the consequences."</p>
+
+<p>The stop-gap leaned back in his chair defiantly, and fixed the host with
+an eye of challenge. Upon the whole the host seemed not so much frightened.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>
+He said: "I don't see anything so original in all that.
+It's merely a travesty of the Swiss law of divorce."</p>
+
+<p>"And you see nothing novel, nothing that makes for the higher
+civilization in the application of that law to marriage? You all
+approve of that law because you believe it prevents nine-tenths of the
+divorces; but if you had a law that would similarly prevent
+nine-tenths of the marriages, you would need no divorce law at all."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know that," the hardy bachelor said. "What about the
+one-tenth of the marriages which it didn't prevent? Would you have the
+parties hopelessly shut up to them? Would you forbid <i>them</i> all hope
+of escape? Would you have no divorce for any cause whatever?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," the husband on the right of the hostess asked (but his wife on
+the right of the host looked as if she wished he had not mixed in),
+"wouldn't more unhappiness result from that one marriage than from all
+the marriages as we have them now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you both rather precipitate?" the stop-gap demanded. "I said,
+let the parties to the final marriage take the consequences. But if
+these consequences were too dire, I would not forbid them the hope of
+relief. I haven't thought the matter out very clearly yet, but there
+are one or two causes for divorce which I would admit."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>
+"Ah?" the host inquired, with a provisional smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, causes going down into the very nature of things&mdash;the nature of
+men and of women. Incompatibility of temperament ought always to be
+very seriously considered as a cause."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"And, above all," and here the stop-gap swept the board with his eye,
+"difference of sex."</p>
+
+<p>The sort of laugh which expresses uncertainty of perception and
+conditional approval went up.</p>
+
+<p>The hostess rose with rather a frightened air. "Shall we leave them to
+their tobacco?" she said to the other women.</p>
+
+<p>When he went home the stop-gap celebrated his triumph to his wife. "I
+don't think she'll ask you for the loan of me again to fill a place
+without you."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she answered, remotely. "You don't suppose she'll think we live
+unhappily together?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE ESCAPADE OF A<br />
+GRANDFATHER</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_ESCAPADE_OF_A" id="THE_ESCAPADE_OF_A"></a>THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Well, what are you doing here?" the younger of the two sages asked,
+with a resolute air of bonhomie, as he dragged himself over the
+asphalt path, and sank, gasping, into the seat beside the other in the
+Park. His senior lifted his head and looked him carefully over to make
+sure of his identity, and then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose, to answer your fatuous question, I am waiting here to get
+my breath before I move on; and in the next place, I am watching the
+feet of the women who go by in their high-heeled shoes."</p>
+
+<p>"How long do you think it will take you to get your breath in the
+atmosphere of these motors?" the younger sage pursued. "And you don't
+imagine that these women are of the first fashion, do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, but I imagine their shoes are. I have been calculating that their
+average heel is from an inch and a half to two inches high, and touches
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>
+the ground in the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece.
+As you seem to be fond of asking questions, perhaps you will like to
+answer one. Why do you think they do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wear shoes like that?" the younger returned, cheerily, and laughed as
+he added, "Because the rest do."</p>
+
+<p>"Mmm!" the elder grumbled, not wholly pleased, and yet not refusing
+the answer. He had been having a little touch of grippe, and was
+somewhat broken from his wonted cynicism. He said: "It's very strange,
+very sad. Just now there was such a pretty young girl, so sweet and
+fine, went tottering by as helpless, in any exigency, as the daughter
+of a thousand years of bound-feet Chinese women. While she tilted on,
+the nice young fellow with her swept forward with one stride to her
+three on the wide soles and low heels of nature-last boots, and kept
+himself from out-walking her by a devotion that made him grit his
+teeth. Probably she was wiser and better and brighter than he, but she
+didn't look it; and I, who voted to give her the vote the other day,
+had my misgivings. I think I shall satisfy myself for the next five
+years by catching cold in taking my hat off to her in elevators, and
+getting killed by automobiles in helping her off the cars, where I've
+given her my seat."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+"But you must allow that if her shoes are too tight, her skirts are
+not so tight as they were. Or have you begun sighing for the good old
+hobble-skirts, now they're gone?"</p>
+
+<p>"The hobble-skirts were prettier than I thought they were when they
+were with us, but the 'tempestuous petticoat' has its charm, which I
+find I'd been missing."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, at least it's a change," the younger sage allowed, "and I
+haven't found the other changes in our dear old New York which I look
+for when I come back in the fall."</p>
+
+<p>The sages were enjoying together the soft weather which lingered with
+us a whole month from the middle of October onward, and the afternoon
+of their meeting in the Park was now softly reddening to the dim
+sunset over the westward trees.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," the elder assented. "I miss the new sky-scrapers which used to
+welcome me back up and down the Avenue. But there are more automobiles
+than ever, and the game of saving your life from them when you cross
+the street is madder and merrier than I have known it before."</p>
+
+<p>"The war seems to have stopped building because people can't afford
+it," the other suggested, "but it has only increased automobiling."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, people can't afford that, either. Nine-tenths
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>
+of them are traveling the road to ruin, I'm told, and apparently they
+can't get over the ground too fast. Just look!" and the sages joined
+in the amused and mournful contemplation of the different types of
+motors innumerably whirring up and down the drive before them, while
+they choked in the fumes of the gasolene.</p>
+
+<p>The motors were not the costliest types, except in a few instances,
+and in most instances they were the cheaper types, such as those who
+could not afford them could at least afford best. The sages had found
+a bench beside the walk where the statue of Daniel Webster looks down
+on the confluence of two driveways, and the stream of motors, going
+and coming, is like a seething torrent either way.</p>
+
+<p>"The mystery is," the elder continued, "why they should want to do it
+in the way they do it. Are they merely going somewhere and must get
+there in the shortest time possible, or are they arriving on a wager?
+If they are taking a pleasure drive, what a droll idea of pleasure
+they must have! Maybe they are trying to escape Black Care, but they must
+know he sits beside the chauffeur as he used to sit behind the horseman,
+and they know that he has a mortgage in his pocket, and can foreclose
+it any time on the house they have hypothecated to buy their car. Ah!"
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>
+The old man started forward with the involuntary impulse of
+rescue. But it was not one of the people who singly, or in terrorized
+groups, had been waiting at the roadside to find their way across; it
+was only a hapless squirrel of those which used to make their way
+safely among the hoofs and wheels of the kind old cabs and carriages,
+and it lay instantly crushed under the tire of a motor. "He's done
+for, poor little wretch! They can't get used to the change. Some day a
+policeman will pick <i>me</i> up from under a second-hand motor. I wonder
+what the great Daniel from his pedestal up there would say if he came
+to judgment."</p>
+
+<p>"He wouldn't believe in the change any more than that squirrel. He
+would decide that he was dreaming, and would sleep on, forgetting and
+forgotten."</p>
+
+<p>"Forgotten," the elder sage assented. "I remember when his fame filled
+the United States, which was then the whole world to me. And now I
+don't imagine that our hyphenated citizens have the remotest
+consciousness of him. If Daniel began delivering one of his
+liberty-and-union-now-and-forever-one-and-inseparable speeches, they
+wouldn't know what he was talking about." The sage laughed and champed
+his toothless jaws together, as old men do in the effort to compose
+their countenances after an emotional outbreak.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>
+"Well, for one thing," the younger observed, "they wouldn't understand
+what he said. You will notice, if you listen to them going by, that
+they seldom speak English. That's getting to be a dead language in New
+York, though it's still used in the newspapers." He thought to hearten
+the other with his whimsicality, for it seemed to him that the elder
+sage was getting sensibly older since their last meeting, and that he
+would be the gayer for such cheer as a man on the hither side of
+eighty can offer a man on the thither. "Perhaps the Russian Jews would
+appreciate Daniel if he were put into Yiddish for them. They're the
+brightest intelligences among our hyphenates. And they have the
+old-fashioned ideals of liberty and humanity, perhaps because they've
+known so little of either."</p>
+
+<p>His gaiety did not seem to enliven his senior much. "Ah, the old
+ideals!" he sighed. "The old ideal of an afternoon airing was a gentle
+course in an open carriage on a soft drive. Now it's a vertiginous
+whirl on an asphalted road, round and round and round the Park till
+the victims stagger with their brains spinning after they get out of
+their cars."</p>
+
+<p>The younger sage laughed. "You've been listening to the pessimism of
+the dear old fellows who drive the few lingering victorias. If you'd
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>
+believe them, all these people in the motors are chauffeurs giving
+their lady-friends joy-rides."</p>
+
+<p>"Few?" the elder retorted. "There are lots of them. I've counted
+twenty in a single round of the Park. I was proud to be in one of
+them, though my horse left something to be desired in the way of youth
+and beauty. But I reflected that I was not very young or beautiful
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>As the sages sat looking out over the dizzying whirl of the motors
+they smoothed the tops of their sticks with their soft old hands, and
+were silent oftener than not. The elder seemed to drowse off from the
+time and place, but he was recalled by the younger saying, "It is
+certainly astonishing weather for this season of the year."</p>
+
+<p>The elder woke up and retorted, as if in offense: "Not at all. I've
+seen the cherries in blossom at the end of October."</p>
+
+<p>"They didn't set their fruit, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;no."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! Well, I saw a butterfly up here in the sheep-pasture the other
+day. I could have put out my hand and caught it. It's the soft weather
+that brings your victorias out like the belated butterflies. Wait till
+the first cold snap, and there won't be a single victoria or butterfly
+left."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," the elder assented, "we butterflies and
+victorias belong to the youth of the year and the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+world. And the sad thing is that we won't have our palingenesis."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" the younger sage demanded. "What is to prevent your coming
+back in two or three thousand years?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if we came back in a year even, we shouldn't find room, for one
+reason. Haven't you noticed how full to bursting the place seems?
+Every street is as packed as lower Fifth Avenue used to be when the
+operatives came out of the big shops for their nooning. The city's
+shell hasn't been enlarged or added to, but the life in it has
+multiplied past its utmost capacity. All the hotels and houses and
+flats are packed. The theaters, wherever the plays are bad enough,
+swarm with spectators. Along up and down every side-streets the motors
+stand in rows, and at the same time the avenues are so dense with them
+that you are killed at every crossing. There has been no building to
+speak of during the summer, but unless New York is overbuilt next year
+we must appeal to Chicago to come and help hold it. But I've an idea
+that the victorias are remaining to stay; if some sort of mechanical
+horse could be substituted for the poor old animals that remind me of
+my mortality, I should be sure of it. Every now and then I get an
+impression of permanence in the things of the Park. As long as the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>
+peanut-men and the swan-boats are with us I sha'n't quite despair.
+And the other night I was moved almost to tears by the sight of a
+four-in-hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue drive. There it was,
+like some vehicular phantom, but how, whence, when? It came, as if out
+of the early eighteen-nineties; two middle-aged grooms, with their
+arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it's the rumble), but of all the
+young people who ought to have flowered over the top none was left but
+the lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box. I've tried every
+evening since for that four-in-hand, but I haven't seen it, and I've
+decided it wasn't a vehicular phantom, but a mere dream of the past."</p>
+
+<p>"Four-horse dream," the younger sage commented, as if musing aloud.</p>
+
+<p>The elder did not seem quite pleased. "A joke?" he challenged.</p>
+
+<p>"Not necessarily. I suppose I was the helpless prey of the rhyme."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know you were a poet."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not, always. But didn't it occur to you that danger for danger
+your four-in-hand was more dangerous than an automobile to the passing
+human creature?"</p>
+
+<p>"It might have been if it had been multiplied by ten thousand. But
+there was only one of it, and it wasn't going twenty miles an hour."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+"That's true," the younger sage assented. "But there was always a
+fearful hazard in horses when we had them. We supposed they were
+tamed, but, after all, they were only <i>trained</i> animals, like
+Hagenback's."</p>
+
+<p>"And what is a chauffeur?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you have me there!" the younger said, and he laughed generously.
+"Or you would have if I hadn't noticed something like amelioration in
+the chauffeurs. At any rate, the taxis are cheaper than they were, and
+I suppose something will be done about the street traffic some time.
+They're talking now about subway crossings. But I should prefer
+overhead foot-bridges at all the corners, crossing one another
+diagonally. They would look like triumphal arches, and would serve the
+purpose of any future Dewey victory if we should happen to have
+another hero to win one."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we must hope for the best. I rather like the notion of the
+diagonal foot-bridges. But why not Rows along the second stories as
+they have them in Chester? I should be pretty sure of always getting
+home alive if we had them. Now if I'm not telephoned for at a hospital
+before I'm restored to consciousness, I think myself pretty lucky. And
+yet it seems but yesterday, as the people used to say in the plays, since I had
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+a pride in counting the automobiles as I walked up the Avenue.
+Once I got as high as twenty before I reached Fifty-ninth
+Street. Now I couldn't count as many horse vehicles."</p>
+
+<p>The elder sage mocked himself in a feeble laugh, but the younger tried
+to be serious. "We don't realize the absolute change. Our streets are
+not streets any more; they are railroad tracks with locomotives let
+loose on them, and no signs up to warn people at the crossings. It's
+pathetic to see the foot-passengers saving themselves, especially the
+poor, pretty, high-heeled women, looking this way and that in their
+fright, and then tottering over as fast as they can totter."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I should have said it was outrageous, humiliating, insulting,
+once, but I don't any more; it would be no use."</p>
+
+<p>"No; and so much depends upon the point of view. When I'm on foot I
+feel all my rights invaded, but when I'm in a taxi it amuses me to see
+the women escaping; and I boil with rage in being halted at every
+other corner by the policeman with his new-fangled semaphore, and it's
+"Go" and "Stop" in red and blue, and my taxi-clock going round all the
+time and getting me in for a dollar when I thought I should keep
+within seventy cents. Then I feel that pedestrians of every age and
+sex ought to be killed."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>
+"Yes, there's something always in the point of view; and there's some
+comfort when you're stopped in your taxi to feel that they often <i>do</i>
+get killed."</p>
+
+<p>The sages laughed together, and the younger said: "I suppose when we
+get aeroplanes in common use, there'll be annoying traffic
+regulations, and policemen anchored out at intervals in the central
+blue to enforce them. After all&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>What he was going to add in amplification cannot be known, for a
+girlish voice, trying to sharpen itself from its native sweetness to a
+conscientious severity, called to them as its owner swiftly advanced
+upon the elder sage: "Now, see here, grandfather! This won't do at
+all. You promised not to leave that bench by the Indian Hunter, and
+here you are away down by the Falconer, and we've been looking
+everywhere for you. It's too bad! I shall be afraid to trust you at
+all after this. Why, it's horrid of you, grandfather! You might have
+got killed crossing the drive."</p>
+
+<p>The grandfather looked up and verified the situation, which seemed to
+include a young man, tall and beautiful, but neither so handsome nor
+so many heads high as the young men in the advertisements of
+ready-to-wear clothing, who smiled down on the young girl as if he had
+arrived with her, and were finding an amusement in her severity
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+which he might not, later. She was, in fact, very pretty, and her skirt
+flared in the fashion of the last moment, as she stooped threateningly
+yet fondly over her grandfather.</p>
+
+<p>The younger sage silently and somewhat guiltily escaped from the
+tumult of emotion which ignored him, and shuffled slowly down the
+path. The other finally gave an "Oh!" of recognition, and then said,
+for all explanation and excuse, "I didn't know what had become of
+you," and then they all laughed.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>SELF-SACRIFICE: A<br />
+FARCE-TRAGEDY</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+<h2><a name="SELF-SACRIFICE_A_FARCE-TRAGEDY" id="SELF-SACRIFICE_A_FARCE-TRAGEDY"></a>SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY</h2>
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+<h4>MISS ISOBEL RAMSEY AND MISS ESTHER GARNETT</h4>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And they were really understood to be engaged?" Miss
+Ramsey is a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of nearly the length of two
+lady's umbrellas and the bulk of one closely folded in its sheath. She
+stands with her elbow supported on the corner of the mantel, her
+temple resting on the knuckle of a thin, nervous hand, in an effect of
+thoughtful absent-mindedness. Miss Garnett, more or less Merovingian
+in a costume that lends itself somewhat reluctantly to a low, thick
+figure, is apparently poising for departure, as she stands before the
+chair from which she has risen beside Miss Ramsey's tea-table and
+looks earnestly up into Miss Ramsey's absent face. Both are very
+young, but aim at being much older than they are, with occasional
+lapses into extreme girlhood.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes, distinctly. I knew you couldn't know, and I
+thought you ought to." She speaks in a deep conviction-bearing and
+conviction-carrying voice. "If he has been coming here so much."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with what seems temperamental abruptness: "Sit down.
+One can always think better sitting down." She catches a chair under
+her with a deft movement of her heel, and Miss Garnett sinks
+provisionally into her seat. "And I think it needs thought, don't
+you?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "That is what I expected of you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And have some more tea. There is nothing like <i>fresh</i>
+tea for clearing the brain, and we certainly need clear brains for
+this." She pushes a button in the wall beside her, and is silent till
+the maid appears. "More tea, Nora." She is silent again while the maid
+reappears with the tea and disappears. "I don't know that he has been
+coming here so <i>very</i> much. But he has no right to be coming at all,
+if he is engaged. That is, in that <i>way</i>."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "No. Not unless&mdash;he wishes he wasn't."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "That would give him <i>less</i> than no right."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "That is true. I didn't think of it in that light."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I'm trying to decide what I ought to do if he does
+want to get off. She said herself that they were engaged?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "As much as that. Conny understood her to say so. And
+Conny never makes a mistake in what people say. Emily didn't say
+<i>whom</i> she was engaged to, but Conny felt that that was to come later,
+and she did not quite feel like asking, don't you know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Of course. And how came she to decide that it was Mr.
+Ashley?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Simply by putting two and two together. They two were
+together the whole time last summer."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I see. Then there is only one thing for me to do."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, admiringly: "I knew you would say that."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, dreamily: "The question is what the thing is."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "That is what I wish to think over. Chocolates?" She
+offers a box, catching it with her left hand from the mantel at her
+shoulder, without rising.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Thank you; do you think they go well with tea?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "They go well with anything.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>
+But we mustn't allow our minds to be distracted. The case is simply
+this: If Mr. Ashley is engaged to Emily Fray, he has no right to go
+round calling on other girls&mdash;well, as if he wasn't&mdash;and he
+has been calling here a great deal. That is perfectly evident. He must
+be made to feel that girls are not to be trifled with&mdash;that they
+are not mere toys."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "How splendidly you do reason! And he ought to
+understand that Emily has a right&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Oh, I don't know that I care about <i>her</i>&mdash;or not
+<i>pri</i>marily. Or do you say pri<i>mar</i>ily?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "I never know. I only use it in writing."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "It's a clumsy word; I don't know that I shall. But
+what I mean is that I must act from a general principle, and that
+principle is that when a man is engaged, it doesn't matter whether the
+girl has thrown herself at him, or not&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "She certainly did, from what Conny says."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "He must be shown that other girls won't tolerate his
+behaving as if he were <i>not</i> engaged. It is wrong."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "We must stand together."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Yes. Though I don't infer that he has been attentive
+to other girls generally."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "No. I meant that if he has been coming here so much,
+you want to prevent his trifling with others."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Something like that. But it ought to be more definite.
+He ought to realize that if another girl cared for him, it would be
+cruel to her, paying her attentions, when he was engaged to some one
+else."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "And cruel to the girl he is engaged to."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Yes." She speaks coldly, vaguely. "But that is the
+personal ground, and I wish to avoid that. I wish to deal with him
+purely in the abstract."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes, I understand that. And at the same time you wish
+to punish him. He ought to be made to feel it all the more because he
+is so severe himself."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Severe?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Not tolerating anything that's the least out of the
+way in other people. Taking you up about your ideas and showing where
+you're wrong, or even silly. Spiritually snubbing, Conny calls it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Oh, I like that in him. It's so
+invigorating. It braces up all your good resolutions.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>
+It makes you ashamed; and shame is sanative."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "That's just what I told Conny, or the same thing. Do
+you think another one would hurt me? I will risk it, anyway." She
+takes another chocolate from the box. "Go on."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Oh, I was just wishing that I had been out longer, and
+had a little more experience of men. Then I should know how to act.
+How do you suppose people do, generally?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Why, you know, if they find a man in love with them,
+after he's engaged to another girl, they make him go back to her, it
+doesn't matter whether they're in love with him themselves or not."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I'm <i>not</i> in love with Mr. Ashley, please."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "No; I'm supposing an extreme case."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, after a moment of silent thought: "Did you ever hear of
+anybody doing it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Not just in our set. But I know it's done
+continually."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "It seems to me as if I had read something of the
+kind."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Oh yes, the books are full of it. Are those mallows?
+They might carry off the effects of the chocolates." Miss Ramsey passes
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>
+her the box of marshmallows which she has bent over the table to look at.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And of course they couldn't get into the books if they
+hadn't really happened. I wish I could think of a case in point."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Why, there was Peg Woffington&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with displeasure: "She was an actress of some sort,
+wasn't she?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, with meritorious candor: "Yes, she was. But she was a
+very <i>good</i> actress."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "What did <i>she</i> do?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Well, it's a long time since I read it; and it's
+rather old-fashioned now. But there was a countryman of some sort, I
+remember, who came away from his wife, and fell in love with Peg
+Woffington, and then the wife follows him up to London, and begs her
+to give him back to her, and she does it. There's something about a
+portrait of Peg&mdash;I don't remember exactly; she puts her face through
+and cries when the wife talks to the picture. The wife thinks it is a
+real picture, and she is kind of soliloquizing, and asking Peg to give
+her husband back to her; and Peg does, in the end. That part is
+beautiful. They become the greatest friends."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Rather silly, I should say."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes, it <i>is</i> rather silly, but I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>
+suppose the author thought she had to do something."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And disgusting. A married man, that way! I don't see
+any comparison with Mr. Ashley."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "No, there really isn't any. Emily has never asked you
+to give him up. And besides, Peg Woffington really liked him a
+little&mdash;loved him, in fact."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And I <i>don't</i> like Mr. Ashley at all. Of course I
+respect him&mdash;and I admire his intellect; there's no question about his
+being handsome; but I have never thought of him for a moment in any
+other way; and now I can't even respect him."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Nobody could. I'm sure Emily would be welcome to him
+as far as <i>I</i> was concerned. But he has never been about with me so
+much as he has with you, and I don't wonder you feel indignant."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, coldly: "I don't feel indignant. I wish to be just."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes, that is what I mean. And poor
+Emily is so uninteresting! In the play that Kentucky Summers
+does, she is perfectly fascinating at first, and you can see
+why the poor girl's fianc&eacute; should be so taken with her.
+But I'm sure no one could say you had ever given Mr.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>
+Ashley the least encouragement. It would be pure justice on your part.
+I think you are grand! I shall always be proud of knowing what you
+were going to do."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, after some moments of snubbing intention: "I don't know
+what I am going to do myself, yet. Or how. What <i>was</i> that play? I
+never heard of it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "I don't remember distinctly, but it was about a young
+man who falls in love with her, when he's engaged to another girl, and
+she determines, as soon as she finds it out, to disgust him, so that
+he will go back to the other girl, don't you know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "That sounds rather more practical than the Peg
+Woffington plan. What does she do?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Nothing you'd like to do."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I'd like to do something in such a cause. What does
+she do?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Oh, when he is calling on her, Kentucky Summers
+pretends to fly into a rage with her sister, and she pulls her hair
+down, and slams everything round the room, and scolds, and drinks
+champagne, and wants him to drink with her, and I don't know what all.
+The upshot is that he is only too glad to get away."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "It's rather loathsome, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Garnett</i>: "It <i>is</i> rather loathsome. But it was in a good cause,
+and I suppose it was what an actress would think of."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "An actress?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "I forgot. The heroine is a distinguished actress, you
+know, and Kentucky could play that sort of part to perfection. But I
+don't think a lady would like to cut up, much, in the <i>best</i> cause."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Cut up?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "She certainly frisks about the room a good deal. How
+delicious these mallows are! Have you ever tried toasting them?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "At school. There seems an idea in it. And the hero
+isn't married. I don't like the notion of a married man."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Oh, I'm quite sure he isn't married. He's merely
+engaged. That makes the whole difference from the Peg Woffington
+story. And there's no portrait, I'm confident, so that you wouldn't
+have to do that part."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, haughtily: "I don't propose to do <i>any</i> part, if the
+affair can't be arranged without some such mountebank business!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "You can manage it, if anybody can. You have so much
+dignity that you could awe him into doing his duty by a single glance.
+I wouldn't be in his place!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I shall not give him a glance. I shall not see him
+when he comes. That will be simpler still." To Nora, at the door:
+"What is it, Nora?"</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<h4>NORA, MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT</h4>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "Mr. Ashley, Miss Ramsey."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with a severity not meant for Nora: "Ask him to sit
+down in the reception-room a moment."</p>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<h4>MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT</h4>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, rising and seizing Miss Ramsey's hands: "Oh, Isobel!
+But you will be equal to it! Oh! Oh!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with state: "Why are you going, Esther? Sit down."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "If I only <i>could</i> stay! If I could
+hide under the sofa, or behind the screen! Isn't it
+wonderful&mdash;providential&mdash;his coming at the very instant?
+Oh, Isobel!" She clasps her friend convulsively, and after a moment's
+resistance Miss Ramsey yields to her emotion, and they hide their
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>
+faces in each other's neck, and strangle their hysteric laughter. They
+try to regain their composure, and then abandon the effort with a
+shuddering delight in the perfection of the incident. "What shall you
+do? Shall you trust to inspiration? Shall you make him show his hand
+first, and then act? Or shall you tell him at once that you know all,
+and&mdash; Or no, of course you can't do that. He's not supposed to
+know that you know. Oh, I can imagine the freezing hauteur that you'll
+receive him with, and the icy indifference you'll let him understand
+that he isn't a <i>persona grata</i> with! If I were only as tall as you!
+He isn't as tall himself, and you can tower over him. Don't sit down,
+or bend, or anything; just stand with your head up, and glance
+carelessly at him under your lashes as if nobody was there! Then it
+will gradually dawn upon him that you know everything, and he'll
+simply go through the floor." They take some ecstatic turns about the
+room, Miss Ramsey waltzing as gentleman. She abruptly frees herself.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "No. It can't be as tacit as all that. There must be
+something explicit. As you say, I must <i>do</i> something to cure him of
+his fancy&mdash;his perfidy&mdash;and make him glad to go back to her."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes! Do you think he deserves it?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I've no wish to punish him."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "How noble you are! I don't wonder he adores you. <i>I</i>
+should. But you won't find it so easy. You must do something drastic.
+It <i>is</i> drastic, isn't it? or do I mean static? One of those things
+when you simply crush a person. But now I must go. How I should like
+to listen at the door! We must kiss each other very quietly, and I
+must slip out&mdash; Oh, you dear! How I long to know what you'll do! But it
+will be perfect, whatever it is. You always <i>did</i> do perfect things."
+They knit their fingers together in parting. "On second thoughts I
+won't kiss you. It might unman you, and you need all your strength.
+Unman isn't the word, exactly, but you can't say ungirl, can you? It
+would be ridiculous. Though girls are as brave as men when it comes to
+duty. Good-by, dear!" She catches Miss Ramsey about the neck, and
+pressing her lips silently to her cheek, runs out. Miss Ramsey rings
+and the maid appears.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<h4>NORA, MISS RAMSEY</h4>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, starting: "Oh! Is that you, Nora? Of course! Nora!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Do you know where my brother keeps his cigarettes?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "Why, in his room, Miss Ramsey; you told him you didn't like
+the smell here."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Yes, yes. I forgot. And has he got any cocktails?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "He's got the whole bottle full of them yet."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Full yet?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "You wouldn't let him offer them to the gentlemen he had to
+lunch, last week, because you said&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "What did I say?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "They were vulgar."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And so they are. And so much the better! Bring the
+cigarettes and the bottle and some glasses here, Nora, and then ask
+Mr. Ashley to come." She walks away to the window, and hurriedly hums
+a musical comedy waltz, not quite in tune, as from not remembering
+exactly, and after Nora has tinkled in with a tray of glasses she
+lights a cigarette and stands puffing it, gasping and coughing a
+little, as Walter Ashley enters. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! Sorry to make you
+wait."</p>
+
+
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<h4>MR. ASHLEY, MISS RAMSEY</h4>
+
+<p><i>Mr. Ashley</i>: "The time <i>has</i> seemed long,
+but I could have waited all day. I couldn't have gone
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>
+without seeing you, and telling you&mdash;" He
+pauses, as if bewildered at the spectacle of Miss Ramsey's resolute
+practice with the cigarette, which she now takes from her lips and
+waves before her face with innocent recklessness.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, chokingly: "Do sit down." She drops into an easy-chair
+beside the tea-table, and stretches the tips of her feet out beyond
+the hem of her skirt in extremely lady-like abandon. "Have a
+cigarette." She reaches the box to him.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Thank you. I won't smoke, I believe." He stands frowning,
+while she throws her cigarette into a teacup and lights another.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I thought everybody smoked. Then have a cocktail."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "A what?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "A cocktail. So many people like them with their tea,
+instead of rum, you know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "No, I didn't know." He regards her with amaze, rapidly
+hardening into condemnation.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I hope you don't <i>object</i> to smoking. Englishwomen all
+smoke."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I think I've heard. I didn't know that American ladies
+did."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "They don't, <i>all</i>. But they will when they find how
+nice it is."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>
+<i>Ashley</i>: "And do Englishwomen all drink cocktails?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "They will when they find how nice it is. But why do
+you keep standing? Sit down, if it's only for a moment. There is
+something I would like to talk with you about. What were you saying
+when you came in? I didn't catch it quite."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Nothing&mdash;now&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And I can't persuade you to have a cocktail? I believe
+I'll have another myself." She takes up the bottle, and tries several
+times to pour from it. "I do believe Nora's forgotten to open it! That
+is a good joke on me. But I mustn't let her know. Do you happen to
+have a pocket-corkscrew with you, Mr. Ashley?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "No&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Well, never mind." She tosses her cigarette into the
+grate, and lights another. "I wonder why they always have cynical
+persons smoke, on the stage? I don't see that the two things
+necessarily go together, but it does give you a kind of thrill when
+they strike a match, and it lights up their faces when they put it to
+the cigarette. You know something good and wicked is going to happen."
+She puffs violently at her cigarette, and then suddenly flings
+it away and starts to her feet. "Will you&mdash;would
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>
+you&mdash;open the window?" She collapses into her chair.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>, springing toward her: "Miss Ramsey, are you&mdash;you are ill!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "No, no! The window! A little faint&mdash;it's so
+close&mdash; There, it's all right now. Or it will be&mdash;when&mdash;I've
+had&mdash;another cigarette." She leans forward to take one; Ashley gravely
+watches her, but says nothing. She lights her cigarette, but, without
+smoking, throws it away. "Go on."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I wasn't saying anything!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Oh, I forgot. And I don't know what we were talking
+about myself." She falls limply back into her chair and closes her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Sha'n't I ring for the maid? I'm afraid&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, imperiously: "Not at all. Not on any account." Far less
+imperiously: "You may pour me a cup of tea if you like. That will make
+me well. The full strength, please." She motions away the hot-water
+jug with which he has proposed qualifying the cup of tea which he
+offers her.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "One lump or two?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Only one, thank you." She takes the cup.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>
+<i>Ashley</i>, offering the milk: "Cream?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "A drop." He stands anxiously beside her while she
+takes a long draught and then gives back the cup. "That was perfect."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Another?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "No, that is just right. Now go on. Or, I forgot. You
+were not going on. Oh dear! How much better I feel. There must have
+been something poisonous in those cigarettes."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Yes, there was tobacco."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Oh, do you think it was the tobacco? Do throw the
+whole box into the fire! I shall tell Bob never to get cigarettes with
+tobacco in them after this. Won't you have one of the chocolates? Or a
+mallow? I feel as if I should never want to eat anything again. Where
+was I?" She rests her cheek against the side of her chair cushion, and
+speaks with closed eyes, in a weak murmur. Mr. Ashley watches her at
+first with anxiety, then with a gradual change of countenance until a
+gleam of intelligence steals into his look of compassion.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "You asked me to throw the cigarettes into the fire. But I
+want you to let me keep them."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with wide-flung eyes: "You? You said you wouldn't
+smoke."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>
+<i>Ashley</i>, laughing: "May I change my mind? One talks better." He
+lights a cigarette. "And, Miss Ramsey, I believe I <i>will</i> have a
+cocktail, after all."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Mr. Ashley!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>, without noting her protest: "I had forgotten that I had a
+corkscrew in my pocket-knife. Don't trouble yourself to ring for one."
+He produces the knife and opens the bottle; then, as Miss Ramsey rises
+and stands aghast, he pours out a glass and offers it to her, with
+mock devotion. As she shakes her head and recoils: "Oh! I thought you
+liked cocktails. They are very good after cigarettes&mdash;very reviving.
+But if you won't&mdash;" He tosses off the cocktail and sets down the
+glass, smacking his lips. "Tell your brother I commend his taste&mdash;in
+cocktails and"&mdash;puffing his cigarette&mdash;"tobacco. Poison for poison,
+let me offer you one of <i>my</i> cigarettes. They're milder than these."
+He puts his hand to his breast pocket.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with nervous shrinking: "No&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "It's just as well. I find that I hadn't brought mine with
+me." After a moment: "You are so unconventional, so fearless, that I
+should like your notion of the problem in a book I've just been reading.
+Why should the mere fact that a man is married to one woman prevent his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>
+being in love with another, or half a dozen others; or <i>vice versa</i>?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Mr. Ashley, do you wish to insult me?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Dear me, no! But put the case a little differently. Suppose
+a couple are merely engaged. Does that fact imply that neither has a
+right to a change of mind, or to be fancy free to make another
+choice?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, indignantly: "Yes, it does. They are as sacredly bound
+to each other as if they were married, and if they are false to each
+other the girl is a wretch, and the man is a villain! And if you think
+anything I have said can excuse you for breaking your engagement, or
+that I don't consider you the wickedest person in the world, and the
+most barefaced hypocrite, and&mdash;and&mdash;I don't know what&mdash;you are very
+much mistaken."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "What in the world are you talking about?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I am talking about you and your shameless perfidy."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "My shameless perf&mdash; I don't understand! I came here
+to tell you that I love you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "How dare you! To speak to me of that, when&mdash;
+Or perhaps you <i>have</i> broken with her, and think you are free to
+hoodwink some other poor creature. But you will find that you
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>
+have chosen the wrong person. And it's no excuse for you her being a little&mdash;a
+little&mdash;not so bright as some girls, and not so good-looking. Oh, it's
+enough to make any girl loathe her own looks! You mustn't suppose you
+can come here red-handed&mdash;yes, it's the same as a murder, and any true
+girl would say so&mdash;and tell me you care for me. No, Walter Ashley, I
+haven't fallen so low as that, though I <i>have</i> the disgrace of your
+acquaintance. And I hope&mdash;I hope&mdash;if you don't like my smoking, and
+offering you cocktails, and talking the way I have, it will be a
+lesson to you. And yes!&mdash;I <i>will</i> say it! If it will add to your
+misery to know that I did respect you very much, and thought
+everything&mdash;very highly&mdash;of you, and might have answered you very
+differently before, when you were free to tell me <i>that</i>&mdash;now
+I have nothing but the utmost abhorrence&mdash;and&mdash;disapproval of you.
+And&mdash;and&mdash; Oh, I don't see how you can be so hateful!" She hides her
+face in her hands and rushes from the room, overturning several chairs
+in her course toward the door. Ashley remains staring after her, while
+a succession of impetuous rings make themselves heard from the street
+door. There is a sound of opening it, and then a flutter of skirts and
+anxieties, and Miss Garnett comes running into the room.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span></p>
+<h4>VI</h4>
+
+<h4>MISS GARNETT, MR. ASHLEY</h4>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, to the maid hovering in the doorway: "Yes, I must have
+left it here, for I never missed it till I went to pay my fare in the
+motor-bus, and tried to think whether I had the exact dime, and if I
+hadn't whether the conductor would change a five-dollar bill or not,
+and then it rushed into my mind that I had left my purse somewhere,
+and I knew I hadn't been anywhere else." She runs from the mantel to
+the writing-desk in the corner, and then to the sofa, where, peering
+under the tea-table, she finds her purse on the shelf. "Oh, here it
+is, Nora, just where I put it when we began to talk, and I must have
+gone out and left it. I&mdash;" She starts with a little shriek, in
+encountering Ashley. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! What a fright you gave me! I was
+just looking for my purse that I missed when I went to pay my fare in
+the motor-bus, and was wondering whether I had the exact dime, or the
+conductor could change a five-dollar bill, and&mdash;" She discovers, or
+affects to discover, something strange in his manner. "What&mdash;what is
+the matter, Mr. Ashley?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I shall be glad to have you tell me&mdash;or any one."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Garnett</i>: "I don't understand. Has Isobel&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Miss Garnett, did you know I was engaged?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Why, yes; I was just going to congrat&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Well, don't, unless you can tell me whom I am engaged to."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Why, aren't you engaged to Emily Fray?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Not the least in the world."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, in despair: "Then <i>what</i> have I done? Oh, what a
+fatal, fatal scrape!" With a ray of returning hope: "But she told me
+<i>herself</i> that she was engaged! And you were together so much, last
+summer!" Desperately: "Then if she isn't engaged to you, whom is she
+engaged to?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "On general principles, I shouldn't know, but in this
+particular instance I happen to know that she is engaged to Owen
+Brooks. They were a great deal more together last summer."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, with conviction: "So they were!" With returning doubt:
+"But why didn't she say so?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I can't tell you; she may have had her reasons, or she may
+not. Can you possibly tell me, in return for my ignorance, why the fact
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+of her engagement should involve me in the strange way it seems
+to have done with Miss Ramsey?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, with a burst of involuntary candor: "Why, <i>I</i> did
+that. Or, no! What's she been doing?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Really, Miss Garnett&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "How can I tell you anything, if you don't tell me
+everything? You wouldn't wish me to betray confidence?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "No, certainly not. What was the confidence?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Well&mdash; But I shall have to know first
+what she's been doing. You must see that yourself, Mr. Ashley." He is
+silent. "Has she&mdash;has Isobel&mdash;been behaving&mdash;well, out of character?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Very much indeed."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "I expected she would." She fetches a thoughtful sigh,
+and for her greater emotional convenience she sinks into an easy-chair
+and leans forward. "Oh dear! It is a scrape." Suddenly and
+imperatively: "Tell me exactly what she did, if you hope for any help
+whatever."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Why, she offered me a cocktail&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Oh, how good! I didn't suppose she would dare! Well?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+<i>Ashley</i>: "And she smoked cigarettes&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "How perfectly divine! And what else?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>, coldly: "May I ask why you admire Miss Ramsey's behaving out
+of character so much? I think the smoking made her rather faint, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "She would have let it <i>kill</i> her! Never tell me that
+girls have no moral courage!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "But what&mdash;what was the meaning of it all?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, thoughtfully: "I suppose if I got her in for it, I
+ought to get her out, even if I betray confidence."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "It depends upon the confidence. What is it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Why&mdash; But you're sure it's my duty?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "If you care what I think of her&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Oh, Mr. Ashley, you mustn't think it strange of
+Isobel, on my bended knees you mustn't! Why, don't you see? She was
+just doing it to disgust you!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Disgust me?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes, and drive you back to Emily Fray."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Drive me ba&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "If she thought you were
+engaged to Emily, when you were coming here all
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+the time, and she wasn't quite sure that she hated to have you, don't
+you see it would be her duty to sacrifice herself, and&mdash; Oh, I
+suppose she's heard everything up there, and&mdash;" She catches
+herself up and runs out of the room, leaving Ashley to await the
+retarded descent of skirts which he hears on the stairs after the
+crash of the street door has announced Miss Garnett's escape. He
+stands with his back to the mantel, and faces Miss Ramsey as she
+enters the room.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VII</h4>
+
+<h4>MISS RAMSEY, ASHLEY</h4>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with the effect of cold surprise: "Mr. Ashley? I
+thought I heard&mdash; Wasn't Miss Garnett&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "She was. Did you think it was the street door closing on
+<i>me</i>?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "How should I know?" Then, courageously: "No, I didn't
+think it was. Why do you ask?" She moves uneasily about the room, with
+an air of studied inattention.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Because if you did, I can put you in the right, though I
+can't restore Miss Garnett's presence by my absence."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "You're rather&mdash;enigmatical."
+A ring is heard; the maid pauses at the doorway.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>
+"I'm not at home, Nora." To Mr. Ashley: "It seems to be very close&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "It's my having been smoking."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "<i>Your</i> having?" She goes to the window and tries to
+lift it.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Let <i>me</i>." He follows her to the window, where he stands
+beside her.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Now, she's seen me! And you here with me. Of course&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I shouldn't mind. But I'm so sorry if&mdash;and I will go."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "You can't go now&mdash;till she's round the corner. She'll
+keep looking back, and she'll think I made you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "But haven't you? Aren't you sending me back to Miss Fray to
+tell her that I must keep my engagement, though I care nothing for
+her, and care all the world for you? Isn't that what you want me to
+do?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "But you're not engaged to her! You just&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Just what?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, desperately: "You wish me to disgrace myself forever in
+your eyes. Well, I will; what does it matter now? I heard you telling
+Esther you were not engaged. I <i>over</i>heard you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I fancied you must."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I <i>tried</i> to overhear! I <i>eavesdropped</i>! I wish you to
+know that."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "And what do you wish me to do about it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I should think any self-respecting person would know.
+I'm <i>not</i> a self-respecting person." Her wandering gaze seems to fall
+for the first time upon the tray with the cocktails and glasses and
+cigarettes; she flies at the bell-button and presses it impetuously.
+As the maid appears: "Take these things away, Nora, please!" To Ashley
+when the maid has left the room: "Don't be afraid to say what you
+think of me!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I think all the world of you. But I should merely like to
+ask&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Oh, you can ask anything of me now!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>, with palpable insincerity: "I should like to ask why you
+don't respect yourself?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Was that what you were going to ask? I know it wasn't.
+But I will tell you. Because I have been a fool."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Thank you. Now I will tell you what I was really going to
+ask. Why did you wish to drive me back to Miss Fray when you knew that
+I would be false to her a thousand times if I could only once be true
+to you?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Now you <i>are</i> insulting me!
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>
+And that is just the point. You may be a very clever lawyer, Mr.
+Ashley, and everybody says you are&mdash;very able, and talented, and
+all that, but you can't get round that point. You may torture any
+meaning you please out of my words, but I shall always say you brought
+it on yourself."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Brought what on?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Mr. Ashley! I won't be cross-questioned."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Was that why you smoked, and poured cocktails out of an
+unopened bottle? Was it because you wished me to hate you, and
+remember my duty, and go back to Miss Fray? Well, it was a dead
+failure. It made me love you more than ever. I am a fool too, as you
+call it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Say anything you please. I have given you the right. I
+shall not resent it. Go on."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I should only repeat myself. You must have known how much I
+care for you, Isobel. Do you mind my calling you Isobel?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Not in the least if you wish to humiliate me by it. I
+should like you to trample on me in every way you can."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Trample on you? I would rather be run over by a
+steam-roller than tread on the least of your outlying feelings,
+dearest. Do you mind my saying dearest?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I have told you that you can say anything you like. I
+deserve it. But oh, if you have a spark of pity&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I'm a perfect conflagration of compassion, darling. Do you
+object to darling?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with starting tears: "It doesn't matter now." She has
+let her lovely length trail into the corner of the sofa, where she
+desperately reclines, supporting her elbow on the arm of it, and
+resting her drooping head on her hand. He draws a hassock up in front
+of her, and sits on it.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "This represents kneeling at your feet. One doesn't do it
+literally any more, you know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, in a hollow voice: "I should despise you if you did,
+and"&mdash;deeply murmurous&mdash;"I don't <i>wish</i> to despise you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "No, I understand that. You merely wish <i>me</i> to despise
+<i>you</i>. But why?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, nervously: "You know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "But I don't know&mdash;Isobel, dearest, darling, if you will
+allow me to express myself so fully. <i>How</i> should I know?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I've told you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "May I take your hand? For good-by!" He possesses himself of
+it. "It seems to go along with those expressions."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, self-contemptuously: "Oh yes."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Thank you. Where were we?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>, sitting up and recovering her hand: "You were saying
+good-by&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Was I? But not before I had told you that I knew you were
+doing all that for my best good, and I wish&mdash;I <i>wish</i> you could have
+seen how exemplary you looked when you were trying to pour a cocktail
+out of a corked bottle, between your remarks on passionate fiction and
+puffs of the insidious cigarette! When the venomous tobacco began to
+get in its deadly work, and you turned pale and reeled a little, and
+called for air, it made me mentally vow to go back to Miss Fray
+instantly, whether I was engaged to her or not, and cut out poor old
+Brooks&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Was it Mr. Brooks? I didn't hear the name exactly."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "When I was telling Miss Garnett? I ought to have spoken
+louder, but I wasn't sure at the time you were listening. Though as
+you were saying, what does it matter now?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Did I say that?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Words to that effect. And they have made me feel how
+unworthy of you I am. I'm not heroic&mdash;by nature. But I could be, if
+you made me&mdash;by art&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, springing to her feet indignantly: "Now, you are
+ridiculing me&mdash;you are making fun of me."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>
+<i>Ashley</i>, gathering himself up from his hassock with difficulty, and
+confronting her: "Do I look like a man who would dare to make fun of
+you? I am half a head shorter than you, and in moral grandeur you
+overtop me so that I would always have to wear a high hat when I was
+with you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, thoughtfully: "Plenty of girls are that way, now. But
+if you are ashamed of my being tall&mdash;" Flashingly, and with starting
+tears.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Ashamed! I can always look up to you, you can always stoop
+to me!" He stretches his arms toward her.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, recoiling bewildered: "Wait! We haven't got to that
+yet."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Oh, Isobel&mdash;dearest&mdash;darling! We've got past it! We're on
+the home stretch, now."</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>THE NIGHT BEFORE<br />
+CHRISTMAS</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_NIGHT_BEFORE" id="THE_NIGHT_BEFORE"></a>THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS</h2>
+
+<h3>A MORALITY</h3>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<h4>MR. AND MRS. CLARENCE FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Clarence Fountain</i>, backing into the room, and closing the door
+noiselessly before looking round: "Oh, you poor thing! I can see that
+you are dead, at the first glance. I'm dead myself, for that matter."
+She is speaking to her husband, who clings with one hand to the
+chimney-piece, and supports his back with the other; from this hand a
+little girl's long stocking lumpily dangles; Mrs. Fountain, turning
+round, observes it. "Not finished yet? But I don't wonder! I wonder you've
+even begun. Well, now, <i>I</i> will take hold with you." In token of the aid
+she is going to give, Mrs. Fountain sinks into a chair and rolls a distracted
+eye over the littered and tumbled room. "It's worse than I thought it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>
+would be. You ought to have smoothed the papers out and laid them in a
+pile as fast as you unwrapped the things; that is the way I always do;
+and wound the strings up and put them one side. Then you wouldn't have
+had to wade round in them. I suppose I oughtn't to have left it to
+you, but if I had let <i>you</i> put the children to bed you know you'd
+have told them stories and kept them all night over their prayers. And
+as it was each of them wanted to put in a special Christmas clause; I
+know what kind of Christmas clause <i>I</i> should have put in if I'd been
+frank! I'm not sure it's right to keep up the deception. One comfort,
+the oldest ones don't believe in it any more than we do. Dear! I did
+think at one time this afternoon I should have to be brought home in
+an ambulance; it would have been a convenience, with all the packages.
+I simply marvel at their delivery wagons getting them here."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, coming to the table, where she sits, and taking up one of
+the toys with which it is strewn: "They haven't all of them."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "What do you mean by all of them?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I mean half." He takes up a mechanical locomotive and
+stuffs it into the stocking he holds.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>
+<i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, staying his hand: "What are you doing? Putting
+Jimmy's engine into Susy's stocking! She'll be perfectly insulted when
+she finds it, for she'll know you weren't paying the least attention,
+and you can't blame Santa Claus for it with <i>her</i>. If that's what
+you've been doing with the other stockings&mdash; But there <i>aren't</i> any
+others. Don't tell me you've just begun! Well, I could simply cry."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, dropping into the chair on the other side of the table,
+under the shelter of a tall Christmas tree standing on it: "Do you
+call unwrapping a whole car-load of truck and getting it sorted, just
+beginning? I've been slaving here from the dawn of time, and I had to
+have <i>some</i> leisure for the ghosts of my own Christmases when I was
+little. I didn't have to wade round in the wrappings of my presents in
+those days. But it isn't the sad memories that take it out of you;
+it's the happy ones. I've never had a ghastlier half-hour than I've
+just spent in the humiliating multiplicity of these gifts. All the old
+birthdays and wedding-days and Fourth of Julys and home-comings and
+children's christenings I've ever had came trooping back. There
+oughtn't to be any gay anniversaries; they should be forbidden by law.
+If I could only have recalled a few dangerous fevers and funerals!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>
+<i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Clarence! Don't say such a thing; you'll be punished
+for it. I know how you suffer from those gloomy feelings, and I pity
+you. You ought to bear up against them. If <i>I</i> gave way! You must
+think about something cheerful in the future when the happiness of the
+past afflicts you, and set one against the other; life isn't <i>all</i> a
+vale of tears. You must keep your mind fixed on the work before you. I
+don't believe it's the number of the packages here that's broken you
+down. It's the shopping that's worn you out; I'm sure I'm a mere
+thread. And I had been at it from immediately after breakfast; and I
+lunched in one of the stores with ten thousand suburbans who had come
+pouring in with the first of their unnatural trains: I did hope I
+should have some of the places to myself; but they were every one
+jammed. And you came up from your office about four, perfectly fresh."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Fresh! Yes, quite dewy from a day's fight with the beasts
+at Ephesus on the eve of Christmas week."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, don't be cynical, Clarence, on this, of all
+nights of the year. You know how sorry I always am for what you have to go
+through down there, and I suppose it's worse, as you say, at this season
+than any other time of year. It's the terrible concentration of everything
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+just before Christmas that makes it so killing. I really don't know
+which of the places was the worst; the big department stores or the
+separate places for jewelry and toys and books and stationery and
+antiques; they were all alike, and all maddening. And the rain
+outside, and everybody coming in reeking; though I don't believe that
+sunshine would have been any better; there'd have been more of them. I
+declare, it made my heart ache for those poor creatures behind the
+counters, and I don't know whether I suffered most for them when they
+kept up a ghastly cheerfulness in their attention or were simply
+insulting in their indifference. I know they must be all dead by this
+time. 'Going up?' 'Going down?' 'Ca-ish!' 'Here, boy!' I believe it
+will ring in my ears as long as I live. And the whiz of those overhead
+wire things, and having to wait ages for your change, and then drag
+your tatters out of the stores into the streets! If I hadn't had you
+with me at the last I should certainly have dropped."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Yes, and what had become of your good resolutions about
+doing all your Christmas shopping in July?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "<i>My</i> good resolutions? Really, Clarence, sometimes
+if it were not cruelty to animals I should like to hit you. <i>My</i> good&mdash; You
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>
+<i>know</i> that you suggested that plan, and it wasn't even
+original with you. The papers have been talking about it for years;
+but when you brought it up as such a new idea, I fell in with it to
+please you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Now, look out, Lucy!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Yes, to please you, and to help you forget the
+Christmas worry, just as I've been doing to-night. You never spare
+<i>me</i>."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Stick to the record. Why didn't you do your Christmas
+shopping in July?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Why didn't I? Did you expect me to do my Christmas
+shopping down at Sculpin Beach, where I spent the whole time from the
+middle of June till the middle of September? Why didn't <i>you</i> do the
+Christmas shopping in July? You had the stores under your nose here
+from the beginning till the end of summer, with nothing in the world
+to hinder you, and not a chick or a child to look after."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Oh, I like that. You think I was leading a life of
+complete leisure here, with the thermometer among the nineties
+nine-tenths of the time?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "I only know you were bragging in all your
+letters about your bath and your club, and the folly of any one
+going away from the cool, comfortable town in the summer. I suppose
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>
+you'll say that was to keep me from feeling badly at leaving you. When it was
+only for the children's sake! I will let you take them the next time."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "While you look after my office? And you think the stores
+are full of Christmas things in July, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "I never thought so; and now I hope you see the folly
+of that idea. No, Clarence. We must be logical in everything. You
+can't get rid of Christmas shopping at Christmas-time."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, shouting wrathfully: "Then I say get rid of Christmas!"</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<h4>MR. FRANK WATKINS, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Watkins</i>, opening the door for himself and struggling into the room
+with an armful of parcels: "I'm with you there, Clarence. Christmas is
+at the root of Christmas shopping, and Christmas giving, and all the
+rest of it. Oh, you needn't be afraid, Lucy. I didn't hear any
+epithets; just caught the drift of your argument through the keyhole.
+I've been kicking at the door ever since you began. Where shall I dump
+these things?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>
+<i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Oh, you poor boy! Here&mdash;anywhere&mdash;on the floor&mdash;on
+the sofa&mdash;on the table." She clears several spaces and helps Watkins
+unload. "Clarence! I'm surprised at you. What are you thinking of?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I'm thinking that if this goes on, I'll let somebody else
+arrange the presents."</p>
+
+<p><i>Watkins</i>: "If I saw a man coming into my house with a load like this
+to-night, I'd throw him into the street. But living in a ninth-story
+flat like you, it might hurt him."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, reading the inscriptions on the packages: "'For Benny
+from his uncle Frank.' Oh, how sweet of you, Frank! And here's a kiss
+for his uncle Frank." She embraces him with as little interruption as
+possible. "'From Uncle Frank to Jim.' Oh, I know what that is!" She
+feels the package over. "And this is for 'Susy from her aunt Sue.' Oh,
+I knew she would remember her namesake. 'For Maggie. Merry Christmas
+from Mrs. Watkins.' 'Bridget, with Mrs. Watkins's best wishes for a
+Merry Christmas.' Both the girls! But it's like Sue; she never forgets
+anybody. And what's this for Clarence? I <i>must</i> know! Not a
+bath-gown?" Undoing it: "I simply <i>must</i> see it. Blue! His very
+color!" Holding it up: "From you, Frank?" He nods. "Clarence!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>
+<i>Watkins</i>: "If Fountain tries to kiss me, I'll&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I wouldn't kiss you for a dozen bath-gowns." Lifting it
+up from the floor where Mrs. Fountain has dropped it: "It <i>is</i> rather
+nice."</p>
+
+<p><i>Watkins</i>: "Don't overwhelm me."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, dancing about with a long, soft roll in her hand: "Oh,
+oh, oh! She saw me gloating on it at Shumaker's! I do wonder if it
+<i>is</i>."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, reaching for it: "Why, open it&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "You dare! No, it shall be opened the very last thing
+in the morning, now, to punish you! How is poor Sue? I saw her
+literally dropping by the way at Shumaker's."</p>
+
+<p><i>Watkins</i>, making for the door: "Well, she must have got up again. I
+left her registering a vow that if ever she lived to see another
+Christmas she would leave the country months before the shopping
+began. She called down maledictions on all the recipients of her gifts
+and wished them the worst harm that can befall the wicked."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Poor Sue! She simply lives to do people good, and I
+can understand exactly how she feels toward them. I'll be round bright
+and early to-morrow to thank her. Why do you go?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Watkins</i>: "Well, I can't stay here all night, and I'd better let you
+and Clarence finish up." He escapes from her detaining embrace and
+runs out.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<h4>MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, intent upon her roll: "How funny he is! I wonder if
+he did hear anything but our scolding voices? Where were we?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I had just called you a serpent."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, with amusement: "No, really?" Feeling the parcel: "If
+it's that Spanish lace scarf I can tell her it was machine lace. I saw
+it at the first glance. But poor Sue has no taste. I suppose I must
+stand it. But I can't bear to think what she's given the girls and
+children. She means well. Did you really say serpent, Clarence? You
+never called me just <i>that</i> before."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "No, but you called me a laughing hyena, and said I
+scoffed at everything sacred."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "I can't remember using the word hyena, exactly,
+though I do think the way you talk about Christmas is dreadful. But I
+take back the laughing hyena."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "And I take back the serpent. I meant dove, anyway. But
+it's this Christmas-time when a man gets so tired he doesn't know
+what he's saying."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, <i>you're</i> good, anyway,
+dearest, whatever you say; and now I'm going to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>
+help you arrange the things. I suppose there'll be lots more
+to-morrow, but we must get rid of these now. Don't you wish nobody
+would do anything for us? Just the children&mdash;dear little souls! I
+don't believe but what we can make Jim and Susy believe in Santa Claus
+again; Benny is firm in the faith; he put him into his prayer. I
+declare, his sweetness almost broke my heart." At a knock: "Who's
+that, I wonder? Come in! Oh, it's you, Maggie. Well?"</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<h4>THE FOUNTAINS, FOUNTAIN'S SISTERS</h4>
+
+<p><i>Maggie</i>: "It's Mr. Fountain's sisters just telephoned up."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Have them come up at once, Maggie, of course." As
+Maggie goes out: "Another interruption! If it's going to keep on like
+this! Shouldn't you have thought they might have <i>sent</i> their
+presents?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I thought something like it in Frank's case; but I didn't
+say it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "And I don't know why <i>I</i> say it, now. It's because I'm so
+tired I don't know what I <i>am</i> saying. Do forgive me! It's this terrible Christmas
+spirit that gets into me. But now you'll see how nice I can be to them." At a tap
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>
+on the door: "Come in! Come in! Don't mind our being in all this mess.
+So darling of you to come! You can help cheer Clarence up; you know
+his Christmas Eve dumps." She runs to them and clasps them in her arms
+with several half-open packages dangling from her hands and
+contrasting their disarray with the neatness of their silk-ribboned
+and tissue-papered parcels which their embrace makes meet at her back.
+"Minnie! Aggie! To lug here, when you ought to be at home in bed dying
+of fatigue! But it's just like you, both of you. Did you ever see
+anything like the stores to-day? Do sit down, or swoon on the floor,
+or anything. Let me have those wretched bundles which are simply
+killing you." She looks at the different packages. "'For Benny from
+Grandpa.' 'For a good girl, from Susy's grandmother.' 'Jim, from Aunt
+Minnie and Aunt Aggie.' 'Lucy, with love from Aggie and Minnie.' And
+Clarence! What hearts you <i>have</i> got! Well, I always say there never
+were such thoughtful girls, and you always show such taste and such
+originality. I long to get at the things." She keeps fingering the
+large bundle marked with her husband's name. "Not&mdash;not&mdash;a&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Minnie</i>: "Yes, a bath-robe. Unless you give him a cigar-case it's
+about the only thing you can give a man."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>
+<i>Aggie</i>: "Minnie thought of it and I chose it. Blue, because it's his
+color. Try it on, Clarence, and if it's too long&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Yes, do, dear! Let's see you with it on." While the
+girls are fussily opening the robe, she manages to push her brother's
+gift behind the door. Then, without looking round at her husband. "It
+isn't a bit too long. Just the very&mdash;" Looking: "Well, it can easily
+be taken up at the hem. I can do it to-morrow." She abandons him to
+his awkward isolation while she chatters on with his sisters. "Sit
+down; I insist! Don't think of going. Did you see that frightful pack
+of people when the cab horse fell down in front of Shumaker's?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Minnie</i>: "See it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Aggie</i>: "We were in the midst of it! I wonder we ever got out alive.
+It's enough to make you wish never to see another Christmas as long as
+you live."</p>
+
+<p><i>Minnie</i>: "A great many <i>won't</i> live. There will be more grippe, and
+more pneumonia, and more appendicitis from those jams of people in the
+stores!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Aggie</i>: "The germs must have been swarming."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Lucy was black with them when we got home."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>
+<i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Don't pay the slightest attention to him, girls.
+He'll probably be the first to sneeze himself."</p>
+
+<p><i>Minnie</i>: "I don't know about sneezing. I shall only be too glad if I
+don't have nervous prostration from it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Aggie</i>: "I'm glad we got our motor-car just in time. Any one that
+goes in the trolleys now will take their life in their hand." The
+girls rise and move toward the door. "Well, we must go on now. We're
+making a regular round; you can't trust the delivery wagons at a time
+like this. Good-by. Merry Christmas to the children. They're fast
+asleep by this time, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p><i>Minnie</i>: "I only wish <i>I</i> was!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "I believe you, Minnie. Good-by. Good night. Good
+night, Aggie. Clarence, go to the elevator with them! Or no, he can't
+in that ridiculous bath-gown!" Turning to Fountain as the door closes:
+"Now I've done it."</p>
+
+
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<h4>MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "It isn't a thing you could have wished to phrase that
+way, exactly."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "And you made me do it.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>
+Never thanking them, or anything, and standing there like I don't know
+what, and leaving the talk all to me. And now, making me lose my
+temper again, when I wanted to be so nice to you. Well, it is no use
+trying, and from this on I won't. <i>Clarence!</i>" She has opened the
+parcel addressed to herself and now stands transfixed with joy and
+wonder. "<i>See</i> what the girls have given me! The very necklace I've
+been longing for at Planets', and denying myself for the last
+fortnight! Well, never will I say your sisters are mean again."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "You ought to have said that to them."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "It quite reconciles one to Christmas. What? Oh, that
+<i>was</i> rather nasty. You know I didn't mean it. I was so excited I
+didn't know what I was saying. I'm sure nobody ever got on better with
+sisters-in-law, and that shows my tact; if I do make a slip, now and
+then, I can always get out of it. They will understand. Do you think
+it was very nice of them to flaunt their new motor in my face? But of
+course anything <i>your</i> family does is perfect, and always was, though
+I must say this necklace is sweet of them. I wonder they had the
+taste." A tap on the door is heard. "Come in, Maggie!" <i>Sotto voce.</i>
+"Take it off." She snatches his bath-robe and tosses it behind the door.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span></p>
+<h4>VI</h4>
+
+<h4>WILBUR HAZARD, THE FOUNTAINS</h4>
+
+<p><i>Hazard</i>: "I suppose I can come in, even if I'm not Maggie. Catch,
+Fountain." He tosses a large bundle to Fountain. "It's huge, but it
+isn't hefty." He turns to go out again.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Oh, oh, oh! Don't go! Come in and help us. What have
+you brought Clarence! May I feel?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Hazard</i>: "You can look, if you like. I'm rather proud of it. There's
+only one other thing you can give a man, and I said, 'No, not a
+cigar-case. Fountain smokes enough already, but if a bath-robe can
+induce him to wash&mdash;'" He goes out.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, screaming after him through the open door: "Oh, how
+good! Come back and see it on him." She throws the bath-robe over
+Fountain's shoulders.</p>
+
+<p><i>Hazard</i>, looking in again: "Perfect fit, just as the Jew said, and
+the very color for Fountain." He vanishes, shutting the door behind him.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VII</h4>
+
+<h4>MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "How coarse! Well, my dear, I don't know where you
+picked up your bachelor friends. I hope this is the last of them."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>
+<i>Fountain</i>: "Hazard's the only one who has survived your rigorous
+treatment. But he always had a passion for cold shoulder, poor fellow.
+As bath-robes go, this isn't bad." He gets his arms into it, and walks
+up and down. "Heigh?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Yes, it is pretty good. But the worst of Christmas
+is that it rouses up all your old friends."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "They feel so abnormally good, confound them. I suppose
+poor old Hazard half killed himself looking this thing up and building
+the joke to go with it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, take it off, now, and come help me with the
+children's presents. You're quite forgetting about them, and it'll be
+morning and you'll have the little wretches swarming in before you can
+turn round. Dear little souls! I can sympathize with their impatience,
+of course. But what are you going to do with these bath-robes? You
+can't wear <i>four</i> bath-robes."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I can change them every day. But there ought to be seven.
+This hood is rather a new wrinkle, though, isn't it? I suppose it's
+for a voyage, and you pull it up over your head when you come through
+the corridor back to your stateroom. We shall have to go to Europe,
+Lucy."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "I would go to Asia, Africa,
+and Oceanica, to escape another Christmas.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span>
+Now if there are any more bath-robes&mdash; Come in, Maggie."</p>
+
+
+<h4>VIII</h4>
+
+<h4>MAGGIE, THE FOUNTAINS</h4>
+
+<p><i>Maggie</i>, bringing in a bundle: "Something a District Messenger
+brought. Will you sign for it, ma'am?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "You sign, Clarence. If I know anything about the
+look and the feel of a bundle, this <i>is</i> another bath-robe, but I
+shall soon see." While she is cutting the string and tearing the
+wrappings away, Fountain signs and Maggie goes. Mrs. Fountain shakes
+out the folds of the robe. "Well, upon my word, I should think there
+was conspiracy to insult you, Clarence. I should like to know who has
+had the effrontery&mdash; What's on it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, reading from the card which had fallen out of the garment
+to the floor: "'With Christmas greetings from Mrs. Arthur J. Gibby.'"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, dropping the robe and seizing the card: "<i>Mrs.</i>
+Arthur J. Gibby! Well, upon my word, this <i>is</i> impudence. It's not
+only impudence, it's indelicacy. And I had always thought she was the
+very embodiment of refinement, and I've gone about saying so. Now I shall
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>
+have to take it back. The idea of a lady sending a bath-robe to
+a gentleman! What next, I wonder! What right has Mrs. Gibby to send
+you a bath-robe? Don't prevaricate! Remember that the truth is the
+only thing that can save you. Matters must have gone pretty far, when
+a woman could send you anything so&mdash;intimate. What are you staring at
+with that paper? You needn't hope to divert my mind by&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, giving her the paper in which the robe came: "Seems to be
+for <i>Mrs.</i> Clarence Fountain."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, snatching it from him: "What! It is, it is! Oh, poor
+dear Lilly! How can you ever forgive me? She saw me looking at it
+to-day at Shumaker's, and it must have come into her head in despair
+what else to get me. But it was a perfect inspiration&mdash;for it was just
+what I was longing for. Why"&mdash;laughing hysterically while she holds up
+the robe, and turns it this way and that&mdash;"I might have seen at a
+glance that it wasn't a man's, with this lace on and this silk hood,
+and"&mdash;she hurries into it, and pulls it forward, looking down at
+either side&mdash;"it's just the right length, and if it was made for me it
+couldn't fit me better. What a joke I <i>shall</i> have with Lilly, when I
+tell her about it. I sha'n't spare myself a bit!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Then I hope you'll spare me. I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>
+have some little delicacy of feeling, and I don't like the notion of a
+lady's giving me a bath-robe. It's&mdash;intimate. I don't know where
+you picked up your girl friends."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, capering about joyfully: "Oh, how funny you are,
+darling! But go on. I don't mind it, now. And you may be glad you've
+got off so easily. Only now if there are any more bath-robes&mdash;" A
+timid rap is heard at the door. "Come in, Maggie!" The door is slowly
+set ajar, then flung suddenly wide open, and Jim and Susy in their
+night-gowns rush dancing and exulting in.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IX</h4>
+
+<h4>JIM, SUSY, THE FOUNTAINS</h4>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "We've caught you, we've caught you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>: "I just bet it was you, and now I've won, haven't I, mother?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "And I've won, too, haven't I, father?" Arrested at sight of
+her father in the hooded bath-gown: "He does look like Santa Claus,
+doesn't he, Jimmy? But the real Santa Claus would be all over snow,
+and a long, white beard. You can't fool <i>us</i>!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>: "You can't fool <i>us</i>! We know you, we know you! And mother
+dressed up, too! There isn't any Mrs. Santa Claus, and that proves
+it!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>
+<i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, severely: "Dreadful little things! Who said you might
+come here? Go straight back to bed, this minute, or&mdash; <i>Will</i> you send
+them back, Clarence, and not stand staring so? What are you thinking of?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, dreamily: "Nothing. Merely wondering what we shall do when
+we've got rid of our superstitions. Shall we be the better for it, or
+even the wiser?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "What put that question into your head? Christmas, I
+suppose; and that's another reason for wishing there was no such
+thing. If I had my way, there wouldn't be."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>: "Oh, mother!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "No Christmas?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, not for disobedient children who get out of
+bed and come in, spoiling everything. If you don't go straight back,
+it will be the last time, Santa Claus or no Santa Claus."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>: "And if we go right back?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "And promise not to come in any more?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, we'll see how you keep your promise. If you
+don't, that's the end of Christmas in <i>this</i> house."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>: "It's a bargain, then! Come on, Susy!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "And we do it for you, mother. And for you, father. We just
+came in for fun, anyway."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>: "We just came for a surprise."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>
+<i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, kissing them both: "Well, then, if it was only for
+fun, we'll excuse you this time. Run along, now, that's good children.
+<i>Clarence!</i>"</p>
+
+
+<h4>X</h4>
+
+<h4>MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Well?" He looks up at her from where he has dropped into
+a chair beside the table strewn with opened and unopened gifts at the
+foot of the Christmas tree.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "What <i>are</i> you mooning about?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "What if it was all a fake? Those thousands and hundreds
+of thousands of churches that pierce the clouds with their spires;
+those millions of ministers and missionaries; those billions of
+worshipers, sitting and standing and kneeling, and singing and
+praying; those nuns and monks, and brotherhoods and sisterhoods, with
+their ideals of self-denial, and their duties to the sick and poor;
+those martyrs that died for the one true faith, and those other
+martyrs of the other true faiths whom the one true faith tortured and
+killed; those masses and sermons and ceremonies, what if they were all
+a delusion, a mistake, a misunderstanding? What if it were all as
+unlike the real thing, if there is any real thing,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>
+as this pagan Christmas of ours is as unlike a Christian Christmas?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, springing up: "I knew it! I knew that it was this
+Christmas giving that was making you morbid again. Can't you shake it
+off and be cheerful&mdash;like me? I'm sure I have to bear twice as much of
+it as you have. I've been shopping the whole week, and you've been
+just this one afternoon." She begins to catch her breath, and fails in
+searching for her handkerchief in the folds of her dress under the
+bath-robe.</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, offering his handkerchief: "Take mine."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, catching it from him, and hiding her face in it on
+the table: "You ought to help me bear up, and instead of that you
+fling yourself on my sympathies and break me down." Lifting her face:
+"And if it was all a fake, as you say, and an illusion, what would you
+do, what would you give people in place of it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I don't know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "What would you have in place of Christmas itself?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I don't know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, then, I wouldn't set myself up to preach down
+everything&mdash;in a blue bath-gown. You've no idea how ridiculous you
+are."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span>
+<i>Fountain</i>: "Oh, yes, I have. I can see you. You look like one of
+those blue nuns in Rome. But I don't remember any lace on them."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, you don't look like a blue monk, you needn't
+flatter yourself, for there are none. You look like&mdash; What are you
+thinking about?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Oh, nothing. What do you suppose is in all these packages
+here? Useful things, that we need, that we must have? You know without
+looking that it's the superfluity of naughtiness in one form or other.
+And the givers of these gifts, they <i>had</i> to give them, just as we've
+had to give dozens of gifts ourselves. We ought to have put on our
+cards, 'With the season's bitterest grudges,' 'In hopes of a return,'
+'With a hopeless sense of the folly,' 'To pay a hateful debt,' 'With
+impotent rage and despair.'"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "I don't deny it, Clarence. You're perfectly right; I
+almost wish we <i>had</i> put it. How it would have made them hop! But
+they'd have known it was just the way they felt themselves."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, going on thoughtfully: "It's the cap-sheaf
+of the social barbarism we live in, the hideous hypocrisy. It's
+no use to put it on religion. The Jews keep Christmas, too, and
+we know what they think of Christianity as a belief. No, we've got
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>
+to go further back, to the Pagan Saturnalia&mdash; Well, I renounce the
+whole affair, here and now. I'm going to spend the rest of the night
+bundling these things up, and to-morrow I'm going to spend the day in
+a taxi, going round and giving them back to the fools that sent them."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "And I'm going with you. I hate it as much as you
+do&mdash; Come in, Maggie!"</p>
+
+
+<h4>XI</h4>
+
+<h4>MAGGIE, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Maggie</i>: "Something the elevator-boy says he forgot. It came along
+with the last one."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, taking a bundle from her: "If this is another
+bath-robe, Clarence! It <i>is</i>, as I live. Now if it is a woman sending
+it&mdash;" She picks up a card which falls out of the robe as she unfolds
+it. "'Love the Giver,' indeed! Now, Clarence, I insist, I demand&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Hold on, hold on, my dear. The last bath-robe that came
+from a woman was for <i>you</i>."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "So it was. I don't know what I was thinking about;
+and I do beg your par&mdash; But this is a man's bath-robe!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, taking the card which she mechanically
+stretches out to him: "And a man sends it&mdash;old
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span>
+Fellows. Can't you read print? Ambrose J. Fellows, and a message in
+writing: 'It was a toss-up between this and a cigar-case, and the
+bath-robe won. Hope you haven't got any other thoughtful friends.'"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Oh, very brilliant, giving me a start like this! I
+shall let Mr. Fellows know&mdash; What is it, Maggie? Open the door,
+please."</p>
+
+<p><i>Maggie</i>, opening: "It's just a District Messenger."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, ironically: "Oh, only a District Messenger." He signs the
+messenger's slip, while his wife receives from Maggie a bundle which
+she regards with suspicion.</p>
+
+
+<h4>XII</h4>
+
+<h4>MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "'From Uncle Philip for Clarence.' Well, Uncle
+Philip, if you have sent Clarence&mdash; <i>Clarence!</i>" breaking into
+a whimper: "It is, it is! It's another."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Well, that only makes the seventh, and just enough for
+every day in the week. It's quite my ideal. Now, if there's nothing about
+a cigar-case&mdash; Hello!" He feels in the pocket of the robe and brings out
+a cigar-case, from which a slip of paper falls: "'Couldn't make up my mind
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>
+between them, so send both. Uncle Phil.' Well, this is the last stroke
+of Christmas insanity."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "His brain simply reeled under it, and gave way. It
+shows what Christmas really comes to with a man of strong intellect
+like Uncle Phil."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, opening the case: "Oh, I don't know! He's put some cigars
+in here&mdash;in a lucid interval, probably. There's hope yet."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, in despair: "No, Clarence, there's no hope. Don't
+flatter yourself. The only way is to bundle back all their presents
+and never, never, never give or receive another one. Come! Let's begin
+tying them up at once; it will take us the rest of the night." A knock
+at the door. "Come, Maggie."</p>
+
+
+<h4>XIII</h4>
+
+<h4>JIM AND SUSY, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Jim and Susy</i>, pushing in: "We can't sleep, mother. May we have a
+pillow fight to keep us amused till we're drowsy?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, desolately: "Yes, go and have your pillow fight. It
+doesn't matter now. We're sending the presents all back, anyway." She
+begins frantically wrapping some of the things up.</p>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "Oh, father, are you sending them back?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span>
+<i>Jim</i>: "She's just making believe. Isn't she, father?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Well, I'm not so sure of that. If she doesn't do it, I
+will."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, desisting: "Will you go right back to bed?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim and Susy</i>: "Yes, we will."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "And to sleep, instantly?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim and Susy</i>, in succession: "We won't keep awake a minute longer."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Very well, then, we'll see. Now be off with you." As
+they put their heads together and go out laughing: "And remember, if
+you come here another single time, back go every one of the presents."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "As soon as ever Santa Claus can find a moment for it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>, derisively: "Oh, yes, Santa Claus!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "I guess if you wait for Santa Claus to take them back!"</p>
+
+
+<h4>XIV</h4>
+
+<h4>MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Tiresome little wretches. Of course we can't expect
+them to keep up the self-deception."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "They'll grow to another. When they're men and women they'll pretend that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>
+Christmas is delightful, and go round giving people the presents that
+they've worn their lives out in buying and getting together. And
+they'll work themselves up into the notion that they are really
+enjoying it, when they know at the bottom of their souls that they
+loathe the whole job."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "There you are with your pessimism again! And I had
+just begun to feel cheerful about it!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Since when? Since I proposed sending this rubbish back to
+the givers with our curse?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "No, I was thinking what fun it would be if we could
+get up a sort of Christmas game, and do it just among relations and
+intimate friends."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Ah, I wish you luck of it. Then the thing would begin to
+have some reality, and just as in proportion as people had the worst
+feelings in giving the presents, their best feeling would be hurt in
+getting them back."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Then why did you ever think of it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "To keep from going mad. Come, let's go on with this job
+of sorting the presents, and putting them in the stockings and hanging
+them up on the tree and laying them round the trunk of it. One thing: it's
+for the last time. As soon as Christmas week is over, I shall inaugurate
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>
+an educational campaign against the whole Christmas
+superstition. It must be extirpated root and branch, and the
+extirpation must begin in the minds of the children; we old fools are
+hopeless; we must die in it; but the children can be saved. We must
+organize and make a house-to-house fight; and I'll begin in our own
+house. To-morrow, as soon as the children have made themselves
+thoroughly sick with candy and cake and midday dinner, I will appeal
+to their reason, and get them to agree to drop it; to sign the
+Anti-Christmas pledge; to&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Clarence! I have an idea."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Not a <i>bright</i> one?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Yes, a bright one, even if you didn't originate it.
+Have Christmas confined entirely to children&mdash;to the very youngest&mdash;to
+children that believe firmly in Santa Claus."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Oh, hello! Wouldn't that leave Jim and Susy out? I
+couldn't have <i>them</i> left out."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "That's true. I didn't think of that. Well, say, to
+children that either believe or <i>pretend</i> to believe in him. What's <i>that</i>?"
+She stops at a faint, soft sound on the door. "It's Maggie with her hands so full
+she's pushing with her elbow. Come in, Maggie, come in. <i>Come</i>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>
+in! Don't you hear me? Come in, I say! Oh, it isn't Maggie, of
+course! It's those worthless, worthless little wretches, again."
+She runs to the door calling out, "Naughty, naughty, naughty!"
+as she runs. Then, flinging the door wide, with a final cry of
+"<i>Naughty</i>, I say!" she discovers a small figure on the threshold,
+nightgowned to its feet, and looking up with a frightened, wistful
+face. "Why, Benny!" She stoops down and catches the child in her arms,
+and presses him tight to her neck, and bends over, covering his head
+with kisses. "What in the world are you doing here, you poor little
+lamb? Is mother's darling walking in his sleep? What did you want, my
+pet? Tell mudda, do! Whisper it in mudda's big ear! Can't you tell
+mudda? What? Whisper a little louder, love! We're not angry with you,
+sweetness. Now, try to speak louder. Is that Santa Claus? No, dearest,
+that's just dadda. Santa Claus hasn't come yet, but he will soon.
+What? Say it again. <i>Is</i> there any Santa Claus? Why, who else could
+have brought all these presents? Presents for Benny and Jim and Susy
+and mudda, and seven bath-gowns for dadda. Isn't that funny? Seven! And
+one for mudda. What? I can't quite hear you, pet. Are we going to send
+the presents back? Why, who ever heard of such a thing? Jim said so? And Susy?
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span>
+Well, I will settle with them, when I come to them. You
+don't want me to? Well, I won't, then, if Benny doesn't want mudda to.
+I'll just give them a kiss apiece, pop in their big ears. What? You've
+got something for Santa Claus to give them? What? Where? In your crib?
+And shall we go and get it? For mudda too? And dadda? Oh, my little
+angel!" She begins to cry over him, and to kiss him again. "You'll
+break my heart with your loveliness. He wants to kiss you too, dadda."
+She puts the boy into his father's arms; then catches him back and
+runs from the room with him. Fountain resumes the work of filling the
+long stocking he had begun with; then he takes up a very short sock.
+He has that in his hand when Mrs. Fountain comes back, wiping her
+eyes. "He'll go to sleep now, I guess; he was half dreaming when he
+came in here. I should think, when you saw how Benny believed in it,
+you'd be ashamed of saying a word against Christmas."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Who's said anything against it? I've just been arguing
+for it, and trying to convince you that for the sake of little
+children like Benny it ought to be perpetuated to the end of the
+world. It began with the childhood of the race, in the rejuvenescence
+of the spirit."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Didn't you say that Christmas
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span>
+began with the pagans? How monstrously you prevaricate!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "That was merely a figure of speech. And besides, since
+you've been out with Benny, I've been thinking, and I take back
+everything I've said or thought against Christmas; I didn't really
+think it. I've been going back in my mind to that first Christmas we
+had together, and it's cheered me up wonderfully."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, tenderly: "Have you, dearest? I <i>always</i> think of it.
+If you could have seen Benny, how I left him, just now?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I shouldn't mind seeing him, and I shouldn't care if I
+gave a glance at poor old Jim and Susy. I'd like to reassure them
+about not sending back the presents." He puts his arm round her and
+presses her toward the door.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "How sweet you are! And how funny! And good!" She
+accentuates each sentiment with a kiss. "And don't you suppose I felt
+sorry for you, making you go round with me the whole afternoon, and
+then leaving you to take the brunt of arranging the presents? Now I'll
+tell you: <i>next</i> year, I <i>will</i> do my Christmas shopping in July. It's
+the only way."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "No, there's a better way. As you were saying, they don't
+have the Christmas things out. The only way is to do our Christmas shopping
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span>
+the day after Christmas; everything will be round still, and dog-cheap.
+Come, we'll begin day after to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "We will, we will!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Do you think we will?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, we'll <i>say</i> we will." They laugh together, and
+then he kisses her.</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Even if it goes on in the same old way, as long as we
+have each other&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "And the children."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I forgot the children!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Oh, how delightful you are!"</p>
+
+
+<p style='text-align:center;'><b>THE END</b></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><span class="smcap">Books by</span> W. D. HOWELLS</h2>
+
+<div class="books">
+<p>Annie Kilburn. 12mo.<br />
+April Hopes. 12mo.<br />
+Between the Dark and Daylight. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Boy Life. Illustrated. 12mo.<br />
+Boy's Town. Illustrated. Post 8vo.<br />
+Certain Delightful English Towns. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Traveller's Edition, Leather.</span><br />
+Christmas Every Day, and Other Stories. Illustrated. 12mo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Holiday Edition. Illustrated. 4to.</span><br />
+Coast of Bohemia. Illustrated. 12mo.<br />
+Criticism and Fiction. Portrait. 16mo.<br />
+Day of Their Wedding. Illustrated. 12mo.<br />
+Familiar Spanish Travels. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+Fennel and Rue. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Flight of Pony Baker. Post 8vo.<br />
+Hazard of New Fortunes. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Heroines of Fiction. Illustrated. 2 vols. 8vo.<br />
+Imaginary Interviews. 8vo.<br />
+Imperative Duty. 12mo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Paper.</span><br />
+Impressions and Experiences. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Kentons. 12mo.<br />
+Landlord at Lion's Head. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Letters Home. 12mo.<br />
+Library of Universal Adventure. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Three-quarter Calf.</span><br />
+Literary Friends and Acquaintance. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+Literature and Life. 8vo.<br />
+Little Swiss Sojourn. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+London Films. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Traveller's Edition, Leather.</span><br />
+Miss Bellard's Inspiration. 12mo.<br />
+Modern Italian Poets. Illustrated. 12mo.<br />
+Mother and the Father. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Mouse-Trap, A Likely Story, The Garroters, Five-o'Clock Tea.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.</span><br />
+My Literary Passions. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+My Mark Twain. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+My Year in a Log Cabin. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+Open-Eyed Conspiracy. 12mo.<br />
+Pair of Patient Lovers. 12mo.<br />
+Parting and a Meeting. Illustrated. Square 32mo.<br />
+Quality of Mercy. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Questionable Shapes. Ill'd. 12mo.<br />
+Ragged Lady. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Roman Holidays. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Traveller's Edition, Leather.</span><br />
+Seven English Cities. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Traveller's Edition, Leather.</span><br />
+Shadow of a Dream. 12mo.<br />
+Son of Royal Langbrith. 8vo.<br />
+Stops of Various Quills. Illustrated. 4to.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Limited Edition.</span><br />
+Story of a Play. 12mo.<br />
+The Daughter of the Storage. 8vo.<br />
+The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon. Crown 8vo.<br />
+Their Silver Wedding Journey. Illustrated. 2 vols. Crown 8vo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">In 1 vol. New Edition. 12mo.</span><br />
+Through the Eye of a Needle. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Traveller from Altruria. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+World of Chance. 12mo.<br />
+Years of My Youth. Crown 8vo.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p style='text-align:center;'><b>FARCES:</b></p>
+
+<div class="books">
+<p>A Letter of Introduction. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+A Likely Story. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+A Previous Engagement. 32mo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Paper.</span><br />
+Evening Dress. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+Five-o'Clock Tea. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+Parting Friends. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+The Albany Depot. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+The Garroters. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+The Mouse-Trap. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+The Unexpected Guests. Illustrated. 32mo.</p>
+</div>
+
+<h3>HARPER &amp; BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK</h3>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30023 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #30023 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30023)
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+Project Gutenberg's The Daughter of the Storage, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Daughter of the Storage
+       And Other Things in Prose and Verse
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: September 18, 2009 [EBook #30023]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Ritu Aggarwal and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from scans of public domain material
+produced by Microsoft for their Live Search Books site.)
+
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:--
+
+1. Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
+
+2. Printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation,
+   and ligature usage have been retained except the following:
+     Pg. 117, Ch. VII: Changed comma to period in (relation to life,)
+     Pg. 255, Ch. XVI: Removed ending quote in (the highest sense.")
+
+
+
+
+                      THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
+
+                         WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+
+
+
+
+                             THE DAUGHTER
+                            OF THE STORAGE
+
+                           AND OTHER THINGS
+                          IN PROSE AND VERSE
+
+                            W. D. HOWELLS
+
+
+                     HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+                         NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+             Copyright, 1915, 1916, by Harper & Brothers
+               Printed in the United States of America
+                        Published April, 1916
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+                                                        PAGE
+              I. THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE               3
+             II. A PRESENTIMENT                           45
+            III. CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP              67
+             IV. THE RETURN TO FAVOR                      81
+              V. SOMEBODY'S MOTHER                        93
+             VI. THE FACE AT THE WINDOW                  107
+            VII. AN EXPERIENCE                           117
+           VIII. THE BOARDERS                            127
+             IX. BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL               141
+              X. THE MOTHER-BIRD                         151
+             XI. THE AMIGO                               161
+            XII. BLACK CROSS FARM                        173
+           XIII. THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE                  185
+            XIV. A FEAST OF REASON                       227
+             XV. CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL            243
+            XVI. TABLE TALK                              253
+           XVII. THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER           269
+          XVIII. SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY         285
+            XIX. THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS              319
+
+
+
+
+                     THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
+
+
+                                  I
+
+They were getting some of their things out to send into the country,
+and Forsyth had left his work to help his wife look them over and
+decide which to take and which to leave. The things were mostly trunks
+that they had stored the fall before; there were some tables and
+Colonial bureaus inherited from his mother, and some mirrors and
+decorative odds and ends, which they would not want in the furnished
+house they had taken for the summer. There were some canvases which
+Forsyth said he would paint out and use for other subjects, but which,
+when he came to look at again, he found really not so bad. The rest,
+literally, was nothing but trunks; there were, of course, two or three
+boxes of books. When they had been packed closely into the five-dollar
+room, with the tables and bureaus and mirrors and canvases and
+decorative odds and ends put carefully on top, the Forsyths thought
+the effect very neat, and laughed at themselves for being proud of it.
+
+They spent the winter in Paris planning for the summer in America, and
+now it had come May, a month which in New York is at its best, and in
+the Constitutional Storage Safe-Deposit Warehouse is by no means at
+its worst. The Constitutional Storage is no longer new, but when the
+Forsyths were among the first to store there it was up to the latest
+moment in the modern perfections of a safe-deposit warehouse. It was
+strictly fire-proof; and its long, white, brick-walled, iron-doored
+corridors, with their clean concrete floors, branching from a central
+avenue to the tall windows north and south, offered perspectives
+sculpturesquely bare, or picturesquely heaped with arriving or
+departing household stuff.
+
+When the Forsyths went to look at it a nice young fellow from the
+office had gone with them; running ahead and switching on rows of
+electrics down the corridors, and then, with a wire-basketed electric
+lamp, which he twirled about and held aloft and alow, showing the
+dustless, sweet-smelling spaciousness of a perfect five-dollar room.
+He said it would more than hold their things; and it really held them.
+
+Now, when the same young fellow unlocked the iron door and set it
+wide, he said he would get them a man, and he got Mrs. Forsyth a gilt
+armchair from some furniture going into an adjoining twenty-dollar
+room. She sat down in it, and "Of course," she said, "the pieces I
+want will be at the very back and the very bottom. Why don't you get
+yourself a chair, too, Ambrose? What are you looking at?"
+
+With his eyes on the neighboring furniture he answered, "Seems to be
+the wreck of a millionaire's happy home; parlor and kitchen utensils
+and office furniture all in white and gold."
+
+"Horrors, yes!" Mrs. Forsyth said, without turning her head from
+studying her trunks, as if she might divine their contents from their
+outside.
+
+"Tata and I," her husband said, "are more interested in the
+millionaire's things." Tata, it appeared, was not a dog, but a child;
+the name was not the diminutive of her own name, which was Charlotte,
+but a generic name for a doll, which Tata had learned from her Italian
+nurse to apply to all little girls and had got applied to herself by
+her father. She was now at a distance down the corridor, playing a
+drama with the pieces of millionaire furniture; as they stretched away
+in variety and splendor they naturally suggested personages of
+princely quality, and being touched with her little forefinger tip
+were capable of entering warmly into Tata's plans for them.
+
+Her mother looked over her shoulder toward the child. "Come here,
+Tata," she called, and when Tata, having enjoined some tall mirrors to
+secrecy with a frown and a shake of the head, ran to her, Mrs. Forsyth
+had forgotten why she had called her. "Oh!" she said, recollecting,
+"do you know which your trunk is, Tata? Can you show mamma? Can you
+put your hand on it?"
+
+The child promptly put her hand on the end of a small box just within
+her tiptoe reach, and her mother said, "I do believe she knows
+everything that's in it, Ambrose! That trunk has got to be opened the
+very first one!"
+
+The man that the young fellow said he would send showed at the far end
+of the corridor, smaller than human, but enlarging himself to the
+average Irish bulk as he drew near. He was given instructions and
+obeyed with caressing irony Mrs. Forsyth's order to pull out Tata's
+trunk first, and she found the key in a large tangle of keys, and
+opened it, and had the joy of seeing everything recognized by the
+owner: doll by doll, cook-stove, tin dishes, small brooms, wooden
+animals on feet and wheels, birds of various plumage, a toy piano, a
+dust-pan, alphabet blocks, dog's-eared linen Mother Goose books, and
+the rest. Tata had been allowed to put the things away herself, and
+she took them out with no apparent sense of the time passed since she
+saw them last. In the changing life of her parents all times and
+places were alike to her. She began to play with the things in the
+storage corridor as if it were yesterday when she saw them last in the
+flat. Her mother and father left her to them in the distraction of
+their own trunks. Mrs. Forsyth had these spread over the space toward
+the window and their lids lifted and tried to decide about them. In
+the end she had changed the things in them back and forth till she
+candidly owned that she no longer knew where anything at all was.
+
+As she raised herself for a moment's respite from the problem she saw
+at the far end of the corridor a lady with two men, who increased in
+size like her own man as they approached. The lady herself seemed to
+decrease, though she remained of a magnificence to match the
+furniture, and looked like it as to her dress of white picked out in
+gold when she arrived at the twenty-dollar room next the Forsyths'. In
+her advance she had been vividly played round by a little boy, who ran
+forward and back and easily doubled the length of the corridor before
+he came to a stand and remained with his brown eyes fixed on Tata.
+Tata herself had blue eyes, which now hovered dreamily above the
+things in her trunk.
+
+The two mothers began politely to ignore each other. She of the
+twenty-dollar room directed the men who had come with her, and in a
+voice of authority and appeal at once commanded and consulted them in
+the disposition of her belongings. At the sound of the mixed tones
+Mrs. Forsyth signaled to her husband, and, when he came within
+whispering, murmured: "Pittsburg, _or_ Chicago. Did you _ever_ hear
+such a Mid-Western accent!" She pretended to be asking him about
+repacking the trunk before her, but the other woman was not deceived.
+She was at least aware of criticism in the air of her neighbors, and
+she put on greater severity with the workmen. The boy came up and
+caught her skirt. "What?" she said, bending over. "No, certainly not.
+I haven't time to attend to you. Go off and play. Don't I tell you no?
+Well, there, then! Will you get that trunk out where I can open it?
+That small one there," she said to one of the men, while the other
+rested for both. She stooped to unlock the trunk and flung up the lid.
+"Now if you bother me any more I will surely--" But she lost herself
+short of the threat and began again to seek counsel and issue orders.
+
+The boy fell upon the things in the trunk, which were the things of a
+boy, as those in Tata's trunk were the things of a girl, and to run
+with them, one after another, to Tata and to pile them in gift on the
+floor beside her trunk. He did not stop running back and forth as fast
+as his short, fat legs could carry him till he had reached the bottom
+of his box, chattering constantly and taking no note of the effect
+with Tata. Then, as she made no response whatever to his munificence,
+he began to be abashed and to look pathetically from her to her
+father.
+
+"Oh, really, young man," Forsyth said, "we can't let you impoverish
+yourself at this rate. What have you said to your benefactor, Tata?
+What are you going to give _him_?"
+
+The children did not understand his large words, but they knew he was
+affectionately mocking them.
+
+"Ambrose," Mrs. Forsyth said, "you mustn't let him."
+
+"I'm trying to think how to hinder him, but it's rather late," Forsyth
+answered, and then the boy's mother joined in.
+
+"Indeed, indeed, if you can, it's more than I can. You're just
+worrying the little girl," she said to the boy.
+
+"Oh no, he isn't, dear little soul," Mrs. Forsyth said, leaving her
+chair and going up to the two children. She took the boy's hand in
+hers. "What a kind boy! But you know my little girl mustn't take all
+your playthings. If you'll give her _one_ she'll give _you_ one, and
+that will be enough. You can both play with them all for the present."
+She referred her suggestion to the boy's mother, and the two ladies
+met at the invisible line dividing the five-dollar room from the
+twenty-dollar room.
+
+"Oh yes, indeed," the Mid-Westerner said, willing to meet the
+New-Yorker half-way. "You're taking things out, I see. I hardly know
+which is the worst: taking out or putting in."
+
+"Well, we are just completing the experience," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I
+shall be able to say better how I feel in half an hour."
+
+"You don't mean this is the first time you've stored? I suppose
+_we've_ been in and out of storage twenty times. Not in this warehouse
+exactly; we've never been here before."
+
+"It seems very nice," Mrs. Forsyth suggested.
+
+"They all do at the beginning. I suppose if we ever came to the end
+they would seem nicer still. Mr. Bream's business is always taking him
+away" (it appeared almost instantly that he was the international
+inspector of a great insurance company's agencies in Europe and South
+America), "and when I don't go with him it seems easier to break up
+and go into a hotel than to go on housekeeping. I don't know that it
+is, though," she questioned. "It's so hard to know what to do with the
+child in a hotel."
+
+"Yes, but he seems the sort that you could manage with anywhere," Mrs.
+Forsyth agreed and disagreed.
+
+His mother looked at him where he stood beaming upon Tata and again
+joyfully awaiting some effect with her. But the child sat back upon
+her small heels with her eyes fixed on the things in her trunk and
+made no sign of having seen the heaps of his gifts.
+
+The Forsyths had said to each other before this that their little girl
+was a queer child, and now they were not so much ashamed of her
+apparent selfishness or rude indifference as they thought they were.
+They made a joke of it with the boy's mother, who said she did not
+believe Tata was anything but shy. She said she often told Mr. Bream
+that she did wish Peter--yes, that was his name; she didn't like it
+much, but it was his grandfather's; was Tata a Christian name? Oh,
+just a pet name! Well, it _was_ pretty--could be broken of _his_
+ridiculous habit; most children--little boys, that was--held onto
+their things so.
+
+Forsyth would have taken something from Tata and given it to Peter;
+but his wife would not let him; and he had to content himself with
+giving Peter a pencil of his own that drew red at one end and blue at
+the other, and that at once drew a blue boy, that looked like Peter,
+on the pavement. He told Peter not to draw a boy now, but wait till he
+got home, and then be careful not to draw a blue boy with the red end.
+He helped him put his things back into his trunk, and Peter seemed to
+enjoy that, too.
+
+Tata, without rising from her seat on her heels, watched the
+restitution with her dreamy eyes; she paid no attention to the blue
+boy on the pavement; pictures from her father were nothing new to her.
+The mothers parted with expressions of mutual esteem in spite of their
+difference of accent and fortune. Mrs. Forsyth asked if she might not
+kiss Peter, and did so; he ran to his mother and whispered to her;
+then he ran back and gave Tata so great a hug that she fell over from
+it.
+
+Tata did not cry, but continued as if lost in thought which she could
+not break from, and that night, after she had said her prayers with
+her mother, her mother thought it was time to ask her: "Tata, dear,
+why did you act so to that boy to-day? Why didn't you give him
+something of yours when he brought you all his things? Why did you act
+so oddly?"
+
+Tata said something in a voice so low that her mother could not make
+it out.
+
+"What did you say?"
+
+"I couldn't tell which," the child still whispered; but now her
+mother's ear was at her lips.
+
+"How, which?"
+
+"To give him. The more I looked," and the whisper became a quivering
+breath, "the more I couldn't tell which. And I wanted to give them
+_all_ to him, but I couldn't tell whether it would be right, because
+you and papa gave them to me for birthday and Christmas," and the
+quivering breath broke into a sobbing grief, so that the mother had to
+catch the child up to her heart.
+
+"Dear little tender conscience!" she said, still wiping her eyes when
+she told the child's father, and they fell into a sweet, serious talk
+about her before they slept. "And I was ashamed of her before that
+woman! I know she misjudged her; but _we_ ought to have remembered how
+fine and precious she is, and _known_ how she must have suffered,
+trying to decide."
+
+"Yes, conscience," the father said. "And temperament, the temperament
+to which decision is martyrdom."
+
+"And she will always have to be deciding! She'll have to decide for
+you, some day, as I do now; you are very undecided, Ambrose--she gets
+it from you."
+
+
+                                  II
+
+The Forsyths were afraid that Tata might want to offer Peter some gift
+in reparation the next morning, and her father was quite ready, if she
+said so, to put off their leaving town, and go with her to the
+Constitutional Storage, which was the only address of Mrs. Bream that
+he knew. But the child had either forgotten or she was contented with
+her mother's comforting, and no longer felt remorse.
+
+One does not store the least of one's personal or household gear
+without giving a hostage to storage, a pledge of allegiance impossible
+to break. No matter how few things one puts in, one never takes
+everything out; one puts more things in. Mrs. Forsyth went to the
+warehouse with Tata in the fall before they sailed for another winter
+in Paris, and added some old bits she had picked up at farm-houses in
+their country drives, and they filled the room quite to the top. She
+told her husband how Tata had entered into the spirit of putting back
+her trunk of playthings with the hope of seeing it again in the
+spring; and she added that she had now had to take a seven-fifty room
+without consulting him, or else throw away the things they had brought
+home.
+
+During the ten or twelve years that followed, the Forsyths sometimes
+spent a whole winter in a hotel; sometimes they had a flat; sometimes
+they had a separate dwelling. If their housing was ample, they took
+almost everything out of storage; once they got down to a two-dollar
+bin, and it seemed as if they really were leaving the storage
+altogether. Then, if they went into a flat that was nearly all studio,
+their furniture went back in a cataclysmal wave to the warehouse,
+where a ten-dollar room, a twelve-dollar room, would not dam the
+overflow.
+
+Tata, who had now outgrown her pet name, and was called Charlotte
+because her mother felt she ought to be, always went with her to the
+storage to help look the things over, to see the rooms emptied down to
+a few boxes, or replenished to bursting. In the first years she played
+about, close to her mother; as she grew older she ventured further,
+and began to make friends with other little girls who had come with
+their mothers. It was quite safe socially to be in the Constitutional
+Storage; it gave standing; and Mrs. Forsyth fearlessly chanced
+acquaintance with these mothers, who would sometimes be there whole
+long mornings or afternoons, taking trunks out or putting them in.
+With the trunks set into the corridors and opened for them, they would
+spend the hours looking the contents over, talking to their neighbors,
+or rapt in long silences when they hesitated with things held off or
+up, and, after gazing absently at them, putting them back again.
+Sometimes they varied the process by laying things aside for sending
+home, and receipting for them at the office as "goods selected."
+
+They were mostly hotel people or apartment people, as Mrs. Forsyth
+oftenest was herself, but sometimes they were separate-house people.
+Among these there was one family, not of great rank or wealth, but
+distinguished, as lifelong New-Yorkers, in a world of comers and goers
+of every origin. Mrs. Forsyth especially liked them for a certain
+quality, but what this quality was she could not very well say. They
+were a mother with two daughters, not quite old maids, but on the way
+to it, and there was very intermittently the apparently bachelor
+brother of the girls; at the office Mrs. Forsyth verified her
+conjecture that he was some sort of minister. One could see they were
+all gentlefolks, though the girls were not of the last cry of fashion.
+They were very nice to their mother, and you could tell that they must
+have been coming with her for years.
+
+At this point in her study of them for her husband's amusement she
+realized that Charlotte had been coming to the storage with her nearly
+all her life, and that more and more the child had taken charge of the
+uneventual inspection of the things. She was shocked to think that she
+had let this happen, and now she commanded her husband to say whether
+Charlotte would grow into a storage old maid like those good girls.
+
+Forsyth said, Probably not before her time; but he allowed it was a
+point to be considered.
+
+Very well, then, Mrs. Forsyth said, the child should never go again;
+that was all. She had strongly confirmed herself in this resolution
+when one day she not only let the child go again, but she let her go
+alone. The child was now between seventeen and eighteen, rather tall,
+grave, pretty, with the dull brown hair that goes so well with
+dreaming blue eyes, and of a stiff grace. She had not come out yet,
+because she had always been out, handing cakes at her father's studio
+teas long before she could remember not doing it, and later pouring
+for her mother with rather a quelling air as she got toward fifteen.
+During these years the family had been going and coming between Europe
+and America; they did not know perfectly why, except that it was
+easier than not.
+
+More and more there was a peculiarity in the goods selected by
+Charlotte for sending home, which her mother one day noted. "How is
+it, Charlotte, that you always send exactly the things I want, and
+when you get your own things here you don't know whether they are what
+you wanted or not?"
+
+"Because I don't know when I send them. I don't choose them; I can't."
+
+"But you choose the right things for me?"
+
+"No, I don't, mother. I just take what comes first, and you always
+like it."
+
+"Now, that is nonsense, Charlotte. I can't have you telling me such a
+thing as that. It's an insult to my intelligence. Do you think I don't
+know my own mind?"
+
+"I don't know _my_ mind," the girl said, so persistently, obstinately,
+stubbornly, that her mother did not pursue the subject for fear of
+worse.
+
+She referred it to her husband, who said: "Perhaps it's like poets
+never being able to remember their own poetry. I've heard it's because
+they have several versions in their minds when they write and can't
+remember which they've written. Charlotte has several choices in her
+mind, and can't choose between her choices."
+
+"Well, we ought to have broken her of her indecision. Some day it will
+make her very unhappy."
+
+"Pretty hard to break a person of her temperament," Forsyth suggested.
+
+"I know it!" his wife admitted, with a certain pleasure in realizing
+the fact. "I don't know what we _shall_ do."
+
+
+                                 III
+
+Storage society was almost wholly feminine; in rare instances there
+was a man who must have been sent in dearth of women or in an hour of
+their disability. Then the man came hastily, with a porter, and either
+pulled all the things out of the rooms so that he could honestly say
+he had seen them, and that the thing wanted was not there; or else
+merely had the doors opened, and after a glance inside resolved to
+wait till his wife, or mother, or daughter could come. He agreed in
+guilty eagerness with the workmen that this was the only way.
+
+The exception to the general rule was a young man who came one bright
+spring morning when all nature suggested getting one's stuff out and
+going into the country, and had the room next the Forsyths' original
+five-dollar room opened. As it happened, Charlotte was at the moment
+visiting this room upon her mother's charge to see whether certain old
+scrim sash-curtains, which they had not needed for ages but at last
+simply _must_ have, were not lurking there in a chest of general
+curtainings. The Forsyths now had rooms on other floors, but their
+main room was at the end of the corridor branching northward from that
+where the five-dollar room was. Near this main room that nice New York
+family had their rooms, and Charlotte had begun the morning in their
+friendly neighborhood, going through some chests that might perhaps
+have the general curtainings in them and the scrim curtains among the
+rest. It had not, and she had gone to what the Forsyths called their
+old ancestral five-dollar room, where that New York family continued
+to project a sort of wireless chaperonage over her. But the young man
+had come with a porter, and, with her own porter, Charlotte could not
+feel that even a wireless chaperonage was needed, though the young man
+approached with the most beaming face she thought she had ever seen,
+and said he hoped he should not be in her way. She answered with a
+sort of helpless reverberation of his glow, Not at all; she should
+only be a moment. She wanted to say she hoped she would not be in
+_his_ way, but she saved herself in time, while, with her own eyes
+intent upon the façade of her room and her mind trying to lose itself
+in the question which curtain-trunk the scrims might be in, she kept
+the sense of his sweet eyes, the merriest eyes she had ever seen,
+effulgent with good-will and apology and reverent admiration. She
+blushed to think it admiration, though she liked to think it so, and
+she did not snub him when the young man jumped about, neglecting his
+own storage, and divining the right moments for his offers of help.
+She saw that he was a little shorter than herself, that he was very
+light and quick on his feet, and had a round, brown face,
+clean-shaven, and a round, brown head, close shorn, from which in the
+zeal of his attentions to her he had shed his straw hat onto the
+window-sill. He formed a strong contrast to the contents of his
+store-room, which was full, mainly, of massive white furniture picked
+out in gold, and very blond. He said casually that it had been there,
+off and on, since long before he could remember, and at these words an
+impression, vague, inexplicable, deepened in Charlotte's mind.
+
+"Mother," she said, for she had now disused the earlier "mamma" in
+deference to modern usage, "how old was I when we first took that
+five-dollar room?"
+
+She asked this question after she had shown the scrim curtains she had
+found and brought home with her.
+
+"Why? I don't know. Two or three; three or four. I should have to
+count up. What makes you ask?"
+
+"Can a person recollect what happened when they were three or four?"
+
+"I should say not, decidedly."
+
+"Or recollect a face?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"Then of course it wasn't. Mother, do you remember ever telling me
+what the little boy was like who gave me all his playthings and I
+couldn't decide what to give him back?"
+
+"What a question! Of course not! He was very brown and funny, with the
+beamingest little face in the world. Rather short for his age, I
+should say, though I haven't the least idea what his age was."
+
+"Then it was the very same little boy!" Charlotte said.
+
+"Who was the very same little boy?" her mother demanded.
+
+"The one that was there to-day; the young man, I mean," Charlotte
+explained, and then she told what had happened with a want of fullness
+which her mother's imagination supplied.
+
+"Did he say who he was? Is he coming back to-morrow or this afternoon?
+Did you inquire who he was or where?"
+
+"What an idea, mother!" Charlotte said, grouping the several
+impossibilities under one head in her answer.
+
+"You had a perfect right to know, if you thought he was the one."
+
+"But I didn't _think_ he was the one, and I don't _know_ that he is
+now; and if he was, what could I do about it?"
+
+"That is true," Mrs. Forsyth owned. "But it's very disappointing. I've
+always felt as if they ought to know it was your undecidedness and not
+ungenerousness."
+
+Charlotte laughed a little forlornly, but she only said, "Really,
+mother!"
+
+Mrs. Forsyth was still looking at the curtains. "Well, these are not
+the scrims I wanted. You must go back. I believe I will go with you.
+The sooner we have it over the better," she added, and she left the
+undecided Charlotte to decide whether she meant the scrim curtains or
+the young man's identity.
+
+It was very well, for one reason, that she decided to go with
+Charlotte that afternoon. The New-Yorkers must have completed the
+inspection of their trunks, for they had not come back. Their failure
+to do so was the more important because the young man had come back
+and was actively superintending the unpacking of his room. The
+palatial furniture had all been ranged up and down the corridor, and
+as fast as a trunk was got out and unlocked he went through it with
+the help of the storage-men, listed its contents in a note-book with a
+number, and then transferred the number and a synopsis of the record
+to a tag and fastened it to the trunk, which he had put back into the
+room.
+
+When the Forsyths arrived with the mistaken scrim curtains, he
+interrupted himself with apologies for possibly being in their way;
+and when Mrs. Forsyth said he was not at all in their way, he got
+white-and-gold arm-chairs for her and Charlotte and put them so
+conveniently near the old ancestral room that Mrs. Forsyth scarcely
+needed to move hand or foot in letting Charlotte restore the wrong
+curtains and search the chests for the right ones. His politeness made
+way for conversation and for the almost instant exchange of
+confidences between himself and Mrs. Forsyth, so that Charlotte was
+free to enjoy the silence to which they left her in her labors.
+
+"Before I say a word," Mrs. Forsyth said, after saying some hundreds
+in their mutual inculpation and exculpation, "I want to ask something,
+and I hope you will excuse it to an old woman's curiosity and not
+think it rude."
+
+At the words "old woman's" the young man gave a protesting "Oh!" and
+at the word "rude" he said, "Not at all."
+
+"It is simply this: how long have your things been here? I ask because
+we've had this room thirteen or fourteen years, and I've never seen
+your room opened in that whole time."
+
+The young man laughed joyously. "Because it hasn't been opened in that
+whole time. I was a little chap of three or four bothering round here
+when my mother put the things in; I believe it was a great frolic for
+me, but I'm afraid it wasn't for her. I've been told that my
+activities contributed to the confusion of the things and the things
+in them that she's been in ever since, and I'm here now to make what
+reparation I can by listing them."
+
+"She'll find it a great blessing," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I wish we had
+ours listed. I suppose you remember it all very vividly. It must have
+been a great occasion for you seeing the things stored at that age."
+
+The young man beamed upon her. "Not so great as now, I'm afraid. The
+fact is, I don't remember anything about it. But I've been told that I
+embarrassed with my personal riches a little girl who was looking over
+her doll's things."
+
+"Oh, indeed!" Mrs. Forsyth said, stiffly, and she turned rather
+snubbingly from him and said, coldly, to Charlotte: "I think they are
+in that green trunk. Have you the key?" and, stooping as her daughter
+stooped, she whispered, "Really!" in condemnation and contempt.
+
+Charlotte showed no signs of sharing either, and Mrs. Forsyth could
+not very well manage them alone. So when Charlotte said, "No, I
+haven't the key, mother," and the young man burst in with, "Oh, do let
+me try my master-key; it will unlock anything that isn't a Yale," Mrs.
+Forsyth sank back enthroned and the trunk was thrown open.
+
+She then forgot what she had wanted it opened for. Charlotte said,
+"They're not here, mother," and her mother said, "No, I didn't suppose
+they were," and began to ask the young man about his mother. It
+appeared that his father had died twelve years before, and since then
+his mother and he had been nearly everywhere except at home, though
+mostly in England; now they had come home to see where they should go
+next or whether they should stay.
+
+"That would never suit my daughter," Mrs. Forsyth lugged in, partly
+because the talk had gone on away from her family as long as she could
+endure, and partly because Charlotte's indecision always amused her.
+"She can't bear to choose."
+
+"Really?" the young man said. "I don't know whether I like it or not,
+but I have had to do a lot of it. You mustn't think, though, that I
+chose this magnificent furniture. My father bought an Italian palace
+once, and as we couldn't live in it or move it we brought the
+furniture here."
+
+"It _is_ magnificent," Mrs. Forsyth said, looking down the long
+stretches of it and eying and fingering her specific throne. "I wish
+my husband could see it--I don't believe he remembers it from fourteen
+years ago. It looks--excuse me!--very studio."
+
+"Is he a painter? Not Mr. Forsyth the painter?"
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Forsyth eagerly admitted, but wondering how he should know
+her name, without reflecting that a score of trunk-tags proclaimed it
+and that she had acquired his by like means.
+
+"I like his things so much," he said. "I thought his three portraits
+were the best things in the Salon last year."
+
+"Oh, you _saw_ them?" Mrs. Forsyth laughed with pleasure and pride.
+"Then," as if it necessarily followed, "you must come to us some
+Sunday afternoon. You'll find a number of his new portraits and some
+of the subjects; they like to see themselves framed." She tried for a
+card in her hand-bag, but she had none, and she said, "Have you one
+of my cards, my dear?" Charlotte had, and rendered it up with a
+severity lost upon her for the moment. She held it toward him. "It's
+Mr. _Peter_ Bream?" she smiled upon him, and he beamed back.
+
+"Did you remember it from our first meeting?"
+
+In their cab Mrs. Forsyth said, "I don't know whether he's what you
+call rather fresh or not, Charlotte, and I'm not sure that I've been
+very wise. But he is so nice, and he looked so _glad_ to be asked."
+
+Charlotte did not reply at once, and her silent severity came to the
+surface of her mother's consciousness so painfully that it was rather
+a relief to have her explode, "Mother, I will thank you not to discuss
+my temperament with people."
+
+She gave Mrs. Forsyth her chance, and her mother was so happy in being
+able to say, "I won't--your _temper_, my dear," that she could add
+with sincere apology: "I'm sorry I vexed you, and I won't do it
+again."
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+The next day was Sunday; Peter Bream took it for some Sunday, and came
+to the tea on Mrs. Forsyth's generalized invitation. She pulled her
+mouth down and her eyebrows up when his card was brought in, but as
+he followed hard she made a lightning change to a smile and gave him a
+hand of cordial welcome. Charlotte had no choice but to welcome him,
+too, and so the matter was simple for her. She was pouring, as usual,
+for her mother, who liked to eliminate herself from set duties and
+walk round among the actual portraits in fact and in frame and talk
+about them to the potential portraits. Peter, qualified by long
+sojourn in England, at once pressed himself into the service of
+handing about the curate's assistant; Mrs. Forsyth electrically
+explained that it was one of the first brought to New York, and that
+she had got it at the Stores in London fifteen years before, and it
+had often been in the old ancestral room, and was there on top of the
+trunks that first day. She did not recur to the famous instance of
+Charlotte's infant indecision, and Peter was safe from a snub when he
+sat down by the girl's side and began to make her laugh. At the end,
+when her mother asked Charlotte what they had been laughing about, she
+could not tell; she said she did not know they were laughing.
+
+The next morning Mrs. Forsyth was paying for her Sunday tea with a
+Monday headache, and more things must be got out for the country.
+Charlotte had again no choice but to go alone to the storage, and yet
+again no choice but to be pleasant to Peter when she found him next
+door listing the contents of his mother's trunks and tagging them as
+before. He dropped his work and wanted to help her. Suddenly they
+seemed strangely well acquainted, and he pretended to be asked which
+pieces she should put aside as goods selected, and chose them for her.
+She hinted that he was shirking his own work; he said it was an
+all-summer's job, but he knew her mother was in a hurry. He found the
+little old trunk of her playthings, and got it down and opened it and
+took out some toys as goods selected. She made him put them back, but
+first he catalogued everything in it and synopsized the list on a tag
+and tagged the trunk. He begged for a broken doll which he had not
+listed, and Charlotte had so much of her original childish difficulty
+in parting with that instead of something else that she refused it.
+
+It came lunch-time, and he invited her to go out to lunch with him;
+and when she declined with dignity he argued that if they went to the
+Woman's Exchange she would be properly chaperoned by the genius of the
+place; besides, it was the only place in town where you got real
+strawberry shortcake. She was ashamed of liking it all; he besought
+her to let him carry her hand-bag for her, and, as he already had it,
+she could not prevent him; she did not know, really, how far she
+might successfully forbid him in anything. At the street door of the
+apartment-house they found her mother getting out of a cab, and she
+asked Peter in to lunch; so that Charlotte might as well have lunched
+with him at the Woman's Exchange.
+
+At all storage warehouses there is a season in autumn when the
+corridors are heaped with the incoming furniture of people who have
+decided that they cannot pass another winter in New York and are
+breaking up housekeeping to go abroad indefinitely. But in the spring,
+when the Constitutional Safe-Deposit offered ample space for
+thoughtful research, the meetings of Charlotte and Peter could recur
+without more consciousness of the advance they were making toward the
+fated issue than in so many encounters at tea or luncheon or dinner.
+Mrs. Forsyth was insisting on rather a drastic overhauling of her
+storage that year. Some of the things, by her command, were shifted to
+and fro between the more modern rooms and the old ancestral room, and
+Charlotte had to verify the removals. In deciding upon goods selected
+for the country she had the help of Peter, and she helped him by
+interposing some useful hesitations in the case of things he had put
+aside from his mother's possessions to be sold for her by the
+warehouse people.
+
+One day he came late and told Charlotte that his mother had suddenly
+taken her passage for England, and they were sailing the next morning.
+He said, as if it logically followed, that he had been in love with
+her from that earliest time when she would not give him the least of
+her possessions, and now he asked her if she would not promise him the
+greatest. She did not like what she felt "rehearsed" in his proposal;
+it was not her idea of a proposal, which ought to be spontaneous and
+unpremeditated in terms; at the same time, she resented his
+precipitation, which she could not deny was inevitable.
+
+She perceived that they were sitting side by side on two of those
+white-and-gold thrones, and she summoned an indignation with the
+absurdity in refusing him. She rose and said that she must go; that
+she must be going; that it was quite time for her to go; and she would
+not let him follow her to the elevator, as he made some offer of
+doing, but left him standing among his palatial furniture like a
+prince in exile.
+
+By the time she reached home she had been able to decide that she must
+tell her mother at once. Her mother received the fact of Peter's
+proposal with such transport that she did not realize the fact of
+Charlotte's refusal. When this was connoted to her she could scarcely
+keep her temper within the bounds of maternal tenderness. She said
+she would have nothing more to do with such a girl; that there was but
+one such pearl as Peter in the universe, and for Charlotte to throw
+him away like that! Was it because she could not decide? Well, it
+appeared that she could decide wrong quickly enough when it came to
+the point. Would she leave it now to her mother?
+
+That Charlotte would not do, but what she did do was to write a letter
+to Peter taking him back as much as rested with her; but delaying so
+long in posting it, when it was written, that it reached him among the
+letters sent on board and supplementarily delivered by his room
+steward after all the others when the ship had sailed. The best Peter
+could do in response was a jubilant Marconigram of unequaled cost and
+comprehensiveness.
+
+His mother had meant to return in the fall, after her custom, to find
+out whether she wished to spend the winter in New York or not. Before
+the date for her sailing she fell sick, and Peter came sadly home
+alone in the spring. Mrs. Bream's death brought Mrs. Forsyth a vain
+regret; she was sorry now that she had seen so little of Mrs. Bream;
+Peter's affection for her was beautiful and spoke worlds for both of
+them; and they, the Forsyths, must do what they could to comfort him.
+
+Charlotte felt the pathos of his case peculiarly when she went to make
+provision for goods selected for the summer from the old ancestral
+room, and found him forlorn among his white-and-gold furniture next
+door. He complained that he had no association with it except the
+touching fact of his mother's helplessness with it, which he had now
+inherited. The contents of the trunks were even less intimately of his
+experience; he had performed a filial duty in listing their contents,
+which long antedated him, and consisted mostly of palatial bric-à-brac
+and the varied spoils of travel.
+
+He cheered up, however, in proposing to her that they should buy a
+Castle in Spain and put them into it. The fancy pleased her, but
+visibly she shrank from a step which it involved, so that he was, as
+it were, forced to say, half jokingly, half ruefully, "I can imagine
+your not caring for this rubbish or what became of it, Charlotte, but
+what about the owner?"
+
+"The owner?" she asked, as it were somnambulantly.
+
+"Yes. Marrying him, say, sometime soon."
+
+"Oh, Peter, I couldn't."
+
+"Couldn't? You know that's not playing the game exactly."
+
+"Yes; but not--not right away?"
+
+"Well, I don't know much about it in my own case, but isn't it usual
+to fix some approximate date? When should you think?"
+
+"Oh, Peter, I _can't_ think."
+
+"Will you let me fix it? I must go West and sell out and pull up, you
+know, preparatory to never going again. We can fix the day now or we
+can fix it when I come back."
+
+"Oh, when you come back," she entreated so eagerly that Peter said:
+
+"Charlotte, let me ask you one thing. Were you ever sorry you wrote me
+that taking-back letter?"
+
+"Why, Peter, you know how I am. When I have decided something I have
+undecided it. That's all."
+
+From gay he turned to grave. "I ought to have thought. I haven't been
+fair; _I_ haven't played the game. I ought to have given you another
+chance; and I haven't, have I?"
+
+"Why, I suppose a girl can always change," Charlotte said,
+suggestively.
+
+"Yes, but you won't always be a girl. I've never asked you if you
+wanted to change. I ask you now. Do you?"
+
+"How can I tell? Hadn't we better let it go as it is? Only not hurry
+about--about--marrying?"
+
+"Certainly not hurry about marrying. I've wondered that a girl could
+make up her mind to marry any given man. Haven't you ever wished that
+you had not made up your mind about me?"
+
+"Hundreds of times. But I don't know that I meant anything by it."
+
+He took her hand from where it lay in her lap as again she sat on one
+of the white-and-gold thrones beside him and gently pressed it. "Well,
+then, let's play we have never been engaged. I'm going West to-night
+to settle things up for good, and I won't be back for three or four
+months, and when I come back we'll start new. I'll ask you, and you
+shall say yes or no just as if you had never said either before."
+
+"Peter, when you talk like that!" She saw his brown, round face dimly
+through her wet eyes, and she wanted to hug him for pity of him and
+pride in him, but she could not decide to do it. They went out to
+lunch at the Woman's Exchange, and the only regret Peter had was that
+it was so long past the season of strawberry shortcake, and that
+Charlotte seemed neither to talk nor to listen; she ought to have done
+one or the other.
+
+They had left the Vaneckens busy with their summer trunks at the far
+end of the northward corridor, where their wireless station had been
+re-established for Charlotte's advantage, though she had not thought
+of it the whole short morning long. When she came back from lunch the
+Vaneckens were just brushing away the crumbs of theirs, which the son
+and brother seemed to have brought in for them in a paper box; at any
+rate, he was now there, making believe to help them.
+
+Mrs. Forsyth had promised to come, but she came so late in the
+afternoon that she owned she had been grudgingly admitted at the
+office, and she was rather indignant about it. By this time, without
+having been West for three months, Peter had asked a question which
+had apparently never been asked before, and Charlotte had as newly
+answered it. "And now, mother," she said, while Mrs. Forsyth passed
+from indignant to exultant, "I want to be married right away, before
+Peter changes his mind about taking me West with him. Let us go home
+at once. You always said I should have a home wedding."
+
+"What a ridiculous idea!" Mrs. Forsyth said, more to gain time than
+anything else. She added, "Everything is at sixes and sevens in the
+flat. There wouldn't be standing-room." A sudden thought flashed upon
+her, which, because it was sudden and in keeping with her character,
+she put into tentative words. "You're more at home _here_ than
+anywhere else. You were almost born here. You've played about here
+ever since you were a child. You first met Peter here. He proposed to
+you here, and you rejected him here. He's proposed here again, and
+you've accepted him, you say--"
+
+"Mother!" Charlotte broke in terribly upon her. "Are you suggesting
+that I should be married in a storage warehouse? Well, I haven't
+fallen quite so low as that yet. If I can't have a _home_ wedding, I
+will have a _church_ wedding, and I will wait till doomsday for it if
+necessary."
+
+"I don't know about doomsday," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but as far as
+to-day is concerned, it's too late for a church wedding. Peter, isn't
+there something about canonical hours? And isn't it past them?"
+
+"That's in the Episcopal Church," Peter said, and then he asked, very
+politely, "Will you excuse me for a moment?" and walked away as if he
+had an idea. It was apparently to join the Vaneckens, who stood in a
+group at the end of their corridor, watching the restoration of the
+trunks which they had been working over the whole day. He came back
+with Mr. Vanecken and Mr. Vanecken's mother. He was smiling radiantly,
+and they amusedly.
+
+"It's all right," he explained. "Mr. Vanecken is a Presbyterian
+minister, and he will marry us now."
+
+"But not here!" Charlotte cried, feeling herself weaken.
+
+"No, certainly not," the dominie reassured her. "I know a church in
+the next block that I can borrow for the occasion. But what about the
+license?"
+
+It was in the day before the parties must both make application in
+person, and Peter took a paper from his breast pocket. "I thought it
+might be needed, sometime, and I got it on the way up, this morning."
+
+"Oh, how thoughtful of you, Peter!" Mrs. Forsyth moaned in admiration
+otherwise inexpressible, and the rest laughed, even Charlotte, who
+laughed hysterically. At the end of the corridor they met the Misses
+Vanecken waiting for them, unobtrusively expectant, and they all went
+down in the elevator together. Just as they were leaving the building,
+which had the air of hurrying them out, Mrs. Forsyth had an
+inspiration. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed, and then, in deference to
+Mr. Vanecken, said, "Good gracious, I _mean_. My husband! Peter, go
+right into the office and telephone Mr. Forsyth."
+
+"Perhaps," Mr. Vanecken said, "I had better go and see about having my
+friend's church opened, in the meanwhile, and--"
+
+"By all means!" Mrs. Forsyth said from her mood of universal
+approbation.
+
+But Mr. Vanecken came back looking rather queer and crestfallen. "I
+find my friend has gone into the country for a few days; and I don't
+quite like to get the sexton to open the church without his authority,
+and-- But New York is full of churches, and we can easily find another,
+with a little delay, if--"
+
+He looked at Peter, who looked at Charlotte, who burst out with
+unprecedented determination. "No, we can't wait. I shall never marry
+Peter if we do. Mother, you are right. But _must_ it be in the old
+ancestral five-dollar room?"
+
+They all laughed except Charlotte, who was more like crying.
+
+"Certainly not," Mr. Vanecken said. "I've no doubt the manager--"
+
+He never seemed to end his sentences, and he now left this one broken
+off while he penetrated the railing which fenced in the manager alone
+among a group of vacated desks, frowning impatient. At some murmured
+words from the dominie, he shouted, "_What!_" and then came out
+radiantly smiling, and saying, "Why, certainly." He knew all the group
+as old storers in the Constitutional, and called them each by name as
+he shook them each by the hand. "Everything else has happened here,
+and I don't see why this shouldn't. Come right into the
+reception-room."
+
+With some paintings of biblical subjects, unclaimed from the storage,
+on the walls, the place had a religious effect, and the manager
+significantly looked out of it a lingering stenographer, who was
+standing before a glass with two hatpins crossed in her mouth
+preparatory to thrusting them through the straw. She withdrew, visibly
+curious and reluctant, and then the manager offered to withdraw
+himself.
+
+"No," Charlotte said, surprisingly initiative in these junctures, "I
+don't know how it is in Mr. Vanecken's church, but, if father doesn't
+come, perhaps you'll have to give me away. At any rate, you're an old
+friend of the family, and I should be hurt if you didn't stay."
+
+She laid her hand on the manager's arm, and just as he had
+protestingly and politely consented, her father arrived in a taxicab,
+rather grumbling from having been obliged to cut short a sitting. When
+it was all over, and the Vaneckens were eliminated, when, in fact, the
+Breams had joined the Forsyths at a wedding dinner which the bride's
+father had given them at Delmonico's and had precipitated themselves
+into a train for Niagara ("So banal," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but I
+suppose they had to go somewhere, and _we_ went to Niagara, come to
+think of it, and it's on their way West"), the bride's mother remained
+up late talking it all over. She took credit to herself for the whole
+affair, and gave herself a great deal of just praise. But when she
+said, "I do believe, if it hadn't been for me, at the last, Charlotte
+would never have made up her mind," Forsyth demurred.
+
+"I should say Peter had a good deal to do with making up her mind for
+her."
+
+"Yes, you might say that."
+
+"And for once in her life Charlotte seems to have had her mind ready
+for making up."
+
+"Yes, you might say that, too. I believe she is going to turn out a
+decided character, after all. I _never_ saw anybody so determined not
+to be married in a storage warehouse."
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                            A PRESENTIMENT
+
+
+Over our coffee in the Turkish room Minver was usually a censor of our
+several foibles rather than a sharer in our philosophic speculations
+and metaphysical conjectures. He liked to disable me as one
+professionally vowed to the fabulous, and he had unfailing fun with
+the romantic sentimentality of Rulledge, which was in fact so little
+in keeping with the gross super-abundance of his person, his habitual
+gluttony, and his ridiculous indolence. Minver knew very well that
+Rulledge was a good fellow withal, and would willingly do any kind
+action that did not seriously interfere with his comfort, or make too
+heavy a draft upon his pocket. His self-indulgence, which was quite
+blameless, unless surfeit is a fault, was the basis of an interest in
+occult themes, which was the means of even higher diversion to Minver.
+He liked to have Rulledge approach Wanhope from this side, in the
+invincible persuasion that the psychologist would be interested in
+these themes by the law of his science, though he had been assured
+again and again that in spite of its misleading name psychology did
+not deal with the soul as Rulledge supposed the soul; and Minver's
+eyes lighted up with a prescience of uncommon pleasure when, late one
+night, after we had vainly tried to hit it off in talk, now of this,
+now of that, Rulledge asked Wanhope, abruptly as if it followed from
+something before:
+
+"Wasn't there a great deal more said about presentiments forty or
+fifty years ago than there is now?"
+
+Wanhope had been lapsing deeper and deeper into the hollow of his
+chair; but he now pulled himself up, and turned quickly toward
+Rulledge. "What made you think of that?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know. Why?"
+
+"Because I was thinking of it myself." He glanced at me, and I shook
+my head.
+
+"Well," Minver said, "if it will leave Acton out in the cold, I'll own
+that I was thinking of it, too. I was going back in my mind, for no
+reason that I know of, to my childhood, when I first heard of such a
+thing as a presentiment, and when I was afraid of having one. I had
+the notion that presentiments ran in the family."
+
+"Why had you that notion?" Rulledge demanded.
+
+"I don't know that I proposed telling," the painter said, giving
+himself to his pipe.
+
+"Perhaps you didn't have it," Rulledge retaliated.
+
+"Perhaps," Minver assented.
+
+Wanhope turned from the personal aspect of the matter. "It's rather
+curious that we should all three have had the same thing in mind just
+now; or, rather, it is not very curious. Such coincidences are really
+very common. Something must have been said at dinner which suggested
+it to all of us."
+
+"All but Acton," Minver demurred.
+
+"I mightn't have heard what was said," I explained. "I suppose the
+passing of all that sort of sub-beliefs must date from the general
+lapse of faith in personal immortality."
+
+"Yes, no doubt," Wanhope assented. "It is very striking how sudden the
+lapse was. Everyone who experienced it in himself could date it to a
+year, if not to a day. The agnosticism of scientific men was of course
+all the time undermining the fabric of faith, and then it fell in
+abruptly, reaching one believer after another as fast as the ground
+was taken wholly or partly from under his feet. I can remember how
+people once disputed whether there were such beings as guardian
+spirits or not. That minor question was disposed of when it was
+decided that there were no spirits at all."
+
+"Naturally," Minver said. "And the decay of the presentiment must have
+been hastened by the failure of so many presentiments to make good."
+
+"The great majority of them have failed to make good, from the
+beginning of time," Wanhope replied.
+
+"There are two kinds of presentiments," Rulledge suggested, with a
+philosophic air. "The true and the untrue."
+
+"Like mushrooms," Minver said. "Only, the true presentiment kills, and
+the true mushroom nourishes. Talking of mushrooms, they have a way in
+Switzerland of preserving them in walnut oil, and they fill you with
+the darkest forebodings, after you've filled yourself with the
+mushrooms. There's some occult relation between the two. Think it out,
+Rulledge!"
+
+Rulledge ignored him in turning to Wanhope. "The trouble is how to
+distinguish the true from the untrue presentiment."
+
+"It would be interesting," Wanhope began, but Minver broke in upon him
+maliciously.
+
+"To know how much the dyspepsia of our predecessors had to with the
+prevalence of presentimentalism? I agree with you, that a better diet
+has a good deal to do with the decline of the dark foreboding among
+us. What I can't understand is, how a gross and reckless feeder, like
+Rulledge here, doesn't go about like ancestral voices prophesying all
+sorts of dreadful things."
+
+"That's rather cheap talk, even for you, Minver," Rulledge said. "Why
+did you think presentiments ran in _your_ family?"
+
+"Well, there you have me, Rulledge. That's where my theory fails. I
+can remember," Minver continued soberly, "the talk there used to be
+about them among my people. They were serious people in an unreligious
+way, or rather an unecclesiastical way. They were never spiritualists,
+but I don't think there was one of them who doubted that he should
+live hereafter; he might doubt that he was living here, but there was
+no question of the other thing. I must say it gave a dignity to their
+conversation which, when they met, as they were apt to do at one
+another's houses on Sunday nights, was not of common things. One of my
+uncles was a merchant, another a doctor; my father was a
+portrait-painter by profession, and a sign-painter by practice. I
+suppose that's where I got my knack, such as it is. The merchant was
+an invalid, rather, though he kept about his business, and our people
+merely recognized him as being out of health. He was what we could
+call, for that day and region--the Middle West of the early fifties--a
+man of unusual refinement. I suppose this was temperamental with him
+largely; but he had cultivated tastes, too. I remember him as a
+peculiarly gentle person, with a pensive cast of face, and the
+melancholy accomplishment of playing the flute."
+
+"I wonder why nobody plays the flute nowadays," I mused aloud.
+
+"Yes, it's quite obsolete," Minver said. "They only play the flute in
+the orchestras now. I always look at the man who plays it and think of
+my uncle. He used to be very nice to me as a child; and he was very
+fond of my father, in a sort of filial way; my father was so much
+older. I can remember my young aunt; and how pretty she was as she sat
+at the piano, and sang and played to his fluting. When she looked
+forward at the music, her curls fell into her neck; they wore curls
+then, grown-up women; and though I don't think curls are beautiful, my
+aunt's beauty would have been less without them; in fact, I can't
+think of her without them.
+
+"She was delicate, too; they were really a pair of invalids; but she
+had none of his melancholy. They had had several children, who died,
+one after another, and there was only one left at the time I am
+speaking of. I rather wonder, now, that the thought of those poor
+little ghost-cousins didn't make me uncomfortable. I was a very
+superstitious boy, but I seem not to have thought of them. I played
+with the little girl who was left, and I liked going to my uncle's
+better than anywhere else. I preferred going in the daytime and in the
+summer-time. Then my cousin and I sat in a nook of the garden and
+fought violets, as we called it; hooked the wry necks of the flowers
+together and twitched to see which blossom would come off first. She
+was a sunny little thing, like her mother, and she had curls, like
+her. I can't express the feeling I had for my aunt; she seemed the
+embodiment of a world that was at once very proud and very good. I
+suppose she dressed fashionably, as things went then and there; and
+her style as well as her beauty fascinated me. I would have done
+anything to please her, far more than to please my cousin. With her I
+used to squabble, and sometimes sent her crying to her mother. Then I
+always ran off home, but when I sneaked back, or was sent for to come
+and play with my cousin, I was not scolded for my wickedness.
+
+"My uncle was more prosperous than his brothers; he lived in a much
+better house than ours, and I used to be quite awe-struck by its
+magnificence. He went East, as we said, twice a year to buy goods,
+and he had things sent back for his house such as we never saw
+elsewhere; those cask-shaped seats of blue china for the verandas, and
+bamboo chairs. There were cane-bottom chairs in the sitting-room, such
+as we had in our best room; in the parlor the large pieces were of
+mahogany veneer, upholstered in black hair-cloth; they held me in awe.
+The piano filled half the place; the windows came down to the ground,
+and had Venetian blinds and lace curtains.
+
+"We all went in there after the Sunday night supper, and then the
+fathers and mothers were apt to begin talking of those occult things
+that gave me the creeps. It was after the Rochester Knockings, as they
+were called, had been exposed, and so had spread like an infection
+everywhere. It was as if people were waiting to have the fraud shown
+up in order to believe in it."
+
+"That sort of thing happens," Wanhope agreed. "It's as if the seeds of
+the ventilated imposture were carried atmospherically into the human
+mind broadcast and a universal crop of self-delusion sprang up."
+
+"At any rate," Minver resumed, "instead of the gift being confined to
+a few persons--a small sisterhood with detonating knee-joints--there
+were rappings in every well-regulated household; all the tables
+tipped; people went to sleep to the soft patter of raps on the
+headboards of their beds; and girls who could not spell were occupied
+in delivering messages from Socrates, Ben Franklin and Shakespeare.
+Besides the physical demonstrations, there were all sorts of psychical
+intimations from the world which we've now abolished."
+
+"Not permanently, perhaps," I suggested.
+
+"Well, that remains to be seen," Minver said. "It was this sort of
+thing which my people valued above the other. Perhaps they were
+exclusive in their tastes, and did not care for an occultism which the
+crowd could share with them; though this is a conjecture too long
+after the fact to have much value. As far as I can now remember, they
+used to talk of the double presence of living persons, like their
+being where they greatly wished to be as well as where they really
+were; of clairvoyance; of what we call mind-transference, now; of
+weird coincidences of all kinds; of strange experiences of their own
+and of others; of the participation of animals in these experiences,
+like the testimony of cats and dogs to the presence of invisible
+spirits; of dreams that came true, or came near coming true; and,
+above everything, of forebodings and presentiments.
+
+"I dare say they didn't always talk of such things, and I'm giving
+possibly a general impression from a single instance; everything
+remembered of childhood is as if from large and repeated occurrence.
+But it must have happened more than once, for I recall that when it
+came to presentiments my aunt broke it up, perhaps once only. My
+cousin used to get very sleepy on the rug before the fire, and her
+mother would carry her off to bed, very cross and impatient of being
+kissed good night, while I was left to the brunt of the occult alone.
+I could not go with my aunt and cousin, and I folded myself in my
+mother's skirt, where I sat at her feet, and listened in an anguish of
+drowsy terror. The talk would pass into my dreams, and the dreams
+would return into the talk; and I would suffer a sort of double
+nightmare, waking and sleeping."
+
+"Poor little devil!" Rulledge broke out. "It's astonishing how people
+will go on before children, and never think of the misery they're
+making for them."
+
+"I believe my mother thought of it," Minver returned, "but when that
+sort of talk began, the witchery of it was probably too strong for
+her. 'It held her like a two years' child'; I was eight that winter. I
+don't know how long my suffering had gone on, when my aunt came back
+and seemed to break up the talk. It had got to presentiments, and,
+whether they knew that this was forbidden ground with her, or whether
+she now actually said something about it, they turned to talk of other
+things. I'm not telling you all this from my own memory, which deals
+with only a point or two. My father and mother used to recur to it
+when I was older, and I am piecing out my story from their memories.
+
+"My uncle, with all his temperamental pensiveness, was my aunt's stay
+and cheer in the fits of depression which she paid with for her usual
+gaiety. But these fits always began with some uncommon depression of
+his--some effect of the forebodings he was subject to. Her opposition
+to that kind of thing was purely unselfish, but certainly she dreaded
+it for him as well as herself. I suppose there was a sort of conscious
+silence in the others which betrayed them to her. 'Well,' she said,
+laughing, 'have you been at it again? That poor child looks frightened
+out of his wits.'
+
+"They all laughed then, and my father said, hypocritically, 'I was
+just going to ask Felix whether he expected to start East this week or
+next.'
+
+"My uncle tried to make light of what was always a heavy matter with
+him. 'Well, yesterday,' he answered, 'I should have said next week;
+but it's this week, now. I'm going on Wednesday.'
+
+"'By stage or packet?' my father asked.
+
+"'Oh, I shall take the canal to the lake, and get the boat for Buffalo
+there,' my uncle said.
+
+"They went on to speak of the trip to New York, and how much easier it
+was then than it used to be when you had to go by stage over the
+mountains to Philadelphia and on by stage again. Now, it seemed, you
+got the Erie Canal packet at Buffalo and the Hudson River steamboat at
+Albany, and reached New York in four or five days, in great comfort
+without the least fatigue. They had all risen and my aunt had gone out
+with her sisters-in-law to help them get their wraps. When they
+returned, it seemed that they had been talking of the journey, too,
+for she said to my mother, laughing again, 'Well, Richard may think
+it's easy; but somehow Felix never expects to get home alive.'
+
+"I don't think I ever heard my uncle laugh, but I can remember how he
+smiled at my aunt's laughing, as he put his hand on her shoulder; I
+thought it was somehow a very sad smile. On Wednesday I was allowed to
+go with my aunt and cousin to see him off on the packet, which came up
+from Cincinnati early in the morning; I had lain awake most of the
+night, and then nearly overslept myself, and then was at the canal in
+time. We made a gay parting for him, but when the boat started, and I
+was gloating on the three horses making up the tow-path at a spanking
+trot, under the snaky spirals of the driver's smacking whip-lash, I
+caught sight of my uncle standing on the deck and smiling that sad
+smile of his. My aunt was waving her handkerchief, but when she turned
+away she put it to her eyes.
+
+"The rest of the story, such as it is, I know, almost to the very end,
+from what I heard my father and mother say from my uncle's report
+afterward. He told them that, when the boat started, the stress to
+stay was so strong upon him that if he had not been ashamed he would
+have jumped ashore and followed us home. He said that he could not
+analyze his feelings; it was not yet any definite foreboding, but
+simply a depression that seemed to crush him so that all his movements
+were leaden, when he turned at last, and went down to breakfast in the
+cabin below. The stress did not lighten with the little changes and
+chances of the voyage to the lake. He was never much given to making
+acquaintance with people, but now he found himself so absent-minded
+that he was aware of being sometimes spoken to by friendly strangers
+without replying until it was too late even to apologize. He was not
+only steeped in this gloom, but he had the constant distress of the
+effort he involuntarily made to trace it back to some cause or follow
+it forward to some consequence. He kept trying at this, with a mind so
+tensely bent to the mere horror that he could not for a moment strain
+away from it. He would very willingly have occupied himself with other
+things, but the anguish which the double action of his mind gave him
+was such that he could not bear the effort; all he could do was to
+abandon himself to his obsession. This would ease him only for a
+while, though, and then he would suffer the misery of trying in vain
+to escape from it.
+
+"He thought he must be going mad, but insanity implied some definite
+delusion or hallucination, and, so far as he could make out, he had
+none. He was simply crushed by a nameless foreboding. Something
+dreadful was to happen, but this was all he felt; knowledge had no
+part in his condition. He could not say whether he slept during the
+two nights that passed before he reached Toledo, where he was to take
+the lake steamer for Buffalo. He wished to turn back again, but the
+relentless pressure which had kept him from turning back at the start
+was as strong as ever with him. He tried to give his presentiment
+direction by talking with the other passengers about a recent accident
+to a lake steamer, in which several hundred lives were lost; there
+had been a collision in rough weather, and one of the boats had gone
+down in a few minutes. There was a sort of relief in that, but the
+double action of the mind brought the same intolerable anguish again,
+and he settled back for refuge under the shadow of his impenetrable
+doom. This did not lift till he was well on his way from Albany to New
+York by the Hudson River. The canal-boat voyage from Buffalo to Albany
+had been as eventless as that to Toledo, and his lake steamer had
+reached Buffalo in safety, for which it had seemed as if those lost in
+the recent disaster had paid.
+
+"He tried to pierce his heavy cloud by argument from the security in
+which he had traveled so far, but the very security had its
+hopelessness. If something had happened--some slight accident--to
+interrupt it, his reason, or his unreason, might have taken it for a
+sign that the obscure doom, whatever it was, had been averted.
+
+"Up to this time he had not been able to connect his foreboding with
+anything definite, and he was not afraid for himself. He was simply
+without the formless hope that helps us on at every step, through good
+and bad, and it was a mortal peril, which he came through safely while
+scores of others were lost, that gave his presentiment direction. He
+had taken the day boat from Albany, and about the middle of the
+afternoon the boat, making way under a head-wind, took fire. The pilot
+immediately ran her ashore, and her passengers, those that had the
+courage for it, ran aft, and began jumping from the stern, but a great
+many women and children were burned. My uncle was one of the first of
+those who jumped, and he stood in the water, trying to save those who
+came after from drowning; it was not very deep. Some of the women lost
+courage for the leap, and some turned back into the flames,
+remembering children they had left behind. One poor creature stood
+hesitating wildly, and he called up to her to jump. At last she did
+so, almost into his arms, and then she clung about him as he helped
+her ashore. 'Oh,' she cried out between her sobs, 'if you have a wife
+and children at home, God will take you safe back to them; you have
+saved my life for my husband and little ones.' 'No,' he was conscious
+of saying, 'I shall never see my wife again,' and now his foreboding
+had the direction that it had wanted before.
+
+"From that on he simply knew that he should not get home alive, and he
+waited resignedly for the time and form of his disaster. He had a sort
+of peace in that. He went about his business intelligently, and from
+habit carefully, but it was with a mechanical action of the mind,
+something, he imagined, like the mechanical action of his body in
+those organs which do their part without bidding from the will. He was
+only a few days in New York, but in the course of them he got several
+letters from his wife telling him that all was going well with her and
+their daughter. It was before the times when you can ask and answer
+questions by telegraph, and he started back, necessarily without
+having heard the latest news from home.
+
+"He made the return trip in a sort of daze, talking, reading, eating,
+and sleeping in the calm certainty of doom, and only wondering how it
+would be fulfilled, and what hour of the night or day. But it is no
+use my eking this out; I heard it, as I say, when I was a child, and I
+am afraid that if I should try to give it with the full detail I
+should take to inventing particulars." Minver paused a moment, and
+then he said: "But there was one thing that impressed itself indelibly
+on my memory. My uncle got back perfectly safe and well."
+
+"Oh!" Rulledge snorted in rude dissatisfaction.
+
+"What was it impressed itself on your memory?" Wanhope asked, with
+scientific detachment from the story as a story.
+
+Minver continued to address Wanhope, without regarding Rulledge. "My
+uncle told my father that some sort of psychical change, which he
+could not describe, but which he was as conscious of as if it were
+physical, took place within him as he came in sight of his house--"
+
+"Yes," Wanhope prompted.
+
+"He had driven down from the canal-packet in the old omnibus which
+used to meet passengers and distribute them at their destinations in
+town. All the way to his house he was still under the doom as regarded
+himself, but bewildered that he should be getting home safe and well,
+and he was refusing his escape, as it were, and then suddenly, at the
+sight of the familiar house, the change within him happened. He looked
+out of the omnibus window and saw a group of neighbors at his gate. As
+he got out of the omnibus, my father took him by the hand, as if to
+hold him back a moment. Then he said to my father, very quietly, 'You
+needn't tell me: my wife is dead.'"
+
+There was an appreciable pause, in which we were all silent, and then
+Rulledge demanded, greedily, "And was she?"
+
+"Really, Rulledge!" I could not help protesting.
+
+Minver asked him, almost compassionately and with unwonted gentleness,
+as from the mood in which his reminiscence had left him: "You
+suspected a hoax? She had died suddenly the night before while she and
+my cousin were getting things ready to welcome my uncle home in the
+morning. I'm sorry you're disappointed," he added, getting back to his
+irony.
+
+"Whatever," Rulledge pursued, "became of the little girl?"
+
+"She died rather young; a great many years ago; and my uncle soon
+after her."
+
+Rulledge went away without saying anything, but presently returned
+with the sandwich which he had apparently gone for, while Wanhope was
+remarking: "That want of definition in the presentiment at first, and
+then its determination in the new direction by, as it were,
+propinquity--it is all very curious. Possibly we shall some day
+discover a law in such matters."
+
+Rulledge said: "How was it your boyhood was passed in the Middle West,
+Minver? I always thought you were a Bostonian."
+
+"I was an adoptive Bostonian for a good while, until I decided to
+become a native New-Yorker, so that I could always be near to you,
+Rulledge. You can never know what a delicate satisfaction you are."
+
+Minver laughed, and we were severally restored to the wonted relations
+which his story had interrupted.
+
+
+
+
+                                 III
+
+                     CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
+
+
+  It was against the law, in such case made and provided,
+  Of the United States, but by the good will of the pilots
+  That we would some of us climb to the pilot-house after our breakfast
+  For a morning smoke, and find ourselves seats on the benching
+  Under the windows, or in the worn-smooth arm-chairs. The pilot,
+  Which one it was did not matter, would tilt his head round and say,
+          "All right!"
+  When he had seen who we were, and begin, or go on as from stopping
+  In the midst of talk that was leading up to a story,
+  Just before we came in, and the story, begun or beginning,
+  Always began or ended with some one, or something or other,
+  Having to do with the river. If one left the wheel to the other,
+  Going off watch, he would say to his partner standing behind him
+  With his hands stretched out for the spokes that were not given up yet,
+  "Captain, you can tell them the thing I was going to tell them
+  Better than I could, I reckon," and then the other would answer,
+  "Well, I don't know as I feel so sure of that, captain," and having
+  Recognized each other so by that courtesy title of captain
+  Never officially failed of without offense among pilots,
+  One would subside into Jim and into Jerry the other.
+
+  It was on these terms, at least, Captain Dunn relieved Captain Davis
+  When we had settled ourselves one day to listen in comfort,
+  After some psychological subtleties we had indulged in at breakfast
+  Touching that weird experience every one knows when the senses
+  Juggle the points of the compass out of true orientation,
+  Changing the North to the South, and the East to the West. "Why, Jerry,
+          what was it
+  You was going to tell them?" "Oh, never _you_ mind what it _was_, Jim.
+  _You_ tell them something else," and so Captain Davis submitted,
+  While Captain Dunn, with a laugh, got away beyond reach of his protest.
+  Then Captain Davis, with fitting, deprecatory preamble,
+  Launched himself on a story that promised to be all a story
+  Could be expected to be, when one of those women--you know them--
+  Who interrupt on any occasion or none, interrupted,
+  Pointed her hand, and asked, "Oh, what is that island there, captain?"
+  "That one, ma'am?" He gave her the name, and then the woman persisted,
+  "Don't say you know them all by sight!" "Yes, by sight or by feeling."
+  "What do you mean by feeling?" "Why, just that by daylight we see them,
+  And in the dark it's like as if somehow we felt them, I reckon.
+  Every foot of the channel and change in it, wash-out and cave-in,
+  Every bend and turn of it, every sand-bar and landmark,
+  Every island, of course, we have got to see them, or feel them."
+  "But if you don't?" "But we've got to." "But aren't you ever mistaken?"
+  "Never the second time." "Now, what do you mean, Captain Davis?
+  Never the second time." "Well, let me tell you a story.
+  It's not the one I begun, but that island you asked about yonder
+  Puts me in mind of it, happens to be the place where it happened,
+  Three years ago. I suppose no man ever knew the Ohio
+  Better than Captain Dunlevy, if any one else knew it like him.
+  Man and boy he had been pretty much his whole life on the river:
+  Cabin-boy first on a keelboat before the day of the steamboats,
+  Back in the pioneer times; and watchman then on a steamboat;
+  Then second mate, and then mate, and then pilot and captain and owner--
+  But he was proudest, I reckon, of being about the best pilot
+  On the Ohio. He knew it as well as he knew his own Bible,
+  And I don't hardly believe that ever Captain Dunlevy
+  Let a single day go by without reading a chapter."
+
+  While the pilot went on with his talk, and in regular, rhythmical motion
+  Swayed from one side to the other before his wheel, and we listened,
+  Certain typical facts of the picturesque life of the river
+  Won their way to our consciousness as without help of our senses.
+  It was along about the beginning of March, but already
+  In the sleepy sunshine the budding maples and willows,
+  Where they waded out in the shallow wash of the freshet,
+  Showed the dull red and the yellow green of their blossoms and catkins,
+  And in their tops the foremost flocks of blackbirds debated
+  As to which they should colonize first. The indolent house-boats
+  Loafing along the shore, sent up in silvery spirals
+  Out of their kitchen pipes the smoke of their casual breakfasts.
+  Once a wide tow of coal-barges, loaded clear down to the gunwales,
+  Gave us the slack of the current, with proper formalities shouted
+  By the hoarse-throated stern-wheeler that pushed the black barges
+          before her,
+  And as she passed us poured a foamy cascade from her paddles.
+  Then, as a raft of logs, which the spread of the barges had hidden,
+  River-wide, weltered in sight, with a sudden jump forward the pilot
+  Dropped his whole weight on the spokes of the wheel just in time to
+          escape it.
+
+  "Always give those fellows," he joked, "all the leeway they ask for;
+  Worst kind of thing on the river you want your boat to run into.
+  Where had I got about Captain Dunlevy? Oh yes, I remember.
+  Well, when the railroads began to run away from the steamboats,
+  Taking the carrying trade in the very edge of the water,
+  It was all up with the old flush times, and Captain Dunlevy
+  Had to climb down with the rest of us pilots till he was only
+  Captain the same as any and every pilot is captain,
+  Glad enough, too, to be getting his hundred and twenty-five dollars
+  Through the months of the spring and fall while navigation was open.
+  Never lowered himself, though, a bit from captain and owner,
+  Knew his rights and yours, and never would thought of allowing
+  Any such thing as a liberty _from_ you or taking one _with_ you.
+  I had been his cub, and all that I knew of the river
+  Captain Dunlevy had learnt me; and if you know what the feeling
+  Is of a cub for the pilot that learns him the river, you'll trust me
+  When I tell you I felt it the highest kind of an honor
+  Having him for my partner; and when I came up to relieve him,
+  One day, here at the wheel, and actu'lly thought that I found him
+  Taking that island there on the left, I thought I was crazy.
+  No, I couldn't believe my senses, and yet I couldn't endure it.
+  Seeing him climb the spokes of the wheel to warp the _Kanawha_,
+  With the biggest trip of passengers ever she carried,
+  Round on the bar at the left that fairly stuck out of the water.
+  Well, as I said, he learnt me all that I knew of the river,
+  And was I to learn _him_ now which side to take of an island
+  When I knew he knew it like his right hand from his left hand?
+  My, but I hated to speak! It certainly seemed like my tongue clove,
+  Like the Bible says, to the roof of my mouth! But I had to.
+  'Captain,' I says, and it seemed like another person was talking,
+  'Do you usu'lly take that island there on the eastward?'
+  'Yes,' he says, and he laughed, 'and I thought I had learnt you to do it,
+  When you was going up.' 'But not going _down_, did you, captain?'
+  'Down?' And he whirled at me, and, without ever stopping his laughing,
+  Turned as white as a sheet, and his eyes fairly bulged from their
+          sockets.
+  Then he whirled back again, and looked up and down on the river,
+  Like he was hunting out the shape of the shore and the landmarks.
+  Well, I suppose the thing has happened to every one sometime,
+  When you find the points of the compass have swapped with each other,
+  And at the instant you're looking, the North and the South have changed
+          places.
+  _I_ knew what was in his mind as well as Dunlevy himself did.
+  Neither one of us spoke a word for nearly a minute.
+  Then in a kind of whisper he says, 'Take the wheel, Captain Davis!'
+  Let the spokes fly, and while I made a jump forwards to catch them,
+  Staggered into that chair--well, the very one you are in, ma'am.
+  Set there breathing quick, and, when he could speak, all he said was,
+  'This is the end of it for me on the river, Jim Davis,'
+  Reached up over his head for his coat where it hung by that window,
+  Trembled onto his feet, and stopped in the door there a second,
+  Stared in hard like as if for good-by to the things he was used to,
+  Shut the door behind him, and never come back again through it."
+  While we were silent, not liking to prompt the pilot with questions,
+  "Well," he said, at last, "it was no use to argue. We tried it,
+  In the half-hearted way that people do that don't mean it.
+  Every one was his friend here on the _Kanawha_, and _we_ knew
+  It was the first time he ever had lost his bearings, but _he_ knew,
+  In such a thing as that, that the first and the last are the same time.
+  When we had got through trying our worst to persuade him, he only
+  Shook his head and says, 'I am done for, boys, and you know it,'
+  Left the boat at Wheeling, and left his life on the river--
+  Left his life on the earth, you may say, for I don't call it living,
+  Setting there homesick at home for the wheel he can never go back to.
+  Reads the river-news regular; knows just the stage of the water
+  Up and down the whole way from Cincinnati to Pittsburg;
+  Follows every boat from the time she starts out in the spring-time
+  Till she lays up in the summer, and then again in the winter;
+  Wants to talk all about her and who is her captain and pilot;
+  Then wants to slide away to that everlastingly puzzling
+  Thing that happened to him that morning on the _Kanawha_
+  When he lost his bearings and North and South had changed places--
+  No, I don't call that living, whatever the rest of you call it."
+  We were silent again till that woman spoke up, "And what was it,
+  Captain, that kept him from going back and being a pilot?"
+  "Well, ma'am," after a moment the pilot patiently answered,
+  "_I_ don't hardly believe that I could explain it exactly."
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                          THE RETURN TO FAVOR
+
+
+He never, by any chance, quite kept his word, though there was a
+moment in every case when he seemed to imagine doing what he said, and
+he took with mute patience the rakings which the ladies gave him when
+he disappointed them.
+
+Disappointed is not just the word, for the ladies did not really
+expect him to do what he said. They pretended to believe him when he
+promised, but at the bottom of their hearts they never did or could.
+He was gentle-mannered and soft-spoken, and when he set his head on
+one side, and said that a coat would be ready on Wednesday, or a dress
+on Saturday, and repeated his promise upon the same lady's expressed
+doubt, she would catch her breath and say that now she absolutely must
+have it on the day named, for otherwise she would not have a thing to
+put on. Then he would become very grave, and his soft tenor would
+deepen to a bass of unimpeachable veracity, and he would say, "Sure,
+lady, you have it."
+
+The lady would depart still doubting and slightly sighing, and he
+would turn to the customer who was waiting to have a button sewed on,
+or something like that, and ask him softly what it was he could do for
+him. If the customer offered him his appreciation of the case in hand,
+he would let his head droop lower, and in a yet deeper bass deplore
+the doubt of the ladies as an idiosyncrasy of their sex. He would make
+the customer feel that he was a favorite customer whose rights to a
+perfect fidelity of word and deed must by no means be tampered with,
+and he would have the button sewed on or the rip sewed up at once, and
+refuse to charge anything, while the customer waited in his
+shirt-sleeves in the small, stuffy shop opening directly from the
+street. When he tolerantly discussed the peculiarities of ladies as a
+sex, he would endure to be laughed at, "for sufferance was the badge
+of all his tribe," and possibly he rather liked it.
+
+The favorite customer enjoyed being there when some lady came back on
+the appointed Wednesday or Saturday, and the tailor came soothingly
+forward and showed her into the curtained alcove where she was to try
+on the garments, and then called into the inner shop for them. The
+shirt-sleeved journeyman, with his unbuttoned waistcoat-front all
+pins and threaded needles, would appear in his slippers with the
+things barely basted together, and the tailor would take them, with an
+airy courage, as if they were perfectly finished, and go in behind the
+curtain where the lady was waiting in a dishabille which the favorite
+customer, out of reverence for the sex, forbore to picture to himself.
+Then sounds of volcanic fury would issue from the alcove. "Now, Mr.
+Morrison, you have lied to me again, deliberately _lied_. Didn't I
+tell you I _must_ have the things perfectly ready to-day? You see
+yourself that it will be another week before I can have my things."
+
+"A week? Oh, madam! But I assure you--"
+
+"Don't talk to me any more! It's the last time I shall ever come to
+you, but I suppose I can't take the work away from you as it is.
+_When_ shall I have it?"
+
+"To-morrow. Yes, to-morrow noon. Sure!"
+
+"Now you know you are always out at noon. I should think you would be
+ashamed."
+
+"If it hadn't been for sickness in the family I would have finished
+your dress with my own hands. Sure I would. If you come here to-morrow
+noon you find your dress all ready for you."
+
+"I know I won't, but I will come, and you'd _better_ have it ready."
+
+"Oh, sure."
+
+The lady then added some generalities of opprobrium with some
+particular criticisms of the garments. Her voice sank into
+dispassionate murmurs in these, but it rose again in her renewed sense
+of the wrong done her, and when she came from the alcove she went out
+of the street door purple. She reopened it to say, "Now, remember!"
+before she definitely disappeared.
+
+"Rather a stormy session, Mr. Morrison," the customer said.
+
+"Something fierce," Mr. Morrison sighed. But he did not seem much
+troubled, and he had one way with all his victims, no matter what mood
+they came or went in.
+
+One day the customer was by when a kind creature timidly upbraided
+him. "This is the third time you've disappointed me, Mr. Morrison. I
+really wish you wouldn't promise me unless you mean to do it. I don't
+think it's right for you."
+
+"Oh, but sure, madam! The things will be done, sure. We had a strike
+on us."
+
+"Well, I will trust you once more," the kind creature said.
+
+"You can depend on me, madam, sure."
+
+When she was gone the customer said: "I wonder you do that sort of
+thing, Mr. Morrison. You can't be surprised at their behaving rustily
+with you if you never keep your word."
+
+"Why, I assure you there are times when I don't know where to look,
+the way they go on. It is something awful. You ought to hear them
+once. And now they want the wote." He rearranged some pieces of
+tumbled goods at the table where the customer sat, and put together
+the disheveled leaves of the fashion-papers which looked as if the
+ladies had scattered them in their rage.
+
+One day the customer heard two ladies waiting for their
+disappointments in the outer room while the tailor in the alcove was
+trying to persuade a third lady that positively her things would be
+sent home the next day before dark. The customer had now formed the
+habit of having his own clothes made by the tailor, and his system in
+avoiding disappointment was very simple. In the early fall he ordered
+a spring suit, and in the late spring it was ready. He never had any
+difficulty, but he was curious to learn how the ladies managed, and he
+listened with all his might while these two talked.
+
+"I always wonder we keep coming," one of them said.
+
+"I'll tell you why," the other said. "Because he's cheap, and we get
+things from a fourth to a third less than we can get them anywhere
+else. The quality is first rate, and he's absolutely honest. And,
+besides, he's a genius. The wretch has _touch_. The things have a
+style, a look, a hang! Really it's something wonderful. Sure it iss,"
+she ended in the tailor's accent, and then they both laughed and
+joined in a common sigh.
+
+"Well, I don't believe he means to deceive any one."
+
+"Oh, neither do I. I believe he expects to do everything he says. And
+one can't help liking him even when he doesn't."
+
+"He's a good while getting through with her," the first lady said,
+meaning the unseen lady in the alcove.
+
+"She'll be a good while longer getting through with _him_, if he
+hasn't them ready the next time," the second lady said.
+
+But the lady in the alcove issued from it with an impredicable smile,
+and the tailor came up to the others, and deferred to their wishes
+with a sort of voiceless respect.
+
+He gave the customer a glance of good-fellowship, and said to him,
+radiantly: "Your things all ready for you, this morning. As soon as
+I--"
+
+"Oh, no hurry," the customer responded.
+
+"I won't be a minute," the tailor said, pulling the curtain of the
+alcove aside, and then there began those sounds of objurgation and
+expostulation, although the ladies had seemed so amiable before.
+
+The customer wondered if they did not all enjoy it; the ladies in
+their patience under long trial, and the tailor in the pleasure of
+practising upon it. But perhaps he did believe in the things he
+promised. He might be so much a genius as to have no grasp of facts;
+he might have thought that he could actually do what he said.
+
+The customer's question on these points found answer when one day the
+tailor remarked, as it were out of a clear sky, that he had sold his
+business; sold it to the slippered journeyman who used to come in his
+shirt-sleeves, with his vest-front full of pins and needles, bringing
+the basted garments to be tried on the ladies who had been promised
+them perfectly finished.
+
+"He will do your clothes all right," he explained to the customer. "He
+is a first-rate cutter and fitter; he knows the whole business."
+
+"But why--why--" the customer began.
+
+"I couldn't stand it. The way them ladies would talk to a person, when
+you done your best to please them; it's something fierce."
+
+"Yes, I know. But I thought you liked it, from the way you always
+promised them and never kept your word."
+
+"And if I hadn't promised them?" the tailor returned with some show of
+feeling. "They _wanted_ me to promise them--they made me--they
+wouldn't have gone away without it. Sure. Every one wanted her things
+before every one. You had got to think of that."
+
+"But you had to think of what they would say."
+
+"Say? Sometimes I thought they would _hit_ me. One lady said she had a
+notion to slap me once. It's no way to talk."
+
+"But you didn't seem to mind it."
+
+"I didn't mind it for a good while. Then I couldn't stand it. So I
+sold."
+
+He shook his head sadly; but the customer had no comfort to offer him.
+He asked when his clothes would be done, and the tailor told him when,
+and then they were not. The new proprietor tried them on, but he would
+not say just when they would be finished.
+
+"We have a good deal of work already for some ladies that been
+disappointed. Now we try a new way. We tell people exactly what we
+do."
+
+"Well, that's right," the customer said, but in his heart he was not
+sure he liked the new way.
+
+The day before his clothes were promised he dropped in. From the
+curtained alcove he heard low murmurs, the voice of the new proprietor
+and the voice of some lady trying on, and being severely bidden not to
+expect her things at a time she suggested. "No, madam. We got too much
+work on hand already. These things, they will not be done before next
+week."
+
+"I told you to-morrow," the same voice said to another lady, and the
+new proprietor came out with an unfinished coat in his hand.
+
+"I know you did, but I thought you would be better than your word, and
+so I came to-day. Well, then, to-morrow."
+
+"Yes, to-morrow," the new proprietor said, but he did not seem to have
+liked the lady's joke. He did not look happy.
+
+A few weeks after that the customer came for some little alterations
+in his new suit.
+
+In the curtained alcove he heard the murmurs of trying on, much
+cheerfuller murmurs than before; the voice of a lady lifted in
+gladness, in gaiety, and an incredible voice replying, "Oh, sure,
+madam."
+
+Then the old proprietor came out in his shirt-sleeves and slippers,
+with his waistcoat-front full of pins and needles, just like the new
+proprietor in former days.
+
+"Why!" the customer exclaimed. "Have you bought back?"
+
+"No. I'm just here like a journeyman already. The new man he want me
+to come. He don't get along very well with his way. He's all right;
+he's a good man and a first-class tailor. But," and the former
+proprietor looked down at the basted garment hanging over his arm, and
+picked off an irrelevant thread from it, "he thinks I get along better
+with the ladies."
+
+
+
+
+                                  V
+
+                          SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
+
+
+The figure of a woman sat crouched forward on one of the lowermost
+steps of the brownstone dwelling which was keeping a domestic
+tradition in a street mostly gone to shops and small restaurants and
+local express-offices. The house was black behind its closed shutters,
+and the woman remained sitting there because no one could have come
+out of its door for a year past to hunt her away. The neighborhood
+policeman faltered in going by, and then he kept on. The three people
+who came out of the large, old-fashioned hotel, half a block off, on
+their way for dinner to a French _table d'hôte_ which they had heard
+of, stopped and looked at the woman. They were a father and his son
+and daughter, and it was something like a family instinct that
+controlled them, in their pause before the woman crouching on the
+steps.
+
+It was the early dusk of a December day, and the day was very chilly.
+"She seems to be sick or something," the father vaguely surmised. "Or
+asleep."
+
+The three looked at the woman, but they did nothing for a moment. They
+would rather have gone on, but they waited to see if anything would
+happen to release them from the spell that they seemed to have laid
+upon themselves. They were conditional New-Yorkers of long sojourn,
+and it was from no apparent motive that the son wore evening dress,
+which his unbuttoned overcoat discovered, and an opera-hat. He would
+not have dressed so for that problematical French _table d'hôte_;
+probably he was going on later to some society affair. He now put in
+effect the father's impulse to go closer and look at the woman.
+
+"She seems to be asleep," he reported.
+
+"Shouldn't you think she would take cold? She will get her death
+there. Oughtn't we to do something?" the daughter asked, but she left
+it to the father, and he said:
+
+"Probably somebody will come by."
+
+"That we could leave her to?" the daughter pursued.
+
+"We could do that without waiting," the son commented.
+
+"Well, yes," the father assented; but they did not go on. They waited,
+helplessly, and then somebody came by. It was a young girl, not very
+definite in the dusk, except that she was unmistakably of the working
+class; she was simply dressed, though with the New York instinct for
+clothes. Their having stopped there seemed to stay her involuntarily,
+and after a glance in the direction of their gaze she asked the
+daughter:
+
+"Is she sick, do you think?"
+
+"We don't know what's the matter. But she oughtn't to stay there."
+
+Something velvety in the girl's voice had made its racial quality
+sensible to the ear; as she went up to the crouching woman and bent
+forward over her and then turned to them, a street lamp threw its
+light on her face, and they saw that she was a light shade of colored
+girl.
+
+"She seems to be sleeping."
+
+"Perhaps," the son began, "she's not quite--" But he did not go on.
+
+The girl looked round at the others and suggested, "She must be
+somebody's mother!"
+
+The others all felt abashed in their several sorts and degrees, but in
+their several sorts and degrees they all decided that there was
+something romantic, sentimental, theatrical in the girl's words, like
+something out of some cheap story-paper story.
+
+The father wondered if that kind of thing was current among that kind
+of people. He had a sort of esthetic pleasure in the character and
+condition expressed by the words.
+
+"Well, yes," he said, "if she has children, or has had." The girl
+looked at him uncertainly, and then he added, "But, of course--"
+
+The son went up to the woman again, and asked: "Aren't you well? Can
+we do anything for you? It won't do to stay here, you know." The woman
+only made a low murmur, and he said to his sister, "Suppose we get her
+up."
+
+His sister did not come forward promptly, and the colored girl said,
+"I'll help you."
+
+She took one arm of the woman and the son took the other, and they
+lifted her, without her connivance, to her feet and kept her on them.
+Then they walked her down the steps. On the level below she showed
+taller than either of them; she was bundled up in different incoherent
+wraps; her head was muffled, and she wore a battered bonnet at an
+involuntary slant.
+
+"I don't know exactly what we shall do with her," the son said.
+
+"We ought to get her home somehow," the daughter said.
+
+The father proposed nothing, but the colored girl said, "If we keep
+walking her along, we'll come to a policeman and we can--"
+
+A hoarse rumble of protest came from the muffled head of the woman,
+and the girl put her ear closer. "Want to go home? Well, the policeman
+will take you. We don't know where you live, and we haven't the time."
+
+The woman seemed to have nothing to say further, and they began
+walking her westward; the colored girl supported her on one hand, and
+the son, in his evening dress and opera-hat, on the other.
+
+The daughter followed in a vague anxiety, but the father went along,
+enjoying the anomaly, and happy in his relish of that phrase, "She
+must be somebody's mother." It now sounded to him like a catch from
+one of those New York songs, popular in the order of life where the
+mother represents what is best and holiest. He recalled a vaudeville
+ballad with the refrain of "A Boy's Best Friend is his Mother," which,
+when he heard it in a vaudeville theater, threatened the gallery floor
+under the applauding feet of the frenzied audience. Probably this
+colored girl belonged to that order of life; he wished he could know
+her social circumstance and what her outlook on the greater world
+might be. She seemed a kind creature, poor thing, and he respected
+her. "Somebody's mother"--he liked that.
+
+They all walked westward, aimlessly, except that the _table d'hôte_
+where they had meant to dine was in that direction; they had heard of
+it as an amusingly harmless French place, and they were fond of such
+mild adventures.
+
+The old woman contributed nothing to the definition of their progress.
+She stumbled and mumbled along, but between Seventh Avenue and Eighth
+she stubbornly arrested her guardians. "She says"--the colored girl
+translated some obscure avowal across her back--"she says she wants to
+go home, and she lives up in Harlem."
+
+"Oh, well, that's good," the father said, with an optimistic
+amiability. "We'd better help walk her across to Ninth Avenue and put
+her on a car, and tell the conductor where to let her off."
+
+He was not helping walk her himself, but he enjoyed his son's doing it
+in evening dress and opera-hat, with that kind colored girl on the
+other side of the mother; the composition was agreeably droll. The
+daughter did not like it, and she cherished the ideal of a passing
+policeman to take the old woman in charge.
+
+No policeman passed, though great numbers of other people met them
+without apparently finding anything noticeable in the spectacle which
+their group presented. Among the crowds going and coming on the
+avenues which they crossed scarcely any turned to look at them, or was
+moved by the sense of anything odd in them.
+
+The old woman herself did nothing to attract public notice till they
+were midway between Seventh and Eighth avenues. She mumbled something
+from time to time which the colored girl interpreted to the rest as
+her continued wish to go home. She was now clearer about her street
+and number. The girl, as if after question of her own generous spirit,
+said she did not see how _she_ could go with her; she was expected at
+home herself.
+
+"Oh, you won't have to go with her; we'll just put her aboard the
+Ninth Avenue car," the father encouraged her. He would have encouraged
+any one; he was enjoying the whole affair.
+
+At a certain moment, for no apparent reason, the mother decided to sit
+down on a door-step. It proved to be the door-step of a house where
+from time to time colored people--sometimes of one sex, sometimes of
+another--went in or came out. The door seemed to open directly into a
+large room where dancing and dining were going on concurrently. At a
+long table colored people sat eating, and behind their chairs on both
+sides of the room and at the ends of the table colored couples were
+waltzing.
+
+The effect was the more curious because, except for some almost
+inaudible music, the scene passed in silence. Those who were eating
+were not visibly incommoded by those revolving at their backs; the
+waltzers turned softly around and around, untempted by the table now
+before them, now behind them. When some of the diners or dancers came
+out, they stumbled over the old woman on the door-step without minding
+or stopping to inquire. Those outside, when they went in, fell over
+her with like equanimity and joined the strange company within.
+
+The father murmured to himself the lines,
+
+          "'Vast forms that move fantastically
+             To a discordant melody--'"
+
+with a remote trouble of mind because the words were at once so
+graphic and yet so imperfectly applicable. The son and daughter
+exchanged a silent wonder as long as they could bear it; then the
+daughter asked the colored girl:
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's a boarding-house," the girl answered, simply.
+
+"Oh," the daughter said.
+
+Sounds of more decided character than before now came from the figure
+on the door-step.
+
+"She seems to be saying something," the daughter suggested in general
+terms. "What is she saying?" she asked the colored girl.
+
+The girl stooped over and listened. Then she answered, "She's swearing."
+
+"Swearing? What about? Whom is she swearing at?"
+
+"At me, I reckon. She says, why don't I take her home."
+
+"Well, why doesn't she get up, then?"
+
+"She says she won't."
+
+"We can't carry her to the car," the daughter noted.
+
+"Oh, why not?" the father merrily demanded.
+
+The daughter turned to her brother. They were both very respectful to
+their father, but the son agreed with his sister when she said: "Papa
+would joke about anything. But this has passed a joke. We must get
+this old thing up and start her off."
+
+Upon experiment they could not get the old thing up, even with the
+help of the kind colored girl. They had to let her be, and the colored
+girl reported, after stooping over her again, "She says she can't
+walk."
+
+"She walked here well enough," the daughter said.
+
+"Not _very_ well," the father amended.
+
+His daughter did not notice him. She said to her brother: "Well, now
+you must go and find a policeman. It's strange none has gone by."
+
+It was also strange that still their group remained without attracting
+the notice of the passers. Nobody stopped to speak or even stare;
+perhaps the phenomena of that boarding-house had ceased to have
+surprises for the public of the neighborhood, and they in their
+momentary relation to it would naturally be without interest.
+
+The brother went away, leaving his sister with their father and that
+kind colored creature in charge of the old woman, now more and more
+quiescent on the door-step; she had ceased to swear, or even to speak.
+The brother came back after a time that seemed long, and said that he
+could not find a policeman anywhere, and at the same moment, as if the
+officer had been following at his heels, a policeman crossed the
+street from just behind him.
+
+The daughter ran after him, and asked if he would not come and look at
+the old woman who had so steadfastly remained in their charge, and she
+rapidly explained.
+
+"Sure, lady," the policeman said, and he turned from crossing the
+street and went up to the old woman. He laid his hand on her shoulder,
+and his touch seemed magical. "What's the matter? Can't you stand up?"
+She stood up as if at something familiar in the voice of authority.
+"Where do you live?" She gave an address altogether different from
+that she had given before--a place on the next avenue, within a block
+or two. "You'd better go home. You can walk, can't you?"
+
+"I can walk well enough," she answered in a tone of vexation, and she
+made her word good by walking quite actively away in the direction she
+had given.
+
+The kind colored girl became a part of the prevalent dark after
+refusing the thanks of the others. The daughter then fervently offered
+them to the policeman.
+
+"That's all right, lady," he said, and the incident had closed except
+for her emotion at seeing him enter a police-station precisely across
+the street, where they could have got a dozen policemen in a moment.
+
+"Well," the father said, "we might as well go to our French _table
+d'hôte_ now."
+
+"Oh," the son said, as if that reminded him, "the place seems to be
+shut."
+
+"Well, then, we might as well go back to the hotel," the father
+decided. "I dare say we shall do quite as well there."
+
+On the way the young people laughed over the affair and their escape
+from it, especially at the strange appearance and disappearance of the
+kind colored girl, with her tag of sentiment, and at the instant
+compliance of the old woman with the suggestion of the policeman.
+
+The father followed, turning the matter over in his mind. Did mere
+motherhood hallow that old thing to the colored girl and her sort and
+condition? Was there a superstition of motherhood among such people
+which would endear this disreputable old thing to their affection and
+reverence? Did such people hold mothers in tenderer regard than people
+of larger means? Would a mother in distress or merely embarrassment
+instantly appeal to their better nature as a case of want or sickness
+in the neighborhood always appealed to their compassion? Would her
+family now welcome the old thing home from her aberration more fondly
+than the friends of one who had arrived in a carriage among them in a
+good street? But, after all, how little one knew of other people! How
+little one knew of one self, for that matter! How next to nothing one
+knew of Somebody's Mother! It did not necessarily follow from anything
+they knew of her that she was a mother at all. Her motherhood might be
+the mere figment of that kind colored girl's emotional fancy. She
+might be Nobody's Mother.
+
+When it came to this the father laughed, too. Why, anyhow, were
+mothers more sacred than fathers? If they had found an old man in that
+old woman's condition on those steps, would that kind colored girl
+have appealed to them in his behalf as Somebody's Father?
+
+
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                        THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
+
+
+  He had gone down at Christmas, where our host
+  Had opened up his house on the Maine coast,
+  For the week's holidays, and we were all,
+  On Christmas night, sitting in the great hall,
+  About the corner fireplace, while we told
+  Stories like those that people, young and old,
+  Have told at Christmas firesides from the first,
+  Till one who crouched upon the hearth, and nursed
+  His knees in his claspt arms, threw back his head,
+  And fixed our host with laughing eyes, and said,
+  "This is so good, here--with your hickory logs
+  Blazing like natural-gas ones on the dogs,
+  And sending out their flicker on the wall
+  And rafters of your mock-baronial hall,
+  All in fumed-oak, and on your polished floor,
+  And the steel-studded panels of your door--
+  I think you owe the general make-believe
+  Some sort of story that will somehow give
+  A more ideal completeness to our case,
+  And make each several listener in his place--
+  Or hers--sit up, with a real goose-flesh creeping
+  All over him--or her--in proper keeping
+  With the locality and hour and mood.
+  Come!" And amid the cries of "Yes!" and "Good!"
+  Our host laughed back; then, with a serious air,
+  Looked around him on our hemicycle, where
+  He sat midway of it. "Why," he began,
+  But interrupted by the other man,
+  He paused for him to say: "Nothing remote,
+  But something with the actual Yankee note
+  Of here and now in it!" "I'll do my best,"
+  Our host replied, "to satisfy a guest.
+  What do you say to Barberry Cove? And would
+  Five years be too long past?" "No, both are good.
+  Go on!" "You noticed that big house to-day
+  Close to the water, and the sloop that lay,
+  Stripped for the winter, there, beside the pier?
+  Well, there she has lain just so, year after year;
+  And she will never leave her pier again;
+  But once, each spring she sailed in sun or rain,
+  For Bay Chaleur--or Bay Shaloor, as they
+  Like better to pronounce it down this way."
+
+  "I like Shaloor myself rather the best.
+  But go ahead," said the exacting guest.
+  And with a glance around at us that said,
+  "Don't let me bore you!" our host went ahead.
+
+  "Captain Gilroy built the big house, and he
+  Still lives there with his aging family.
+  He built the sloop, and when he used to come
+  Back from the Banks he made her more his home,
+  With his two boys, than the big house. The two
+  Counted with him a good half of her crew,
+  Until it happened, on the Banks, one day
+  The oldest boy got in a steamer's way,
+  And went down in his dory. In the fall
+  The others came without him. That was all
+  That showed in either one of them except
+  That now the father and the brother slept
+  Ashore, and not on board. When the spring came
+  They sailed for the old fishing-ground the same
+  As ever. Yet, not quite the same. The brother,
+  If you believed what folks say, kissed his mother
+  Good-by in going; and by general rumor,
+  The father, so far yielding as to humor
+  His daughters' weakness, rubbed his stubbly cheek
+  Against their lips. Neither of them would speak,
+  But the dumb passion of their love and grief
+  In so much show at parting found relief.
+
+  "The weeks passed and the months. Sometimes they heard
+  At home, by letter, from the sloop, or word
+  Of hearsay from the fleet. But by and by
+  Along about the middle of July,
+  A time in which they had no news began,
+  And holding unbrokenly through August, ran
+  Into September. Then, one afternoon,
+  While the world hung between the sun and moon,
+  And while the mother and her girls were sitting
+  Together with their sewing and their knitting,--
+  Before the early-coming evening's gloom
+  Had gathered round them in the living-room,
+  Helplessly wondering to each other when
+  They should hear something from their absent men,--
+  They saw, all three, against the window-pane,
+  A face that came and went, and came again,
+  Three times, as though for each of them, about
+  As high up from the porch's floor without
+  As a man's head would be that stooped to stare
+  Into the room on their own level there.
+  Its eyes dwelt on them wistfully as if
+  Longing to speak with the dumb lips some grief
+  They could not speak. The women did not start
+  Or scream, though each one of them, in her heart,
+  Knew she was looking on no living face,
+  But stared, as dumb as it did, in her place."
+
+  Here our host paused, and one sigh broke from all
+  Our circle whom his tale had held in thrall.
+  But he who had required it of him spoke
+  In what we others felt an ill-timed joke:
+  "Well, this is something like!" A girl said, "Don't!"
+  As if it hurt, and he said, "Well, I won't.
+  Go on!" And in a sort of muse our host
+  Said: "I suppose we all expect a ghost
+  Will sometimes come to us. But I doubt if we
+  Are moved by its coming as we thought to be.
+  At any rate, the women were not scared,
+  But, as I said, they simply sat and stared
+  Till the face vanished. Then the mother said,
+  'It was your father, girls, and he is dead.'
+  But both had known him; and now all went on
+  Much as before till three weeks more were gone,
+  When, one night sitting as they sat before,
+  Together with their mother, at the door
+  They heard a fumbling hand, and on the walk
+  Up from the pier, the tramp and muffled talk
+  Of different wind-blown voices that they knew
+  For the hoarse voices of their father's crew.
+  Then the door opened, and their father stood
+  Before them, palpably in flesh and blood.
+  The mother spoke for all, her own misgiving:
+  'Father, is this your ghost? Or are you living?'
+  'I am alive!' 'But in this very place
+  We saw your face look, like a spirit's face,
+  There through that window, just three weeks ago,
+  And now you are alive!' 'I did not know
+  That I had come; all I know is that then
+  I wanted to tell you folks here that our Ben
+  Was dying of typhoid fever. He raved of you
+  So that I could not think what else to do.
+  He's there in Bay Shaloor!'
+
+                        "Well, that's the end."
+  And rising up to mend the fire our friend
+  Seemed trying to shun comment; but in vain:
+  The exacting guest came at him once again;
+  "You must be going to fall down, I thought,
+  There at the climax, when your story brought
+  The skipper home alive and well. But no,
+  You saved yourself with honor." The girl said, "Oh,"
+  Who spoke before, "it's wonderful! But you,
+  How could you think of anything so true,
+  So delicate, as the father's wistful face
+  Coming there at the window in the place
+  Of the dead son's! And then, that quaintest touch,
+  Of half-apology--that he felt so much,
+  He _had_ to come! How perfectly New England! Well,
+  I hope nobody will undertake to tell
+  A common or garden ghost-story to-night."
+
+  Our host had turned again, and at her light
+  And playful sympathy he said, "My dear,
+  I hope that no one will imagine here
+  I have been inventing in the tale that's done.
+  My little story's charm if it has one
+  Is from no skill of mine. One does not change
+  The course of fable from its wonted range
+  To such effect as I have seemed to do:
+  Only the fact could make my story true."
+
+
+
+
+                                 VII
+
+                            AN EXPERIENCE
+
+
+For a long time after the event my mind dealt with the poor man in
+helpless conjecture, and it has now begun to do so again for no reason
+that I can assign. All that I ever heard about him was that he was
+some kind of insurance man. Whether life, fire, or marine insurance I
+never found out, and I am not sure that I tried to find out.
+
+There was something in the event which discharged him of all
+obligation to define himself of this or that relation to life. He must
+have had some relation to it such as we all bear, and since the
+question of him has come up with me again I have tried him in several
+of those relations--father, son, brother, husband--without identifying
+him very satisfyingly in either.
+
+As I say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the debt we
+owe in that kind to one another's curiosity, sympathy, or whatever. I
+cannot say what errand it was that brought him to the place, a
+strange, large, indeterminate open room, where several of us sat
+occupied with different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me now,
+by only a provisional right to the place. Certainly the corner
+allotted to my own editorial business was of temporary assignment; I
+was there until we could find a more permanent office. The man had
+nothing to do with me or with the publishers; he had no manuscript, or
+plan for an article which he wished to propose and to talk himself
+into writing, so that he might bring it with a claim to acceptance, as
+though he had been asked to write it. In fact, he did not even look of
+the writing sort; and his affair with some other occupant of that
+anomalous place could have been in no wise literary. Probably it was
+some kind of insurance business, and I have been left with the
+impression of fussiness in his conduct of it; he had to my involuntary
+attention an effect of conscious unwelcome with it.
+
+After subjectively dealing with this impression, I ceased to notice
+him, without being able to give myself to my own work. The day was
+choking hot, of a damp that clung about one, and forbade one so much
+effort as was needed to relieve one of one's discomfort; to pull at
+one's wilted collar and loosen the linen about one's reeking neck
+meant exertion which one willingly forbore; it was less suffering to
+suffer passively than to suffer actively. The day was of the sort
+which begins with a brisk heat, and then, with a falling breeze,
+decays into mere swelter. To come indoors out of the sun was no escape
+from the heat; my window opened upon a shaded alley where the air was
+damper without being cooler than the air within.
+
+At last I lost myself in my work with a kind of humid interest in the
+psychological inquiry of a contributor who was dealing with a matter
+rather beyond his power. I did not think that he was fortunate in
+having cast his inquiry in the form of a story; I did not think that
+his contrast of love and death as the supreme facts of life was what a
+subtler or stronger hand could have made it, or that the situation
+gained in effectiveness from having the hero die in the very moment of
+his acceptance. In his supposition that the reader would care more for
+his hero simply because he had undergone that tremendous catastrophe,
+the writer had omitted to make him interesting otherwise; perhaps he
+could not.
+
+My mind began to wander from the story and not very relevantly to
+employ itself with the question of how far our experiences really
+affect our characters. I remembered having once classed certain
+temperaments as the stuff of tragedy, and others as the stuff of
+comedy, and of having found a greater cruelty in the sorrows which
+light natures undergo, as unfit and disproportionate for them.
+Disaster, I tacitly decided, was the fit lot of serious natures; when
+it befell the frivolous it was more than they ought to have been made
+to bear; it was not of their quality. Then by the mental zigzagging
+which all thinking is I thought of myself and whether I was of this
+make or that. If it was more creditable to be of serious stuff than
+frivolous, though I had no agency in choosing, I asked myself how I
+should be affected by the sight of certain things, like the common
+calamities reported every day in the papers which I had hitherto
+escaped seeing. By another zigzag I thought that I had never known a
+day so close and stifling and humid. I then reflected upon the
+comparative poverty of the French language, which I was told had only
+that one word for the condition we could call by half a dozen
+different names, as humid, moist, damp, sticky, reeking, sweltering,
+and so on. I supposed that a book of synonyms would give even more
+English adjectives; I thought of looking, but my book of synonyms was
+at the back of my table, and I would have to rise for it. Then I
+questioned whether the French language was so destitute of adjectives,
+after all; I preferred to doubt it rather than rise.
+
+With no more logic than those other vagaries had, I realized that the
+person who had started me in them was no longer in the room. He must
+have gone outdoors, and I visualized him in the street pushing about,
+crowded hither and thither, and striking against other people as he
+went and came. I was glad I was not in his place; I believed I should
+have fallen in a faint from the heat, as I had once almost done in New
+York on a day like that. From this my mind jumped to the thought of
+sudden death in general. Was it such a happy thing as people
+pretended? For the person himself, yes, perhaps; but not for those
+whom he had left at home, say, in the morning, and who were expecting
+him at home in the evening. I granted that it was generally accepted
+as the happiest death, but no one that had tried it had said so. To be
+sure, one was spared a long sickness, with suffering from pain and
+from the fear of death. But one had no time for making one's peace
+with God, as it used to be said, and after all there might be
+something in death-bed repentance, although cultivated people no
+longer believed in it. Then I reverted to the family unprepared for
+the sudden death: the mother, the wife, the children. I struggled to
+get away from the question, but the vagaries which had lightly
+dispersed themselves before clung persistently to the theme now. I
+felt that it was like a bad dream. That was a promising diversion. Had
+one any sort of volition in the quick changes of dreams? One was aware
+of finding a certain nightmare insupportable, and of breaking from it
+as by main force, and then falling into a deep, sweet sleep. Was death
+something like waking from a dream such as that, which this life
+largely was, and then sinking into a long, restful slumber, and
+possibly never waking again?
+
+Suddenly I perceived that the man had come back. He might have been
+there some time with his effect of fussing and his pathetic sense of
+unwelcome. I had not noticed; I only knew that he stood at the
+half-open door with the knob of it in his hand looking into the room
+blankly.
+
+As he stood there he lifted his hand and rubbed it across his forehead
+as if in a sort of daze from the heat. I recognized the gesture as one
+very characteristic of myself; I had often rubbed my hand across my
+forehead on a close, hot day like that. Then the man suddenly vanished
+as if he had sunk through the floor.
+
+People who had not noticed that he was there noticed now that he was
+not there. Some made a crooked rush toward the place where he had
+been, and one of those helpful fellow-men who are first in all needs
+lifted his head and mainly carried him into the wide space which the
+street stairs mounted to, and laid him on the floor. It was darker, if
+not cooler there, and we stood back to give him the air which he drew
+in with long, deep sighs. One of us ran down the stairs to the street
+for a doctor, wherever he might be found, and ran against a doctor at
+the last step.
+
+The doctor came and knelt over the prostrate figure and felt its
+pulse, and put his ear down to its heart. It, which has already in my
+telling ceased to be he, drew its breath in those long suspirations
+which seemed to search each more profoundly than the last the lurking
+life, drawing it from the vital recesses and expelling it in those
+vast sighs.
+
+They went on and on, and established in our consciousness the
+expectation of indefinite continuance. We knew that the figure there
+was without such consciousness as ours, unless it was something so
+remotely withdrawn that it could not manifest itself in any signal to
+our senses. There was nothing tragical in the affair, but it had a
+surpassing dignity. It was as if the figure was saying something to
+the life in each of us which none of us would have words to interpret,
+speaking some last message from the hither side of that bourne from
+which there is no returning.
+
+There was a clutch upon my heart which tightened with the slower and
+slower succession of those awful breaths. Then one was drawn and
+expelled and then another was not drawn. I waited for the breathing to
+begin again, and it did not begin. The doctor rose from kneeling over
+the figure that had been a man, and uttered, with a kind of
+soundlessness, "Gone," and mechanically dusted his fingers with the
+thumbs of each hand from their contact with what had now become all
+dust forever.
+
+That helpfulest one among us laid a cloth over the face, and the rest
+of us went away. It was finished. The man was done with the sorrow
+which, in our sad human order, must now begin for those he loved and
+who loved him. I tried vaguely to imagine their grief for not having
+been uselessly with him at the last, and I could not. The incident
+remained with me like an experience, something I had known rather than
+seen. I could not alienate it by my pity and make it another's. They
+whom it must bereave seemed for the time immeasurably removed from the
+fact.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+                             THE BOARDERS
+
+
+The boarder who had eloped was a student at the theological seminary,
+and he had really gone to visit his family, so that he had a fairly
+good conscience in giving this color to the fact that he was leaving
+the place permanently because he could not bear it any longer. It was
+a shade of deceit to connive with his room-mate for the custody of his
+carpet-bag and the few socks and collars and the one shirt and summer
+coat which did not visibly affect its lankness when gathered into it
+from his share of the bureau-drawers; but he did not know what else to
+do, and he trusted to a final forgiveness when all the facts were
+considered by a merciful providence. His board was fully paid, and he
+had suffered long. He argued with his room-mate that he could do no
+good by remaining, and that he would have stayed if he could have
+believed there was any use. Besides, the food was undermining his
+health, and the room with that broken window had given him a cold
+already. He had a right to go, and it was his duty to himself and the
+friends who were helping him through the seminary not to get sick.
+
+He did not feel that he had convinced his room-mate, who took charge
+of his carpet-bag and now sat with it between his feet waiting the
+signal of the fugitive's surreptitious return for it. He was a
+vague-looking young man, presently in charge of the "Local and
+Literary" column of the one daily paper of the place, and he had just
+explained to the two other boarders who were watching with him for the
+event that he was not certain whether it was the supper, or the
+anxiety of the situation, or just what it was that was now affecting
+his digestion.
+
+The fellow-boarders, who sat on the edge of the bed, in default of the
+one unbroken chair which their host kept for himself, as easier than a
+mattress to get up from suddenly, did not take sides for or against
+him in his theories of his discomfort. One of them glanced at the
+broken window.
+
+"How do you glaze that in the daytime? You can't use the bolster
+then?"
+
+"I'm not in, much, in the daytime."
+
+It was a medical student who had spoken, but he was now silent, and
+the other said, after they had listened to the twitter of a piano in
+the parlor under the room, "That girl's playing will be the death of
+me."
+
+"Not if her mother's cooking isn't," the medical student, whose name
+was Wallace, observed with a professional effect.
+
+"Why don't you prescribe something for it?" the law student suggested.
+
+"Which?" Wallace returned.
+
+"I don't believe anything could cure the playing. I must have meant
+the cooking."
+
+"You're a promising young jurist, Blakeley. What makes you think I
+could cure the cooking?"
+
+"Oh, I just wondered. The sick one gets paler every day. I wonder what
+ails her."
+
+"She's not my patient."
+
+"Oh! Hippocratic oath. Rather fine of you, Wallace. But if she's not
+your patient--"
+
+"Listen!" their host interrupted, sharply. After a joint silence he
+added: "No. It must have been the sleet."
+
+"Well, Briggs," the law student said, "if it must have been the sleet,
+what mustn't it have been?"
+
+"Oh!" Briggs explained, "I thought it was Phillips. He was to throw a
+handful of gravel at the window."
+
+"And then you were to run down with his bag and help him to make his
+escape from a friendless widow. Well, I don't know that I blame him.
+If I didn't owe two weeks' board, I'd leave myself--though I hope I
+shouldn't sneak away. And if Mrs. Betterson didn't owe Wallace, here,
+two weeks' board, we'd walk off together arm-in-arm at high noon. I
+can't understand how he ever came to advance her the money."
+
+Wallace rose from the bed, and kicked each leg out to dislodge the
+tight trousers of the middle eighteen-fifties which had caught on the
+tops of his high boots. "You're a tonguey fellow, Blakeley. But you'll
+find, as you live long, that there are several things you can't
+explain."
+
+"I'll tell you what," Blakeley said. "We'll get Mrs. Betterson to take
+your loan for my debt, and we'll go at once."
+
+"You can propose something like that before the justice of the peace
+in your first pettifogging case."
+
+"I believe Wallace likes to stay. And yet he must know from his
+anatomical studies, better than the animals themselves, what cuts of
+meat the old lady gives us. I shouldn't be so fastidious about the
+cuts, if she didn't treat them all with pork gravy. Well, I mustn't be
+too hard on a lone widow that I owe board to. I don't suppose his diet
+had anything to do with the deep damnation of the late Betterson's
+taking off. Does that stove of yours smoke, Briggs?"
+
+"Not when there isn't a fire in it."
+
+"I just asked. Wallace's stove smokes, fire or no fire. It takes
+advantage of the old lady's indebtedness to him. There seem," he
+added, philosophically, "to be just two occupations open to widows who
+have to support themselves: millinery business for young ones,
+boarding-housing for old ones. It _is_ rather restricted. What do you
+suppose she puts into the mince-pies? Mince-pies are rather a mystery
+at the best."
+
+Wallace was walking up and down the room still in some difficulty with
+his trousers-legs, and kicking out from time to time to dislodge them.
+"How long should you say Blakeley had been going on?" he asked Briggs.
+
+"You never can tell," Briggs responded. "I think he doesn't know
+himself."
+
+"Well said, youthful scribe! With such listeners as you two, I could
+go on forever. Consider yourselves clapped jovially on the back, my
+gentle Briggs; I can't get up to do it from the hollow of your bed
+here. As you were saying, the wonder about these elderly widows who
+keep boarding-houses is the domestic dilapidation they fall into. If
+they've ever known how to cook a meal or sweep a room or make a bed,
+these arts desert them in the presence of their boarders. Their only
+aim in life seems to be preventing the escape of their victims, and
+they either let them get into debt for their board or borrow money
+from them. But why do they always have daughters, and just two of
+them: one beautiful, fashionable, and devoted to the piano; the other
+willing to work, but pale, pathetic, and incapable of the smallest
+achievement with the gridiron or the wash-board? It's a thing to make
+a person want to pay up and leave, even if he's reading law. If
+Wallace, here, had the spirit of a man, he would collect the money
+owing him, and--"
+
+"Oh, stop it, Blakeley!" Wallace stormed. "I should think you'd get
+tired of your talk yourself."
+
+"Well, as you insist--"
+
+Blakeley began again, but Briggs jumped to his feet and caught up
+Phillips's carpet-bag, and looked wildly around. "It's gravel, this
+time."
+
+"Well, take your hat, Briggs. It may be a prolonged struggle. But
+remember that Phillips's cause is just. He's paid his board, and he
+has a perfect right to leave. She has no right to prevent him. Think
+of that when the fray is at its worst. But try to get him off quietly,
+if you can. Deal gently with the erring, while you stand firm for
+boarders' rights. Remember that Phillips is sneaking off in order to
+spare her feelings and has come pretty near prevarication in the
+effort. Have you got your shoes off? No; it's your rubbers on. That's
+better."
+
+Briggs faltered with the carpet-bag in his hand. "Boys, I don't like
+this. It feels--clandestine."
+
+"It _looks_ that way, too," Blakeley admitted. "It has an air of
+conspiracy."
+
+"I've got half a mind to let Phillips come in and get his bag
+himself."
+
+"It would serve him right, though I don't know why, exactly. He has a
+right to spare his own feelings if he's sparing hers at the same time.
+Of course he's afraid she'll plead with him to stay, and he'll have to
+be inexorable with her; and if I understand the yielding nature of
+Phillips he doesn't like to be inexorable."
+
+There came another sharp rattle of small pebbles at the window.
+
+"Oh, confound him!" Briggs cried under his breath, and he shuffled out
+of the room and crept noiselessly down the stairs to the front door.
+The door creaked a little in opening, and he left it ajar. The current
+of cold air that swept up to the companions he had left behind at his
+room door brought them the noise of his rush down the gravel walk to
+the gate and a noise there as of fugitive steps on the pavement
+outside.
+
+A weak female tread made itself heard in the hallway, followed by a
+sharp voice from a door in the rear. "Was it the cat, Jenny?"
+
+"No; the door just seems to have blown open. The catch is broken."
+
+Swift, strong steps advanced with an effect of angry suspicion. "I
+don't believe it blew open. More likely the cat clawed it open."
+
+The steps which the voice preceded seemed to halt at the open door, as
+if falling back from it, and Wallace and Blakeley, looking down, saw
+by the dim flare of the hall lamp the face of Briggs confronting the
+face of Mrs. Betterson from the outer darkness. They saw the sick
+girl, whose pallor they could not see, supporting herself by the
+stairs-post with one hand and pressing the other to her side.
+
+"Oh! It's _you_, Mr. Briggs," the landlady said, with a note of
+inculpation. "What made you leave the door open?"
+
+The spectators could not see the swift change in Briggs's face from
+terror to savage desperation, but they noted it in his voice.
+"Yes--yes! It's me. I just--I was just-- No I won't, either! You'd
+better know the truth. I was taking Phillips's bag out to him. He was
+afraid to come in for it, because he didn't want to see you, the
+confounded coward! He's left."
+
+"Left? And he said he would stay till spring! Didn't he, Jenny?"
+
+"I don't remember--" the girl weakly gasped, but her mother did not
+heed her in her mounting wrath.
+
+"A great preacher _he'll_ make. What'd he say he left for?"
+
+"He didn't say. Will you let me up-stairs?"
+
+"No, I won't, till you tell me. You know well enough, between you."
+
+"Yes, I do know," Briggs answered, savagely. "He left because he was
+tired of eating sole-leather for steak, and fire-salt pork, and tar
+for molasses, and butter strong enough to make your nose curl, and
+drinking burnt-rye slops for coffee and tea-grounds for tea. And so am
+I, and so are all of us, and--and-- Will you let me go up-stairs now,
+Mrs. Betterson?"
+
+His voice had risen, not so high but that another voice from the
+parlor could prevail over it: a false, silly, girl voice, with the
+twitter of piano-keys as from hands swept over the whole board to help
+drown the noise of the quarrel in the hall. "Oh yes, I'll sing it
+again, Mr. Saunders, if you sa-a-a-y."
+
+Then this voice lifted itself in a silly song, and a silence followed
+the voices in the hall, except for the landlady's saying, brokenly:
+"Well, all right, Mr. Briggs. You can go up to your room for all me.
+I've tried to be a mother to you boys, but if _this_ is what I get for
+it!"
+
+The two at the threshold of Briggs's room retreated within, as he
+bounded furiously upon them and slammed the door after him. It started
+open again, from the chronic defect of the catch, but he did not care.
+
+"Well, Briggs, I hope you feel better now," Blakeley began. "You
+certainly told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing _but_ the
+truth. But I wonder you had the heart to do it before that sick girl."
+
+"I _didn't_ have the heart," Briggs shouted. "But I had the courage,
+and if you say one word more, Blakeley, I'll throw you out of the
+room. I'm going to leave! _My_ board's paid if yours isn't."
+
+He went wildly about, catching things down here and there from nails
+and out of drawers. The tears stood in his eyes. But suddenly he
+stopped and listened to the sounds from below--the sound of the silly
+singing in the parlor, and the sound of sobbing in the dining-room,
+and the sound of vain entreating between the sobs.
+
+"Oh, I don't suppose I'm fit to keep a boarding-house. I never was a
+good manager; and everybody imposes on me, and everything is so dear,
+and I don't know what's good from what's bad. Your poor father used
+to look after all that."
+
+"Well, don't you cry, now, mother! It'll all come right, you'll see.
+I'm getting so I can go and do the marketing now; and if Minervy would
+only help a little--"
+
+"No, no!" the mother's voice came anxiously up. "We can get along
+without her; we always have. I know he likes her, and I want to give
+her every chance. _We_ can get along. If she was on'y married, once,
+we could all live--" A note of self-comforting gradually stole into
+the mother's voice, and the sound of a nose violently blown seemed to
+note a period in her suffering.
+
+"Oh, mother, I wish I was well!" The girl's voice came with a burst of
+wild lamenting.
+
+"'Sh, 'sh, deary!" her mother entreated. "He'll _hear_ you, and
+then--"
+
+"'Hazel Dell'?" the silly voice came from the parlor, with a sound of
+fright in it. "I can sing it without the music." The piano keys
+twittered the prelude and the voice sang:
+
+          "In the Hazel Dell my Nelly's sleeping,
+            Nelly loved so long!"
+
+Wallace went forward and shut the door. "It's a shame to overhear
+them! What are you going to do, you fellows?"
+
+"I'm going to stay," Briggs said, "if it kills me. At least I will
+till Minervy's married. _I_ don't care what the grub's like. I can
+always get a bite at the restaurant."
+
+"If anybody will pay up my back board, I'll stay, too," Blakeley
+followed. "I should like to make a virtue of it, and, as things stand,
+I can't."
+
+"All right," Wallace said, and he went out and down the stairs. Then
+from the dining-room below his heavy voice offering encouragement came
+up, in terms which the others could not make out.
+
+"I'll bet he's making her another advance," Blakeley whispered, as if
+he might be overheard by Wallace.
+
+"I wish _I_ could have made to do it," Briggs whispered back. "I feel
+as mean as pursley. Would you like to kick me?"
+
+"I don't see how that would do any good. I may want to borrow money of
+you, and you can't ask a loan from a man you've kicked. Besides, I
+think what you said may do her good."
+
+
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+                      BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL
+
+
+                                  I
+
+  Breakfast is my best meal, and I reckon it's always been
+  Ever since I was old enough to know what breakfast could mean.
+  I mind when we lived in the cabin out on the Illinoy,
+  Where father had took up a quarter-section when I was a boy,
+  I used to go for the cows as soon as it was light;
+  And when I started back home, before I come in sight,
+  I come in _smell_ of the cabin, where mother was frying the ham,
+  And boiling the coffee, that reached through the air like a mile o' ba'm,
+  'N' I bet you I didn't wait to see what it was that the dog
+  Thought he'd got under the stump or inside o' the hollow log!
+  But I made the old cows canter till their hoof-joints cracked--you know
+  That dry, funny kind of a noise that the cows make when they go--
+  And I never stopped to wash when I got to the cabin door;
+  I pulled up my chair and e't like I never had e't before.
+  And mother she set there and watched me eat, and eat, and eat,
+  Like as if she couldn't give her old eyes enough of the treat;
+  And she split the shortened biscuit, and spread the butter between,
+  And let it lay there and melt, and soak and soak itself in;
+  And she piled up my plate with potato and ham and eggs,
+  Till I couldn't hold any more, or hardly stand on my legs;
+  And she filled me up with coffee that would float an iron wedge,
+  And never give way a mite, or spill a drop at the edge.
+
+
+                                  II
+
+  What? Well, yes, this is good coffee, too. If they don't know much,
+  They do know how to make coffee, I _will_ say that for these Dutch.
+  But my--oh, my! It ain't the kind of coffee my mother made,
+  And the coffee my wife used to make would throw it clear in the shade;
+  And the brand of sugar-cured, canvased ham that she always used--
+  Well, this Westphalia stuff would simply have made her amused!
+  That so, heigh? I saw that you was United States as soon
+  As ever I heard you talk; I reckon I know the tune!
+  Pick it out anywhere; and _you_ understand how I feel
+  About these here foreign breakfasts: breakfast is my best meal.
+
+
+                                 III
+
+  My! but my wife was a cook; and the breakfasts she used to get
+  The first years we was married, I can smell 'em and taste 'em yet:
+  Corn cake light as a feather, and buckwheat thin as lace
+  And crisp as cracklin'; and steak that you couldn't have the face
+  To compare any steak over here to; and chicken fried
+  Maryland style--I couldn't get through the bill if I tried.
+  And then, her waffles! My! She'd kind of slip in a few
+  Between the ham and the chicken--you know how women'll do--
+  For a sort of little surprise, and, if I was running light,
+  To take my fancy and give an edge to my appetite.
+  Done it all herself as long as we was poor, and I tell _you_
+  _She_ liked to see me eat as well as mother used to do;
+  I reckon she went ahead of mother some, if the truth was known,
+  And everything she touched she give a taste of her own.
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+  _She_ was a cook, I can tell you! And after we got ahead,
+  And she could 'a' had a girl to do the cookin' instead,
+  I had the greatest time to get Momma to leave the work;
+  She said it made her feel like a mis'able sneak and shirk.
+  She didn't want daughter, though, when we did begin to keep girls,
+  To come in the kitchen and cook, and smell up her clo'es and curls;
+  But you couldn't have stopped the child, whatever you tried to do--
+  I reckon the gift of the cookin' was born in Girly, too.
+  Cook she would from the first, and we just had to let her alone;
+  And after she got married, and had a house of her own,
+  She tried to make me feel, when I come to live with her,
+  Like it was my house, too; and I tell you she done it, sir!
+  She remembered that breakfast was my best meal, and she tried
+  To have all I used to have, and a good deal more beside;
+  Grape-fruit to begin with, or melons or peaches, at least--
+  Husband's business took him there, and they had went to live East--
+  Then a Spanish macker'l, or a soft-shell crab on toast,
+  Or a broiled live lobster! Well, sir, I don't want to seem to boast,
+  But I don't believe you could have got in the whole of New York
+  Any such an oyster fry or sausage of country pork.
+
+
+                                  V
+
+  Well, I don't know what-all it means; I always lived just so--
+  Never drinked or smoked, and yet, here about two years ago,
+  I begun to run down; I ain't as young as I used to be;
+  And the doctors all said Carlsbad, and I reckon this is me.
+  But it's more like some one I've dreamt of, with all three of 'em gone!
+  Believe in ghosts? Well, _I_ do. I _know_ there are ghosts. I'm _one_.
+  Maybe I mayn't look it--I was always inclined to fat;
+  The doctors say that's the trouble, and very likely it's that.
+  This is my little grandson, and this is the oldest one
+  Of Girly's girls; and for all that the whole of us said and done,
+  She must come with grandpa when the doctors sent me off here,
+  To see that they didn't starve him. Ain't that about so, my dear?
+  _She_ can cook, I tell you; and when we get home again
+  We're goin' to have something to _eat_; I'm just a-livin' till then.
+  But when I set here of a morning, and think of them that's gone--
+  Mother and Momma and Girly--well, I wouldn't like to let on
+  Before the children, but I can almost seem to see
+  All of 'em lookin' down, like as if they pitied me,
+  After the breakfasts they give me, to have me have to put up
+  With nothing but bread and butter, and a little mis'able cup
+  Of this here weak-kneed coffee! I can't tell how _you_ feel,
+  But it fairly makes me sick! Breakfast is my best meal.
+
+
+
+
+                                  X
+
+                           THE MOTHER-BIRD
+
+
+She wore around the turned-up brim of her bolero-like toque a band of
+violets not so much in keeping with the gray of the austere November
+day as with the blue of her faded autumnal eyes. Her eyes were
+autumnal, but it was not from this, or from the lines of maturity
+graven on the passing prettiness of her little face, that the notion
+and the name of Mother-Bird suggested itself. She became known as the
+Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the earliest, if not the
+latest, of her friends, because she was slight and small, and like a
+bird in her eager movements, and because she spoke so instantly and so
+constantly of her children in Dresden: before you knew anything else
+of her you knew that she was going out to them.
+
+She was quite alone, and she gave the sense of claiming their
+protection, and sheltering herself in the fact of them. When she
+mentioned her daughters she had the effect of feeling herself
+chaperoned by them. You could not go behind them and find her wanting
+in the social guarantees which women on steamers, if not men, exact of
+lonely birds of passage who are not mother-birds. One must respect the
+convention by which she safeguarded herself and tried to make good her
+standing; yet it did not lastingly avail her with other birds of
+passage, so far as they were themselves mother-birds, or sometimes
+only maiden-birds. The day had not ended before they began to hold her
+off by slight liftings of their wings and rufflings of their feathers,
+by quick, evasive flutterings, by subtle ignorances of her approach,
+which convinced no one but themselves that they had not seen her. She
+sailed with the sort of acquaintance-in-common which every one shares
+on a ship leaving port, when people are confused by the kindness of
+friends coming to see them off after sending baskets of fruit and
+sheaves of flowers, and scarcely know what they are doing or saying.
+But when the ship was abreast of Fire Island, and the pilot had gone
+over the side, these provisional intimacies of the parting hour began
+to restrict themselves. Then the Mother-Bird did not know half the
+women she had known at the pier, or quite all the men.
+
+It was not that she did anything obvious to forfeit this knowledge.
+Her behavior was if anything too exemplary; it might be thought to
+form a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the unseasonable band of
+violets around her hat-brim; perhaps it was the vernal gaiety of her
+dress; perhaps it was the uncertainty of her anxious eyes, which
+presumed while they implored. A mother-bird must not hover too
+confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose preoccupations she
+does not share. It might have been her looking and dressing younger
+than nature justified; at forty one must not look thirty; in November
+one must not, even involuntarily, wear the things of May if one would
+have others believe in one's devotion to one's children in Dresden;
+one alleges in vain one's impatience to join them as grounds for
+joining groups or detached persons who have begun to write home to
+their children in New York or Boston.
+
+The very readiness of the Mother-Bird to give security by the mention
+of well-known names, to offer proof of her social solvency by the
+eager correctness of her behavior, created reluctance around her. Some
+would not have her at all from the first; others, who had partially or
+conditionally accepted her, returned her upon her hands and withdrew
+from the negotiation. More and more she found herself outside that
+hard woman-world, and trying less and less to beat her way into it.
+
+The women may have known her better even than she knew herself, and it
+may have been through ignorance greater than her own that the men were
+more acquiescent. But the men too were not so acquiescent, or not at
+all, as time passed.
+
+It would be hard to fix the day, the hour, far harder the moment, when
+the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear
+in the smoking-room, or say whether she passed from the one to the
+other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women's unwritten
+law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship,
+after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and
+sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her
+poor, pretty little face, with its faded blue eyes and wistful mouth.
+There she passed by quick transition from the conversation of the
+graver elderly smokers to the loud laughter of two birds of prey who
+became her comrades, or such friends as birds like them can be to
+birds like her.
+
+From anything she had said or done there was no reason for her lapse
+from the women and the better men to such men; for her transition from
+the better sort of women there was no reason except that it happened.
+Whether she attached herself to the birds of prey, or they to her, by
+that instinct which enables birds of all kinds to know themselves of a
+feather remained a touching question.
+
+There remained to the end the question whether she was of a feather
+with them, or whether it was by some mischance, or by some such stress
+of the elements as drives birds of any feather to flock with birds of
+any other. To the end there remained a distracted and forsaken
+innocence in her looks. It was imaginable that she had made overtures
+to the birds of prey because she had made overtures to every one else;
+she was always seeking rather than sought, and her acceptance with
+them was as deplorable as her refusal by better birds. Often they were
+seen without her, when they had that look of having escaped, which
+others wore; but she was not often seen without them.
+
+There is not much walking-weather on a November passage, and she was
+seen less with them in the early dark outdoors than in the late light
+within, by which she wavered a small form through the haze of their
+cigars in the smoking-room, or in the grill-room, where she showed in
+faint eclipse through the fumes of the broiling and frying, or
+through the vapors of the hot whiskies. The birds of prey were then
+heard laughing, but whether at her or with her it must have been
+equally sorrowful to learn.
+
+Perhaps they were laughing at the maternal fondness which she had used
+for introduction to the general acquaintance lost almost in the moment
+of winning it. She seemed not to resent their laughter, though she
+seemed not to join in it. The worst of her was the company she kept;
+but since no better would allow her to keep it, you could not
+confidently say she would not have liked the best company on board. At
+the same time you could not have said she would; you could not have
+been sure it would not have bored her. Doubtless these results are not
+solely the sport of chance; they must be somewhat the event of choice
+if not of desert.
+
+For anything you could have sworn, the Mother-Bird would have liked to
+be as good as the best. But since it was not possible for her to be
+good in the society of the best, she could only be good in that of the
+worst. It was to be hoped that the birds of prey were not cruel to
+her; that their mockery was never unkind if ever it was mockery. The
+cruelty which must come came when they began to be seen less and less
+with her, even at the late suppers, through the haze of their cigars
+and the smoke of the broiling and frying, and the vapors of the hot
+whiskies. Then it was the sharpest pang of all to meet her wandering
+up and down the ship's promenades, or leaning on the rail and looking
+dimly out over the foam-whitened black sea. It is the necessity of
+birds of prey to get rid of other birds when they are tired of them,
+and it had doubtless come to that.
+
+One night, the night before getting into port, when the curiosity
+which always followed her with grief failed of her in the heightened
+hilarity of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the ship's run
+were making, it found her alone beside a little iron table, of those
+set in certain nooks outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one
+near, where the light from within fell palely upon her. The boon birds
+of prey, with whom she had been supping, had abandoned her, and she
+was supporting her cheek on the small hand of the arm that rested on
+the table. She leaned forward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the
+violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vibrations of the
+machinery. She was asleep, poor Mother-Bird, and it would have been
+impossible not to wish her dreams were kind.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XI
+
+                              THE AMIGO
+
+
+His name was really Perez Armando Aldeano, but in the end everybody
+called him the _amigo_, because that was the endearing term by which
+he saluted all the world. There was a time when the children called
+him "Span-yard" in their games, for he spoke no tongue but Spanish,
+and though he came from Ecuador, and was no more a Spaniard than they
+were English, he answered to the call of "Span-yard!" whenever he
+heard it. He came eagerly in the hope of fun, and all the more eagerly
+if there was a hope of mischief in the fun. Still, to discerning
+spirits, he was always the _amigo_, for, when he hailed you so, you
+could not help hailing him so again, and whatever mock he put upon you
+afterward, you were his secret and inalienable friend.
+
+The moment of my own acceptance in this quality came in the first
+hours of expansion following our getting to sea after long detention
+in the dock by fog. A small figure came flying down the dock with
+outspread arms, and a joyful cry of "Ah, _amigo_!" as if we were now
+meeting unexpectedly after a former intimacy in Bogotá; and the
+_amigo_ clasped me round the middle to his bosom, or more strictly
+speaking, his brow, which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was clad in
+a long black overcoat, and a boy's knee-pants, and under the peak of
+his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a
+smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was more and more, with the
+thinness of his small black legs, and his habit of hopping up and
+down, and dancing threateningly about, with mischief latent in every
+motion, like a crow which in being tamed has acquired one of the worst
+traits of civilization. He began babbling and gurgling in Spanish, and
+took my hand for a stroll about the ship, and from that time we were,
+with certain crises of disaffection, firm allies.
+
+There were others whom he hailed and adopted his friends, whose legs
+he clung about and impeded in their walks, or whom he required to toss
+him into the air as they passed, but I flattered myself that he had a
+peculiar, because a primary, esteem for myself. I have thought it
+might be that, Bogotá being said to be a very literary capital, as
+those things go in South America, he was mystically aware of a common
+ground between us, wider and deeper than that of his other
+friendships. But it may have been somewhat owing to my inviting him to
+my cabin to choose such portion as he would of a lady-cake sent us on
+shipboard at the last hour. He prattled and chuckled over it in the
+soft gutturals of his parrot-like Spanish, and rushed up on deck to
+eat the frosting off in the presence of his small companions, and to
+exult before them in the exploitation of a novel pleasure. Yet it
+could not have been the lady-cake which lastingly endeared me to him,
+for by the next day he had learned prudence and refused it without
+withdrawing his amity.
+
+This, indeed, was always tempered by what seemed a constitutional
+irony, and he did not impart it to any one without some time making
+his friend feel the edge of his practical humor. It was not long
+before the children whom he gathered to his heart had each and all
+suffered some fall or bump or bruise which, if not of his intention,
+was of his infliction, and which was regretted with such winning
+archness that the very mothers of them could not resist him, and his
+victims dried their tears to follow him with glad cries of "Span-yard,
+Span-yard!" Injury at his hands was a favor; neglect was the only real
+grievance. He went about rolling his small black head, and darting
+roguish lightnings from under his thick-fringed eyes, and making more
+trouble with a more enticing gaiety than all the other people on the
+ship put together.
+
+The truth must be owned that the time came, long before the end of the
+voyage, when it was felt that in the interest of the common welfare,
+something must be done about the _amigo_. At the conversational end of
+the doctor's table, where he was discussed whenever the racks were not
+on, and the talk might have languished without their inspiration, his
+badness was debated at every meal. Some declared him the worst boy in
+the world, and held against his half-hearted defenders that something
+ought to be done about him; and one was left to imagine all the darker
+fate for him because there was nothing specific in these convictions.
+He could not be thrown overboard, and if he had been put in irons
+probably his worst enemies at the conversational end of the table
+would have been the first to intercede for him. It is not certain,
+however, that their prayers would have been effective with the
+captain, if that officer, framed for comfort as well as command, could
+have known how accurately the _amigo_ had dramatized his personal
+presence by throwing himself back, and clasping his hands a foot in
+front of his small stomach, and making a few tilting paces forward.
+
+The _amigo_ had a mimic gift which he liked to exercise when he could
+find no intelligible language for the expression of his ironic spirit.
+Being forbidden visits in and out of season to certain staterooms
+whose inmates feigned a wish to sleep, he represented in what
+grotesque attitudes of sonorous slumber they passed their day, and he
+spared neither age nor sex in these graphic shows. When age refused
+one day to go up on deck with him and pleaded in such Spanish as it
+could pluck up from its past studies that it was too old, he laughed
+it to scorn. "You are not old," he said. "Why?" the flattered dotard
+inquired. "Because you smile," and that seemed reason enough for one's
+continued youth. It was then that the _amigo_ gave his own age,
+carefully telling the Spanish numerals over, and explaining further by
+holding up both hands with one finger shut in. But he had the subtlety
+of centuries in his nine years, and he penetrated the ship everywhere
+with his arch spirit of mischief. It was mischief always in the
+interest of the good-fellowship which he offered impartially to old
+and young; and if it were mere frolic, with no ulterior object, he did
+not care at all how old or young his playmate was. This endeared him
+naturally to every age; and the little blond German-American boy
+dried his tears from the last accident inflicted on him by the _amigo_
+to recall him by tender entreaties of "Span-yard, Span-yard!" while
+the eldest of his friends could not hold out against him more than two
+days in the strained relations following upon the _amigo's_ sweeping
+him down the back with a toy broom employed by the German-American boy
+to scrub the scuppers. This was not so much an injury as an indignity,
+but it was resented as an indignity, in spite of many demure glances
+of propitiation from the _amigo's_ ironical eyes and murmurs of
+inarticulate apology as he passed.
+
+He was, up to a certain point, the kindest and truest of _amigos_;
+then his weird seizure came, and the baby was spilled out of the
+carriage he had been so benevolently pushing up and down; or the
+second officer's legs, as he walked past with the prettiest girl on
+board, were hit with the stick that the _amigo_ had been innocently
+playing shuffle-board with; or some passenger was taken unawares in
+his vanity or infirmity and made to contribute to the _amigo's_
+passion for active amusement.
+
+At this point I ought to explain that the _amigo_ was not traveling
+alone from Ecuador to Paris, where it was said he was to rejoin his
+father. At meal-times, and at other rare intervals, he was seen to be
+in the charge of a very dark and very silent little man, with
+intensely black eyes and mustache, clad in raven hues from his head to
+the delicate feet on which he wore patent-leather shoes. With him the
+_amigo_ walked gravely up and down the deck, and behaved decorously at
+table; and we could not reconcile the apparent affection between the
+two with a theory we had that the _amigo_ had been found impossible in
+his own country, and had been sent out of Ecuador by a decree of the
+government, or perhaps a vote of the whole people. The little, dark,
+silent man, in his patent-leather boots, had not the air of conveying
+a state prisoner into exile, and we wondered in vain what the tie
+between him and the _amigo_ was. He might have been his tutor, or his
+uncle. He exercised a quite mystical control over the _amigo_, who was
+exactly obedient to him in everything, and would not look aside at you
+when in his keeping. We reflected with awe and pathos that, as they
+roomed together, it was his privilege to see the _amigo_ asleep, when
+that little, very kissable black head rested innocently on the pillow,
+and the busy brain within it was at peace with the world which formed
+its pleasure and its prey in waking.
+
+It would be idle to represent that the _amigo_ played his pranks upon
+that shipload of long-suffering people with final impunity. The time
+came when they not only said something must be done, but actually did
+something. It was by the hand of one of the _amigo's_ sweetest and
+kindest friends, namely, that elderly captain, off duty, who was going
+out to be assigned his ship in Hamburg. From the first he had shown
+the affectionate tenderness for the _amigo_ which was felt by all
+except some obdurate hearts at the conversational end of the table;
+and it must have been with a loving interest in the _amigo's_ ultimate
+well-being that, taking him in an ecstasy of mischief, he drew the
+_amigo_ face downward across his knees, and bestowed the chastisement
+which was morally a caress. He dismissed him with a smile in which the
+_amigo_ read the good understanding that existed unimpaired between
+them, and accepted his correction with the same affection as that
+which had given it. He shook himself and ran off with an enjoyment of
+the joke as great as that of any of the spectators and far more
+generous.
+
+In fact there was nothing mean in the _amigo_. Impish he was, or might
+be, but only in the sort of the crow or the parrot; there was no
+malevolence in his fine malice. One fancied him in his adolescence
+taking part in one of the frequent revolutions of his continent, but
+humorously, not homicidally. He would like to alarm the other
+faction, and perhaps drive it from power, or overset it from its
+official place, but if he had the say there would be no bringing the
+vanquished out into the plaza to be shot. He may now have been on his
+way to France ultimately to study medicine, which seems to be
+preliminary to a high political career in South America; but in the
+mean time we feared for him in that republic of severely regulated
+subordinations.
+
+We thought with pathos of our early parting with him, as we approached
+Plymouth and tried to be kodaked with him, considering it an honor and
+pleasure. He so far shared our feeling as to consent, but he insisted
+on wearing a pair of glasses which had large eyes painted on them, and
+on being taken in the act of inflating a toy balloon. Probably,
+therefore, the likeness would not be recognized in Bogotá, but it will
+always be endeared to us by the memory of the many mockeries suffered
+from him. There were other friends whom we left on the ship, notably
+those of the conversational end of the table, who thought him simply a
+bad boy; but there were none of such peculiar appeal as he, when he
+stood by the guard, opening and shutting his hand in ironical adieu,
+and looking smaller and smaller as our tender drifted away and the
+vast liner loomed immense before us. He may have contributed to its
+effect of immensity by the smallness of his presence, or it may have
+dwarfed him. No matter; he filled no slight space in our lives while
+he lasted. Now that he is no longer there, was he really a bad little
+boy, merely and simply? Heaven knows, which alone knows good boys from
+bad.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XII
+
+                           BLACK CROSS FARM
+
+                              (To F. S.)
+
+
+  After full many a mutual delay
+  My friend and I at last fixed on a day
+  For seeing Black Cross Farm, which he had long
+  Boasted the fittest theme for tale or song
+  In all that charming region round about:
+  Something that must not really be left out
+  Of the account of things to do for me.
+  It was a teasing bit of mystery,
+  He said, which he and his had tried in vain,
+  Ever since they had found it, to explain.
+  The right way was to happen, as they did,
+  Upon it in the hills where it was hid;
+  But chance could not be always trusted, quite,
+  You might not happen on it, though you might;
+  Encores were usually objected to
+  By chance. The next best thing that we could do
+  Was in his carryall, to start together,
+  And trust that somehow favoring wind and weather,
+  With the eccentric progress of his horse,
+  Would so far drift us from our settled course
+  That we at least could lose ourselves, if not
+  Find the mysterious object that we sought.
+  So one blithe morning of the ripe July
+  We fared, by easy stages, toward the sky
+  That rested one rim of its turquoise cup
+  Low on the distant sea, and, tilted up,
+  The other on the irregular hilltops. Sweet
+  The sun and wind that joined to cool and heat
+  The air to one delicious temperature;
+  And over the smooth-cropt mowing-pieces pure
+  The pine-breath, borrowing their spicy scent
+  In barter for the balsam that it lent!
+  And when my friend handed the reins to me,
+  And drew a fuming match along his knee,
+  And, lighting his cigar, began to talk,
+  I let the old horse lapse into a walk
+  From his perfunctory trot, content to listen,
+  Amid that leafy rustle and that glisten
+  Of field, and wood, and ocean, rapt afar,
+  From every trouble of our anxious star.
+  From time to time, between effect and cause
+  In this or that, making a questioning pause,
+  My friend peered round him while he feigned a gay
+  Hope that we might have taken the wrong way
+  At the last turn, and then let me push on,
+  Or the old horse rather, slanting hither and yon,
+  And never in the middle of the track,
+  Except when slanting off or slanting back.
+  He talked, I listened, while we wandered by
+  The scanty fields of wheat and oats and rye,
+  With patches of potatoes and of corn,
+  And now and then a garden spot forlorn,
+  Run wild where once a house had stood, or where
+  An empty house yet stood, and seemed to stare
+  Upon us blindly from the twisted glass
+  Of windows that once let no wayfarer pass
+  Unseen of children dancing at the pane,
+  And vanishing to reappear again,
+  Pulling their mother with them to the sight.
+  Still we kept on, with turnings left and right,
+  Past farmsteads grouped in cheerful neighborhoods,
+  Or solitary; then through shadowy woods
+  Of pine or birch, until the road, grass-grown,
+  Had given back to Nature all her own
+  Save a faint wheel-trace, that along the slope,
+  Rain-gullied, seemed to stop and doubt and grope,
+  And then quite ceased, as if 't had turned and fled
+  Out of the forest into which it led,
+  And left us at the gate whose every bar
+  Was nailed against us. But, "Oh, here we are!"
+  My friend cried joyously. "At last, at last!"
+  And making our horse superfluously fast,
+  He led the way onward by what had been
+  A lane, now hid by weeds and briers between
+  Meadows scarce worth the mowing, to a space
+  Shaped as by Nature for the dwelling-place
+  Of kindly human life: a small plateau
+  Open to the heaven that seemed bending low
+  In liking for it. There beneath a roof
+  Still against winter and summer weather-proof,
+  With walls and doors and windows perfect yet,
+  Between its garden and its graveyard set,
+  Stood the old homestead, out of which had perished
+  The home whose memory it dumbly cherished,
+  And which, when at our push the door swung wide,
+  We might have well imagined to have died
+  And had its funeral the day before:
+  So clean and cold it was from floor to floor,
+  So lifelike and so deathlike, with the thrill
+  Of hours when life and death encountered still
+  Passionate in it. They that lay below
+  The tangled grasses or the drifted snow,
+  Husband and wife, mother and little one,
+  From that sad house less utterly were gone
+  Than they that living had abandoned it.
+  In moonless nights their Absences might flit,
+  Homesick, from room to room, or dimly sit
+  Around its fireless hearths, or haunt the rose
+  And lily in the neglected garden close;
+  But they whose feet had borne them from the door
+  Would pass the footworn threshold nevermore.
+  We read the moss-grown names upon the tombs,
+  With lighter melancholy than the glooms
+  Of the dead house shadowed us with, and thence
+  Turning, my heart was pierced with more intense
+  Suggestion of a mystical dismay,
+  As in the brilliance of the summer day
+  We faced the vast gray barn. The house was old,
+  Though so well kept, as age by years is told
+  In our young land; but the barn, gray and vast,
+  Stood new and straight and strong--all battened fast
+  At every opening; and where once the mow
+  Had yawned wide-windowed, on the sheathing now
+  A Cross was nailed, the bigness of a man,
+  Aslant from left to right, athwart the span,
+  And painted black as paint could make it. Hushed,
+  I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed
+  To this point and to that point, and then burst
+  In the impotent questionings rejected first.
+  What did it mean? Ah, that no one could tell.
+  Who put it there? That was unknown as well.
+  Was there no legend? My friend knew of none.
+  No neighborhood story? He had sought for one
+  In vain. Did he imagine it accident,
+  With nothing really implied or meant
+  By the boards set in that way? It might be,
+  But I could answer that as well as he.
+  Then (desperately) what did he guess it was:
+  Something of purpose, or without a cause
+  Other than chance? He slowly shook his head,
+  And with his gaze fixed on the symbol said:
+  "We have quite ceased from guessing or surmising,
+  For all our several and joint devising
+  Has left us finally where I must leave you.
+  But now I think it is your part to do
+  Yourself some guessing. I hoped you might bring
+  A fresh mind to the riddle's unraveling.
+  Come!"
+
+        And thus challenged I could not deny
+  The sort of right he had to have me try;
+  And yielding, I began--instinctively
+  Proceeding by exclusion: "We agree
+  It was not put there as a pious charm
+  To keep the abandoned property from harm?
+  The owner could have been no Catholic;
+  And yet it was no sacrilegious trick
+  To make folks wonder; and it was not chance
+  Assuredly that set those boards askance
+  In that shape, or before or after, so
+  Painted them to that coloring of woe.
+  Do you suppose, then, that it could have been
+  Some secret sorrow or some secret sin,
+  That tried to utter or to expiate
+  Itself in that way: some unhappy hate
+  Turned to remorse, or some life-rending grief
+  That could not find in years or tears relief?
+  Who lived here last?"
+
+                        "Ah," my friend made reply,
+  "You know as much concerning that as I.
+  All I could tell is what those gravestones tell,
+  And they have told it all to you as well.
+  The names, the dates, the curious epitaphs
+  At whose quaint phrase one either sighs or laughs,
+  Just as one's heart or head happens to be
+  Hollow or not, are there for each to see.
+  But I believe they have nothing to reveal:
+  No wrong to publish, no shame to conceal."
+
+    "And yet that Cross!" I turned at his reply,
+  Fixing the silent symbol with my eye,
+  Insistently. "And you consent," I said,
+  "To leave the enigma uninterpreted?"
+
+    "Why, no," he faltered, then went on: "Suppose
+  That some one that had known the average woes
+  Of human nature, finding that the load
+  Was overheavy for him on life's road,
+  Had wished to leave some token in this Cross,
+  Of what had been his gain and been his loss,
+  Of what had been his suffering and of what
+  Had also been the solace of his lot?
+  Whoever that unknown brother-man might be,
+  I think he must have been like you and me,
+  Who bear our Cross, and when we fail at length,
+  Bow down and pray to it for greater strength."
+
+    I mused, and as I mused, I seemed to find
+  The fancy more and still more to my mind.
+
+    "Well, let it go at that! I think, for me,
+  I like that better than some tragedy
+  Of clearer physiognomy, which were
+  In being more definite the vulgarer.
+  For us, what, after all, would be the gain
+  Of making the elusive meaning plain?
+  I really think, if I were you and yours,
+  I would not lift the veil that now obscures
+  The appealing fact, lest I should spoil the charm
+  Deeding me for my own the Black Cross Farm."
+
+    "A good suggestion! I am glad," said he,
+  "We have always practised your philosophy."
+
+    He smiled, we laughed; we sighed and turned away,
+  And left the mystery to the summer day
+  That made as if it understood, and could
+  Have read the riddle to us if it would:
+  The wide, wise sky, the clouds that on the grass
+  Let their vague shadows dreamlike trail and pass;
+  The conscious woods, the stony meadows growing
+  Up to birch pastures, where we heard the lowing
+  Of one disconsolate cow. All the warm afternoon,
+  Lulled in a reverie by the myriad tune
+  Of insects, and the chirp of songless birds,
+  Forgetful of the spring-time's lyric words,
+  Drowsed round us while we tried to find the lane
+  That to our coming feet had been so plain,
+  And lost ourselves among the sweetfern's growth,
+  And thickets of young pine-trees, nothing loath,
+  Amidst the wilding loveliness to stray,
+  And spend, if need were, looking for the way,
+  Whole hours; but blundered into the right course
+  Suddenly, and came out upon our horse,
+  Where we had left him--to our great surprise,
+  Stamping and switching at the pestering flies,
+  But not apparently anxious to depart,
+  When nearly overturning at the start,
+  We followed down that evanescent trace
+  Which, followed up, had brought us to the place.
+
+    Then, all the wayside scenes reversing, we
+  Dropped to the glimpses of the distant sea,
+  Content as if we brought, returning thus,
+  The secret of the Black Cross back with us.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIII
+
+                        THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
+
+
+It had long been the notion of Frederick Erlcort, who held it
+playfully, held it seriously, according to the company he was in, that
+there might be a censorship of taste and conscience in literary
+matters strictly affiliated with the retail commerce in books. When he
+first began to propose it, playfully, seriously, as his listener
+chose, he said that he had noticed how in the great department stores
+where nearly everything to supply human need was sold, the shopmen and
+shopwomen seemed instructed by the ownership or the management to deal
+in absolute good faith with the customers, and not to misrepresent the
+quality, the make, or the material of any article in the slightest
+degree. A thing was not to be called silk or wool when it was partly
+cotton; it was not to be said that it would wash when it would not
+wash, or that the color would not come off when it would come off, or
+that the stuff was English or French when it was American.
+
+When Erlcort once noted his interest in the fact to a floor-walker
+whom he happened to find at leisure, the floor-walker said, Yes, that
+was so; and the house did it because it was business, good business,
+the only good business. He was instantly enthusiastic, and he said
+that just in the same way, as an extension of its good faith with the
+public, the house had established the rule of taking back any article
+which a customer did not like, or did not find what she had supposed
+when she got it home, and refunding the money. This was the best sort
+of business; it held custom; the woman became a customer for life. The
+floor-walker laughed, and after he had told an anxious applicant,
+"Second aisle to the left, lady; three counters back," he concluded to
+Erlcort, "I say she because a man never brings a thing back when he's
+made a mistake; but a woman can always blame it on the house. That
+so?"
+
+Erlcort laughed with him, and in going out he stopped at the
+book-counter. Rather it was a bookstore, and no small one, with ranks
+of new books covering the large tables and mounting to their level
+from the floor, neatly piled, and with shelves of complete editions
+and soberer-looking volumes stretching along the wall as high as the
+ceiling. "Do you happen to have a good book--a book that would read
+good, I mean--in your stock here?" he asked the neat blonde behind
+the literary barricade.
+
+"Well, here's a book that a good many are reading," she answered, with
+prompt interest and a smile that told in the book's favor; it was a
+protectingly filial and guardedly ladylike smile.
+
+"Yes, but is it a book worth reading--worth the money?"
+
+"Well, I don't know as I'm a judge," the kind little blonde replied.
+She added, daringly, "All I can say is, I set up till two last night
+to finish it."
+
+"And you advise me to buy it?"
+
+"Well, we're not allowed to do that, exactly. I can only tell you what
+I know."
+
+"But if I take it, and it isn't what I expected, I can return it and
+get my money back?"
+
+"That's something I never was asked before. Mr. Jeffers! Mr. Jeffers!"
+she called to a floor-walker passing near; and when he stopped and
+came up to the counter, she put the case to him.
+
+He took the book from Erlcort's hand and examined the outside of it
+curiously if not critically. Then he looked from it to Erlcort, and
+said, "Oh, how do you do again! Well, no, sir; I don't know as we
+could do that. You see, you would have to read it to find out that you
+didn't want it, and that would be like using or wearing an article,
+wouldn't it? We couldn't take back a thing that had been used or
+worn--heigh?"
+
+"But you might have some means of knowing whether a book is good or
+not?"
+
+"Well, yes, we might. That's a point we have never had raised before.
+Miss Prittiman, haven't we any means of knowing whether a book's
+something we can guarantee or not?"
+
+"Well, Mr. Jeffers, there's the publisher's advertisement."
+
+"Why, yes, so there is! And a respectable publisher wouldn't indorse a
+book that wasn't the genuine article, would he now, sir?"
+
+"He mightn't," Erlcort said, as if he felt the force of the argument.
+
+"And there are the notices in the newspapers. They ought to tell,"
+Miss Prittiman added, more convincingly. "I don't know," she said, as
+from a sensitive conscience, "whether there have been any about this
+book yet, but I should think there would be."
+
+"And in the mean time, as you won't guarantee the book so that I can
+bring it back and get my money if I find it worthless, I must accept
+the publisher's word?" Erlcort pressed further.
+
+"I should think you could do that," the floor-walker suggested, with
+the appearance of being tired.
+
+"Well, I think I will, for once," Erlcort relented. "But wait! What
+does the publisher say?"
+
+"It's all printed on this slip inside," the blonde said, and she
+showed it as she took the book from him. "Shall I send it? Or will
+you--"
+
+"No, no, thank you, I'll take it with me. Let me--"
+
+He kept the printed slip and began to read it. The blonde wrapped the
+book up and laid it with a half-dollar in change on the counter before
+Erlcort. The floor-walker went away; Erlcort heard him saying, "No,
+madam; toys on the fifth floor, at the extreme rear, left," while he
+lost himself in the glowing promises of the publisher. It appeared
+that the book he had just bought was by a perfectly new author, an old
+lady of seventy who had never written a novel before, and might
+therefore be trusted for an entire freshness of thought and feeling.
+The plot was of a gripping intensity; the characters were painted with
+large, bold strokes, and were of an unexampled virility; the story was
+packed with passion from cover to cover; and the reader would be held
+breathless by the author's skill in working from the tragic conditions
+to an all-round happy conclusion.
+
+From time to time Erlcort heard the gentle blonde saying such things
+as, "Oh yes; it's the best-seller, all right," and, "All I can say is
+I set up till two o'clock in the morning to finish it," and, "Yes,
+ma'am; it's by a new writer; a very old lady of seventy who is just
+beginning to write; well, that's what I _heard_."
+
+On his way up-town in the Subway he clung to the wonted strap,
+unsupported by anything in the romance which he had bought; and yet he
+could not take the book back and get his money, or even exchange it
+for some article of neckwear or footwear. In his extremity he thought
+he would try giving it to the trainman just before he reached his
+stop.
+
+"You want to _give_ it to me? Well, that's something that never
+happened to me on _this_ line before. I guess my wife will like it.
+I--_1009th Street! Change for East Brooklyn and the Bronx!_" the guard
+shouted, and he let Erlcort out of the car, the very first of the tide
+that spilled itself forth at the station. He called after him, "Do as
+much for you some time."
+
+The incident first amused Erlcort, and then it began to trouble him;
+but he appeased his remorse by toying with his old notion of a
+critical bookstore. His mind was still at play with it when he stopped
+at the bell-pull of an elderly girl of his acquaintance who had a
+studio ten stories above, and the habit of giving him afternoon tea in
+it if he called there about five o'clock. She had her ugly
+painting-apron still on, and her thumb through the hole in her
+palette, when she opened her door to him.
+
+"Too soon?" he asked.
+
+She answered as well as she could with the brush held horizontally in
+her mouth while she glared inhospitably at him. "Well, not much," and
+then she let him in, and went and lighted her spirit-lamp.
+
+He began at once to tell her of his strange experience, and went on
+till she said: "Well, there's your tea. _I_ don't know what you've
+been driving at, but I suppose you do. Is it the old thing?"
+
+"It's my critical bookstore, if that's what you call the old thing."
+
+"Oh! _That!_ I thought it had failed 'way back in the dark ages."
+
+"The dark ages are not _back_, please; they're all 'round, and you
+know very well that my critical bookstore has never been tried yet.
+But tell me one thing: should you wish to live with a picture, even
+for a few hours, which had been painted by an old lady of seventy who
+had never tried to paint before?"
+
+"If I intended to go crazy, yes. What has all that got to do with it?"
+
+"That's the joint commendation of the publisher and the kind little
+blonde who united to sell me the book I just gave to that poor Subway
+trainman. Do you ever buy a new book?"
+
+"No; I always borrow an old one."
+
+"But if you _had_ to buy a new one, wouldn't you like to know of a
+place where you could be sure of getting a good one?"
+
+"I shouldn't mind. Or, yes, I should, rather. Where's it to be?"
+
+"Oh, I know. I've had my eye on the place for a good while. It's a
+funny old place in Sixth Avenue--"
+
+"Sixth _Avenue_!"
+
+"Don't interrupt--where the dearest old codger in the world is just
+going out of the house-furnishing business in a small way. It's kept
+getting smaller and smaller--I've watched it shrink--till now it can't
+stand up against the big shops, and the old codger told me the other
+day that it was no use."
+
+"Poor fellow!"
+
+"No. He's not badly off, and he's going back up-state where he came
+from about forty years ago, and he can live--or die--very well on what
+he's put by. I've known him rather a good while, and we've been
+friends ever since we've been acquainted."
+
+"Go on," the elderly girl said.
+
+Erlcort was not stopping, but she spoke so as to close her mouth,
+which she was apt to let hang open in a way that she did not like; she
+had her intimates pledged to tell her when she was doing it, but she
+could not make a man promise, and she had to look after her mouth
+herself with Erlcort. It was not a bad mouth; her eyes were large, and
+it was merely large to match them.
+
+"When shall you begin--open shop?" she asked.
+
+"My old codger's lease expires in the fall," he answered, "but he
+would be glad to have me take it off his hands this spring. I could
+give the summer to changing and decorating, and begin my campaign in
+the fall--the first of October, say. Wouldn't you like to come some
+day and see the old place?"
+
+"I should love it. But you're not supposing I shall be of the least
+use, I hope? I'm not decorational, you know. Easel pictures, and small
+ones at that."
+
+"Of course. But you are a woman, and have ideas of the cozy. I mean
+that the place shall be made attractive."
+
+"Do you think the situation will be--on Sixth Avenue?"
+
+"It will be quaint. It's in a retarded region of low buildings, with a
+carpenter's shop two doors off. The L roars overhead and the surface
+cars squeal before, but that is New York, you know, and it's very
+central. Besides, at the back of the shop, with the front door shut,
+it is very quiet."
+
+The next day the friends lunched together at an Italian restaurant
+very near the place, and rather hurried themselves away to the old
+codger's store.
+
+"He _is_ a dear," Margaret whispered to Erlcort in following him about
+to see the advantages of the place.
+
+"Oh, mine's setting-hen's time," he justified his hospitality in
+finally asking them to take seats on a nail-keg apiece. "You mustn't
+think you're interruptin'. Look 'round all ye want to, or set down and
+rest ye."
+
+"That would be a good motto for your bookstore," she screamed to
+Erlcort, when they got out into the roar of the avenue. "'Look 'round
+all ye want to, or set down and rest ye.' Wasn't he sweet? And I don't
+wonder you're taken with the place: it _has_ such capabilities. You
+might as well begin imagining how you will arrange it."
+
+They were walking involuntarily up the avenue, and when they came to
+the Park they went into it, and in the excitement of their planning
+they went as far as the Ramble, where they sat down on a bench and
+disappointed some squirrels who supposed they had brought peanuts with
+them.
+
+They decided that the front of the shop should be elaborately simple;
+perhaps the door should be painted black, with a small-paned sash and
+a heavy brass latch. On each side should be a small-paned show-window,
+with books laid inside on an inclined shelving; on the door should be
+a modest bronze plate, reading, "The Critical Bookstore." They
+rejected _shop_ as an affectation, and they hooted the notion of "Ye
+Critical Bookstore" as altogether loathsome. The door and window would
+be in a rather belated taste, but the beautiful is never out of date,
+and black paint and small panes might be found rococo in their
+old-fashionedness now. There should be a fireplace, or perhaps a
+Franklin stove, at the rear of the room, with a high-shouldered,
+small-paned sash on each side letting in the light from the yard of
+the carpenter-shop. On the chimneypiece should be lettered, "Look
+'round all ye want to, or set down and rest ye."
+
+The genius of the place should be a refined hospitality, such as the
+gentle old codger had practised with them, and to facilitate this
+there should be a pair of high-backed settles, one under each window.
+The book-counter should stretch the whole length of the store, and at
+intervals beside it, against the book-shelving, should be set
+old-fashioned chairs, but not too old-fashioned. Against the lower
+book-shelves on a deeper shelf might be stood against the books a few
+sketches in water-color, or even oil.
+
+This was Margaret Green's idea.
+
+"And would you guarantee the quality?" Erlcort asked.
+
+"Perhaps they wouldn't be for sale, though if any one insisted--"
+
+"I see. Well, pass the sketches. What else?"
+
+"Well, a few little figures in plaster, or even marble or bronze, very
+Greek, or very American; things in low relief."
+
+"Pass the little figures and low reliefs. But don't forget it's a
+_bookstore_."
+
+"Oh, I won't. The sketches of all kinds would be strictly subordinated
+to the books. If I had a tea-room handy here, with a table and the
+backs of some menus to draw on, I could show you just how it would
+look."
+
+"What's the matter with the Casino?"
+
+"Nothing; only it's rather early for tea yet."
+
+"It isn't for soda-lemonade."
+
+She set him the example of instantly rising, and led the way back
+along the lake to the Casino, resting at that afternoon hour among its
+spring flowers and blossoms innocent of its lurid after-dark
+frequentation. He got some paper from the waiter who came to take
+their order. She began to draw rapidly, and by the time the waiter
+came again she was giving Erlcort the last scrap of paper.
+
+"Well," he said, "I had no idea that I had imagined anything so
+charming! If this critical bookstore doesn't succeed, it'll be because
+there are no critics. But what--what are these little things hung
+against the partitions of the shelves?"
+
+"Oh--mirrors. Little round ones."
+
+"But why mirrors of any shape?"
+
+"Nothing; only people like to see themselves in a glass of any shape.
+And when," Margaret added, in a burst of candor, "a woman looks up and
+sees herself with a book in her hand, she will feel so intellectual
+she will never put it down. She will buy it."
+
+"Margaret Green, this is immoral. Strike out those mirrors, or I will
+smash them every one!"
+
+"Oh, very well!" she said, and she rubbed them out with the top of her
+pencil. "If you want your place a howling wilderness."
+
+He looked at the ruin her rubber had wrought. "They _were_ rather
+nice. Could--could you rub them in again?"
+
+"Not if I tried a hundred years. Besides, they _were_ rather impudent.
+What time is it?"
+
+"No time at all. It's half-past three."
+
+"Dear me! I must be going. And if you're really going to start that
+precious critical bookstore in the fall, you must begin work on it
+right away."
+
+"Work?"
+
+"Reading up for it. If you're going to guarantee the books, you must
+know what's in them, mustn't you?"
+
+He realized that he must do what she said; he must know from his own
+knowledge what was in the books he offered for sale, and he began
+reading, or reading _at_, the new books immediately. He was a good
+deal occupied by day with the arrangement of his store, though he left
+it mainly with the lively young decorator who undertook for a lump sum
+to realize Margaret Green's ideas. It was at night that he did most of
+his reading in the spring books which the publishers were willing to
+send him gratis, when they understood he was going to open a
+bookstore, and only wanted sample copies. As long as she remained in
+town Margaret Green helped him read, and they talked the books over,
+and mostly rejected them. By the time she went to Europe in August
+with another elderly girl they had not chosen more than eight or ten
+books; but they hoped for better things in the fall.
+
+Word of what he was doing had gone out from Margaret, and a great many
+women of their rather esthetic circle began writing to him about the
+books they were reading, and commending them to him or warning him
+against them. The circle of his volunteer associates enlarged itself
+in the nature of an endless chain, and before society quite broke up
+for the summer a Sympathetic Tea was offered to Erlcort by a Leading
+Society Woman at the Intellectual Club, where he was invited to
+address the Intellectuals in explanation of his project. This was
+before Margaret sailed, and he hurried to her in horror.
+
+"Why, of course you must accept. You're not going to hide your
+Critical Bookstore under a bushel; you can't have too much publicity."
+
+The Leading Society Woman flowed in fulsome gratitude at his
+acceptance, and promised no one but the club should be there; he had
+hinted his reluctance. She kept her promise, but among the
+Intellectuals there was a girl who was a just beginning journalist,
+and who pumped Erlcort's whole scheme out of him, unsuspicious of what
+she was doing, till he saw it all, with his picture, in the Sunday
+Supplement. She rightly judged that the intimacy of an interview would
+be more popular with her readers than the cold and distant report of
+his formal address, which she must give, though she received it so
+ardently with all the other Intellectuals. They flocked flatteringly,
+almost suffocatingly, around him at the end. His scheme was just what
+every one had vaguely thought of: something must be done to stem the
+tide of worthless fiction, which was so often shocking as well as
+silly, and they would only be too glad to help read for him. They were
+nearly all just going to sail, but they would each take a spring book
+on the ship, and write him about it from the other side; they would
+each get a fall book coming home, and report as soon as they got back.
+
+His scheme was discussed seriously and satirically by the press; it
+became a joke with many papers, and a byword quickly worn out, so that
+people thought that it had been dropped. But Erlcort gave his days and
+nights to preparation for his autumnal campaign. He studied in careful
+comparison the reviews of the different literary authorities, and was
+a little surprised to find, when he came to read the books they
+reviewed, how honest and adequate they often were. He was obliged to
+own to himself that if people were guided by them, few worthless books
+would be sold, and he decided that the immense majority of the
+book-buyers were not guided by the critics. The publishers themselves
+seemed not so much to blame when he went to see them and explained his
+wish to deal with them on the basis of a critical bookseller. They
+said they wished all the booksellers were like him, for they would ask
+nothing better than to publish only good books. The trouble, they
+said, lay with the authors; they wrote such worthless books. Or if now
+and then one of them did write a good book and they were over-tempted
+to publish it, the public united in refusing to buy it. So he saw? But
+if the booksellers persisted in selling none but good books, perhaps
+something might be done. At any rate they would like to see the
+experiment tried.
+
+Erlcort felt obliged to read the books suggested to him by the endless
+chain of readers who volunteered to read for him, on both sides of the
+ocean, or going and coming on the ocean. Mostly the books they praised
+were abject rubbish, but it took time to find this out, and he formed
+the habit of reading far into the night, and if he was very much vexed
+at discovering that the book recommended to him was trash, he could
+not sleep unless he took veronal, and then he had a ghastly next day.
+
+He did not go out of town except for a few brief sojourns at places
+where he knew cultivated people were staying, and could give him their
+opinions of the books he was reading. When the publishers began, as
+they had agreed, to send him their advance sheets, the stitched but
+unbound volumes roused so much interest by the novelty of their form
+that his readers could not give an undivided attention to their
+contents. He foresaw that in the end he should have to rely upon the
+taste of mercenaries in his warfare against rubbish, and more and more
+he found it necessary to expend himself in it, to read at second hand
+as well as at first. His greatest relief was in returning to town and
+watching the magical changes which the decorator was working in his
+store. This was consolation, this was inspiration, but he longed for
+the return of Margaret Green, that she might help him enjoy the
+realization of her ideas in the equipment of the place; and he held
+the decorator to the most slavish obedience through the carpenters and
+painters who created at his bidding a miraculous interior, all white,
+or just off-white, such as had never been imagined of a bookstore in
+New York before. It was actually ready by the end of August, though
+smelling a little of turpentine still, and Erlcort, letting himself in
+at the small-paned black door, and ranging up and down the long,
+beautiful room, and round and round the central book-table, and in and
+out between the side tables, under the soft, bright shelving of the
+walls, could hardly wait the arrival of the _Minnedingdong_ in which
+the elderly girl had taken her passage back. One day, ten days ahead
+of time, she blew in at the front door in a paroxysm of explanation;
+she had swapped passages home with another girl who wanted to come
+back later, while she herself wanted to come back earlier. She had no
+very convincing reason for this as she gave it, but Erlcort did not
+listen to her reason, whatever it was. He said, between the raptures
+with the place that she fell in and out of, that now she was just in
+time for the furnishing, which he never could have dared to undertake
+alone.
+
+In the gay September weather they visited all the antiquity shops in
+Fourth Avenue, and then threw themselves frankly upon reproductions,
+which they bought in the native wood and ordered painted, the settles
+and the spindle-backed chairs in the cool gray which she decided was
+the thing. In the same spirit they bought new brass fire-irons and new
+shovel and tongs, but all very tall and antique-looking, and then they
+got those little immoral mirrors, which Margaret Green attached with
+her own hands to the partitions of the shelving. She also got soft
+green silk curtains for the chimney windows and for the sash of the
+front door; even the front windows she curtained, but very low, so
+that a salesman or a saleswoman could easily reach over from the
+interior and get a book that any customer had seen from the outside.
+
+One day when all this was done, and Erlcort had begun ordering in a
+stock of such books as he had selected to start with, she said:
+"You're looking rather peakéd, aren't you?"
+
+"Well, I've been _feeling_ rather peakéd, until lately, keeping awake
+to read and read _after_ the volunteer readers."
+
+"You mean you've lost sleep?"
+
+"Something like that."
+
+"Well, you mustn't. How many books do you start with?"
+
+"About twenty-five."
+
+"Good ones? It's a lot, isn't it? I didn't suppose there were so
+many."
+
+"Well, to fill our shelves I shall have to order about a thousand of
+each."
+
+"You'll never sell them in the world! You'll be ruined."
+
+"Oh no; the publishers will take them back."
+
+"How nice of them! But that's only what painters have to do when the
+dealers can't sell their pictures."
+
+A month off, the prospect was brilliant, and when the shelves and
+tables were filled and the sketches and bas-reliefs were stuck about
+and the little immoral mirrors were hung, the place was charming. The
+chairs and settles were all that could be asked; Margaret Green helped
+put them about; and he let her light the low fire on the hearth of
+the Franklin stove; he said he should not always burn hickory, but he
+had got twenty-four sticks for two dollars from an Italian in a cellar
+near by, and he meant to burn that much. She upbraided him for his
+extravagance while touching the match to the paper under the kindling;
+but October opened cold, and he needed the fire.
+
+The enterprise seemed rather to mystify the neighborhood, and some old
+customers of the old codger's came in upon one fictitious errand and
+another to see about it, and went away without quite making it out. It
+was a bookstore, all right, they owned in conference, but what did he
+mean by "critical"?
+
+The first _bona fide_ buyer appeared in a little girl who could just
+get her chin on the counter, and who asked for an egg-beater. Erlcort
+had begun with only one assistant, the young lady who typed his
+letters and who said she guessed she could help him when she was not
+working. She leaned over and tried to understand the little girl, and
+then she called to Erlcort where he stood with his back to the fire
+and the morning paper open before his face.
+
+"Mr. Erlcort, have we got a book called _The Egg-beater_?"
+
+"_The Egg-beater?_" he echoed, letting his paper drop below his face.
+
+"No, no!" the little girl shouted, angrily. "It _ain't_ a book. It's a
+thing to beat eggs with. Mother said to come here and get it."
+
+"Well, she's sent you to the wrong place, little girl. You want to go
+to a hardware-store," the young lady argued.
+
+"Ain't this No. 1232?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, this is the _right_ place. Mother said to go to 1232. I guess
+she knows. She's an old customer."
+
+"_The Egg-beater! The Egg-beater!_" the blithe young novelist to whom
+Erlcort told the story repeated. He was still happy in his original
+success as a best-seller, and he had come to the Critical Bookstore to
+spy out the stock and see whether his last novel was in it; but though
+it was not, he joyously extended an acquaintance with Erlcort which
+had begun elsewhere. "_The Egg-beater?_ What a splendid title for a
+story of adventure! Keep the secret of its applicability to the last
+word, or perhaps never reveal it at all, and leave the reader
+worrying. That's one way; makes him go and talk about the book to all
+the girls he knows and get them guessing. Best ad. in the world. _The
+Egg-beater!_ Doesn't it suggest desert islands and penguins' nests in
+the rocks? Fellow and girl shipwrecked, and girl wants to make an
+omelette after they've got sick of plain eggs, and can't for want of
+an egg-beater. Heigh? He invents one--makes it out of some wire that
+floats off from the wreck. See? When they are rescued, she brings it
+away, and doesn't let him know it till their Iron Wedding Day. They
+keep it over his study fireplace always."
+
+This author was the first to stretch his legs before Erlcort's fire
+from his seat on one of the reproductions. He could not say enough of
+the beauty of the place, and he asked if he might sit there and watch
+for the old codger's old customers coming to buy hardware. There might
+be copy in it.
+
+But the old customers did not come so often as he hoped and Erlcort
+feared. Instead there came _bona fide_ book-buyers, who asked some for
+a book and some for a particular book. The first were not satisfied
+with the books that Erlcort or his acting saleslady recommended, and
+went away without buying. The last were indignant at not finding what
+they wanted in Erlcort's selection.
+
+"Why don't you stock it?" they demanded.
+
+"Because I don't think it's worth reading."
+
+"Oh, indeed!" The sarcastic customers were commonly ladies. "I
+thought you let the public judge of that!"
+
+"There are bookstores where they do. This is a critical bookstore. I
+sell only the books that _I_ think worth reading. If you had noticed
+my sign--"
+
+"Oh!" the customer would say, and she, too, would go away without
+buying.
+
+There were other ladies who came, links of the endless chain of
+volunteer readers who had tried to help Erlcort in making his
+selection, and he could see them slyly looking his stock over for the
+books they had praised to him. Mostly they went away without comment,
+but with heads held high in the offense which he felt even more than
+saw. One, indeed, did ask him why he had not stocked her chosen book,
+and he had to say, "Well, when I came to go through it carefully, I
+didn't think it quite--"
+
+"But here is _The Green Bay Tree_, and _The Biggest Toad in the
+Puddle_, and--"
+
+"I know. For one reason and another I thought them worth stocking."
+
+Then another head went away high in the air, with its plumes
+quivering. One afternoon late a lady came flying in with all the
+marks, whatever they are, of transatlantic travel upon her.
+
+"I'm just through the customs, and I've motored up here the first
+thing, even before I went home, to stop you from selling that book I
+recommended. It's dreadful; and, horrors! horrors! here it is by the
+hundreds! Oh, Mr. Erlcort! You mustn't sell that dreadful book! You
+see, I had skipped through it in my berth going out, and posted my
+letter the first thing; and just now, coming home, I found it in the
+ship's library and came on that frightful episode. You know!
+Where-- How _could_ you order it without reading it, on a mere say-so?
+It's utterly immoral!"
+
+"I don't agree with you," Erlcort answered, dryly. "I consider that
+passage one of the finest in modern fiction--one of the most ennobling
+and illumining--"
+
+"Ennobling!" The lady made a gesture of horror. "Very well! If _that_
+is your idea of a critical bookstore, all I've got to say is--"
+
+But she had apparently no words to say it in, and she went out banging
+but failing to latch the door which let through the indignant snort of
+her car as it whirled her away. She left Erlcort and his assistant to
+a common silence, but he imagined somehow a resolution in the
+stenographer not to let the book go unsearched till she had grasped
+the full iniquity of that episode and felt all its ennobling force. He
+was not consoled when another lady came in and, after drifting
+unmolestedly about (it was the primary rule of the place not to
+follow people up), stopped before the side shelf where the book was
+ranged in dozens and scores. She took a copy from the neat ranks, and
+opened it; then she lifted her head by chance and caught sight of her
+plume in one of the little mirrors. She stealthily lifted herself on
+tiptoe till she could see her face, and then she turned to the
+assistant and said, gently, "I believe I should like _this_ book,
+please," and paid for it and went out.
+
+It was now almost on the stroke of six, and Erlcort said to his
+assistant: "I'll close the store, Miss Pearsall. You needn't stay any
+longer."
+
+"All right, sir," the girl said, and went into the little closet at
+the rear for her hat and coat. Did she contrive to get a copy of that
+book under her coat as she passed the shelf where it lay?
+
+When she was gone, he turned the key in the door and went back and sat
+down before the fire dying on the hearth of the Franklin stove. It was
+not a very cheerful moment with him, but he could not have said that
+the day had been unprofitable, either spiritually or pecuniarily. In
+its experiences it had been a varied day, and he had really sold a
+good many books. More people than he could have expected had taken him
+seriously and even intelligently. It is true that he had been somewhat
+vexed by the sort of authority the president of the Intellectual Club
+had shown in the way she swelled into the store and patronized him and
+it, as if she had invented them both, and blamed him in a high, sweet
+voice for having so many _old_ books. "My idea was that it would be a
+place where one could come for the best of the _new_ books. But here!
+Why, half of them I saw in June before I sailed!" She chided him
+merrily, and she acted as if it were quite part of the joke when he
+said that he did not think a good book could age much in four months.
+She laughed patronizingly at his conceit of getting in the fall books
+by Thanksgiving; but even for the humor of it she could not let him
+say he should not do anything in holiday books. "I had expected to get
+_all_ my Christmas books of you, Mr. Erlcort," she crowed, but for the
+present she bought nothing. In compensation he recalled the gratitude,
+almost humble gratitude, of a lady (she was a lady!) who had come that
+day, bringing her daughter to get a book, any book in his stock, and
+to thank him for his enterprise, which she had found worked perfectly
+in the case of the book she had got the week before; the book had been
+an unalloyed delight, and had left a sense of heightened self-respect
+with her: that book of the dreadful episode.
+
+He wished Margaret Green had been there; but she had been there only
+once since his opening; he could not think why. He heard a rattling at
+the door-latch, and he said before he turned to look, "What if it
+should be she _now_?" But when he went to peer through the
+door-curtain it was only an old fellow who had spent the better part
+of the afternoon in the best chair, reading a book. Erlcort went back
+to the fire and let him rattle, which he did rather a long time, and
+then went away, Erlcort hoped, in dudgeon. He was one of a number of
+customers who had acted on the half of his motto asking them to sit
+down and rest them, after acting on the other half to look round all
+they wanted. Most of them did not read, even; they seemed to know one
+another, and they talked comfortably together. Erlcort recognized a
+companionship of four whom he had noticed in the Park formerly; they
+were clean-enough-looking elderly men, but occupied nearly all the
+chairs and settles, so that lady customers did not like to bring books
+and look over them in the few places left, and Erlcort foresaw the
+time when he should have to ask the old fellows to look around more
+and rest them less. In resuming his own place before the fire he felt
+the fleeting ache of a desire to ask Margaret Green whether it would
+not be a good plan to remove the motto from the chimneypiece. He would
+not have liked to do it without asking her; it had been her notion to
+put it there, and her other notion of the immoral mirrors had
+certainly worked well. The thoughtful expression they had reflected on
+the faces of lady customers had sold a good many books; not that
+Erlcort wished to sell books that way, though he argued with himself
+that his responsibility ought strictly to end with the provision of
+books which he had critically approved before offering them for sale.
+
+His conscience was not wholly at peace as to his stock, not only the
+books which he had included, but also those he had excluded. Some of
+these tacitly pleaded against his severity; in one case an author came
+and personally protested. This was the case of a book by the
+ex-best-seller, who held that his last book was so much better than
+his first that it ought certainly to be found in any critical
+bookstore. The proceeds of his best-seller had enabled him to buy an
+electric runabout, and he purred up to Erlcort's door in it to argue
+the matter with him. He sat down in a reproduction and proved, gaily,
+that Erlcort was quite wrong about it. He had the book with him, and
+read passages from it; then he read passages from some of the books on
+sale and defied Erlcort to say that his passages were not just as
+good, or, as he put it merrily, the same as. He held that his marked
+improvement entitled him to the favor of a critical bookstore;
+without this, what motive had he in keeping from a reversion to the
+errors which had won him the vicious prosperity of his first venture?
+Hadn't Erlcort a duty to perform in preventing his going back to the
+bad? Refuse this markedly improved fiction, and you drove him to
+writing nothing but best-sellers from now on. He urged Erlcort to
+reflect.
+
+They had a jolly time, and the ex-best-seller went away in high
+spirits, prophesying that Erlcort would come to his fiction yet.
+
+There were authors who did not leave Erlcort so cheerful when they
+failed to see their books on his shelves or tables. Some of them were
+young authors who had written their worthless books with a devout
+faith in their worth, and they went away more in sorrow than in anger,
+and yet more in bewilderment. Some were old authors who had been all
+their lives acceptably writing second-rate books and trying to make
+them unacceptably first-rate. If he knew them he kept out of their
+way, but the dejection of their looks was not less a pang to him if he
+saw them searching his stock for their books in vain.
+
+He had his own moments of dejection. The interest of the press in his
+enterprise had flashed through the Sunday issues of a single week, and
+then flashed out in lasting darkness. He wondered vaguely if he had
+counted without the counting-house in hoping for their continued
+favor; he could not realize that nothing is so stale as old news, and
+that no excess of advertising would have relumed those fitful fires.
+
+He would have liked to talk the case over with Margaret Green. After
+his first revolt from the easy publicity the reporters had first given
+him, he was aware of having enjoyed it--perhaps vulgarly enjoyed it.
+But he hoped not quite that; he hoped that in his fleeting celebrity
+he had cared for his scheme rather than himself. He had really
+believed in it, and he liked having it recognized as a feature of
+modern civilization, an innovation which did his city and his country
+credit. Now and then an essayist of those who wrote thoughtful
+articles in the Sunday or Saturday-evening editions had dropped in,
+and he had opened his heart to them in a way he would not have minded
+their taking advantage of. Secretly he hoped they would see a topic in
+his enterprise and his philosophy of it. But they never did, and he
+was left to the shame of hopes which had held nothing to support
+defeat. He would have liked to confess his shame and own the justice
+of his punishment to Margaret Green, but she seemed the only friend
+who never came near. Other friends came, and many strangers, the
+friends to look and the strangers to buy. He had no reason to
+complain of his sales; the fame of his critical bookstore might have
+ceased in New York, because it had gone abroad to Chicago and St.
+Louis and Pittsburg; people who were clearly from these commercial
+capitals and others came and bought copiously of his criticized stock,
+and they praised the notion of it in telling him that he ought to open
+branches in their several cities.
+
+They were all women, and it was nearly all women who frequented the
+Critical Bookstore, but in their multitude Margaret Green was not. He
+thought it the greater pity because she would have enjoyed many of
+them with him, and would have divined such as hoped the culture
+implicated by a critical bookstore would come off on them without
+great effort of their own; she would have known the sincere spirits,
+too, and could have helped direct their choice of the best where all
+was so good. He smiled to find that he was invoking her help, which he
+had no right to.
+
+His longing had no effect upon her till deep in January, when the
+weather was engaged late one afternoon in keeping the promise of a
+January thaw in the form of the worst snow-storm of the winter. Then
+she came thumping with her umbrella-handle at his door as if, he
+divined, she were too stiff-handed or too package-laden to press the
+latch and let herself in, and she almost fell in, but saved herself
+by spilling on the floor some canvases and other things which she had
+been getting at the artist's-materials store near by. "Don't bother
+about them," she said, "but take me to the fire as fast as you can,"
+and when she had turned from snow to rain and had dripped partially
+dry before the Franklin stove, she asked, "Where have you been all the
+time?"
+
+"Waiting here for you," he answered.
+
+"Well, you needn't. I wasn't going to come--or at least not till you
+sent for me, or said you wanted my advice."
+
+"I don't want your advice now."
+
+"I didn't come to give it. I just dropped in because if I hadn't I
+should have just dropped outside. How have you been getting along with
+your ridiculous critical bookstore?"
+
+"Well, things are rather quiet with us just now, as the publishers say
+to the authors when they don't want to publish their books."
+
+"Yes, I know that saying. Why didn't you go in for the holiday books?"
+
+"How did you know I didn't?"
+
+"Lots of people told me."
+
+"Well, then, I'll tell you why. I would have had to read them first,
+and no human being could do that--not even a volunteer link in an
+endless chain."
+
+"I see. But since Christmas?"
+
+"You know very well that after Christmas the book market drops dead."
+
+"Yes, so I've been told." She had flung her wet veil back over her
+shoulders, and he thought she had never looked so adorably plain
+before; if she could have seen herself in a glass she would have found
+her whole face out of drawing. It seemed as if his thinking had put
+her in mind of them, and she said, "Those immoral mirrors are
+shameful."
+
+"They've sold more of the best books than anything else."
+
+"No matter. As soon as I get a little drier I shall take them down."
+
+"Very well. _I_ didn't put them up." He laid a log of hickory on the
+fire. "I'm not doing it to dry you quicker."
+
+"Oh, I know. I'll tell you one thing. You ought to keep the magazines,
+or at least the Big Four. You could keep them with a good conscience,
+and you could sell them without reading; they're always good."
+
+"There's an idea in that. I believe I'll try it."
+
+Margaret Green was now dry enough, and she rose and removed the
+mirrors. In doing this she noticed that Erlcort had apparently sold a
+good many of his best books, and she said: "Well! I don't see why
+_you_ should be discouraged."
+
+"Who said I was? I'm exultant."
+
+"Then you were exulting with the corners of your mouth down just now.
+Well, I must be going. Will you get a taxi to flounder over to the
+Subway with me?" While Erlcort was telephoning she was talking to him.
+"I believe the magazines will revive public interest in your scheme.
+Put them in your window. Try to get advance copies for it."
+
+"You have a commercial genius, Margaret Green."
+
+"When it comes to selling literature, I have. Selling art is where I
+fall down."
+
+"That's because you always try to sell your own art. I should fall
+down, too, if I tried to sell my own literature."
+
+They got quite back to their old friendliness; the coming of the taxi
+gave them plenty of time. The electric lights were turned brilliantly
+on, but there, at the far end of the store, before the Franklin stove,
+they had a cozy privacy. At the moment of parting she said:
+
+"If I were you I should take out these settles. They simply invite
+loafing."
+
+"I've noticed that they seem to do that."
+
+"And better paint out that motto."
+
+"I've sometimes fancied I'd better. _That_ invites loafing, too;
+though some nice people like it."
+
+"Nice people? Why haven't some of them bought a picture?" He perceived
+that she had taken in the persistent presence of the sketches when
+removing the mirrors, and he shared the indignation she expressed:
+"Shabby things!"
+
+She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and he asked what she was
+going to do with them, as he followed her to the door with her other
+things.
+
+"Put them around the studio. But you needn't come to see the effect."
+
+"No. I shall come to see you."
+
+But when he came in a lull of February, and he could walk part of the
+way up through the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said:
+
+"I suppose you've come to pour out some more of your griefs. Well,
+pour away! Has the magazine project failed?"
+
+"On the contrary, it has been a _succès fou_. But I don't feel
+altogether easy in my mind about it. The fact is, they seem to print
+much more rubbish than I supposed."
+
+"Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their
+nostrils."
+
+She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut and getting very close
+to her picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her
+mouth hang open. He wondered why she was so charming; but when she
+stepped back rhythmically, tilting her pretty head this way and that,
+he saw why: it was her unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her
+mouth and shut it to say, "Well?"
+
+"Well, some people have come back at me. They've said, What a rotten
+number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in
+all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What's
+to be done about it? I can't ask people to buy truck or read truck
+because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the
+first quality."
+
+"No. You can't. Why," she asked, drifting up to her picture again,
+"don't you tear the bad out, and sell the good?"
+
+Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot be spelled in English.
+"Do you know how defiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the
+magazines? They're wired together, and you could no more tear out the
+bad and leave the good than you could part vice from virtue in human
+nature."
+
+"I see," Margaret Green said, but she saw no further, and she had to
+let him go disconsolate. After waiting a decent time she went to find
+him in his critical bookstore. It was late in an afternoon of the days
+that were getting longer, and only one electric was lighted in the
+rear of the room, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Franklin
+stove, so busy at something that he scarcely seemed aware of her.
+
+"What in the world are you doing?" she demanded.
+
+He looked up. "Who? I? Oh, it's you! Why, I'm merely censoring the
+truck in the May number of this magazine." He held up a little roller,
+as long as the magazine was wide, blacked with printer's ink, which he
+had been applying to the open periodical. "I've taken a hint from the
+way the Russian censorship blots out seditious literature before it
+lets it go to the public."
+
+"And _what_ a mess you're making!"
+
+"Of course it will have to dry before it's put on sale."
+
+"I should think so. Listen to me, Frederick Erlcort: you're going
+crazy."
+
+"I've sometimes thought so: crazy with conceit and vanity and
+arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical
+bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast,
+benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or
+a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him?
+Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is
+it universal suffrage?"
+
+"Now," Margaret Green said, "you are talking sense. Why didn't you
+think of this in the beginning?"
+
+"Is it a world, a whole earth," he went on, "where the weeds mostly
+outflourish the flowers, or is it a wretched little florist's
+conservatory where the watering-pot assumes to better the instruction
+of the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust? What is all the
+worthy family of asses to do if there are no thistles to feed them?
+Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the
+finer organisms, are the coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made a
+mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the
+gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the
+gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the
+pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have
+their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the
+rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural
+selection become to certain of them. But let there be no artificial
+selection, no survival of the fittest by main force--the force of the
+spectator, who thinks he knows better than the creator of the ugly and
+the beautiful, the fair and foul, the evil and good."
+
+"Oh, _now_ if the Intellectual Club could hear you!" Margaret Green
+said, with a long, deep, admiring suspiration. "And what are you
+going to do with your critical bookstore?"
+
+"I'm going to sell it. I've had an offer from the author of that
+best-seller--I've told you about him. I was just trying to censor that
+magazine while I was thinking it over. He's got an idea. He's going to
+keep it a critical bookstore, but the criticism is to be made by
+universal suffrage and the will of the majority. The latest books will
+be put to a vote; and the one getting the greatest number of votes
+will be the first offered for sale, and the author will receive a free
+passage to Europe by the southern route."
+
+"The southern route!" Margaret mused. "I've never been that way. It
+must be delightful."
+
+"Then come with _me_! _I'm_ going."
+
+"But how can I?"
+
+"By marrying me!"
+
+"I never thought of that," she said. Then, with the conscientious
+resolution of an elderly girl who puts her fate to the touch of any
+risk the truth compels, she added: "Or, yes! I _have_. But I never
+supposed you would ask me." She stared at him, and she was aware she
+was letting her mouth hang open. While she was trying for some word to
+close it with he closed it for her.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIV
+
+                          A FEAST OF REASON
+
+
+Florindo and Lindora had come to the end of another winter in town,
+and had packed up for another summer in the country. They were sitting
+together over their last breakfast until the taxi should arrive to
+whirl them away to the station, and were brooding in a joint gloom
+from the effect of the dinner they had eaten at the house of a friend
+the night before, and, "Well, thank goodness," she said, "there is an
+end to that sort of thing for _one_ while."
+
+"An end to _that_ thing," he partially assented, "but not that _sort_
+of thing."
+
+"What do you mean?" she demanded excitedly, almost resentfully.
+
+"I mean that the lunch is of the nature of the dinner, and that in the
+country we shall begin lunching where we left off dining."
+
+"Not instantly," she protested shrilly. "There will be nobody there
+for a while--not for a whole month, nearly."
+
+"They will be there before you can turn round, almost; and then you
+women will begin feeding one another there before you have well left
+off here."
+
+"We women!" she protested.
+
+"Yes, you--you women. You give the dinners. Can you deny it?"
+
+"It's because we can't get you to the lunches."
+
+"In the country you can; and so you will give the lunches."
+
+"We would give dinners if it were not for the distance, and the
+darkness on those bad roads."
+
+"I don't see where your reasoning is carrying you."
+
+"No," she despaired, "there is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of
+it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time before it is all
+going on again."
+
+They computed the number of dinners they had given during the winter;
+that was not hard, and the sum was not great: six or seven at the
+most, large and small. When it came to the dinners they had received,
+it was another thing; but still she considered, "Were they really so
+few? It's nothing to what the English do. They never dine alone at
+home, and they never dine alone abroad--of course not! I wonder they
+can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept kind, is always
+loathsome: the everlasting soup, if there aren't oysters first, or
+grape-fruit, or melon, and the fish, and the entrée, and the roast and
+salad, and the ice-cream and the fruit nobody touches, and the coffee
+and cigarettes and cigars--how I hate it all!"
+
+Lindora sank back in her chair and toyed desperately with the fragment
+of bacon on her plate.
+
+"And yet," Florindo said, "there is a charm about the first dinner of
+autumn, after you've got back."
+
+"Oh, yes," she assented; "it's like a part of our lost youth. We think
+all the dinners of the winter will be like that, and we come away
+beaming."
+
+"But when it keeps on and there's more and more of our lost youth,
+till it comes to being the whole--"
+
+"Florindo!" she stopped him. He pretended that he was not going to
+have said it, and she resumed, dreamily, "I wonder what it is makes it
+so detestable as the winter goes on."
+
+"All customs are detestable, the best of them," he suggested, "and I
+should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner, that the society
+dinner was an unlovely rite. You try to carry if off with china and
+glass, and silver and linen, and if people could fix their minds on
+these, or even on the dishes of the dinner as they come successively
+on, it would be all very well; but the diners, the diners!"
+
+"Yes," she said, "the old men are hideous, certainly; and the young
+ones--I try not to look at them, poking things into the hollows of
+their faces with spoons and forks--"
+
+"Better than when it was done with knives! Still, it's a horror! A
+veteran diner-out in full action is certainly a hideous spectacle.
+Often he has few teeth of his own, and the dentists don't serve him
+perfectly. He is in danger of dropping things out of his mouth, both
+liquids and solids: better not look! His eyes bulge and roll in his
+head in the stress of mastication and deglutition; his color rises and
+spreads to his gray hair or over his baldness; his person seems to
+swell vividly in his chair, and when he laughs--"
+
+"Don't, Florindo! It _is_ awful."
+
+"Well, perhaps no worse than the sight of a middle-aged matron tending
+to overweight and bulking above her plate--"
+
+"Yes, yes! That's dreadful, too. But when people are young--"
+
+"Oh, when people are young!" He said this in despair. Then he went on
+in an audible muse. "When people are young they are not only in their
+own youth; they are in the youth of the world, the race. They dine,
+but they don't think of the dinner or the unpleasantness of the
+diners, and the grotesqueness of feeding in common. They think--" he
+broke off in defect of other ideas, and concluded with a laugh, "they
+think of themselves. And they don't think of how they are looking."
+
+"They needn't; they are looking very well. Don't keep harping on that!
+I remember when we first began going to dinners, I thought it was the
+most beautiful thing in the world. I don't mean when I was a girl; a
+girl only goes to a dinner because it comes before a dance. I mean
+when we were young married people; and I pinned up my dress and we
+went in the horse-cars, or even walked. I enjoyed every instant of it:
+the finding who was going to take me in and who you were; and the
+going in; and the hovering round the table to find our places from the
+cards; and the seeing how you looked next some one else, and wondering
+how you thought I looked; and the beads sparkling up through the
+champagne and getting into one's nose; and the laughing and joking and
+talking! Oh, the talking! What's become of it? The talking, last
+night, it bored me to death! And what good stories people used to
+tell, women as well as men! You can't deny it was beautiful."
+
+"I don't; and I don't deny that the forms of dining are still
+charming. It's the dining itself that I object to."
+
+"That's because your digestion is bad."
+
+"Isn't yours?"
+
+"Of course it is. What has that got to do with it?"
+
+"It seems to me that we have arrived at what is called an _impasse_ in
+French." He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she gave a little
+jump in her chair. "Oh, there's plenty of time. The taxi won't be here
+for half an hour yet. Is there any heat left in that coffee?"
+
+"There will be," she said, and she lighted the lamp under the pot.
+"But I don't like being scared out of half a year's growth."
+
+"I'm sorry. I won't look at the clock any more; I don't care if we're
+left. Where were we? Oh, I remember--the objection to dining itself.
+If we could have the forms without the facts, dining would be all
+right. Our superstition is that we can't be gay without gorging; that
+society can't be run without meat and drink. But don't you remember
+when we first went to Italy there was no supper at Italian houses
+where we thought it such a favor to be asked?"
+
+"I remember that the young Italian swells wouldn't go to the American
+and English houses where they weren't sure of supper. They didn't
+give supper at the Italian houses because they couldn't afford it."
+
+"I know that. I believe they do, now. But--
+
+          'Sweet are the uses of adversity,'
+
+and the fasting made for beauty then more than the feasting does now.
+It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses
+conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed--the
+sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out to supper."
+
+"I wonder," Lindora said, "whether the same sort of thing goes on at
+evening parties still--it's so long since I've been at one. It was
+awful standing jammed up in a corner or behind a door and eating
+_vis-à-vis_ with a man who brought you a plate; and it wasn't much
+better when you sat down and he stood over you gabbling and gobbling,
+with his plate in one hand and his fork in the other. I was always
+afraid of his dropping things into my lap; and the sight of his jaws
+champing as you looked up at them from below!"
+
+"Yes, ridiculous. But there was an element of the grotesque in a
+bird's-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and
+trying to smile and look _spirituelle_ between the shots."
+
+Lindora as she laughed bowed her forehead on the back of her hand in
+the way Florindo thought so pretty when they were both young. "Yes,"
+she said, "awful, awful! Why _should_ people want to flock together
+when they feed? Do you suppose it's a survival of the primitive
+hospitality when those who had something to eat hurried to share it
+with those who had nothing?"
+
+"Possibly," Florindo said, flattered into consequence by her momentary
+deference, or show of it. "But the people who mostly meet to feed
+together now are not hungry; they are already so stuffed that they
+loathe the sight of the things. Some of them shirk the consequences by
+frankly dining at home first, and then openly or covertly dodging the
+courses."
+
+"Yes, and you hear that praised as a mark of high civilization, or
+social wisdom. I call it wicked, and an insult to the very genius of
+hospitality."
+
+"Well, I don't know. It must give the faster a good chance of seeing
+how funny the feeders all look."
+
+"I wonder, I _do_ wonder, how the feeding in common came to be the
+custom," she said, thoughtfully. "Of course where it's done for
+convenience, like hotels or in boarding-houses--but to do it wantonly,
+as people do in society, it ought to be stopped."
+
+"We might call art to our aid--have a large tableful of people kodaked
+in the moments of ingulfing, chewing, or swallowing, as the act varied
+from guest to guest; might be reproduced as picture postals, or from
+films for the movies. That would give the ten and twenty cent
+audiences a chance to see what life in the exclusive circles was."
+
+She listened in dreamy inattention. "It was a step in the right
+direction when people began to have afternoon teas. To be sure, there
+was the biting and chewing sandwiches, but you needn't take _them_,
+and most women could manage their teacups gracefully."
+
+"Or hide their faces in them when they couldn't."
+
+"Only," she continued, "the men wouldn't come after the first go off.
+It was as bad as lunches. Now that the English way of serving tea to
+callers has come in, it's better. You really get the men, and it keeps
+them from taking cocktails so much."
+
+"They're rather glad of that. But still, still, there's the guttling
+and guzzling."
+
+"It's reduced to a minimum."
+
+"But it's there. And the first thing you know you've loaded yourself
+up with cake or bread-and-butter and spoiled your appetite for dinner.
+No, afternoon tea must go with the rest of it, if we're going to be
+truly civilized. If people could come to one another's tables with
+full minds instead of stomachs, there would be some excuse for
+hospitality. Perhaps if we reversed the practice of the professional
+diner-out, and read up at home as he now eats at home, and-- No, I
+don't see how it could be done. But we might take a leaf from the book
+of people who are not in society. They never ask anybody to meals if
+they can possibly help it; if some one happens in at meal-times they
+tell him to pull up a chair--if they have to, or he shows no signs
+first of going. But even among these people the instinct of
+hospitality--the feeding form of it--lurks somewhere. In our
+farm-boarding days--"
+
+"Don't speak of them!" she implored.
+
+"We once went to an evening party," he pursued, "where raw apples and
+cold water were served."
+
+"I thought I should die of hunger. And when we got home to our own
+farmer's we ravaged the pantry for everything left from supper. It
+wasn't much. There!" Lindora screamed. "There _is_ the taxi!" And the
+shuddering sound of the clock making time at their expense penetrated
+from the street. "Come!"
+
+"How the instinct of economy lingers in us, too, long after the use
+of it is outgrown. It's as bad as the instinct of hospitality. We
+could easily afford to pay extra for the comfort of sitting here over
+these broken victuals--"
+
+"I tell you we shall be left," she retorted; and in the thirty-five
+minutes they had at the station before their train started she
+outlined a scheme of social reform which she meant to put in force as
+soon as people began to gather in summer force at Lobster Cove.
+
+He derided the notion; but she said, "You will see!" and in rather
+more time than it takes to tell it they were settled in their cottage,
+where, after some unavoidable changes of cook and laundress, they were
+soon in perfect running order.
+
+By this time Lobster Cove was in the full tide of lunching and being
+lunched. The lunches were almost exclusively ladies' lunches, and the
+ladies came to them with appetites sharpened by the incomparable air
+of those real Lobster Cove days which were all cloudless skies and
+west winds, and by the vigorous automobile exercise of getting to one
+another's cottages. They seized every pretext for giving these feasts,
+marked each by some vivid touch of invention within the limits of the
+graceful convention which all felt bound not to transcend. It was some
+surprising flavor in the salad, or some touch of color appealing to
+the eye only; or it was some touch in the ice-cream, or some daring
+substitution of a native dish for it, as strawberry or peach
+shortcake; or some bold transposition in the order of the courses; or
+some capricious arrangement of the decoration, or the use of wild
+flowers, or even weeds (as meadow-rue or field-lilies), for the local
+florist's flowers, which set the ladies screaming at the moment and
+talking of it till the next lunch. This would follow perhaps the next
+day, or the next but one, according as a new cottager's claims
+insisted or a lady had a change of guests, or three days at the
+latest, for no reason.
+
+In their rapid succession people scarcely noticed that Lindora had not
+given a lunch, and she had so far abandoned herself to the enjoyment
+of the others' lunches that she had half forgotten her high purposes
+of reform, when she was sharply recalled to them by a lunch which had
+not at all agreed with her; she had, in fact, had to have the doctor,
+and many people had asked one another whether they had heard how she
+was. Then she took her good resolution in both hands and gave an
+afternoon, asking people by note or 'phone simply whether they would
+not come in at four sharp. People were a good deal mystified, but for
+this very reason everybody came. Some of them came from somebody's
+lunch, which had been so nice that they lingered over it till four,
+and then walked, partly to fill in the time and partly to walk off the
+lunch, as there would be sure to be something at Lindora's later on.
+
+It would be invidious to say what the nature of Lindora's
+entertainment was. It was certainly to the last degree original, and
+those who said the worst of it could say no worse than that it was
+queer. It quite filled the time till six o'clock, and may be perhaps
+best described as a negative rather than a positive triumph, though
+what Lindora had aimed at she had undoubtedly achieved. Whatever it
+was, whether original or queer, it was certainly novel.
+
+A good many men had come, one at least to every five ladies, but as
+the time passed and a certain blankness began to gather over the
+spirits of all, they fell into different attitudes of the despair
+which the ladies did their best to pass off for rapture. At each
+unscheduled noise they started in a vain expectation, and when the end
+came, it came so without accent, so without anything but the clock to
+mark it as the close, that they could hardly get themselves together
+for going away. They did what was nice and right, of course, in
+thanking Lindora for her fascinating afternoon, but when they were
+well beyond hearing one said to another: "Well, I shall certainly
+have an appetite for my dinner _to-night_! Why, if there had only been
+a cup of the weakest kind of tea, or even of cold water!"
+
+Then those who had come in autos gathered as many pedestrians into
+them as they would hold in leaving the house, or caught them up
+fainting by the way.
+
+Lindora and Florindo watched them from their veranda.
+
+"Well, my dear," he said, "it's been a wonderful afternoon; an immense
+stride forward in the cause of anti-eating--or--"
+
+"Don't _speak_ to me!" she cried.
+
+"But it leaves one rather hungry, doesn't it?"
+
+"_Hungry!_" she hurled back at him. "I could eat a--I don't know
+what!"
+
+
+
+
+                                  XV
+
+                     CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL
+
+                       A Long-distance Eclogue
+
+                                 1902
+
+
+  _Morrison._ Hello! Hello! Is that you, Wetherbee?
+
+  _Wetherbee._ Yes. Who are you? What do you want with me?
+
+  _Morrison._ Oh, nothing much. It's Morrison, you know;
+  Morrison--down at Clamhurst Shortsands.
+
+  _Wetherbee._                             Oh!
+  Why, Morrison, of course! Of course, I know!
+  How are you, Morrison? And, by the way,
+  _Where_ are you? What! You never mean to say
+  You are down there _yet_? Well, by the Holy Poker!
+  What are you doing there, you ancient joker?
+
+  _Morrison._ Sticking it out over Thanksgiving Day.
+  I said I would. I tell you, it is gay
+  Down here. You ought to see the Hunter's Moon,
+  These silver nights, prinking in our lagoon.
+  You ought to see our sunsets, glassy red,
+  Shading to pink and violet overhead.
+  You ought to see our mornings, still and clear,
+  White silence, far as you can look and hear.
+  You ought to see the leaves--our oaks and ashes
+  Crimson and yellow, with those gorgeous splashes,
+  Purple and orange, against the bluish green
+  Of the pine woods; and scattered in between
+  The scarlet of the maples; and the blaze
+  Of blackberry-vines, along the dusty ways
+  And on the old stone walls; the air just balm,
+  And the crows cawing through the perfect calm
+  Of afternoons all gold and turquoise. Say,
+  You ought to have been with wife and me to-day,
+  A drive we took--it would have made you sick:
+  The pigeons and the partridges so thick;
+  And on the hill just beyond Barkin's lane,
+  Before you reach the barn of Widow Payne,
+  Showing right up against the sky, as clear
+  And motionless as sculpture, stood a deer!
+  Say, does that jar you just a little? Say,
+  How have you found things up there, anyway,
+  Since you got back? Air like a cotton string
+  To breathe? The same old dust on everything,
+  And in your teeth, and in your eyes? The smoke
+  From the soft coal, got long beyond a joke?
+  The trolleys rather more upon your curves,
+  And all the roar and clatter in your nerves?
+  Don't you wish you had stayed here, too?
+
+  _Wetherbee._                          Well, yes,
+  I do at certain times, I must confess.
+  I swear it is enough at times to make you swear
+  You would almost rather be anywhere
+  Than here. The building up and pulling down,
+  The getting to and fro about the town,
+  The turmoil underfoot and overhead,
+  Certainly make you wish that you were dead,
+  At first; and all the mean vulgarity
+  Of city life, the filth and misery
+  You see around you, make you want to put
+  Back to the country anywhere, hot-foot.
+  Yet--there are compensations.
+
+  _Morrison._                    Such as?
+
+  _Wetherbee._                           Why,
+  There is the club.
+
+  _Morrison._         The club I can't deny.
+  Many o' the fellows back there?
+
+  _Wetherbee._                     Nearly all.
+  Over the twilight cocktails there are tall
+  Stories and talk. But you would hardly care;
+  You have the natives to talk with down there,
+  And always find them meaty.
+
+  _Morrison._                  Well, so-so.
+  Their words outlast their ideas at times, you know,
+  And they have _staying_ powers. The theaters
+  All open now?
+
+  _Wetherbee._    Yes, all. And it occurs
+  To me: there's one among the things that you
+  Would have enjoyed; an opera with the new--
+  Or at least the last--music by Sullivan,
+  And words, though not Gilbertian, that ran
+  Trippingly with it. Oh, I tell you what,
+  I'd rather that you had been there than not.
+
+  _Morrison._ Thanks ever so!
+
+  _Wetherbee._                Oh, there is nothing mean
+  About your early friend. That deer and autumn scene
+  Were kind of you! And, say, I think you like
+  Afternoon teas when good. I have chanced to strike
+  Some of the best of late, where people said
+  They had sent you cards, but thought you must be dead.
+  I told them I left you down there by the sea,
+  And then they sort of looked askance at me,
+  As if it were a joke, and bade me get
+  Myself some bouillon or some chocolate,
+  And turned the subject--did not even give
+  Me time to prove it is not life to live
+  In town as long as you can keep from freezing
+  Beside the autumn sea. A little sneezing,
+  At Clamhurst Shortsands, since the frosts set in?
+
+  _Morrison._ Well, not enough to make a true friend grin.
+  Slight colds, mere nothings. With our open fires
+  We've all the warmth and cheer that heart desires.
+  Next year we'll have a furnace in, and stay
+  Not till Thanksgiving, but till Christmas Day.
+  It's glorious in these roomy autumn nights
+  To sit between the firelight and the lights
+  Of our big lamps, and read aloud by turns
+  As long as kerosene or hickory burns.
+  We hate to go to bed.
+
+  _Wetherbee._           Of course you do!
+  And hate to get up in the morning, too--
+  To pull the coverlet from your frost-bit nose,
+  And touch the glary matting with your toes!
+  Are you beginning yet to break the ice
+  In your wash-pitchers? No? Well, that is nice.
+  I always hate to do it--seems as if
+  Summer was going; but when your hand is stiff
+  With cold, it can be done. Still, I prefer
+  To wash and dress beside my register,
+  When summer gets a little on, like this.
+  But some folks find the other thing pure bliss--
+  Lusty young chaps, like you.
+
+  _Morrison._                   And some folks find
+  A sizzling radiator to their mind.
+  What else have you, there, you could recommend
+  To the attention of a country friend?
+
+  _Wetherbee._ Well, you know how it is in Madison Square,
+  Late afternoons, now, if the day's been fair--
+  How all the western sidewalk ebbs and flows
+  With pretty women in their pretty clo'es:
+  I've never seen them prettier than this year.
+  Of course, I know a dear is not a deer,
+  But still, I think that if I had to meet
+  One or the other in the road, or street,
+  All by myself, I am not sure but that
+  I'd choose the dear that wears the fetching hat.
+
+  _Morrison._ Get out! What else?
+
+  _Wetherbee._                Well, it is not so bad,
+  If you are feeling a little down, or sad,
+  To walk along Fifth Avenue to the Park,
+  When the day thinks perhaps of getting dark,
+  And meet that mighty flood of vehicles
+  Laden with all the different kinds of swells,
+  Homing to dinner, in their carriages--
+  Victorias, landaus, chariots, coupés--
+  There's nothing like it to lift up the heart
+  And make you realize yourself a part,
+  Sure, of the greatest show on earth.
+
+  _Morrison._                           Oh, yes,
+  I know. I've felt that rapture more or less.
+  But I would rather put it off as long
+  As possible. I suppose you like the song
+  Of the sweet car-gongs better than the cry
+  Of jays and yellowhammers when the sky
+  Begins to redden these October mornings,
+  And the loons sound their melancholy warnings;
+  Or honk of the wild-geese that write their A
+  Along the horizon in the evening's gray.
+  Or when the squirrels look down on you and bark
+  From the nut trees--
+
+  _Wetherbee._           We have them in the Park
+  Plenty enough. But, say, you aged sinner,
+  Have you been out much recently at dinner?
+
+  _Morrison._ What do you mean? You know there's no one here
+  That dines except ourselves now.
+
+  _Wetherbee._                Well, that's queer!
+  I thought the natives-- But I recollect!
+  It was not reasonable to expect--
+
+  _Morrison._ What are you driving at?
+
+  _Wetherbee._              Oh, nothing much.
+  But I was thinking how you come in touch
+  With life at the first dinner in the fall,
+  When you get back, first, as you can't at all
+  Later along. But you, of course, won't care
+  With your idyllic pleasures.
+
+  _Morrison._                   _Who was there?_
+
+  _Wetherbee._ Oh--ha, ha! What d'you mean by _there_?
+
+  _Morrison._                              Come off!
+
+  _Wetherbee._ What! you remain to pray that came to scoff!
+
+  _Morrison._ You know what I am after.
+
+  _Wetherbee._                         Yes, that dinner.
+  Just a round dozen: Ferguson and Binner
+  For the fine arts; Bowyer the novelist;
+  Dr. Le Martin; the psychologist
+  Fletcher; the English actor Philipson;
+  The two newspaper Witkins, Bob and John;
+  A nice Bostonian, Bane the archæologer,
+  And a queer Russian amateur astrologer;
+  And Father Gray, the jolly ritualist priest,
+  And last your humble servant, but not least.
+  The food was not so filthy, and the wine
+  Was not so poison. We made out to dine
+  From eight till one A.M. One could endure
+  The dinner. But, oh say! _The talk was poor!_
+  Your natives down at Clamhurst--
+
+  _Morrison._                      Look ye here!
+  What date does Thanksgiving come on this year?
+
+  _Wetherbee._ Why, I suppose--although I don't remember
+  Certainly--the usual 28th November.
+
+  _Morrison._ Novem-- You should have waited to get sober!
+  It comes on the 11th of October!
+  And that's to-morrow; and if you happen down
+  Later, you'd better look for us in town.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XVI
+
+                              TABLE TALK
+
+
+They were talking after dinner in that cozy moment when the
+conversation has ripened, just before the coffee, into mocking guesses
+and laughing suggestions. The thing they were talking of was something
+that would have held them apart if less happily timed and placed, but
+then and there it drew these together in what most of them felt a
+charming and flattering intimacy. Not all of them took part in the
+talk, and of those who did, none perhaps assumed to talk with
+authority or finality. At first they spoke of the subject as _it_,
+forbearing to name it, as if the name of it would convey an unpleasant
+shock, out of temper with the general feeling.
+
+"I don't suppose," the host said, "that it's really so much commoner
+than it used to be. But the publicity is more invasive and explosive.
+That's perhaps because it has got higher up in the world and has
+spread more among the first circles. The time was when you seldom
+heard of it there, and now it is scarcely a scandal. I remember that
+when I went abroad, twenty or thirty years ago, and the English
+brought me to book about it, I could put them down by saying that I
+didn't know a single divorced person."
+
+"And of course," a bachelor guest ventured, "a person of that sort
+_must_ be single."
+
+At first the others did not take the joke; then they laughed, but the
+women not so much as the men.
+
+"And you couldn't say that now?" the lady on the right of the host
+inquired.
+
+"Why, I don't know," he returned, thoughtfully, after a little
+interval. "I don't just call one to mind."
+
+"Then," the bachelor said, "that classes you. If you moved in our best
+society you would certainly know some of the many smart people whose
+disunions alternate with the morning murders in the daily papers."
+
+"Yes, the fact seems to rank me rather low; but I'm rather proud of
+the fact."
+
+The hostess seemed not quite to like this arrogant humility. She said,
+over the length of the table (it was not very long), "I'm sure you
+know some very nice people who have not been."
+
+"Well, yes, I do. But are they really smart people? They're of very
+good family, certainly."
+
+"You mustn't brag," the bachelor said.
+
+A husband on the right of the hostess wondered if there were really
+more of the thing than there used to be.
+
+"Qualitatively, yes, I should say. Quantitatively, I'm not convinced,"
+the host answered. "In a good many of the States it's been made
+difficult."
+
+The husband on the right of the hostess was not convinced, he said, as
+to the qualitative increase. The parties to the suits were rich
+enough, and sometimes they were high enough placed and far enough
+derived. But there was nearly always a leak in them, a social leak
+somewhere, on one side or the other. They could not be said to be
+persons of quality in the highest sense.
+
+"Why, persons of quality seldom can be," the bachelor contended.
+
+The girl opposite, who had been invited to balance him in the scale of
+celibacy by the hostess in her study of her dinner-party, first
+smiled, and then alleged a very distinguished instance of divorce in
+which the parties were both of immaculate origin and unimpeachable
+fashion. "Nobody," she said, "can accuse _them_ of a want of quality."
+She was good-looking, though no longer so young as she could have
+wished; she flung out her answer to the bachelor defiantly, but she
+addressed it to the host, and he said that was true; certainly it was
+a signal case; but wasn't it exceptional? The others mentioned like
+cases, though none quite so perfect, and then there was a lull till
+the husband on the left of the hostess noted a fact which renewed the
+life of the discussion.
+
+"There was a good deal of agitation, six or eight years ago, about it.
+I don't know whether the agitation accomplished anything."
+
+The host believed it had influenced legislation.
+
+"For or against?" the bachelor inquired.
+
+"Oh, against."
+
+"But in other countries it's been coming in more and more. It seems to
+be as easy in England now as it used to be in Indiana. In France it's
+nothing scandalous, and in Norwegian society you meet so many
+disunited couples in a state of quadruplicate reunion that it is very
+embarrassing. It doesn't seem to bother the parties to the new
+relation themselves."
+
+"It's very common in Germany, too," the husband on the right of the
+hostess said.
+
+The husband on her left side said he did not know just how it was in
+Italy and Spain, and no one offered to disperse his ignorance.
+
+In the silence which ensued the lady on the left of the host created a
+diversion in her favor by saying that she had heard they had a very
+good law in Switzerland.
+
+Being asked to tell what it was, she could not remember, but her
+husband, on the right of the hostess, saved the credit of his family
+by supplying her defect. "Oh, yes. It's very curious. We heard of it
+when we were there. When people want to be put asunder, for any reason
+or other, they go before a magistrate and declare their wish. Then
+they go home, and at the end of a certain time--weeks or months--the
+magistrate summons them before him with a view to reconciliation. If
+they come, it is a good sign; if they don't come, or come and persist
+in their desire, then they are summoned after another interval, and
+are either reconciled or put asunder, as the case may be, or as they
+choose. It is not expensive, and I believe it isn't scandalous."
+
+"It seems very sensible," the husband on the left of the hostess said,
+as if to keep the other husband in countenance. But for an interval no
+one else joined him, and the mature girl said to the man next her that
+it seemed rather cold-blooded. He was a man who had been entreated to
+come in, on the frank confession that he was asked as a stop-gap, the
+original guest having fallen by the way. Such men are apt to abuse
+their magnanimity, their condescension. They think that being there
+out of compassion, and in compliance with a hospitality that had not
+at first contemplated their presence, they can say anything; they are
+usually asked without but through their wives, who are asked to "lend"
+them, and who lend them with a grudge veiled in eager acquiescence;
+and the men think it will afterward advantage them with their wives,
+when they find they are enjoying themselves, if they will go home and
+report that they said something vexing or verging on the offensive to
+their hostess. This man now addressed himself to the lady at the head
+of the table.
+
+"Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce was an unquestionable
+evil?"
+
+The hostess looked with a frightened air to the right and left, and
+then down the table to her husband. But no one came to her rescue, and
+she asked feebly, as if foreboding trouble (for she knew she had taken
+a liberty with this man's wife), "Why, don't we?"
+
+"About one in seven of us doesn't," the stop-gap said.
+
+"Oh!" the girl beside him cried out, in a horror-stricken voice which
+seemed not to interpret her emotion truly. "Is it so bad as that?"
+
+"Perhaps not quite, even if it is bad at all," he returned, and the
+hostess smiled gratefully at the girl for drawing his fire. But it
+appeared she had not, for he directed his further speech at the
+hostess again: really the most inoffensive person there, and the least
+able to contend with adverse opinions.
+
+"No, I don't believe we do think it an unquestionable evil, unless we
+think marriage is so." Everybody sat up, as the stop-gap had intended,
+no doubt, and he "held them with his glittering eye," or as many as he
+could sweep with his glance. "I suppose that the greatest hypocrite at
+this table, where we are all so frankly hypocrites together, will not
+deny that marriage is the prime cause of divorce. In fact, divorce
+couldn't exist without it."
+
+The women all looked bewilderedly at one another, and then appealingly
+at the men. None of these answered directly, but the bachelor softly
+intoned out of Gilbert and Sullivan--he was of that date:
+
+          "'A paradox, a paradox;
+            A most ingenious paradox!'"
+
+"Yes," the stop-gap defiantly assented. "A paradox; and all aboriginal
+verities, all giant truths, are paradoxes."
+
+"Giant truths is good," the bachelor noted, but the stop-gap did not
+mind him.
+
+He turned to the host: "I suppose that if divorce is an evil, and we
+wish to extirpate it, we must strike at its root, at marriage?"
+
+The host laughed. "I prefer not to take the floor. I'm sure we all
+want to hear what you have to say in support of your mammoth idea."
+
+"Oh yes, indeed," the women chorused, but rather tremulously, as not
+knowing what might be coming.
+
+"Which do you mean? That all truth is paradoxical, or that marriage is
+the mother of divorce?"
+
+"Whichever you like."
+
+"The last proposition is self-evident," the stop-gap said, supplying
+himself with a small bunch of the grapes which nobody ever takes at
+dinner; the hostess was going to have coffee for the women in the
+drawing-room, and to leave the men to theirs with their tobacco at the
+table. "And you must allow that if divorce is a good thing or a bad
+thing, it equally partakes of the nature of its parent. Or else
+there's nothing in heredity."
+
+"Oh, come!" one of the husbands said.
+
+"Very well!" the stop-gap submitted. "I yield the word to you." But as
+the other went no further, he continued. "The case is so clear that it
+needs no argument. Up to this time, in dealing with the evil of
+divorce, if it is an evil, we have simply been suppressing the
+symptoms; and your Swiss method--"
+
+"Oh, it isn't _mine_," the man said who had stated it.
+
+"--Is only a part of the general practice. It is another attempt to
+make divorce difficult, when it is marriage that ought to be made
+difficult."
+
+"Some," the daring bachelor said, "think it ought to be made
+impossible." The girl across the table began to laugh hysterically,
+but caught herself up and tried to look as if she had not laughed at
+all.
+
+"I don't go as far as that," the stop-gap resumed, "but as an
+inveterate enemy of divorce--"
+
+An "Oh!" varying from surprise to derision chorused up; but he did not
+mind it; he went on as if uninterrupted.
+
+"I should put every possible obstacle, and at every step, in the way
+of marriage. The attitude of society toward marriage is now simply
+preposterous, absolutely grotesque. Society? The whole human framework
+in all its manifestations, social, literary, religious, artistic, and
+civic, is perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the matter.
+Nothing is done to retard or prevent marriage; everything to
+accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue
+which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly vulgar and
+entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The blind and
+witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least with us, is
+flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and revered as
+if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse. But is it? I
+defy any one here to say that it is."
+
+As if they were afraid of worse things if they spoke, the company
+remained silent. But this did not save them.
+
+"You all know it isn't. You all know that it is the caprice of chance
+encounter, the result of propinquity, the invention of poets and
+novelists, the superstition of the victims, the unscrupulous
+make-believe of the witnesses. As an impulse it quickly wears itself
+out in marriage, and makes way for divorce. In this country
+nine-tenths of the marriages are love-matches. The old motives which
+delay and prevent marriage in other countries, aristocratic countries,
+like questions of rank and descent, even of money, do not exist. Yet
+this is the land of unhappy unions beyond all other lands, the very
+home of divorce. The conditions of marriage are ideally favorable
+according to the opinions of its friends, who are all more or less
+active in bottling husbands and wives up in its felicity and
+preventing their escape through divorce."
+
+Still the others were silent, and again the stop-gap triumphed on.
+"Now, I am an enemy of divorce, too; but I would have it begin before
+marriage."
+
+"Rather paradoxical again?" the bachelor alone had the hardihood to
+suggest.
+
+"Not at all. I am quite literal. I would have it begin with the
+engagement. I would have the betrothed--the mistress and the
+lover--come before the magistrate or the minister, and declare their
+motives in wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with
+them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to
+a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would
+quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not,
+he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think
+it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them,
+and dismiss them as before, if they continued obstinate. After three
+months more, he should call them before him and reason with them for
+the last time. If they persisted in spite of everything, he should
+marry them, and let them take the consequences."
+
+The stop-gap leaned back in his chair defiantly, and fixed the host
+with an eye of challenge. Upon the whole the host seemed not so much
+frightened. He said: "I don't see anything so original in all that.
+It's merely a travesty of the Swiss law of divorce."
+
+"And you see nothing novel, nothing that makes for the higher
+civilization in the application of that law to marriage? You all
+approve of that law because you believe it prevents nine-tenths of the
+divorces; but if you had a law that would similarly prevent
+nine-tenths of the marriages, you would need no divorce law at all."
+
+"Oh, I don't know that," the hardy bachelor said. "What about the
+one-tenth of the marriages which it didn't prevent? Would you have the
+parties hopelessly shut up to them? Would you forbid _them_ all hope
+of escape? Would you have no divorce for any cause whatever?"
+
+"Yes," the husband on the right of the hostess asked (but his wife on
+the right of the host looked as if she wished he had not mixed in),
+"wouldn't more unhappiness result from that one marriage than from all
+the marriages as we have them now?"
+
+"Aren't you both rather precipitate?" the stop-gap demanded. "I said,
+let the parties to the final marriage take the consequences. But if
+these consequences were too dire, I would not forbid them the hope of
+relief. I haven't thought the matter out very clearly yet, but there
+are one or two causes for divorce which I would admit."
+
+"Ah?" the host inquired, with a provisional smile.
+
+"Yes, causes going down into the very nature of things--the nature of
+men and of women. Incompatibility of temperament ought always to be
+very seriously considered as a cause."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"And, above all," and here the stop-gap swept the board with his eye,
+"difference of sex."
+
+The sort of laugh which expresses uncertainty of perception and
+conditional approval went up.
+
+The hostess rose with rather a frightened air. "Shall we leave them to
+their tobacco?" she said to the other women.
+
+When he went home the stop-gap celebrated his triumph to his wife. "I
+don't think she'll ask you for the loan of me again to fill a place
+without you."
+
+"Yes," she answered, remotely. "You don't suppose she'll think we live
+unhappily together?"
+
+
+
+
+                                 XVII
+
+                    THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
+
+
+"Well, what are you doing here?" the younger of the two sages asked,
+with a resolute air of bonhomie, as he dragged himself over the
+asphalt path, and sank, gasping, into the seat beside the other in the
+Park. His senior lifted his head and looked him carefully over to make
+sure of his identity, and then he said:
+
+"I suppose, to answer your fatuous question, I am waiting here to get
+my breath before I move on; and in the next place, I am watching the
+feet of the women who go by in their high-heeled shoes."
+
+"How long do you think it will take you to get your breath in the
+atmosphere of these motors?" the younger sage pursued. "And you don't
+imagine that these women are of the first fashion, do you?"
+
+"No, but I imagine their shoes are. I have been calculating that their
+average heel is from an inch and a half to two inches high, and
+touches the ground in the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece.
+As you seem to be fond of asking questions, perhaps you will like to
+answer one. Why do you think they do it?"
+
+"Wear shoes like that?" the younger returned, cheerily, and laughed as
+he added, "Because the rest do."
+
+"Mmm!" the elder grumbled, not wholly pleased, and yet not refusing
+the answer. He had been having a little touch of grippe, and was
+somewhat broken from his wonted cynicism. He said: "It's very strange,
+very sad. Just now there was such a pretty young girl, so sweet and
+fine, went tottering by as helpless, in any exigency, as the daughter
+of a thousand years of bound-feet Chinese women. While she tilted on,
+the nice young fellow with her swept forward with one stride to her
+three on the wide soles and low heels of nature-last boots, and kept
+himself from out-walking her by a devotion that made him grit his
+teeth. Probably she was wiser and better and brighter than he, but she
+didn't look it; and I, who voted to give her the vote the other day,
+had my misgivings. I think I shall satisfy myself for the next five
+years by catching cold in taking my hat off to her in elevators, and
+getting killed by automobiles in helping her off the cars, where I've
+given her my seat."
+
+"But you must allow that if her shoes are too tight, her skirts are
+not so tight as they were. Or have you begun sighing for the good old
+hobble-skirts, now they're gone?"
+
+"The hobble-skirts were prettier than I thought they were when they
+were with us, but the 'tempestuous petticoat' has its charm, which I
+find I'd been missing."
+
+"Well, at least it's a change," the younger sage allowed, "and I
+haven't found the other changes in our dear old New York which I look
+for when I come back in the fall."
+
+The sages were enjoying together the soft weather which lingered with
+us a whole month from the middle of October onward, and the afternoon
+of their meeting in the Park was now softly reddening to the dim
+sunset over the westward trees.
+
+"Yes," the elder assented. "I miss the new sky-scrapers which used to
+welcome me back up and down the Avenue. But there are more automobiles
+than ever, and the game of saving your life from them when you cross
+the street is madder and merrier than I have known it before."
+
+"The war seems to have stopped building because people can't afford
+it," the other suggested, "but it has only increased automobiling."
+
+"Well, people can't afford that, either. Nine-tenths of them are
+traveling the road to ruin, I'm told, and apparently they can't get
+over the ground too fast. Just look!" and the sages joined in the
+amused and mournful contemplation of the different types of motors
+innumerably whirring up and down the drive before them, while they
+choked in the fumes of the gasolene.
+
+The motors were not the costliest types, except in a few instances,
+and in most instances they were the cheaper types, such as those who
+could not afford them could at least afford best. The sages had found
+a bench beside the walk where the statue of Daniel Webster looks down
+on the confluence of two driveways, and the stream of motors, going
+and coming, is like a seething torrent either way.
+
+"The mystery is," the elder continued, "why they should want to do it
+in the way they do it. Are they merely going somewhere and must get
+there in the shortest time possible, or are they arriving on a wager?
+If they are taking a pleasure drive, what a droll idea of pleasure
+they must have! Maybe they are trying to escape Black Care, but they
+must know he sits beside the chauffeur as he used to sit behind the
+horseman, and they know that he has a mortgage in his pocket, and can
+foreclose it any time on the house they have hypothecated to buy their
+car. Ah!" The old man started forward with the involuntary impulse of
+rescue. But it was not one of the people who singly, or in terrorized
+groups, had been waiting at the roadside to find their way across; it
+was only a hapless squirrel of those which used to make their way
+safely among the hoofs and wheels of the kind old cabs and carriages,
+and it lay instantly crushed under the tire of a motor. "He's done
+for, poor little wretch! They can't get used to the change. Some day a
+policeman will pick _me_ up from under a second-hand motor. I wonder
+what the great Daniel from his pedestal up there would say if he came
+to judgment."
+
+"He wouldn't believe in the change any more than that squirrel. He
+would decide that he was dreaming, and would sleep on, forgetting and
+forgotten."
+
+"Forgotten," the elder sage assented. "I remember when his fame filled
+the United States, which was then the whole world to me. And now I
+don't imagine that our hyphenated citizens have the remotest
+consciousness of him. If Daniel began delivering one of his
+liberty-and-union-now-and-forever-one-and-inseparable speeches, they
+wouldn't know what he was talking about." The sage laughed and champed
+his toothless jaws together, as old men do in the effort to compose
+their countenances after an emotional outbreak.
+
+"Well, for one thing," the younger observed, "they wouldn't understand
+what he said. You will notice, if you listen to them going by, that
+they seldom speak English. That's getting to be a dead language in New
+York, though it's still used in the newspapers." He thought to hearten
+the other with his whimsicality, for it seemed to him that the elder
+sage was getting sensibly older since their last meeting, and that he
+would be the gayer for such cheer as a man on the hither side of
+eighty can offer a man on the thither. "Perhaps the Russian Jews would
+appreciate Daniel if he were put into Yiddish for them. They're the
+brightest intelligences among our hyphenates. And they have the
+old-fashioned ideals of liberty and humanity, perhaps because they've
+known so little of either."
+
+His gaiety did not seem to enliven his senior much. "Ah, the old
+ideals!" he sighed. "The old ideal of an afternoon airing was a gentle
+course in an open carriage on a soft drive. Now it's a vertiginous
+whirl on an asphalted road, round and round and round the Park till
+the victims stagger with their brains spinning after they get out of
+their cars."
+
+The younger sage laughed. "You've been listening to the pessimism of
+the dear old fellows who drive the few lingering victorias. If you'd
+believe them, all these people in the motors are chauffeurs giving
+their lady-friends joy-rides."
+
+"Few?" the elder retorted. "There are lots of them. I've counted
+twenty in a single round of the Park. I was proud to be in one of
+them, though my horse left something to be desired in the way of youth
+and beauty. But I reflected that I was not very young or beautiful
+myself."
+
+As the sages sat looking out over the dizzying whirl of the motors
+they smoothed the tops of their sticks with their soft old hands, and
+were silent oftener than not. The elder seemed to drowse off from the
+time and place, but he was recalled by the younger saying, "It is
+certainly astonishing weather for this season of the year."
+
+The elder woke up and retorted, as if in offense: "Not at all. I've
+seen the cherries in blossom at the end of October."
+
+"They didn't set their fruit, I suppose."
+
+"Well--no."
+
+"Ah! Well, I saw a butterfly up here in the sheep-pasture the other
+day. I could have put out my hand and caught it. It's the soft weather
+that brings your victorias out like the belated butterflies. Wait till
+the first cold snap, and there won't be a single victoria or butterfly
+left."
+
+"Yes," the elder assented, "we butterflies and victorias belong to the
+youth of the year and the world. And the sad thing is that we won't
+have our palingenesis."
+
+"Why not?" the younger sage demanded. "What is to prevent your coming
+back in two or three thousand years?"
+
+"Well, if we came back in a year even, we shouldn't find room, for one
+reason. Haven't you noticed how full to bursting the place seems?
+Every street is as packed as lower Fifth Avenue used to be when the
+operatives came out of the big shops for their nooning. The city's
+shell hasn't been enlarged or added to, but the life in it has
+multiplied past its utmost capacity. All the hotels and houses and
+flats are packed. The theaters, wherever the plays are bad enough,
+swarm with spectators. Along up and down every side-streets the motors
+stand in rows, and at the same time the avenues are so dense with them
+that you are killed at every crossing. There has been no building to
+speak of during the summer, but unless New York is overbuilt next year
+we must appeal to Chicago to come and help hold it. But I've an idea
+that the victorias are remaining to stay; if some sort of mechanical
+horse could be substituted for the poor old animals that remind me of
+my mortality, I should be sure of it. Every now and then I get an
+impression of permanence in the things of the Park. As long as the
+peanut-men and the swan-boats are with us I sha'n't quite despair.
+And the other night I was moved almost to tears by the sight of a
+four-in-hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue drive. There it was,
+like some vehicular phantom, but how, whence, when? It came, as if out
+of the early eighteen-nineties; two middle-aged grooms, with their
+arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it's the rumble), but of all the
+young people who ought to have flowered over the top none was left but
+the lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box. I've tried every
+evening since for that four-in-hand, but I haven't seen it, and I've
+decided it wasn't a vehicular phantom, but a mere dream of the past."
+
+"Four-horse dream," the younger sage commented, as if musing aloud.
+
+The elder did not seem quite pleased. "A joke?" he challenged.
+
+"Not necessarily. I suppose I was the helpless prey of the rhyme."
+
+"I didn't know you were a poet."
+
+"I'm not, always. But didn't it occur to you that danger for danger
+your four-in-hand was more dangerous than an automobile to the passing
+human creature?"
+
+"It might have been if it had been multiplied by ten thousand. But
+there was only one of it, and it wasn't going twenty miles an hour."
+
+"That's true," the younger sage assented. "But there was always a
+fearful hazard in horses when we had them. We supposed they were
+tamed, but, after all, they were only _trained_ animals, like
+Hagenback's."
+
+"And what is a chauffeur?"
+
+"Ah, you have me there!" the younger said, and he laughed generously.
+"Or you would have if I hadn't noticed something like amelioration in
+the chauffeurs. At any rate, the taxis are cheaper than they were, and
+I suppose something will be done about the street traffic some time.
+They're talking now about subway crossings. But I should prefer
+overhead foot-bridges at all the corners, crossing one another
+diagonally. They would look like triumphal arches, and would serve the
+purpose of any future Dewey victory if we should happen to have
+another hero to win one."
+
+"Well, we must hope for the best. I rather like the notion of the
+diagonal foot-bridges. But why not Rows along the second stories as
+they have them in Chester? I should be pretty sure of always getting
+home alive if we had them. Now if I'm not telephoned for at a hospital
+before I'm restored to consciousness, I think myself pretty lucky. And
+yet it seems but yesterday, as the people used to say in the plays,
+since I had a pride in counting the automobiles as I walked up the
+Avenue. Once I got as high as twenty before I reached Fifty-ninth
+Street. Now I couldn't count as many horse vehicles."
+
+The elder sage mocked himself in a feeble laugh, but the younger tried
+to be serious. "We don't realize the absolute change. Our streets are
+not streets any more; they are railroad tracks with locomotives let
+loose on them, and no signs up to warn people at the crossings. It's
+pathetic to see the foot-passengers saving themselves, especially the
+poor, pretty, high-heeled women, looking this way and that in their
+fright, and then tottering over as fast as they can totter."
+
+"Well, I should have said it was outrageous, humiliating, insulting,
+once, but I don't any more; it would be no use."
+
+"No; and so much depends upon the point of view. When I'm on foot I
+feel all my rights invaded, but when I'm in a taxi it amuses me to see
+the women escaping; and I boil with rage in being halted at every
+other corner by the policeman with his new-fangled semaphore, and it's
+"Go" and "Stop" in red and blue, and my taxi-clock going round all the
+time and getting me in for a dollar when I thought I should keep
+within seventy cents. Then I feel that pedestrians of every age and
+sex ought to be killed."
+
+"Yes, there's something always in the point of view; and there's some
+comfort when you're stopped in your taxi to feel that they often _do_
+get killed."
+
+The sages laughed together, and the younger said: "I suppose when we
+get aeroplanes in common use, there'll be annoying traffic
+regulations, and policemen anchored out at intervals in the central
+blue to enforce them. After all--"
+
+What he was going to add in amplification cannot be known, for a
+girlish voice, trying to sharpen itself from its native sweetness to a
+conscientious severity, called to them as its owner swiftly advanced
+upon the elder sage: "Now, see here, grandfather! This won't do at
+all. You promised not to leave that bench by the Indian Hunter, and
+here you are away down by the Falconer, and we've been looking
+everywhere for you. It's too bad! I shall be afraid to trust you at
+all after this. Why, it's horrid of you, grandfather! You might have
+got killed crossing the drive."
+
+The grandfather looked up and verified the situation, which seemed to
+include a young man, tall and beautiful, but neither so handsome nor
+so many heads high as the young men in the advertisements of
+ready-to-wear clothing, who smiled down on the young girl as if he had
+arrived with her, and were finding an amusement in her severity which
+he might not, later. She was, in fact, very pretty, and her skirt
+flared in the fashion of the last moment, as she stooped threateningly
+yet fondly over her grandfather.
+
+The younger sage silently and somewhat guiltily escaped from the
+tumult of emotion which ignored him, and shuffled slowly down the
+path. The other finally gave an "Oh!" of recognition, and then said,
+for all explanation and excuse, "I didn't know what had become of
+you," and then they all laughed.
+
+
+
+
+                                XVIII
+
+                   SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
+
+
+                                  I
+
+              MISS ISOBEL RAMSEY AND MISS ESTHER GARNETT
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And they were really understood to be engaged?" Miss
+Ramsey is a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of nearly the length of two
+lady's umbrellas and the bulk of one closely folded in its sheath. She
+stands with her elbow supported on the corner of the mantel, her
+temple resting on the knuckle of a thin, nervous hand, in an effect of
+thoughtful absent-mindedness. Miss Garnett, more or less Merovingian
+in a costume that lends itself somewhat reluctantly to a low, thick
+figure, is apparently poising for departure, as she stands before the
+chair from which she has risen beside Miss Ramsey's tea-table and
+looks earnestly up into Miss Ramsey's absent face. Both are very
+young, but aim at being much older than they are, with occasional
+lapses into extreme girlhood.
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, distinctly. I knew you couldn't know, and I
+thought you ought to." She speaks in a deep conviction-bearing and
+conviction-carrying voice. "If he has been coming here so much."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with what seems temperamental abruptness: "Sit down.
+One can always think better sitting down." She catches a chair under
+her with a deft movement of her heel, and Miss Garnett sinks
+provisionally into her seat. "And I think it needs thought, don't
+you?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "That is what I expected of you."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And have some more tea. There is nothing like _fresh_
+tea for clearing the brain, and we certainly need clear brains for
+this." She pushes a button in the wall beside her, and is silent till
+the maid appears. "More tea, Nora." She is silent again while the maid
+reappears with the tea and disappears. "I don't know that he has been
+coming here so _very_ much. But he has no right to be coming at all,
+if he is engaged. That is, in that _way_."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "No. Not unless--he wishes he wasn't."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "That would give him _less_ than no right."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "That is true. I didn't think of it in that light."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I'm trying to decide what I ought to do if he does
+want to get off. She said herself that they were engaged?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "As much as that. Conny understood her to say so. And
+Conny never makes a mistake in what people say. Emily didn't say
+_whom_ she was engaged to, but Conny felt that that was to come later,
+and she did not quite feel like asking, don't you know."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Of course. And how came she to decide that it was Mr.
+Ashley?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Simply by putting two and two together. They two were
+together the whole time last summer."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I see. Then there is only one thing for me to do."
+
+_Miss Garnett_, admiringly: "I knew you would say that."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, dreamily: "The question is what the thing is."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "That is what I wish to think over. Chocolates?" She
+offers a box, catching it with her left hand from the mantel at her
+shoulder, without rising.
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Thank you; do you think they go well with tea?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "They go well with anything. But we mustn't allow our
+minds to be distracted. The case is simply this: If Mr. Ashley is
+engaged to Emily Fray, he has no right to go round calling on other
+girls--well, as if he wasn't--and he has been calling here a great
+deal. That is perfectly evident. He must be made to feel that girls
+are not to be trifled with--that they are not mere toys."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "How splendidly you do reason! And he ought to
+understand that Emily has a right--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, I don't know that I care about _her_--or not
+_pri_marily. Or do you say pri_mar_ily?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I never know. I only use it in writing."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "It's a clumsy word; I don't know that I shall. But
+what I mean is that I must act from a general principle, and that
+principle is that when a man is engaged, it doesn't matter whether the
+girl has thrown herself at him, or not--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "She certainly did, from what Conny says."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "He must be shown that other girls won't tolerate his
+behaving as if he were _not_ engaged. It is wrong."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "We must stand together."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Yes. Though I don't infer that he has been attentive
+to other girls generally."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "No. I meant that if he has been coming here so much,
+you want to prevent his trifling with others."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Something like that. But it ought to be more definite.
+He ought to realize that if another girl cared for him, it would be
+cruel to her, paying her attentions, when he was engaged to some one
+else."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "And cruel to the girl he is engaged to."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Yes." She speaks coldly, vaguely. "But that is the
+personal ground, and I wish to avoid that. I wish to deal with him
+purely in the abstract."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, I understand that. And at the same time you wish
+to punish him. He ought to be made to feel it all the more because he
+is so severe himself."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Severe?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Not tolerating anything that's the least out of the
+way in other people. Taking you up about your ideas and showing where
+you're wrong, or even silly. Spiritually snubbing, Conny calls it."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, I like that in him. It's so invigorating. It
+braces up all your good resolutions. It makes you ashamed; and shame
+is sanative."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "That's just what I told Conny, or the same thing. Do
+you think another one would hurt me? I will risk it, anyway." She
+takes another chocolate from the box. "Go on."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, I was just wishing that I had been out longer, and
+had a little more experience of men. Then I should know how to act.
+How do you suppose people do, generally?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why, you know, if they find a man in love with them,
+after he's engaged to another girl, they make him go back to her, it
+doesn't matter whether they're in love with him themselves or not."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I'm _not_ in love with Mr. Ashley, please."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "No; I'm supposing an extreme case."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, after a moment of silent thought: "Did you ever hear of
+anybody doing it?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Not just in our set. But I know it's done
+continually."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "It seems to me as if I had read something of the
+kind."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh yes, the books are full of it. Are those mallows?
+They might carry off the effects of the chocolates." Miss Ramsey
+passes her the box of marshmallows which she has bent over the table
+to look at.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And of course they couldn't get into the books if they
+hadn't really happened. I wish I could think of a case in point."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why, there was Peg Woffington--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with displeasure: "She was an actress of some sort,
+wasn't she?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_, with meritorious candor: "Yes, she was. But she was a
+very _good_ actress."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "What did _she_ do?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Well, it's a long time since I read it; and it's
+rather old-fashioned now. But there was a countryman of some sort, I
+remember, who came away from his wife, and fell in love with Peg
+Woffington, and then the wife follows him up to London, and begs her
+to give him back to her, and she does it. There's something about a
+portrait of Peg--I don't remember exactly; she puts her face through
+and cries when the wife talks to the picture. The wife thinks it is a
+real picture, and she is kind of soliloquizing, and asking Peg to give
+her husband back to her; and Peg does, in the end. That part is
+beautiful. They become the greatest friends."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Rather silly, I should say."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, it _is_ rather silly, but I suppose the author
+thought she had to do something."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And disgusting. A married man, that way! I don't see
+any comparison with Mr. Ashley."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "No, there really isn't any. Emily has never asked you
+to give him up. And besides, Peg Woffington really liked him a
+little--loved him, in fact."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And I _don't_ like Mr. Ashley at all. Of course I
+respect him--and I admire his intellect; there's no question about his
+being handsome; but I have never thought of him for a moment in any
+other way; and now I can't even respect him."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Nobody could. I'm sure Emily would be welcome to him
+as far as _I_ was concerned. But he has never been about with me so
+much as he has with you, and I don't wonder you feel indignant."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, coldly: "I don't feel indignant. I wish to be just."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, that is what I mean. And poor Emily is so
+uninteresting! In the play that Kentucky Summers does, she is
+perfectly fascinating at first, and you can see why the poor girl's
+fiancé should be so taken with her. But I'm sure no one could say you
+had ever given Mr. Ashley the least encouragement. It would be pure
+justice on your part. I think you are grand! I shall always be proud
+of knowing what you were going to do."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, after some moments of snubbing intention: "I don't know
+what I am going to do myself, yet. Or how. What _was_ that play? I
+never heard of it."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I don't remember distinctly, but it was about a young
+man who falls in love with her, when he's engaged to another girl, and
+she determines, as soon as she finds it out, to disgust him, so that
+he will go back to the other girl, don't you know."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "That sounds rather more practical than the Peg
+Woffington plan. What does she do?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Nothing you'd like to do."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I'd like to do something in such a cause. What does
+she do?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh, when he is calling on her, Kentucky Summers
+pretends to fly into a rage with her sister, and she pulls her hair
+down, and slams everything round the room, and scolds, and drinks
+champagne, and wants him to drink with her, and I don't know what all.
+The upshot is that he is only too glad to get away."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "It's rather loathsome, isn't it?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "It _is_ rather loathsome. But it was in a good cause,
+and I suppose it was what an actress would think of."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "An actress?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I forgot. The heroine is a distinguished actress, you
+know, and Kentucky could play that sort of part to perfection. But I
+don't think a lady would like to cut up, much, in the _best_ cause."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Cut up?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "She certainly frisks about the room a good deal. How
+delicious these mallows are! Have you ever tried toasting them?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "At school. There seems an idea in it. And the hero
+isn't married. I don't like the notion of a married man."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh, I'm quite sure he isn't married. He's merely
+engaged. That makes the whole difference from the Peg Woffington
+story. And there's no portrait, I'm confident, so that you wouldn't
+have to do that part."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, haughtily: "I don't propose to do _any_ part, if the
+affair can't be arranged without some such mountebank business!"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "You can manage it, if anybody can. You have so much
+dignity that you could awe him into doing his duty by a single glance.
+I wouldn't be in his place!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I shall not give him a glance. I shall not see him
+when he comes. That will be simpler still." To Nora, at the door:
+"What is it, Nora?"
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                   NORA, MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT
+
+_Nora_: "Mr. Ashley, Miss Ramsey."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with a severity not meant for Nora: "Ask him to sit
+down in the reception-room a moment."
+
+_Nora_: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."
+
+
+                                 III
+
+                      MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT
+
+_Miss Garnett_, rising and seizing Miss Ramsey's hands: "Oh, Isobel!
+But you will be equal to it! Oh! Oh!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with state: "Why are you going, Esther? Sit down."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "If I only _could_ stay! If I could hide under the
+sofa, or behind the screen! Isn't it wonderful--providential--his
+coming at the very instant? Oh, Isobel!" She clasps her friend
+convulsively, and after a moment's resistance Miss Ramsey yields to
+her emotion, and they hide their faces in each other's neck, and
+strangle their hysteric laughter. They try to regain their composure,
+and then abandon the effort with a shuddering delight in the
+perfection of the incident. "What shall you do? Shall you trust to
+inspiration? Shall you make him show his hand first, and then act? Or
+shall you tell him at once that you know all, and-- Or no, of course
+you can't do that. He's not supposed to know that you know. Oh, I can
+imagine the freezing hauteur that you'll receive him with, and the icy
+indifference you'll let him understand that he isn't a _persona grata_
+with! If I were only as tall as you! He isn't as tall himself, and you
+can tower over him. Don't sit down, or bend, or anything; just stand
+with your head up, and glance carelessly at him under your lashes as
+if nobody was there! Then it will gradually dawn upon him that you
+know everything, and he'll simply go through the floor." They take
+some ecstatic turns about the room, Miss Ramsey waltzing as gentleman.
+She abruptly frees herself.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "No. It can't be as tacit as all that. There must be
+something explicit. As you say, I must _do_ something to cure him of
+his fancy--his perfidy--and make him glad to go back to her."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes! Do you think he deserves it?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I've no wish to punish him."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "How noble you are! I don't wonder he adores you. _I_
+should. But you won't find it so easy. You must do something drastic.
+It _is_ drastic, isn't it? or do I mean static? One of those things
+when you simply crush a person. But now I must go. How I should like
+to listen at the door! We must kiss each other very quietly, and I
+must slip out-- Oh, you dear! How I long to know what you'll do! But it
+will be perfect, whatever it is. You always _did_ do perfect things."
+They knit their fingers together in parting. "On second thoughts I
+won't kiss you. It might unman you, and you need all your strength.
+Unman isn't the word, exactly, but you can't say ungirl, can you? It
+would be ridiculous. Though girls are as brave as men when it comes to
+duty. Good-by, dear!" She catches Miss Ramsey about the neck, and
+pressing her lips silently to her cheek, runs out. Miss Ramsey rings
+and the maid appears.
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                          NORA, MISS RAMSEY
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, starting: "Oh! Is that you, Nora? Of course! Nora!"
+
+_Nora_: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Do you know where my brother keeps his cigarettes?"
+
+_Nora_: "Why, in his room, Miss Ramsey; you told him you didn't like
+the smell here."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Yes, yes. I forgot. And has he got any cocktails?"
+
+_Nora_: "He's got the whole bottle full of them yet."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Full yet?"
+
+_Nora_: "You wouldn't let him offer them to the gentlemen he had to
+lunch, last week, because you said--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "What did I say?"
+
+_Nora_: "They were vulgar."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And so they are. And so much the better! Bring the
+cigarettes and the bottle and some glasses here, Nora, and then ask
+Mr. Ashley to come." She walks away to the window, and hurriedly hums
+a musical comedy waltz, not quite in tune, as from not remembering
+exactly, and after Nora has tinkled in with a tray of glasses she
+lights a cigarette and stands puffing it, gasping and coughing a
+little, as Walter Ashley enters. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! Sorry to make you
+wait."
+
+
+                                  V
+
+                       MR. ASHLEY, MISS RAMSEY
+
+_Mr. Ashley_: "The time _has_ seemed long, but I could have waited all
+day. I couldn't have gone without seeing you, and telling you--" He
+pauses, as if bewildered at the spectacle of Miss Ramsey's resolute
+practice with the cigarette, which she now takes from her lips and
+waves before her face with innocent recklessness.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, chokingly: "Do sit down." She drops into an easy-chair
+beside the tea-table, and stretches the tips of her feet out beyond
+the hem of her skirt in extremely lady-like abandon. "Have a
+cigarette." She reaches the box to him.
+
+_Ashley_: "Thank you. I won't smoke, I believe." He stands frowning,
+while she throws her cigarette into a teacup and lights another.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I thought everybody smoked. Then have a cocktail."
+
+_Ashley_: "A what?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "A cocktail. So many people like them with their tea,
+instead of rum, you know."
+
+_Ashley_: "No, I didn't know." He regards her with amaze, rapidly
+hardening into condemnation.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I hope you don't _object_ to smoking. Englishwomen all
+smoke."
+
+_Ashley_: "I think I've heard. I didn't know that American ladies
+did."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "They don't, _all_. But they will when they find how
+nice it is."
+
+_Ashley_: "And do Englishwomen all drink cocktails?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "They will when they find how nice it is. But why do
+you keep standing? Sit down, if it's only for a moment. There is
+something I would like to talk with you about. What were you saying
+when you came in? I didn't catch it quite."
+
+_Ashley_: "Nothing--now--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And I can't persuade you to have a cocktail? I believe
+I'll have another myself." She takes up the bottle, and tries several
+times to pour from it. "I do believe Nora's forgotten to open it! That
+is a good joke on me. But I mustn't let her know. Do you happen to
+have a pocket-corkscrew with you, Mr. Ashley?"
+
+_Ashley_: "No--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Well, never mind." She tosses her cigarette into the
+grate, and lights another. "I wonder why they always have cynical
+persons smoke, on the stage? I don't see that the two things
+necessarily go together, but it does give you a kind of thrill when
+they strike a match, and it lights up their faces when they put it to
+the cigarette. You know something good and wicked is going to happen."
+She puffs violently at her cigarette, and then suddenly flings it away
+and starts to her feet. "Will you--would you--open the window?" She
+collapses into her chair.
+
+_Ashley_, springing toward her: "Miss Ramsey, are you--you are ill!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "No, no! The window! A little faint--it's so
+close-- There, it's all right now. Or it will be--when--I've
+had--another cigarette." She leans forward to take one; Ashley gravely
+watches her, but says nothing. She lights her cigarette, but, without
+smoking, throws it away. "Go on."
+
+_Ashley_: "I wasn't saying anything!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, I forgot. And I don't know what we were talking
+about myself." She falls limply back into her chair and closes her
+eyes.
+
+_Ashley_: "Sha'n't I ring for the maid? I'm afraid--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, imperiously: "Not at all. Not on any account." Far less
+imperiously: "You may pour me a cup of tea if you like. That will make
+me well. The full strength, please." She motions away the hot-water
+jug with which he has proposed qualifying the cup of tea which he
+offers her.
+
+_Ashley_: "One lump or two?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Only one, thank you." She takes the cup.
+
+_Ashley_, offering the milk: "Cream?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "A drop." He stands anxiously beside her while she
+takes a long draught and then gives back the cup. "That was perfect."
+
+_Ashley_: "Another?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "No, that is just right. Now go on. Or, I forgot. You
+were not going on. Oh dear! How much better I feel. There must have
+been something poisonous in those cigarettes."
+
+_Ashley_: "Yes, there was tobacco."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, do you think it was the tobacco? Do throw the
+whole box into the fire! I shall tell Bob never to get cigarettes with
+tobacco in them after this. Won't you have one of the chocolates? Or a
+mallow? I feel as if I should never want to eat anything again. Where
+was I?" She rests her cheek against the side of her chair cushion, and
+speaks with closed eyes, in a weak murmur. Mr. Ashley watches her at
+first with anxiety, then with a gradual change of countenance until a
+gleam of intelligence steals into his look of compassion.
+
+_Ashley_: "You asked me to throw the cigarettes into the fire. But I
+want you to let me keep them."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with wide-flung eyes: "You? You said you wouldn't
+smoke."
+
+_Ashley_, laughing: "May I change my mind? One talks better." He
+lights a cigarette. "And, Miss Ramsey, I believe I _will_ have a
+cocktail, after all."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Mr. Ashley!"
+
+_Ashley_, without noting her protest: "I had forgotten that I had a
+corkscrew in my pocket-knife. Don't trouble yourself to ring for one."
+He produces the knife and opens the bottle; then, as Miss Ramsey rises
+and stands aghast, he pours out a glass and offers it to her, with
+mock devotion. As she shakes her head and recoils: "Oh! I thought you
+liked cocktails. They are very good after cigarettes--very reviving.
+But if you won't--" He tosses off the cocktail and sets down the
+glass, smacking his lips. "Tell your brother I commend his taste--in
+cocktails and"--puffing his cigarette--"tobacco. Poison for poison,
+let me offer you one of _my_ cigarettes. They're milder than these."
+He puts his hand to his breast pocket.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with nervous shrinking: "No--"
+
+_Ashley_: "It's just as well. I find that I hadn't brought mine with
+me." After a moment: "You are so unconventional, so fearless, that I
+should like your notion of the problem in a book I've just been
+reading. Why should the mere fact that a man is married to one woman
+prevent his being in love with another, or half a dozen others; or
+_vice versa_?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Mr. Ashley, do you wish to insult me?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Dear me, no! But put the case a little differently. Suppose
+a couple are merely engaged. Does that fact imply that neither has a
+right to a change of mind, or to be fancy free to make another
+choice?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, indignantly: "Yes, it does. They are as sacredly bound
+to each other as if they were married, and if they are false to each
+other the girl is a wretch, and the man is a villain! And if you think
+anything I have said can excuse you for breaking your engagement, or
+that I don't consider you the wickedest person in the world, and the
+most barefaced hypocrite, and--and--I don't know what--you are very
+much mistaken."
+
+_Ashley_: "What in the world are you talking about?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I am talking about you and your shameless perfidy."
+
+_Ashley_: "My shameless perf-- I don't understand! I came here
+to tell you that I love you--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "How dare you! To speak to me of that, when-- Or
+perhaps you _have_ broken with her, and think you are free to hoodwink
+some other poor creature. But you will find that you have chosen the
+wrong person. And it's no excuse for you her being a little--a
+little--not so bright as some girls, and not so good-looking. Oh, it's
+enough to make any girl loathe her own looks! You mustn't suppose you
+can come here red-handed--yes, it's the same as a murder, and any true
+girl would say so--and tell me you care for me. No, Walter Ashley, I
+haven't fallen so low as that, though I _have_ the disgrace of your
+acquaintance. And I hope--I hope--if you don't like my smoking, and
+offering you cocktails, and talking the way I have, it will be a
+lesson to you. And yes!--I _will_ say it! If it will add to your
+misery to know that I did respect you very much, and thought
+everything--very highly--of you, and might have answered you very
+differently before, when you were free to tell me _that_--now
+I have nothing but the utmost abhorrence--and--disapproval of you.
+And--and-- Oh, I don't see how you can be so hateful!" She hides her
+face in her hands and rushes from the room, overturning several chairs
+in her course toward the door. Ashley remains staring after her, while
+a succession of impetuous rings make themselves heard from the street
+door. There is a sound of opening it, and then a flutter of skirts and
+anxieties, and Miss Garnett comes running into the room.
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                       MISS GARNETT, MR. ASHLEY
+
+_Miss Garnett_, to the maid hovering in the doorway: "Yes, I must have
+left it here, for I never missed it till I went to pay my fare in the
+motor-bus, and tried to think whether I had the exact dime, and if I
+hadn't whether the conductor would change a five-dollar bill or not,
+and then it rushed into my mind that I had left my purse somewhere,
+and I knew I hadn't been anywhere else." She runs from the mantel to
+the writing-desk in the corner, and then to the sofa, where, peering
+under the tea-table, she finds her purse on the shelf. "Oh, here it
+is, Nora, just where I put it when we began to talk, and I must have
+gone out and left it. I--" She starts with a little shriek, in
+encountering Ashley. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! What a fright you gave me! I was
+just looking for my purse that I missed when I went to pay my fare in
+the motor-bus, and was wondering whether I had the exact dime, or the
+conductor could change a five-dollar bill, and--" She discovers, or
+affects to discover, something strange in his manner. "What--what is
+the matter, Mr. Ashley?"
+
+_Ashley_: "I shall be glad to have you tell me--or any one."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I don't understand. Has Isobel--"
+
+_Ashley_: "Miss Garnett, did you know I was engaged?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why, yes; I was just going to congrat--"
+
+_Ashley_: "Well, don't, unless you can tell me whom I am engaged to."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why, aren't you engaged to Emily Fray?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Not the least in the world."
+
+_Miss Garnett_, in despair: "Then _what_ have I done? Oh, what a
+fatal, fatal scrape!" With a ray of returning hope: "But she told me
+_herself_ that she was engaged! And you were together so much, last
+summer!" Desperately: "Then if she isn't engaged to you, whom is she
+engaged to?"
+
+_Ashley_: "On general principles, I shouldn't know, but in this
+particular instance I happen to know that she is engaged to Owen
+Brooks. They were a great deal more together last summer."
+
+_Miss Garnett_, with conviction: "So they were!" With returning doubt:
+"But why didn't she say so?"
+
+_Ashley_: "I can't tell you; she may have had her reasons, or she may
+not. Can you possibly tell me, in return for my ignorance, why the
+fact of her engagement should involve me in the strange way it seems
+to have done with Miss Ramsey?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_, with a burst of involuntary candor: "Why, _I_ did
+that. Or, no! What's she been doing?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Really, Miss Garnett--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "How can I tell you anything, if you don't tell me
+everything? You wouldn't wish me to betray confidence?"
+
+_Ashley_: "No, certainly not. What was the confidence?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Well-- But I shall have to know first what she's been
+doing. You must see that yourself, Mr. Ashley." He is silent. "Has
+she--has Isobel--been behaving--well, out of character?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Very much indeed."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I expected she would." She fetches a thoughtful sigh,
+and for her greater emotional convenience she sinks into an easy-chair
+and leans forward. "Oh dear! It is a scrape." Suddenly and
+imperatively: "Tell me exactly what she did, if you hope for any help
+whatever."
+
+_Ashley_: "Why, she offered me a cocktail--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh, how good! I didn't suppose she would dare! Well?"
+
+_Ashley_: "And she smoked cigarettes--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "How perfectly divine! And what else?"
+
+_Ashley_, coldly: "May I ask why you admire Miss Ramsey's behaving out
+of character so much? I think the smoking made her rather faint, and--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "She would have let it _kill_ her! Never tell me that
+girls have no moral courage!"
+
+_Ashley_: "But what--what was the meaning of it all?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_, thoughtfully: "I suppose if I got her in for it, I
+ought to get her out, even if I betray confidence."
+
+_Ashley_: "It depends upon the confidence. What is it?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why-- But you're sure it's my duty?"
+
+_Ashley_: "If you care what I think of her--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh, Mr. Ashley, you mustn't think it strange of
+Isobel, on my bended knees you mustn't! Why, don't you see? She was
+just doing it to disgust you!"
+
+_Ashley_: "Disgust me?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, and drive you back to Emily Fray."
+
+_Ashley_: "Drive me ba--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "If she thought you were engaged to Emily, when you
+were coming here all the time, and she wasn't quite sure that she
+hated to have you, don't you see it would be her duty to sacrifice
+herself, and-- Oh, I suppose she's heard everything up there, and--"
+She catches herself up and runs out of the room, leaving Ashley to
+await the retarded descent of skirts which he hears on the stairs
+after the crash of the street door has announced Miss Garnett's
+escape. He stands with his back to the mantel, and faces Miss Ramsey
+as she enters the room.
+
+
+                                 VII
+
+                         MISS RAMSEY, ASHLEY
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with the effect of cold surprise: "Mr. Ashley? I
+thought I heard-- Wasn't Miss Garnett--"
+
+_Ashley_: "She was. Did you think it was the street door closing on
+_me_?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "How should I know?" Then, courageously: "No, I didn't
+think it was. Why do you ask?" She moves uneasily about the room, with
+an air of studied inattention.
+
+_Ashley_: "Because if you did, I can put you in the right, though I
+can't restore Miss Garnett's presence by my absence."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "You're rather--enigmatical." A ring is heard; the maid
+pauses at the doorway. "I'm not at home, Nora." To Mr. Ashley: "It
+seems to be very close--"
+
+_Ashley_: "It's my having been smoking."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "_Your_ having?" She goes to the window and tries to
+lift it.
+
+_Ashley_: "Let _me_." He follows her to the window, where he stands
+beside her.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Now, she's seen me! And you here with me. Of course--"
+
+_Ashley_: "I shouldn't mind. But I'm so sorry if--and I will go."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "You can't go now--till she's round the corner. She'll
+keep looking back, and she'll think I made you."
+
+_Ashley_: "But haven't you? Aren't you sending me back to Miss Fray to
+tell her that I must keep my engagement, though I care nothing for
+her, and care all the world for you? Isn't that what you want me to
+do?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "But you're not engaged to her! You just--"
+
+_Ashley_: "Just what?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, desperately: "You wish me to disgrace myself forever in
+your eyes. Well, I will; what does it matter now? I heard you telling
+Esther you were not engaged. I _overheard_ you."
+
+_Ashley_: "I fancied you must."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I _tried_ to overhear! I _eavesdropped_! I wish you to
+know that."
+
+_Ashley_: "And what do you wish me to do about it?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I should think any self-respecting person would know.
+I'm _not_ a self-respecting person." Her wandering gaze seems to fall
+for the first time upon the tray with the cocktails and glasses and
+cigarettes; she flies at the bell-button and presses it impetuously.
+As the maid appears: "Take these things away, Nora, please!" To Ashley
+when the maid has left the room: "Don't be afraid to say what you
+think of me!"
+
+_Ashley_: "I think all the world of you. But I should merely like to
+ask--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, you can ask anything of me now!"
+
+_Ashley_, with palpable insincerity: "I should like to ask why you
+don't respect yourself?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Was that what you were going to ask? I know it wasn't.
+But I will tell you. Because I have been a fool."
+
+_Ashley_: "Thank you. Now I will tell you what I was really going to
+ask. Why did you wish to drive me back to Miss Fray when you knew that
+I would be false to her a thousand times if I could only once be true
+to you?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Now you _are_ insulting me! And that is just the
+point. You may be a very clever lawyer, Mr. Ashley, and everybody says
+you are--very able, and talented, and all that, but you can't get
+round that point. You may torture any meaning you please out of my
+words, but I shall always say you brought it on yourself."
+
+_Ashley_: "Brought what on?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Mr. Ashley! I won't be cross-questioned."
+
+_Ashley_: "Was that why you smoked, and poured cocktails out of an
+unopened bottle? Was it because you wished me to hate you, and
+remember my duty, and go back to Miss Fray? Well, it was a dead
+failure. It made me love you more than ever. I am a fool too, as you
+call it."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Say anything you please. I have given you the right. I
+shall not resent it. Go on."
+
+_Ashley_: "I should only repeat myself. You must have known how much I
+care for you, Isobel. Do you mind my calling you Isobel?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Not in the least if you wish to humiliate me by it. I
+should like you to trample on me in every way you can."
+
+_Ashley_: "Trample on you? I would rather be run over by a
+steam-roller than tread on the least of your outlying feelings,
+dearest. Do you mind my saying dearest?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I have told you that you can say anything you like. I
+deserve it. But oh, if you have a spark of pity--"
+
+_Ashley_: "I'm a perfect conflagration of compassion, darling. Do you
+object to darling?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with starting tears: "It doesn't matter now." She has
+let her lovely length trail into the corner of the sofa, where she
+desperately reclines, supporting her elbow on the arm of it, and
+resting her drooping head on her hand. He draws a hassock up in front
+of her, and sits on it.
+
+_Ashley_: "This represents kneeling at your feet. One doesn't do it
+literally any more, you know."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, in a hollow voice: "I should despise you if you did,
+and"--deeply murmurous--"I don't _wish_ to despise you."
+
+_Ashley_: "No, I understand that. You merely wish _me_ to despise
+_you_. But why?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, nervously: "You know."
+
+_Ashley_: "But I don't know--Isobel, dearest, darling, if you will
+allow me to express myself so fully. _How_ should I know?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I've told you."
+
+_Ashley_: "May I take your hand? For good-by!" He possesses himself of
+it. "It seems to go along with those expressions."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, self-contemptuously: "Oh yes."
+
+_Ashley_: "Thank you. Where were we?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, sitting up and recovering her hand: "You were saying
+good-by--"
+
+_Ashley_: "Was I? But not before I had told you that I knew you were
+doing all that for my best good, and I wish--I _wish_ you could have
+seen how exemplary you looked when you were trying to pour a cocktail
+out of a corked bottle, between your remarks on passionate fiction and
+puffs of the insidious cigarette! When the venomous tobacco began to
+get in its deadly work, and you turned pale and reeled a little, and
+called for air, it made me mentally vow to go back to Miss Fray
+instantly, whether I was engaged to her or not, and cut out poor old
+Brooks--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Was it Mr. Brooks? I didn't hear the name exactly."
+
+_Ashley_: "When I was telling Miss Garnett? I ought to have spoken
+louder, but I wasn't sure at the time you were listening. Though as
+you were saying, what does it matter now?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Did I say that?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Words to that effect. And they have made me feel how
+unworthy of you I am. I'm not heroic--by nature. But I could be, if
+you made me--by art--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, springing to her feet indignantly: "Now, you are
+ridiculing me--you are making fun of me."
+
+_Ashley_, gathering himself up from his hassock with difficulty, and
+confronting her: "Do I look like a man who would dare to make fun of
+you? I am half a head shorter than you, and in moral grandeur you
+overtop me so that I would always have to wear a high hat when I was
+with you."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, thoughtfully: "Plenty of girls are that way, now. But
+if you are ashamed of my being tall--" Flashingly, and with starting
+tears.
+
+_Ashley_: "Ashamed! I can always look up to you, you can always stoop
+to me!" He stretches his arms toward her.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, recoiling bewildered: "Wait! We haven't got to that
+yet."
+
+_Ashley_: "Oh, Isobel--dearest--darling! We've got past it! We're on
+the home stretch, now."
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIX
+
+                      THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
+
+                              A MORALITY
+
+
+                                  I
+
+                    MR. AND MRS. CLARENCE FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Clarence Fountain_, backing into the room, and closing the door
+noiselessly before looking round: "Oh, you poor thing! I can see that
+you are dead, at the first glance. I'm dead myself, for that matter."
+She is speaking to her husband, who clings with one hand to the
+chimney-piece, and supports his back with the other; from this hand a
+little girl's long stocking lumpily dangles; Mrs. Fountain, turning
+round, observes it. "Not finished yet? But I don't wonder! I wonder
+you've even begun. Well, now, _I_ will take hold with you." In token
+of the aid she is going to give, Mrs. Fountain sinks into a chair and
+rolls a distracted eye over the littered and tumbled room. "It's worse
+than I thought it would be. You ought to have smoothed the papers out
+and laid them in a pile as fast as you unwrapped the things; that is
+the way I always do; and wound the strings up and put them one side.
+Then you wouldn't have had to wade round in them. I suppose I oughtn't
+to have left it to you, but if I had let _you_ put the children to bed
+you know you'd have told them stories and kept them all night over
+their prayers. And as it was each of them wanted to put in a special
+Christmas clause; I know what kind of Christmas clause _I_ should have
+put in if I'd been frank! I'm not sure it's right to keep up the
+deception. One comfort, the oldest ones don't believe in it any more
+than we do. Dear! I did think at one time this afternoon I should have
+to be brought home in an ambulance; it would have been a convenience,
+with all the packages. I simply marvel at their delivery wagons
+getting them here."
+
+_Fountain_, coming to the table, where she sits, and taking up one of
+the toys with which it is strewn: "They haven't all of them."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "What do you mean by all of them?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I mean half." He takes up a mechanical locomotive and
+stuffs it into the stocking he holds.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, staying his hand: "What are you doing? Putting
+Jimmy's engine into Susy's stocking! She'll be perfectly insulted when
+she finds it, for she'll know you weren't paying the least attention,
+and you can't blame Santa Claus for it with _her_. If that's what
+you've been doing with the other stockings-- But there _aren't_ any
+others. Don't tell me you've just begun! Well, I could simply cry."
+
+_Fountain_, dropping into the chair on the other side of the table,
+under the shelter of a tall Christmas tree standing on it: "Do you
+call unwrapping a whole car-load of truck and getting it sorted, just
+beginning? I've been slaving here from the dawn of time, and I had to
+have _some_ leisure for the ghosts of my own Christmases when I was
+little. I didn't have to wade round in the wrappings of my presents in
+those days. But it isn't the sad memories that take it out of you;
+it's the happy ones. I've never had a ghastlier half-hour than I've
+just spent in the humiliating multiplicity of these gifts. All the old
+birthdays and wedding-days and Fourth of Julys and home-comings and
+children's christenings I've ever had came trooping back. There
+oughtn't to be any gay anniversaries; they should be forbidden by law.
+If I could only have recalled a few dangerous fevers and funerals!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Clarence! Don't say such a thing; you'll be punished
+for it. I know how you suffer from those gloomy feelings, and I pity
+you. You ought to bear up against them. If _I_ gave way! You must
+think about something cheerful in the future when the happiness of the
+past afflicts you, and set one against the other; life isn't _all_ a
+vale of tears. You must keep your mind fixed on the work before you. I
+don't believe it's the number of the packages here that's broken you
+down. It's the shopping that's worn you out; I'm sure I'm a mere
+thread. And I had been at it from immediately after breakfast; and I
+lunched in one of the stores with ten thousand suburbans who had come
+pouring in with the first of their unnatural trains: I did hope I
+should have some of the places to myself; but they were every one
+jammed. And you came up from your office about four, perfectly fresh."
+
+_Fountain_: "Fresh! Yes, quite dewy from a day's fight with the beasts
+at Ephesus on the eve of Christmas week."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, don't be cynical, Clarence, on this, of all
+nights of the year. You know how sorry I always am for what you have
+to go through down there, and I suppose it's worse, as you say, at
+this season than any other time of year. It's the terrible
+concentration of everything just before Christmas that makes it so
+killing. I really don't know which of the places was the worst; the
+big department stores or the separate places for jewelry and toys and
+books and stationery and antiques; they were all alike, and all
+maddening. And the rain outside, and everybody coming in reeking;
+though I don't believe that sunshine would have been any better;
+there'd have been more of them. I declare, it made my heart ache for
+those poor creatures behind the counters, and I don't know whether I
+suffered most for them when they kept up a ghastly cheerfulness in
+their attention or were simply insulting in their indifference. I know
+they must be all dead by this time. 'Going up?' 'Going down?'
+'Ca-ish!' 'Here, boy!' I believe it will ring in my ears as long as I
+live. And the whiz of those overhead wire things, and having to wait
+ages for your change, and then drag your tatters out of the stores
+into the streets! If I hadn't had you with me at the last I should
+certainly have dropped."
+
+_Fountain_: "Yes, and what had become of your good resolutions about
+doing all your Christmas shopping in July?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "_My_ good resolutions? Really, Clarence, sometimes
+if it were not cruelty to animals I should like to hit you. _My_ good--
+You _know_ that you suggested that plan, and it wasn't even original
+with you. The papers have been talking about it for years; but when
+you brought it up as such a new idea, I fell in with it to please you--"
+
+_Fountain_: "Now, look out, Lucy!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Yes, to please you, and to help you forget the
+Christmas worry, just as I've been doing to-night. You never spare
+_me_."
+
+_Fountain_: "Stick to the record. Why didn't you do your Christmas
+shopping in July?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Why didn't I? Did you expect me to do my Christmas
+shopping down at Sculpin Beach, where I spent the whole time from the
+middle of June till the middle of September? Why didn't _you_ do the
+Christmas shopping in July? You had the stores under your nose here
+from the beginning till the end of summer, with nothing in the world
+to hinder you, and not a chick or a child to look after."
+
+_Fountain_: "Oh, I like that. You think I was leading a life of
+complete leisure here, with the thermometer among the nineties
+nine-tenths of the time?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I only know you were bragging in all your letters
+about your bath and your club, and the folly of any one going away
+from the cool, comfortable town in the summer. I suppose you'll say
+that was to keep me from feeling badly at leaving you. When it was
+only for the children's sake! I will let you take them the next time."
+
+_Fountain_: "While you look after my office? And you think the stores
+are full of Christmas things in July, I suppose."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I never thought so; and now I hope you see the folly
+of that idea. No, Clarence. We must be logical in everything. You
+can't get rid of Christmas shopping at Christmas-time."
+
+_Fountain_, shouting wrathfully: "Then I say get rid of Christmas!"
+
+
+                                  II
+
+              MR. FRANK WATKINS, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Watkins_, opening the door for himself and struggling into the room
+with an armful of parcels: "I'm with you there, Clarence. Christmas is
+at the root of Christmas shopping, and Christmas giving, and all the
+rest of it. Oh, you needn't be afraid, Lucy. I didn't hear any
+epithets; just caught the drift of your argument through the keyhole.
+I've been kicking at the door ever since you began. Where shall I dump
+these things?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Oh, you poor boy! Here--anywhere--on the floor--on
+the sofa--on the table." She clears several spaces and helps Watkins
+unload. "Clarence! I'm surprised at you. What are you thinking of?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I'm thinking that if this goes on, I'll let somebody else
+arrange the presents."
+
+_Watkins_: "If I saw a man coming into my house with a load like this
+to-night, I'd throw him into the street. But living in a ninth-story
+flat like you, it might hurt him."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, reading the inscriptions on the packages: "'For Benny
+from his uncle Frank.' Oh, how sweet of you, Frank! And here's a kiss
+for his uncle Frank." She embraces him with as little interruption as
+possible. "'From Uncle Frank to Jim.' Oh, I know what that is!" She
+feels the package over. "And this is for 'Susy from her aunt Sue.' Oh,
+I knew she would remember her namesake. 'For Maggie. Merry Christmas
+from Mrs. Watkins.' 'Bridget, with Mrs. Watkins's best wishes for a
+Merry Christmas.' Both the girls! But it's like Sue; she never forgets
+anybody. And what's this for Clarence? I _must_ know! Not a
+bath-gown?" Undoing it: "I simply _must_ see it. Blue! His very
+color!" Holding it up: "From you, Frank?" He nods. "Clarence!"
+
+_Watkins_: "If Fountain tries to kiss me, I'll--"
+
+_Fountain_: "I wouldn't kiss you for a dozen bath-gowns." Lifting it
+up from the floor where Mrs. Fountain has dropped it: "It _is_ rather
+nice."
+
+_Watkins_: "Don't overwhelm me."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, dancing about with a long, soft roll in her hand: "Oh,
+oh, oh! She saw me gloating on it at Shumaker's! I do wonder if it
+_is_."
+
+_Fountain_, reaching for it: "Why, open it--"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "You dare! No, it shall be opened the very last thing
+in the morning, now, to punish you! How is poor Sue? I saw her
+literally dropping by the way at Shumaker's."
+
+_Watkins_, making for the door: "Well, she must have got up again. I
+left her registering a vow that if ever she lived to see another
+Christmas she would leave the country months before the shopping
+began. She called down maledictions on all the recipients of her gifts
+and wished them the worst harm that can befall the wicked."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Poor Sue! She simply lives to do people good, and I
+can understand exactly how she feels toward them. I'll be round bright
+and early to-morrow to thank her. Why do you go?"
+
+_Watkins_: "Well, I can't stay here all night, and I'd better let you
+and Clarence finish up." He escapes from her detaining embrace and
+runs out.
+
+
+                                 III
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, intent upon her roll: "How funny he is! I wonder if
+he did hear anything but our scolding voices? Where were we?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I had just called you a serpent."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, with amusement: "No, really?" Feeling the parcel: "If
+it's that Spanish lace scarf I can tell her it was machine lace. I saw
+it at the first glance. But poor Sue has no taste. I suppose I must
+stand it. But I can't bear to think what she's given the girls and
+children. She means well. Did you really say serpent, Clarence? You
+never called me just _that_ before."
+
+_Fountain_: "No, but you called me a laughing hyena, and said I
+scoffed at everything sacred."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I can't remember using the word hyena, exactly,
+though I do think the way you talk about Christmas is dreadful. But I
+take back the laughing hyena."
+
+_Fountain_: "And I take back the serpent. I meant dove, anyway. But
+it's this Christmas-time when a man gets so tired he doesn't know
+what he's saying."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, _you're_ good, anyway, dearest, whatever you
+say; and now I'm going to help you arrange the things. I suppose
+there'll be lots more to-morrow, but we must get rid of these now.
+Don't you wish nobody would do anything for us? Just the
+children--dear little souls! I don't believe but what we can make Jim
+and Susy believe in Santa Claus again; Benny is firm in the faith; he
+put him into his prayer. I declare, his sweetness almost broke my
+heart." At a knock: "Who's that, I wonder? Come in! Oh, it's you,
+Maggie. Well?"
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                  THE FOUNTAINS, FOUNTAIN'S SISTERS
+
+_Maggie_: "It's Mr. Fountain's sisters just telephoned up."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Have them come up at once, Maggie, of course." As
+Maggie goes out: "Another interruption! If it's going to keep on like
+this! Shouldn't you have thought they might have _sent_ their
+presents?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I thought something like it in Frank's case; but I didn't
+say it."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And I don't know why _I_ say it, now. It's because
+I'm so tired I don't know what I _am_ saying. Do forgive me! It's this
+terrible Christmas spirit that gets into me. But now you'll see how
+nice I can be to them." At a tap on the door: "Come in! Come in!
+Don't mind our being in all this mess. So darling of you to come! You
+can help cheer Clarence up; you know his Christmas Eve dumps." She
+runs to them and clasps them in her arms with several half-open
+packages dangling from her hands and contrasting their disarray with
+the neatness of their silk-ribboned and tissue-papered parcels which
+their embrace makes meet at her back. "Minnie! Aggie! To lug here,
+when you ought to be at home in bed dying of fatigue! But it's just
+like you, both of you. Did you ever see anything like the stores
+to-day? Do sit down, or swoon on the floor, or anything. Let me have
+those wretched bundles which are simply killing you." She looks at the
+different packages. "'For Benny from Grandpa.' 'For a good girl, from
+Susy's grandmother.' 'Jim, from Aunt Minnie and Aunt Aggie.' 'Lucy,
+with love from Aggie and Minnie.' And Clarence! What hearts you _have_
+got! Well, I always say there never were such thoughtful girls, and
+you always show such taste and such originality. I long to get at the
+things." She keeps fingering the large bundle marked with her
+husband's name. "Not--not--a--"
+
+_Minnie_: "Yes, a bath-robe. Unless you give him a cigar-case it's
+about the only thing you can give a man."
+
+_Aggie_: "Minnie thought of it and I chose it. Blue, because it's his
+color. Try it on, Clarence, and if it's too long--"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Yes, do, dear! Let's see you with it on." While the
+girls are fussily opening the robe, she manages to push her brother's
+gift behind the door. Then, without looking round at her husband. "It
+isn't a bit too long. Just the very--" Looking: "Well, it can easily
+be taken up at the hem. I can do it to-morrow." She abandons him to
+his awkward isolation while she chatters on with his sisters. "Sit
+down; I insist! Don't think of going. Did you see that frightful pack
+of people when the cab horse fell down in front of Shumaker's?"
+
+_Minnie_: "See it?"
+
+_Aggie_: "We were in the midst of it! I wonder we ever got out alive.
+It's enough to make you wish never to see another Christmas as long as
+you live."
+
+_Minnie_: "A great many _won't_ live. There will be more grippe, and
+more pneumonia, and more appendicitis from those jams of people in the
+stores!"
+
+_Aggie_: "The germs must have been swarming."
+
+_Fountain_: "Lucy was black with them when we got home."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Don't pay the slightest attention to him, girls.
+He'll probably be the first to sneeze himself."
+
+_Minnie_: "I don't know about sneezing. I shall only be too glad if I
+don't have nervous prostration from it."
+
+_Aggie_: "I'm glad we got our motor-car just in time. Any one that
+goes in the trolleys now will take their life in their hand." The
+girls rise and move toward the door. "Well, we must go on now. We're
+making a regular round; you can't trust the delivery wagons at a time
+like this. Good-by. Merry Christmas to the children. They're fast
+asleep by this time, I suppose."
+
+_Minnie_: "I only wish _I_ was!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I believe you, Minnie. Good-by. Good night. Good
+night, Aggie. Clarence, go to the elevator with them! Or no, he can't
+in that ridiculous bath-gown!" Turning to Fountain as the door closes:
+"Now I've done it."
+
+
+                                  V
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Fountain_: "It isn't a thing you could have wished to phrase that
+way, exactly."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And you made me do it. Never thanking them, or
+anything, and standing there like I don't know what, and leaving the
+talk all to me. And now, making me lose my temper again, when I wanted
+to be so nice to you. Well, it is no use trying, and from this on I
+won't. _Clarence!_" She has opened the parcel addressed to herself and
+now stands transfixed with joy and wonder. "_See_ what the girls have
+given me! The very necklace I've been longing for at Planets', and
+denying myself for the last fortnight! Well, never will I say your
+sisters are mean again."
+
+_Fountain_: "You ought to have said that to them."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "It quite reconciles one to Christmas. What? Oh, that
+_was_ rather nasty. You know I didn't mean it. I was so excited I
+didn't know what I was saying. I'm sure nobody ever got on better with
+sisters-in-law, and that shows my tact; if I do make a slip, now and
+then, I can always get out of it. They will understand. Do you think
+it was very nice of them to flaunt their new motor in my face? But of
+course anything _your_ family does is perfect, and always was, though
+I must say this necklace is sweet of them. I wonder they had the
+taste." A tap on the door is heard. "Come in, Maggie!" _Sotto voce._
+"Take it off." She snatches his bath-robe and tosses it behind the
+door.
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                     WILBUR HAZARD, THE FOUNTAINS
+
+_Hazard_: "I suppose I can come in, even if I'm not Maggie. Catch,
+Fountain." He tosses a large bundle to Fountain. "It's huge, but it
+isn't hefty." He turns to go out again.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Oh, oh, oh! Don't go! Come in and help us. What have
+you brought Clarence! May I feel?"
+
+_Hazard_: "You can look, if you like. I'm rather proud of it. There's
+only one other thing you can give a man, and I said, 'No, not a
+cigar-case. Fountain smokes enough already, but if a bath-robe can
+induce him to wash--'" He goes out.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, screaming after him through the open door: "Oh, how
+good! Come back and see it on him." She throws the bath-robe over
+Fountain's shoulders.
+
+_Hazard_, looking in again: "Perfect fit, just as the Jew said, and
+the very color for Fountain." He vanishes, shutting the door behind
+him.
+
+
+                                 VII
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "How coarse! Well, my dear, I don't know where you
+picked up your bachelor friends. I hope this is the last of them."
+
+_Fountain_: "Hazard's the only one who has survived your rigorous
+treatment. But he always had a passion for cold shoulder, poor fellow.
+As bath-robes go, this isn't bad." He gets his arms into it, and walks
+up and down. "Heigh?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Yes, it is pretty good. But the worst of Christmas
+is that it rouses up all your old friends."
+
+_Fountain_: "They feel so abnormally good, confound them. I suppose
+poor old Hazard half killed himself looking this thing up and building
+the joke to go with it."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, take it off, now, and come help me with the
+children's presents. You're quite forgetting about them, and it'll be
+morning and you'll have the little wretches swarming in before you can
+turn round. Dear little souls! I can sympathize with their impatience,
+of course. But what are you going to do with these bath-robes? You
+can't wear _four_ bath-robes."
+
+_Fountain_: "I can change them every day. But there ought to be seven.
+This hood is rather a new wrinkle, though, isn't it? I suppose it's
+for a voyage, and you pull it up over your head when you come through
+the corridor back to your stateroom. We shall have to go to Europe,
+Lucy."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I would go to Asia, Africa, and Oceanica, to escape
+another Christmas. Now if there are any more bath-robes-- Come in,
+Maggie."
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+                        MAGGIE, THE FOUNTAINS
+
+_Maggie_, bringing in a bundle: "Something a District Messenger
+brought. Will you sign for it, ma'am?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "You sign, Clarence. If I know anything about the
+look and the feel of a bundle, this _is_ another bath-robe, but I
+shall soon see." While she is cutting the string and tearing the
+wrappings away, Fountain signs and Maggie goes. Mrs. Fountain shakes
+out the folds of the robe. "Well, upon my word, I should think there
+was conspiracy to insult you, Clarence. I should like to know who has
+had the effrontery-- What's on it?"
+
+_Fountain_, reading from the card which had fallen out of the garment
+to the floor: "'With Christmas greetings from Mrs. Arthur J. Gibby.'"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, dropping the robe and seizing the card: "_Mrs._
+Arthur J. Gibby! Well, upon my word, this _is_ impudence. It's not
+only impudence, it's indelicacy. And I had always thought she was the
+very embodiment of refinement, and I've gone about saying so. Now I
+shall have to take it back. The idea of a lady sending a bath-robe to
+a gentleman! What next, I wonder! What right has Mrs. Gibby to send
+you a bath-robe? Don't prevaricate! Remember that the truth is the
+only thing that can save you. Matters must have gone pretty far, when
+a woman could send you anything so--intimate. What are you staring at
+with that paper? You needn't hope to divert my mind by--"
+
+_Fountain_, giving her the paper in which the robe came: "Seems to be
+for _Mrs._ Clarence Fountain."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, snatching it from him: "What! It is, it is! Oh, poor
+dear Lilly! How can you ever forgive me? She saw me looking at it
+to-day at Shumaker's, and it must have come into her head in despair
+what else to get me. But it was a perfect inspiration--for it was just
+what I was longing for. Why"--laughing hysterically while she holds up
+the robe, and turns it this way and that--"I might have seen at a
+glance that it wasn't a man's, with this lace on and this silk hood,
+and"--she hurries into it, and pulls it forward, looking down at
+either side--"it's just the right length, and if it was made for me it
+couldn't fit me better. What a joke I _shall_ have with Lilly, when I
+tell her about it. I sha'n't spare myself a bit!"
+
+_Fountain_: "Then I hope you'll spare me. I have some little delicacy
+of feeling, and I don't like the notion of a lady's giving me a
+bath-robe. It's--intimate. I don't know where you picked up your girl
+friends."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, capering about joyfully: "Oh, how funny you are,
+darling! But go on. I don't mind it, now. And you may be glad you've
+got off so easily. Only now if there are any more bath-robes--" A
+timid rap is heard at the door. "Come in, Maggie!" The door is slowly
+set ajar, then flung suddenly wide open, and Jim and Susy in their
+night-gowns rush dancing and exulting in.
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+                       JIM, SUSY, THE FOUNTAINS
+
+_Susy_: "We've caught you, we've caught you."
+
+_Jim_: "I just bet it was you, and now I've won, haven't I, mother?"
+
+_Susy_: "And I've won, too, haven't I, father?" Arrested at sight of
+her father in the hooded bath-gown: "He does look like Santa Claus,
+doesn't he, Jimmy? But the real Santa Claus would be all over snow,
+and a long, white beard. You can't fool _us_!"
+
+_Jim_: "You can't fool _us_! We know you, we know you! And mother
+dressed up, too! There isn't any Mrs. Santa Claus, and that proves
+it!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, severely: "Dreadful little things! Who said you might
+come here? Go straight back to bed, this minute, or-- _Will_ you send
+them back, Clarence, and not stand staring so? What are you thinking of?"
+
+_Fountain_, dreamily: "Nothing. Merely wondering what we shall do when
+we've got rid of our superstitions. Shall we be the better for it, or
+even the wiser?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "What put that question into your head? Christmas, I
+suppose; and that's another reason for wishing there was no such
+thing. If I had my way, there wouldn't be."
+
+_Jim_: "Oh, mother!"
+
+_Susy_: "No Christmas?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, not for disobedient children who get out of
+bed and come in, spoiling everything. If you don't go straight back,
+it will be the last time, Santa Claus or no Santa Claus."
+
+_Jim_: "And if we go right back?"
+
+_Susy_: "And promise not to come in any more?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, we'll see how you keep your promise. If you
+don't, that's the end of Christmas in _this_ house."
+
+_Jim_: "It's a bargain, then! Come on, Susy!"
+
+_Susy_: "And we do it for you, mother. And for you, father. We just
+came in for fun, anyway."
+
+_Jim_: "We just came for a surprise."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, kissing them both: "Well, then, if it was only for
+fun, we'll excuse you this time. Run along, now, that's good children.
+_Clarence!_"
+
+
+                                  X
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Fountain_: "Well?" He looks up at her from where he has dropped into
+a chair beside the table strewn with opened and unopened gifts at the
+foot of the Christmas tree.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "What _are_ you mooning about?"
+
+_Fountain_: "What if it was all a fake? Those thousands and hundreds
+of thousands of churches that pierce the clouds with their spires;
+those millions of ministers and missionaries; those billions of
+worshipers, sitting and standing and kneeling, and singing and
+praying; those nuns and monks, and brotherhoods and sisterhoods, with
+their ideals of self-denial, and their duties to the sick and poor;
+those martyrs that died for the one true faith, and those other
+martyrs of the other true faiths whom the one true faith tortured and
+killed; those masses and sermons and ceremonies, what if they were all
+a delusion, a mistake, a misunderstanding? What if it were all as
+unlike the real thing, if there is any real thing, as this pagan
+Christmas of ours is as unlike a Christian Christmas?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, springing up: "I knew it! I knew that it was this
+Christmas giving that was making you morbid again. Can't you shake it
+off and be cheerful--like me? I'm sure I have to bear twice as much of
+it as you have. I've been shopping the whole week, and you've been
+just this one afternoon." She begins to catch her breath, and fails in
+searching for her handkerchief in the folds of her dress under the
+bath-robe.
+
+_Fountain_, offering his handkerchief: "Take mine."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, catching it from him, and hiding her face in it on
+the table: "You ought to help me bear up, and instead of that you
+fling yourself on my sympathies and break me down." Lifting her face:
+"And if it was all a fake, as you say, and an illusion, what would you
+do, what would you give people in place of it?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I don't know."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "What would you have in place of Christmas itself?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I don't know."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, then, I wouldn't set myself up to preach down
+everything--in a blue bath-gown. You've no idea how ridiculous you
+are."
+
+_Fountain_: "Oh, yes, I have. I can see you. You look like one of
+those blue nuns in Rome. But I don't remember any lace on them."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, you don't look like a blue monk, you needn't
+flatter yourself, for there are none. You look like-- What are you
+thinking about?"
+
+_Fountain_: "Oh, nothing. What do you suppose is in all these packages
+here? Useful things, that we need, that we must have? You know without
+looking that it's the superfluity of naughtiness in one form or other.
+And the givers of these gifts, they _had_ to give them, just as we've
+had to give dozens of gifts ourselves. We ought to have put on our
+cards, 'With the season's bitterest grudges,' 'In hopes of a return,'
+'With a hopeless sense of the folly,' 'To pay a hateful debt,' 'With
+impotent rage and despair.'"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I don't deny it, Clarence. You're perfectly right; I
+almost wish we _had_ put it. How it would have made them hop! But
+they'd have known it was just the way they felt themselves."
+
+_Fountain_, going on thoughtfully: "It's the cap-sheaf of the social
+barbarism we live in, the hideous hypocrisy. It's no use to put it on
+religion. The Jews keep Christmas, too, and we know what they think of
+Christianity as a belief. No, we've got to go further back, to the
+Pagan Saturnalia-- Well, I renounce the whole affair, here and now. I'm
+going to spend the rest of the night bundling these things up, and
+to-morrow I'm going to spend the day in a taxi, going round and giving
+them back to the fools that sent them."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And I'm going with you. I hate it as much as you
+do-- Come in, Maggie!"
+
+
+                                  XI
+
+                   MAGGIE, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Maggie_: "Something the elevator-boy says he forgot. It came along
+with the last one."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, taking a bundle from her: "If this is another
+bath-robe, Clarence! It _is_, as I live. Now if it is a woman sending
+it--" She picks up a card which falls out of the robe as she unfolds
+it. "'Love the Giver,' indeed! Now, Clarence, I insist, I demand--"
+
+_Fountain_: "Hold on, hold on, my dear. The last bath-robe that came
+from a woman was for _you_."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "So it was. I don't know what I was thinking about;
+and I do beg your par-- But this is a man's bath-robe!"
+
+_Fountain_, taking the card which she mechanically stretches out to
+him: "And a man sends it--old Fellows. Can't you read print? Ambrose
+J. Fellows, and a message in writing: 'It was a toss-up between this
+and a cigar-case, and the bath-robe won. Hope you haven't got any
+other thoughtful friends.'"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Oh, very brilliant, giving me a start like this! I
+shall let Mr. Fellows know-- What is it, Maggie? Open the door,
+please."
+
+_Maggie_, opening: "It's just a District Messenger."
+
+_Fountain_, ironically: "Oh, only a District Messenger." He signs the
+messenger's slip, while his wife receives from Maggie a bundle which
+she regards with suspicion.
+
+
+                                 XII
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "'From Uncle Philip for Clarence.' Well, Uncle
+Philip, if you have sent Clarence-- _Clarence!_" breaking into
+a whimper: "It is, it is! It's another."
+
+_Fountain_: "Well, that only makes the seventh, and just enough for
+every day in the week. It's quite my ideal. Now, if there's nothing
+about a cigar-case-- Hello!" He feels in the pocket of the robe and
+brings out a cigar-case, from which a slip of paper falls: "'Couldn't
+make up my mind between them, so send both. Uncle Phil.' Well, this
+is the last stroke of Christmas insanity."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "His brain simply reeled under it, and gave way. It
+shows what Christmas really comes to with a man of strong intellect
+like Uncle Phil."
+
+_Fountain_, opening the case: "Oh, I don't know! He's put some cigars
+in here--in a lucid interval, probably. There's hope yet."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, in despair: "No, Clarence, there's no hope. Don't
+flatter yourself. The only way is to bundle back all their presents
+and never, never, never give or receive another one. Come! Let's begin
+tying them up at once; it will take us the rest of the night." A knock
+at the door. "Come, Maggie."
+
+
+                                 XIII
+
+                JIM AND SUSY, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Jim and Susy_, pushing in: "We can't sleep, mother. May we have a
+pillow fight to keep us amused till we're drowsy?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, desolately: "Yes, go and have your pillow fight. It
+doesn't matter now. We're sending the presents all back, anyway." She
+begins frantically wrapping some of the things up.
+
+_Susy_: "Oh, father, are you sending them back?"
+
+_Jim_: "She's just making believe. Isn't she, father?"
+
+_Fountain_: "Well, I'm not so sure of that. If she doesn't do it, I
+will."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, desisting: "Will you go right back to bed?"
+
+_Jim and Susy_: "Yes, we will."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And to sleep, instantly?"
+
+_Jim and Susy_, in succession: "We won't keep awake a minute longer."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Very well, then, we'll see. Now be off with you." As
+they put their heads together and go out laughing: "And remember, if
+you come here another single time, back go every one of the presents."
+
+_Fountain_: "As soon as ever Santa Claus can find a moment for it."
+
+_Jim_, derisively: "Oh, yes, Santa Claus!"
+
+_Susy_: "I guess if you wait for Santa Claus to take them back!"
+
+
+                                 XIV
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Tiresome little wretches. Of course we can't expect
+them to keep up the self-deception."
+
+_Fountain_: "They'll grow to another. When they're men and women
+they'll pretend that Christmas is delightful, and go round giving
+people the presents that they've worn their lives out in buying and
+getting together. And they'll work themselves up into the notion that
+they are really enjoying it, when they know at the bottom of their
+souls that they loathe the whole job."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "There you are with your pessimism again! And I had
+just begun to feel cheerful about it!"
+
+_Fountain_: "Since when? Since I proposed sending this rubbish back to
+the givers with our curse?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "No, I was thinking what fun it would be if we could
+get up a sort of Christmas game, and do it just among relations and
+intimate friends."
+
+_Fountain_: "Ah, I wish you luck of it. Then the thing would begin to
+have some reality, and just as in proportion as people had the worst
+feelings in giving the presents, their best feeling would be hurt in
+getting them back."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Then why did you ever think of it?"
+
+_Fountain_: "To keep from going mad. Come, let's go on with this job
+of sorting the presents, and putting them in the stockings and hanging
+them up on the tree and laying them round the trunk of it. One thing:
+it's for the last time. As soon as Christmas week is over, I shall
+inaugurate an educational campaign against the whole Christmas
+superstition. It must be extirpated root and branch, and the
+extirpation must begin in the minds of the children; we old fools are
+hopeless; we must die in it; but the children can be saved. We must
+organize and make a house-to-house fight; and I'll begin in our own
+house. To-morrow, as soon as the children have made themselves
+thoroughly sick with candy and cake and midday dinner, I will appeal
+to their reason, and get them to agree to drop it; to sign the
+Anti-Christmas pledge; to--"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Clarence! I have an idea."
+
+_Fountain_: "Not a _bright_ one?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Yes, a bright one, even if you didn't originate it.
+Have Christmas confined entirely to children--to the very youngest--to
+children that believe firmly in Santa Claus."
+
+_Fountain_: "Oh, hello! Wouldn't that leave Jim and Susy out? I
+couldn't have _them_ left out."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "That's true. I didn't think of that. Well, say, to
+children that either believe or _pretend_ to believe in him. What's
+_that_?" She stops at a faint, soft sound on the door. "It's Maggie
+with her hands so full she's pushing with her elbow. Come in, Maggie,
+come in. _Come_ in! Don't you hear me? Come in, I say! Oh, it isn't
+Maggie, of course! It's those worthless, worthless little wretches,
+again." She runs to the door calling out, "Naughty, naughty, naughty!"
+as she runs. Then, flinging the door wide, with a final cry of
+"_Naughty_, I say!" she discovers a small figure on the threshold,
+nightgowned to its feet, and looking up with a frightened, wistful
+face. "Why, Benny!" She stoops down and catches the child in her arms,
+and presses him tight to her neck, and bends over, covering his head
+with kisses. "What in the world are you doing here, you poor little
+lamb? Is mother's darling walking in his sleep? What did you want, my
+pet? Tell mudda, do! Whisper it in mudda's big ear! Can't you tell
+mudda? What? Whisper a little louder, love! We're not angry with you,
+sweetness. Now, try to speak louder. Is that Santa Claus? No, dearest,
+that's just dadda. Santa Claus hasn't come yet, but he will soon.
+What? Say it again. _Is_ there any Santa Claus? Why, who else could
+have brought all these presents? Presents for Benny and Jim and Susy
+and mudda, and seven bath-gowns for dadda. Isn't that funny? Seven!
+And one for mudda. What? I can't quite hear you, pet. Are we going to
+send the presents back? Why, who ever heard of such a thing? Jim said
+so? And Susy? Well, I will settle with them, when I come to them. You
+don't want me to? Well, I won't, then, if Benny doesn't want mudda to.
+I'll just give them a kiss apiece, pop in their big ears. What? You've
+got something for Santa Claus to give them? What? Where? In your crib?
+And shall we go and get it? For mudda too? And dadda? Oh, my little
+angel!" She begins to cry over him, and to kiss him again. "You'll
+break my heart with your loveliness. He wants to kiss you too, dadda."
+She puts the boy into his father's arms; then catches him back and
+runs from the room with him. Fountain resumes the work of filling the
+long stocking he had begun with; then he takes up a very short sock.
+He has that in his hand when Mrs. Fountain comes back, wiping her
+eyes. "He'll go to sleep now, I guess; he was half dreaming when he
+came in here. I should think, when you saw how Benny believed in it,
+you'd be ashamed of saying a word against Christmas."
+
+_Fountain_: "Who's said anything against it? I've just been arguing
+for it, and trying to convince you that for the sake of little
+children like Benny it ought to be perpetuated to the end of the
+world. It began with the childhood of the race, in the rejuvenescence
+of the spirit."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Didn't you say that Christmas began with the
+pagans? How monstrously you prevaricate!"
+
+_Fountain_: "That was merely a figure of speech. And besides, since
+you've been out with Benny, I've been thinking, and I take back
+everything I've said or thought against Christmas; I didn't really
+think it. I've been going back in my mind to that first Christmas we
+had together, and it's cheered me up wonderfully."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, tenderly: "Have you, dearest? I _always_ think of it.
+If you could have seen Benny, how I left him, just now?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I shouldn't mind seeing him, and I shouldn't care if I
+gave a glance at poor old Jim and Susy. I'd like to reassure them
+about not sending back the presents." He puts his arm round her and
+presses her toward the door.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "How sweet you are! And how funny! And good!" She
+accentuates each sentiment with a kiss. "And don't you suppose I felt
+sorry for you, making you go round with me the whole afternoon, and
+then leaving you to take the brunt of arranging the presents? Now I'll
+tell you: _next_ year, I _will_ do my Christmas shopping in July. It's
+the only way."
+
+_Fountain_: "No, there's a better way. As you were saying, they don't
+have the Christmas things out. The only way is to do our Christmas
+shopping the day after Christmas; everything will be round still, and
+dog-cheap. Come, we'll begin day after to-morrow."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "We will, we will!"
+
+_Fountain_: "Do you think we will?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, we'll _say_ we will." They laugh together, and
+then he kisses her.
+
+_Fountain_: "Even if it goes on in the same old way, as long as we
+have each other--"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And the children."
+
+_Fountain_: "I forgot the children!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Oh, how delightful you are!"
+
+
+                               THE END
+
+
+
+
+                        BOOKS BY W. D. HOWELLS
+
+  Annie Kilburn. 12mo.
+  April Hopes. 12mo.
+  Between the Dark and Daylight. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Boy Life. Illustrated. 12mo.
+  Boy's Town. Illustrated. Post 8vo.
+  Certain Delightful English Towns. Illustrated. 8vo.
+    Traveller's Edition, Leather.
+  Christmas Every Day, and Other Stories. Illustrated. 12mo.
+    Holiday Edition. Illustrated. 4to.
+  Coast of Bohemia. Illustrated. 12mo.
+  Criticism and Fiction. Portrait. 16mo.
+  Day of Their Wedding. Illustrated. 12mo.
+  Familiar Spanish Travels. Illustrated. 8vo.
+  Fennel and Rue. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Flight of Pony Baker. Post 8vo.
+  Hazard of New Fortunes. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Heroines of Fiction. Illustrated. 2 vols. 8vo.
+  Imaginary Interviews. 8vo.
+  Imperative Duty. 12mo.
+    Paper.
+  Impressions and Experiences. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Kentons. 12mo.
+  Landlord at Lion's Head. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Letters Home. 12mo.
+  Library of Universal Adventure. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth.
+    Three-quarter Calf.
+  Literary Friends and Acquaintance. Illustrated. 8vo.
+  Literature and Life. 8vo.
+  Little Swiss Sojourn. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  London Films. Illustrated. 8vo.
+    Traveller's Edition, Leather.
+  Miss Bellard's Inspiration. 12mo.
+  Modern Italian Poets. Illustrated. 12mo.
+  Mother and the Father. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Mouse-Trap, A Likely Story, The Garroters, Five-o'Clock Tea.
+    Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  My Literary Passions. New Edition. 12mo.
+  My Mark Twain. Illustrated. 8vo.
+  My Year in a Log Cabin. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  Open-Eyed Conspiracy. 12mo.
+  Pair of Patient Lovers. 12mo.
+  Parting and a Meeting. Illustrated. Square 32mo.
+  Quality of Mercy. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Questionable Shapes. Ill'd. 12mo.
+  Ragged Lady. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Roman Holidays. Illustrated. 8vo.
+    Traveller's Edition, Leather.
+  Seven English Cities. Illustrated. 8vo.
+    Traveller's Edition, Leather.
+  Shadow of a Dream. 12mo.
+  Son of Royal Langbrith. 8vo.
+  Stops of Various Quills. Illustrated. 4to.
+    Limited Edition.
+  Story of a Play. 12mo.
+  The Daughter of the Storage. 8vo.
+  The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon. Crown 8vo.
+  Their Silver Wedding Journey. Illustrated. 2 vols. Crown 8vo.
+    In 1 vol. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Through the Eye of a Needle. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Traveller from Altruria. New Edition. 12mo.
+  World of Chance. 12mo.
+  Years of My Youth. Crown 8vo.
+
+
+                                FARCES:
+
+  A Letter of Introduction. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  A Likely Story. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  A Previous Engagement. 32mo.
+    Paper.
+  Evening Dress. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  Five-o'Clock Tea. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  Parting Friends. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  The Albany Depot. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  The Garroters. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  The Mouse-Trap. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  The Unexpected Guests. Illustrated. 32mo.
+
+
+               HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Daughter of the Storage, by 
+William Dean Howells
+
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Daughter of the Storage, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Daughter of the Storage
+       And Other Things in Prose and Verse
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: September 18, 2009 [EBook #30023]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Ritu Aggarwal and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from scans of public domain material
+produced by Microsoft for their Live Search Books site.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<p><b>TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:</b></p>
+<p>Printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation,
+and ligature usage have been retained except the following:<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; Pg. 117, Ch. VII: Changed comma to period in (relation to life,)<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; Pg. 255, Ch. XVI: Removed ending quote in (the highest sense.")</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE</h1>
+
+<h2>WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS</h2>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE DAUGHTER<br />
+OF THE STORAGE</h2>
+
+<h4>AND OTHER THINGS<br />
+IN PROSE AND VERSE<br /><br /></h4>
+
+<h4>W. D. HOWELLS<br /><br /></h4>
+
+<h4>HARPER &amp; BROTHERS PUBLISHERS</h4>
+<h5>NEW YORK AND LONDON</h5>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p style='text-align:center;'><span class="smcap">The Daughter of the Storage</span></p>
+
+<p style='text-align:center;'>Copyright, 1915, 1916, by Harper &amp; Brothers<br />
+Printed in the United States of America<br />
+Published April, 1916</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" summary="Table of Contents">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#I">I</a></td><td><a href="#THE_DAUGHTER_OF_THE_STORAGE"><span class="smcap">The Daughter of the Storage</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#II">II</a></td><td><a href="#A_PRESENTIMENT"><span class="smcap">A Presentiment</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_45">45</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#III">III</a></td><td><a href="#CAPTAIN_DUNLEVYS"><span class="smcap">Captain Dunlevy's Last Trip</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#IV">IV</a></td><td><a href="#THE_RETURN_TO_FAVOR"><span class="smcap">The Return to Favor</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#V">V</a></td><td><a href="#SOMEBODYS_MOTHER"><span class="smcap">Somebody's Mother</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#VI">VI</a></td><td><a href="#THE_FACE_AT_THE_WINDOW"><span class="smcap">The Face at the Window</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#VII">VII</a></td><td><a href="#AN_EXPERIENCE"><span class="smcap">An Experience</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#VIII">VIII</a></td><td><a href="#THE_BOARDERS"><span class="smcap">The Boarders</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#IX">IX</a></td><td><a href="#BREAKFAST_IS_MY_BEST_MEAL"><span class="smcap">Breakfast Is My Best Meal</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_141">141</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#X">X</a></td><td><a href="#THE_MOTHER-BIRD"><span class="smcap">The Mother-Bird</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_151">151</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XI">XI</a></td><td><a href="#THE_AMIGO"><span class="smcap">The Amigo</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_161">161</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XII">XII</a></td><td><a href="#BLACK_CROSS_FARM"><span class="smcap">Black Cross Farm</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_173">173</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XIII">XIII</a></td><td><a href="#THE_CRITICAL_BOOKSTORE"><span class="smcap">The Critical Bookstore</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_185">185</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XIV">XIV</a></td><td><a href="#A_FEAST_OF_REASON"><span class="smcap">A Feast of Reason</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_227">227</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XV">XV</a></td><td><a href="#CITY_AND_COUNTRY_IN"><span class="smcap">City and Country in the Fall</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XVI">XVI</a></td><td><a href="#TABLE_TALK"><span class="smcap">Table Talk</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_253">253</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XVII">XVII</a></td><td><a href="#THE_ESCAPADE_OF_A"><span class="smcap">The Escapade of a Grandfather</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_269">269</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XVIII">XVIII</a></td><td><a href="#SELF-SACRIFICE_A_FARCE-TRAGEDY"><span class="smcap">Self-Sacrifice: A Farce-tragedy</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_285">285</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XIX">XIX</a></td><td><a href="#THE_NIGHT_BEFORE"><span class="smcap">The Night before Christmas</span></a></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_319">319</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_DAUGHTER_OF_THE_STORAGE" id="THE_DAUGHTER_OF_THE_STORAGE"></a>THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE</h2>
+
+<h4><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h4>
+
+<p>They were getting some of their things out to send into the country,
+and Forsyth had left his work to help his wife look them over and
+decide which to take and which to leave. The things were mostly trunks
+that they had stored the fall before; there were some tables and
+Colonial bureaus inherited from his mother, and some mirrors and
+decorative odds and ends, which they would not want in the furnished
+house they had taken for the summer. There were some canvases which
+Forsyth said he would paint out and use for other subjects, but which,
+when he came to look at again, he found really not so bad. The rest,
+literally, was nothing but trunks; there were, of course, two or three
+boxes of books. When they had been packed closely into the five-dollar room,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>
+with the tables and bureaus and mirrors and canvases and decorative
+odds and ends put carefully on top, the Forsyths thought the effect
+very neat, and laughed at themselves for being proud of it.</p>
+
+<p>They spent the winter in Paris planning for the summer in America, and
+now it had come May, a month which in New York is at its best, and in
+the Constitutional Storage Safe-Deposit Warehouse is by no means at
+its worst. The Constitutional Storage is no longer new, but when the
+Forsyths were among the first to store there it was up to the latest
+moment in the modern perfections of a safe-deposit warehouse. It was
+strictly fire-proof; and its long, white, brick-walled, iron-doored
+corridors, with their clean concrete floors, branching from a central
+avenue to the tall windows north and south, offered perspectives
+sculpturesquely bare, or picturesquely heaped with arriving or
+departing household stuff.</p>
+
+<p>When the Forsyths went to look at it a nice young fellow from the
+office had gone with them; running ahead and switching on rows of
+electrics down the corridors, and then, with a wire-basketed electric
+lamp, which he twirled about and held aloft and alow, showing the
+dustless, sweet-smelling spaciousness of a perfect five-dollar room.
+He said it would more than hold their things; and it really held them.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+Now, when the same young fellow unlocked the iron door and set it
+wide, he said he would get them a man, and he got Mrs. Forsyth a gilt
+armchair from some furniture going into an adjoining twenty-dollar
+room. She sat down in it, and "Of course," she said, "the pieces I
+want will be at the very back and the very bottom. Why don't you get
+yourself a chair, too, Ambrose? What are you looking at?"</p>
+
+<p>With his eyes on the neighboring furniture he answered, "Seems to be
+the wreck of a millionaire's happy home; parlor and kitchen utensils
+and office furniture all in white and gold."</p>
+
+<p>"Horrors, yes!" Mrs. Forsyth said, without turning her head from
+studying her trunks, as if she might divine their contents from their
+outside.</p>
+
+<p>"Tata and I," her husband said, "are more interested in the
+millionaire's things." Tata, it appeared, was not a dog, but a child;
+the name was not the diminutive of her own name, which was Charlotte,
+but a generic name for a doll, which Tata had learned from her Italian
+nurse to apply to all little girls and had got applied to herself by
+her father. She was now at a distance down the corridor, playing
+a drama with the pieces of millionaire furniture; as they
+stretched away in variety and splendor they naturally suggested
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+personages of princely quality, and being touched with her little forefinger
+tip were capable of entering warmly into Tata's plans for them.</p>
+
+<p>Her mother looked over her shoulder toward the child. "Come here,
+Tata," she called, and when Tata, having enjoined some tall mirrors to
+secrecy with a frown and a shake of the head, ran to her, Mrs. Forsyth
+had forgotten why she had called her. "Oh!" she said, recollecting,
+"do you know which your trunk is, Tata? Can you show mamma? Can you
+put your hand on it?"</p>
+
+<p>The child promptly put her hand on the end of a small box just within
+her tiptoe reach, and her mother said, "I do believe she knows
+everything that's in it, Ambrose! That trunk has got to be opened the
+very first one!"</p>
+
+<p>The man that the young fellow said he would send showed at the far end
+of the corridor, smaller than human, but enlarging himself to the
+average Irish bulk as he drew near. He was given instructions and
+obeyed with caressing irony Mrs. Forsyth's order to pull out Tata's
+trunk first, and she found the key in a large tangle of keys, and
+opened it, and had the joy of seeing everything recognized by
+the owner: doll by doll, cook-stove, tin dishes, small brooms,
+wooden animals on feet and wheels, birds of various plumage,
+a toy piano, a dust-pan, alphabet blocks, dog's-eared linen
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+Mother Goose books, and the rest. Tata had been allowed to put the
+things away herself, and she took them out with no apparent sense of
+the time passed since she saw them last. In the changing life of her
+parents all times and places were alike to her. She began to play with
+the things in the storage corridor as if it were yesterday when she
+saw them last in the flat. Her mother and father left her to them in
+the distraction of their own trunks. Mrs. Forsyth had these spread
+over the space toward the window and their lids lifted and tried to
+decide about them. In the end she had changed the things in them back
+and forth till she candidly owned that she no longer knew where
+anything at all was.</p>
+
+<p>As she raised herself for a moment's respite from the problem she saw
+at the far end of the corridor a lady with two men, who increased in
+size like her own man as they approached. The lady herself seemed to
+decrease, though she remained of a magnificence to match the
+furniture, and looked like it as to her dress of white picked out in
+gold when she arrived at the twenty-dollar room next the Forsyths'. In
+her advance she had been vividly played round by a little boy, who ran
+forward and back and easily doubled the length of the corridor before
+he came to a stand and remained with his brown eyes fixed on Tata.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+Tata herself had blue eyes, which now hovered dreamily above the
+things in her trunk.</p>
+
+<p>The two mothers began politely to ignore each other. She of the
+twenty-dollar room directed the men who had come with her, and in a
+voice of authority and appeal at once commanded and consulted them in
+the disposition of her belongings. At the sound of the mixed tones
+Mrs. Forsyth signaled to her husband, and, when he came within
+whispering, murmured: "Pittsburg, <i>or</i> Chicago. Did you <i>ever</i> hear
+such a Mid-Western accent!" She pretended to be asking him about
+repacking the trunk before her, but the other woman was not deceived.
+She was at least aware of criticism in the air of her neighbors, and
+she put on greater severity with the workmen. The boy came up and
+caught her skirt. "What?" she said, bending over. "No, certainly not.
+I haven't time to attend to you. Go off and play. Don't I tell you no?
+Well, there, then! Will you get that trunk out where I can open it?
+That small one there," she said to one of the men, while the other
+rested for both. She stooped to unlock the trunk and flung up the lid.
+"Now if you bother me any more I will surely&mdash;" But she lost herself
+short of the threat and began again to seek counsel and issue orders.</p>
+
+<p>The boy fell upon the things in the trunk, which
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+were the things of a boy, as those in Tata's trunk were the things of
+a girl, and to run with them, one after another, to Tata and to pile
+them in gift on the floor beside her trunk. He did not stop running
+back and forth as fast as his short, fat legs could carry him till he
+had reached the bottom of his box, chattering constantly and taking no
+note of the effect with Tata. Then, as she made no response whatever
+to his munificence, he began to be abashed and to look pathetically
+from her to her father.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, really, young man," Forsyth said, "we can't let you impoverish
+yourself at this rate. What have you said to your benefactor, Tata?
+What are you going to give <i>him</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>The children did not understand his large words, but they knew he was
+affectionately mocking them.</p>
+
+<p>"Ambrose," Mrs. Forsyth said, "you mustn't let him."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm trying to think how to hinder him, but it's rather late," Forsyth
+answered, and then the boy's mother joined in.</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, indeed, if you can, it's more than I can. You're just
+worrying the little girl," she said to the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, he isn't, dear little soul," Mrs. Forsyth
+said, leaving her chair and going up to the two
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>
+children. She took the boy's hand in hers. "What a kind boy! But you
+know my little girl mustn't take all your playthings. If you'll give
+her <i>one</i> she'll give <i>you</i> one, and that will be enough.
+You can both play with them all for the present." She referred her
+suggestion to the boy's mother, and the two ladies met at the
+invisible line dividing the five-dollar room from the twenty-dollar
+room.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, indeed," the Mid-Westerner said, willing to meet the
+New-Yorker half-way. "You're taking things out, I see. I hardly know
+which is the worst: taking out or putting in."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we are just completing the experience," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I
+shall be able to say better how I feel in half an hour."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean this is the first time you've stored? I suppose
+<i>we've</i> been in and out of storage twenty times. Not in this warehouse
+exactly; we've never been here before."</p>
+
+<p>"It seems very nice," Mrs. Forsyth suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"They all do at the beginning. I suppose if we ever came to the end
+they would seem nicer still. Mr. Bream's business is always taking him
+away" (it appeared almost instantly that he was the international
+inspector of a great insurance company's agencies in Europe and
+South America), "and when I don't go with him it seems easier
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+to break up and go into a hotel than to go on housekeeping. I don't
+know that it is, though," she questioned. "It's so hard to know what
+to do with the child in a hotel."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but he seems the sort that you could manage with anywhere," Mrs.
+Forsyth agreed and disagreed.</p>
+
+<p>His mother looked at him where he stood beaming upon Tata and again
+joyfully awaiting some effect with her. But the child sat back upon
+her small heels with her eyes fixed on the things in her trunk and
+made no sign of having seen the heaps of his gifts.</p>
+
+<p>The Forsyths had said to each other before this that their little girl
+was a queer child, and now they were not so much ashamed of her
+apparent selfishness or rude indifference as they thought they were.
+They made a joke of it with the boy's mother, who said she did not
+believe Tata was anything but shy. She said she often told Mr. Bream
+that she did wish Peter&mdash;yes, that was his name; she didn't like it
+much, but it was his grandfather's; was Tata a Christian name? Oh,
+just a pet name! Well, it <i>was</i> pretty&mdash;could be broken of <i>his</i>
+ridiculous habit; most children&mdash;little boys, that was&mdash;held onto
+their things so.</p>
+
+<p>Forsyth would have taken something from Tata
+and given it to Peter; but his wife would
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+not let him; and he had to content himself with giving Peter a pencil
+of his own that drew red at one end and blue at the other, and that at
+once drew a blue boy, that looked like Peter, on the pavement. He told
+Peter not to draw a boy now, but wait till he got home, and then be
+careful not to draw a blue boy with the red end. He helped him put his
+things back into his trunk, and Peter seemed to enjoy that, too.</p>
+
+<p>Tata, without rising from her seat on her heels, watched the
+restitution with her dreamy eyes; she paid no attention to the blue
+boy on the pavement; pictures from her father were nothing new to her.
+The mothers parted with expressions of mutual esteem in spite of their
+difference of accent and fortune. Mrs. Forsyth asked if she might not
+kiss Peter, and did so; he ran to his mother and whispered to her;
+then he ran back and gave Tata so great a hug that she fell over from
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Tata did not cry, but continued as if lost in thought which she could
+not break from, and that night, after she had said her prayers with
+her mother, her mother thought it was time to ask her: "Tata, dear,
+why did you act so to that boy to-day? Why didn't you give him
+something of yours when he brought you all his things? Why did you act
+so oddly?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+Tata said something in a voice so low that her mother could not make it out.</p>
+
+<p>"What did you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't tell which," the child still whispered; but now her
+mother's ear was at her lips.</p>
+
+<p>"How, which?"</p>
+
+<p>"To give him. The more I looked," and the whisper became a quivering
+breath, "the more I couldn't tell which. And I wanted to give them
+<i>all</i> to him, but I couldn't tell whether it would be right, because
+you and papa gave them to me for birthday and Christmas," and the
+quivering breath broke into a sobbing grief, so that the mother had to
+catch the child up to her heart.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear little tender conscience!" she said, still wiping her eyes when
+she told the child's father, and they fell into a sweet, serious talk
+about her before they slept. "And I was ashamed of her before that
+woman! I know she misjudged her; but <i>we</i> ought to have remembered how
+fine and precious she is, and <i>known</i> how she must have suffered,
+trying to decide."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, conscience," the father said. "And temperament, the temperament
+to which decision is martyrdom."</p>
+
+<p>"And she will always have to be deciding! She'll have to decide for you, some day, as I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+do now; you are very undecided, Ambrose&mdash;she gets it from you."</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>The Forsyths were afraid that Tata might want to offer Peter some gift
+in reparation the next morning, and her father was quite ready, if she
+said so, to put off their leaving town, and go with her to the
+Constitutional Storage, which was the only address of Mrs. Bream that
+he knew. But the child had either forgotten or she was contented with
+her mother's comforting, and no longer felt remorse.</p>
+
+<p>One does not store the least of one's personal or household gear
+without giving a hostage to storage, a pledge of allegiance impossible
+to break. No matter how few things one puts in, one never takes
+everything out; one puts more things in. Mrs. Forsyth went to the
+warehouse with Tata in the fall before they sailed for another winter
+in Paris, and added some old bits she had picked up at farm-houses in
+their country drives, and they filled the room quite to the top. She
+told her husband how Tata had entered into the spirit of putting back
+her trunk of playthings with the hope of seeing it again in the
+spring; and she added that she had now had to take a seven-fifty
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+room without consulting him, or else throw away the things they had
+brought home.</p>
+
+<p>During the ten or twelve years that followed, the Forsyths sometimes
+spent a whole winter in a hotel; sometimes they had a flat; sometimes
+they had a separate dwelling. If their housing was ample, they took
+almost everything out of storage; once they got down to a two-dollar
+bin, and it seemed as if they really were leaving the storage
+altogether. Then, if they went into a flat that was nearly all studio,
+their furniture went back in a cataclysmal wave to the warehouse,
+where a ten-dollar room, a twelve-dollar room, would not dam the
+overflow.</p>
+
+<p>Tata, who had now outgrown her pet name, and was called Charlotte
+because her mother felt she ought to be, always went with her to the
+storage to help look the things over, to see the rooms emptied down to
+a few boxes, or replenished to bursting. In the first years she played
+about, close to her mother; as she grew older she ventured further,
+and began to make friends with other little girls who had come with
+their mothers. It was quite safe socially to be in the Constitutional
+Storage; it gave standing; and Mrs. Forsyth fearlessly chanced
+acquaintance with these mothers, who would sometimes be there
+whole long mornings or afternoons, taking trunks out or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+putting them in. With the trunks set into the corridors and opened for
+them, they would spend the hours looking the contents over, talking to
+their neighbors, or rapt in long silences when they hesitated with
+things held off or up, and, after gazing absently at them, putting
+them back again. Sometimes they varied the process by laying things
+aside for sending home, and receipting for them at the office as
+"goods selected."</p>
+
+<p>They were mostly hotel people or apartment people, as Mrs. Forsyth
+oftenest was herself, but sometimes they were separate-house people.
+Among these there was one family, not of great rank or wealth, but
+distinguished, as lifelong New-Yorkers, in a world of comers and goers
+of every origin. Mrs. Forsyth especially liked them for a certain
+quality, but what this quality was she could not very well say. They
+were a mother with two daughters, not quite old maids, but on the way
+to it, and there was very intermittently the apparently bachelor
+brother of the girls; at the office Mrs. Forsyth verified her
+conjecture that he was some sort of minister. One could see they were
+all gentlefolks, though the girls were not of the last cry of fashion.
+They were very nice to their mother, and you could tell that they must
+have been coming with her for years.</p>
+
+<p>At this point in her study of them for her
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+husband's amusement she realized that Charlotte had been coming to the
+storage with her nearly all her life, and that more and more the child
+had taken charge of the uneventual inspection of the things. She was
+shocked to think that she had let this happen, and now she commanded
+her husband to say whether Charlotte would grow into a storage old
+maid like those good girls.</p>
+
+<p>Forsyth said, Probably not before her time; but he allowed it was a
+point to be considered.</p>
+
+<p>Very well, then, Mrs. Forsyth said, the child should never go again;
+that was all. She had strongly confirmed herself in this resolution
+when one day she not only let the child go again, but she let her go
+alone. The child was now between seventeen and eighteen, rather tall,
+grave, pretty, with the dull brown hair that goes so well with
+dreaming blue eyes, and of a stiff grace. She had not come out yet,
+because she had always been out, handing cakes at her father's studio
+teas long before she could remember not doing it, and later pouring
+for her mother with rather a quelling air as she got toward fifteen.
+During these years the family had been going and coming between Europe
+and America; they did not know perfectly why, except that it was
+easier than not.</p>
+
+<p>More and more there was a peculiarity in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
+goods selected by Charlotte for sending home, which her mother one day
+noted. "How is it, Charlotte, that you always send exactly the things
+I want, and when you get your own things here you don't know whether
+they are what you wanted or not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I don't know when I send them. I don't choose them; I can't."</p>
+
+<p>"But you choose the right things for me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't, mother. I just take what comes first, and you always
+like it."</p>
+
+<p>"Now, that is nonsense, Charlotte. I can't have you telling me such a
+thing as that. It's an insult to my intelligence. Do you think I don't
+know my own mind?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know <i>my</i> mind," the girl said, so persistently, obstinately,
+stubbornly, that her mother did not pursue the subject for fear of
+worse.</p>
+
+<p>She referred it to her husband, who said: "Perhaps it's like poets
+never being able to remember their own poetry. I've heard it's because
+they have several versions in their minds when they write and can't
+remember which they've written. Charlotte has several choices in her
+mind, and can't choose between her choices."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we ought to have broken her of her indecision. Some day it will
+make her very unhappy."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+"Pretty hard to break a person of her temperament," Forsyth suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"I know it!" his wife admitted, with a certain pleasure in realizing
+the fact. "I don't know what we <i>shall</i> do."</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>Storage society was almost wholly feminine; in rare instances there
+was a man who must have been sent in dearth of women or in an hour of
+their disability. Then the man came hastily, with a porter, and either
+pulled all the things out of the rooms so that he could honestly say
+he had seen them, and that the thing wanted was not there; or else
+merely had the doors opened, and after a glance inside resolved to
+wait till his wife, or mother, or daughter could come. He agreed in
+guilty eagerness with the workmen that this was the only way.</p>
+
+<p>The exception to the general rule was a young man who came one bright
+spring morning when all nature suggested getting one's stuff out and going
+into the country, and had the room next the Forsyths' original five-dollar
+room opened. As it happened, Charlotte was at the moment visiting this room
+upon her mother's charge to see whether certain old scrim sash-curtains, which
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+they had not needed for ages but at last simply <i>must</i> have, were not
+lurking there in a chest of general curtainings. The Forsyths now had
+rooms on other floors, but their main room was at the end of the
+corridor branching northward from that where the five-dollar room was.
+Near this main room that nice New York family had their rooms, and
+Charlotte had begun the morning in their friendly neighborhood, going
+through some chests that might perhaps have the general curtainings in
+them and the scrim curtains among the rest. It had not, and she had
+gone to what the Forsyths called their old ancestral five-dollar room,
+where that New York family continued to project a sort of wireless
+chaperonage over her. But the young man had come with a porter, and,
+with her own porter, Charlotte could not feel that even a wireless
+chaperonage was needed, though the young man approached with the most
+beaming face she thought she had ever seen, and said he hoped he should
+not be in her way. She answered with a sort of helpless reverberation
+of his glow, Not at all; she should only be a moment. She wanted to say
+she hoped she would not be in <i>his</i> way, but she saved herself in
+time, while, with her own eyes intent upon the fa&ccedil;ade of her room
+and her mind trying to lose itself in the question which curtain-trunk
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+the scrims might be in, she kept the sense of his sweet eyes, the
+merriest eyes she had ever seen, effulgent with good-will and apology
+and reverent admiration. She blushed to think it admiration, though
+she liked to think it so, and she did not snub him when the young man
+jumped about, neglecting his own storage, and divining the right
+moments for his offers of help. She saw that he was a little shorter
+than herself, that he was very light and quick on his feet, and had a
+round, brown face, clean-shaven, and a round, brown head, close shorn,
+from which in the zeal of his attentions to her he had shed his straw
+hat onto the window-sill. He formed a strong contrast to the contents
+of his store-room, which was full, mainly, of massive white furniture
+picked out in gold, and very blond. He said casually that it had been
+there, off and on, since long before he could remember, and at these
+words an impression, vague, inexplicable, deepened in Charlotte's mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother," she said, for she had now disused the earlier "mamma" in
+deference to modern usage, "how old was I when we first took that
+five-dollar room?"</p>
+
+<p>She asked this question after she had shown the scrim curtains she had
+found and brought home with her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+"Why? I don't know. Two or three; three or four. I should have to
+count up. What makes you ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"Can a person recollect what happened when they were three or four?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should say not, decidedly."</p>
+
+<p>"Or recollect a face?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not."</p>
+
+<p>"Then of course it wasn't. Mother, do you remember ever telling me
+what the little boy was like who gave me all his playthings and I
+couldn't decide what to give him back?"</p>
+
+<p>"What a question! Of course not! He was very brown and funny, with the
+beamingest little face in the world. Rather short for his age, I
+should say, though I haven't the least idea what his age was."</p>
+
+<p>"Then it was the very same little boy!" Charlotte said.</p>
+
+<p>"Who was the very same little boy?" her mother demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"The one that was there to-day; the young man, I mean," Charlotte
+explained, and then she told what had happened with a want of fullness
+which her mother's imagination supplied.</p>
+
+<p>"Did he say who he was? Is he coming back to-morrow or this afternoon?
+Did you inquire who he was or where?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+"What an idea, mother!" Charlotte said, grouping the several
+impossibilities under one head in her answer.</p>
+
+<p>"You had a perfect right to know, if you thought he was the one."</p>
+
+<p>"But I didn't <i>think</i> he was the one, and I don't <i>know</i> that he is
+now; and if he was, what could I do about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is true," Mrs. Forsyth owned. "But it's very disappointing. I've
+always felt as if they ought to know it was your undecidedness and not
+ungenerousness."</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte laughed a little forlornly, but she only said, "Really,
+mother!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Forsyth was still looking at the curtains. "Well, these are not
+the scrims I wanted. You must go back. I believe I will go with you.
+The sooner we have it over the better," she added, and she left the
+undecided Charlotte to decide whether she meant the scrim curtains or
+the young man's identity.</p>
+
+<p>It was very well, for one reason, that she decided to go with
+Charlotte that afternoon. The New-Yorkers must have completed the
+inspection of their trunks, for they had not come back. Their failure
+to do so was the more important because the young man had come back
+and was actively superintending the unpacking of his room. The
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+palatial furniture had all been ranged up and down the corridor, and
+as fast as a trunk was got out and unlocked he went through it with
+the help of the storage-men, listed its contents in a note-book with a
+number, and then transferred the number and a synopsis of the record
+to a tag and fastened it to the trunk, which he had put back into the
+room.</p>
+
+<p>When the Forsyths arrived with the mistaken scrim curtains, he
+interrupted himself with apologies for possibly being in their way;
+and when Mrs. Forsyth said he was not at all in their way, he got
+white-and-gold arm-chairs for her and Charlotte and put them so
+conveniently near the old ancestral room that Mrs. Forsyth scarcely
+needed to move hand or foot in letting Charlotte restore the wrong
+curtains and search the chests for the right ones. His politeness made
+way for conversation and for the almost instant exchange of
+confidences between himself and Mrs. Forsyth, so that Charlotte was
+free to enjoy the silence to which they left her in her labors.</p>
+
+<p>"Before I say a word," Mrs. Forsyth said, after saying some hundreds
+in their mutual inculpation and exculpation, "I want to ask something,
+and I hope you will excuse it to an old woman's curiosity and not
+think it rude."</p>
+
+<p>At the words "old woman's" the young man
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+gave a protesting "Oh!" and at the word "rude" he said, "Not at all."</p>
+
+<p>"It is simply this: how long have your things been here? I ask because
+we've had this room thirteen or fourteen years, and I've never seen
+your room opened in that whole time."</p>
+
+<p>The young man laughed joyously. "Because it hasn't been opened in that
+whole time. I was a little chap of three or four bothering round here
+when my mother put the things in; I believe it was a great frolic for
+me, but I'm afraid it wasn't for her. I've been told that my
+activities contributed to the confusion of the things and the things
+in them that she's been in ever since, and I'm here now to make what
+reparation I can by listing them."</p>
+
+<p>"She'll find it a great blessing," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I wish we had
+ours listed. I suppose you remember it all very vividly. It must have
+been a great occasion for you seeing the things stored at that age."</p>
+
+<p>The young man beamed upon her. "Not so great as now, I'm afraid. The
+fact is, I don't remember anything about it. But I've been told that I
+embarrassed with my personal riches a little girl who was looking over
+her doll's things."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, indeed!" Mrs. Forsyth said, stiffly, and she
+turned rather snubbingly from him and said,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+coldly, to Charlotte: "I think they are in that green trunk. Have you
+the key?" and, stooping as her daughter stooped, she whispered,
+"Really!" in condemnation and contempt.</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte showed no signs of sharing either, and Mrs. Forsyth could
+not very well manage them alone. So when Charlotte said, "No, I
+haven't the key, mother," and the young man burst in with, "Oh, do let
+me try my master-key; it will unlock anything that isn't a Yale," Mrs.
+Forsyth sank back enthroned and the trunk was thrown open.</p>
+
+<p>She then forgot what she had wanted it opened for. Charlotte said,
+"They're not here, mother," and her mother said, "No, I didn't suppose
+they were," and began to ask the young man about his mother. It
+appeared that his father had died twelve years before, and since then
+his mother and he had been nearly everywhere except at home, though
+mostly in England; now they had come home to see where they should go
+next or whether they should stay.</p>
+
+<p>"That would never suit my daughter," Mrs. Forsyth lugged in, partly
+because the talk had gone on away from her family as long as she could
+endure, and partly because Charlotte's indecision always amused her.
+"She can't bear to choose."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+"Really?" the young man said. "I don't know whether I like it or not,
+but I have had to do a lot of it. You mustn't think, though, that I
+chose this magnificent furniture. My father bought an Italian palace
+once, and as we couldn't live in it or move it we brought the
+furniture here."</p>
+
+<p>"It <i>is</i> magnificent," Mrs. Forsyth said, looking down the long
+stretches of it and eying and fingering her specific throne. "I wish
+my husband could see it&mdash;I don't believe he remembers it from fourteen
+years ago. It looks&mdash;excuse me!&mdash;very studio."</p>
+
+<p>"Is he a painter? Not Mr. Forsyth the painter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Mrs. Forsyth eagerly admitted, but wondering how he should know
+her name, without reflecting that a score of trunk-tags proclaimed it
+and that she had acquired his by like means.</p>
+
+<p>"I like his things so much," he said. "I thought his three portraits
+were the best things in the Salon last year."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you <i>saw</i> them?" Mrs. Forsyth laughed with pleasure and
+pride. "Then," as if it necessarily followed, "you must come to us
+some Sunday afternoon. You'll find a number of his new portraits
+and some of the subjects; they like to see themselves framed."
+She tried for a card in her hand-bag, but she had none, and she
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+said, "Have you one of my cards, my dear?" Charlotte had, and rendered
+it up with a severity lost upon her for the moment. She held it toward
+him. "It's Mr. <i>Peter</i> Bream?" she smiled upon him, and he beamed
+back.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you remember it from our first meeting?"</p>
+
+<p>In their cab Mrs. Forsyth said, "I don't know whether he's what you
+call rather fresh or not, Charlotte, and I'm not sure that I've been
+very wise. But he is so nice, and he looked so <i>glad</i> to be asked."</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte did not reply at once, and her silent severity came to the
+surface of her mother's consciousness so painfully that it was rather
+a relief to have her explode, "Mother, I will thank you not to discuss
+my temperament with people."</p>
+
+<p>She gave Mrs. Forsyth her chance, and her mother was so happy in being
+able to say, "I won't&mdash;your <i>temper</i>, my dear," that she could add
+with sincere apology: "I'm sorry I vexed you, and I won't do it
+again."</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>The next day was Sunday; Peter Bream took it for some Sunday,
+and came to the tea on Mrs. Forsyth's generalized invitation.
+She pulled her mouth down and her eyebrows up when his card
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+was brought in, but as he followed hard she made a lightning change to
+a smile and gave him a hand of cordial welcome. Charlotte had no
+choice but to welcome him, too, and so the matter was simple for her.
+She was pouring, as usual, for her mother, who liked to eliminate
+herself from set duties and walk round among the actual portraits in
+fact and in frame and talk about them to the potential portraits.
+Peter, qualified by long sojourn in England, at once pressed himself
+into the service of handing about the curate's assistant; Mrs. Forsyth
+electrically explained that it was one of the first brought to New
+York, and that she had got it at the Stores in London fifteen years
+before, and it had often been in the old ancestral room, and was there
+on top of the trunks that first day. She did not recur to the famous
+instance of Charlotte's infant indecision, and Peter was safe from a
+snub when he sat down by the girl's side and began to make her laugh.
+At the end, when her mother asked Charlotte what they had been
+laughing about, she could not tell; she said she did not know they
+were laughing.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning Mrs. Forsyth was paying for her Sunday tea with a Monday
+headache, and more things must be got out for the country. Charlotte had again
+no choice but to go alone to the storage, and yet again no choice but to be
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+pleasant to Peter when she found him next door listing the contents of
+his mother's trunks and tagging them as before. He dropped his work
+and wanted to help her. Suddenly they seemed strangely well
+acquainted, and he pretended to be asked which pieces she should put
+aside as goods selected, and chose them for her. She hinted that he
+was shirking his own work; he said it was an all-summer's job, but he
+knew her mother was in a hurry. He found the little old trunk of her
+playthings, and got it down and opened it and took out some toys as
+goods selected. She made him put them back, but first he catalogued
+everything in it and synopsized the list on a tag and tagged the
+trunk. He begged for a broken doll which he had not listed, and
+Charlotte had so much of her original childish difficulty in parting
+with that instead of something else that she refused it.</p>
+
+<p>It came lunch-time, and he invited her to go out to lunch with him;
+and when she declined with dignity he argued that if they went to the
+Woman's Exchange she would be properly chaperoned by the genius of the
+place; besides, it was the only place in town where you got real
+strawberry shortcake. She was ashamed of liking it all; he besought
+her to let him carry her hand-bag for her, and, as he already
+had it, she could not prevent him; she did not know, really, how
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+far she might successfully forbid him in anything. At the street door
+of the apartment-house they found her mother getting out of a cab, and
+she asked Peter in to lunch; so that Charlotte might as well have lunched
+with him at the Woman's Exchange.</p>
+
+<p>At all storage warehouses there is a season in autumn when the
+corridors are heaped with the incoming furniture of people who have
+decided that they cannot pass another winter in New York and are
+breaking up housekeeping to go abroad indefinitely. But in the spring,
+when the Constitutional Safe-Deposit offered ample space for
+thoughtful research, the meetings of Charlotte and Peter could recur
+without more consciousness of the advance they were making toward the
+fated issue than in so many encounters at tea or luncheon or dinner.
+Mrs. Forsyth was insisting on rather a drastic overhauling of her
+storage that year. Some of the things, by her command, were shifted to
+and fro between the more modern rooms and the old ancestral room, and
+Charlotte had to verify the removals. In deciding upon goods selected
+for the country she had the help of Peter, and she helped him by
+interposing some useful hesitations in the case of things he had put
+aside from his mother's possessions to be sold for her by the
+warehouse people.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+One day he came late and told Charlotte that his mother had suddenly
+taken her passage for England, and they were sailing the next morning.
+He said, as if it logically followed, that he had been in love with
+her from that earliest time when she would not give him the least of
+her possessions, and now he asked her if she would not promise him the
+greatest. She did not like what she felt "rehearsed" in his proposal;
+it was not her idea of a proposal, which ought to be spontaneous and
+unpremeditated in terms; at the same time, she resented his
+precipitation, which she could not deny was inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>She perceived that they were sitting side by side on two of those
+white-and-gold thrones, and she summoned an indignation with the
+absurdity in refusing him. She rose and said that she must go; that
+she must be going; that it was quite time for her to go; and she would
+not let him follow her to the elevator, as he made some offer of
+doing, but left him standing among his palatial furniture like a
+prince in exile.</p>
+
+<p>By the time she reached home she had been able to decide that she must
+tell her mother at once. Her mother received the fact of Peter's proposal
+with such transport that she did not realize the fact of Charlotte's
+refusal. When this was connoted to her she could scarcely keep her
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+temper within the bounds of maternal tenderness. She said she would
+have nothing more to do with such a girl; that there was but one such
+pearl as Peter in the universe, and for Charlotte to throw him away
+like that! Was it because she could not decide? Well, it appeared that
+she could decide wrong quickly enough when it came to the point. Would
+she leave it now to her mother?</p>
+
+<p>That Charlotte would not do, but what she did do was to write a letter
+to Peter taking him back as much as rested with her; but delaying so
+long in posting it, when it was written, that it reached him among the
+letters sent on board and supplementarily delivered by his room
+steward after all the others when the ship had sailed. The best Peter
+could do in response was a jubilant Marconigram of unequaled cost and
+comprehensiveness.</p>
+
+<p>His mother had meant to return in the fall, after her custom, to find
+out whether she wished to spend the winter in New York or not. Before
+the date for her sailing she fell sick, and Peter came sadly home
+alone in the spring. Mrs. Bream's death brought Mrs. Forsyth a vain
+regret; she was sorry now that she had seen so little of Mrs. Bream;
+Peter's affection for her was beautiful and spoke worlds for both of
+them; and they, the Forsyths, must do what they could to comfort him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+Charlotte felt the pathos of his case peculiarly when she went to make
+provision for goods selected for the summer from the old ancestral
+room, and found him forlorn among his white-and-gold furniture next
+door. He complained that he had no association with it except the
+touching fact of his mother's helplessness with it, which he had now
+inherited. The contents of the trunks were even less intimately of his
+experience; he had performed a filial duty in listing their contents,
+which long antedated him, and consisted mostly of palatial bric-&agrave;-brac
+and the varied spoils of travel.</p>
+
+<p>He cheered up, however, in proposing to her that they should buy a
+Castle in Spain and put them into it. The fancy pleased her, but
+visibly she shrank from a step which it involved, so that he was, as
+it were, forced to say, half jokingly, half ruefully, "I can imagine
+your not caring for this rubbish or what became of it, Charlotte, but
+what about the owner?"</p>
+
+<p>"The owner?" she asked, as it were somnambulantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Marrying him, say, sometime soon."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Peter, I couldn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't? You know that's not playing the game exactly."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but not&mdash;not right away?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+"Well, I don't know much about it in my own case, but isn't it usual
+to fix some approximate date? When should you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Peter, I <i>can't</i> think."</p>
+
+<p>"Will you let me fix it? I must go West and sell out and pull up, you
+know, preparatory to never going again. We can fix the day now or we
+can fix it when I come back."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, when you come back," she entreated so eagerly that Peter said:</p>
+
+<p>"Charlotte, let me ask you one thing. Were you ever sorry you wrote me
+that taking-back letter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Peter, you know how I am. When I have decided something I have
+undecided it. That's all."</p>
+
+<p>From gay he turned to grave. "I ought to have thought. I haven't been
+fair; <i>I</i> haven't played the game. I ought to have given you another
+chance; and I haven't, have I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I suppose a girl can always change," Charlotte said,
+suggestively.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but you won't always be a girl. I've never asked you if you
+wanted to change. I ask you now. Do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"How can I tell? Hadn't we better let it go as it is? Only not hurry
+about&mdash;about&mdash;marrying?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+"Certainly not hurry about marrying. I've wondered that a girl could
+make up her mind to marry any given man. Haven't you ever wished that
+you had not made up your mind about me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hundreds of times. But I don't know that I meant anything by it."</p>
+
+<p>He took her hand from where it lay in her lap as again she sat on one
+of the white-and-gold thrones beside him and gently pressed it. "Well,
+then, let's play we have never been engaged. I'm going West to-night
+to settle things up for good, and I won't be back for three or four
+months, and when I come back we'll start new. I'll ask you, and you
+shall say yes or no just as if you had never said either before."</p>
+
+<p>"Peter, when you talk like that!" She saw his brown, round face dimly
+through her wet eyes, and she wanted to hug him for pity of him and
+pride in him, but she could not decide to do it. They went out to
+lunch at the Woman's Exchange, and the only regret Peter had was that
+it was so long past the season of strawberry shortcake, and that
+Charlotte seemed neither to talk nor to listen; she ought to have done
+one or the other.</p>
+
+<p>They had left the Vaneckens busy with their summer trunks at the
+far end of the northward corridor, where their wireless station
+had been re-established for Charlotte's advantage, though
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+she had not thought of it the whole short morning long. When she came
+back from lunch the Vaneckens were just brushing away the crumbs of
+theirs, which the son and brother seemed to have brought in for them
+in a paper box; at any rate, he was now there, making believe to help
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Forsyth had promised to come, but she came so late in the
+afternoon that she owned she had been grudgingly admitted at the
+office, and she was rather indignant about it. By this time, without
+having been West for three months, Peter had asked a question which
+had apparently never been asked before, and Charlotte had as newly
+answered it. "And now, mother," she said, while Mrs. Forsyth passed
+from indignant to exultant, "I want to be married right away, before
+Peter changes his mind about taking me West with him. Let us go home
+at once. You always said I should have a home wedding."</p>
+
+<p>"What a ridiculous idea!" Mrs. Forsyth said, more to gain time
+than anything else. She added, "Everything is at sixes and sevens
+in the flat. There wouldn't be standing-room." A sudden thought
+flashed upon her, which, because it was sudden and in keeping
+with her character, she put into tentative words. "You're more
+at home <i>here</i> than anywhere else. You were almost born
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+here. You've played about here ever since you were a child. You first
+met Peter here. He proposed to you here, and you rejected him here.
+He's proposed here again, and you've accepted him, you say&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Mother!" Charlotte broke in terribly upon her. "Are you suggesting
+that I should be married in a storage warehouse? Well, I haven't
+fallen quite so low as that yet. If I can't have a <i>home</i> wedding, I
+will have a <i>church</i> wedding, and I will wait till doomsday for it if
+necessary."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know about doomsday," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but as far as
+to-day is concerned, it's too late for a church wedding. Peter, isn't
+there something about canonical hours? And isn't it past them?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's in the Episcopal Church," Peter said, and then he asked, very
+politely, "Will you excuse me for a moment?" and walked away as if he
+had an idea. It was apparently to join the Vaneckens, who stood in a
+group at the end of their corridor, watching the restoration of the
+trunks which they had been working over the whole day. He came back
+with Mr. Vanecken and Mr. Vanecken's mother. He was smiling radiantly,
+and they amusedly.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right," he explained. "Mr. Vanecken is a Presbyterian
+minister, and he will marry us now."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+"But not here!" Charlotte cried, feeling herself weaken.</p>
+
+<p>"No, certainly not," the dominie reassured her. "I know a church in
+the next block that I can borrow for the occasion. But what about the
+license?"</p>
+
+<p>It was in the day before the parties must both make application in
+person, and Peter took a paper from his breast pocket. "I thought it
+might be needed, sometime, and I got it on the way up, this morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, how thoughtful of you, Peter!" Mrs. Forsyth moaned in admiration
+otherwise inexpressible, and the rest laughed, even Charlotte, who
+laughed hysterically. At the end of the corridor they met the Misses
+Vanecken waiting for them, unobtrusively expectant, and they all went
+down in the elevator together. Just as they were leaving the building,
+which had the air of hurrying them out, Mrs. Forsyth had an
+inspiration. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed, and then, in deference to
+Mr. Vanecken, said, "Good gracious, I <i>mean</i>. My husband! Peter, go
+right into the office and telephone Mr. Forsyth."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," Mr. Vanecken said, "I had better go and see about having my
+friend's church opened, in the meanwhile, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"By all means!" Mrs. Forsyth said from her mood of universal
+approbation.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+But Mr. Vanecken came back looking rather queer and crestfallen. "I
+find my friend has gone into the country for a few days; and I don't
+quite like to get the sexton to open the church without his authority,
+and&mdash; But New York is full of churches, and we can easily find another,
+with a little delay, if&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at Peter, who looked at Charlotte, who burst out with
+unprecedented determination. "No, we can't wait. I shall never marry
+Peter if we do. Mother, you are right. But <i>must</i> it be in the old
+ancestral five-dollar room?"</p>
+
+<p>They all laughed except Charlotte, who was more like crying.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not," Mr. Vanecken said. "I've no doubt the manager&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He never seemed to end his sentences, and he now left this one broken
+off while he penetrated the railing which fenced in the manager alone
+among a group of vacated desks, frowning impatient. At some murmured
+words from the dominie, he shouted, "<i>What!</i>" and then came out
+radiantly smiling, and saying, "Why, certainly." He knew all the group
+as old storers in the Constitutional, and called them each by name as
+he shook them each by the hand. "Everything else has happened here,
+and I don't see why this shouldn't. Come right into the
+reception-room."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+With some paintings of biblical subjects, unclaimed from the storage,
+on the walls, the place had a religious effect, and the manager
+significantly looked out of it a lingering stenographer, who was
+standing before a glass with two hatpins crossed in her mouth
+preparatory to thrusting them through the straw. She withdrew, visibly
+curious and reluctant, and then the manager offered to withdraw
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"No," Charlotte said, surprisingly initiative in these junctures, "I
+don't know how it is in Mr. Vanecken's church, but, if father doesn't
+come, perhaps you'll have to give me away. At any rate, you're an old
+friend of the family, and I should be hurt if you didn't stay."</p>
+
+<p>She laid her hand on the manager's arm, and just as he had
+protestingly and politely consented, her father arrived in a taxicab,
+rather grumbling from having been obliged to cut short a sitting. When
+it was all over, and the Vaneckens were eliminated, when, in fact, the
+Breams had joined the Forsyths at a wedding dinner which the bride's
+father had given them at Delmonico's and had precipitated themselves into
+a train for Niagara ("So banal," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but I suppose they
+had to go somewhere, and <i>we</i> went to Niagara, come to think of it,
+and it's on their way West"), the bride's mother remained up late talking it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+all over. She took credit to herself for the whole affair, and gave
+herself a great deal of just praise. But when she said, "I do believe,
+if it hadn't been for me, at the last, Charlotte would never have made
+up her mind," Forsyth demurred.</p>
+
+<p>"I should say Peter had a good deal to do with making up her mind for
+her."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you might say that."</p>
+
+<p>"And for once in her life Charlotte seems to have had her mind ready
+for making up."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you might say that, too. I believe she is going to turn out a
+decided character, after all. I <i>never</i> saw anybody so determined not
+to be married in a storage warehouse."</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>A PRESENTIMENT</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="II" id="II">II</a></h2>
+<h2><a name="A_PRESENTIMENT" id="A_PRESENTIMENT">A PRESENTIMENT</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Over our coffee in the Turkish room Minver was usually a censor of our
+several foibles rather than a sharer in our philosophic speculations
+and metaphysical conjectures. He liked to disable me as one
+professionally vowed to the fabulous, and he had unfailing fun with
+the romantic sentimentality of Rulledge, which was in fact so little
+in keeping with the gross super-abundance of his person, his habitual
+gluttony, and his ridiculous indolence. Minver knew very well that
+Rulledge was a good fellow withal, and would willingly do any kind
+action that did not seriously interfere with his comfort, or make too
+heavy a draft upon his pocket. His self-indulgence, which was quite
+blameless, unless surfeit is a fault, was the basis of an interest in
+occult themes, which was the means of even higher diversion to Minver. He
+liked to have Rulledge approach Wanhope from this side, in the invincible
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+persuasion that the psychologist would be interested in these themes
+by the law of his science, though he had been assured again and again
+that in spite of its misleading name psychology did not deal with the
+soul as Rulledge supposed the soul; and Minver's eyes lighted up with
+a prescience of uncommon pleasure when, late one night, after we had
+vainly tried to hit it off in talk, now of this, now of that, Rulledge
+asked Wanhope, abruptly as if it followed from something before:</p>
+
+<p>"Wasn't there a great deal more said about presentiments forty or
+fifty years ago than there is now?"</p>
+
+<p>Wanhope had been lapsing deeper and deeper into the hollow of his
+chair; but he now pulled himself up, and turned quickly toward
+Rulledge. "What made you think of that?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I was thinking of it myself." He glanced at me, and I shook
+my head.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Minver said, "if it will leave Acton out in the cold, I'll own
+that I was thinking of it, too. I was going back in my mind, for no
+reason that I know of, to my childhood, when I first heard of such a
+thing as a presentiment, and when I was afraid of having one. I had
+the notion that presentiments ran in the family."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+"Why had you that notion?" Rulledge demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know that I proposed telling," the painter said, giving
+himself to his pipe.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you didn't have it," Rulledge retaliated.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," Minver assented.</p>
+
+<p>Wanhope turned from the personal aspect of the matter. "It's rather
+curious that we should all three have had the same thing in mind just
+now; or, rather, it is not very curious. Such coincidences are really
+very common. Something must have been said at dinner which suggested
+it to all of us."</p>
+
+<p>"All but Acton," Minver demurred.</p>
+
+<p>"I mightn't have heard what was said," I explained. "I suppose the
+passing of all that sort of sub-beliefs must date from the general
+lapse of faith in personal immortality."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, no doubt," Wanhope assented. "It is very striking how sudden the
+lapse was. Everyone who experienced it in himself could date it to a
+year, if not to a day. The agnosticism of scientific men was of course
+all the time undermining the fabric of faith, and then it fell in
+abruptly, reaching one believer after another as fast as the ground
+was taken wholly or partly from under his feet. I can remember how people
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+once disputed whether there were such beings as guardian spirits or
+not. That minor question was disposed of when it was decided that
+there were no spirits at all."</p>
+
+<p>"Naturally," Minver said. "And the decay of the presentiment must have
+been hastened by the failure of so many presentiments to make good."</p>
+
+<p>"The great majority of them have failed to make good, from the
+beginning of time," Wanhope replied.</p>
+
+<p>"There are two kinds of presentiments," Rulledge suggested, with a
+philosophic air. "The true and the untrue."</p>
+
+<p>"Like mushrooms," Minver said. "Only, the true presentiment kills, and
+the true mushroom nourishes. Talking of mushrooms, they have a way in
+Switzerland of preserving them in walnut oil, and they fill you with
+the darkest forebodings, after you've filled yourself with the
+mushrooms. There's some occult relation between the two. Think it out,
+Rulledge!"</p>
+
+<p>Rulledge ignored him in turning to Wanhope. "The trouble is how to
+distinguish the true from the untrue presentiment."</p>
+
+<p>"It would be interesting," Wanhope began, but Minver broke in upon him
+maliciously.</p>
+
+<p>"To know how much the dyspepsia of our predecessors had to with the prevalence of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+presentimentalism? I agree with you, that a better diet has a good
+deal to do with the decline of the dark foreboding among us. What I
+can't understand is, how a gross and reckless feeder, like Rulledge
+here, doesn't go about like ancestral voices prophesying all sorts of
+dreadful things."</p>
+
+<p>"That's rather cheap talk, even for you, Minver," Rulledge said. "Why
+did you think presentiments ran in <i>your</i> family?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, there you have me, Rulledge. That's where my theory fails. I
+can remember," Minver continued soberly, "the talk there used to be
+about them among my people. They were serious people in an unreligious
+way, or rather an unecclesiastical way. They were never spiritualists,
+but I don't think there was one of them who doubted that he should
+live hereafter; he might doubt that he was living here, but there was
+no question of the other thing. I must say it gave a dignity to their
+conversation which, when they met, as they were apt to do at one
+another's houses on Sunday nights, was not of common things. One of my
+uncles was a merchant, another a doctor; my father was a
+portrait-painter by profession, and a sign-painter by practice. I
+suppose that's where I got my knack, such as it is. The merchant was
+an invalid, rather, though he kept about his business, and our people merely
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+recognized him as being out of health. He was what we could call, for
+that day and region&mdash;the Middle West of the early fifties&mdash;a
+man of unusual refinement. I suppose this was temperamental with him
+largely; but he had cultivated tastes, too. I remember him as a
+peculiarly gentle person, with a pensive cast of face, and the
+melancholy accomplishment of playing the flute."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder why nobody plays the flute nowadays," I mused aloud.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it's quite obsolete," Minver said. "They only play the flute in
+the orchestras now. I always look at the man who plays it and think of
+my uncle. He used to be very nice to me as a child; and he was very
+fond of my father, in a sort of filial way; my father was so much
+older. I can remember my young aunt; and how pretty she was as she sat
+at the piano, and sang and played to his fluting. When she looked
+forward at the music, her curls fell into her neck; they wore curls
+then, grown-up women; and though I don't think curls are beautiful, my
+aunt's beauty would have been less without them; in fact, I can't
+think of her without them.</p>
+
+<p>"She was delicate, too; they were really a pair of invalids; but
+she had none of his melancholy. They had had several children,
+who died, one after another, and there was only one left at the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+time I am speaking of. I rather wonder, now, that the thought of those
+poor little ghost-cousins didn't make me uncomfortable. I was a very
+superstitious boy, but I seem not to have thought of them. I played
+with the little girl who was left, and I liked going to my uncle's
+better than anywhere else. I preferred going in the daytime and in the
+summer-time. Then my cousin and I sat in a nook of the garden and
+fought violets, as we called it; hooked the wry necks of the flowers
+together and twitched to see which blossom would come off first. She
+was a sunny little thing, like her mother, and she had curls, like
+her. I can't express the feeling I had for my aunt; she seemed the
+embodiment of a world that was at once very proud and very good. I
+suppose she dressed fashionably, as things went then and there; and
+her style as well as her beauty fascinated me. I would have done
+anything to please her, far more than to please my cousin. With her I
+used to squabble, and sometimes sent her crying to her mother. Then I
+always ran off home, but when I sneaked back, or was sent for to come
+and play with my cousin, I was not scolded for my wickedness.</p>
+
+<p>"My uncle was more prosperous than his brothers; he lived in a much
+better house than ours, and I used to be quite awe-struck by its
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+magnificence. He went East, as we said, twice a year to buy goods,
+and he had things sent back for his house such as we never saw
+elsewhere; those cask-shaped seats of blue china for the verandas, and
+bamboo chairs. There were cane-bottom chairs in the sitting-room, such
+as we had in our best room; in the parlor the large pieces were of
+mahogany veneer, upholstered in black hair-cloth; they held me in awe.
+The piano filled half the place; the windows came down to the ground,
+and had Venetian blinds and lace curtains.</p>
+
+<p>"We all went in there after the Sunday night supper, and then the
+fathers and mothers were apt to begin talking of those occult things
+that gave me the creeps. It was after the Rochester Knockings, as they
+were called, had been exposed, and so had spread like an infection
+everywhere. It was as if people were waiting to have the fraud shown
+up in order to believe in it."</p>
+
+<p>"That sort of thing happens," Wanhope agreed. "It's as if the seeds of
+the ventilated imposture were carried atmospherically into the human
+mind broadcast and a universal crop of self-delusion sprang up."</p>
+
+<p>"At any rate," Minver resumed, "instead of the gift being confined to a few
+persons&mdash;a small sisterhood with detonating knee-joints&mdash;there were
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+rappings in every well-regulated household; all the tables
+tipped; people went to sleep to the soft patter of raps on the
+headboards of their beds; and girls who could not spell were occupied
+in delivering messages from Socrates, Ben Franklin and Shakespeare.
+Besides the physical demonstrations, there were all sorts of psychical
+intimations from the world which we've now abolished."</p>
+
+<p>"Not permanently, perhaps," I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that remains to be seen," Minver said. "It was this sort of
+thing which my people valued above the other. Perhaps they were
+exclusive in their tastes, and did not care for an occultism which the
+crowd could share with them; though this is a conjecture too long
+after the fact to have much value. As far as I can now remember, they
+used to talk of the double presence of living persons, like their
+being where they greatly wished to be as well as where they really
+were; of clairvoyance; of what we call mind-transference, now; of
+weird coincidences of all kinds; of strange experiences of their own
+and of others; of the participation of animals in these experiences,
+like the testimony of cats and dogs to the presence of invisible
+spirits; of dreams that came true, or came near coming true; and,
+above everything, of forebodings and presentiments.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+"I dare say they didn't always talk of such things, and I'm giving
+possibly a general impression from a single instance; everything
+remembered of childhood is as if from large and repeated occurrence.
+But it must have happened more than once, for I recall that when it
+came to presentiments my aunt broke it up, perhaps once only. My
+cousin used to get very sleepy on the rug before the fire, and her
+mother would carry her off to bed, very cross and impatient of being
+kissed good night, while I was left to the brunt of the occult alone.
+I could not go with my aunt and cousin, and I folded myself in my
+mother's skirt, where I sat at her feet, and listened in an anguish of
+drowsy terror. The talk would pass into my dreams, and the dreams
+would return into the talk; and I would suffer a sort of double
+nightmare, waking and sleeping."</p>
+
+<p>"Poor little devil!" Rulledge broke out. "It's astonishing how people
+will go on before children, and never think of the misery they're
+making for them."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe my mother thought of it," Minver returned, "but when that
+sort of talk began, the witchery of it was probably too strong for
+her. 'It held her like a two years' child'; I was eight that winter. I
+don't know how long my suffering had gone on, when my aunt came back and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+seemed to break up the talk. It had got to presentiments, and,
+whether they knew that this was forbidden ground with her, or whether
+she now actually said something about it, they turned to talk of other
+things. I'm not telling you all this from my own memory, which deals
+with only a point or two. My father and mother used to recur to it
+when I was older, and I am piecing out my story from their memories.</p>
+
+<p>"My uncle, with all his temperamental pensiveness, was my aunt's stay
+and cheer in the fits of depression which she paid with for her usual
+gaiety. But these fits always began with some uncommon depression of
+his&mdash;some effect of the forebodings he was subject to. Her opposition
+to that kind of thing was purely unselfish, but certainly she dreaded
+it for him as well as herself. I suppose there was a sort of conscious
+silence in the others which betrayed them to her. 'Well,' she said,
+laughing, 'have you been at it again? That poor child looks frightened
+out of his wits.'</p>
+
+<p>"They all laughed then, and my father said, hypocritically, 'I was
+just going to ask Felix whether he expected to start East this week or
+next.'</p>
+
+<p>"My uncle tried to make light of what was always a heavy matter with
+him. 'Well, yesterday,' he answered, 'I should have said next week;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+but it's this week, now. I'm going on Wednesday.'</p>
+
+<p>"'By stage or packet?' my father asked.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, I shall take the canal to the lake, and get the boat for Buffalo
+there,' my uncle said.</p>
+
+<p>"They went on to speak of the trip to New York, and how much easier it
+was then than it used to be when you had to go by stage over the
+mountains to Philadelphia and on by stage again. Now, it seemed, you
+got the Erie Canal packet at Buffalo and the Hudson River steamboat at
+Albany, and reached New York in four or five days, in great comfort
+without the least fatigue. They had all risen and my aunt had gone out
+with her sisters-in-law to help them get their wraps. When they
+returned, it seemed that they had been talking of the journey, too,
+for she said to my mother, laughing again, 'Well, Richard may think
+it's easy; but somehow Felix never expects to get home alive.'</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I ever heard my uncle laugh, but I can remember how he
+smiled at my aunt's laughing, as he put his hand on her shoulder; I thought
+it was somehow a very sad smile. On Wednesday I was allowed to go with my
+aunt and cousin to see him off on the packet, which came up from Cincinnati
+early in the morning; I had lain awake most of the night, and then nearly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+overslept myself, and then was at the canal in time. We made a gay
+parting for him, but when the boat started, and I was gloating on the
+three horses making up the tow-path at a spanking trot, under the
+snaky spirals of the driver's smacking whip-lash, I caught sight of my
+uncle standing on the deck and smiling that sad smile of his. My aunt
+was waving her handkerchief, but when she turned away she put it to
+her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"The rest of the story, such as it is, I know, almost to the very end,
+from what I heard my father and mother say from my uncle's report
+afterward. He told them that, when the boat started, the stress to
+stay was so strong upon him that if he had not been ashamed he would
+have jumped ashore and followed us home. He said that he could not
+analyze his feelings; it was not yet any definite foreboding, but
+simply a depression that seemed to crush him so that all his movements
+were leaden, when he turned at last, and went down to breakfast in the
+cabin below. The stress did not lighten with the little changes and
+chances of the voyage to the lake. He was never much given to making
+acquaintance with people, but now he found himself so absent-minded
+that he was aware of being sometimes spoken to by friendly strangers
+without replying until it was too late even to apologize. He was not only
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+steeped in this gloom, but he had the constant distress of the
+effort he involuntarily made to trace it back to some cause or follow
+it forward to some consequence. He kept trying at this, with a mind so
+tensely bent to the mere horror that he could not for a moment strain
+away from it. He would very willingly have occupied himself with other
+things, but the anguish which the double action of his mind gave him
+was such that he could not bear the effort; all he could do was to
+abandon himself to his obsession. This would ease him only for a
+while, though, and then he would suffer the misery of trying in vain
+to escape from it.</p>
+
+<p>"He thought he must be going mad, but insanity implied some definite
+delusion or hallucination, and, so far as he could make out, he had
+none. He was simply crushed by a nameless foreboding. Something
+dreadful was to happen, but this was all he felt; knowledge had no
+part in his condition. He could not say whether he slept during the
+two nights that passed before he reached Toledo, where he was to take
+the lake steamer for Buffalo. He wished to turn back again, but the
+relentless pressure which had kept him from turning back at the start
+was as strong as ever with him. He tried to give his presentiment
+direction by talking with the other passengers about a recent
+accident to a lake steamer, in which several hundred lives
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+were lost; there had been a collision in rough weather, and one of the
+boats had gone down in a few minutes. There was a sort of relief in
+that, but the double action of the mind brought the same intolerable
+anguish again, and he settled back for refuge under the shadow of his
+impenetrable doom. This did not lift till he was well on his way from
+Albany to New York by the Hudson River. The canal-boat voyage from
+Buffalo to Albany had been as eventless as that to Toledo, and his
+lake steamer had reached Buffalo in safety, for which it had seemed as
+if those lost in the recent disaster had paid.</p>
+
+<p>"He tried to pierce his heavy cloud by argument from the security in
+which he had traveled so far, but the very security had its
+hopelessness. If something had happened&mdash;some slight accident&mdash;to
+interrupt it, his reason, or his unreason, might have taken it for a
+sign that the obscure doom, whatever it was, had been averted.</p>
+
+<p>"Up to this time he had not been able to connect his foreboding
+with anything definite, and he was not afraid for himself. He was
+simply without the formless hope that helps us on at every step,
+through good and bad, and it was a mortal peril, which he came
+through safely while scores of others were lost, that gave his
+presentiment direction. He had taken the day boat from
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+Albany, and about the middle of the afternoon the boat, making way
+under a head-wind, took fire. The pilot immediately ran her ashore,
+and her passengers, those that had the courage for it, ran aft, and
+began jumping from the stern, but a great many women and children were
+burned. My uncle was one of the first of those who jumped, and he
+stood in the water, trying to save those who came after from drowning;
+it was not very deep. Some of the women lost courage for the leap, and
+some turned back into the flames, remembering children they had left
+behind. One poor creature stood hesitating wildly, and he called up to
+her to jump. At last she did so, almost into his arms, and then she
+clung about him as he helped her ashore. 'Oh,' she cried out between
+her sobs, 'if you have a wife and children at home, God will take you
+safe back to them; you have saved my life for my husband and little
+ones.' 'No,' he was conscious of saying, 'I shall never see my wife
+again,' and now his foreboding had the direction that it had wanted
+before.</p>
+
+<p>"From that on he simply knew that he should not get home alive, and he
+waited resignedly for the time and form of his disaster. He had a sort
+of peace in that. He went about his business intelligently, and from habit
+carefully, but it was with a mechanical action of the mind, something,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+he imagined, like the mechanical action of his body in those organs
+which do their part without bidding from the will. He was only a few
+days in New York, but in the course of them he got several letters
+from his wife telling him that all was going well with her and their
+daughter. It was before the times when you can ask and answer
+questions by telegraph, and he started back, necessarily without
+having heard the latest news from home.</p>
+
+<p>"He made the return trip in a sort of daze, talking, reading, eating,
+and sleeping in the calm certainty of doom, and only wondering how it
+would be fulfilled, and what hour of the night or day. But it is no
+use my eking this out; I heard it, as I say, when I was a child, and I
+am afraid that if I should try to give it with the full detail I
+should take to inventing particulars." Minver paused a moment, and
+then he said: "But there was one thing that impressed itself indelibly
+on my memory. My uncle got back perfectly safe and well."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" Rulledge snorted in rude dissatisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>"What was it impressed itself on your memory?" Wanhope asked, with
+scientific detachment from the story as a story.</p>
+
+<p>Minver continued to address Wanhope, without
+regarding Rulledge. "My uncle told my father
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+that some sort of psychical change, which he could not describe, but
+which he was as conscious of as if it were physical, took place within
+him as he came in sight of his house&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Wanhope prompted.</p>
+
+<p>"He had driven down from the canal-packet in the old omnibus which
+used to meet passengers and distribute them at their destinations in
+town. All the way to his house he was still under the doom as regarded
+himself, but bewildered that he should be getting home safe and well,
+and he was refusing his escape, as it were, and then suddenly, at the
+sight of the familiar house, the change within him happened. He looked
+out of the omnibus window and saw a group of neighbors at his gate. As
+he got out of the omnibus, my father took him by the hand, as if to
+hold him back a moment. Then he said to my father, very quietly, 'You
+needn't tell me: my wife is dead.'"</p>
+
+<p>There was an appreciable pause, in which we were all silent, and then
+Rulledge demanded, greedily, "And was she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Really, Rulledge!" I could not help protesting.</p>
+
+<p>Minver asked him, almost compassionately and with unwonted gentleness, as
+from the mood in which his reminiscence had left him: "You suspected a hoax?
+She had died suddenly the night before while she and my cousin were getting
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+things ready to welcome my uncle home in the morning. I'm sorry you're
+disappointed," he added, getting back to his irony.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever," Rulledge pursued, "became of the little girl?"</p>
+
+<p>"She died rather young; a great many years ago; and my uncle soon
+after her."</p>
+
+<p>Rulledge went away without saying anything, but presently returned
+with the sandwich which he had apparently gone for, while Wanhope was
+remarking: "That want of definition in the presentiment at first, and
+then its determination in the new direction by, as it were,
+propinquity&mdash;it is all very curious. Possibly we shall some day
+discover a law in such matters."</p>
+
+<p>Rulledge said: "How was it your boyhood was passed in the Middle West,
+Minver? I always thought you were a Bostonian."</p>
+
+<p>"I was an adoptive Bostonian for a good while, until I decided to
+become a native New-Yorker, so that I could always be near to you,
+Rulledge. You can never know what a delicate satisfaction you are."</p>
+
+<p>Minver laughed, and we were severally restored to the wonted relations
+which his story had interrupted.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+<h1>CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S<br />
+LAST TRIP</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h2><a name="CAPTAIN_DUNLEVYS" id="CAPTAIN_DUNLEVYS"></a>CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">It was against the law, in such case made and provided,</span><br />
+    Of the United States, but by the good will of the pilots<br />
+    That we would some of us climb to the pilot-house after our breakfast<br />
+    For a morning smoke, and find ourselves seats on the benching<br />
+    Under the windows, or in the worn-smooth arm-chairs. The pilot,<br />
+    Which one it was did not matter, would tilt his head round and say, "All right!"<br />
+    When he had seen who we were, and begin, or go on as from stopping<br />
+    In the midst of talk that was leading up to a story,<br />
+    Just before we came in, and the story, begun or beginning,<br />
+    Always began or ended with some one, or something or other,<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+    Having to do with the river. If one left the wheel to the other,<br />
+    Going off watch, he would say to his partner standing behind him<br />
+    With his hands stretched out for the spokes that were not given up yet,<br />
+    "Captain, you can tell them the thing I was going to tell them<br />
+    Better than I could, I reckon," and then the other would answer,<br />
+    "Well, I don't know as I feel so sure of that, captain," and having<br />
+    Recognized each other so by that courtesy title of captain<br />
+    Never officially failed of without offense among pilots,<br />
+    One would subside into Jim and into Jerry the other.</p>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">It was on these terms, at least, Captain Dunn relieved Captain Davis</span><br />
+    When we had settled ourselves one day to listen in comfort,<br />
+    After some psychological subtleties we had indulged in at breakfast<br />
+    Touching that weird experience every one knows when the senses<br />
+    Juggle the points of the compass out of true orientation,<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+    Changing the North to the South, and the East to the West. "Why, Jerry, what was it<br />
+    You was going to tell them?" "Oh, never <i>you</i> mind what it <i>was</i>, Jim.<br />
+    <i>You</i> tell them something else," and so Captain Davis submitted,<br />
+    While Captain Dunn, with a laugh, got away beyond reach of his protest.<br />
+    Then Captain Davis, with fitting, deprecatory preamble,<br />
+    Launched himself on a story that promised to be all a story<br />
+    Could be expected to be, when one of those women&mdash;you know them&mdash;<br />
+    Who interrupt on any occasion or none, interrupted,<br />
+    Pointed her hand, and asked, "Oh, what is that island there, captain?"<br />
+    "That one, ma'am?" He gave her the name, and then the woman persisted,<br />
+    "Don't say you know them all by sight!" "Yes, by sight or by feeling."<br />
+    "What do you mean by feeling?" "Why, just that by daylight we see them,<br />
+    And in the dark it's like as if somehow we felt them, I reckon.<br />
+    Every foot of the channel and change in it, wash-out and cave-in,<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+    Every bend and turn of it, every sand-bar and landmark,<br />
+    Every island, of course, we have got to see them, or feel them."<br />
+    "But if you don't?" "But we've got to." "But aren't you ever mistaken?"<br />
+    "Never the second time." "Now, what do you mean, Captain Davis?<br />
+    Never the second time." "Well, let me tell you a story.<br />
+    It's not the one I begun, but that island you asked about yonder<br />
+    Puts me in mind of it, happens to be the place where it happened,<br />
+    Three years ago. I suppose no man ever knew the Ohio<br />
+    Better than Captain Dunlevy, if any one else knew it like him.<br />
+    Man and boy he had been pretty much his whole life on the river:<br />
+    Cabin-boy first on a keelboat before the day of the steamboats,<br />
+    Back in the pioneer times; and watchman then on a steamboat;<br />
+    Then second mate, and then mate, and then pilot and captain and owner&mdash;<br />
+    But he was proudest, I reckon, of being about the best pilot<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+    On the Ohio. He knew it as well as he knew his own Bible,<br />
+    And I don't hardly believe that ever Captain Dunlevy<br />
+    Let a single day go by without reading a chapter."</p>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">While the pilot went on with his talk, and in regular, rhythmical motion</span><br />
+    Swayed from one side to the other before his wheel, and we listened,<br />
+    Certain typical facts of the picturesque life of the river<br />
+    Won their way to our consciousness as without help of our senses.<br />
+    It was along about the beginning of March, but already<br />
+    In the sleepy sunshine the budding maples and willows,<br />
+    Where they waded out in the shallow wash of the freshet,<br />
+    Showed the dull red and the yellow green of their blossoms and catkins,<br />
+    And in their tops the foremost flocks of blackbirds debated<br />
+    As to which they should colonize first. The indolent house-boats<br />
+    Loafing along the shore, sent up in silvery spirals<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
+    Out of their kitchen pipes the smoke of their casual breakfasts.<br />
+    Once a wide tow of coal-barges, loaded clear down to the gunwales,<br />
+    Gave us the slack of the current, with proper formalities shouted<br />
+    By the hoarse-throated stern-wheeler that pushed the black barges before her,<br />
+    And as she passed us poured a foamy cascade from her paddles.<br />
+    Then, as a raft of logs, which the spread of the barges had hidden,<br />
+    River-wide, weltered in sight, with a sudden jump forward the pilot<br />
+    Dropped his whole weight on the spokes of the wheel just in time to escape it.</p>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Always give those fellows," he joked, "all the leeway they ask for;</span><br />
+    Worst kind of thing on the river you want your boat to run into.<br />
+    Where had I got about Captain Dunlevy? Oh yes, I remember.<br />
+    Well, when the railroads began to run away from the steamboats,<br />
+    Taking the carrying trade in the very edge of the water,<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+    It was all up with the old flush times, and Captain Dunlevy<br />
+    Had to climb down with the rest of us pilots till he was only<br />
+    Captain the same as any and every pilot is captain,<br />
+    Glad enough, too, to be getting his hundred and twenty-five dollars<br />
+    Through the months of the spring and fall while navigation was open.<br />
+    Never lowered himself, though, a bit from captain and owner,<br />
+    Knew his rights and yours, and never would thought of allowing<br />
+    Any such thing as a liberty <i>from</i> you or taking one <i>with</i> you.<br />
+    I had been his cub, and all that I knew of the river<br />
+    Captain Dunlevy had learnt me; and if you know what the feeling<br />
+    Is of a cub for the pilot that learns him the river, you'll trust me<br />
+    When I tell you I felt it the highest kind of an honor<br />
+    Having him for my partner; and when I came up to relieve him,<br />
+    One day, here at the wheel, and actu'lly thought that I found him<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+    Taking that island there on the left, I thought I was crazy.<br />
+    No, I couldn't believe my senses, and yet I couldn't endure it.<br />
+    Seeing him climb the spokes of the wheel to warp the <i>Kanawha</i>,<br />
+    With the biggest trip of passengers ever she carried,<br />
+    Round on the bar at the left that fairly stuck out of the water.<br />
+    Well, as I said, he learnt me all that I knew of the river,<br />
+    And was I to learn <i>him</i> now which side to take of an island<br />
+    When I knew he knew it like his right hand from his left hand?<br />
+    My, but I hated to speak! It certainly seemed like my tongue clove,<br />
+    Like the Bible says, to the roof of my mouth! But I had to.<br />
+    'Captain,' I says, and it seemed like another person was talking,<br />
+    'Do you usu'lly take that island there on the eastward?'<br />
+    'Yes,' he says, and he laughed, 'and I thought I had learnt you to do it,<br />
+    When you was going up.' 'But not going <i>down</i>, did you, captain?'<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+    'Down?' And he whirled at me, and, without ever stopping his laughing,<br />
+    Turned as white as a sheet, and his eyes fairly bulged from their sockets.<br />
+    Then he whirled back again, and looked up and down on the river,<br />
+    Like he was hunting out the shape of the shore and the landmarks.<br />
+    Well, I suppose the thing has happened to every one sometime,<br />
+    When you find the points of the compass have swapped with each other,<br />
+    And at the instant you're looking, the North and the South have changed places.<br />
+    <i>I</i> knew what was in his mind as well as Dunlevy himself did.<br />
+    Neither one of us spoke a word for nearly a minute.<br />
+    Then in a kind of whisper he says, 'Take the wheel, Captain Davis!'<br />
+    Let the spokes fly, and while I made a jump forwards to catch them,<br />
+    Staggered into that chair&mdash;well, the very one you are in, ma'am.<br />
+    Set there breathing quick, and, when he could speak, all he said was,<br />
+    'This is the end of it for me on the river, Jim Davis,'<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+    Reached up over his head for his coat where it hung by that window,<br />
+    Trembled onto his feet, and stopped in the door there a second,<br />
+    Stared in hard like as if for good-by to the things he was used to,<br />
+    Shut the door behind him, and never come back again through it."<br />
+    While we were silent, not liking to prompt the pilot with questions,<br />
+    "Well," he said, at last, "it was no use to argue. We tried it,<br />
+    In the half-hearted way that people do that don't mean it.<br />
+    Every one was his friend here on the <i>Kanawha</i>, and <i>we</i> knew<br />
+    It was the first time he ever had lost his bearings, but <i>he</i> knew,<br />
+    In such a thing as that, that the first and the last are the same time.<br />
+    When we had got through trying our worst to persuade him, he only<br />
+    Shook his head and says, 'I am done for, boys, and you know it,'<br />
+    Left the boat at Wheeling, and left his life on the river&mdash;<br />
+    Left his life on the earth, you may say, for I don't call it living,<br />
+    <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+    Setting there homesick at home for the wheel he can never go back to.<br />
+    Reads the river-news regular; knows just the stage of the water<br />
+    Up and down the whole way from Cincinnati to Pittsburg;<br />
+    Follows every boat from the time she starts out in the spring-time<br />
+    Till she lays up in the summer, and then again in the winter;<br />
+    Wants to talk all about her and who is her captain and pilot;<br />
+    Then wants to slide away to that everlastingly puzzling<br />
+    Thing that happened to him that morning on the <i>Kanawha</i><br />
+    When he lost his bearings and North and South had changed places&mdash;<br />
+    No, I don't call that living, whatever the rest of you call it."<br />
+    We were silent again till that woman spoke up, "And what was it,<br />
+    Captain, that kept him from going back and being a pilot?"<br />
+    "Well, ma'am," after a moment the pilot patiently answered,<br />
+    "<i>I</i> don't hardly believe that I could explain it exactly."</p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE RETURN TO FAVOR</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_RETURN_TO_FAVOR" id="THE_RETURN_TO_FAVOR"></a>THE RETURN TO FAVOR</h2>
+
+
+<p>He never, by any chance, quite kept his word, though there was a
+moment in every case when he seemed to imagine doing what he said, and
+he took with mute patience the rakings which the ladies gave him when
+he disappointed them.</p>
+
+<p>Disappointed is not just the word, for the ladies did not really
+expect him to do what he said. They pretended to believe him when he
+promised, but at the bottom of their hearts they never did or could.
+He was gentle-mannered and soft-spoken, and when he set his head on
+one side, and said that a coat would be ready on Wednesday, or
+a dress on Saturday, and repeated his promise upon the same lady's
+expressed doubt, she would catch her breath and say that now she
+absolutely must have it on the day named, for otherwise she would
+not have a thing to put on. Then he would become very grave,
+and his soft tenor would deepen to a bass of unimpeachable
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+veracity, and he would say, "Sure, lady, you have it."</p>
+
+<p>The lady would depart still doubting and slightly sighing, and he
+would turn to the customer who was waiting to have a button sewed on,
+or something like that, and ask him softly what it was he could do for
+him. If the customer offered him his appreciation of the case in hand,
+he would let his head droop lower, and in a yet deeper bass deplore
+the doubt of the ladies as an idiosyncrasy of their sex. He would make
+the customer feel that he was a favorite customer whose rights to a
+perfect fidelity of word and deed must by no means be tampered with,
+and he would have the button sewed on or the rip sewed up at once, and
+refuse to charge anything, while the customer waited in his
+shirt-sleeves in the small, stuffy shop opening directly from the
+street. When he tolerantly discussed the peculiarities of ladies as a
+sex, he would endure to be laughed at, "for sufferance was the badge
+of all his tribe," and possibly he rather liked it.</p>
+
+<p>The favorite customer enjoyed being there when some lady came back on
+the appointed Wednesday or Saturday, and the tailor came soothingly
+forward and showed her into the curtained alcove where she was to try
+on the garments, and then called into the inner shop for them. The
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+shirt-sleeved journeyman, with his unbuttoned waistcoat-front all
+pins and threaded needles, would appear in his slippers with the
+things barely basted together, and the tailor would take them, with an
+airy courage, as if they were perfectly finished, and go in behind the
+curtain where the lady was waiting in a dishabille which the favorite
+customer, out of reverence for the sex, forbore to picture to himself.
+Then sounds of volcanic fury would issue from the alcove. "Now, Mr.
+Morrison, you have lied to me again, deliberately <i>lied</i>. Didn't I
+tell you I <i>must</i> have the things perfectly ready to-day? You see
+yourself that it will be another week before I can have my things."</p>
+
+<p>"A week? Oh, madam! But I assure you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't talk to me any more! It's the last time I shall ever come to
+you, but I suppose I can't take the work away from you as it is.
+<i>When</i> shall I have it?"</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow. Yes, to-morrow noon. Sure!"</p>
+
+<p>"Now you know you are always out at noon. I should think you would be
+ashamed."</p>
+
+<p>"If it hadn't been for sickness in the family I would have finished
+your dress with my own hands. Sure I would. If you come here to-morrow
+noon you find your dress all ready for you."</p>
+
+<p>"I know I won't, but I will come, and you'd <i>better</i> have it ready."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+"Oh, sure."</p>
+
+<p>The lady then added some generalities of opprobrium with some
+particular criticisms of the garments. Her voice sank into
+dispassionate murmurs in these, but it rose again in her renewed sense
+of the wrong done her, and when she came from the alcove she went out
+of the street door purple. She reopened it to say, "Now, remember!"
+before she definitely disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>"Rather a stormy session, Mr. Morrison," the customer said.</p>
+
+<p>"Something fierce," Mr. Morrison sighed. But he did not seem much
+troubled, and he had one way with all his victims, no matter what mood
+they came or went in.</p>
+
+<p>One day the customer was by when a kind creature timidly upbraided
+him. "This is the third time you've disappointed me, Mr. Morrison. I
+really wish you wouldn't promise me unless you mean to do it. I don't
+think it's right for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but sure, madam! The things will be done, sure. We had a strike
+on us."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I will trust you once more," the kind creature said.</p>
+
+<p>"You can depend on me, madam, sure."</p>
+
+<p>When she was gone the customer said: "I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+wonder you do that sort of thing, Mr. Morrison. You can't be surprised
+at their behaving rustily with you if you never keep your word."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I assure you there are times when I don't know where to look,
+the way they go on. It is something awful. You ought to hear them
+once. And now they want the wote." He rearranged some pieces of
+tumbled goods at the table where the customer sat, and put together
+the disheveled leaves of the fashion-papers which looked as if the
+ladies had scattered them in their rage.</p>
+
+<p>One day the customer heard two ladies waiting for their
+disappointments in the outer room while the tailor in the alcove was
+trying to persuade a third lady that positively her things would be
+sent home the next day before dark. The customer had now formed the
+habit of having his own clothes made by the tailor, and his system in
+avoiding disappointment was very simple. In the early fall he ordered
+a spring suit, and in the late spring it was ready. He never had any
+difficulty, but he was curious to learn how the ladies managed, and he
+listened with all his might while these two talked.</p>
+
+<p>"I always wonder we keep coming," one of them said.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you why," the other said. "Because
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+he's cheap, and we get things from a fourth to a third less than we
+can get them anywhere else. The quality is first rate, and he's
+absolutely honest. And, besides, he's a genius. The wretch has
+<i>touch</i>. The things have a style, a look, a hang! Really it's
+something wonderful. Sure it iss," she ended in the tailor's accent,
+and then they both laughed and joined in a common sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't believe he means to deceive any one."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, neither do I. I believe he expects to do everything he says. And
+one can't help liking him even when he doesn't."</p>
+
+<p>"He's a good while getting through with her," the first lady said,
+meaning the unseen lady in the alcove.</p>
+
+<p>"She'll be a good while longer getting through with <i>him</i>, if he
+hasn't them ready the next time," the second lady said.</p>
+
+<p>But the lady in the alcove issued from it with an impredicable smile,
+and the tailor came up to the others, and deferred to their wishes
+with a sort of voiceless respect.</p>
+
+<p>He gave the customer a glance of good-fellowship, and said to him,
+radiantly: "Your things all ready for you, this morning. As soon as
+I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no hurry," the customer responded.</p>
+
+<p>"I won't be a minute," the tailor said, pulling
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+the curtain of the alcove aside, and then there began those sounds of
+objurgation and expostulation, although the ladies had seemed so
+amiable before.</p>
+
+<p>The customer wondered if they did not all enjoy it; the ladies in
+their patience under long trial, and the tailor in the pleasure of
+practising upon it. But perhaps he did believe in the things he
+promised. He might be so much a genius as to have no grasp of facts;
+he might have thought that he could actually do what he said.</p>
+
+<p>The customer's question on these points found answer when one day the
+tailor remarked, as it were out of a clear sky, that he had sold his
+business; sold it to the slippered journeyman who used to come in his
+shirt-sleeves, with his vest-front full of pins and needles, bringing
+the basted garments to be tried on the ladies who had been promised
+them perfectly finished.</p>
+
+<p>"He will do your clothes all right," he explained to the customer. "He
+is a first-rate cutter and fitter; he knows the whole business."</p>
+
+<p>"But why&mdash;why&mdash;" the customer began.</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't stand it. The way them ladies would talk to a person, when
+you done your best to please them; it's something fierce."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know. But I thought you liked it,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+from the way you always promised them and never kept your word."</p>
+
+<p>"And if I hadn't promised them?" the tailor returned with some show of
+feeling. "They <i>wanted</i> me to promise them&mdash;they made me&mdash;they
+wouldn't have gone away without it. Sure. Every one wanted her things
+before every one. You had got to think of that."</p>
+
+<p>"But you had to think of what they would say."</p>
+
+<p>"Say? Sometimes I thought they would <i>hit</i> me. One lady said she had a
+notion to slap me once. It's no way to talk."</p>
+
+<p>"But you didn't seem to mind it."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't mind it for a good while. Then I couldn't stand it. So I
+sold."</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head sadly; but the customer had no comfort to offer him.
+He asked when his clothes would be done, and the tailor told him when,
+and then they were not. The new proprietor tried them on, but he would
+not say just when they would be finished.</p>
+
+<p>"We have a good deal of work already for some ladies that been
+disappointed. Now we try a new way. We tell people exactly what we
+do."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's right," the customer said, but in his heart he was not
+sure he liked the new way.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+The day before his clothes were promised he dropped in. From the
+curtained alcove he heard low murmurs, the voice of the new proprietor
+and the voice of some lady trying on, and being severely bidden not to
+expect her things at a time she suggested. "No, madam. We got too much
+work on hand already. These things, they will not be done before next
+week."</p>
+
+<p>"I told you to-morrow," the same voice said to another lady, and the
+new proprietor came out with an unfinished coat in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I know you did, but I thought you would be better than your word, and
+so I came to-day. Well, then, to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, to-morrow," the new proprietor said, but he did not seem to have
+liked the lady's joke. He did not look happy.</p>
+
+<p>A few weeks after that the customer came for some little alterations
+in his new suit.</p>
+
+<p>In the curtained alcove he heard the murmurs of trying on, much
+cheerfuller murmurs than before; the voice of a lady lifted in
+gladness, in gaiety, and an incredible voice replying, "Oh, sure,
+madam."</p>
+
+<p>Then the old proprietor came out in his shirt-sleeves and slippers,
+with his waistcoat-front full of pins and needles, just like the new
+proprietor in former days.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+"Why!" the customer exclaimed. "Have you bought back?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. I'm just here like a journeyman already. The new man he want me
+to come. He don't get along very well with his way. He's all right;
+he's a good man and a first-class tailor. But," and the former
+proprietor looked down at the basted garment hanging over his arm, and
+picked off an irrelevant thread from it, "he thinks I get along better
+with the ladies."</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>SOMEBODY'S MOTHER</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+<h2><a name="SOMEBODYS_MOTHER" id="SOMEBODYS_MOTHER"></a>SOMEBODY'S MOTHER</h2>
+
+
+<p>The figure of a woman sat crouched forward on one of the lowermost
+steps of the brownstone dwelling which was keeping a domestic
+tradition in a street mostly gone to shops and small restaurants and
+local express-offices. The house was black behind its closed shutters,
+and the woman remained sitting there because no one could have come
+out of its door for a year past to hunt her away. The neighborhood
+policeman faltered in going by, and then he kept on. The three people
+who came out of the large, old-fashioned hotel, half a block off, on
+their way for dinner to a French <i>table d'h&ocirc;te</i> which they had heard
+of, stopped and looked at the woman. They were a father and his son
+and daughter, and it was something like a family instinct that
+controlled them, in their pause before the woman crouching on the
+steps.</p>
+
+<p>It was the early dusk of a December day, and the
+day was very chilly. "She seems to be sick or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+something," the father vaguely surmised. "Or asleep."</p>
+
+<p>The three looked at the woman, but they did nothing for a moment. They
+would rather have gone on, but they waited to see if anything would
+happen to release them from the spell that they seemed to have laid
+upon themselves. They were conditional New-Yorkers of long sojourn,
+and it was from no apparent motive that the son wore evening dress,
+which his unbuttoned overcoat discovered, and an opera-hat. He would
+not have dressed so for that problematical French <i>table d'h&ocirc;te</i>;
+probably he was going on later to some society affair. He now put in
+effect the father's impulse to go closer and look at the woman.</p>
+
+<p>"She seems to be asleep," he reported.</p>
+
+<p>"Shouldn't you think she would take cold? She will get her death
+there. Oughtn't we to do something?" the daughter asked, but she left
+it to the father, and he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Probably somebody will come by."</p>
+
+<p>"That we could leave her to?" the daughter pursued.</p>
+
+<p>"We could do that without waiting," the son commented.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes," the father assented; but they did not go on. They waited,
+helplessly, and then somebody came by. It was a young girl, not very
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+definite in the dusk, except that she was unmistakably of the working
+class; she was simply dressed, though with the New York instinct for
+clothes. Their having stopped there seemed to stay her involuntarily,
+and after a glance in the direction of their gaze she asked the
+daughter:</p>
+
+<p>"Is she sick, do you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"We don't know what's the matter. But she oughtn't to stay there."</p>
+
+<p>Something velvety in the girl's voice had made its racial quality
+sensible to the ear; as she went up to the crouching woman and bent
+forward over her and then turned to them, a street lamp threw its
+light on her face, and they saw that she was a light shade of colored
+girl.</p>
+
+<p>"She seems to be sleeping."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," the son began, "she's not quite&mdash;" But he did not go on.</p>
+
+<p>The girl looked round at the others and suggested, "She must be
+somebody's mother!"</p>
+
+<p>The others all felt abashed in their several sorts and degrees, but in
+their several sorts and degrees they all decided that there was
+something romantic, sentimental, theatrical in the girl's words, like
+something out of some cheap story-paper story.</p>
+
+<p>The father wondered if that kind of thing was current among that kind of people. He had a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+sort of esthetic pleasure in the character and condition expressed by the words.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes," he said, "if she has children, or has had." The girl
+looked at him uncertainly, and then he added, "But, of course&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The son went up to the woman again, and asked: "Aren't you well? Can
+we do anything for you? It won't do to stay here, you know." The woman
+only made a low murmur, and he said to his sister, "Suppose we get her
+up."</p>
+
+<p>His sister did not come forward promptly, and the colored girl said,
+"I'll help you."</p>
+
+<p>She took one arm of the woman and the son took the other, and they
+lifted her, without her connivance, to her feet and kept her on them.
+Then they walked her down the steps. On the level below she showed
+taller than either of them; she was bundled up in different incoherent
+wraps; her head was muffled, and she wore a battered bonnet at an
+involuntary slant.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know exactly what we shall do with her," the son said.</p>
+
+<p>"We ought to get her home somehow," the daughter said.</p>
+
+<p>The father proposed nothing, but the colored girl said, "If we keep
+walking her along, we'll come to a policeman and we can&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A hoarse rumble of protest came from the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+muffled head of the woman, and the girl put her ear closer. "Want to
+go home? Well, the policeman will take you. We don't know where you
+live, and we haven't the time."</p>
+
+<p>The woman seemed to have nothing to say further, and they began
+walking her westward; the colored girl supported her on one hand, and
+the son, in his evening dress and opera-hat, on the other.</p>
+
+<p>The daughter followed in a vague anxiety, but the father went along,
+enjoying the anomaly, and happy in his relish of that phrase, "She
+must be somebody's mother." It now sounded to him like a catch from
+one of those New York songs, popular in the order of life where the
+mother represents what is best and holiest. He recalled a vaudeville
+ballad with the refrain of "A Boy's Best Friend is his Mother," which,
+when he heard it in a vaudeville theater, threatened the gallery floor
+under the applauding feet of the frenzied audience. Probably this
+colored girl belonged to that order of life; he wished he could know
+her social circumstance and what her outlook on the greater world
+might be. She seemed a kind creature, poor thing, and he respected
+her. "Somebody's mother"&mdash;he liked that.</p>
+
+<p>They all walked westward, aimlessly, except that the
+<i>table d'h&ocirc;te</i> where they had meant to dine
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+was in that direction; they had heard of it as an amusingly harmless
+French place, and they were fond of such mild adventures.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman contributed nothing to the definition of their progress.
+She stumbled and mumbled along, but between Seventh Avenue and Eighth
+she stubbornly arrested her guardians. "She says"&mdash;the colored girl
+translated some obscure avowal across her back&mdash;"she says she wants to
+go home, and she lives up in Harlem."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, that's good," the father said, with an optimistic
+amiability. "We'd better help walk her across to Ninth Avenue and put
+her on a car, and tell the conductor where to let her off."</p>
+
+<p>He was not helping walk her himself, but he enjoyed his son's doing it
+in evening dress and opera-hat, with that kind colored girl on the
+other side of the mother; the composition was agreeably droll. The
+daughter did not like it, and she cherished the ideal of a passing
+policeman to take the old woman in charge.</p>
+
+<p>No policeman passed, though great numbers of other people met them
+without apparently finding anything noticeable in the spectacle which
+their group presented. Among the crowds going and coming on the
+avenues which they crossed scarcely any turned to look at them, or was
+moved by the sense of anything odd in them.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+The old woman herself did nothing to attract public notice till they
+were midway between Seventh and Eighth avenues. She mumbled something
+from time to time which the colored girl interpreted to the rest as
+her continued wish to go home. She was now clearer about her street
+and number. The girl, as if after question of her own generous spirit,
+said she did not see how <i>she</i> could go with her; she was expected at
+home herself.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you won't have to go with her; we'll just put her aboard the
+Ninth Avenue car," the father encouraged her. He would have encouraged
+any one; he was enjoying the whole affair.</p>
+
+<p>At a certain moment, for no apparent reason, the mother decided to sit
+down on a door-step. It proved to be the door-step of a house where
+from time to time colored people&mdash;sometimes of one sex, sometimes of
+another&mdash;went in or came out. The door seemed to open directly into a
+large room where dancing and dining were going on concurrently. At a
+long table colored people sat eating, and behind their chairs on both
+sides of the room and at the ends of the table colored couples were
+waltzing.</p>
+
+<p>The effect was the more curious because, except for some almost inaudible
+music, the scene passed in silence. Those who were eating were not
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+visibly incommoded by those revolving at their backs; the waltzers
+turned softly around and around, untempted by the table now before
+them, now behind them. When some of the diners or dancers came out,
+they stumbled over the old woman on the door-step without minding or
+stopping to inquire. Those outside, when they went in, fell over her
+with like equanimity and joined the strange company within.</p>
+
+<p>The father murmured to himself the lines,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><p><small>
+"'Vast forms that move fantastically<br />
+To a discordant melody&mdash;'"
+</small></p></div>
+
+<p>with a remote trouble of mind because the words were at once so
+graphic and yet so imperfectly applicable. The son and daughter
+exchanged a silent wonder as long as they could bear it; then the
+daughter asked the colored girl:</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's a boarding-house," the girl answered, simply.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," the daughter said.</p>
+
+<p>Sounds of more decided character than before now came from the figure
+on the door-step.</p>
+
+<p>"She seems to be saying something," the daughter suggested in general
+terms. "What is she saying?" she asked the colored girl.</p>
+
+<p>The girl stooped over and listened. Then she answered, "She's
+swearing."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+"Swearing? What about? Whom is she swearing at?"</p>
+
+<p>"At me, I reckon. She says, why don't I take her home."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, why doesn't she get up, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"She says she won't."</p>
+
+<p>"We can't carry her to the car," the daughter noted.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, why not?" the father merrily demanded.</p>
+
+<p>The daughter turned to her brother. They were both very respectful to
+their father, but the son agreed with his sister when she said: "Papa
+would joke about anything. But this has passed a joke. We must get
+this old thing up and start her off."</p>
+
+<p>Upon experiment they could not get the old thing up, even with the
+help of the kind colored girl. They had to let her be, and the colored
+girl reported, after stooping over her again, "She says she can't
+walk."</p>
+
+<p>"She walked here well enough," the daughter said.</p>
+
+<p>"Not <i>very</i> well," the father amended.</p>
+
+<p>His daughter did not notice him. She said to her brother: "Well, now
+you must go and find a policeman. It's strange none has gone by."</p>
+
+<p>It was also strange that still their group remained without
+attracting the notice of the passers. Nobody stopped to speak
+or even stare; perhaps the phenomena of that boarding-house
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+had ceased to have surprises for the public of the neighborhood, and
+they in their momentary relation to it would naturally be without
+interest.</p>
+
+<p>The brother went away, leaving his sister with their father and that
+kind colored creature in charge of the old woman, now more and more
+quiescent on the door-step; she had ceased to swear, or even to speak.
+The brother came back after a time that seemed long, and said that he
+could not find a policeman anywhere, and at the same moment, as if the
+officer had been following at his heels, a policeman crossed the
+street from just behind him.</p>
+
+<p>The daughter ran after him, and asked if he would not come and look at
+the old woman who had so steadfastly remained in their charge, and she
+rapidly explained.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure, lady," the policeman said, and he turned from crossing the
+street and went up to the old woman. He laid his hand on her shoulder,
+and his touch seemed magical. "What's the matter? Can't you stand up?"
+She stood up as if at something familiar in the voice of authority.
+"Where do you live?" She gave an address altogether different from
+that she had given before&mdash;a place on the next avenue, within a block
+or two. "You'd better go home. You can walk, can't you?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>
+"I can walk well enough," she answered in a tone of vexation, and she
+made her word good by walking quite actively away in the direction she
+had given.</p>
+
+<p>The kind colored girl became a part of the prevalent dark after
+refusing the thanks of the others. The daughter then fervently offered
+them to the policeman.</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right, lady," he said, and the incident had closed except
+for her emotion at seeing him enter a police-station precisely across
+the street, where they could have got a dozen policemen in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," the father said, "we might as well go to our French <i>table
+d'h&ocirc;te</i> now."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," the son said, as if that reminded him, "the place seems to be
+shut."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, we might as well go back to the hotel," the father
+decided. "I dare say we shall do quite as well there."</p>
+
+<p>On the way the young people laughed over the affair and their escape
+from it, especially at the strange appearance and disappearance of the
+kind colored girl, with her tag of sentiment, and at the instant
+compliance of the old woman with the suggestion of the policeman.</p>
+
+<p>The father followed, turning the matter over in
+his mind. Did mere motherhood hallow that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>
+old thing to the colored girl and her sort and condition? Was there a
+superstition of motherhood among such people which would endear this
+disreputable old thing to their affection and reverence? Did such
+people hold mothers in tenderer regard than people of larger means?
+Would a mother in distress or merely embarrassment instantly appeal to
+their better nature as a case of want or sickness in the neighborhood
+always appealed to their compassion? Would her family now welcome the
+old thing home from her aberration more fondly than the friends of one
+who had arrived in a carriage among them in a good street? But, after
+all, how little one knew of other people! How little one knew of one
+self, for that matter! How next to nothing one knew of Somebody's
+Mother! It did not necessarily follow from anything they knew of her
+that she was a mother at all. Her motherhood might be the mere figment
+of that kind colored girl's emotional fancy. She might be Nobody's
+Mother.</p>
+
+<p>When it came to this the father laughed, too. Why, anyhow, were
+mothers more sacred than fathers? If they had found an old man in that
+old woman's condition on those steps, would that kind colored girl
+have appealed to them in his behalf as Somebody's Father?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>THE FACE AT THE WINDOW</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_FACE_AT_THE_WINDOW" id="THE_FACE_AT_THE_WINDOW"></a>THE FACE AT THE WINDOW</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">He had gone down at Christmas, where our host</span><br />
+  Had opened up his house on the Maine coast,<br />
+  For the week's holidays, and we were all,<br />
+  On Christmas night, sitting in the great hall,<br />
+  About the corner fireplace, while we told<br />
+  Stories like those that people, young and old,<br />
+  Have told at Christmas firesides from the first,<br />
+  Till one who crouched upon the hearth, and nursed<br />
+  His knees in his claspt arms, threw back his head,<br />
+  And fixed our host with laughing eyes, and said,<br />
+  "This is so good, here&mdash;with your hickory logs<br />
+  Blazing like natural-gas ones on the dogs,<br />
+  And sending out their flicker on the wall<br />
+  And rafters of your mock-baronial hall,<br />
+  All in fumed-oak, and on your polished floor,<br />
+  And the steel-studded panels of your door&mdash;<br />
+  I think you owe the general make-believe<br />
+  Some sort of story that will somehow give<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+  A more ideal completeness to our case,<br />
+  And make each several listener in his place&mdash;<br />
+  Or hers&mdash;sit up, with a real goose-flesh creeping<br />
+  All over him&mdash;or her&mdash;in proper keeping<br />
+  With the locality and hour and mood.<br />
+  Come!" And amid the cries of "Yes!" and "Good!"<br />
+  Our host laughed back; then, with a serious air,<br />
+  Looked around him on our hemicycle, where<br />
+  He sat midway of it. "Why," he began,<br />
+  But interrupted by the other man,<br />
+  He paused for him to say: "Nothing remote,<br />
+  But something with the actual Yankee note<br />
+  Of here and now in it!" "I'll do my best,"<br />
+  Our host replied, "to satisfy a guest.<br />
+  What do you say to Barberry Cove? And would<br />
+  Five years be too long past?" "No, both are good.<br />
+  Go on!" "You noticed that big house to-day<br />
+  Close to the water, and the sloop that lay,<br />
+  Stripped for the winter, there, beside the pier?<br />
+  Well, there she has lain just so, year after year;<br />
+  And she will never leave her pier again;<br />
+  But once, each spring she sailed in sun or rain,<br />
+  For Bay Chaleur&mdash;or Bay Shaloor, as they<br />
+  Like better to pronounce it down this way."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"I like Shaloor myself rather the best.</span><br />
+  But go ahead," said the exacting guest.<br />
+  <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+  And with a glance around at us that said,<br />
+  "Don't let me bore you!" our host went ahead.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Captain Gilroy built the big house, and he</span><br />
+  Still lives there with his aging family.<br />
+  He built the sloop, and when he used to come<br />
+  Back from the Banks he made her more his home,<br />
+  With his two boys, than the big house. The two<br />
+  Counted with him a good half of her crew,<br />
+  Until it happened, on the Banks, one day<br />
+  The oldest boy got in a steamer's way,<br />
+  And went down in his dory. In the fall<br />
+  The others came without him. That was all<br />
+  That showed in either one of them except<br />
+  That now the father and the brother slept<br />
+  Ashore, and not on board. When the spring came<br />
+  They sailed for the old fishing-ground the same<br />
+  As ever. Yet, not quite the same. The brother,<br />
+  If you believed what folks say, kissed his mother<br />
+  Good-by in going; and by general rumor,<br />
+  The father, so far yielding as to humor<br />
+  His daughters' weakness, rubbed his stubbly cheek<br />
+  Against their lips. Neither of them would speak,<br />
+  But the dumb passion of their love and grief<br />
+  In so much show at parting found relief.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"The weeks passed and the months. Sometimes they heard</span><br />
+  At home, by letter, from the sloop, or word<br />
+  Of hearsay from the fleet. But by and by<br />
+  Along about the middle of July,<br />
+  A time in which they had no news began,<br />
+  And holding unbrokenly through August, ran<br />
+  Into September. Then, one afternoon,<br />
+  While the world hung between the sun and moon,<br />
+  And while the mother and her girls were sitting<br />
+  Together with their sewing and their knitting,&mdash;<br />
+  Before the early-coming evening's gloom<br />
+  Had gathered round them in the living-room,<br />
+  Helplessly wondering to each other when<br />
+  They should hear something from their absent men,&mdash;<br />
+  They saw, all three, against the window-pane,<br />
+  A face that came and went, and came again,<br />
+  Three times, as though for each of them, about<br />
+  As high up from the porch's floor without<br />
+  As a man's head would be that stooped to stare<br />
+  Into the room on their own level there.<br />
+  Its eyes dwelt on them wistfully as if<br />
+  Longing to speak with the dumb lips some grief<br />
+  They could not speak. The women did not start<br />
+  Or scream, though each one of them, in her heart,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+  Knew she was looking on no living face,<br />
+  But stared, as dumb as it did, in her place."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Here our host paused, and one sigh broke from all</span><br />
+  Our circle whom his tale had held in thrall.<br />
+  But he who had required it of him spoke<br />
+  In what we others felt an ill-timed joke:<br />
+  "Well, this is something like!" A girl said, "Don't!"<br />
+  As if it hurt, and he said, "Well, I won't.<br />
+  Go on!" And in a sort of muse our host<br />
+  Said: "I suppose we all expect a ghost<br />
+  Will sometimes come to us. But I doubt if we<br />
+  Are moved by its coming as we thought to be.<br />
+  At any rate, the women were not scared,<br />
+  But, as I said, they simply sat and stared<br />
+  Till the face vanished. Then the mother said,<br />
+  'It was your father, girls, and he is dead.'<br />
+  But both had known him; and now all went on<br />
+  Much as before till three weeks more were gone,<br />
+  When, one night sitting as they sat before,<br />
+  Together with their mother, at the door<br />
+  They heard a fumbling hand, and on the walk<br />
+  Up from the pier, the tramp and muffled talk<br />
+  Of different wind-blown voices that they knew<br />
+  For the hoarse voices of their father's crew.<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+  Then the door opened, and their father stood<br />
+  Before them, palpably in flesh and blood.<br />
+  The mother spoke for all, her own misgiving:<br />
+  'Father, is this your ghost? Or are you living?'<br />
+  'I am alive!' 'But in this very place<br />
+  We saw your face look, like a spirit's face,<br />
+  There through that window, just three weeks ago,<br />
+  And now you are alive!' 'I did not know<br />
+  That I had come; all I know is that then<br />
+  I wanted to tell you folks here that our Ben<br />
+  Was dying of typhoid fever. He raved of you<br />
+  So that I could not think what else to do.<br />
+  He's there in Bay Shaloor!'</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 12em;">"Well, that's the end."</span><br />
+  And rising up to mend the fire our friend<br />
+  Seemed trying to shun comment; but in vain:<br />
+  The exacting guest came at him once again;<br />
+  "You must be going to fall down, I thought,<br />
+  There at the climax, when your story brought<br />
+  The skipper home alive and well. But no,<br />
+  You saved yourself with honor." The girl said, "Oh,"<br />
+  Who spoke before, "it's wonderful! But you,<br />
+  How could you think of anything so true,<br />
+  So delicate, as the father's wistful face<br />
+  Coming there at the window in the place<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+  Of the dead son's! And then, that quaintest touch,<br />
+  Of half-apology&mdash;that he felt so much,<br />
+  He <i>had</i> to come! How perfectly New England! Well,<br />
+  I hope nobody will undertake to tell<br />
+  A common or garden ghost-story to-night."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+  <p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Our host had turned again, and at her light</span><br />
+  And playful sympathy he said, "My dear,<br />
+  I hope that no one will imagine here<br />
+  I have been inventing in the tale that's done.<br />
+  My little story's charm if it has one<br />
+  Is from no skill of mine. One does not change<br />
+  The course of fable from its wonted range<br />
+  To such effect as I have seemed to do:<br />
+  Only the fact could make my story true."</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>AN EXPERIENCE</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+<h2><a name="AN_EXPERIENCE" id="AN_EXPERIENCE"></a>AN EXPERIENCE</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>For a long time after the event my mind dealt with the poor man in
+helpless conjecture, and it has now begun to do so again for no reason
+that I can assign. All that I ever heard about him was that he was
+some kind of insurance man. Whether life, fire, or marine insurance I
+never found out, and I am not sure that I tried to find out.</p>
+
+<p>There was something in the event which discharged him of all
+obligation to define himself of this or that relation to life. He must
+have had some relation to it such as we all bear, and since the
+question of him has come up with me again I have tried him in several
+of those relations&mdash;father, son, brother, husband&mdash;without identifying
+him very satisfyingly in either.</p>
+
+<p>As I say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the
+debt we owe in that kind to one another's curiosity, sympathy,
+or whatever. I cannot say what errand it was that brought
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+him to the place, a strange, large, indeterminate open room, where
+several of us sat occupied with different sorts of business, but, as
+it seems to me now, by only a provisional right to the place.
+Certainly the corner allotted to my own editorial business was of
+temporary assignment; I was there until we could find a more permanent
+office. The man had nothing to do with me or with the publishers; he
+had no manuscript, or plan for an article which he wished to propose
+and to talk himself into writing, so that he might bring it with a
+claim to acceptance, as though he had been asked to write it. In fact,
+he did not even look of the writing sort; and his affair with some
+other occupant of that anomalous place could have been in no wise
+literary. Probably it was some kind of insurance business, and I have
+been left with the impression of fussiness in his conduct of it; he
+had to my involuntary attention an effect of conscious unwelcome with
+it.</p>
+
+<p>After subjectively dealing with this impression, I ceased to
+notice him, without being able to give myself to my own work.
+The day was choking hot, of a damp that clung about one, and
+forbade one so much effort as was needed to relieve one of one's
+discomfort; to pull at one's wilted collar and loosen the linen about
+one's reeking neck meant exertion which one willingly forbore; it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+was less suffering to suffer passively than to suffer actively. The
+day was of the sort which begins with a brisk heat, and then, with a
+falling breeze, decays into mere swelter. To come indoors out of the
+sun was no escape from the heat; my window opened upon a shaded alley
+where the air was damper without being cooler than the air within.</p>
+
+<p>At last I lost myself in my work with a kind of humid interest in the
+psychological inquiry of a contributor who was dealing with a matter
+rather beyond his power. I did not think that he was fortunate in
+having cast his inquiry in the form of a story; I did not think that
+his contrast of love and death as the supreme facts of life was what a
+subtler or stronger hand could have made it, or that the situation
+gained in effectiveness from having the hero die in the very moment of
+his acceptance. In his supposition that the reader would care more for
+his hero simply because he had undergone that tremendous catastrophe,
+the writer had omitted to make him interesting otherwise; perhaps he
+could not.</p>
+
+<p>My mind began to wander from the story and not very relevantly
+to employ itself with the question of how far our experiences
+really affect our characters. I remembered having once
+classed certain temperaments as the stuff of tragedy, and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+others as the stuff of comedy, and of having found a greater cruelty
+in the sorrows which light natures undergo, as unfit and
+disproportionate for them. Disaster, I tacitly decided, was the fit
+lot of serious natures; when it befell the frivolous it was more than
+they ought to have been made to bear; it was not of their quality.
+Then by the mental zigzagging which all thinking is I thought of
+myself and whether I was of this make or that. If it was more
+creditable to be of serious stuff than frivolous, though I had no
+agency in choosing, I asked myself how I should be affected by the
+sight of certain things, like the common calamities reported every day
+in the papers which I had hitherto escaped seeing. By another zigzag I
+thought that I had never known a day so close and stifling and humid.
+I then reflected upon the comparative poverty of the French language,
+which I was told had only that one word for the condition we could
+call by half a dozen different names, as humid, moist, damp, sticky,
+reeking, sweltering, and so on. I supposed that a book of synonyms
+would give even more English adjectives; I thought of looking, but my
+book of synonyms was at the back of my table, and I would have to rise
+for it. Then I questioned whether the French language was so destitute
+of adjectives, after all; I preferred to doubt it rather than rise.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+With no more logic than those other vagaries had, I realized that the
+person who had started me in them was no longer in the room. He must
+have gone outdoors, and I visualized him in the street pushing about,
+crowded hither and thither, and striking against other people as he
+went and came. I was glad I was not in his place; I believed I should
+have fallen in a faint from the heat, as I had once almost done in New
+York on a day like that. From this my mind jumped to the thought of
+sudden death in general. Was it such a happy thing as people
+pretended? For the person himself, yes, perhaps; but not for those
+whom he had left at home, say, in the morning, and who were expecting
+him at home in the evening. I granted that it was generally accepted
+as the happiest death, but no one that had tried it had said so. To be
+sure, one was spared a long sickness, with suffering from pain and
+from the fear of death. But one had no time for making one's peace
+with God, as it used to be said, and after all there might be
+something in death-bed repentance, although cultivated people no
+longer believed in it. Then I reverted to the family unprepared
+for the sudden death: the mother, the wife, the children. I
+struggled to get away from the question, but the vagaries which
+had lightly dispersed themselves before clung persistently to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+the theme now. I felt that it was like a bad dream. That was a
+promising diversion. Had one any sort of volition in the quick changes
+of dreams? One was aware of finding a certain nightmare insupportable,
+and of breaking from it as by main force, and then falling into a
+deep, sweet sleep. Was death something like waking from a dream such
+as that, which this life largely was, and then sinking into a long,
+restful slumber, and possibly never waking again?</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly I perceived that the man had come back. He might have been
+there some time with his effect of fussing and his pathetic sense of
+unwelcome. I had not noticed; I only knew that he stood at the
+half-open door with the knob of it in his hand looking into the room
+blankly.</p>
+
+<p>As he stood there he lifted his hand and rubbed it across his forehead
+as if in a sort of daze from the heat. I recognized the gesture as one
+very characteristic of myself; I had often rubbed my hand across my
+forehead on a close, hot day like that. Then the man suddenly vanished
+as if he had sunk through the floor.</p>
+
+<p>People who had not noticed that he was there noticed now that he was not
+there. Some made a crooked rush toward the place where he had been, and one
+of those helpful fellow-men who are first in all needs lifted his head and mainly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+carried him into the wide space which the street stairs mounted to,
+and laid him on the floor. It was darker, if not cooler there, and we
+stood back to give him the air which he drew in with long, deep sighs.
+One of us ran down the stairs to the street for a doctor, wherever he
+might be found, and ran against a doctor at the last step.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor came and knelt over the prostrate figure and felt its
+pulse, and put his ear down to its heart. It, which has already in my
+telling ceased to be he, drew its breath in those long suspirations
+which seemed to search each more profoundly than the last the lurking
+life, drawing it from the vital recesses and expelling it in those
+vast sighs.</p>
+
+<p>They went on and on, and established in our consciousness the
+expectation of indefinite continuance. We knew that the figure there
+was without such consciousness as ours, unless it was something so
+remotely withdrawn that it could not manifest itself in any signal to
+our senses. There was nothing tragical in the affair, but it had a
+surpassing dignity. It was as if the figure was saying something to
+the life in each of us which none of us would have words to interpret,
+speaking some last message from the hither side of that bourne from
+which there is no returning.</p>
+
+<p>There was a clutch upon my heart which tightened
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+with the slower and slower succession of those awful breaths. Then one
+was drawn and expelled and then another was not drawn. I waited for
+the breathing to begin again, and it did not begin. The doctor rose
+from kneeling over the figure that had been a man, and uttered, with a
+kind of soundlessness, "Gone," and mechanically dusted his fingers
+with the thumbs of each hand from their contact with what had now
+become all dust forever.</p>
+
+<p>That helpfulest one among us laid a cloth over the face, and the rest
+of us went away. It was finished. The man was done with the sorrow
+which, in our sad human order, must now begin for those he loved and
+who loved him. I tried vaguely to imagine their grief for not having
+been uselessly with him at the last, and I could not. The incident
+remained with me like an experience, something I had known rather than
+seen. I could not alienate it by my pity and make it another's. They
+whom it must bereave seemed for the time immeasurably removed from the
+fact.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>THE BOARDERS</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_BOARDERS" id="THE_BOARDERS"></a>THE BOARDERS</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The boarder who had eloped was a student at the theological seminary,
+and he had really gone to visit his family, so that he had a fairly
+good conscience in giving this color to the fact that he was leaving
+the place permanently because he could not bear it any longer. It was
+a shade of deceit to connive with his room-mate for the custody of his
+carpet-bag and the few socks and collars and the one shirt and summer
+coat which did not visibly affect its lankness when gathered into it
+from his share of the bureau-drawers; but he did not know what else
+to do, and he trusted to a final forgiveness when all the facts were
+considered by a merciful providence. His board was fully paid, and he
+had suffered long. He argued with his room-mate that he could
+do no good by remaining, and that he would have stayed if he
+could have believed there was any use. Besides, the food was
+undermining his health, and the room with that broken window
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+had given him a cold already. He had a right to go, and it was his
+duty to himself and the friends who were helping him through the
+seminary not to get sick.</p>
+
+<p>He did not feel that he had convinced his room-mate, who took charge
+of his carpet-bag and now sat with it between his feet waiting the
+signal of the fugitive's surreptitious return for it. He was a
+vague-looking young man, presently in charge of the "Local and
+Literary" column of the one daily paper of the place, and he had just
+explained to the two other boarders who were watching with him for the
+event that he was not certain whether it was the supper, or the
+anxiety of the situation, or just what it was that was now affecting
+his digestion.</p>
+
+<p>The fellow-boarders, who sat on the edge of the bed, in default of the
+one unbroken chair which their host kept for himself, as easier than a
+mattress to get up from suddenly, did not take sides for or against
+him in his theories of his discomfort. One of them glanced at the
+broken window.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you glaze that in the daytime? You can't use the bolster
+then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not in, much, in the daytime."</p>
+
+<p>It was a medical student who had spoken, but he
+was now silent, and the other said, after they
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+had listened to the twitter of a piano in the parlor under the room,
+"That girl's playing will be the death of me."</p>
+
+<p>"Not if her mother's cooking isn't," the medical student, whose name
+was Wallace, observed with a professional effect.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you prescribe something for it?" the law student suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Which?" Wallace returned.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe anything could cure the playing. I must have meant
+the cooking."</p>
+
+<p>"You're a promising young jurist, Blakeley. What makes you think I
+could cure the cooking?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I just wondered. The sick one gets paler every day. I wonder what
+ails her."</p>
+
+<p>"She's not my patient."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! Hippocratic oath. Rather fine of you, Wallace. But if she's not
+your patient&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Listen!" their host interrupted, sharply. After a joint silence he
+added: "No. It must have been the sleet."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Briggs," the law student said, "if it must have been the sleet,
+what mustn't it have been?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" Briggs explained, "I thought it was Phillips. He was to throw a
+handful of gravel at the window."</p>
+
+<p>"And then you were to run down with his bag
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+and help him to make his escape from a friendless widow. Well, I don't
+know that I blame him. If I didn't owe two weeks' board, I'd leave
+myself&mdash;though I hope I shouldn't sneak away. And if Mrs.
+Betterson didn't owe Wallace, here, two weeks' board, we'd walk off
+together arm-in-arm at high noon. I can't understand how he ever came
+to advance her the money."</p>
+
+<p>Wallace rose from the bed, and kicked each leg out to dislodge the
+tight trousers of the middle eighteen-fifties which had caught on the
+tops of his high boots. "You're a tonguey fellow, Blakeley. But you'll
+find, as you live long, that there are several things you can't
+explain."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you what," Blakeley said. "We'll get Mrs. Betterson to take
+your loan for my debt, and we'll go at once."</p>
+
+<p>"You can propose something like that before the justice of the peace
+in your first pettifogging case."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe Wallace likes to stay. And yet he must know from his
+anatomical studies, better than the animals themselves, what cuts
+of meat the old lady gives us. I shouldn't be so fastidious about
+the cuts, if she didn't treat them all with pork gravy. Well, I
+mustn't be too hard on a lone widow that I owe board to. I don't
+suppose his diet had anything to do with the deep damnation
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+of the late Betterson's taking off. Does that stove of yours smoke, Briggs?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not when there isn't a fire in it."</p>
+
+<p>"I just asked. Wallace's stove smokes, fire or no fire. It takes
+advantage of the old lady's indebtedness to him. There seem," he
+added, philosophically, "to be just two occupations open to widows who
+have to support themselves: millinery business for young ones,
+boarding-housing for old ones. It <i>is</i> rather restricted. What do you
+suppose she puts into the mince-pies? Mince-pies are rather a mystery
+at the best."</p>
+
+<p>Wallace was walking up and down the room still in some difficulty with
+his trousers-legs, and kicking out from time to time to dislodge them.
+"How long should you say Blakeley had been going on?" he asked Briggs.</p>
+
+<p>"You never can tell," Briggs responded. "I think he doesn't know
+himself."</p>
+
+<p>"Well said, youthful scribe! With such listeners as you two,
+I could go on forever. Consider yourselves clapped jovially on
+the back, my gentle Briggs; I can't get up to do it from the hollow
+of your bed here. As you were saying, the wonder about these
+elderly widows who keep boarding-houses is the domestic dilapidation
+they fall into. If they've ever known how to cook a meal or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+sweep a room or make a bed, these arts desert them in the presence of
+their boarders. Their only aim in life seems to be preventing the
+escape of their victims, and they either let them get into debt for
+their board or borrow money from them. But why do they always have
+daughters, and just two of them: one beautiful, fashionable, and
+devoted to the piano; the other willing to work, but pale, pathetic,
+and incapable of the smallest achievement with the gridiron or the
+wash-board? It's a thing to make a person want to pay up and leave,
+even if he's reading law. If Wallace, here, had the spirit of a man,
+he would collect the money owing him, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, stop it, Blakeley!" Wallace stormed. "I should think you'd get
+tired of your talk yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, as you insist&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Blakeley began again, but Briggs jumped to his feet and caught up
+Phillips's carpet-bag, and looked wildly around. "It's gravel, this
+time."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, take your hat, Briggs. It may be a prolonged struggle.
+But remember that Phillips's cause is just. He's paid his board,
+and he has a perfect right to leave. She has no right to prevent
+him. Think of that when the fray is at its worst. But try to get
+him off quietly, if you can. Deal gently with the erring, while
+you stand firm for boarders' rights. Remember that Phillips is
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+sneaking off in order to spare her feelings and has come pretty near
+prevarication in the effort. Have you got your shoes off? No; it's
+your rubbers on. That's better."</p>
+
+<p>Briggs faltered with the carpet-bag in his hand. "Boys, I don't like
+this. It feels&mdash;clandestine."</p>
+
+<p>"It <i>looks</i> that way, too," Blakeley admitted. "It has an air of
+conspiracy."</p>
+
+<p>"I've got half a mind to let Phillips come in and get his bag
+himself."</p>
+
+<p>"It would serve him right, though I don't know why, exactly. He has a
+right to spare his own feelings if he's sparing hers at the same time.
+Of course he's afraid she'll plead with him to stay, and he'll have to
+be inexorable with her; and if I understand the yielding nature of
+Phillips he doesn't like to be inexorable."</p>
+
+<p>There came another sharp rattle of small pebbles at the window.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, confound him!" Briggs cried under his breath, and he shuffled out
+of the room and crept noiselessly down the stairs to the front door.
+The door creaked a little in opening, and he left it ajar. The current
+of cold air that swept up to the companions he had left behind at his
+room door brought them the noise of his rush down the gravel walk to
+the gate and a noise there as of fugitive steps on the pavement
+outside.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+A weak female tread made itself heard in the hallway, followed by a
+sharp voice from a door in the rear. "Was it the cat, Jenny?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; the door just seems to have blown open. The catch is broken."</p>
+
+<p>Swift, strong steps advanced with an effect of angry suspicion. "I
+don't believe it blew open. More likely the cat clawed it open."</p>
+
+<p>The steps which the voice preceded seemed to halt at the open door, as
+if falling back from it, and Wallace and Blakeley, looking down, saw
+by the dim flare of the hall lamp the face of Briggs confronting the
+face of Mrs. Betterson from the outer darkness. They saw the sick
+girl, whose pallor they could not see, supporting herself by the
+stairs-post with one hand and pressing the other to her side.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! It's <i>you</i>, Mr. Briggs," the landlady said, with a note of
+inculpation. "What made you leave the door open?"</p>
+
+<p>The spectators could not see the swift change in Briggs's face from
+terror to savage desperation, but they noted it in his voice.
+"Yes&mdash;yes! It's me. I just&mdash;I was just&mdash; No I won't, either! You'd
+better know the truth. I was taking Phillips's bag out to him. He was
+afraid to come in for it, because he didn't want to see you, the
+confounded coward! He's left."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+"Left? And he said he would stay till spring! Didn't he, Jenny?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't remember&mdash;" the girl weakly gasped, but her mother did not
+heed her in her mounting wrath.</p>
+
+<p>"A great preacher <i>he'll</i> make. What'd he say he left for?"</p>
+
+<p>"He didn't say. Will you let me up-stairs?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I won't, till you tell me. You know well enough, between you."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I do know," Briggs answered, savagely. "He left because he was
+tired of eating sole-leather for steak, and fire-salt pork, and tar
+for molasses, and butter strong enough to make your nose curl, and
+drinking burnt-rye slops for coffee and tea-grounds for tea. And so am
+I, and so are all of us, and&mdash;and&mdash; Will you let me go up-stairs now,
+Mrs. Betterson?"</p>
+
+<p>His voice had risen, not so high but that another voice from the
+parlor could prevail over it: a false, silly, girl voice, with the
+twitter of piano-keys as from hands swept over the whole board to help
+drown the noise of the quarrel in the hall. "Oh yes, I'll sing it
+again, Mr. Saunders, if you sa-a-a-y."</p>
+
+<p>Then this voice lifted itself in a silly song, and a silence followed the
+voices in the hall, except for the landlady's saying, brokenly: "Well, all right,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+Mr. Briggs. You can go up to your room for all me. I've tried to be a
+mother to you boys, but if <i>this</i> is what I get for it!"</p>
+
+<p>The two at the threshold of Briggs's room retreated within, as he
+bounded furiously upon them and slammed the door after him. It started
+open again, from the chronic defect of the catch, but he did not care.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Briggs, I hope you feel better now," Blakeley began. "You
+certainly told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing <i>but</i> the
+truth. But I wonder you had the heart to do it before that sick girl."</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>didn't</i> have the heart," Briggs shouted. "But I had the courage,
+and if you say one word more, Blakeley, I'll throw you out of the
+room. I'm going to leave! <i>My</i> board's paid if yours isn't."</p>
+
+<p>He went wildly about, catching things down here and there from nails
+and out of drawers. The tears stood in his eyes. But suddenly he
+stopped and listened to the sounds from below&mdash;the sound of the silly
+singing in the parlor, and the sound of sobbing in the dining-room,
+and the sound of vain entreating between the sobs.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't suppose I'm fit to keep a boarding-house. I never was a
+good manager; and everybody imposes on me, and everything is so dear,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+and I don't know what's good from what's bad. Your poor father used
+to look after all that."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, don't you cry, now, mother! It'll all come right, you'll see.
+I'm getting so I can go and do the marketing now; and if Minervy would
+only help a little&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no!" the mother's voice came anxiously up. "We can get along
+without her; we always have. I know he likes her, and I want to give
+her every chance. <i>We</i> can get along. If she was on'y married, once,
+we could all live&mdash;" A note of self-comforting gradually stole into
+the mother's voice, and the sound of a nose violently blown seemed to
+note a period in her suffering.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mother, I wish I was well!" The girl's voice came with a burst of
+wild lamenting.</p>
+
+<p>"'Sh, 'sh, deary!" her mother entreated. "He'll <i>hear</i> you, and
+then&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"'Hazel Dell'?" the silly voice came from the parlor, with a sound of
+fright in it. "I can sing it without the music." The piano keys
+twittered the prelude and the voice sang:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><p><small>
+"In the Hazel Dell my Nelly's sleeping,<br />
+Nelly loved so long!"
+</small></p></div>
+
+<p>Wallace went forward and shut the door. "It's a shame to overhear
+them! What are you going to do, you fellows?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+"I'm going to stay," Briggs said, "if it kills me. At least I will
+till Minervy's married. <i>I</i> don't care what the grub's like. I can
+always get a bite at the restaurant."</p>
+
+<p>"If anybody will pay up my back board, I'll stay, too," Blakeley
+followed. "I should like to make a virtue of it, and, as things stand,
+I can't."</p>
+
+<p>"All right," Wallace said, and he went out and down the stairs. Then
+from the dining-room below his heavy voice offering encouragement came
+up, in terms which the others could not make out.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll bet he's making her another advance," Blakeley whispered, as if
+he might be overheard by Wallace.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish <i>I</i> could have made to do it," Briggs whispered back. "I feel
+as mean as pursley. Would you like to kick me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see how that would do any good. I may want to borrow money of
+you, and you can't ask a loan from a man you've kicked. Besides, I
+think what you said may do her good."</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+<h2><a name="BREAKFAST_IS_MY_BEST_MEAL" id="BREAKFAST_IS_MY_BEST_MEAL"></a>BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL</h2>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Breakfast is my best meal, and I reckon it's always been<br />
+Ever since I was old enough to know what breakfast could mean.<br />
+I mind when we lived in the cabin out on the Illinoy,<br />
+Where father had took up a quarter-section when I was a boy,<br />
+I used to go for the cows as soon as it was light;<br />
+And when I started back home, before I come in sight,<br />
+I come in <i>smell</i> of the cabin, where mother was frying the ham,<br />
+And boiling the coffee, that reached through the air like a mile o' ba'm,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+'N' I bet you I didn't wait to see what it was that the dog<br />
+Thought he'd got under the stump or inside o' the hollow log!<br />
+But I made the old cows canter till their hoof-joints cracked&mdash;you know<br />
+That dry, funny kind of a noise that the cows make when they go&mdash;<br />
+And I never stopped to wash when I got to the cabin door;<br />
+I pulled up my chair and e't like I never had e't before.<br />
+And mother she set there and watched me eat, and eat, and eat,<br />
+Like as if she couldn't give her old eyes enough of the treat;<br />
+And she split the shortened biscuit, and spread the butter between,<br />
+And let it lay there and melt, and soak and soak itself in;<br />
+And she piled up my plate with potato and ham and eggs,<br />
+Till I couldn't hold any more, or hardly stand on my legs;<br />
+And she filled me up with coffee that would float an iron wedge,<br />
+And never give way a mite, or spill a drop at the edge.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>What? Well, yes, this is good coffee, too. If they don't know much,<br />
+They do know how to make coffee, I <i>will</i> say that for these Dutch.<br />
+But my&mdash;oh, my! It ain't the kind of coffee my mother made,<br />
+And the coffee my wife used to make would throw it clear in the shade;<br />
+And the brand of sugar-cured, canvased ham that she always used&mdash;<br />
+Well, this Westphalia stuff would simply have made her amused!<br />
+That so, heigh? I saw that you was United States as soon<br />
+As ever I heard you talk; I reckon I know the tune!<br />
+Pick it out anywhere; and <i>you</i> understand how I feel<br />
+About these here foreign breakfasts: breakfast is my best meal.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>My! but my wife was a cook; and the breakfasts she used to get<br />
+The first years we was married, I can smell 'em and taste 'em yet:<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+Corn cake light as a feather, and buckwheat thin as lace<br />
+And crisp as cracklin'; and steak that you couldn't have the face<br />
+To compare any steak over here to; and chicken fried<br />
+Maryland style&mdash;I couldn't get through the bill if I tried.<br />
+And then, her waffles! My! She'd kind of slip in a few<br />
+Between the ham and the chicken&mdash;you know how women'll do&mdash;<br />
+For a sort of little surprise, and, if I was running light,<br />
+To take my fancy and give an edge to my appetite.<br />
+Done it all herself as long as we was poor, and I tell <i>you</i><br />
+<i>She</i> liked to see me eat as well as mother used to do;<br />
+I reckon she went ahead of mother some, if the truth was known,<br />
+And everything she touched she give a taste of her own.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p><i>She</i> was a cook, I can tell you! And after we got ahead,<br />
+And she could 'a' had a girl to do the cookin' instead,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+I had the greatest time to get Momma to leave the work;<br />
+She said it made her feel like a mis'able sneak and shirk.<br />
+She didn't want daughter, though, when we did begin to keep girls,<br />
+To come in the kitchen and cook, and smell up her clo'es and curls;<br />
+But you couldn't have stopped the child, whatever you tried to do&mdash;<br />
+I reckon the gift of the cookin' was born in Girly, too.<br />
+Cook she would from the first, and we just had to let her alone;<br />
+And after she got married, and had a house of her own,<br />
+She tried to make me feel, when I come to live with her,<br />
+Like it was my house, too; and I tell you she done it, sir!<br />
+She remembered that breakfast was my best meal, and she tried<br />
+To have all I used to have, and a good deal more beside;<br />
+Grape-fruit to begin with, or melons or peaches, at least&mdash;<br />
+Husband's business took him there, and they had went to live East&mdash;<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
+Then a Spanish macker'l, or a soft-shell crab on toast,<br />
+Or a broiled live lobster! Well, sir, I don't want to seem to boast,<br />
+But I don't believe you could have got in the whole of New York<br />
+Any such an oyster fry or sausage of country pork.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<p>Well, I don't know what-all it means; I always lived just so&mdash;<br />
+Never drinked or smoked, and yet, here about two years ago,<br />
+I begun to run down; I ain't as young as I used to be;<br />
+And the doctors all said Carlsbad, and I reckon this is me.<br />
+But it's more like some one I've dreamt of, with all three of 'em gone!<br />
+Believe in ghosts? Well, <i>I</i> do. I <i>know</i> there are ghosts. I'm <i>one</i>.<br />
+Maybe I mayn't look it&mdash;I was always inclined to fat;<br />
+The doctors say that's the trouble, and very likely it's that.<br />
+This is my little grandson, and this is the oldest one<br />
+Of Girly's girls; and for all that the whole of us said and done,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+She must come with grandpa when the doctors sent me off here,<br />
+To see that they didn't starve him. Ain't that about so, my dear?<br />
+<i>She</i> can cook, I tell you; and when we get home again<br />
+We're goin' to have something to <i>eat</i>; I'm just a-livin' till then.<br />
+But when I set here of a morning, and think of them that's gone&mdash;<br />
+Mother and Momma and Girly&mdash;well, I wouldn't like to let on<br />
+Before the children, but I can almost seem to see<br />
+All of 'em lookin' down, like as if they pitied me,<br />
+After the breakfasts they give me, to have me have to put up<br />
+With nothing but bread and butter, and a little mis'able cup<br />
+Of this here weak-kneed coffee! I can't tell how <i>you</i> feel,<br />
+But it fairly makes me sick! Breakfast is my best meal.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE MOTHER-BIRD</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_MOTHER-BIRD" id="THE_MOTHER-BIRD"></a>THE MOTHER-BIRD</h2>
+
+
+<p>She wore around the turned-up brim of her bolero-like toque a band of
+violets not so much in keeping with the gray of the austere November
+day as with the blue of her faded autumnal eyes. Her eyes were
+autumnal, but it was not from this, or from the lines of maturity
+graven on the passing prettiness of her little face, that the notion
+and the name of Mother-Bird suggested itself. She became known as the
+Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the earliest, if not the
+latest, of her friends, because she was slight and small, and like a
+bird in her eager movements, and because she spoke so instantly and so
+constantly of her children in Dresden: before you knew anything else
+of her you knew that she was going out to them.</p>
+
+<p>She was quite alone, and she gave the sense of claiming their protection,
+and sheltering herself in the fact of them. When she mentioned her
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+daughters she had the effect of feeling herself chaperoned by them.
+You could not go behind them and find her wanting in the social
+guarantees which women on steamers, if not men, exact of lonely birds
+of passage who are not mother-birds. One must respect the convention
+by which she safeguarded herself and tried to make good her standing;
+yet it did not lastingly avail her with other birds of passage, so far
+as they were themselves mother-birds, or sometimes only maiden-birds.
+The day had not ended before they began to hold her off by slight
+liftings of their wings and rufflings of their feathers, by quick,
+evasive flutterings, by subtle ignorances of her approach, which
+convinced no one but themselves that they had not seen her. She sailed
+with the sort of acquaintance-in-common which every one shares on a
+ship leaving port, when people are confused by the kindness of friends
+coming to see them off after sending baskets of fruit and sheaves of
+flowers, and scarcely know what they are doing or saying. But when the
+ship was abreast of Fire Island, and the pilot had gone over the side,
+these provisional intimacies of the parting hour began to restrict
+themselves. Then the Mother-Bird did not know half the women she had
+known at the pier, or quite all the men.</p>
+
+<p>It was not that she did anything obvious to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+forfeit this knowledge. Her behavior was if anything too exemplary; it
+might be thought to form a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the
+unseasonable band of violets around her hat-brim; perhaps it was the
+vernal gaiety of her dress; perhaps it was the uncertainty of her
+anxious eyes, which presumed while they implored. A mother-bird must
+not hover too confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose
+preoccupations she does not share. It might have been her looking and
+dressing younger than nature justified; at forty one must not look
+thirty; in November one must not, even involuntarily, wear the things
+of May if one would have others believe in one's devotion to one's
+children in Dresden; one alleges in vain one's impatience to join them
+as grounds for joining groups or detached persons who have begun to
+write home to their children in New York or Boston.</p>
+
+<p>The very readiness of the Mother-Bird to give security by the mention
+of well-known names, to offer proof of her social solvency by the
+eager correctness of her behavior, created reluctance around her. Some
+would not have her at all from the first; others, who had partially or
+conditionally accepted her, returned her upon her hands and withdrew
+from the negotiation. More and more she found herself outside that hard
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+woman-world, and trying less and less to beat her way into it.</p>
+
+<p>The women may have known her better even than she knew herself, and it
+may have been through ignorance greater than her own that the men were
+more acquiescent. But the men too were not so acquiescent, or not at
+all, as time passed.</p>
+
+<p>It would be hard to fix the day, the hour, far harder the moment, when
+the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear
+in the smoking-room, or say whether she passed from the one to the
+other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women's unwritten
+law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship,
+after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and
+sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her
+poor, pretty little face, with its faded blue eyes and wistful mouth.
+There she passed by quick transition from the conversation of the
+graver elderly smokers to the loud laughter of two birds of prey who
+became her comrades, or such friends as birds like them can be to
+birds like her.</p>
+
+<p>From anything she had said or done there was no reason for her lapse
+from the women and the better men to such men; for her transition from
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+the better sort of women there was no reason except that it happened.
+Whether she attached herself to the birds of prey, or they to her, by
+that instinct which enables birds of all kinds to know themselves of a
+feather remained a touching question.</p>
+
+<p>There remained to the end the question whether she was of a feather
+with them, or whether it was by some mischance, or by some such stress
+of the elements as drives birds of any feather to flock with birds of
+any other. To the end there remained a distracted and forsaken
+innocence in her looks. It was imaginable that she had made overtures
+to the birds of prey because she had made overtures to every one else;
+she was always seeking rather than sought, and her acceptance with
+them was as deplorable as her refusal by better birds. Often they were
+seen without her, when they had that look of having escaped, which
+others wore; but she was not often seen without them.</p>
+
+<p>There is not much walking-weather on a November passage, and she was
+seen less with them in the early dark outdoors than in the late light
+within, by which she wavered a small form through the haze of their
+cigars in the smoking-room, or in the grill-room, where she showed in
+faint eclipse through the fumes of the broiling and frying, or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+through the vapors of the hot whiskies. The birds of prey were then
+heard laughing, but whether at her or with her it must have been
+equally sorrowful to learn.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps they were laughing at the maternal fondness which she had used
+for introduction to the general acquaintance lost almost in the moment
+of winning it. She seemed not to resent their laughter, though she
+seemed not to join in it. The worst of her was the company she kept;
+but since no better would allow her to keep it, you could not
+confidently say she would not have liked the best company on board. At
+the same time you could not have said she would; you could not have
+been sure it would not have bored her. Doubtless these results are not
+solely the sport of chance; they must be somewhat the event of choice
+if not of desert.</p>
+
+<p>For anything you could have sworn, the Mother-Bird would have liked to
+be as good as the best. But since it was not possible for her to be
+good in the society of the best, she could only be good in that of the
+worst. It was to be hoped that the birds of prey were not cruel to
+her; that their mockery was never unkind if ever it was mockery. The
+cruelty which must come came when they began to be seen less and less
+with her, even at the late suppers, through the haze of their cigars
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>
+and the smoke of the broiling and frying, and the vapors of the hot
+whiskies. Then it was the sharpest pang of all to meet her wandering
+up and down the ship's promenades, or leaning on the rail and looking
+dimly out over the foam-whitened black sea. It is the necessity of
+birds of prey to get rid of other birds when they are tired of them,
+and it had doubtless come to that.</p>
+
+<p>One night, the night before getting into port, when the curiosity
+which always followed her with grief failed of her in the heightened
+hilarity of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the ship's run
+were making, it found her alone beside a little iron table, of those
+set in certain nooks outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one
+near, where the light from within fell palely upon her. The boon birds
+of prey, with whom she had been supping, had abandoned her, and she
+was supporting her cheek on the small hand of the arm that rested on
+the table. She leaned forward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the
+violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vibrations of the
+machinery. She was asleep, poor Mother-Bird, and it would have been
+impossible not to wish her dreams were kind.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE AMIGO</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_AMIGO" id="THE_AMIGO"></a>THE AMIGO</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>His name was really Perez Armando Aldeano, but in the end everybody
+called him the <i>amigo</i>, because that was the endearing term by which
+he saluted all the world. There was a time when the children called
+him "Span-yard" in their games, for he spoke no tongue but Spanish,
+and though he came from Ecuador, and was no more a Spaniard than they
+were English, he answered to the call of "Span-yard!" whenever he
+heard it. He came eagerly in the hope of fun, and all the more eagerly
+if there was a hope of mischief in the fun. Still, to discerning
+spirits, he was always the <i>amigo</i>, for, when he hailed you so, you
+could not help hailing him so again, and whatever mock he put upon you
+afterward, you were his secret and inalienable friend.</p>
+
+<p>The moment of my own acceptance in this quality came in the first
+hours of expansion following our getting to sea after long detention in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+the dock by fog. A small figure came flying down the dock with
+outspread arms, and a joyful cry of "Ah, <i>amigo</i>!" as if we were now
+meeting unexpectedly after a former intimacy in Bogot&aacute;; and the
+<i>amigo</i> clasped me round the middle to his bosom, or more strictly
+speaking, his brow, which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was clad in
+a long black overcoat, and a boy's knee-pants, and under the peak of
+his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a
+smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was more and more, with the
+thinness of his small black legs, and his habit of hopping up and
+down, and dancing threateningly about, with mischief latent in every
+motion, like a crow which in being tamed has acquired one of the worst
+traits of civilization. He began babbling and gurgling in Spanish, and
+took my hand for a stroll about the ship, and from that time we were,
+with certain crises of disaffection, firm allies.</p>
+
+<p>There were others whom he hailed and adopted his friends, whose
+legs he clung about and impeded in their walks, or whom he required
+to toss him into the air as they passed, but I flattered myself that
+he had a peculiar, because a primary, esteem for myself. I have
+thought it might be that, Bogot&aacute; being said to be a very
+literary capital, as those things go in South America, he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+was mystically aware of a common ground between us, wider and deeper
+than that of his other friendships. But it may have been somewhat
+owing to my inviting him to my cabin to choose such portion as he
+would of a lady-cake sent us on shipboard at the last hour. He
+prattled and chuckled over it in the soft gutturals of his parrot-like
+Spanish, and rushed up on deck to eat the frosting off in the presence
+of his small companions, and to exult before them in the exploitation
+of a novel pleasure. Yet it could not have been the lady-cake which
+lastingly endeared me to him, for by the next day he had learned
+prudence and refused it without withdrawing his amity.</p>
+
+<p>This, indeed, was always tempered by what seemed a constitutional
+irony, and he did not impart it to any one without some time making
+his friend feel the edge of his practical humor. It was not long
+before the children whom he gathered to his heart had each and all
+suffered some fall or bump or bruise which, if not of his intention,
+was of his infliction, and which was regretted with such winning archness
+that the very mothers of them could not resist him, and his victims dried
+their tears to follow him with glad cries of "Span-yard, Span-yard!"
+Injury at his hands was a favor; neglect was the only real grievance. He
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+went about rolling his small black head, and darting roguish
+lightnings from under his thick-fringed eyes, and making more trouble
+with a more enticing gaiety than all the other people on the ship put
+together.</p>
+
+<p>The truth must be owned that the time came, long before the end of the
+voyage, when it was felt that in the interest of the common welfare,
+something must be done about the <i>amigo</i>. At the conversational end of
+the doctor's table, where he was discussed whenever the racks were not
+on, and the talk might have languished without their inspiration, his
+badness was debated at every meal. Some declared him the worst boy in
+the world, and held against his half-hearted defenders that something
+ought to be done about him; and one was left to imagine all the darker
+fate for him because there was nothing specific in these convictions.
+He could not be thrown overboard, and if he had been put in irons
+probably his worst enemies at the conversational end of the table
+would have been the first to intercede for him. It is not certain,
+however, that their prayers would have been effective with the
+captain, if that officer, framed for comfort as well as command,
+could have known how accurately the <i>amigo</i> had dramatized his
+personal presence by throwing himself back, and clasping his hands a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+foot in front of his small stomach, and making a few tilting paces forward.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>amigo</i> had a mimic gift which he liked to exercise when he could
+find no intelligible language for the expression of his ironic spirit.
+Being forbidden visits in and out of season to certain staterooms
+whose inmates feigned a wish to sleep, he represented in what
+grotesque attitudes of sonorous slumber they passed their day, and he
+spared neither age nor sex in these graphic shows. When age refused
+one day to go up on deck with him and pleaded in such Spanish as it
+could pluck up from its past studies that it was too old, he laughed
+it to scorn. "You are not old," he said. "Why?" the flattered dotard
+inquired. "Because you smile," and that seemed reason enough for one's
+continued youth. It was then that the <i>amigo</i> gave his own age,
+carefully telling the Spanish numerals over, and explaining further by
+holding up both hands with one finger shut in. But he had the subtlety
+of centuries in his nine years, and he penetrated the ship everywhere
+with his arch spirit of mischief. It was mischief always in the
+interest of the good-fellowship which he offered impartially to
+old and young; and if it were mere frolic, with no ulterior
+object, he did not care at all how old or young his playmate
+was. This endeared him naturally to every age; and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>
+the little blond German-American boy dried his tears from the last
+accident inflicted on him by the <i>amigo</i> to recall him by tender
+entreaties of "Span-yard, Span-yard!" while the eldest of his friends
+could not hold out against him more than two days in the strained
+relations following upon the <i>amigo's</i> sweeping him down the back with
+a toy broom employed by the German-American boy to scrub the scuppers.
+This was not so much an injury as an indignity, but it was resented as
+an indignity, in spite of many demure glances of propitiation from the
+<i>amigo's</i> ironical eyes and murmurs of inarticulate apology as he
+passed.</p>
+
+<p>He was, up to a certain point, the kindest and truest of <i>amigos</i>;
+then his weird seizure came, and the baby was spilled out of the
+carriage he had been so benevolently pushing up and down; or the
+second officer's legs, as he walked past with the prettiest girl on
+board, were hit with the stick that the <i>amigo</i> had been innocently
+playing shuffle-board with; or some passenger was taken unawares in
+his vanity or infirmity and made to contribute to the <i>amigo's</i>
+passion for active amusement.</p>
+
+<p>At this point I ought to explain that the <i>amigo</i> was not
+traveling alone from Ecuador to Paris, where it was said he was to
+rejoin his father. At meal-times, and at other rare intervals, he was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+seen to be in the charge of a very dark and very silent little man, with
+intensely black eyes and mustache, clad in raven hues from his head to
+the delicate feet on which he wore patent-leather shoes. With him the
+<i>amigo</i> walked gravely up and down the deck, and behaved decorously at
+table; and we could not reconcile the apparent affection between the
+two with a theory we had that the <i>amigo</i> had been found impossible in
+his own country, and had been sent out of Ecuador by a decree of the
+government, or perhaps a vote of the whole people. The little, dark,
+silent man, in his patent-leather boots, had not the air of conveying
+a state prisoner into exile, and we wondered in vain what the tie
+between him and the <i>amigo</i> was. He might have been his tutor, or his
+uncle. He exercised a quite mystical control over the <i>amigo</i>, who was
+exactly obedient to him in everything, and would not look aside at you
+when in his keeping. We reflected with awe and pathos that, as they
+roomed together, it was his privilege to see the <i>amigo</i> asleep, when
+that little, very kissable black head rested innocently on the pillow,
+and the busy brain within it was at peace with the world which formed
+its pleasure and its prey in waking.</p>
+
+<p>It would be idle to represent that the <i>amigo</i>
+played his pranks upon that shipload of long-suffering
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+people with final impunity. The time came when they not only said
+something must be done, but actually did something. It was by the hand
+of one of the <i>amigo's</i> sweetest and kindest friends, namely, that
+elderly captain, off duty, who was going out to be assigned his ship
+in Hamburg. From the first he had shown the affectionate tenderness
+for the <i>amigo</i> which was felt by all except some obdurate hearts at
+the conversational end of the table; and it must have been with a
+loving interest in the <i>amigo's</i> ultimate well-being that, taking him
+in an ecstasy of mischief, he drew the <i>amigo</i> face downward across
+his knees, and bestowed the chastisement which was morally a caress.
+He dismissed him with a smile in which the <i>amigo</i> read the good
+understanding that existed unimpaired between them, and accepted his
+correction with the same affection as that which had given it. He
+shook himself and ran off with an enjoyment of the joke as great as
+that of any of the spectators and far more generous.</p>
+
+<p>In fact there was nothing mean in the <i>amigo</i>. Impish he was, or might
+be, but only in the sort of the crow or the parrot; there was no malevolence
+in his fine malice. One fancied him in his adolescence taking part in
+one of the frequent revolutions of his continent, but humorously, not
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+homicidally. He would like to alarm the other faction, and perhaps
+drive it from power, or overset it from its official place, but if he
+had the say there would be no bringing the vanquished out into the
+plaza to be shot. He may now have been on his way to France ultimately
+to study medicine, which seems to be preliminary to a high political
+career in South America; but in the mean time we feared for him in
+that republic of severely regulated subordinations.</p>
+
+<p>We thought with pathos of our early parting with him, as we approached
+Plymouth and tried to be kodaked with him, considering it an honor and
+pleasure. He so far shared our feeling as to consent, but he insisted
+on wearing a pair of glasses which had large eyes painted on them, and
+on being taken in the act of inflating a toy balloon. Probably,
+therefore, the likeness would not be recognized in Bogot&aacute;, but it will
+always be endeared to us by the memory of the many mockeries suffered
+from him. There were other friends whom we left on the ship, notably
+those of the conversational end of the table, who thought him simply a
+bad boy; but there were none of such peculiar appeal as he, when he stood
+by the guard, opening and shutting his hand in ironical adieu, and looking
+smaller and smaller as our tender drifted away and the vast liner loomed
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+immense before us. He may have contributed to its effect of immensity
+by the smallness of his presence, or it may have dwarfed him. No
+matter; he filled no slight space in our lives while he lasted. Now
+that he is no longer there, was he really a bad little boy, merely and
+simply? Heaven knows, which alone knows good boys from bad.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>BLACK CROSS FARM</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+<h2><a name="BLACK_CROSS_FARM" id="BLACK_CROSS_FARM"></a>BLACK CROSS FARM</h2>
+
+<h4>(To F. S.)</h4>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>After full many a mutual delay<br />
+My friend and I at last fixed on a day<br />
+For seeing Black Cross Farm, which he had long<br />
+Boasted the fittest theme for tale or song<br />
+In all that charming region round about:<br />
+Something that must not really be left out<br />
+Of the account of things to do for me.<br />
+It was a teasing bit of mystery,<br />
+He said, which he and his had tried in vain,<br />
+Ever since they had found it, to explain.<br />
+The right way was to happen, as they did,<br />
+Upon it in the hills where it was hid;<br />
+But chance could not be always trusted, quite,<br />
+You might not happen on it, though you might;<br />
+Encores were usually objected to<br />
+By chance. The next best thing that we could do<br />
+Was in his carryall, to start together,<br />
+And trust that somehow favoring wind and weather,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+With the eccentric progress of his horse,<br />
+Would so far drift us from our settled course<br />
+That we at least could lose ourselves, if not<br />
+Find the mysterious object that we sought.<br />
+So one blithe morning of the ripe July<br />
+We fared, by easy stages, toward the sky<br />
+That rested one rim of its turquoise cup<br />
+Low on the distant sea, and, tilted up,<br />
+The other on the irregular hilltops. Sweet<br />
+The sun and wind that joined to cool and heat<br />
+The air to one delicious temperature;<br />
+And over the smooth-cropt mowing-pieces pure<br />
+The pine-breath, borrowing their spicy scent<br />
+In barter for the balsam that it lent!<br />
+And when my friend handed the reins to me,<br />
+And drew a fuming match along his knee,<br />
+And, lighting his cigar, began to talk,<br />
+I let the old horse lapse into a walk<br />
+From his perfunctory trot, content to listen,<br />
+Amid that leafy rustle and that glisten<br />
+Of field, and wood, and ocean, rapt afar,<br />
+From every trouble of our anxious star.<br />
+From time to time, between effect and cause<br />
+In this or that, making a questioning pause,<br />
+My friend peered round him while he feigned a gay<br />
+Hope that we might have taken the wrong way<br />
+At the last turn, and then let me push on,<br />
+Or the old horse rather, slanting hither and yon,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+And never in the middle of the track,<br />
+Except when slanting off or slanting back.<br />
+He talked, I listened, while we wandered by<br />
+The scanty fields of wheat and oats and rye,<br />
+With patches of potatoes and of corn,<br />
+And now and then a garden spot forlorn,<br />
+Run wild where once a house had stood, or where<br />
+An empty house yet stood, and seemed to stare<br />
+Upon us blindly from the twisted glass<br />
+Of windows that once let no wayfarer pass<br />
+Unseen of children dancing at the pane,<br />
+And vanishing to reappear again,<br />
+Pulling their mother with them to the sight.<br />
+Still we kept on, with turnings left and right,<br />
+Past farmsteads grouped in cheerful neighborhoods,<br />
+Or solitary; then through shadowy woods<br />
+Of pine or birch, until the road, grass-grown,<br />
+Had given back to Nature all her own<br />
+Save a faint wheel-trace, that along the slope,<br />
+Rain-gullied, seemed to stop and doubt and grope,<br />
+And then quite ceased, as if 't had turned and fled<br />
+Out of the forest into which it led,<br />
+And left us at the gate whose every bar<br />
+Was nailed against us. But, "Oh, here we are!"<br />
+My friend cried joyously. "At last, at last!"<br />
+And making our horse superfluously fast,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+He led the way onward by what had been<br />
+A lane, now hid by weeds and briers between<br />
+Meadows scarce worth the mowing, to a space<br />
+Shaped as by Nature for the dwelling-place<br />
+Of kindly human life: a small plateau<br />
+Open to the heaven that seemed bending low<br />
+In liking for it. There beneath a roof<br />
+Still against winter and summer weather-proof,<br />
+With walls and doors and windows perfect yet,<br />
+Between its garden and its graveyard set,<br />
+Stood the old homestead, out of which had perished<br />
+The home whose memory it dumbly cherished,<br />
+And which, when at our push the door swung wide,<br />
+We might have well imagined to have died<br />
+And had its funeral the day before:<br />
+So clean and cold it was from floor to floor,<br />
+So lifelike and so deathlike, with the thrill<br />
+Of hours when life and death encountered still<br />
+Passionate in it. They that lay below<br />
+The tangled grasses or the drifted snow,<br />
+Husband and wife, mother and little one,<br />
+From that sad house less utterly were gone<br />
+Than they that living had abandoned it.<br />
+In moonless nights their Absences might flit,<br />
+Homesick, from room to room, or dimly sit<br />
+Around its fireless hearths, or haunt the rose<br />
+And lily in the neglected garden close;<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+But they whose feet had borne them from the door<br />
+Would pass the footworn threshold nevermore.<br />
+We read the moss-grown names upon the tombs,<br />
+With lighter melancholy than the glooms<br />
+Of the dead house shadowed us with, and thence<br />
+Turning, my heart was pierced with more intense<br />
+Suggestion of a mystical dismay,<br />
+As in the brilliance of the summer day<br />
+We faced the vast gray barn. The house was old,<br />
+Though so well kept, as age by years is told<br />
+In our young land; but the barn, gray and vast,<br />
+Stood new and straight and strong&mdash;all battened fast<br />
+At every opening; and where once the mow<br />
+Had yawned wide-windowed, on the sheathing now<br />
+A Cross was nailed, the bigness of a man,<br />
+Aslant from left to right, athwart the span,<br />
+And painted black as paint could make it. Hushed,<br />
+I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed<br />
+To this point and to that point, and then burst<br />
+In the impotent questionings rejected first.<br />
+What did it mean? Ah, that no one could tell.<br />
+Who put it there? That was unknown as well.<br />
+Was there no legend? My friend knew of none.<br />
+No neighborhood story? He had sought for one<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+In vain. Did he imagine it accident,<br />
+With nothing really implied or meant<br />
+By the boards set in that way? It might be,<br />
+But I could answer that as well as he.<br />
+Then (desperately) what did he guess it was:<br />
+Something of purpose, or without a cause<br />
+Other than chance? He slowly shook his head,<br />
+And with his gaze fixed on the symbol said:<br />
+"We have quite ceased from guessing or surmising,<br />
+For all our several and joint devising<br />
+Has left us finally where I must leave you.<br />
+But now I think it is your part to do<br />
+Yourself some guessing. I hoped you might bring<br />
+A fresh mind to the riddle's unraveling.<br />
+Come!"</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 3em;">And thus challenged I could not deny</span><br />
+The sort of right he had to have me try;<br />
+And yielding, I began&mdash;instinctively<br />
+Proceeding by exclusion: "We agree<br />
+It was not put there as a pious charm<br />
+To keep the abandoned property from harm?<br />
+The owner could have been no Catholic;<br />
+And yet it was no sacrilegious trick<br />
+To make folks wonder; and it was not chance<br />
+Assuredly that set those boards askance<br />
+In that shape, or before or after, so<br />
+Painted them to that coloring of woe.<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+Do you suppose, then, that it could have been<br />
+Some secret sorrow or some secret sin,<br />
+That tried to utter or to expiate<br />
+Itself in that way: some unhappy hate<br />
+Turned to remorse, or some life-rending grief<br />
+That could not find in years or tears relief?<br />
+Who lived here last?"</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 8em;">"Ah," my friend made reply,</span><br />
+"You know as much concerning that as I.<br />
+All I could tell is what those gravestones tell,<br />
+And they have told it all to you as well.<br />
+The names, the dates, the curious epitaphs<br />
+At whose quaint phrase one either sighs or laughs,<br />
+Just as one's heart or head happens to be<br />
+Hollow or not, are there for each to see.<br />
+But I believe they have nothing to reveal:<br />
+No wrong to publish, no shame to conceal."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"And yet that Cross!" I turned at his reply,</span><br />
+Fixing the silent symbol with my eye,<br />
+Insistently. "And you consent," I said,<br />
+"To leave the enigma uninterpreted?"</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Why, no," he faltered, then went on: "Suppose</span><br />
+That some one that had known the average woes<br />
+Of human nature, finding that the load<br />
+Was overheavy for him on life's road,<br />
+Had wished to leave some token in this Cross,<br />
+Of what had been his gain and been his loss,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+Of what had been his suffering and of what<br />
+Had also been the solace of his lot?<br />
+Whoever that unknown brother-man might be,<br />
+I think he must have been like you and me,<br />
+Who bear our Cross, and when we fail at length,<br />
+Bow down and pray to it for greater strength."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">I mused, and as I mused, I seemed to find</span><br />
+The fancy more and still more to my mind.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Well, let it go at that! I think, for me,</span><br />
+I like that better than some tragedy<br />
+Of clearer physiognomy, which were<br />
+In being more definite the vulgarer.<br />
+For us, what, after all, would be the gain<br />
+Of making the elusive meaning plain?<br />
+I really think, if I were you and yours,<br />
+I would not lift the veil that now obscures<br />
+The appealing fact, lest I should spoil the charm<br />
+Deeding me for my own the Black Cross Farm."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"A good suggestion! I am glad," said he,</span><br />
+"We have always practised your philosophy."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">He smiled, we laughed; we sighed and turned away,</span><br />
+And left the mystery to the summer day<br />
+That made as if it understood, and could<br />
+Have read the riddle to us if it would:<br />
+The wide, wise sky, the clouds that on the grass<br />
+Let their vague shadows dreamlike trail and pass;<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+The conscious woods, the stony meadows growing<br />
+Up to birch pastures, where we heard the lowing<br />
+Of one disconsolate cow. All the warm afternoon,<br />
+Lulled in a reverie by the myriad tune<br />
+Of insects, and the chirp of songless birds,<br />
+Forgetful of the spring-time's lyric words,<br />
+Drowsed round us while we tried to find the lane<br />
+That to our coming feet had been so plain,<br />
+And lost ourselves among the sweetfern's growth,<br />
+And thickets of young pine-trees, nothing loath,<br />
+Amidst the wilding loveliness to stray,<br />
+And spend, if need were, looking for the way,<br />
+Whole hours; but blundered into the right course<br />
+Suddenly, and came out upon our horse,<br />
+Where we had left him&mdash;to our great surprise,<br />
+Stamping and switching at the pestering flies,<br />
+But not apparently anxious to depart,<br />
+When nearly overturning at the start,<br />
+We followed down that evanescent trace<br />
+Which, followed up, had brought us to the place.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Then, all the wayside scenes reversing, we</span><br />
+Dropped to the glimpses of the distant sea,<br />
+Content as if we brought, returning thus,<br />
+The secret of the Black Cross back with us.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_CRITICAL_BOOKSTORE" id="THE_CRITICAL_BOOKSTORE"></a>THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE</h2>
+
+
+<p>It had long been the notion of Frederick Erlcort, who held it
+playfully, held it seriously, according to the company he was in, that
+there might be a censorship of taste and conscience in literary
+matters strictly affiliated with the retail commerce in books. When he
+first began to propose it, playfully, seriously, as his listener
+chose, he said that he had noticed how in the great department stores
+where nearly everything to supply human need was sold, the shopmen and
+shopwomen seemed instructed by the ownership or the management to deal
+in absolute good faith with the customers, and not to misrepresent the
+quality, the make, or the material of any article in the slightest
+degree. A thing was not to be called silk or wool when it was partly
+cotton; it was not to be said that it would wash when it would not
+wash, or that the color would not come off when it would come off, or
+that the stuff was English or French when it was American.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+When Erlcort once noted his interest in the fact to a floor-walker
+whom he happened to find at leisure, the floor-walker said, Yes, that
+was so; and the house did it because it was business, good business,
+the only good business. He was instantly enthusiastic, and he said
+that just in the same way, as an extension of its good faith with the
+public, the house had established the rule of taking back any article
+which a customer did not like, or did not find what she had supposed
+when she got it home, and refunding the money. This was the best sort
+of business; it held custom; the woman became a customer for life. The
+floor-walker laughed, and after he had told an anxious applicant,
+"Second aisle to the left, lady; three counters back," he concluded to
+Erlcort, "I say she because a man never brings a thing back when he's
+made a mistake; but a woman can always blame it on the house. That
+so?"</p>
+
+<p>Erlcort laughed with him, and in going out he stopped at the
+book-counter. Rather it was a bookstore, and no small one, with
+ranks of new books covering the large tables and mounting to
+their level from the floor, neatly piled, and with shelves of
+complete editions and soberer-looking volumes stretching along
+the wall as high as the ceiling. "Do you happen to have a good
+book&mdash;a book that would read good, I mean&mdash;in your
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+stock here?" he asked the neat blonde behind the literary barricade.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, here's a book that a good many are reading," she answered, with
+prompt interest and a smile that told in the book's favor; it was a
+protectingly filial and guardedly ladylike smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but is it a book worth reading&mdash;worth the money?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know as I'm a judge," the kind little blonde replied.
+She added, daringly, "All I can say is, I set up till two last night
+to finish it."</p>
+
+<p>"And you advise me to buy it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we're not allowed to do that, exactly. I can only tell you what
+I know."</p>
+
+<p>"But if I take it, and it isn't what I expected, I can return it and
+get my money back?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's something I never was asked before. Mr. Jeffers! Mr. Jeffers!"
+she called to a floor-walker passing near; and when he stopped and
+came up to the counter, she put the case to him.</p>
+
+<p>He took the book from Erlcort's hand and examined the outside of it
+curiously if not critically. Then he looked from it to Erlcort, and
+said, "Oh, how do you do again! Well, no, sir; I don't know as we
+could do that. You see, you would have to read it to find out that you
+didn't want it, and that would be like using or wearing an article,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+wouldn't it? We couldn't take back a thing that had been used or
+worn&mdash;heigh?"</p>
+
+<p>"But you might have some means of knowing whether a book is good or
+not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes, we might. That's a point we have never had raised before.
+Miss Prittiman, haven't we any means of knowing whether a book's
+something we can guarantee or not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Mr. Jeffers, there's the publisher's advertisement."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes, so there is! And a respectable publisher wouldn't indorse a
+book that wasn't the genuine article, would he now, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"He mightn't," Erlcort said, as if he felt the force of the argument.</p>
+
+<p>"And there are the notices in the newspapers. They ought to tell,"
+Miss Prittiman added, more convincingly. "I don't know," she said, as
+from a sensitive conscience, "whether there have been any about this
+book yet, but I should think there would be."</p>
+
+<p>"And in the mean time, as you won't guarantee the book so that I can
+bring it back and get my money if I find it worthless, I must accept
+the publisher's word?" Erlcort pressed further.</p>
+
+<p>"I should think you could do that," the floor-walker suggested, with
+the appearance of being tired.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+"Well, I think I will, for once," Erlcort relented. "But wait! What
+does the publisher say?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's all printed on this slip inside," the blonde said, and she
+showed it as she took the book from him. "Shall I send it? Or will
+you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, thank you, I'll take it with me. Let me&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He kept the printed slip and began to read it. The blonde wrapped the
+book up and laid it with a half-dollar in change on the counter before
+Erlcort. The floor-walker went away; Erlcort heard him saying, "No,
+madam; toys on the fifth floor, at the extreme rear, left," while he
+lost himself in the glowing promises of the publisher. It appeared
+that the book he had just bought was by a perfectly new author, an old
+lady of seventy who had never written a novel before, and might
+therefore be trusted for an entire freshness of thought and feeling.
+The plot was of a gripping intensity; the characters were painted with
+large, bold strokes, and were of an unexampled virility; the story was
+packed with passion from cover to cover; and the reader would be held
+breathless by the author's skill in working from the tragic conditions
+to an all-round happy conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>From time to time Erlcort heard the gentle blonde saying such things
+as, "Oh yes; it's the best-seller, all right," and, "All I can say is I set
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
+up till two o'clock in the morning to finish it," and, "Yes,
+ma'am; it's by a new writer; a very old lady of seventy who is just
+beginning to write; well, that's what I <i>heard</i>."</p>
+
+<p>On his way up-town in the Subway he clung to the wonted strap,
+unsupported by anything in the romance which he had bought; and yet he
+could not take the book back and get his money, or even exchange it
+for some article of neckwear or footwear. In his extremity he thought
+he would try giving it to the trainman just before he reached his
+stop.</p>
+
+<p>"You want to <i>give</i> it to me? Well, that's something that never
+happened to me on <i>this</i> line before. I guess my wife will like it.
+I&mdash;<i>1009th Street! Change for East Brooklyn and the Bronx!</i>" the guard
+shouted, and he let Erlcort out of the car, the very first of the tide
+that spilled itself forth at the station. He called after him, "Do as
+much for you some time."</p>
+
+<p>The incident first amused Erlcort, and then it began to trouble him;
+but he appeased his remorse by toying with his old notion of a
+critical bookstore. His mind was still at play with it when he
+stopped at the bell-pull of an elderly girl of his acquaintance
+who had a studio ten stories above, and the habit of giving him
+afternoon tea in it if he called there about five o'clock. She
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+had her ugly painting-apron still on, and her thumb through the hole in her
+palette, when she opened her door to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Too soon?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>She answered as well as she could with the brush held horizontally in
+her mouth while she glared inhospitably at him. "Well, not much," and
+then she let him in, and went and lighted her spirit-lamp.</p>
+
+<p>He began at once to tell her of his strange experience, and went on
+till she said: "Well, there's your tea. <i>I</i> don't know what you've
+been driving at, but I suppose you do. Is it the old thing?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's my critical bookstore, if that's what you call the old thing."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! <i>That!</i> I thought it had failed 'way back in the dark ages."</p>
+
+<p>"The dark ages are not <i>back</i>, please; they're all 'round, and you
+know very well that my critical bookstore has never been tried yet.
+But tell me one thing: should you wish to live with a picture, even
+for a few hours, which had been painted by an old lady of seventy who
+had never tried to paint before?"</p>
+
+<p>"If I intended to go crazy, yes. What has all that got to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's the joint commendation of the publisher
+and the kind little blonde who united to sell me
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+the book I just gave to that poor Subway trainman. Do you ever buy a new book?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I always borrow an old one."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you <i>had</i> to buy a new one, wouldn't you like to know of a
+place where you could be sure of getting a good one?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't mind. Or, yes, I should, rather. Where's it to be?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know. I've had my eye on the place for a good while. It's a
+funny old place in Sixth Avenue&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Sixth <i>Avenue</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't interrupt&mdash;where the dearest old codger in the world is just
+going out of the house-furnishing business in a small way. It's kept
+getting smaller and smaller&mdash;I've watched it shrink&mdash;till now it can't
+stand up against the big shops, and the old codger told me the other
+day that it was no use."</p>
+
+<p>"Poor fellow!"</p>
+
+<p>"No. He's not badly off, and he's going back up-state where he came
+from about forty years ago, and he can live&mdash;or die&mdash;very well on what
+he's put by. I've known him rather a good while, and we've been
+friends ever since we've been acquainted."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," the elderly girl said.</p>
+
+<p>Erlcort was not stopping, but she spoke so as
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+to close her mouth, which she was apt to let hang open in a way that
+she did not like; she had her intimates pledged to tell her when she
+was doing it, but she could not make a man promise, and she had to
+look after her mouth herself with Erlcort. It was not a bad mouth; her
+eyes were large, and it was merely large to match them.</p>
+
+<p>"When shall you begin&mdash;open shop?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"My old codger's lease expires in the fall," he answered, "but he
+would be glad to have me take it off his hands this spring. I could
+give the summer to changing and decorating, and begin my campaign in
+the fall&mdash;the first of October, say. Wouldn't you like to come some
+day and see the old place?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should love it. But you're not supposing I shall be of the least
+use, I hope? I'm not decorational, you know. Easel pictures, and small
+ones at that."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course. But you are a woman, and have ideas of the cozy. I mean
+that the place shall be made attractive."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think the situation will be&mdash;on Sixth Avenue?"</p>
+
+<p>"It will be quaint. It's in a retarded region of low buildings, with a
+carpenter's shop two doors off. The L roars overhead and the surface cars
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+squeal before, but that is New York, you know, and it's very central.
+Besides, at the back of the shop, with the front door shut, it is very
+quiet."</p>
+
+<p>The next day the friends lunched together at an Italian restaurant
+very near the place, and rather hurried themselves away to the old
+codger's store.</p>
+
+<p>"He <i>is</i> a dear," Margaret whispered to Erlcort in following him about
+to see the advantages of the place.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mine's setting-hen's time," he justified his hospitality in
+finally asking them to take seats on a nail-keg apiece. "You mustn't
+think you're interruptin'. Look 'round all ye want to, or set down and
+rest ye."</p>
+
+<p>"That would be a good motto for your bookstore," she screamed to
+Erlcort, when they got out into the roar of the avenue. "'Look 'round
+all ye want to, or set down and rest ye.' Wasn't he sweet? And I don't
+wonder you're taken with the place: it <i>has</i> such capabilities. You
+might as well begin imagining how you will arrange it."</p>
+
+<p>They were walking involuntarily up the avenue, and when they came to
+the Park they went into it, and in the excitement of their planning they
+went as far as the Ramble, where they sat down on a bench and disappointed
+some squirrels who supposed they had brought peanuts with them.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+They decided that the front of the shop should be elaborately simple;
+perhaps the door should be painted black, with a small-paned sash and
+a heavy brass latch. On each side should be a small-paned show-window,
+with books laid inside on an inclined shelving; on the door should be
+a modest bronze plate, reading, "The Critical Bookstore." They
+rejected <i>shop</i> as an affectation, and they hooted the notion of "Ye
+Critical Bookstore" as altogether loathsome. The door and window would
+be in a rather belated taste, but the beautiful is never out of date,
+and black paint and small panes might be found rococo in their
+old-fashionedness now. There should be a fireplace, or perhaps a
+Franklin stove, at the rear of the room, with a high-shouldered,
+small-paned sash on each side letting in the light from the yard of
+the carpenter-shop. On the chimneypiece should be lettered, "Look
+'round all ye want to, or set down and rest ye."</p>
+
+<p>The genius of the place should be a refined hospitality, such as the
+gentle old codger had practised with them, and to facilitate this
+there should be a pair of high-backed settles, one under each
+window. The book-counter should stretch the whole length of the
+store, and at intervals beside it, against the book-shelving,
+should be set old-fashioned chairs, but not too old-fashioned.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+Against the lower book-shelves on a deeper shelf might be stood
+against the books a few sketches in water-color, or even oil.</p>
+
+<p>This was Margaret Green's idea.</p>
+
+<p>"And would you guarantee the quality?" Erlcort asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps they wouldn't be for sale, though if any one insisted&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I see. Well, pass the sketches. What else?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, a few little figures in plaster, or even marble or bronze, very
+Greek, or very American; things in low relief."</p>
+
+<p>"Pass the little figures and low reliefs. But don't forget it's a
+<i>book</i>store."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I won't. The sketches of all kinds would be strictly subordinated
+to the books. If I had a tea-room handy here, with a table and the
+backs of some menus to draw on, I could show you just how it would
+look."</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter with the Casino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing; only it's rather early for tea yet."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't for soda-lemonade."</p>
+
+<p>She set him the example of instantly rising, and led the way back along
+the lake to the Casino, resting at that afternoon hour among its spring
+flowers and blossoms innocent of its lurid after-dark frequentation. He
+got some paper from the waiter who came to take their order. She began
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+to draw rapidly, and by the time the waiter came again she was giving
+Erlcort the last scrap of paper.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, "I had no idea that I had imagined anything so
+charming! If this critical bookstore doesn't succeed, it'll
+be because there are no critics. But what&mdash;what are these little
+things hung against the partitions of the shelves?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;mirrors. Little round ones."</p>
+
+<p>"But why mirrors of any shape?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing; only people like to see themselves in a glass of any shape.
+And when," Margaret added, in a burst of candor, "a woman looks up and
+sees herself with a book in her hand, she will feel so intellectual
+she will never put it down. She will buy it."</p>
+
+<p>"Margaret Green, this is immoral. Strike out those mirrors, or I will
+smash them every one!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, very well!" she said, and she rubbed them out with the top of her
+pencil. "If you want your place a howling wilderness."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at the ruin her rubber had wrought. "They <i>were</i> rather
+nice. Could&mdash;could you rub them in again?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not if I tried a hundred years. Besides, they <i>were</i> rather impudent.
+What time is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No time at all. It's half-past three."</p>
+
+<p>"Dear me! I must be going. And if you're
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+really going to start that precious critical bookstore in the fall,
+you must begin work on it right away."</p>
+
+<p>"Work?"</p>
+
+<p>"Reading up for it. If you're going to guarantee the books, you must
+know what's in them, mustn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>He realized that he must do what she said; he must know from his own
+knowledge what was in the books he offered for sale, and he began
+reading, or reading <i>at</i>, the new books immediately. He was a good
+deal occupied by day with the arrangement of his store, though he left
+it mainly with the lively young decorator who undertook for a lump sum
+to realize Margaret Green's ideas. It was at night that he did most of
+his reading in the spring books which the publishers were willing to
+send him gratis, when they understood he was going to open a
+bookstore, and only wanted sample copies. As long as she remained in
+town Margaret Green helped him read, and they talked the books over,
+and mostly rejected them. By the time she went to Europe in August
+with another elderly girl they had not chosen more than eight or ten
+books; but they hoped for better things in the fall.</p>
+
+<p>Word of what he was doing had gone out from Margaret,
+and a great many women of their rather
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+esthetic circle began writing to him about the books they were
+reading, and commending them to him or warning him against them. The
+circle of his volunteer associates enlarged itself in the nature of an
+endless chain, and before society quite broke up for the summer a
+Sympathetic Tea was offered to Erlcort by a Leading Society Woman at
+the Intellectual Club, where he was invited to address the
+Intellectuals in explanation of his project. This was before Margaret
+sailed, and he hurried to her in horror.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, of course you must accept. You're not going to hide your
+Critical Bookstore under a bushel; you can't have too much publicity."</p>
+
+<p>The Leading Society Woman flowed in fulsome gratitude at his
+acceptance, and promised no one but the club should be there; he had
+hinted his reluctance. She kept her promise, but among the
+Intellectuals there was a girl who was a just beginning journalist,
+and who pumped Erlcort's whole scheme out of him, unsuspicious of what
+she was doing, till he saw it all, with his picture, in the Sunday
+Supplement. She rightly judged that the intimacy of an interview would
+be more popular with her readers than the cold and distant report of
+his formal address, which she must give, though she received it so
+ardently with all the other Intellectuals. They flocked flatteringly,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+almost suffocatingly, around him at the end. His scheme was just what
+every one had vaguely thought of: something must be done to stem the
+tide of worthless fiction, which was so often shocking as well as
+silly, and they would only be too glad to help read for him. They were
+nearly all just going to sail, but they would each take a spring book
+on the ship, and write him about it from the other side; they would
+each get a fall book coming home, and report as soon as they got back.</p>
+
+<p>His scheme was discussed seriously and satirically by the press; it
+became a joke with many papers, and a byword quickly worn out, so that
+people thought that it had been dropped. But Erlcort gave his days and
+nights to preparation for his autumnal campaign. He studied in careful
+comparison the reviews of the different literary authorities, and was
+a little surprised to find, when he came to read the books they
+reviewed, how honest and adequate they often were. He was obliged to
+own to himself that if people were guided by them, few worthless books
+would be sold, and he decided that the immense majority of the
+book-buyers were not guided by the critics. The publishers
+themselves seemed not so much to blame when he went to see them
+and explained his wish to deal with them on the basis of a critical
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+bookseller. They said they wished all the booksellers were like him,
+for they would ask nothing better than to publish only good books. The
+trouble, they said, lay with the authors; they wrote such worthless
+books. Or if now and then one of them did write a good book and they
+were over-tempted to publish it, the public united in refusing to buy
+it. So he saw? But if the booksellers persisted in selling none but
+good books, perhaps something might be done. At any rate they would
+like to see the experiment tried.</p>
+
+<p>Erlcort felt obliged to read the books suggested to him by the endless
+chain of readers who volunteered to read for him, on both sides of the
+ocean, or going and coming on the ocean. Mostly the books they praised
+were abject rubbish, but it took time to find this out, and he formed
+the habit of reading far into the night, and if he was very much vexed
+at discovering that the book recommended to him was trash, he could
+not sleep unless he took veronal, and then he had a ghastly next day.</p>
+
+<p>He did not go out of town except for a few brief sojourns at places
+where he knew cultivated people were staying, and could give him their
+opinions of the books he was reading. When the publishers began, as they
+had agreed, to send him their advance sheets, the stitched but unbound
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+volumes roused so much interest by the novelty of their form that his
+readers could not give an undivided attention to their contents. He
+foresaw that in the end he should have to rely upon the taste of
+mercenaries in his warfare against rubbish, and more and more he found
+it necessary to expend himself in it, to read at second hand as well
+as at first. His greatest relief was in returning to town and watching
+the magical changes which the decorator was working in his store. This
+was consolation, this was inspiration, but he longed for the return of
+Margaret Green, that she might help him enjoy the realization of her
+ideas in the equipment of the place; and he held the decorator to the
+most slavish obedience through the carpenters and painters who created
+at his bidding a miraculous interior, all white, or just off-white,
+such as had never been imagined of a bookstore in New York before. It
+was actually ready by the end of August, though smelling a little of
+turpentine still, and Erlcort, letting himself in at the small-paned
+black door, and ranging up and down the long, beautiful room, and
+round and round the central book-table, and in and out between the
+side tables, under the soft, bright shelving of the walls, could
+hardly wait the arrival of the <i>Minnedingdong</i> in which
+the elderly girl had taken her passage back. One day, ten days
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
+ahead of time, she blew in at the front door in a paroxysm of explanation;
+she had swapped passages home with another girl who wanted to come
+back later, while she herself wanted to come back earlier. She had no
+very convincing reason for this as she gave it, but Erlcort did not
+listen to her reason, whatever it was. He said, between the raptures
+with the place that she fell in and out of, that now she was just in
+time for the furnishing, which he never could have dared to undertake
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>In the gay September weather they visited all the antiquity shops in
+Fourth Avenue, and then threw themselves frankly upon reproductions,
+which they bought in the native wood and ordered painted, the settles
+and the spindle-backed chairs in the cool gray which she decided was
+the thing. In the same spirit they bought new brass fire-irons and
+new shovel and tongs, but all very tall and antique-looking, and then
+they got those little immoral mirrors, which Margaret Green attached
+with her own hands to the partitions of the shelving. She also got
+soft green silk curtains for the chimney windows and for the sash of
+the front door; even the front windows she curtained, but very low, so
+that a salesman or a saleswoman could easily reach over from the
+interior and get a book that any customer had seen from the outside.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+One day when all this was done, and Erlcort had begun ordering in a
+stock of such books as he had selected to start with, she said:
+"You're looking rather peak&eacute;d, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I've been <i>feeling</i> rather peak&eacute;d, until lately, keeping awake
+to read and read <i>after</i> the volunteer readers."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean you've lost sleep?"</p>
+
+<p>"Something like that."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you mustn't. How many books do you start with?"</p>
+
+<p>"About twenty-five."</p>
+
+<p>"Good ones? It's a lot, isn't it? I didn't suppose there were so
+many."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, to fill our shelves I shall have to order about a thousand of
+each."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll never sell them in the world! You'll be ruined."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no; the publishers will take them back."</p>
+
+<p>"How nice of them! But that's only what painters have to do when the
+dealers can't sell their pictures."</p>
+
+<p>A month off, the prospect was brilliant, and when the shelves and
+tables were filled and the sketches and bas-reliefs were stuck about and
+the little immoral mirrors were hung, the place was charming. The chairs
+and settles were all that could be asked; Margaret Green helped put them
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>
+about; and he let her light the low fire on the hearth of the Franklin
+stove; he said he should not always burn hickory, but he had got
+twenty-four sticks for two dollars from an Italian in a cellar near
+by, and he meant to burn that much. She upbraided him for his
+extravagance while touching the match to the paper under the kindling;
+but October opened cold, and he needed the fire.</p>
+
+<p>The enterprise seemed rather to mystify the neighborhood, and some old
+customers of the old codger's came in upon one fictitious errand and
+another to see about it, and went away without quite making it out. It
+was a bookstore, all right, they owned in conference, but what did he
+mean by "critical"?</p>
+
+<p>The first <i>bona fide</i> buyer appeared in a little girl who could just
+get her chin on the counter, and who asked for an egg-beater. Erlcort
+had begun with only one assistant, the young lady who typed his
+letters and who said she guessed she could help him when she was not
+working. She leaned over and tried to understand the little girl, and
+then she called to Erlcort where he stood with his back to the fire
+and the morning paper open before his face.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Erlcort, have we got a book called <i>The Egg-beater</i>?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+"<i>The Egg-beater?</i>" he echoed, letting his paper drop below his face.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no!" the little girl shouted, angrily. "It <i>ain't</i> a book. It's a
+thing to beat eggs with. Mother said to come here and get it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she's sent you to the wrong place, little girl. You want to go
+to a hardware-store," the young lady argued.</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't this No. 1232?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, this is the <i>right</i> place. Mother said to go to 1232. I guess
+she knows. She's an old customer."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>The Egg-beater! The Egg-beater!</i>" the blithe young novelist to whom
+Erlcort told the story repeated. He was still happy in his original
+success as a best-seller, and he had come to the Critical Bookstore to
+spy out the stock and see whether his last novel was in it; but though
+it was not, he joyously extended an acquaintance with Erlcort which had
+begun elsewhere. "<i>The Egg-beater?</i> What a splendid title for a story
+of adventure! Keep the secret of its applicability to the last word, or
+perhaps never reveal it at all, and leave the reader worrying. That's one
+way; makes him go and talk about the book to all the girls he knows and get
+them guessing. Best ad. in the world. <i>The Egg-beater!</i> Doesn't it suggest
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+desert islands and penguins' nests in the rocks? Fellow and girl
+shipwrecked, and girl wants to make an omelette after they've got sick
+of plain eggs, and can't for want of an egg-beater. Heigh? He invents
+one&mdash;makes it out of some wire that floats off from the wreck.
+See? When they are rescued, she brings it away, and doesn't let him
+know it till their Iron Wedding Day. They keep it over his study
+fireplace always."</p>
+
+<p>This author was the first to stretch his legs before Erlcort's fire
+from his seat on one of the reproductions. He could not say enough of
+the beauty of the place, and he asked if he might sit there and watch
+for the old codger's old customers coming to buy hardware. There might
+be copy in it.</p>
+
+<p>But the old customers did not come so often as he hoped and Erlcort
+feared. Instead there came <i>bona fide</i> book-buyers, who asked some for
+a book and some for a particular book. The first were not satisfied
+with the books that Erlcort or his acting saleslady recommended, and
+went away without buying. The last were indignant at not finding what
+they wanted in Erlcort's selection.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you stock it?" they demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Because I don't think it's worth reading."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, indeed!" The sarcastic customers were
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+commonly ladies. "I thought you let the public judge of that!"</p>
+
+<p>"There are bookstores where they do. This is a critical bookstore. I
+sell only the books that <i>I</i> think worth reading. If you had noticed
+my sign&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" the customer would say, and she, too, would go away without
+buying.</p>
+
+<p>There were other ladies who came, links of the endless chain of
+volunteer readers who had tried to help Erlcort in making his
+selection, and he could see them slyly looking his stock over for the
+books they had praised to him. Mostly they went away without comment,
+but with heads held high in the offense which he felt even more than
+saw. One, indeed, did ask him why he had not stocked her chosen book,
+and he had to say, "Well, when I came to go through it carefully, I
+didn't think it quite&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But here is <i>The Green Bay Tree</i>, and <i>The Biggest Toad in the
+Puddle</i>, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know. For one reason and another I thought them worth stocking."</p>
+
+<p>Then another head went away high in the air, with its plumes
+quivering. One afternoon late a lady came flying in with all the
+marks, whatever they are, of transatlantic travel upon her.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm just through the customs, and I've motored
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+up here the first thing, even before I went home, to stop you from
+selling that book I recommended. It's dreadful; and, horrors! horrors!
+here it is by the hundreds! Oh, Mr. Erlcort! You mustn't sell that
+dreadful book! You see, I had skipped through it in my berth going
+out, and posted my letter the first thing; and just now, coming home,
+I found it in the ship's library and came on that frightful episode.
+You know! Where&mdash; How <i>could</i> you order it without reading it, on
+a mere say-so? It's utterly immoral!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't agree with you," Erlcort answered, dryly. "I consider that
+passage one of the finest in modern fiction&mdash;one of the most ennobling
+and illumining&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ennobling!" The lady made a gesture of horror. "Very well! If <i>that</i>
+is your idea of a critical bookstore, all I've got to say is&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But she had apparently no words to say it in, and she went out banging
+but failing to latch the door which let through the indignant snort of
+her car as it whirled her away. She left Erlcort and his assistant to
+a common silence, but he imagined somehow a resolution in the
+stenographer not to let the book go unsearched till she had grasped
+the full iniquity of that episode and felt all its ennobling force. He
+was not consoled when another lady came in and, after drifting
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
+unmolestedly about (it was the primary rule of the place not to
+follow people up), stopped before the side shelf where the book was
+ranged in dozens and scores. She took a copy from the neat ranks, and
+opened it; then she lifted her head by chance and caught sight of her
+plume in one of the little mirrors. She stealthily lifted herself on
+tiptoe till she could see her face, and then she turned to the
+assistant and said, gently, "I believe I should like <i>this</i> book,
+please," and paid for it and went out.</p>
+
+<p>It was now almost on the stroke of six, and Erlcort said to his
+assistant: "I'll close the store, Miss Pearsall. You needn't stay any
+longer."</p>
+
+<p>"All right, sir," the girl said, and went into the little closet at
+the rear for her hat and coat. Did she contrive to get a copy of that
+book under her coat as she passed the shelf where it lay?</p>
+
+<p>When she was gone, he turned the key in the door and went back and sat
+down before the fire dying on the hearth of the Franklin stove. It was
+not a very cheerful moment with him, but he could not have said that
+the day had been unprofitable, either spiritually or pecuniarily.
+In its experiences it had been a varied day, and he had really
+sold a good many books. More people than he could have expected
+had taken him seriously and even intelligently. It is true that
+he had been somewhat vexed by the sort of authority
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+the president of the Intellectual Club had shown in the way she
+swelled into the store and patronized him and it, as if she had
+invented them both, and blamed him in a high, sweet voice for having
+so many <i>old</i> books. "My idea was that it would be a place where one
+could come for the best of the <i>new</i> books. But here! Why, half of
+them I saw in June before I sailed!" She chided him merrily, and she
+acted as if it were quite part of the joke when he said that he did
+not think a good book could age much in four months. She laughed
+patronizingly at his conceit of getting in the fall books by
+Thanksgiving; but even for the humor of it she could not let him say
+he should not do anything in holiday books. "I had expected to get
+<i>all</i> my Christmas books of you, Mr. Erlcort," she crowed, but for the
+present she bought nothing. In compensation he recalled the gratitude,
+almost humble gratitude, of a lady (she was a lady!) who had come that
+day, bringing her daughter to get a book, any book in his stock, and
+to thank him for his enterprise, which she had found worked perfectly
+in the case of the book she had got the week before; the book had been
+an unalloyed delight, and had left a sense of heightened self-respect
+with her: that book of the dreadful episode.</p>
+
+<p>He wished Margaret Green had been there;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
+but she had been there only once since his opening; he could not think
+why. He heard a rattling at the door-latch, and he said before he
+turned to look, "What if it should be she <i>now</i>?" But when he went to
+peer through the door-curtain it was only an old fellow who had spent
+the better part of the afternoon in the best chair, reading a book.
+Erlcort went back to the fire and let him rattle, which he did rather
+a long time, and then went away, Erlcort hoped, in dudgeon. He was one
+of a number of customers who had acted on the half of his motto asking
+them to sit down and rest them, after acting on the other half to look
+round all they wanted. Most of them did not read, even; they seemed to
+know one another, and they talked comfortably together. Erlcort
+recognized a companionship of four whom he had noticed in the Park
+formerly; they were clean-enough-looking elderly men, but occupied
+nearly all the chairs and settles, so that lady customers did not like
+to bring books and look over them in the few places left, and Erlcort
+foresaw the time when he should have to ask the old fellows to look
+around more and rest them less. In resuming his own place before the
+fire he felt the fleeting ache of a desire to ask Margaret Green
+whether it would not be a good plan to remove the motto from the
+chimneypiece. He would not have liked to do it without asking
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+her; it had been her notion to put it there, and her other notion of
+the immoral mirrors had certainly worked well. The thoughtful
+expression they had reflected on the faces of lady customers had sold
+a good many books; not that Erlcort wished to sell books that way,
+though he argued with himself that his responsibility ought strictly
+to end with the provision of books which he had critically approved
+before offering them for sale.</p>
+
+<p>His conscience was not wholly at peace as to his stock, not only the
+books which he had included, but also those he had excluded. Some of
+these tacitly pleaded against his severity; in one case an author came
+and personally protested. This was the case of a book by the
+ex-best-seller, who held that his last book was so much better than
+his first that it ought certainly to be found in any critical
+bookstore. The proceeds of his best-seller had enabled him to buy an
+electric runabout, and he purred up to Erlcort's door in it to argue
+the matter with him. He sat down in a reproduction and proved,
+gaily, that Erlcort was quite wrong about it. He had the book
+with him, and read passages from it; then he read passages from
+some of the books on sale and defied Erlcort to say that his
+passages were not just as good, or, as he put it merrily, the
+same as. He held that his marked improvement entitled him
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+to the favor of a critical bookstore; without this, what motive had he
+in keeping from a reversion to the errors which had won him the
+vicious prosperity of his first venture? Hadn't Erlcort a duty to
+perform in preventing his going back to the bad? Refuse this markedly
+improved fiction, and you drove him to writing nothing but
+best-sellers from now on. He urged Erlcort to reflect.</p>
+
+<p>They had a jolly time, and the ex-best-seller went away in high
+spirits, prophesying that Erlcort would come to his fiction yet.</p>
+
+<p>There were authors who did not leave Erlcort so cheerful when they
+failed to see their books on his shelves or tables. Some of them were
+young authors who had written their worthless books with a devout
+faith in their worth, and they went away more in sorrow than in anger,
+and yet more in bewilderment. Some were old authors who had been all
+their lives acceptably writing second-rate books and trying to make
+them unacceptably first-rate. If he knew them he kept out of their
+way, but the dejection of their looks was not less a pang to him if he
+saw them searching his stock for their books in vain.</p>
+
+<p>He had his own moments of dejection. The interest of the press
+in his enterprise had flashed through the Sunday issues of a
+single week, and then flashed out in lasting darkness. He wondered
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>
+vaguely if he had counted without the counting-house in hoping for
+their continued favor; he could not realize that nothing is so stale
+as old news, and that no excess of advertising would have relumed
+those fitful fires.</p>
+
+<p>He would have liked to talk the case over with Margaret Green. After
+his first revolt from the easy publicity the reporters had first given
+him, he was aware of having enjoyed it&mdash;perhaps vulgarly enjoyed it.
+But he hoped not quite that; he hoped that in his fleeting celebrity
+he had cared for his scheme rather than himself. He had really
+believed in it, and he liked having it recognized as a feature of
+modern civilization, an innovation which did his city and his country
+credit. Now and then an essayist of those who wrote thoughtful
+articles in the Sunday or Saturday-evening editions had dropped in,
+and he had opened his heart to them in a way he would not have minded
+their taking advantage of. Secretly he hoped they would see a topic in
+his enterprise and his philosophy of it. But they never did, and he
+was left to the shame of hopes which had held nothing to support
+defeat. He would have liked to confess his shame and own the justice
+of his punishment to Margaret Green, but she seemed the only friend who
+never came near. Other friends came, and many strangers, the friends to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+look and the strangers to buy. He had no reason to complain of his
+sales; the fame of his critical bookstore might have ceased in New
+York, because it had gone abroad to Chicago and St. Louis and
+Pittsburg; people who were clearly from these commercial capitals and
+others came and bought copiously of his criticized stock, and they
+praised the notion of it in telling him that he ought to open branches
+in their several cities.</p>
+
+<p>They were all women, and it was nearly all women who frequented the
+Critical Bookstore, but in their multitude Margaret Green was not. He
+thought it the greater pity because she would have enjoyed many of
+them with him, and would have divined such as hoped the culture
+implicated by a critical bookstore would come off on them without
+great effort of their own; she would have known the sincere spirits,
+too, and could have helped direct their choice of the best where all
+was so good. He smiled to find that he was invoking her help, which he
+had no right to.</p>
+
+<p>His longing had no effect upon her till deep in January, when the
+weather was engaged late one afternoon in keeping the promise of a
+January thaw in the form of the worst snow-storm of the winter. Then
+she came thumping with her umbrella-handle at his door as if, he
+divined, she were too stiff-handed or too package-laden to press the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+latch and let herself in, and she almost fell in, but saved herself by
+spilling on the floor some canvases and other things which she had
+been getting at the artist's-materials store near by. "Don't bother
+about them," she said, "but take me to the fire as fast as you can,"
+and when she had turned from snow to rain and had dripped partially
+dry before the Franklin stove, she asked, "Where have you been all the
+time?"</p>
+
+<p>"Waiting here for you," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you needn't. I wasn't going to come&mdash;or at least not till you
+sent for me, or said you wanted my advice."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want your advice now."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't come to give it. I just dropped in because if I hadn't I
+should have just dropped outside. How have you been getting along with
+your ridiculous critical bookstore?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, things are rather quiet with us just now, as the publishers say
+to the authors when they don't want to publish their books."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know that saying. Why didn't you go in for the holiday books?"</p>
+
+<p>"How did you know I didn't?"</p>
+
+<p>"Lots of people told me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I'll tell you why. I would have had to read them first,
+and no human being could do that&mdash;not even a volunteer link in an
+endless chain."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>
+"I see. But since Christmas?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know very well that after Christmas the book market drops dead."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, so I've been told." She had flung her wet veil back over her
+shoulders, and he thought she had never looked so adorably plain
+before; if she could have seen herself in a glass she would have found
+her whole face out of drawing. It seemed as if his thinking had put
+her in mind of them, and she said, "Those immoral mirrors are
+shameful."</p>
+
+<p>"They've sold more of the best books than anything else."</p>
+
+<p>"No matter. As soon as I get a little drier I shall take them down."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well. <i>I</i> didn't put them up." He laid a log of hickory on the
+fire. "I'm not doing it to dry you quicker."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know. I'll tell you one thing. You ought to keep the magazines,
+or at least the Big Four. You could keep them with a good conscience,
+and you could sell them without reading; they're always good."</p>
+
+<p>"There's an idea in that. I believe I'll try it."</p>
+
+<p>Margaret Green was now dry enough, and she rose and removed the
+mirrors. In doing this she noticed that Erlcort had apparently sold a
+good many of his best books, and she said: "Well! I don't see why
+<i>you</i> should be discouraged."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+"Who said I was? I'm exultant."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you were exulting with the corners of your mouth down just now.
+Well, I must be going. Will you get a taxi to flounder over to the
+Subway with me?" While Erlcort was telephoning she was talking to him.
+"I believe the magazines will revive public interest in your scheme.
+Put them in your window. Try to get advance copies for it."</p>
+
+<p>"You have a commercial genius, Margaret Green."</p>
+
+<p>"When it comes to selling literature, I have. Selling art is where I
+fall down."</p>
+
+<p>"That's because you always try to sell your own art. I should fall
+down, too, if I tried to sell my own literature."</p>
+
+<p>They got quite back to their old friendliness; the coming of the taxi
+gave them plenty of time. The electric lights were turned brilliantly
+on, but there, at the far end of the store, before the Franklin stove,
+they had a cozy privacy. At the moment of parting she said:</p>
+
+<p>"If I were you I should take out these settles. They simply invite
+loafing."</p>
+
+<p>"I've noticed that they seem to do that."</p>
+
+<p>"And better paint out that motto."</p>
+
+<p>"I've sometimes fancied I'd better. <i>That</i> invites loafing, too;
+though some nice people like it."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>
+"Nice people? Why haven't some of them bought a picture?" He perceived
+that she had taken in the persistent presence of the sketches when
+removing the mirrors, and he shared the indignation she expressed:
+"Shabby things!"</p>
+
+<p>She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and he asked what she was
+going to do with them, as he followed her to the door with her other
+things.</p>
+
+<p>"Put them around the studio. But you needn't come to see the effect."</p>
+
+<p>"No. I shall come to see you."</p>
+
+<p>But when he came in a lull of February, and he could walk part of the
+way up through the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said:</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you've come to pour out some more of your griefs. Well,
+pour away! Has the magazine project failed?"</p>
+
+<p>"On the contrary, it has been a <i>succ&egrave;s fou</i>. But I don't feel
+altogether easy in my mind about it. The fact is, they seem to print
+much more rubbish than I supposed."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their
+nostrils."</p>
+
+<p>She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut and getting very close to her
+picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her mouth hang open.
+He wondered why she was so charming; but when she stepped back rhythmically,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+tilting her pretty head this way and that, he saw why: it was her
+unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her mouth and shut it to say,
+"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, some people have come back at me. They've said, What a rotten
+number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in
+all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What's
+to be done about it? I can't ask people to buy truck or read truck
+because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the
+first quality."</p>
+
+<p>"No. You can't. Why," she asked, drifting up to her picture again,
+"don't you tear the bad out, and sell the good?"</p>
+
+<p>Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot be spelled in English.
+"Do you know how defiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the
+magazines? They're wired together, and you could no more tear out the
+bad and leave the good than you could part vice from virtue in human
+nature."</p>
+
+<p>"I see," Margaret Green said, but she saw no further, and she had to
+let him go disconsolate. After waiting a decent time she went to find him
+in his critical bookstore. It was late in an afternoon of the days that
+were getting longer, and only one electric was lighted in the rear of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+room, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Franklin stove, so busy at
+something that he scarcely seemed aware of her.</p>
+
+<p>"What in the world are you doing?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>He looked up. "Who? I? Oh, it's you! Why, I'm merely censoring the
+truck in the May number of this magazine." He held up a little roller,
+as long as the magazine was wide, blacked with printer's ink, which he
+had been applying to the open periodical. "I've taken a hint from the
+way the Russian censorship blots out seditious literature before it
+lets it go to the public."</p>
+
+<p>"And <i>what</i> a mess you're making!"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it will have to dry before it's put on sale."</p>
+
+<p>"I should think so. Listen to me, Frederick Erlcort: you're going
+crazy."</p>
+
+<p>"I've sometimes thought so: crazy with conceit and vanity and
+arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical
+bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast,
+benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or
+a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him?
+Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is
+it universal suffrage?"</p>
+
+<p>"Now," Margaret Green said, "you are talking
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
+sense. Why didn't you think of this in the beginning?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is it a world, a whole earth," he went on, "where the weeds mostly
+outflourish the flowers, or is it a wretched little florist's
+conservatory where the watering-pot assumes to better the instruction
+of the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust? What is all the
+worthy family of asses to do if there are no thistles to feed them?
+Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the
+finer organisms, are the coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made a
+mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the
+gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the
+gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the
+pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have
+their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the
+rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural
+selection become to certain of them. But let there be no artificial
+selection, no survival of the fittest by main force&mdash;the force of the
+spectator, who thinks he knows better than the creator of the ugly and
+the beautiful, the fair and foul, the evil and good."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>now</i> if the Intellectual Club could hear you!"
+Margaret Green said, with a long, deep,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+admiring suspiration. "And what are you going to do with
+your critical bookstore?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to sell it. I've had an offer from the author of that
+best-seller&mdash;I've told you about him. I was just trying to censor that
+magazine while I was thinking it over. He's got an idea. He's going to
+keep it a critical bookstore, but the criticism is to be made by
+universal suffrage and the will of the majority. The latest books will
+be put to a vote; and the one getting the greatest number of votes
+will be the first offered for sale, and the author will receive a free
+passage to Europe by the southern route."</p>
+
+<p>"The southern route!" Margaret mused. "I've never been that way. It
+must be delightful."</p>
+
+<p>"Then come with <i>me</i>! <i>I'm</i> going."</p>
+
+<p>"But how can I?"</p>
+
+<p>"By marrying me!"</p>
+
+<p>"I never thought of that," she said. Then, with the conscientious
+resolution of an elderly girl who puts her fate to the touch of any
+risk the truth compels, she added: "Or, yes! I <i>have</i>. But I never
+supposed you would ask me." She stared at him, and she was aware she
+was letting her mouth hang open. While she was trying for some word to
+close it with he closed it for her.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>A FEAST OF REASON</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+<h2><a name="A_FEAST_OF_REASON" id="A_FEAST_OF_REASON"></a>A FEAST OF REASON</h2>
+
+
+<p>Florindo and Lindora had come to the end of another winter in town,
+and had packed up for another summer in the country. They were sitting
+together over their last breakfast until the taxi should arrive to
+whirl them away to the station, and were brooding in a joint gloom
+from the effect of the dinner they had eaten at the house of a friend
+the night before, and, "Well, thank goodness," she said, "there is an
+end to that sort of thing for <i>one</i> while."</p>
+
+<p>"An end to <i>that</i> thing," he partially assented, "but not that <i>sort</i>
+of thing."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" she demanded excitedly, almost resentfully.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean that the lunch is of the nature of the dinner, and that in the
+country we shall begin lunching where we left off dining."</p>
+
+<p>"Not instantly," she protested shrilly. "There will be nobody there
+for a while&mdash;not for a whole month, nearly."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+"They will be there before you can turn round, almost; and then you
+women will begin feeding one another there before you have well left
+off here."</p>
+
+<p>"We women!" she protested.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you&mdash;you women. You give the dinners. Can you deny it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's because we can't get you to the lunches."</p>
+
+<p>"In the country you can; and so you will give the lunches."</p>
+
+<p>"We would give dinners if it were not for the distance, and the
+darkness on those bad roads."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see where your reasoning is carrying you."</p>
+
+<p>"No," she despaired, "there is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of
+it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time before it is all
+going on again."</p>
+
+<p>They computed the number of dinners they had given during the winter;
+that was not hard, and the sum was not great: six or seven at the
+most, large and small. When it came to the dinners they had received,
+it was another thing; but still she considered, "Were they really so
+few? It's nothing to what the English do. They never dine alone at
+home, and they never dine alone abroad&mdash;of course not! I
+wonder they can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
+kind, is always loathsome: the everlasting soup, if there aren't
+oysters first, or grape-fruit, or melon, and the fish, and the
+entr&eacute;e, and the roast and salad, and the ice-cream and the
+fruit nobody touches, and the coffee and cigarettes and
+cigars&mdash;how I hate it all!"</p>
+
+<p>Lindora sank back in her chair and toyed desperately with the fragment
+of bacon on her plate.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet," Florindo said, "there is a charm about the first dinner of
+autumn, after you've got back."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," she assented; "it's like a part of our lost youth. We think
+all the dinners of the winter will be like that, and we come away
+beaming."</p>
+
+<p>"But when it keeps on and there's more and more of our lost youth,
+till it comes to being the whole&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Florindo!" she stopped him. He pretended that he was not going to
+have said it, and she resumed, dreamily, "I wonder what it is makes it
+so detestable as the winter goes on."</p>
+
+<p>"All customs are detestable, the best of them," he suggested,
+"and I should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner, that
+the society dinner was an unlovely rite. You try to carry if
+off with china and glass, and silver and linen, and if people
+could fix their minds on these, or even on the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>
+dishes of the dinner as they come successively on, it
+would be all very well; but the diners, the diners!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, "the old men are hideous, certainly; and the young
+ones&mdash;I try not to look at them, poking things into the hollows of
+their faces with spoons and forks&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Better than when it was done with knives! Still, it's a horror! A
+veteran diner-out in full action is certainly a hideous spectacle.
+Often he has few teeth of his own, and the dentists don't serve him
+perfectly. He is in danger of dropping things out of his mouth, both
+liquids and solids: better not look! His eyes bulge and roll in his
+head in the stress of mastication and deglutition; his color rises and
+spreads to his gray hair or over his baldness; his person seems to
+swell vividly in his chair, and when he laughs&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't, Florindo! It <i>is</i> awful."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, perhaps no worse than the sight of a middle-aged matron tending
+to overweight and bulking above her plate&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes! That's dreadful, too. But when people are young&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, when people are young!" He said this in despair. Then
+he went on in an audible muse. "When people are young they are
+not only in their own youth; they are in the youth of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
+world, the race. They dine, but they don't think of the dinner or the
+unpleasantness of the diners, and the grotesqueness of feeding in
+common. They think&mdash;" he broke off in defect of other ideas, and
+concluded with a laugh, "they think of themselves. And they don't
+think of how they are looking."</p>
+
+<p>"They needn't; they are looking very well. Don't keep harping on that!
+I remember when we first began going to dinners, I thought it was the
+most beautiful thing in the world. I don't mean when I was a girl; a
+girl only goes to a dinner because it comes before a dance. I mean
+when we were young married people; and I pinned up my dress and we
+went in the horse-cars, or even walked. I enjoyed every instant of it:
+the finding who was going to take me in and who you were; and the
+going in; and the hovering round the table to find our places from the
+cards; and the seeing how you looked next some one else, and wondering
+how you thought I looked; and the beads sparkling up through the
+champagne and getting into one's nose; and the laughing and joking and
+talking! Oh, the talking! What's become of it? The talking, last
+night, it bored me to death! And what good stories people used to
+tell, women as well as men! You can't deny it was beautiful."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+"I don't; and I don't deny that the forms of dining are still
+charming. It's the dining itself that I object to."</p>
+
+<p>"That's because your digestion is bad."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't yours?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it is. What has that got to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me that we have arrived at what is called an <i>impasse</i> in
+French." He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she gave a little
+jump in her chair. "Oh, there's plenty of time. The taxi won't be here
+for half an hour yet. Is there any heat left in that coffee?"</p>
+
+<p>"There will be," she said, and she lighted the lamp under the pot.
+"But I don't like being scared out of half a year's growth."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry. I won't look at the clock any more; I don't care if we're
+left. Where were we? Oh, I remember&mdash;the objection to dining itself.
+If we could have the forms without the facts, dining would be all
+right. Our superstition is that we can't be gay without gorging; that
+society can't be run without meat and drink. But don't you remember
+when we first went to Italy there was no supper at Italian houses
+where we thought it such a favor to be asked?"</p>
+
+<p>"I remember that the young Italian swells wouldn't
+go to the American and English houses
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>
+where they weren't sure of supper. They didn't give supper at the
+Italian houses because they couldn't afford it."</p>
+
+<p>"I know that. I believe they do, now. But&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><small>'Sweet are the uses of adversity,'</small></p></div>
+
+<p>and the fasting made for beauty then more than the feasting does now.
+It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses
+conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed&mdash;the
+sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out to supper."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder," Lindora said, "whether the same sort of thing goes on at
+evening parties still&mdash;it's so long since I've been at one. It was
+awful standing jammed up in a corner or behind a door and eating
+<i>vis-&agrave;-vis</i> with a man who brought you a plate; and it wasn't much
+better when you sat down and he stood over you gabbling and gobbling,
+with his plate in one hand and his fork in the other. I was always
+afraid of his dropping things into my lap; and the sight of his jaws
+champing as you looked up at them from below!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, ridiculous. But there was an element of the grotesque in a
+bird's-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and
+trying to smile and look <i>spirituelle</i> between the shots."</p>
+
+<p>Lindora as she laughed bowed her forehead on
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+the back of her hand in the way Florindo thought so pretty when they
+were both young. "Yes," she said, "awful, awful! Why <i>should</i> people
+want to flock together when they feed? Do you suppose it's a survival
+of the primitive hospitality when those who had something to eat
+hurried to share it with those who had nothing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Possibly," Florindo said, flattered into consequence by her momentary
+deference, or show of it. "But the people who mostly meet to feed
+together now are not hungry; they are already so stuffed that they
+loathe the sight of the things. Some of them shirk the consequences by
+frankly dining at home first, and then openly or covertly dodging the
+courses."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and you hear that praised as a mark of high civilization, or
+social wisdom. I call it wicked, and an insult to the very genius of
+hospitality."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know. It must give the faster a good chance of seeing
+how funny the feeders all look."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder, I <i>do</i> wonder, how the feeding in common came to be the
+custom," she said, thoughtfully. "Of course where it's done for
+convenience, like hotels or in boarding-houses&mdash;but to do it wantonly,
+as people do in society, it ought to be stopped."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
+"We might call art to our aid&mdash;have a large tableful of people kodaked
+in the moments of ingulfing, chewing, or swallowing, as the act varied
+from guest to guest; might be reproduced as picture postals, or from
+films for the movies. That would give the ten and twenty cent
+audiences a chance to see what life in the exclusive circles was."</p>
+
+<p>She listened in dreamy inattention. "It was a step in the right
+direction when people began to have afternoon teas. To be sure, there
+was the biting and chewing sandwiches, but you needn't take <i>them</i>,
+and most women could manage their teacups gracefully."</p>
+
+<p>"Or hide their faces in them when they couldn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Only," she continued, "the men wouldn't come after the first go off.
+It was as bad as lunches. Now that the English way of serving tea to
+callers has come in, it's better. You really get the men, and it keeps
+them from taking cocktails so much."</p>
+
+<p>"They're rather glad of that. But still, still, there's the guttling
+and guzzling."</p>
+
+<p>"It's reduced to a minimum."</p>
+
+<p>"But it's there. And the first thing you know you've loaded yourself
+up with cake or bread-and-butter and spoiled your appetite for dinner.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
+No, afternoon tea must go with the rest of it, if we're going to be
+truly civilized. If people could come to one another's tables with
+full minds instead of stomachs, there would be some excuse for
+hospitality. Perhaps if we reversed the practice of the professional
+diner-out, and read up at home as he now eats at home, and&mdash; No, I
+don't see how it could be done. But we might take a leaf from the book
+of people who are not in society. They never ask anybody to meals if
+they can possibly help it; if some one happens in at meal-times they
+tell him to pull up a chair&mdash;if they have to, or he shows no signs
+first of going. But even among these people the instinct of
+hospitality&mdash;the feeding form of it&mdash;lurks somewhere. In our
+farm-boarding days&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't speak of them!" she implored.</p>
+
+<p>"We once went to an evening party," he pursued, "where raw apples and
+cold water were served."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought I should die of hunger. And when we got home to our own
+farmer's we ravaged the pantry for everything left from supper. It
+wasn't much. There!" Lindora screamed. "There <i>is</i> the taxi!" And the
+shuddering sound of the clock making time at their expense penetrated
+from the street. "Come!"</p>
+
+<p>"How the instinct of economy lingers in us,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+too, long after the use of it is outgrown. It's as bad as the instinct
+of hospitality. We could easily afford to pay extra for the comfort of
+sitting here over these broken victuals&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you we shall be left," she retorted; and in the thirty-five
+minutes they had at the station before their train started she
+outlined a scheme of social reform which she meant to put in force as
+soon as people began to gather in summer force at Lobster Cove.</p>
+
+<p>He derided the notion; but she said, "You will see!" and in rather
+more time than it takes to tell it they were settled in their cottage,
+where, after some unavoidable changes of cook and laundress, they were
+soon in perfect running order.</p>
+
+<p>By this time Lobster Cove was in the full tide of lunching and being
+lunched. The lunches were almost exclusively ladies' lunches, and the ladies
+came to them with appetites sharpened by the incomparable air of those real
+Lobster Cove days which were all cloudless skies and west winds, and by the
+vigorous automobile exercise of getting to one another's cottages. They
+seized every pretext for giving these feasts, marked each by some vivid
+touch of invention within the limits of the graceful convention which
+all felt bound not to transcend. It was some surprising flavor in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+salad, or some touch of color appealing to the eye only; or it was
+some touch in the ice-cream, or some daring substitution of a native
+dish for it, as strawberry or peach shortcake; or some bold
+transposition in the order of the courses; or some capricious
+arrangement of the decoration, or the use of wild flowers, or even
+weeds (as meadow-rue or field-lilies), for the local florist's
+flowers, which set the ladies screaming at the moment and talking of
+it till the next lunch. This would follow perhaps the next day, or the
+next but one, according as a new cottager's claims insisted or a lady
+had a change of guests, or three days at the latest, for no reason.</p>
+
+<p>In their rapid succession people scarcely noticed that Lindora had not
+given a lunch, and she had so far abandoned herself to the enjoyment
+of the others' lunches that she had half forgotten her high purposes
+of reform, when she was sharply recalled to them by a lunch which had
+not at all agreed with her; she had, in fact, had to have the doctor,
+and many people had asked one another whether they had heard how she
+was. Then she took her good resolution in both hands and gave an
+afternoon, asking people by note or 'phone simply whether they
+would not come in at four sharp. People were a good deal
+mystified, but for this very reason everybody came. Some
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>
+of them came from somebody's lunch, which had been so nice that they
+lingered over it till four, and then walked, partly to fill in the
+time and partly to walk off the lunch, as there would be sure to be
+something at Lindora's later on.</p>
+
+<p>It would be invidious to say what the nature of Lindora's
+entertainment was. It was certainly to the last degree original, and
+those who said the worst of it could say no worse than that it was
+queer. It quite filled the time till six o'clock, and may be perhaps
+best described as a negative rather than a positive triumph, though
+what Lindora had aimed at she had undoubtedly achieved. Whatever it
+was, whether original or queer, it was certainly novel.</p>
+
+<p>A good many men had come, one at least to every five ladies, but as
+the time passed and a certain blankness began to gather over the
+spirits of all, they fell into different attitudes of the despair
+which the ladies did their best to pass off for rapture. At each
+unscheduled noise they started in a vain expectation, and when the end
+came, it came so without accent, so without anything but the clock to
+mark it as the close, that they could hardly get themselves together
+for going away. They did what was nice and right, of course, in thanking
+Lindora for her fascinating afternoon, but when they were well beyond hearing
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+one said to another: "Well, I shall certainly have an appetite for my
+dinner <i>to-night</i>! Why, if there had only been a cup of the weakest
+kind of tea, or even of cold water!"</p>
+
+<p>Then those who had come in autos gathered as many pedestrians into
+them as they would hold in leaving the house, or caught them up
+fainting by the way.</p>
+
+<p>Lindora and Florindo watched them from their veranda.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my dear," he said, "it's been a wonderful afternoon; an immense
+stride forward in the cause of anti-eating&mdash;or&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't <i>speak</i> to me!" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>"But it leaves one rather hungry, doesn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Hungry!</i>" she hurled back at him. "I could eat a&mdash;I don't know
+what!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>CITY AND COUNTRY IN<br />
+THE FALL</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+<h2><a name="CITY_AND_COUNTRY_IN" id="CITY_AND_COUNTRY_IN"></a>CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL</h2>
+
+
+<h4>A Long-distance Eclogue</h4>
+
+<h4>1902</h4>
+
+<p>
+<i>Morrison.</i> Hello! Hello! Is that you, Wetherbee?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> Yes. Who are you? What do you want with me?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> Oh, nothing much. It's Morrison, you know;<br />
+Morrison&mdash;down at Clamhurst Shortsands.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;">Oh!</span><br />
+Why, Morrison, of course! Of course, I know!<br />
+How are you, Morrison? And, by the way,<br />
+<i>Where</i> are you? What! You never mean to say<br />
+You are down there <i>yet</i>? Well, by the Holy Poker!<br />
+What are you doing there, you ancient joker?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> Sticking it out over Thanksgiving Day.<br />
+I said I would. I tell you, it is gay<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
+Down here. You ought to see the Hunter's Moon,<br />
+These silver nights, prinking in our lagoon.<br />
+You ought to see our sunsets, glassy red,<br />
+Shading to pink and violet overhead.<br />
+You ought to see our mornings, still and clear,<br />
+White silence, far as you can look and hear.<br />
+You ought to see the leaves&mdash;our oaks and ashes<br />
+Crimson and yellow, with those gorgeous splashes,<br />
+Purple and orange, against the bluish green<br />
+Of the pine woods; and scattered in between<br />
+The scarlet of the maples; and the blaze<br />
+Of blackberry-vines, along the dusty ways<br />
+And on the old stone walls; the air just balm,<br />
+And the crows cawing through the perfect calm<br />
+Of afternoons all gold and turquoise. Say,<br />
+You ought to have been with wife and me to-day,<br />
+A drive we took&mdash;it would have made you sick:<br />
+The pigeons and the partridges so thick;<br />
+And on the hill just beyond Barkin's lane,<br />
+Before you reach the barn of Widow Payne,<br />
+Showing right up against the sky, as clear<br />
+And motionless as sculpture, stood a deer!<br />
+Say, does that jar you just a little? Say,<br />
+How have you found things up there, anyway,<br />
+Since you got back? Air like a cotton string<br />
+To breathe? The same old dust on everything,<br />
+And in your teeth, and in your eyes? The smoke<br />
+From the soft coal, got long beyond a joke?<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>
+The trolleys rather more upon your curves,<br />
+And all the roar and clatter in your nerves?<br />
+Don't you wish you had stayed here, too?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Well, yes,</span><br />
+I do at certain times, I must confess.<br />
+I swear it is enough at times to make you swear<br />
+You would almost rather be anywhere<br />
+Than here. The building up and pulling down,<br />
+The getting to and fro about the town,<br />
+The turmoil underfoot and overhead,<br />
+Certainly make you wish that you were dead,<br />
+At first; and all the mean vulgarity<br />
+Of city life, the filth and misery<br />
+You see around you, make you want to put<br />
+Back to the country anywhere, hot-foot.<br />
+Yet&mdash;there are compensations.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Such as?</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Why,</span><br />
+There is the club.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> The club I can't deny.</span><br />
+Many o' the fellows back there?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Nearly all.</span><br />
+Over the twilight cocktails there are tall<br />
+Stories and talk. But you would hardly care;<br />
+You have the natives to talk with down there,<br />
+And always find them meaty.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Well, so-so.</span><br />
+Their words outlast their ideas at times, you know,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>
+And they have <i>staying</i> powers. The theaters<br />
+All open now?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Yes, all. And it occurs</span><br />
+To me: there's one among the things that you<br />
+Would have enjoyed; an opera with the new&mdash;<br />
+Or at least the last&mdash;music by Sullivan,<br />
+And words, though not Gilbertian, that ran<br />
+Trippingly with it. Oh, I tell you what,<br />
+I'd rather that you had been there than not.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> Thanks ever so!<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Oh, there is nothing mean</span><br />
+About your early friend. That deer and autumn scene<br />
+Were kind of you! And, say, I think you like<br />
+Afternoon teas when good. I have chanced to strike<br />
+Some of the best of late, where people said<br />
+They had sent you cards, but thought you must be dead.<br />
+I told them I left you down there by the sea,<br />
+And then they sort of looked askance at me,<br />
+As if it were a joke, and bade me get<br />
+Myself some bouillon or some chocolate,<br />
+And turned the subject&mdash;did not even give<br />
+Me time to prove it is not life to live<br />
+In town as long as you can keep from freezing<br />
+Beside the autumn sea. A little sneezing,<br />
+At Clamhurst Shortsands, since the frosts set in?<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span><br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> Well, not enough to make a true friend grin.<br />
+Slight colds, mere nothings. With our open fires<br />
+We've all the warmth and cheer that heart desires.<br />
+Next year we'll have a furnace in, and stay<br />
+Not till Thanksgiving, but till Christmas Day.<br />
+It's glorious in these roomy autumn nights<br />
+To sit between the firelight and the lights<br />
+Of our big lamps, and read aloud by turns<br />
+As long as kerosene or hickory burns.<br />
+We hate to go to bed.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Of course you do!</span><br />
+And hate to get up in the morning, too&mdash;<br />
+To pull the coverlet from your frost-bit nose,<br />
+And touch the glary matting with your toes!<br />
+Are you beginning yet to break the ice<br />
+In your wash-pitchers? No? Well, that is nice.<br />
+I always hate to do it&mdash;seems as if<br />
+Summer was going; but when your hand is stiff<br />
+With cold, it can be done. Still, I prefer<br />
+To wash and dress beside my register,<br />
+When summer gets a little on, like this.<br />
+But some folks find the other thing pure bliss&mdash;<br />
+Lusty young chaps, like you.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 2em;"> And some folks find</span><br />
+A sizzling radiator to their mind.<br />
+What else have you, there, you could recommend<br />
+To the attention of a country friend?<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span><br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> Well, you know how it is in Madison Square,<br />
+Late afternoons, now, if the day's been fair&mdash;<br />
+How all the western sidewalk ebbs and flows<br />
+With pretty women in their pretty clo'es:<br />
+I've never seen them prettier than this year.<br />
+Of course, I know a dear is not a deer,<br />
+But still, I think that if I had to meet<br />
+One or the other in the road, or street,<br />
+All by myself, I am not sure but that<br />
+I'd choose the dear that wears the fetching hat.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> Get out! What else?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Well, it is not so bad,</span><br />
+If you are feeling a little down, or sad,<br />
+To walk along Fifth Avenue to the Park,<br />
+When the day thinks perhaps of getting dark,<br />
+And meet that mighty flood of vehicles<br />
+Laden with all the different kinds of swells,<br />
+Homing to dinner, in their carriages&mdash;<br />
+Victorias, landaus, chariots, coup&eacute;s&mdash;<br />
+There's nothing like it to lift up the heart<br />
+And make you realize yourself a part,<br />
+Sure, of the greatest show on earth.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Oh, yes,</span><br />
+I know. I've felt that rapture more or less.<br />
+But I would rather put it off as long<br />
+As possible. I suppose you like the song<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+Of the sweet car-gongs better than the cry<br />
+Of jays and yellowhammers when the sky<br />
+Begins to redden these October mornings,<br />
+And the loons sound their melancholy warnings;<br />
+Or honk of the wild-geese that write their A<br />
+Along the horizon in the evening's gray.<br />
+Or when the squirrels look down on you and bark<br />
+From the nut trees&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> We have them in the Park</span><br />
+Plenty enough. But, say, you aged sinner,<br />
+Have you been out much recently at dinner?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> What do you mean? You know there's no one here<br />
+That dines except ourselves now.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Well, that's queer!</span><br />
+I thought the natives&mdash; But I recollect!<br />
+It was not reasonable to expect&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> What are you driving at?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Oh, nothing much.</span><br />
+But I was thinking how you come in touch<br />
+With life at the first dinner in the fall,<br />
+When you get back, first, as you can't at all<br />
+Later along. But you, of course, won't care<br />
+With your idyllic pleasures.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> <i>Who was there?</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> Oh&mdash;ha, ha! What d'you mean by <i>there</i>?<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Come off!</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span><br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> What! you remain to pray that came to scoff!<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> You know what I am after.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> <span style="margin-left: 4em;"> Yes, that dinner.</span><br />
+Just a round dozen: Ferguson and Binner<br />
+For the fine arts; Bowyer the novelist;<br />
+Dr. Le Martin; the psychologist<br />
+Fletcher; the English actor Philipson;<br />
+The two newspaper Witkins, Bob and John;<br />
+A nice Bostonian, Bane the arch&aelig;ologer,<br />
+And a queer Russian amateur astrologer;<br />
+And Father Gray, the jolly ritualist priest,<br />
+And last your humble servant, but not least.<br />
+The food was not so filthy, and the wine<br />
+Was not so poison. We made out to dine<br />
+From eight till one <span class="smcap">A.M.</span> One could endure<br />
+The dinner. But, oh say! <i>The talk was poor!</i><br />
+Your natives down at Clamhurst&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> <span style="margin-left: 8em;"> Look ye here!</span><br />
+What date does Thanksgiving come on this year?<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wetherbee.</i> Why, I suppose&mdash;although I don't remember<br />
+Certainly&mdash;the usual 28th November.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Morrison.</i> Novem&mdash;You should have waited to get sober!<br />
+It comes on the 11th of October!<br />
+And that's to-morrow; and if you happen down<br />
+Later, you'd better look for us in town.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>TABLE TALK</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+<h2><a name="TABLE_TALK" id="TABLE_TALK"></a>TABLE TALK</h2>
+
+
+<p>They were talking after dinner in that cozy moment when the
+conversation has ripened, just before the coffee, into mocking guesses
+and laughing suggestions. The thing they were talking of was something
+that would have held them apart if less happily timed and placed, but
+then and there it drew these together in what most of them felt a
+charming and flattering intimacy. Not all of them took part in the
+talk, and of those who did, none perhaps assumed to talk with
+authority or finality. At first they spoke of the subject as <i>it</i>,
+forbearing to name it, as if the name of it would convey an unpleasant
+shock, out of temper with the general feeling.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't suppose," the host said, "that it's really so much commoner
+than it used to be. But the publicity is more invasive and explosive.
+That's perhaps because it has got higher up in the world and has spread
+more among the first circles. The time was when you seldom heard of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>
+it there, and now it is scarcely a scandal. I remember that when I
+went abroad, twenty or thirty years ago, and the English brought me to
+book about it, I could put them down by saying that I didn't know a
+single divorced person."</p>
+
+<p>"And of course," a bachelor guest ventured, "a person of that sort
+<i>must</i> be single."</p>
+
+<p>At first the others did not take the joke; then they laughed, but the
+women not so much as the men.</p>
+
+<p>"And you couldn't say that now?" the lady on the right of the host
+inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I don't know," he returned, thoughtfully, after a little
+interval. "I don't just call one to mind."</p>
+
+<p>"Then," the bachelor said, "that classes you. If you moved in our best
+society you would certainly know some of the many smart people whose
+disunions alternate with the morning murders in the daily papers."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, the fact seems to rank me rather low; but I'm rather proud of
+the fact."</p>
+
+<p>The hostess seemed not quite to like this arrogant humility. She said,
+over the length of the table (it was not very long), "I'm sure you
+know some very nice people who have not been."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes, I do. But are they really smart people? They're of very
+good family, certainly."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>
+"You mustn't brag," the bachelor said.</p>
+
+<p>A husband on the right of the hostess wondered if there were really
+more of the thing than there used to be.</p>
+
+<p>"Qualitatively, yes, I should say. Quantitatively, I'm not convinced,"
+the host answered. "In a good many of the States it's been made
+difficult."</p>
+
+<p>The husband on the right of the hostess was not convinced, he said, as
+to the qualitative increase. The parties to the suits were rich
+enough, and sometimes they were high enough placed and far enough
+derived. But there was nearly always a leak in them, a social leak
+somewhere, on one side or the other. They could not be said to be
+persons of quality in the highest sense.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, persons of quality seldom can be," the bachelor contended.</p>
+
+<p>The girl opposite, who had been invited to balance him in the scale of
+celibacy by the hostess in her study of her dinner-party, first
+smiled, and then alleged a very distinguished instance of divorce in
+which the parties were both of immaculate origin and unimpeachable
+fashion. "Nobody," she said, "can accuse <i>them</i> of a want of quality."
+She was good-looking, though no longer so young as she could have wished;
+she flung out her answer to the bachelor defiantly, but she addressed
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>
+it to the host, and he said that was true; certainly it was
+a signal case; but wasn't it exceptional? The others mentioned like
+cases, though none quite so perfect, and then there was a lull till
+the husband on the left of the hostess noted a fact which renewed the
+life of the discussion.</p>
+
+<p>"There was a good deal of agitation, six or eight years ago, about it.
+I don't know whether the agitation accomplished anything."</p>
+
+<p>The host believed it had influenced legislation.</p>
+
+<p>"For or against?" the bachelor inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, against."</p>
+
+<p>"But in other countries it's been coming in more and more. It seems to
+be as easy in England now as it used to be in Indiana. In France it's
+nothing scandalous, and in Norwegian society you meet so many
+disunited couples in a state of quadruplicate reunion that it is very
+embarrassing. It doesn't seem to bother the parties to the new
+relation themselves."</p>
+
+<p>"It's very common in Germany, too," the husband on the right of the
+hostess said.</p>
+
+<p>The husband on her left side said he did not know just how it was in
+Italy and Spain, and no one offered to disperse his ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>In the silence which ensued the lady on the left
+of the host created a diversion in her favor by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>
+saying that she had heard they had a very good law in Switzerland.</p>
+
+<p>Being asked to tell what it was, she could not remember, but her
+husband, on the right of the hostess, saved the credit of his family
+by supplying her defect. "Oh, yes. It's very curious. We heard of it
+when we were there. When people want to be put asunder, for any reason
+or other, they go before a magistrate and declare their wish. Then
+they go home, and at the end of a certain time&mdash;weeks or months&mdash;the
+magistrate summons them before him with a view to reconciliation. If
+they come, it is a good sign; if they don't come, or come and persist
+in their desire, then they are summoned after another interval, and
+are either reconciled or put asunder, as the case may be, or as they
+choose. It is not expensive, and I believe it isn't scandalous."</p>
+
+<p>"It seems very sensible," the husband on the left of the hostess
+said, as if to keep the other husband in countenance. But for an
+interval no one else joined him, and the mature girl said to the
+man next her that it seemed rather cold-blooded. He was a man who
+had been entreated to come in, on the frank confession that he was
+asked as a stop-gap, the original guest having fallen by the way.
+Such men are apt to abuse their magnanimity, their condescension. They
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+think that being there out of compassion, and in compliance with a
+hospitality that had not at first contemplated their presence, they
+can say anything; they are usually asked without but through their
+wives, who are asked to "lend" them, and who lend them with a grudge
+veiled in eager acquiescence; and the men think it will afterward
+advantage them with their wives, when they find they are enjoying
+themselves, if they will go home and report that they said something
+vexing or verging on the offensive to their hostess. This man now
+addressed himself to the lady at the head of the table.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce was an unquestionable
+evil?"</p>
+
+<p>The hostess looked with a frightened air to the right and left, and
+then down the table to her husband. But no one came to her rescue, and
+she asked feebly, as if foreboding trouble (for she knew she had taken
+a liberty with this man's wife), "Why, don't we?"</p>
+
+<p>"About one in seven of us doesn't," the stop-gap said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" the girl beside him cried out, in a horror-stricken voice which
+seemed not to interpret her emotion truly. "Is it so bad as that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps not quite, even if it is bad at all,"
+he returned, and the hostess smiled gratefully at
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>
+the girl for drawing his fire. But it appeared she had not, for he
+directed his further speech at the hostess again: really the most
+inoffensive person there, and the least able to contend with adverse
+opinions.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't believe we do think it an unquestionable evil, unless we
+think marriage is so." Everybody sat up, as the stop-gap had intended,
+no doubt, and he "held them with his glittering eye," or as many as he
+could sweep with his glance. "I suppose that the greatest hypocrite at
+this table, where we are all so frankly hypocrites together, will not
+deny that marriage is the prime cause of divorce. In fact, divorce
+couldn't exist without it."</p>
+
+<p>The women all looked bewilderedly at one another, and then appealingly
+at the men. None of these answered directly, but the bachelor softly
+intoned out of Gilbert and Sullivan&mdash;he was of that date:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><p><small>
+"'A paradox, a paradox;<br />
+A most ingenious paradox!'"
+</small></p></div>
+
+<p>"Yes," the stop-gap defiantly assented. "A paradox; and all aboriginal
+verities, all giant truths, are paradoxes."</p>
+
+<p>"Giant truths is good," the bachelor noted, but the stop-gap did not
+mind him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>
+He turned to the host: "I suppose that if divorce is an evil, and we
+wish to extirpate it, we must strike at its root, at marriage?"</p>
+
+<p>The host laughed. "I prefer not to take the floor. I'm sure we all
+want to hear what you have to say in support of your mammoth idea."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, indeed," the women chorused, but rather tremulously, as not
+knowing what might be coming.</p>
+
+<p>"Which do you mean? That all truth is paradoxical, or that marriage is
+the mother of divorce?"</p>
+
+<p>"Whichever you like."</p>
+
+<p>"The last proposition is self-evident," the stop-gap said, supplying
+himself with a small bunch of the grapes which nobody ever takes at
+dinner; the hostess was going to have coffee for the women in the
+drawing-room, and to leave the men to theirs with their tobacco at the
+table. "And you must allow that if divorce is a good thing or a bad
+thing, it equally partakes of the nature of its parent. Or else
+there's nothing in heredity."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come!" one of the husbands said.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well!" the stop-gap submitted. "I yield the word to you."
+But as the other went no further, he continued. "The case is so
+clear that it needs no argument. Up to this time, in dealing
+with the evil of divorce, if it is an evil, we have
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>
+simply been suppressing the symptoms; and your Swiss method&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it isn't <i>mine</i>," the man said who had stated it.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;Is only a part of the general practice. It is another attempt to
+make divorce difficult, when it is marriage that ought to be made
+difficult."</p>
+
+<p>"Some," the daring bachelor said, "think it ought to be made
+impossible." The girl across the table began to laugh hysterically,
+but caught herself up and tried to look as if she had not laughed at
+all.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't go as far as that," the stop-gap resumed, "but as an
+inveterate enemy of divorce&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>An "Oh!" varying from surprise to derision chorused up; but he did not
+mind it; he went on as if uninterrupted.</p>
+
+<p>"I should put every possible obstacle, and at every step, in the way
+of marriage. The attitude of society toward marriage is now simply
+preposterous, absolutely grotesque. Society? The whole human framework
+in all its manifestations, social, literary, religious, artistic, and
+civic, is perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the matter.
+Nothing is done to retard or prevent marriage; everything to
+accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue
+which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>
+vulgar and entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The
+blind and witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least
+with us, is flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and
+revered as if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse.
+But is it? I defy any one here to say that it is."</p>
+
+<p>As if they were afraid of worse things if they spoke, the company
+remained silent. But this did not save them.</p>
+
+<p>"You all know it isn't. You all know that it is the caprice of chance
+encounter, the result of propinquity, the invention of poets and
+novelists, the superstition of the victims, the unscrupulous
+make-believe of the witnesses. As an impulse it quickly wears itself
+out in marriage, and makes way for divorce. In this country
+nine-tenths of the marriages are love-matches. The old motives which
+delay and prevent marriage in other countries, aristocratic countries,
+like questions of rank and descent, even of money, do not exist. Yet
+this is the land of unhappy unions beyond all other lands, the very
+home of divorce. The conditions of marriage are ideally favorable
+according to the opinions of its friends, who are all more or less
+active in bottling husbands and wives up in its felicity and
+preventing their escape through divorce."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>
+Still the others were silent, and again the stop-gap triumphed on.
+"Now, I am an enemy of divorce, too; but I would have it begin before
+marriage."</p>
+
+<p>"Rather paradoxical again?" the bachelor alone had the hardihood to
+suggest.</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all. I am quite literal. I would have it begin with the
+engagement. I would have the betrothed&mdash;the mistress and the
+lover&mdash;come before the magistrate or the minister, and declare their
+motives in wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with
+them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to
+a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would
+quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not,
+he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think
+it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them,
+and dismiss them as before, if they continued obstinate. After three
+months more, he should call them before him and reason with them for
+the last time. If they persisted in spite of everything, he should
+marry them, and let them take the consequences."</p>
+
+<p>The stop-gap leaned back in his chair defiantly, and fixed the host with
+an eye of challenge. Upon the whole the host seemed not so much frightened.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>
+He said: "I don't see anything so original in all that.
+It's merely a travesty of the Swiss law of divorce."</p>
+
+<p>"And you see nothing novel, nothing that makes for the higher
+civilization in the application of that law to marriage? You all
+approve of that law because you believe it prevents nine-tenths of the
+divorces; but if you had a law that would similarly prevent
+nine-tenths of the marriages, you would need no divorce law at all."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know that," the hardy bachelor said. "What about the
+one-tenth of the marriages which it didn't prevent? Would you have the
+parties hopelessly shut up to them? Would you forbid <i>them</i> all hope
+of escape? Would you have no divorce for any cause whatever?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," the husband on the right of the hostess asked (but his wife on
+the right of the host looked as if she wished he had not mixed in),
+"wouldn't more unhappiness result from that one marriage than from all
+the marriages as we have them now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you both rather precipitate?" the stop-gap demanded. "I said,
+let the parties to the final marriage take the consequences. But if
+these consequences were too dire, I would not forbid them the hope of
+relief. I haven't thought the matter out very clearly yet, but there
+are one or two causes for divorce which I would admit."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>
+"Ah?" the host inquired, with a provisional smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, causes going down into the very nature of things&mdash;the nature of
+men and of women. Incompatibility of temperament ought always to be
+very seriously considered as a cause."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"And, above all," and here the stop-gap swept the board with his eye,
+"difference of sex."</p>
+
+<p>The sort of laugh which expresses uncertainty of perception and
+conditional approval went up.</p>
+
+<p>The hostess rose with rather a frightened air. "Shall we leave them to
+their tobacco?" she said to the other women.</p>
+
+<p>When he went home the stop-gap celebrated his triumph to his wife. "I
+don't think she'll ask you for the loan of me again to fill a place
+without you."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she answered, remotely. "You don't suppose she'll think we live
+unhappily together?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE ESCAPADE OF A<br />
+GRANDFATHER</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_ESCAPADE_OF_A" id="THE_ESCAPADE_OF_A"></a>THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Well, what are you doing here?" the younger of the two sages asked,
+with a resolute air of bonhomie, as he dragged himself over the
+asphalt path, and sank, gasping, into the seat beside the other in the
+Park. His senior lifted his head and looked him carefully over to make
+sure of his identity, and then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose, to answer your fatuous question, I am waiting here to get
+my breath before I move on; and in the next place, I am watching the
+feet of the women who go by in their high-heeled shoes."</p>
+
+<p>"How long do you think it will take you to get your breath in the
+atmosphere of these motors?" the younger sage pursued. "And you don't
+imagine that these women are of the first fashion, do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, but I imagine their shoes are. I have been calculating that their
+average heel is from an inch and a half to two inches high, and touches
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>
+the ground in the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece.
+As you seem to be fond of asking questions, perhaps you will like to
+answer one. Why do you think they do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wear shoes like that?" the younger returned, cheerily, and laughed as
+he added, "Because the rest do."</p>
+
+<p>"Mmm!" the elder grumbled, not wholly pleased, and yet not refusing
+the answer. He had been having a little touch of grippe, and was
+somewhat broken from his wonted cynicism. He said: "It's very strange,
+very sad. Just now there was such a pretty young girl, so sweet and
+fine, went tottering by as helpless, in any exigency, as the daughter
+of a thousand years of bound-feet Chinese women. While she tilted on,
+the nice young fellow with her swept forward with one stride to her
+three on the wide soles and low heels of nature-last boots, and kept
+himself from out-walking her by a devotion that made him grit his
+teeth. Probably she was wiser and better and brighter than he, but she
+didn't look it; and I, who voted to give her the vote the other day,
+had my misgivings. I think I shall satisfy myself for the next five
+years by catching cold in taking my hat off to her in elevators, and
+getting killed by automobiles in helping her off the cars, where I've
+given her my seat."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+"But you must allow that if her shoes are too tight, her skirts are
+not so tight as they were. Or have you begun sighing for the good old
+hobble-skirts, now they're gone?"</p>
+
+<p>"The hobble-skirts were prettier than I thought they were when they
+were with us, but the 'tempestuous petticoat' has its charm, which I
+find I'd been missing."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, at least it's a change," the younger sage allowed, "and I
+haven't found the other changes in our dear old New York which I look
+for when I come back in the fall."</p>
+
+<p>The sages were enjoying together the soft weather which lingered with
+us a whole month from the middle of October onward, and the afternoon
+of their meeting in the Park was now softly reddening to the dim
+sunset over the westward trees.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," the elder assented. "I miss the new sky-scrapers which used to
+welcome me back up and down the Avenue. But there are more automobiles
+than ever, and the game of saving your life from them when you cross
+the street is madder and merrier than I have known it before."</p>
+
+<p>"The war seems to have stopped building because people can't afford
+it," the other suggested, "but it has only increased automobiling."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, people can't afford that, either. Nine-tenths
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>
+of them are traveling the road to ruin, I'm told, and apparently they
+can't get over the ground too fast. Just look!" and the sages joined
+in the amused and mournful contemplation of the different types of
+motors innumerably whirring up and down the drive before them, while
+they choked in the fumes of the gasolene.</p>
+
+<p>The motors were not the costliest types, except in a few instances,
+and in most instances they were the cheaper types, such as those who
+could not afford them could at least afford best. The sages had found
+a bench beside the walk where the statue of Daniel Webster looks down
+on the confluence of two driveways, and the stream of motors, going
+and coming, is like a seething torrent either way.</p>
+
+<p>"The mystery is," the elder continued, "why they should want to do it
+in the way they do it. Are they merely going somewhere and must get
+there in the shortest time possible, or are they arriving on a wager?
+If they are taking a pleasure drive, what a droll idea of pleasure
+they must have! Maybe they are trying to escape Black Care, but they must
+know he sits beside the chauffeur as he used to sit behind the horseman,
+and they know that he has a mortgage in his pocket, and can foreclose
+it any time on the house they have hypothecated to buy their car. Ah!"
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>
+The old man started forward with the involuntary impulse of
+rescue. But it was not one of the people who singly, or in terrorized
+groups, had been waiting at the roadside to find their way across; it
+was only a hapless squirrel of those which used to make their way
+safely among the hoofs and wheels of the kind old cabs and carriages,
+and it lay instantly crushed under the tire of a motor. "He's done
+for, poor little wretch! They can't get used to the change. Some day a
+policeman will pick <i>me</i> up from under a second-hand motor. I wonder
+what the great Daniel from his pedestal up there would say if he came
+to judgment."</p>
+
+<p>"He wouldn't believe in the change any more than that squirrel. He
+would decide that he was dreaming, and would sleep on, forgetting and
+forgotten."</p>
+
+<p>"Forgotten," the elder sage assented. "I remember when his fame filled
+the United States, which was then the whole world to me. And now I
+don't imagine that our hyphenated citizens have the remotest
+consciousness of him. If Daniel began delivering one of his
+liberty-and-union-now-and-forever-one-and-inseparable speeches, they
+wouldn't know what he was talking about." The sage laughed and champed
+his toothless jaws together, as old men do in the effort to compose
+their countenances after an emotional outbreak.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>
+"Well, for one thing," the younger observed, "they wouldn't understand
+what he said. You will notice, if you listen to them going by, that
+they seldom speak English. That's getting to be a dead language in New
+York, though it's still used in the newspapers." He thought to hearten
+the other with his whimsicality, for it seemed to him that the elder
+sage was getting sensibly older since their last meeting, and that he
+would be the gayer for such cheer as a man on the hither side of
+eighty can offer a man on the thither. "Perhaps the Russian Jews would
+appreciate Daniel if he were put into Yiddish for them. They're the
+brightest intelligences among our hyphenates. And they have the
+old-fashioned ideals of liberty and humanity, perhaps because they've
+known so little of either."</p>
+
+<p>His gaiety did not seem to enliven his senior much. "Ah, the old
+ideals!" he sighed. "The old ideal of an afternoon airing was a gentle
+course in an open carriage on a soft drive. Now it's a vertiginous
+whirl on an asphalted road, round and round and round the Park till
+the victims stagger with their brains spinning after they get out of
+their cars."</p>
+
+<p>The younger sage laughed. "You've been listening to the pessimism of
+the dear old fellows who drive the few lingering victorias. If you'd
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>
+believe them, all these people in the motors are chauffeurs giving
+their lady-friends joy-rides."</p>
+
+<p>"Few?" the elder retorted. "There are lots of them. I've counted
+twenty in a single round of the Park. I was proud to be in one of
+them, though my horse left something to be desired in the way of youth
+and beauty. But I reflected that I was not very young or beautiful
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>As the sages sat looking out over the dizzying whirl of the motors
+they smoothed the tops of their sticks with their soft old hands, and
+were silent oftener than not. The elder seemed to drowse off from the
+time and place, but he was recalled by the younger saying, "It is
+certainly astonishing weather for this season of the year."</p>
+
+<p>The elder woke up and retorted, as if in offense: "Not at all. I've
+seen the cherries in blossom at the end of October."</p>
+
+<p>"They didn't set their fruit, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;no."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! Well, I saw a butterfly up here in the sheep-pasture the other
+day. I could have put out my hand and caught it. It's the soft weather
+that brings your victorias out like the belated butterflies. Wait till
+the first cold snap, and there won't be a single victoria or butterfly
+left."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," the elder assented, "we butterflies and
+victorias belong to the youth of the year and the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+world. And the sad thing is that we won't have our palingenesis."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" the younger sage demanded. "What is to prevent your coming
+back in two or three thousand years?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if we came back in a year even, we shouldn't find room, for one
+reason. Haven't you noticed how full to bursting the place seems?
+Every street is as packed as lower Fifth Avenue used to be when the
+operatives came out of the big shops for their nooning. The city's
+shell hasn't been enlarged or added to, but the life in it has
+multiplied past its utmost capacity. All the hotels and houses and
+flats are packed. The theaters, wherever the plays are bad enough,
+swarm with spectators. Along up and down every side-streets the motors
+stand in rows, and at the same time the avenues are so dense with them
+that you are killed at every crossing. There has been no building to
+speak of during the summer, but unless New York is overbuilt next year
+we must appeal to Chicago to come and help hold it. But I've an idea
+that the victorias are remaining to stay; if some sort of mechanical
+horse could be substituted for the poor old animals that remind me of
+my mortality, I should be sure of it. Every now and then I get an
+impression of permanence in the things of the Park. As long as the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>
+peanut-men and the swan-boats are with us I sha'n't quite despair.
+And the other night I was moved almost to tears by the sight of a
+four-in-hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue drive. There it was,
+like some vehicular phantom, but how, whence, when? It came, as if out
+of the early eighteen-nineties; two middle-aged grooms, with their
+arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it's the rumble), but of all the
+young people who ought to have flowered over the top none was left but
+the lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box. I've tried every
+evening since for that four-in-hand, but I haven't seen it, and I've
+decided it wasn't a vehicular phantom, but a mere dream of the past."</p>
+
+<p>"Four-horse dream," the younger sage commented, as if musing aloud.</p>
+
+<p>The elder did not seem quite pleased. "A joke?" he challenged.</p>
+
+<p>"Not necessarily. I suppose I was the helpless prey of the rhyme."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know you were a poet."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not, always. But didn't it occur to you that danger for danger
+your four-in-hand was more dangerous than an automobile to the passing
+human creature?"</p>
+
+<p>"It might have been if it had been multiplied by ten thousand. But
+there was only one of it, and it wasn't going twenty miles an hour."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+"That's true," the younger sage assented. "But there was always a
+fearful hazard in horses when we had them. We supposed they were
+tamed, but, after all, they were only <i>trained</i> animals, like
+Hagenback's."</p>
+
+<p>"And what is a chauffeur?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you have me there!" the younger said, and he laughed generously.
+"Or you would have if I hadn't noticed something like amelioration in
+the chauffeurs. At any rate, the taxis are cheaper than they were, and
+I suppose something will be done about the street traffic some time.
+They're talking now about subway crossings. But I should prefer
+overhead foot-bridges at all the corners, crossing one another
+diagonally. They would look like triumphal arches, and would serve the
+purpose of any future Dewey victory if we should happen to have
+another hero to win one."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we must hope for the best. I rather like the notion of the
+diagonal foot-bridges. But why not Rows along the second stories as
+they have them in Chester? I should be pretty sure of always getting
+home alive if we had them. Now if I'm not telephoned for at a hospital
+before I'm restored to consciousness, I think myself pretty lucky. And
+yet it seems but yesterday, as the people used to say in the plays, since I had
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+a pride in counting the automobiles as I walked up the Avenue.
+Once I got as high as twenty before I reached Fifty-ninth
+Street. Now I couldn't count as many horse vehicles."</p>
+
+<p>The elder sage mocked himself in a feeble laugh, but the younger tried
+to be serious. "We don't realize the absolute change. Our streets are
+not streets any more; they are railroad tracks with locomotives let
+loose on them, and no signs up to warn people at the crossings. It's
+pathetic to see the foot-passengers saving themselves, especially the
+poor, pretty, high-heeled women, looking this way and that in their
+fright, and then tottering over as fast as they can totter."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I should have said it was outrageous, humiliating, insulting,
+once, but I don't any more; it would be no use."</p>
+
+<p>"No; and so much depends upon the point of view. When I'm on foot I
+feel all my rights invaded, but when I'm in a taxi it amuses me to see
+the women escaping; and I boil with rage in being halted at every
+other corner by the policeman with his new-fangled semaphore, and it's
+"Go" and "Stop" in red and blue, and my taxi-clock going round all the
+time and getting me in for a dollar when I thought I should keep
+within seventy cents. Then I feel that pedestrians of every age and
+sex ought to be killed."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>
+"Yes, there's something always in the point of view; and there's some
+comfort when you're stopped in your taxi to feel that they often <i>do</i>
+get killed."</p>
+
+<p>The sages laughed together, and the younger said: "I suppose when we
+get aeroplanes in common use, there'll be annoying traffic
+regulations, and policemen anchored out at intervals in the central
+blue to enforce them. After all&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>What he was going to add in amplification cannot be known, for a
+girlish voice, trying to sharpen itself from its native sweetness to a
+conscientious severity, called to them as its owner swiftly advanced
+upon the elder sage: "Now, see here, grandfather! This won't do at
+all. You promised not to leave that bench by the Indian Hunter, and
+here you are away down by the Falconer, and we've been looking
+everywhere for you. It's too bad! I shall be afraid to trust you at
+all after this. Why, it's horrid of you, grandfather! You might have
+got killed crossing the drive."</p>
+
+<p>The grandfather looked up and verified the situation, which seemed to
+include a young man, tall and beautiful, but neither so handsome nor
+so many heads high as the young men in the advertisements of
+ready-to-wear clothing, who smiled down on the young girl as if he had
+arrived with her, and were finding an amusement in her severity
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+which he might not, later. She was, in fact, very pretty, and her skirt
+flared in the fashion of the last moment, as she stooped threateningly
+yet fondly over her grandfather.</p>
+
+<p>The younger sage silently and somewhat guiltily escaped from the
+tumult of emotion which ignored him, and shuffled slowly down the
+path. The other finally gave an "Oh!" of recognition, and then said,
+for all explanation and excuse, "I didn't know what had become of
+you," and then they all laughed.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>SELF-SACRIFICE: A<br />
+FARCE-TRAGEDY</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+<h2><a name="SELF-SACRIFICE_A_FARCE-TRAGEDY" id="SELF-SACRIFICE_A_FARCE-TRAGEDY"></a>SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY</h2>
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+<h4>MISS ISOBEL RAMSEY AND MISS ESTHER GARNETT</h4>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And they were really understood to be engaged?" Miss
+Ramsey is a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of nearly the length of two
+lady's umbrellas and the bulk of one closely folded in its sheath. She
+stands with her elbow supported on the corner of the mantel, her
+temple resting on the knuckle of a thin, nervous hand, in an effect of
+thoughtful absent-mindedness. Miss Garnett, more or less Merovingian
+in a costume that lends itself somewhat reluctantly to a low, thick
+figure, is apparently poising for departure, as she stands before the
+chair from which she has risen beside Miss Ramsey's tea-table and
+looks earnestly up into Miss Ramsey's absent face. Both are very
+young, but aim at being much older than they are, with occasional
+lapses into extreme girlhood.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes, distinctly. I knew you couldn't know, and I
+thought you ought to." She speaks in a deep conviction-bearing and
+conviction-carrying voice. "If he has been coming here so much."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with what seems temperamental abruptness: "Sit down.
+One can always think better sitting down." She catches a chair under
+her with a deft movement of her heel, and Miss Garnett sinks
+provisionally into her seat. "And I think it needs thought, don't
+you?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "That is what I expected of you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And have some more tea. There is nothing like <i>fresh</i>
+tea for clearing the brain, and we certainly need clear brains for
+this." She pushes a button in the wall beside her, and is silent till
+the maid appears. "More tea, Nora." She is silent again while the maid
+reappears with the tea and disappears. "I don't know that he has been
+coming here so <i>very</i> much. But he has no right to be coming at all,
+if he is engaged. That is, in that <i>way</i>."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "No. Not unless&mdash;he wishes he wasn't."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "That would give him <i>less</i> than no right."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "That is true. I didn't think of it in that light."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I'm trying to decide what I ought to do if he does
+want to get off. She said herself that they were engaged?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "As much as that. Conny understood her to say so. And
+Conny never makes a mistake in what people say. Emily didn't say
+<i>whom</i> she was engaged to, but Conny felt that that was to come later,
+and she did not quite feel like asking, don't you know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Of course. And how came she to decide that it was Mr.
+Ashley?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Simply by putting two and two together. They two were
+together the whole time last summer."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I see. Then there is only one thing for me to do."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, admiringly: "I knew you would say that."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, dreamily: "The question is what the thing is."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "That is what I wish to think over. Chocolates?" She
+offers a box, catching it with her left hand from the mantel at her
+shoulder, without rising.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Thank you; do you think they go well with tea?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "They go well with anything.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>
+But we mustn't allow our minds to be distracted. The case is simply
+this: If Mr. Ashley is engaged to Emily Fray, he has no right to go
+round calling on other girls&mdash;well, as if he wasn't&mdash;and he
+has been calling here a great deal. That is perfectly evident. He must
+be made to feel that girls are not to be trifled with&mdash;that they
+are not mere toys."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "How splendidly you do reason! And he ought to
+understand that Emily has a right&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Oh, I don't know that I care about <i>her</i>&mdash;or not
+<i>pri</i>marily. Or do you say pri<i>mar</i>ily?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "I never know. I only use it in writing."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "It's a clumsy word; I don't know that I shall. But
+what I mean is that I must act from a general principle, and that
+principle is that when a man is engaged, it doesn't matter whether the
+girl has thrown herself at him, or not&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "She certainly did, from what Conny says."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "He must be shown that other girls won't tolerate his
+behaving as if he were <i>not</i> engaged. It is wrong."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "We must stand together."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Yes. Though I don't infer that he has been attentive
+to other girls generally."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "No. I meant that if he has been coming here so much,
+you want to prevent his trifling with others."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Something like that. But it ought to be more definite.
+He ought to realize that if another girl cared for him, it would be
+cruel to her, paying her attentions, when he was engaged to some one
+else."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "And cruel to the girl he is engaged to."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Yes." She speaks coldly, vaguely. "But that is the
+personal ground, and I wish to avoid that. I wish to deal with him
+purely in the abstract."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes, I understand that. And at the same time you wish
+to punish him. He ought to be made to feel it all the more because he
+is so severe himself."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Severe?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Not tolerating anything that's the least out of the
+way in other people. Taking you up about your ideas and showing where
+you're wrong, or even silly. Spiritually snubbing, Conny calls it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Oh, I like that in him. It's so
+invigorating. It braces up all your good resolutions.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>
+It makes you ashamed; and shame is sanative."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "That's just what I told Conny, or the same thing. Do
+you think another one would hurt me? I will risk it, anyway." She
+takes another chocolate from the box. "Go on."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Oh, I was just wishing that I had been out longer, and
+had a little more experience of men. Then I should know how to act.
+How do you suppose people do, generally?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Why, you know, if they find a man in love with them,
+after he's engaged to another girl, they make him go back to her, it
+doesn't matter whether they're in love with him themselves or not."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I'm <i>not</i> in love with Mr. Ashley, please."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "No; I'm supposing an extreme case."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, after a moment of silent thought: "Did you ever hear of
+anybody doing it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Not just in our set. But I know it's done
+continually."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "It seems to me as if I had read something of the
+kind."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Oh yes, the books are full of it. Are those mallows?
+They might carry off the effects of the chocolates." Miss Ramsey passes
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>
+her the box of marshmallows which she has bent over the table to look at.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And of course they couldn't get into the books if they
+hadn't really happened. I wish I could think of a case in point."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Why, there was Peg Woffington&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with displeasure: "She was an actress of some sort,
+wasn't she?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, with meritorious candor: "Yes, she was. But she was a
+very <i>good</i> actress."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "What did <i>she</i> do?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Well, it's a long time since I read it; and it's
+rather old-fashioned now. But there was a countryman of some sort, I
+remember, who came away from his wife, and fell in love with Peg
+Woffington, and then the wife follows him up to London, and begs her
+to give him back to her, and she does it. There's something about a
+portrait of Peg&mdash;I don't remember exactly; she puts her face through
+and cries when the wife talks to the picture. The wife thinks it is a
+real picture, and she is kind of soliloquizing, and asking Peg to give
+her husband back to her; and Peg does, in the end. That part is
+beautiful. They become the greatest friends."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Rather silly, I should say."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes, it <i>is</i> rather silly, but I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>
+suppose the author thought she had to do something."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And disgusting. A married man, that way! I don't see
+any comparison with Mr. Ashley."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "No, there really isn't any. Emily has never asked you
+to give him up. And besides, Peg Woffington really liked him a
+little&mdash;loved him, in fact."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And I <i>don't</i> like Mr. Ashley at all. Of course I
+respect him&mdash;and I admire his intellect; there's no question about his
+being handsome; but I have never thought of him for a moment in any
+other way; and now I can't even respect him."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Nobody could. I'm sure Emily would be welcome to him
+as far as <i>I</i> was concerned. But he has never been about with me so
+much as he has with you, and I don't wonder you feel indignant."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, coldly: "I don't feel indignant. I wish to be just."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes, that is what I mean. And poor
+Emily is so uninteresting! In the play that Kentucky Summers
+does, she is perfectly fascinating at first, and you can see
+why the poor girl's fianc&eacute; should be so taken with her.
+But I'm sure no one could say you had ever given Mr.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>
+Ashley the least encouragement. It would be pure justice on your part.
+I think you are grand! I shall always be proud of knowing what you
+were going to do."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, after some moments of snubbing intention: "I don't know
+what I am going to do myself, yet. Or how. What <i>was</i> that play? I
+never heard of it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "I don't remember distinctly, but it was about a young
+man who falls in love with her, when he's engaged to another girl, and
+she determines, as soon as she finds it out, to disgust him, so that
+he will go back to the other girl, don't you know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "That sounds rather more practical than the Peg
+Woffington plan. What does she do?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Nothing you'd like to do."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I'd like to do something in such a cause. What does
+she do?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Oh, when he is calling on her, Kentucky Summers
+pretends to fly into a rage with her sister, and she pulls her hair
+down, and slams everything round the room, and scolds, and drinks
+champagne, and wants him to drink with her, and I don't know what all.
+The upshot is that he is only too glad to get away."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "It's rather loathsome, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Garnett</i>: "It <i>is</i> rather loathsome. But it was in a good cause,
+and I suppose it was what an actress would think of."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "An actress?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "I forgot. The heroine is a distinguished actress, you
+know, and Kentucky could play that sort of part to perfection. But I
+don't think a lady would like to cut up, much, in the <i>best</i> cause."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Cut up?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "She certainly frisks about the room a good deal. How
+delicious these mallows are! Have you ever tried toasting them?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "At school. There seems an idea in it. And the hero
+isn't married. I don't like the notion of a married man."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Oh, I'm quite sure he isn't married. He's merely
+engaged. That makes the whole difference from the Peg Woffington
+story. And there's no portrait, I'm confident, so that you wouldn't
+have to do that part."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, haughtily: "I don't propose to do <i>any</i> part, if the
+affair can't be arranged without some such mountebank business!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "You can manage it, if anybody can. You have so much
+dignity that you could awe him into doing his duty by a single glance.
+I wouldn't be in his place!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I shall not give him a glance. I shall not see him
+when he comes. That will be simpler still." To Nora, at the door:
+"What is it, Nora?"</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<h4>NORA, MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT</h4>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "Mr. Ashley, Miss Ramsey."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with a severity not meant for Nora: "Ask him to sit
+down in the reception-room a moment."</p>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<h4>MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT</h4>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, rising and seizing Miss Ramsey's hands: "Oh, Isobel!
+But you will be equal to it! Oh! Oh!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with state: "Why are you going, Esther? Sit down."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "If I only <i>could</i> stay! If I could
+hide under the sofa, or behind the screen! Isn't it
+wonderful&mdash;providential&mdash;his coming at the very instant?
+Oh, Isobel!" She clasps her friend convulsively, and after a moment's
+resistance Miss Ramsey yields to her emotion, and they hide their
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>
+faces in each other's neck, and strangle their hysteric laughter. They
+try to regain their composure, and then abandon the effort with a
+shuddering delight in the perfection of the incident. "What shall you
+do? Shall you trust to inspiration? Shall you make him show his hand
+first, and then act? Or shall you tell him at once that you know all,
+and&mdash; Or no, of course you can't do that. He's not supposed to
+know that you know. Oh, I can imagine the freezing hauteur that you'll
+receive him with, and the icy indifference you'll let him understand
+that he isn't a <i>persona grata</i> with! If I were only as tall as you!
+He isn't as tall himself, and you can tower over him. Don't sit down,
+or bend, or anything; just stand with your head up, and glance
+carelessly at him under your lashes as if nobody was there! Then it
+will gradually dawn upon him that you know everything, and he'll
+simply go through the floor." They take some ecstatic turns about the
+room, Miss Ramsey waltzing as gentleman. She abruptly frees herself.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "No. It can't be as tacit as all that. There must be
+something explicit. As you say, I must <i>do</i> something to cure him of
+his fancy&mdash;his perfidy&mdash;and make him glad to go back to her."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes! Do you think he deserves it?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I've no wish to punish him."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "How noble you are! I don't wonder he adores you. <i>I</i>
+should. But you won't find it so easy. You must do something drastic.
+It <i>is</i> drastic, isn't it? or do I mean static? One of those things
+when you simply crush a person. But now I must go. How I should like
+to listen at the door! We must kiss each other very quietly, and I
+must slip out&mdash; Oh, you dear! How I long to know what you'll do! But it
+will be perfect, whatever it is. You always <i>did</i> do perfect things."
+They knit their fingers together in parting. "On second thoughts I
+won't kiss you. It might unman you, and you need all your strength.
+Unman isn't the word, exactly, but you can't say ungirl, can you? It
+would be ridiculous. Though girls are as brave as men when it comes to
+duty. Good-by, dear!" She catches Miss Ramsey about the neck, and
+pressing her lips silently to her cheek, runs out. Miss Ramsey rings
+and the maid appears.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<h4>NORA, MISS RAMSEY</h4>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, starting: "Oh! Is that you, Nora? Of course! Nora!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Do you know where my brother keeps his cigarettes?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "Why, in his room, Miss Ramsey; you told him you didn't like
+the smell here."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Yes, yes. I forgot. And has he got any cocktails?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "He's got the whole bottle full of them yet."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Full yet?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "You wouldn't let him offer them to the gentlemen he had to
+lunch, last week, because you said&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "What did I say?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Nora</i>: "They were vulgar."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And so they are. And so much the better! Bring the
+cigarettes and the bottle and some glasses here, Nora, and then ask
+Mr. Ashley to come." She walks away to the window, and hurriedly hums
+a musical comedy waltz, not quite in tune, as from not remembering
+exactly, and after Nora has tinkled in with a tray of glasses she
+lights a cigarette and stands puffing it, gasping and coughing a
+little, as Walter Ashley enters. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! Sorry to make you
+wait."</p>
+
+
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<h4>MR. ASHLEY, MISS RAMSEY</h4>
+
+<p><i>Mr. Ashley</i>: "The time <i>has</i> seemed long,
+but I could have waited all day. I couldn't have gone
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>
+without seeing you, and telling you&mdash;" He
+pauses, as if bewildered at the spectacle of Miss Ramsey's resolute
+practice with the cigarette, which she now takes from her lips and
+waves before her face with innocent recklessness.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, chokingly: "Do sit down." She drops into an easy-chair
+beside the tea-table, and stretches the tips of her feet out beyond
+the hem of her skirt in extremely lady-like abandon. "Have a
+cigarette." She reaches the box to him.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Thank you. I won't smoke, I believe." He stands frowning,
+while she throws her cigarette into a teacup and lights another.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I thought everybody smoked. Then have a cocktail."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "A what?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "A cocktail. So many people like them with their tea,
+instead of rum, you know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "No, I didn't know." He regards her with amaze, rapidly
+hardening into condemnation.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I hope you don't <i>object</i> to smoking. Englishwomen all
+smoke."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I think I've heard. I didn't know that American ladies
+did."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "They don't, <i>all</i>. But they will when they find how
+nice it is."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>
+<i>Ashley</i>: "And do Englishwomen all drink cocktails?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "They will when they find how nice it is. But why do
+you keep standing? Sit down, if it's only for a moment. There is
+something I would like to talk with you about. What were you saying
+when you came in? I didn't catch it quite."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Nothing&mdash;now&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "And I can't persuade you to have a cocktail? I believe
+I'll have another myself." She takes up the bottle, and tries several
+times to pour from it. "I do believe Nora's forgotten to open it! That
+is a good joke on me. But I mustn't let her know. Do you happen to
+have a pocket-corkscrew with you, Mr. Ashley?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "No&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Well, never mind." She tosses her cigarette into the
+grate, and lights another. "I wonder why they always have cynical
+persons smoke, on the stage? I don't see that the two things
+necessarily go together, but it does give you a kind of thrill when
+they strike a match, and it lights up their faces when they put it to
+the cigarette. You know something good and wicked is going to happen."
+She puffs violently at her cigarette, and then suddenly flings
+it away and starts to her feet. "Will you&mdash;would
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>
+you&mdash;open the window?" She collapses into her chair.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>, springing toward her: "Miss Ramsey, are you&mdash;you are ill!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "No, no! The window! A little faint&mdash;it's so
+close&mdash; There, it's all right now. Or it will be&mdash;when&mdash;I've
+had&mdash;another cigarette." She leans forward to take one; Ashley gravely
+watches her, but says nothing. She lights her cigarette, but, without
+smoking, throws it away. "Go on."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I wasn't saying anything!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Oh, I forgot. And I don't know what we were talking
+about myself." She falls limply back into her chair and closes her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Sha'n't I ring for the maid? I'm afraid&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, imperiously: "Not at all. Not on any account." Far less
+imperiously: "You may pour me a cup of tea if you like. That will make
+me well. The full strength, please." She motions away the hot-water
+jug with which he has proposed qualifying the cup of tea which he
+offers her.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "One lump or two?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Only one, thank you." She takes the cup.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>
+<i>Ashley</i>, offering the milk: "Cream?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "A drop." He stands anxiously beside her while she
+takes a long draught and then gives back the cup. "That was perfect."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Another?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "No, that is just right. Now go on. Or, I forgot. You
+were not going on. Oh dear! How much better I feel. There must have
+been something poisonous in those cigarettes."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Yes, there was tobacco."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Oh, do you think it was the tobacco? Do throw the
+whole box into the fire! I shall tell Bob never to get cigarettes with
+tobacco in them after this. Won't you have one of the chocolates? Or a
+mallow? I feel as if I should never want to eat anything again. Where
+was I?" She rests her cheek against the side of her chair cushion, and
+speaks with closed eyes, in a weak murmur. Mr. Ashley watches her at
+first with anxiety, then with a gradual change of countenance until a
+gleam of intelligence steals into his look of compassion.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "You asked me to throw the cigarettes into the fire. But I
+want you to let me keep them."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with wide-flung eyes: "You? You said you wouldn't
+smoke."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>
+<i>Ashley</i>, laughing: "May I change my mind? One talks better." He
+lights a cigarette. "And, Miss Ramsey, I believe I <i>will</i> have a
+cocktail, after all."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Mr. Ashley!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>, without noting her protest: "I had forgotten that I had a
+corkscrew in my pocket-knife. Don't trouble yourself to ring for one."
+He produces the knife and opens the bottle; then, as Miss Ramsey rises
+and stands aghast, he pours out a glass and offers it to her, with
+mock devotion. As she shakes her head and recoils: "Oh! I thought you
+liked cocktails. They are very good after cigarettes&mdash;very reviving.
+But if you won't&mdash;" He tosses off the cocktail and sets down the
+glass, smacking his lips. "Tell your brother I commend his taste&mdash;in
+cocktails and"&mdash;puffing his cigarette&mdash;"tobacco. Poison for poison,
+let me offer you one of <i>my</i> cigarettes. They're milder than these."
+He puts his hand to his breast pocket.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with nervous shrinking: "No&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "It's just as well. I find that I hadn't brought mine with
+me." After a moment: "You are so unconventional, so fearless, that I
+should like your notion of the problem in a book I've just been reading.
+Why should the mere fact that a man is married to one woman prevent his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>
+being in love with another, or half a dozen others; or <i>vice versa</i>?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Mr. Ashley, do you wish to insult me?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Dear me, no! But put the case a little differently. Suppose
+a couple are merely engaged. Does that fact imply that neither has a
+right to a change of mind, or to be fancy free to make another
+choice?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, indignantly: "Yes, it does. They are as sacredly bound
+to each other as if they were married, and if they are false to each
+other the girl is a wretch, and the man is a villain! And if you think
+anything I have said can excuse you for breaking your engagement, or
+that I don't consider you the wickedest person in the world, and the
+most barefaced hypocrite, and&mdash;and&mdash;I don't know what&mdash;you are very
+much mistaken."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "What in the world are you talking about?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I am talking about you and your shameless perfidy."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "My shameless perf&mdash; I don't understand! I came here
+to tell you that I love you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "How dare you! To speak to me of that, when&mdash;
+Or perhaps you <i>have</i> broken with her, and think you are free to
+hoodwink some other poor creature. But you will find that you
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>
+have chosen the wrong person. And it's no excuse for you her being a little&mdash;a
+little&mdash;not so bright as some girls, and not so good-looking. Oh, it's
+enough to make any girl loathe her own looks! You mustn't suppose you
+can come here red-handed&mdash;yes, it's the same as a murder, and any true
+girl would say so&mdash;and tell me you care for me. No, Walter Ashley, I
+haven't fallen so low as that, though I <i>have</i> the disgrace of your
+acquaintance. And I hope&mdash;I hope&mdash;if you don't like my smoking, and
+offering you cocktails, and talking the way I have, it will be a
+lesson to you. And yes!&mdash;I <i>will</i> say it! If it will add to your
+misery to know that I did respect you very much, and thought
+everything&mdash;very highly&mdash;of you, and might have answered you very
+differently before, when you were free to tell me <i>that</i>&mdash;now
+I have nothing but the utmost abhorrence&mdash;and&mdash;disapproval of you.
+And&mdash;and&mdash; Oh, I don't see how you can be so hateful!" She hides her
+face in her hands and rushes from the room, overturning several chairs
+in her course toward the door. Ashley remains staring after her, while
+a succession of impetuous rings make themselves heard from the street
+door. There is a sound of opening it, and then a flutter of skirts and
+anxieties, and Miss Garnett comes running into the room.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span></p>
+<h4>VI</h4>
+
+<h4>MISS GARNETT, MR. ASHLEY</h4>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, to the maid hovering in the doorway: "Yes, I must have
+left it here, for I never missed it till I went to pay my fare in the
+motor-bus, and tried to think whether I had the exact dime, and if I
+hadn't whether the conductor would change a five-dollar bill or not,
+and then it rushed into my mind that I had left my purse somewhere,
+and I knew I hadn't been anywhere else." She runs from the mantel to
+the writing-desk in the corner, and then to the sofa, where, peering
+under the tea-table, she finds her purse on the shelf. "Oh, here it
+is, Nora, just where I put it when we began to talk, and I must have
+gone out and left it. I&mdash;" She starts with a little shriek, in
+encountering Ashley. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! What a fright you gave me! I was
+just looking for my purse that I missed when I went to pay my fare in
+the motor-bus, and was wondering whether I had the exact dime, or the
+conductor could change a five-dollar bill, and&mdash;" She discovers, or
+affects to discover, something strange in his manner. "What&mdash;what is
+the matter, Mr. Ashley?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I shall be glad to have you tell me&mdash;or any one."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Garnett</i>: "I don't understand. Has Isobel&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Miss Garnett, did you know I was engaged?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Why, yes; I was just going to congrat&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Well, don't, unless you can tell me whom I am engaged to."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Why, aren't you engaged to Emily Fray?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Not the least in the world."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, in despair: "Then <i>what</i> have I done? Oh, what a
+fatal, fatal scrape!" With a ray of returning hope: "But she told me
+<i>herself</i> that she was engaged! And you were together so much, last
+summer!" Desperately: "Then if she isn't engaged to you, whom is she
+engaged to?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "On general principles, I shouldn't know, but in this
+particular instance I happen to know that she is engaged to Owen
+Brooks. They were a great deal more together last summer."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, with conviction: "So they were!" With returning doubt:
+"But why didn't she say so?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I can't tell you; she may have had her reasons, or she may
+not. Can you possibly tell me, in return for my ignorance, why the fact
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+of her engagement should involve me in the strange way it seems
+to have done with Miss Ramsey?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, with a burst of involuntary candor: "Why, <i>I</i> did
+that. Or, no! What's she been doing?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Really, Miss Garnett&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "How can I tell you anything, if you don't tell me
+everything? You wouldn't wish me to betray confidence?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "No, certainly not. What was the confidence?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Well&mdash; But I shall have to know first
+what she's been doing. You must see that yourself, Mr. Ashley." He is
+silent. "Has she&mdash;has Isobel&mdash;been behaving&mdash;well, out of character?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Very much indeed."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "I expected she would." She fetches a thoughtful sigh,
+and for her greater emotional convenience she sinks into an easy-chair
+and leans forward. "Oh dear! It is a scrape." Suddenly and
+imperatively: "Tell me exactly what she did, if you hope for any help
+whatever."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Why, she offered me a cocktail&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Oh, how good! I didn't suppose she would dare! Well?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+<i>Ashley</i>: "And she smoked cigarettes&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "How perfectly divine! And what else?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>, coldly: "May I ask why you admire Miss Ramsey's behaving out
+of character so much? I think the smoking made her rather faint, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "She would have let it <i>kill</i> her! Never tell me that
+girls have no moral courage!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "But what&mdash;what was the meaning of it all?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>, thoughtfully: "I suppose if I got her in for it, I
+ought to get her out, even if I betray confidence."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "It depends upon the confidence. What is it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Why&mdash; But you're sure it's my duty?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "If you care what I think of her&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Oh, Mr. Ashley, you mustn't think it strange of
+Isobel, on my bended knees you mustn't! Why, don't you see? She was
+just doing it to disgust you!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Disgust me?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "Yes, and drive you back to Emily Fray."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Drive me ba&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Garnett</i>: "If she thought you were
+engaged to Emily, when you were coming here all
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+the time, and she wasn't quite sure that she hated to have you, don't
+you see it would be her duty to sacrifice herself, and&mdash; Oh, I
+suppose she's heard everything up there, and&mdash;" She catches
+herself up and runs out of the room, leaving Ashley to await the
+retarded descent of skirts which he hears on the stairs after the
+crash of the street door has announced Miss Garnett's escape. He
+stands with his back to the mantel, and faces Miss Ramsey as she
+enters the room.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VII</h4>
+
+<h4>MISS RAMSEY, ASHLEY</h4>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with the effect of cold surprise: "Mr. Ashley? I
+thought I heard&mdash; Wasn't Miss Garnett&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "She was. Did you think it was the street door closing on
+<i>me</i>?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "How should I know?" Then, courageously: "No, I didn't
+think it was. Why do you ask?" She moves uneasily about the room, with
+an air of studied inattention.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Because if you did, I can put you in the right, though I
+can't restore Miss Garnett's presence by my absence."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "You're rather&mdash;enigmatical."
+A ring is heard; the maid pauses at the doorway.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>
+"I'm not at home, Nora." To Mr. Ashley: "It seems to be very close&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "It's my having been smoking."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "<i>Your</i> having?" She goes to the window and tries to
+lift it.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Let <i>me</i>." He follows her to the window, where he stands
+beside her.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Now, she's seen me! And you here with me. Of course&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I shouldn't mind. But I'm so sorry if&mdash;and I will go."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "You can't go now&mdash;till she's round the corner. She'll
+keep looking back, and she'll think I made you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "But haven't you? Aren't you sending me back to Miss Fray to
+tell her that I must keep my engagement, though I care nothing for
+her, and care all the world for you? Isn't that what you want me to
+do?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "But you're not engaged to her! You just&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Just what?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, desperately: "You wish me to disgrace myself forever in
+your eyes. Well, I will; what does it matter now? I heard you telling
+Esther you were not engaged. I <i>over</i>heard you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I fancied you must."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I <i>tried</i> to overhear! I <i>eavesdropped</i>! I wish you to
+know that."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "And what do you wish me to do about it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I should think any self-respecting person would know.
+I'm <i>not</i> a self-respecting person." Her wandering gaze seems to fall
+for the first time upon the tray with the cocktails and glasses and
+cigarettes; she flies at the bell-button and presses it impetuously.
+As the maid appears: "Take these things away, Nora, please!" To Ashley
+when the maid has left the room: "Don't be afraid to say what you
+think of me!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I think all the world of you. But I should merely like to
+ask&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Oh, you can ask anything of me now!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>, with palpable insincerity: "I should like to ask why you
+don't respect yourself?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Was that what you were going to ask? I know it wasn't.
+But I will tell you. Because I have been a fool."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Thank you. Now I will tell you what I was really going to
+ask. Why did you wish to drive me back to Miss Fray when you knew that
+I would be false to her a thousand times if I could only once be true
+to you?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Now you <i>are</i> insulting me!
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>
+And that is just the point. You may be a very clever lawyer, Mr.
+Ashley, and everybody says you are&mdash;very able, and talented, and
+all that, but you can't get round that point. You may torture any
+meaning you please out of my words, but I shall always say you brought
+it on yourself."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Brought what on?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Mr. Ashley! I won't be cross-questioned."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Was that why you smoked, and poured cocktails out of an
+unopened bottle? Was it because you wished me to hate you, and
+remember my duty, and go back to Miss Fray? Well, it was a dead
+failure. It made me love you more than ever. I am a fool too, as you
+call it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Say anything you please. I have given you the right. I
+shall not resent it. Go on."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I should only repeat myself. You must have known how much I
+care for you, Isobel. Do you mind my calling you Isobel?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Not in the least if you wish to humiliate me by it. I
+should like you to trample on me in every way you can."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Trample on you? I would rather be run over by a
+steam-roller than tread on the least of your outlying feelings,
+dearest. Do you mind my saying dearest?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I have told you that you can say anything you like. I
+deserve it. But oh, if you have a spark of pity&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "I'm a perfect conflagration of compassion, darling. Do you
+object to darling?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, with starting tears: "It doesn't matter now." She has
+let her lovely length trail into the corner of the sofa, where she
+desperately reclines, supporting her elbow on the arm of it, and
+resting her drooping head on her hand. He draws a hassock up in front
+of her, and sits on it.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "This represents kneeling at your feet. One doesn't do it
+literally any more, you know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, in a hollow voice: "I should despise you if you did,
+and"&mdash;deeply murmurous&mdash;"I don't <i>wish</i> to despise you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "No, I understand that. You merely wish <i>me</i> to despise
+<i>you</i>. But why?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, nervously: "You know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "But I don't know&mdash;Isobel, dearest, darling, if you will
+allow me to express myself so fully. <i>How</i> should I know?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "I've told you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "May I take your hand? For good-by!" He possesses himself of
+it. "It seems to go along with those expressions."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, self-contemptuously: "Oh yes."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Thank you. Where were we?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>
+<i>Miss Ramsey</i>, sitting up and recovering her hand: "You were saying
+good-by&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Was I? But not before I had told you that I knew you were
+doing all that for my best good, and I wish&mdash;I <i>wish</i> you could have
+seen how exemplary you looked when you were trying to pour a cocktail
+out of a corked bottle, between your remarks on passionate fiction and
+puffs of the insidious cigarette! When the venomous tobacco began to
+get in its deadly work, and you turned pale and reeled a little, and
+called for air, it made me mentally vow to go back to Miss Fray
+instantly, whether I was engaged to her or not, and cut out poor old
+Brooks&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Was it Mr. Brooks? I didn't hear the name exactly."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "When I was telling Miss Garnett? I ought to have spoken
+louder, but I wasn't sure at the time you were listening. Though as
+you were saying, what does it matter now?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>: "Did I say that?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Words to that effect. And they have made me feel how
+unworthy of you I am. I'm not heroic&mdash;by nature. But I could be, if
+you made me&mdash;by art&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, springing to her feet indignantly: "Now, you are
+ridiculing me&mdash;you are making fun of me."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>
+<i>Ashley</i>, gathering himself up from his hassock with difficulty, and
+confronting her: "Do I look like a man who would dare to make fun of
+you? I am half a head shorter than you, and in moral grandeur you
+overtop me so that I would always have to wear a high hat when I was
+with you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, thoughtfully: "Plenty of girls are that way, now. But
+if you are ashamed of my being tall&mdash;" Flashingly, and with starting
+tears.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Ashamed! I can always look up to you, you can always stoop
+to me!" He stretches his arms toward her.</p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Ramsey</i>, recoiling bewildered: "Wait! We haven't got to that
+yet."</p>
+
+<p><i>Ashley</i>: "Oh, Isobel&mdash;dearest&mdash;darling! We've got past it! We're on
+the home stretch, now."</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>THE NIGHT BEFORE<br />
+CHRISTMAS</h1>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+<h2><a name="THE_NIGHT_BEFORE" id="THE_NIGHT_BEFORE"></a>THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS</h2>
+
+<h3>A MORALITY</h3>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<h4>MR. AND MRS. CLARENCE FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Clarence Fountain</i>, backing into the room, and closing the door
+noiselessly before looking round: "Oh, you poor thing! I can see that
+you are dead, at the first glance. I'm dead myself, for that matter."
+She is speaking to her husband, who clings with one hand to the
+chimney-piece, and supports his back with the other; from this hand a
+little girl's long stocking lumpily dangles; Mrs. Fountain, turning
+round, observes it. "Not finished yet? But I don't wonder! I wonder you've
+even begun. Well, now, <i>I</i> will take hold with you." In token of the aid
+she is going to give, Mrs. Fountain sinks into a chair and rolls a distracted
+eye over the littered and tumbled room. "It's worse than I thought it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>
+would be. You ought to have smoothed the papers out and laid them in a
+pile as fast as you unwrapped the things; that is the way I always do;
+and wound the strings up and put them one side. Then you wouldn't have
+had to wade round in them. I suppose I oughtn't to have left it to
+you, but if I had let <i>you</i> put the children to bed you know you'd
+have told them stories and kept them all night over their prayers. And
+as it was each of them wanted to put in a special Christmas clause; I
+know what kind of Christmas clause <i>I</i> should have put in if I'd been
+frank! I'm not sure it's right to keep up the deception. One comfort,
+the oldest ones don't believe in it any more than we do. Dear! I did
+think at one time this afternoon I should have to be brought home in
+an ambulance; it would have been a convenience, with all the packages.
+I simply marvel at their delivery wagons getting them here."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, coming to the table, where she sits, and taking up one of
+the toys with which it is strewn: "They haven't all of them."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "What do you mean by all of them?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I mean half." He takes up a mechanical locomotive and
+stuffs it into the stocking he holds.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>
+<i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, staying his hand: "What are you doing? Putting
+Jimmy's engine into Susy's stocking! She'll be perfectly insulted when
+she finds it, for she'll know you weren't paying the least attention,
+and you can't blame Santa Claus for it with <i>her</i>. If that's what
+you've been doing with the other stockings&mdash; But there <i>aren't</i> any
+others. Don't tell me you've just begun! Well, I could simply cry."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, dropping into the chair on the other side of the table,
+under the shelter of a tall Christmas tree standing on it: "Do you
+call unwrapping a whole car-load of truck and getting it sorted, just
+beginning? I've been slaving here from the dawn of time, and I had to
+have <i>some</i> leisure for the ghosts of my own Christmases when I was
+little. I didn't have to wade round in the wrappings of my presents in
+those days. But it isn't the sad memories that take it out of you;
+it's the happy ones. I've never had a ghastlier half-hour than I've
+just spent in the humiliating multiplicity of these gifts. All the old
+birthdays and wedding-days and Fourth of Julys and home-comings and
+children's christenings I've ever had came trooping back. There
+oughtn't to be any gay anniversaries; they should be forbidden by law.
+If I could only have recalled a few dangerous fevers and funerals!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>
+<i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Clarence! Don't say such a thing; you'll be punished
+for it. I know how you suffer from those gloomy feelings, and I pity
+you. You ought to bear up against them. If <i>I</i> gave way! You must
+think about something cheerful in the future when the happiness of the
+past afflicts you, and set one against the other; life isn't <i>all</i> a
+vale of tears. You must keep your mind fixed on the work before you. I
+don't believe it's the number of the packages here that's broken you
+down. It's the shopping that's worn you out; I'm sure I'm a mere
+thread. And I had been at it from immediately after breakfast; and I
+lunched in one of the stores with ten thousand suburbans who had come
+pouring in with the first of their unnatural trains: I did hope I
+should have some of the places to myself; but they were every one
+jammed. And you came up from your office about four, perfectly fresh."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Fresh! Yes, quite dewy from a day's fight with the beasts
+at Ephesus on the eve of Christmas week."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, don't be cynical, Clarence, on this, of all
+nights of the year. You know how sorry I always am for what you have to go
+through down there, and I suppose it's worse, as you say, at this season
+than any other time of year. It's the terrible concentration of everything
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+just before Christmas that makes it so killing. I really don't know
+which of the places was the worst; the big department stores or the
+separate places for jewelry and toys and books and stationery and
+antiques; they were all alike, and all maddening. And the rain
+outside, and everybody coming in reeking; though I don't believe that
+sunshine would have been any better; there'd have been more of them. I
+declare, it made my heart ache for those poor creatures behind the
+counters, and I don't know whether I suffered most for them when they
+kept up a ghastly cheerfulness in their attention or were simply
+insulting in their indifference. I know they must be all dead by this
+time. 'Going up?' 'Going down?' 'Ca-ish!' 'Here, boy!' I believe it
+will ring in my ears as long as I live. And the whiz of those overhead
+wire things, and having to wait ages for your change, and then drag
+your tatters out of the stores into the streets! If I hadn't had you
+with me at the last I should certainly have dropped."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Yes, and what had become of your good resolutions about
+doing all your Christmas shopping in July?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "<i>My</i> good resolutions? Really, Clarence, sometimes
+if it were not cruelty to animals I should like to hit you. <i>My</i> good&mdash; You
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>
+<i>know</i> that you suggested that plan, and it wasn't even
+original with you. The papers have been talking about it for years;
+but when you brought it up as such a new idea, I fell in with it to
+please you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Now, look out, Lucy!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Yes, to please you, and to help you forget the
+Christmas worry, just as I've been doing to-night. You never spare
+<i>me</i>."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Stick to the record. Why didn't you do your Christmas
+shopping in July?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Why didn't I? Did you expect me to do my Christmas
+shopping down at Sculpin Beach, where I spent the whole time from the
+middle of June till the middle of September? Why didn't <i>you</i> do the
+Christmas shopping in July? You had the stores under your nose here
+from the beginning till the end of summer, with nothing in the world
+to hinder you, and not a chick or a child to look after."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Oh, I like that. You think I was leading a life of
+complete leisure here, with the thermometer among the nineties
+nine-tenths of the time?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "I only know you were bragging in all your
+letters about your bath and your club, and the folly of any one
+going away from the cool, comfortable town in the summer. I suppose
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>
+you'll say that was to keep me from feeling badly at leaving you. When it was
+only for the children's sake! I will let you take them the next time."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "While you look after my office? And you think the stores
+are full of Christmas things in July, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "I never thought so; and now I hope you see the folly
+of that idea. No, Clarence. We must be logical in everything. You
+can't get rid of Christmas shopping at Christmas-time."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, shouting wrathfully: "Then I say get rid of Christmas!"</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<h4>MR. FRANK WATKINS, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Watkins</i>, opening the door for himself and struggling into the room
+with an armful of parcels: "I'm with you there, Clarence. Christmas is
+at the root of Christmas shopping, and Christmas giving, and all the
+rest of it. Oh, you needn't be afraid, Lucy. I didn't hear any
+epithets; just caught the drift of your argument through the keyhole.
+I've been kicking at the door ever since you began. Where shall I dump
+these things?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>
+<i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Oh, you poor boy! Here&mdash;anywhere&mdash;on the floor&mdash;on
+the sofa&mdash;on the table." She clears several spaces and helps Watkins
+unload. "Clarence! I'm surprised at you. What are you thinking of?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I'm thinking that if this goes on, I'll let somebody else
+arrange the presents."</p>
+
+<p><i>Watkins</i>: "If I saw a man coming into my house with a load like this
+to-night, I'd throw him into the street. But living in a ninth-story
+flat like you, it might hurt him."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, reading the inscriptions on the packages: "'For Benny
+from his uncle Frank.' Oh, how sweet of you, Frank! And here's a kiss
+for his uncle Frank." She embraces him with as little interruption as
+possible. "'From Uncle Frank to Jim.' Oh, I know what that is!" She
+feels the package over. "And this is for 'Susy from her aunt Sue.' Oh,
+I knew she would remember her namesake. 'For Maggie. Merry Christmas
+from Mrs. Watkins.' 'Bridget, with Mrs. Watkins's best wishes for a
+Merry Christmas.' Both the girls! But it's like Sue; she never forgets
+anybody. And what's this for Clarence? I <i>must</i> know! Not a
+bath-gown?" Undoing it: "I simply <i>must</i> see it. Blue! His very
+color!" Holding it up: "From you, Frank?" He nods. "Clarence!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>
+<i>Watkins</i>: "If Fountain tries to kiss me, I'll&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I wouldn't kiss you for a dozen bath-gowns." Lifting it
+up from the floor where Mrs. Fountain has dropped it: "It <i>is</i> rather
+nice."</p>
+
+<p><i>Watkins</i>: "Don't overwhelm me."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, dancing about with a long, soft roll in her hand: "Oh,
+oh, oh! She saw me gloating on it at Shumaker's! I do wonder if it
+<i>is</i>."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, reaching for it: "Why, open it&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "You dare! No, it shall be opened the very last thing
+in the morning, now, to punish you! How is poor Sue? I saw her
+literally dropping by the way at Shumaker's."</p>
+
+<p><i>Watkins</i>, making for the door: "Well, she must have got up again. I
+left her registering a vow that if ever she lived to see another
+Christmas she would leave the country months before the shopping
+began. She called down maledictions on all the recipients of her gifts
+and wished them the worst harm that can befall the wicked."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Poor Sue! She simply lives to do people good, and I
+can understand exactly how she feels toward them. I'll be round bright
+and early to-morrow to thank her. Why do you go?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Watkins</i>: "Well, I can't stay here all night, and I'd better let you
+and Clarence finish up." He escapes from her detaining embrace and
+runs out.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<h4>MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, intent upon her roll: "How funny he is! I wonder if
+he did hear anything but our scolding voices? Where were we?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I had just called you a serpent."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, with amusement: "No, really?" Feeling the parcel: "If
+it's that Spanish lace scarf I can tell her it was machine lace. I saw
+it at the first glance. But poor Sue has no taste. I suppose I must
+stand it. But I can't bear to think what she's given the girls and
+children. She means well. Did you really say serpent, Clarence? You
+never called me just <i>that</i> before."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "No, but you called me a laughing hyena, and said I
+scoffed at everything sacred."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "I can't remember using the word hyena, exactly,
+though I do think the way you talk about Christmas is dreadful. But I
+take back the laughing hyena."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "And I take back the serpent. I meant dove, anyway. But
+it's this Christmas-time when a man gets so tired he doesn't know
+what he's saying."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, <i>you're</i> good, anyway,
+dearest, whatever you say; and now I'm going to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>
+help you arrange the things. I suppose there'll be lots more
+to-morrow, but we must get rid of these now. Don't you wish nobody
+would do anything for us? Just the children&mdash;dear little souls! I
+don't believe but what we can make Jim and Susy believe in Santa Claus
+again; Benny is firm in the faith; he put him into his prayer. I
+declare, his sweetness almost broke my heart." At a knock: "Who's
+that, I wonder? Come in! Oh, it's you, Maggie. Well?"</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<h4>THE FOUNTAINS, FOUNTAIN'S SISTERS</h4>
+
+<p><i>Maggie</i>: "It's Mr. Fountain's sisters just telephoned up."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Have them come up at once, Maggie, of course." As
+Maggie goes out: "Another interruption! If it's going to keep on like
+this! Shouldn't you have thought they might have <i>sent</i> their
+presents?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I thought something like it in Frank's case; but I didn't
+say it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "And I don't know why <i>I</i> say it, now. It's because I'm so
+tired I don't know what I <i>am</i> saying. Do forgive me! It's this terrible Christmas
+spirit that gets into me. But now you'll see how nice I can be to them." At a tap
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>
+on the door: "Come in! Come in! Don't mind our being in all this mess.
+So darling of you to come! You can help cheer Clarence up; you know
+his Christmas Eve dumps." She runs to them and clasps them in her arms
+with several half-open packages dangling from her hands and
+contrasting their disarray with the neatness of their silk-ribboned
+and tissue-papered parcels which their embrace makes meet at her back.
+"Minnie! Aggie! To lug here, when you ought to be at home in bed dying
+of fatigue! But it's just like you, both of you. Did you ever see
+anything like the stores to-day? Do sit down, or swoon on the floor,
+or anything. Let me have those wretched bundles which are simply
+killing you." She looks at the different packages. "'For Benny from
+Grandpa.' 'For a good girl, from Susy's grandmother.' 'Jim, from Aunt
+Minnie and Aunt Aggie.' 'Lucy, with love from Aggie and Minnie.' And
+Clarence! What hearts you <i>have</i> got! Well, I always say there never
+were such thoughtful girls, and you always show such taste and such
+originality. I long to get at the things." She keeps fingering the
+large bundle marked with her husband's name. "Not&mdash;not&mdash;a&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Minnie</i>: "Yes, a bath-robe. Unless you give him a cigar-case it's
+about the only thing you can give a man."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>
+<i>Aggie</i>: "Minnie thought of it and I chose it. Blue, because it's his
+color. Try it on, Clarence, and if it's too long&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Yes, do, dear! Let's see you with it on." While the
+girls are fussily opening the robe, she manages to push her brother's
+gift behind the door. Then, without looking round at her husband. "It
+isn't a bit too long. Just the very&mdash;" Looking: "Well, it can easily
+be taken up at the hem. I can do it to-morrow." She abandons him to
+his awkward isolation while she chatters on with his sisters. "Sit
+down; I insist! Don't think of going. Did you see that frightful pack
+of people when the cab horse fell down in front of Shumaker's?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Minnie</i>: "See it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Aggie</i>: "We were in the midst of it! I wonder we ever got out alive.
+It's enough to make you wish never to see another Christmas as long as
+you live."</p>
+
+<p><i>Minnie</i>: "A great many <i>won't</i> live. There will be more grippe, and
+more pneumonia, and more appendicitis from those jams of people in the
+stores!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Aggie</i>: "The germs must have been swarming."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Lucy was black with them when we got home."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>
+<i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Don't pay the slightest attention to him, girls.
+He'll probably be the first to sneeze himself."</p>
+
+<p><i>Minnie</i>: "I don't know about sneezing. I shall only be too glad if I
+don't have nervous prostration from it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Aggie</i>: "I'm glad we got our motor-car just in time. Any one that
+goes in the trolleys now will take their life in their hand." The
+girls rise and move toward the door. "Well, we must go on now. We're
+making a regular round; you can't trust the delivery wagons at a time
+like this. Good-by. Merry Christmas to the children. They're fast
+asleep by this time, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p><i>Minnie</i>: "I only wish <i>I</i> was!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "I believe you, Minnie. Good-by. Good night. Good
+night, Aggie. Clarence, go to the elevator with them! Or no, he can't
+in that ridiculous bath-gown!" Turning to Fountain as the door closes:
+"Now I've done it."</p>
+
+
+<h4>V</h4>
+
+<h4>MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "It isn't a thing you could have wished to phrase that
+way, exactly."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "And you made me do it.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>
+Never thanking them, or anything, and standing there like I don't know
+what, and leaving the talk all to me. And now, making me lose my
+temper again, when I wanted to be so nice to you. Well, it is no use
+trying, and from this on I won't. <i>Clarence!</i>" She has opened the
+parcel addressed to herself and now stands transfixed with joy and
+wonder. "<i>See</i> what the girls have given me! The very necklace I've
+been longing for at Planets', and denying myself for the last
+fortnight! Well, never will I say your sisters are mean again."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "You ought to have said that to them."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "It quite reconciles one to Christmas. What? Oh, that
+<i>was</i> rather nasty. You know I didn't mean it. I was so excited I
+didn't know what I was saying. I'm sure nobody ever got on better with
+sisters-in-law, and that shows my tact; if I do make a slip, now and
+then, I can always get out of it. They will understand. Do you think
+it was very nice of them to flaunt their new motor in my face? But of
+course anything <i>your</i> family does is perfect, and always was, though
+I must say this necklace is sweet of them. I wonder they had the
+taste." A tap on the door is heard. "Come in, Maggie!" <i>Sotto voce.</i>
+"Take it off." She snatches his bath-robe and tosses it behind the door.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span></p>
+<h4>VI</h4>
+
+<h4>WILBUR HAZARD, THE FOUNTAINS</h4>
+
+<p><i>Hazard</i>: "I suppose I can come in, even if I'm not Maggie. Catch,
+Fountain." He tosses a large bundle to Fountain. "It's huge, but it
+isn't hefty." He turns to go out again.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Oh, oh, oh! Don't go! Come in and help us. What have
+you brought Clarence! May I feel?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Hazard</i>: "You can look, if you like. I'm rather proud of it. There's
+only one other thing you can give a man, and I said, 'No, not a
+cigar-case. Fountain smokes enough already, but if a bath-robe can
+induce him to wash&mdash;'" He goes out.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, screaming after him through the open door: "Oh, how
+good! Come back and see it on him." She throws the bath-robe over
+Fountain's shoulders.</p>
+
+<p><i>Hazard</i>, looking in again: "Perfect fit, just as the Jew said, and
+the very color for Fountain." He vanishes, shutting the door behind him.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VII</h4>
+
+<h4>MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "How coarse! Well, my dear, I don't know where you
+picked up your bachelor friends. I hope this is the last of them."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>
+<i>Fountain</i>: "Hazard's the only one who has survived your rigorous
+treatment. But he always had a passion for cold shoulder, poor fellow.
+As bath-robes go, this isn't bad." He gets his arms into it, and walks
+up and down. "Heigh?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Yes, it is pretty good. But the worst of Christmas
+is that it rouses up all your old friends."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "They feel so abnormally good, confound them. I suppose
+poor old Hazard half killed himself looking this thing up and building
+the joke to go with it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, take it off, now, and come help me with the
+children's presents. You're quite forgetting about them, and it'll be
+morning and you'll have the little wretches swarming in before you can
+turn round. Dear little souls! I can sympathize with their impatience,
+of course. But what are you going to do with these bath-robes? You
+can't wear <i>four</i> bath-robes."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I can change them every day. But there ought to be seven.
+This hood is rather a new wrinkle, though, isn't it? I suppose it's
+for a voyage, and you pull it up over your head when you come through
+the corridor back to your stateroom. We shall have to go to Europe,
+Lucy."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "I would go to Asia, Africa,
+and Oceanica, to escape another Christmas.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span>
+Now if there are any more bath-robes&mdash; Come in, Maggie."</p>
+
+
+<h4>VIII</h4>
+
+<h4>MAGGIE, THE FOUNTAINS</h4>
+
+<p><i>Maggie</i>, bringing in a bundle: "Something a District Messenger
+brought. Will you sign for it, ma'am?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "You sign, Clarence. If I know anything about the
+look and the feel of a bundle, this <i>is</i> another bath-robe, but I
+shall soon see." While she is cutting the string and tearing the
+wrappings away, Fountain signs and Maggie goes. Mrs. Fountain shakes
+out the folds of the robe. "Well, upon my word, I should think there
+was conspiracy to insult you, Clarence. I should like to know who has
+had the effrontery&mdash; What's on it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, reading from the card which had fallen out of the garment
+to the floor: "'With Christmas greetings from Mrs. Arthur J. Gibby.'"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, dropping the robe and seizing the card: "<i>Mrs.</i>
+Arthur J. Gibby! Well, upon my word, this <i>is</i> impudence. It's not
+only impudence, it's indelicacy. And I had always thought she was the
+very embodiment of refinement, and I've gone about saying so. Now I shall
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>
+have to take it back. The idea of a lady sending a bath-robe to
+a gentleman! What next, I wonder! What right has Mrs. Gibby to send
+you a bath-robe? Don't prevaricate! Remember that the truth is the
+only thing that can save you. Matters must have gone pretty far, when
+a woman could send you anything so&mdash;intimate. What are you staring at
+with that paper? You needn't hope to divert my mind by&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, giving her the paper in which the robe came: "Seems to be
+for <i>Mrs.</i> Clarence Fountain."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, snatching it from him: "What! It is, it is! Oh, poor
+dear Lilly! How can you ever forgive me? She saw me looking at it
+to-day at Shumaker's, and it must have come into her head in despair
+what else to get me. But it was a perfect inspiration&mdash;for it was just
+what I was longing for. Why"&mdash;laughing hysterically while she holds up
+the robe, and turns it this way and that&mdash;"I might have seen at a
+glance that it wasn't a man's, with this lace on and this silk hood,
+and"&mdash;she hurries into it, and pulls it forward, looking down at
+either side&mdash;"it's just the right length, and if it was made for me it
+couldn't fit me better. What a joke I <i>shall</i> have with Lilly, when I
+tell her about it. I sha'n't spare myself a bit!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Then I hope you'll spare me. I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>
+have some little delicacy of feeling, and I don't like the notion of a
+lady's giving me a bath-robe. It's&mdash;intimate. I don't know where
+you picked up your girl friends."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, capering about joyfully: "Oh, how funny you are,
+darling! But go on. I don't mind it, now. And you may be glad you've
+got off so easily. Only now if there are any more bath-robes&mdash;" A
+timid rap is heard at the door. "Come in, Maggie!" The door is slowly
+set ajar, then flung suddenly wide open, and Jim and Susy in their
+night-gowns rush dancing and exulting in.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IX</h4>
+
+<h4>JIM, SUSY, THE FOUNTAINS</h4>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "We've caught you, we've caught you."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>: "I just bet it was you, and now I've won, haven't I, mother?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "And I've won, too, haven't I, father?" Arrested at sight of
+her father in the hooded bath-gown: "He does look like Santa Claus,
+doesn't he, Jimmy? But the real Santa Claus would be all over snow,
+and a long, white beard. You can't fool <i>us</i>!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>: "You can't fool <i>us</i>! We know you, we know you! And mother
+dressed up, too! There isn't any Mrs. Santa Claus, and that proves
+it!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>
+<i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, severely: "Dreadful little things! Who said you might
+come here? Go straight back to bed, this minute, or&mdash; <i>Will</i> you send
+them back, Clarence, and not stand staring so? What are you thinking of?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, dreamily: "Nothing. Merely wondering what we shall do when
+we've got rid of our superstitions. Shall we be the better for it, or
+even the wiser?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "What put that question into your head? Christmas, I
+suppose; and that's another reason for wishing there was no such
+thing. If I had my way, there wouldn't be."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>: "Oh, mother!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "No Christmas?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, not for disobedient children who get out of
+bed and come in, spoiling everything. If you don't go straight back,
+it will be the last time, Santa Claus or no Santa Claus."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>: "And if we go right back?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "And promise not to come in any more?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, we'll see how you keep your promise. If you
+don't, that's the end of Christmas in <i>this</i> house."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>: "It's a bargain, then! Come on, Susy!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "And we do it for you, mother. And for you, father. We just
+came in for fun, anyway."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>: "We just came for a surprise."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>
+<i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, kissing them both: "Well, then, if it was only for
+fun, we'll excuse you this time. Run along, now, that's good children.
+<i>Clarence!</i>"</p>
+
+
+<h4>X</h4>
+
+<h4>MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Well?" He looks up at her from where he has dropped into
+a chair beside the table strewn with opened and unopened gifts at the
+foot of the Christmas tree.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "What <i>are</i> you mooning about?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "What if it was all a fake? Those thousands and hundreds
+of thousands of churches that pierce the clouds with their spires;
+those millions of ministers and missionaries; those billions of
+worshipers, sitting and standing and kneeling, and singing and
+praying; those nuns and monks, and brotherhoods and sisterhoods, with
+their ideals of self-denial, and their duties to the sick and poor;
+those martyrs that died for the one true faith, and those other
+martyrs of the other true faiths whom the one true faith tortured and
+killed; those masses and sermons and ceremonies, what if they were all
+a delusion, a mistake, a misunderstanding? What if it were all as
+unlike the real thing, if there is any real thing,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>
+as this pagan Christmas of ours is as unlike a Christian Christmas?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, springing up: "I knew it! I knew that it was this
+Christmas giving that was making you morbid again. Can't you shake it
+off and be cheerful&mdash;like me? I'm sure I have to bear twice as much of
+it as you have. I've been shopping the whole week, and you've been
+just this one afternoon." She begins to catch her breath, and fails in
+searching for her handkerchief in the folds of her dress under the
+bath-robe.</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, offering his handkerchief: "Take mine."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, catching it from him, and hiding her face in it on
+the table: "You ought to help me bear up, and instead of that you
+fling yourself on my sympathies and break me down." Lifting her face:
+"And if it was all a fake, as you say, and an illusion, what would you
+do, what would you give people in place of it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I don't know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "What would you have in place of Christmas itself?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I don't know."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, then, I wouldn't set myself up to preach down
+everything&mdash;in a blue bath-gown. You've no idea how ridiculous you
+are."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span>
+<i>Fountain</i>: "Oh, yes, I have. I can see you. You look like one of
+those blue nuns in Rome. But I don't remember any lace on them."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, you don't look like a blue monk, you needn't
+flatter yourself, for there are none. You look like&mdash; What are you
+thinking about?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Oh, nothing. What do you suppose is in all these packages
+here? Useful things, that we need, that we must have? You know without
+looking that it's the superfluity of naughtiness in one form or other.
+And the givers of these gifts, they <i>had</i> to give them, just as we've
+had to give dozens of gifts ourselves. We ought to have put on our
+cards, 'With the season's bitterest grudges,' 'In hopes of a return,'
+'With a hopeless sense of the folly,' 'To pay a hateful debt,' 'With
+impotent rage and despair.'"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "I don't deny it, Clarence. You're perfectly right; I
+almost wish we <i>had</i> put it. How it would have made them hop! But
+they'd have known it was just the way they felt themselves."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, going on thoughtfully: "It's the cap-sheaf
+of the social barbarism we live in, the hideous hypocrisy. It's
+no use to put it on religion. The Jews keep Christmas, too, and
+we know what they think of Christianity as a belief. No, we've got
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>
+to go further back, to the Pagan Saturnalia&mdash; Well, I renounce the
+whole affair, here and now. I'm going to spend the rest of the night
+bundling these things up, and to-morrow I'm going to spend the day in
+a taxi, going round and giving them back to the fools that sent them."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "And I'm going with you. I hate it as much as you
+do&mdash; Come in, Maggie!"</p>
+
+
+<h4>XI</h4>
+
+<h4>MAGGIE, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Maggie</i>: "Something the elevator-boy says he forgot. It came along
+with the last one."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, taking a bundle from her: "If this is another
+bath-robe, Clarence! It <i>is</i>, as I live. Now if it is a woman sending
+it&mdash;" She picks up a card which falls out of the robe as she unfolds
+it. "'Love the Giver,' indeed! Now, Clarence, I insist, I demand&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Hold on, hold on, my dear. The last bath-robe that came
+from a woman was for <i>you</i>."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "So it was. I don't know what I was thinking about;
+and I do beg your par&mdash; But this is a man's bath-robe!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, taking the card which she mechanically
+stretches out to him: "And a man sends it&mdash;old
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span>
+Fellows. Can't you read print? Ambrose J. Fellows, and a message in
+writing: 'It was a toss-up between this and a cigar-case, and the
+bath-robe won. Hope you haven't got any other thoughtful friends.'"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Oh, very brilliant, giving me a start like this! I
+shall let Mr. Fellows know&mdash; What is it, Maggie? Open the door,
+please."</p>
+
+<p><i>Maggie</i>, opening: "It's just a District Messenger."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, ironically: "Oh, only a District Messenger." He signs the
+messenger's slip, while his wife receives from Maggie a bundle which
+she regards with suspicion.</p>
+
+
+<h4>XII</h4>
+
+<h4>MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "'From Uncle Philip for Clarence.' Well, Uncle
+Philip, if you have sent Clarence&mdash; <i>Clarence!</i>" breaking into
+a whimper: "It is, it is! It's another."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Well, that only makes the seventh, and just enough for
+every day in the week. It's quite my ideal. Now, if there's nothing about
+a cigar-case&mdash; Hello!" He feels in the pocket of the robe and brings out
+a cigar-case, from which a slip of paper falls: "'Couldn't make up my mind
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>
+between them, so send both. Uncle Phil.' Well, this is the last stroke
+of Christmas insanity."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "His brain simply reeled under it, and gave way. It
+shows what Christmas really comes to with a man of strong intellect
+like Uncle Phil."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>, opening the case: "Oh, I don't know! He's put some cigars
+in here&mdash;in a lucid interval, probably. There's hope yet."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, in despair: "No, Clarence, there's no hope. Don't
+flatter yourself. The only way is to bundle back all their presents
+and never, never, never give or receive another one. Come! Let's begin
+tying them up at once; it will take us the rest of the night." A knock
+at the door. "Come, Maggie."</p>
+
+
+<h4>XIII</h4>
+
+<h4>JIM AND SUSY, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Jim and Susy</i>, pushing in: "We can't sleep, mother. May we have a
+pillow fight to keep us amused till we're drowsy?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, desolately: "Yes, go and have your pillow fight. It
+doesn't matter now. We're sending the presents all back, anyway." She
+begins frantically wrapping some of the things up.</p>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "Oh, father, are you sending them back?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span>
+<i>Jim</i>: "She's just making believe. Isn't she, father?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Well, I'm not so sure of that. If she doesn't do it, I
+will."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, desisting: "Will you go right back to bed?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim and Susy</i>: "Yes, we will."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "And to sleep, instantly?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim and Susy</i>, in succession: "We won't keep awake a minute longer."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Very well, then, we'll see. Now be off with you." As
+they put their heads together and go out laughing: "And remember, if
+you come here another single time, back go every one of the presents."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "As soon as ever Santa Claus can find a moment for it."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jim</i>, derisively: "Oh, yes, Santa Claus!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Susy</i>: "I guess if you wait for Santa Claus to take them back!"</p>
+
+
+<h4>XIV</h4>
+
+<h4>MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN</h4>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Tiresome little wretches. Of course we can't expect
+them to keep up the self-deception."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "They'll grow to another. When they're men and women they'll pretend that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>
+Christmas is delightful, and go round giving people the presents that
+they've worn their lives out in buying and getting together. And
+they'll work themselves up into the notion that they are really
+enjoying it, when they know at the bottom of their souls that they
+loathe the whole job."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "There you are with your pessimism again! And I had
+just begun to feel cheerful about it!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Since when? Since I proposed sending this rubbish back to
+the givers with our curse?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "No, I was thinking what fun it would be if we could
+get up a sort of Christmas game, and do it just among relations and
+intimate friends."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Ah, I wish you luck of it. Then the thing would begin to
+have some reality, and just as in proportion as people had the worst
+feelings in giving the presents, their best feeling would be hurt in
+getting them back."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Then why did you ever think of it?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "To keep from going mad. Come, let's go on with this job
+of sorting the presents, and putting them in the stockings and hanging
+them up on the tree and laying them round the trunk of it. One thing: it's
+for the last time. As soon as Christmas week is over, I shall inaugurate
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>
+an educational campaign against the whole Christmas
+superstition. It must be extirpated root and branch, and the
+extirpation must begin in the minds of the children; we old fools are
+hopeless; we must die in it; but the children can be saved. We must
+organize and make a house-to-house fight; and I'll begin in our own
+house. To-morrow, as soon as the children have made themselves
+thoroughly sick with candy and cake and midday dinner, I will appeal
+to their reason, and get them to agree to drop it; to sign the
+Anti-Christmas pledge; to&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Clarence! I have an idea."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Not a <i>bright</i> one?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Yes, a bright one, even if you didn't originate it.
+Have Christmas confined entirely to children&mdash;to the very youngest&mdash;to
+children that believe firmly in Santa Claus."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Oh, hello! Wouldn't that leave Jim and Susy out? I
+couldn't have <i>them</i> left out."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "That's true. I didn't think of that. Well, say, to
+children that either believe or <i>pretend</i> to believe in him. What's <i>that</i>?"
+She stops at a faint, soft sound on the door. "It's Maggie with her hands so full
+she's pushing with her elbow. Come in, Maggie, come in. <i>Come</i>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>
+in! Don't you hear me? Come in, I say! Oh, it isn't Maggie, of
+course! It's those worthless, worthless little wretches, again."
+She runs to the door calling out, "Naughty, naughty, naughty!"
+as she runs. Then, flinging the door wide, with a final cry of
+"<i>Naughty</i>, I say!" she discovers a small figure on the threshold,
+nightgowned to its feet, and looking up with a frightened, wistful
+face. "Why, Benny!" She stoops down and catches the child in her arms,
+and presses him tight to her neck, and bends over, covering his head
+with kisses. "What in the world are you doing here, you poor little
+lamb? Is mother's darling walking in his sleep? What did you want, my
+pet? Tell mudda, do! Whisper it in mudda's big ear! Can't you tell
+mudda? What? Whisper a little louder, love! We're not angry with you,
+sweetness. Now, try to speak louder. Is that Santa Claus? No, dearest,
+that's just dadda. Santa Claus hasn't come yet, but he will soon.
+What? Say it again. <i>Is</i> there any Santa Claus? Why, who else could
+have brought all these presents? Presents for Benny and Jim and Susy
+and mudda, and seven bath-gowns for dadda. Isn't that funny? Seven! And
+one for mudda. What? I can't quite hear you, pet. Are we going to send
+the presents back? Why, who ever heard of such a thing? Jim said so? And Susy?
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span>
+Well, I will settle with them, when I come to them. You
+don't want me to? Well, I won't, then, if Benny doesn't want mudda to.
+I'll just give them a kiss apiece, pop in their big ears. What? You've
+got something for Santa Claus to give them? What? Where? In your crib?
+And shall we go and get it? For mudda too? And dadda? Oh, my little
+angel!" She begins to cry over him, and to kiss him again. "You'll
+break my heart with your loveliness. He wants to kiss you too, dadda."
+She puts the boy into his father's arms; then catches him back and
+runs from the room with him. Fountain resumes the work of filling the
+long stocking he had begun with; then he takes up a very short sock.
+He has that in his hand when Mrs. Fountain comes back, wiping her
+eyes. "He'll go to sleep now, I guess; he was half dreaming when he
+came in here. I should think, when you saw how Benny believed in it,
+you'd be ashamed of saying a word against Christmas."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Who's said anything against it? I've just been arguing
+for it, and trying to convince you that for the sake of little
+children like Benny it ought to be perpetuated to the end of the
+world. It began with the childhood of the race, in the rejuvenescence
+of the spirit."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Didn't you say that Christmas
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span>
+began with the pagans? How monstrously you prevaricate!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "That was merely a figure of speech. And besides, since
+you've been out with Benny, I've been thinking, and I take back
+everything I've said or thought against Christmas; I didn't really
+think it. I've been going back in my mind to that first Christmas we
+had together, and it's cheered me up wonderfully."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>, tenderly: "Have you, dearest? I <i>always</i> think of it.
+If you could have seen Benny, how I left him, just now?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I shouldn't mind seeing him, and I shouldn't care if I
+gave a glance at poor old Jim and Susy. I'd like to reassure them
+about not sending back the presents." He puts his arm round her and
+presses her toward the door.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "How sweet you are! And how funny! And good!" She
+accentuates each sentiment with a kiss. "And don't you suppose I felt
+sorry for you, making you go round with me the whole afternoon, and
+then leaving you to take the brunt of arranging the presents? Now I'll
+tell you: <i>next</i> year, I <i>will</i> do my Christmas shopping in July. It's
+the only way."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "No, there's a better way. As you were saying, they don't
+have the Christmas things out. The only way is to do our Christmas shopping
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span>
+the day after Christmas; everything will be round still, and dog-cheap.
+Come, we'll begin day after to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "We will, we will!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Do you think we will?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Well, we'll <i>say</i> we will." They laugh together, and
+then he kisses her.</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "Even if it goes on in the same old way, as long as we
+have each other&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "And the children."</p>
+
+<p><i>Fountain</i>: "I forgot the children!"</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Fountain</i>: "Oh, how delightful you are!"</p>
+
+
+<p style='text-align:center;'><b>THE END</b></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h2><span class="smcap">Books by</span> W. D. HOWELLS</h2>
+
+<div class="books">
+<p>Annie Kilburn. 12mo.<br />
+April Hopes. 12mo.<br />
+Between the Dark and Daylight. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Boy Life. Illustrated. 12mo.<br />
+Boy's Town. Illustrated. Post 8vo.<br />
+Certain Delightful English Towns. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Traveller's Edition, Leather.</span><br />
+Christmas Every Day, and Other Stories. Illustrated. 12mo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Holiday Edition. Illustrated. 4to.</span><br />
+Coast of Bohemia. Illustrated. 12mo.<br />
+Criticism and Fiction. Portrait. 16mo.<br />
+Day of Their Wedding. Illustrated. 12mo.<br />
+Familiar Spanish Travels. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+Fennel and Rue. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Flight of Pony Baker. Post 8vo.<br />
+Hazard of New Fortunes. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Heroines of Fiction. Illustrated. 2 vols. 8vo.<br />
+Imaginary Interviews. 8vo.<br />
+Imperative Duty. 12mo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Paper.</span><br />
+Impressions and Experiences. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Kentons. 12mo.<br />
+Landlord at Lion's Head. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Letters Home. 12mo.<br />
+Library of Universal Adventure. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Three-quarter Calf.</span><br />
+Literary Friends and Acquaintance. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+Literature and Life. 8vo.<br />
+Little Swiss Sojourn. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+London Films. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Traveller's Edition, Leather.</span><br />
+Miss Bellard's Inspiration. 12mo.<br />
+Modern Italian Poets. Illustrated. 12mo.<br />
+Mother and the Father. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Mouse-Trap, A Likely Story, The Garroters, Five-o'Clock Tea.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.</span><br />
+My Literary Passions. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+My Mark Twain. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+My Year in a Log Cabin. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+Open-Eyed Conspiracy. 12mo.<br />
+Pair of Patient Lovers. 12mo.<br />
+Parting and a Meeting. Illustrated. Square 32mo.<br />
+Quality of Mercy. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Questionable Shapes. Ill'd. 12mo.<br />
+Ragged Lady. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Roman Holidays. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Traveller's Edition, Leather.</span><br />
+Seven English Cities. Illustrated. 8vo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Traveller's Edition, Leather.</span><br />
+Shadow of a Dream. 12mo.<br />
+Son of Royal Langbrith. 8vo.<br />
+Stops of Various Quills. Illustrated. 4to.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Limited Edition.</span><br />
+Story of a Play. 12mo.<br />
+The Daughter of the Storage. 8vo.<br />
+The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon. Crown 8vo.<br />
+Their Silver Wedding Journey. Illustrated. 2 vols. Crown 8vo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">In 1 vol. New Edition. 12mo.</span><br />
+Through the Eye of a Needle. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+Traveller from Altruria. New Edition. 12mo.<br />
+World of Chance. 12mo.<br />
+Years of My Youth. Crown 8vo.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p style='text-align:center;'><b>FARCES:</b></p>
+
+<div class="books">
+<p>A Letter of Introduction. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+A Likely Story. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+A Previous Engagement. 32mo.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Paper.</span><br />
+Evening Dress. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+Five-o'Clock Tea. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+Parting Friends. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+The Albany Depot. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+The Garroters. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+The Mouse-Trap. Illustrated. 32mo.<br />
+The Unexpected Guests. Illustrated. 32mo.</p>
+</div>
+
+<h3>HARPER &amp; BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK</h3>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Daughter of the Storage, by 
+William Dean Howells
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diff --git a/old/30023.txt b/old/30023.txt
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+++ b/old/30023.txt
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+Project Gutenberg's The Daughter of the Storage, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Daughter of the Storage
+       And Other Things in Prose and Verse
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: September 18, 2009 [EBook #30023]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Ritu Aggarwal and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from scans of public domain material
+produced by Microsoft for their Live Search Books site.)
+
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:--
+
+1. Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
+
+2. Printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation,
+   and ligature usage have been retained except the following:
+     Pg. 117, Ch. VII: Changed comma to period in (relation to life,)
+     Pg. 255, Ch. XVI: Removed ending quote in (the highest sense.")
+
+
+
+
+                      THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
+
+                         WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+
+
+
+
+                             THE DAUGHTER
+                            OF THE STORAGE
+
+                           AND OTHER THINGS
+                          IN PROSE AND VERSE
+
+                            W. D. HOWELLS
+
+
+                     HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+                         NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+             Copyright, 1915, 1916, by Harper & Brothers
+               Printed in the United States of America
+                        Published April, 1916
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+                                                        PAGE
+              I. THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE               3
+             II. A PRESENTIMENT                           45
+            III. CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP              67
+             IV. THE RETURN TO FAVOR                      81
+              V. SOMEBODY'S MOTHER                        93
+             VI. THE FACE AT THE WINDOW                  107
+            VII. AN EXPERIENCE                           117
+           VIII. THE BOARDERS                            127
+             IX. BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL               141
+              X. THE MOTHER-BIRD                         151
+             XI. THE AMIGO                               161
+            XII. BLACK CROSS FARM                        173
+           XIII. THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE                  185
+            XIV. A FEAST OF REASON                       227
+             XV. CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL            243
+            XVI. TABLE TALK                              253
+           XVII. THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER           269
+          XVIII. SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY         285
+            XIX. THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS              319
+
+
+
+
+                     THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE
+
+
+                                  I
+
+They were getting some of their things out to send into the country,
+and Forsyth had left his work to help his wife look them over and
+decide which to take and which to leave. The things were mostly trunks
+that they had stored the fall before; there were some tables and
+Colonial bureaus inherited from his mother, and some mirrors and
+decorative odds and ends, which they would not want in the furnished
+house they had taken for the summer. There were some canvases which
+Forsyth said he would paint out and use for other subjects, but which,
+when he came to look at again, he found really not so bad. The rest,
+literally, was nothing but trunks; there were, of course, two or three
+boxes of books. When they had been packed closely into the five-dollar
+room, with the tables and bureaus and mirrors and canvases and
+decorative odds and ends put carefully on top, the Forsyths thought
+the effect very neat, and laughed at themselves for being proud of it.
+
+They spent the winter in Paris planning for the summer in America, and
+now it had come May, a month which in New York is at its best, and in
+the Constitutional Storage Safe-Deposit Warehouse is by no means at
+its worst. The Constitutional Storage is no longer new, but when the
+Forsyths were among the first to store there it was up to the latest
+moment in the modern perfections of a safe-deposit warehouse. It was
+strictly fire-proof; and its long, white, brick-walled, iron-doored
+corridors, with their clean concrete floors, branching from a central
+avenue to the tall windows north and south, offered perspectives
+sculpturesquely bare, or picturesquely heaped with arriving or
+departing household stuff.
+
+When the Forsyths went to look at it a nice young fellow from the
+office had gone with them; running ahead and switching on rows of
+electrics down the corridors, and then, with a wire-basketed electric
+lamp, which he twirled about and held aloft and alow, showing the
+dustless, sweet-smelling spaciousness of a perfect five-dollar room.
+He said it would more than hold their things; and it really held them.
+
+Now, when the same young fellow unlocked the iron door and set it
+wide, he said he would get them a man, and he got Mrs. Forsyth a gilt
+armchair from some furniture going into an adjoining twenty-dollar
+room. She sat down in it, and "Of course," she said, "the pieces I
+want will be at the very back and the very bottom. Why don't you get
+yourself a chair, too, Ambrose? What are you looking at?"
+
+With his eyes on the neighboring furniture he answered, "Seems to be
+the wreck of a millionaire's happy home; parlor and kitchen utensils
+and office furniture all in white and gold."
+
+"Horrors, yes!" Mrs. Forsyth said, without turning her head from
+studying her trunks, as if she might divine their contents from their
+outside.
+
+"Tata and I," her husband said, "are more interested in the
+millionaire's things." Tata, it appeared, was not a dog, but a child;
+the name was not the diminutive of her own name, which was Charlotte,
+but a generic name for a doll, which Tata had learned from her Italian
+nurse to apply to all little girls and had got applied to herself by
+her father. She was now at a distance down the corridor, playing a
+drama with the pieces of millionaire furniture; as they stretched away
+in variety and splendor they naturally suggested personages of
+princely quality, and being touched with her little forefinger tip
+were capable of entering warmly into Tata's plans for them.
+
+Her mother looked over her shoulder toward the child. "Come here,
+Tata," she called, and when Tata, having enjoined some tall mirrors to
+secrecy with a frown and a shake of the head, ran to her, Mrs. Forsyth
+had forgotten why she had called her. "Oh!" she said, recollecting,
+"do you know which your trunk is, Tata? Can you show mamma? Can you
+put your hand on it?"
+
+The child promptly put her hand on the end of a small box just within
+her tiptoe reach, and her mother said, "I do believe she knows
+everything that's in it, Ambrose! That trunk has got to be opened the
+very first one!"
+
+The man that the young fellow said he would send showed at the far end
+of the corridor, smaller than human, but enlarging himself to the
+average Irish bulk as he drew near. He was given instructions and
+obeyed with caressing irony Mrs. Forsyth's order to pull out Tata's
+trunk first, and she found the key in a large tangle of keys, and
+opened it, and had the joy of seeing everything recognized by the
+owner: doll by doll, cook-stove, tin dishes, small brooms, wooden
+animals on feet and wheels, birds of various plumage, a toy piano, a
+dust-pan, alphabet blocks, dog's-eared linen Mother Goose books, and
+the rest. Tata had been allowed to put the things away herself, and
+she took them out with no apparent sense of the time passed since she
+saw them last. In the changing life of her parents all times and
+places were alike to her. She began to play with the things in the
+storage corridor as if it were yesterday when she saw them last in the
+flat. Her mother and father left her to them in the distraction of
+their own trunks. Mrs. Forsyth had these spread over the space toward
+the window and their lids lifted and tried to decide about them. In
+the end she had changed the things in them back and forth till she
+candidly owned that she no longer knew where anything at all was.
+
+As she raised herself for a moment's respite from the problem she saw
+at the far end of the corridor a lady with two men, who increased in
+size like her own man as they approached. The lady herself seemed to
+decrease, though she remained of a magnificence to match the
+furniture, and looked like it as to her dress of white picked out in
+gold when she arrived at the twenty-dollar room next the Forsyths'. In
+her advance she had been vividly played round by a little boy, who ran
+forward and back and easily doubled the length of the corridor before
+he came to a stand and remained with his brown eyes fixed on Tata.
+Tata herself had blue eyes, which now hovered dreamily above the
+things in her trunk.
+
+The two mothers began politely to ignore each other. She of the
+twenty-dollar room directed the men who had come with her, and in a
+voice of authority and appeal at once commanded and consulted them in
+the disposition of her belongings. At the sound of the mixed tones
+Mrs. Forsyth signaled to her husband, and, when he came within
+whispering, murmured: "Pittsburg, _or_ Chicago. Did you _ever_ hear
+such a Mid-Western accent!" She pretended to be asking him about
+repacking the trunk before her, but the other woman was not deceived.
+She was at least aware of criticism in the air of her neighbors, and
+she put on greater severity with the workmen. The boy came up and
+caught her skirt. "What?" she said, bending over. "No, certainly not.
+I haven't time to attend to you. Go off and play. Don't I tell you no?
+Well, there, then! Will you get that trunk out where I can open it?
+That small one there," she said to one of the men, while the other
+rested for both. She stooped to unlock the trunk and flung up the lid.
+"Now if you bother me any more I will surely--" But she lost herself
+short of the threat and began again to seek counsel and issue orders.
+
+The boy fell upon the things in the trunk, which were the things of a
+boy, as those in Tata's trunk were the things of a girl, and to run
+with them, one after another, to Tata and to pile them in gift on the
+floor beside her trunk. He did not stop running back and forth as fast
+as his short, fat legs could carry him till he had reached the bottom
+of his box, chattering constantly and taking no note of the effect
+with Tata. Then, as she made no response whatever to his munificence,
+he began to be abashed and to look pathetically from her to her
+father.
+
+"Oh, really, young man," Forsyth said, "we can't let you impoverish
+yourself at this rate. What have you said to your benefactor, Tata?
+What are you going to give _him_?"
+
+The children did not understand his large words, but they knew he was
+affectionately mocking them.
+
+"Ambrose," Mrs. Forsyth said, "you mustn't let him."
+
+"I'm trying to think how to hinder him, but it's rather late," Forsyth
+answered, and then the boy's mother joined in.
+
+"Indeed, indeed, if you can, it's more than I can. You're just
+worrying the little girl," she said to the boy.
+
+"Oh no, he isn't, dear little soul," Mrs. Forsyth said, leaving her
+chair and going up to the two children. She took the boy's hand in
+hers. "What a kind boy! But you know my little girl mustn't take all
+your playthings. If you'll give her _one_ she'll give _you_ one, and
+that will be enough. You can both play with them all for the present."
+She referred her suggestion to the boy's mother, and the two ladies
+met at the invisible line dividing the five-dollar room from the
+twenty-dollar room.
+
+"Oh yes, indeed," the Mid-Westerner said, willing to meet the
+New-Yorker half-way. "You're taking things out, I see. I hardly know
+which is the worst: taking out or putting in."
+
+"Well, we are just completing the experience," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I
+shall be able to say better how I feel in half an hour."
+
+"You don't mean this is the first time you've stored? I suppose
+_we've_ been in and out of storage twenty times. Not in this warehouse
+exactly; we've never been here before."
+
+"It seems very nice," Mrs. Forsyth suggested.
+
+"They all do at the beginning. I suppose if we ever came to the end
+they would seem nicer still. Mr. Bream's business is always taking him
+away" (it appeared almost instantly that he was the international
+inspector of a great insurance company's agencies in Europe and South
+America), "and when I don't go with him it seems easier to break up
+and go into a hotel than to go on housekeeping. I don't know that it
+is, though," she questioned. "It's so hard to know what to do with the
+child in a hotel."
+
+"Yes, but he seems the sort that you could manage with anywhere," Mrs.
+Forsyth agreed and disagreed.
+
+His mother looked at him where he stood beaming upon Tata and again
+joyfully awaiting some effect with her. But the child sat back upon
+her small heels with her eyes fixed on the things in her trunk and
+made no sign of having seen the heaps of his gifts.
+
+The Forsyths had said to each other before this that their little girl
+was a queer child, and now they were not so much ashamed of her
+apparent selfishness or rude indifference as they thought they were.
+They made a joke of it with the boy's mother, who said she did not
+believe Tata was anything but shy. She said she often told Mr. Bream
+that she did wish Peter--yes, that was his name; she didn't like it
+much, but it was his grandfather's; was Tata a Christian name? Oh,
+just a pet name! Well, it _was_ pretty--could be broken of _his_
+ridiculous habit; most children--little boys, that was--held onto
+their things so.
+
+Forsyth would have taken something from Tata and given it to Peter;
+but his wife would not let him; and he had to content himself with
+giving Peter a pencil of his own that drew red at one end and blue at
+the other, and that at once drew a blue boy, that looked like Peter,
+on the pavement. He told Peter not to draw a boy now, but wait till he
+got home, and then be careful not to draw a blue boy with the red end.
+He helped him put his things back into his trunk, and Peter seemed to
+enjoy that, too.
+
+Tata, without rising from her seat on her heels, watched the
+restitution with her dreamy eyes; she paid no attention to the blue
+boy on the pavement; pictures from her father were nothing new to her.
+The mothers parted with expressions of mutual esteem in spite of their
+difference of accent and fortune. Mrs. Forsyth asked if she might not
+kiss Peter, and did so; he ran to his mother and whispered to her;
+then he ran back and gave Tata so great a hug that she fell over from
+it.
+
+Tata did not cry, but continued as if lost in thought which she could
+not break from, and that night, after she had said her prayers with
+her mother, her mother thought it was time to ask her: "Tata, dear,
+why did you act so to that boy to-day? Why didn't you give him
+something of yours when he brought you all his things? Why did you act
+so oddly?"
+
+Tata said something in a voice so low that her mother could not make
+it out.
+
+"What did you say?"
+
+"I couldn't tell which," the child still whispered; but now her
+mother's ear was at her lips.
+
+"How, which?"
+
+"To give him. The more I looked," and the whisper became a quivering
+breath, "the more I couldn't tell which. And I wanted to give them
+_all_ to him, but I couldn't tell whether it would be right, because
+you and papa gave them to me for birthday and Christmas," and the
+quivering breath broke into a sobbing grief, so that the mother had to
+catch the child up to her heart.
+
+"Dear little tender conscience!" she said, still wiping her eyes when
+she told the child's father, and they fell into a sweet, serious talk
+about her before they slept. "And I was ashamed of her before that
+woman! I know she misjudged her; but _we_ ought to have remembered how
+fine and precious she is, and _known_ how she must have suffered,
+trying to decide."
+
+"Yes, conscience," the father said. "And temperament, the temperament
+to which decision is martyrdom."
+
+"And she will always have to be deciding! She'll have to decide for
+you, some day, as I do now; you are very undecided, Ambrose--she gets
+it from you."
+
+
+                                  II
+
+The Forsyths were afraid that Tata might want to offer Peter some gift
+in reparation the next morning, and her father was quite ready, if she
+said so, to put off their leaving town, and go with her to the
+Constitutional Storage, which was the only address of Mrs. Bream that
+he knew. But the child had either forgotten or she was contented with
+her mother's comforting, and no longer felt remorse.
+
+One does not store the least of one's personal or household gear
+without giving a hostage to storage, a pledge of allegiance impossible
+to break. No matter how few things one puts in, one never takes
+everything out; one puts more things in. Mrs. Forsyth went to the
+warehouse with Tata in the fall before they sailed for another winter
+in Paris, and added some old bits she had picked up at farm-houses in
+their country drives, and they filled the room quite to the top. She
+told her husband how Tata had entered into the spirit of putting back
+her trunk of playthings with the hope of seeing it again in the
+spring; and she added that she had now had to take a seven-fifty room
+without consulting him, or else throw away the things they had brought
+home.
+
+During the ten or twelve years that followed, the Forsyths sometimes
+spent a whole winter in a hotel; sometimes they had a flat; sometimes
+they had a separate dwelling. If their housing was ample, they took
+almost everything out of storage; once they got down to a two-dollar
+bin, and it seemed as if they really were leaving the storage
+altogether. Then, if they went into a flat that was nearly all studio,
+their furniture went back in a cataclysmal wave to the warehouse,
+where a ten-dollar room, a twelve-dollar room, would not dam the
+overflow.
+
+Tata, who had now outgrown her pet name, and was called Charlotte
+because her mother felt she ought to be, always went with her to the
+storage to help look the things over, to see the rooms emptied down to
+a few boxes, or replenished to bursting. In the first years she played
+about, close to her mother; as she grew older she ventured further,
+and began to make friends with other little girls who had come with
+their mothers. It was quite safe socially to be in the Constitutional
+Storage; it gave standing; and Mrs. Forsyth fearlessly chanced
+acquaintance with these mothers, who would sometimes be there whole
+long mornings or afternoons, taking trunks out or putting them in.
+With the trunks set into the corridors and opened for them, they would
+spend the hours looking the contents over, talking to their neighbors,
+or rapt in long silences when they hesitated with things held off or
+up, and, after gazing absently at them, putting them back again.
+Sometimes they varied the process by laying things aside for sending
+home, and receipting for them at the office as "goods selected."
+
+They were mostly hotel people or apartment people, as Mrs. Forsyth
+oftenest was herself, but sometimes they were separate-house people.
+Among these there was one family, not of great rank or wealth, but
+distinguished, as lifelong New-Yorkers, in a world of comers and goers
+of every origin. Mrs. Forsyth especially liked them for a certain
+quality, but what this quality was she could not very well say. They
+were a mother with two daughters, not quite old maids, but on the way
+to it, and there was very intermittently the apparently bachelor
+brother of the girls; at the office Mrs. Forsyth verified her
+conjecture that he was some sort of minister. One could see they were
+all gentlefolks, though the girls were not of the last cry of fashion.
+They were very nice to their mother, and you could tell that they must
+have been coming with her for years.
+
+At this point in her study of them for her husband's amusement she
+realized that Charlotte had been coming to the storage with her nearly
+all her life, and that more and more the child had taken charge of the
+uneventual inspection of the things. She was shocked to think that she
+had let this happen, and now she commanded her husband to say whether
+Charlotte would grow into a storage old maid like those good girls.
+
+Forsyth said, Probably not before her time; but he allowed it was a
+point to be considered.
+
+Very well, then, Mrs. Forsyth said, the child should never go again;
+that was all. She had strongly confirmed herself in this resolution
+when one day she not only let the child go again, but she let her go
+alone. The child was now between seventeen and eighteen, rather tall,
+grave, pretty, with the dull brown hair that goes so well with
+dreaming blue eyes, and of a stiff grace. She had not come out yet,
+because she had always been out, handing cakes at her father's studio
+teas long before she could remember not doing it, and later pouring
+for her mother with rather a quelling air as she got toward fifteen.
+During these years the family had been going and coming between Europe
+and America; they did not know perfectly why, except that it was
+easier than not.
+
+More and more there was a peculiarity in the goods selected by
+Charlotte for sending home, which her mother one day noted. "How is
+it, Charlotte, that you always send exactly the things I want, and
+when you get your own things here you don't know whether they are what
+you wanted or not?"
+
+"Because I don't know when I send them. I don't choose them; I can't."
+
+"But you choose the right things for me?"
+
+"No, I don't, mother. I just take what comes first, and you always
+like it."
+
+"Now, that is nonsense, Charlotte. I can't have you telling me such a
+thing as that. It's an insult to my intelligence. Do you think I don't
+know my own mind?"
+
+"I don't know _my_ mind," the girl said, so persistently, obstinately,
+stubbornly, that her mother did not pursue the subject for fear of
+worse.
+
+She referred it to her husband, who said: "Perhaps it's like poets
+never being able to remember their own poetry. I've heard it's because
+they have several versions in their minds when they write and can't
+remember which they've written. Charlotte has several choices in her
+mind, and can't choose between her choices."
+
+"Well, we ought to have broken her of her indecision. Some day it will
+make her very unhappy."
+
+"Pretty hard to break a person of her temperament," Forsyth suggested.
+
+"I know it!" his wife admitted, with a certain pleasure in realizing
+the fact. "I don't know what we _shall_ do."
+
+
+                                 III
+
+Storage society was almost wholly feminine; in rare instances there
+was a man who must have been sent in dearth of women or in an hour of
+their disability. Then the man came hastily, with a porter, and either
+pulled all the things out of the rooms so that he could honestly say
+he had seen them, and that the thing wanted was not there; or else
+merely had the doors opened, and after a glance inside resolved to
+wait till his wife, or mother, or daughter could come. He agreed in
+guilty eagerness with the workmen that this was the only way.
+
+The exception to the general rule was a young man who came one bright
+spring morning when all nature suggested getting one's stuff out and
+going into the country, and had the room next the Forsyths' original
+five-dollar room opened. As it happened, Charlotte was at the moment
+visiting this room upon her mother's charge to see whether certain old
+scrim sash-curtains, which they had not needed for ages but at last
+simply _must_ have, were not lurking there in a chest of general
+curtainings. The Forsyths now had rooms on other floors, but their
+main room was at the end of the corridor branching northward from that
+where the five-dollar room was. Near this main room that nice New York
+family had their rooms, and Charlotte had begun the morning in their
+friendly neighborhood, going through some chests that might perhaps
+have the general curtainings in them and the scrim curtains among the
+rest. It had not, and she had gone to what the Forsyths called their
+old ancestral five-dollar room, where that New York family continued
+to project a sort of wireless chaperonage over her. But the young man
+had come with a porter, and, with her own porter, Charlotte could not
+feel that even a wireless chaperonage was needed, though the young man
+approached with the most beaming face she thought she had ever seen,
+and said he hoped he should not be in her way. She answered with a
+sort of helpless reverberation of his glow, Not at all; she should
+only be a moment. She wanted to say she hoped she would not be in
+_his_ way, but she saved herself in time, while, with her own eyes
+intent upon the facade of her room and her mind trying to lose itself
+in the question which curtain-trunk the scrims might be in, she kept
+the sense of his sweet eyes, the merriest eyes she had ever seen,
+effulgent with good-will and apology and reverent admiration. She
+blushed to think it admiration, though she liked to think it so, and
+she did not snub him when the young man jumped about, neglecting his
+own storage, and divining the right moments for his offers of help.
+She saw that he was a little shorter than herself, that he was very
+light and quick on his feet, and had a round, brown face,
+clean-shaven, and a round, brown head, close shorn, from which in the
+zeal of his attentions to her he had shed his straw hat onto the
+window-sill. He formed a strong contrast to the contents of his
+store-room, which was full, mainly, of massive white furniture picked
+out in gold, and very blond. He said casually that it had been there,
+off and on, since long before he could remember, and at these words an
+impression, vague, inexplicable, deepened in Charlotte's mind.
+
+"Mother," she said, for she had now disused the earlier "mamma" in
+deference to modern usage, "how old was I when we first took that
+five-dollar room?"
+
+She asked this question after she had shown the scrim curtains she had
+found and brought home with her.
+
+"Why? I don't know. Two or three; three or four. I should have to
+count up. What makes you ask?"
+
+"Can a person recollect what happened when they were three or four?"
+
+"I should say not, decidedly."
+
+"Or recollect a face?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"Then of course it wasn't. Mother, do you remember ever telling me
+what the little boy was like who gave me all his playthings and I
+couldn't decide what to give him back?"
+
+"What a question! Of course not! He was very brown and funny, with the
+beamingest little face in the world. Rather short for his age, I
+should say, though I haven't the least idea what his age was."
+
+"Then it was the very same little boy!" Charlotte said.
+
+"Who was the very same little boy?" her mother demanded.
+
+"The one that was there to-day; the young man, I mean," Charlotte
+explained, and then she told what had happened with a want of fullness
+which her mother's imagination supplied.
+
+"Did he say who he was? Is he coming back to-morrow or this afternoon?
+Did you inquire who he was or where?"
+
+"What an idea, mother!" Charlotte said, grouping the several
+impossibilities under one head in her answer.
+
+"You had a perfect right to know, if you thought he was the one."
+
+"But I didn't _think_ he was the one, and I don't _know_ that he is
+now; and if he was, what could I do about it?"
+
+"That is true," Mrs. Forsyth owned. "But it's very disappointing. I've
+always felt as if they ought to know it was your undecidedness and not
+ungenerousness."
+
+Charlotte laughed a little forlornly, but she only said, "Really,
+mother!"
+
+Mrs. Forsyth was still looking at the curtains. "Well, these are not
+the scrims I wanted. You must go back. I believe I will go with you.
+The sooner we have it over the better," she added, and she left the
+undecided Charlotte to decide whether she meant the scrim curtains or
+the young man's identity.
+
+It was very well, for one reason, that she decided to go with
+Charlotte that afternoon. The New-Yorkers must have completed the
+inspection of their trunks, for they had not come back. Their failure
+to do so was the more important because the young man had come back
+and was actively superintending the unpacking of his room. The
+palatial furniture had all been ranged up and down the corridor, and
+as fast as a trunk was got out and unlocked he went through it with
+the help of the storage-men, listed its contents in a note-book with a
+number, and then transferred the number and a synopsis of the record
+to a tag and fastened it to the trunk, which he had put back into the
+room.
+
+When the Forsyths arrived with the mistaken scrim curtains, he
+interrupted himself with apologies for possibly being in their way;
+and when Mrs. Forsyth said he was not at all in their way, he got
+white-and-gold arm-chairs for her and Charlotte and put them so
+conveniently near the old ancestral room that Mrs. Forsyth scarcely
+needed to move hand or foot in letting Charlotte restore the wrong
+curtains and search the chests for the right ones. His politeness made
+way for conversation and for the almost instant exchange of
+confidences between himself and Mrs. Forsyth, so that Charlotte was
+free to enjoy the silence to which they left her in her labors.
+
+"Before I say a word," Mrs. Forsyth said, after saying some hundreds
+in their mutual inculpation and exculpation, "I want to ask something,
+and I hope you will excuse it to an old woman's curiosity and not
+think it rude."
+
+At the words "old woman's" the young man gave a protesting "Oh!" and
+at the word "rude" he said, "Not at all."
+
+"It is simply this: how long have your things been here? I ask because
+we've had this room thirteen or fourteen years, and I've never seen
+your room opened in that whole time."
+
+The young man laughed joyously. "Because it hasn't been opened in that
+whole time. I was a little chap of three or four bothering round here
+when my mother put the things in; I believe it was a great frolic for
+me, but I'm afraid it wasn't for her. I've been told that my
+activities contributed to the confusion of the things and the things
+in them that she's been in ever since, and I'm here now to make what
+reparation I can by listing them."
+
+"She'll find it a great blessing," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I wish we had
+ours listed. I suppose you remember it all very vividly. It must have
+been a great occasion for you seeing the things stored at that age."
+
+The young man beamed upon her. "Not so great as now, I'm afraid. The
+fact is, I don't remember anything about it. But I've been told that I
+embarrassed with my personal riches a little girl who was looking over
+her doll's things."
+
+"Oh, indeed!" Mrs. Forsyth said, stiffly, and she turned rather
+snubbingly from him and said, coldly, to Charlotte: "I think they are
+in that green trunk. Have you the key?" and, stooping as her daughter
+stooped, she whispered, "Really!" in condemnation and contempt.
+
+Charlotte showed no signs of sharing either, and Mrs. Forsyth could
+not very well manage them alone. So when Charlotte said, "No, I
+haven't the key, mother," and the young man burst in with, "Oh, do let
+me try my master-key; it will unlock anything that isn't a Yale," Mrs.
+Forsyth sank back enthroned and the trunk was thrown open.
+
+She then forgot what she had wanted it opened for. Charlotte said,
+"They're not here, mother," and her mother said, "No, I didn't suppose
+they were," and began to ask the young man about his mother. It
+appeared that his father had died twelve years before, and since then
+his mother and he had been nearly everywhere except at home, though
+mostly in England; now they had come home to see where they should go
+next or whether they should stay.
+
+"That would never suit my daughter," Mrs. Forsyth lugged in, partly
+because the talk had gone on away from her family as long as she could
+endure, and partly because Charlotte's indecision always amused her.
+"She can't bear to choose."
+
+"Really?" the young man said. "I don't know whether I like it or not,
+but I have had to do a lot of it. You mustn't think, though, that I
+chose this magnificent furniture. My father bought an Italian palace
+once, and as we couldn't live in it or move it we brought the
+furniture here."
+
+"It _is_ magnificent," Mrs. Forsyth said, looking down the long
+stretches of it and eying and fingering her specific throne. "I wish
+my husband could see it--I don't believe he remembers it from fourteen
+years ago. It looks--excuse me!--very studio."
+
+"Is he a painter? Not Mr. Forsyth the painter?"
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Forsyth eagerly admitted, but wondering how he should know
+her name, without reflecting that a score of trunk-tags proclaimed it
+and that she had acquired his by like means.
+
+"I like his things so much," he said. "I thought his three portraits
+were the best things in the Salon last year."
+
+"Oh, you _saw_ them?" Mrs. Forsyth laughed with pleasure and pride.
+"Then," as if it necessarily followed, "you must come to us some
+Sunday afternoon. You'll find a number of his new portraits and some
+of the subjects; they like to see themselves framed." She tried for a
+card in her hand-bag, but she had none, and she said, "Have you one
+of my cards, my dear?" Charlotte had, and rendered it up with a
+severity lost upon her for the moment. She held it toward him. "It's
+Mr. _Peter_ Bream?" she smiled upon him, and he beamed back.
+
+"Did you remember it from our first meeting?"
+
+In their cab Mrs. Forsyth said, "I don't know whether he's what you
+call rather fresh or not, Charlotte, and I'm not sure that I've been
+very wise. But he is so nice, and he looked so _glad_ to be asked."
+
+Charlotte did not reply at once, and her silent severity came to the
+surface of her mother's consciousness so painfully that it was rather
+a relief to have her explode, "Mother, I will thank you not to discuss
+my temperament with people."
+
+She gave Mrs. Forsyth her chance, and her mother was so happy in being
+able to say, "I won't--your _temper_, my dear," that she could add
+with sincere apology: "I'm sorry I vexed you, and I won't do it
+again."
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+The next day was Sunday; Peter Bream took it for some Sunday, and came
+to the tea on Mrs. Forsyth's generalized invitation. She pulled her
+mouth down and her eyebrows up when his card was brought in, but as
+he followed hard she made a lightning change to a smile and gave him a
+hand of cordial welcome. Charlotte had no choice but to welcome him,
+too, and so the matter was simple for her. She was pouring, as usual,
+for her mother, who liked to eliminate herself from set duties and
+walk round among the actual portraits in fact and in frame and talk
+about them to the potential portraits. Peter, qualified by long
+sojourn in England, at once pressed himself into the service of
+handing about the curate's assistant; Mrs. Forsyth electrically
+explained that it was one of the first brought to New York, and that
+she had got it at the Stores in London fifteen years before, and it
+had often been in the old ancestral room, and was there on top of the
+trunks that first day. She did not recur to the famous instance of
+Charlotte's infant indecision, and Peter was safe from a snub when he
+sat down by the girl's side and began to make her laugh. At the end,
+when her mother asked Charlotte what they had been laughing about, she
+could not tell; she said she did not know they were laughing.
+
+The next morning Mrs. Forsyth was paying for her Sunday tea with a
+Monday headache, and more things must be got out for the country.
+Charlotte had again no choice but to go alone to the storage, and yet
+again no choice but to be pleasant to Peter when she found him next
+door listing the contents of his mother's trunks and tagging them as
+before. He dropped his work and wanted to help her. Suddenly they
+seemed strangely well acquainted, and he pretended to be asked which
+pieces she should put aside as goods selected, and chose them for her.
+She hinted that he was shirking his own work; he said it was an
+all-summer's job, but he knew her mother was in a hurry. He found the
+little old trunk of her playthings, and got it down and opened it and
+took out some toys as goods selected. She made him put them back, but
+first he catalogued everything in it and synopsized the list on a tag
+and tagged the trunk. He begged for a broken doll which he had not
+listed, and Charlotte had so much of her original childish difficulty
+in parting with that instead of something else that she refused it.
+
+It came lunch-time, and he invited her to go out to lunch with him;
+and when she declined with dignity he argued that if they went to the
+Woman's Exchange she would be properly chaperoned by the genius of the
+place; besides, it was the only place in town where you got real
+strawberry shortcake. She was ashamed of liking it all; he besought
+her to let him carry her hand-bag for her, and, as he already had it,
+she could not prevent him; she did not know, really, how far she
+might successfully forbid him in anything. At the street door of the
+apartment-house they found her mother getting out of a cab, and she
+asked Peter in to lunch; so that Charlotte might as well have lunched
+with him at the Woman's Exchange.
+
+At all storage warehouses there is a season in autumn when the
+corridors are heaped with the incoming furniture of people who have
+decided that they cannot pass another winter in New York and are
+breaking up housekeeping to go abroad indefinitely. But in the spring,
+when the Constitutional Safe-Deposit offered ample space for
+thoughtful research, the meetings of Charlotte and Peter could recur
+without more consciousness of the advance they were making toward the
+fated issue than in so many encounters at tea or luncheon or dinner.
+Mrs. Forsyth was insisting on rather a drastic overhauling of her
+storage that year. Some of the things, by her command, were shifted to
+and fro between the more modern rooms and the old ancestral room, and
+Charlotte had to verify the removals. In deciding upon goods selected
+for the country she had the help of Peter, and she helped him by
+interposing some useful hesitations in the case of things he had put
+aside from his mother's possessions to be sold for her by the
+warehouse people.
+
+One day he came late and told Charlotte that his mother had suddenly
+taken her passage for England, and they were sailing the next morning.
+He said, as if it logically followed, that he had been in love with
+her from that earliest time when she would not give him the least of
+her possessions, and now he asked her if she would not promise him the
+greatest. She did not like what she felt "rehearsed" in his proposal;
+it was not her idea of a proposal, which ought to be spontaneous and
+unpremeditated in terms; at the same time, she resented his
+precipitation, which she could not deny was inevitable.
+
+She perceived that they were sitting side by side on two of those
+white-and-gold thrones, and she summoned an indignation with the
+absurdity in refusing him. She rose and said that she must go; that
+she must be going; that it was quite time for her to go; and she would
+not let him follow her to the elevator, as he made some offer of
+doing, but left him standing among his palatial furniture like a
+prince in exile.
+
+By the time she reached home she had been able to decide that she must
+tell her mother at once. Her mother received the fact of Peter's
+proposal with such transport that she did not realize the fact of
+Charlotte's refusal. When this was connoted to her she could scarcely
+keep her temper within the bounds of maternal tenderness. She said
+she would have nothing more to do with such a girl; that there was but
+one such pearl as Peter in the universe, and for Charlotte to throw
+him away like that! Was it because she could not decide? Well, it
+appeared that she could decide wrong quickly enough when it came to
+the point. Would she leave it now to her mother?
+
+That Charlotte would not do, but what she did do was to write a letter
+to Peter taking him back as much as rested with her; but delaying so
+long in posting it, when it was written, that it reached him among the
+letters sent on board and supplementarily delivered by his room
+steward after all the others when the ship had sailed. The best Peter
+could do in response was a jubilant Marconigram of unequaled cost and
+comprehensiveness.
+
+His mother had meant to return in the fall, after her custom, to find
+out whether she wished to spend the winter in New York or not. Before
+the date for her sailing she fell sick, and Peter came sadly home
+alone in the spring. Mrs. Bream's death brought Mrs. Forsyth a vain
+regret; she was sorry now that she had seen so little of Mrs. Bream;
+Peter's affection for her was beautiful and spoke worlds for both of
+them; and they, the Forsyths, must do what they could to comfort him.
+
+Charlotte felt the pathos of his case peculiarly when she went to make
+provision for goods selected for the summer from the old ancestral
+room, and found him forlorn among his white-and-gold furniture next
+door. He complained that he had no association with it except the
+touching fact of his mother's helplessness with it, which he had now
+inherited. The contents of the trunks were even less intimately of his
+experience; he had performed a filial duty in listing their contents,
+which long antedated him, and consisted mostly of palatial bric-a-brac
+and the varied spoils of travel.
+
+He cheered up, however, in proposing to her that they should buy a
+Castle in Spain and put them into it. The fancy pleased her, but
+visibly she shrank from a step which it involved, so that he was, as
+it were, forced to say, half jokingly, half ruefully, "I can imagine
+your not caring for this rubbish or what became of it, Charlotte, but
+what about the owner?"
+
+"The owner?" she asked, as it were somnambulantly.
+
+"Yes. Marrying him, say, sometime soon."
+
+"Oh, Peter, I couldn't."
+
+"Couldn't? You know that's not playing the game exactly."
+
+"Yes; but not--not right away?"
+
+"Well, I don't know much about it in my own case, but isn't it usual
+to fix some approximate date? When should you think?"
+
+"Oh, Peter, I _can't_ think."
+
+"Will you let me fix it? I must go West and sell out and pull up, you
+know, preparatory to never going again. We can fix the day now or we
+can fix it when I come back."
+
+"Oh, when you come back," she entreated so eagerly that Peter said:
+
+"Charlotte, let me ask you one thing. Were you ever sorry you wrote me
+that taking-back letter?"
+
+"Why, Peter, you know how I am. When I have decided something I have
+undecided it. That's all."
+
+From gay he turned to grave. "I ought to have thought. I haven't been
+fair; _I_ haven't played the game. I ought to have given you another
+chance; and I haven't, have I?"
+
+"Why, I suppose a girl can always change," Charlotte said,
+suggestively.
+
+"Yes, but you won't always be a girl. I've never asked you if you
+wanted to change. I ask you now. Do you?"
+
+"How can I tell? Hadn't we better let it go as it is? Only not hurry
+about--about--marrying?"
+
+"Certainly not hurry about marrying. I've wondered that a girl could
+make up her mind to marry any given man. Haven't you ever wished that
+you had not made up your mind about me?"
+
+"Hundreds of times. But I don't know that I meant anything by it."
+
+He took her hand from where it lay in her lap as again she sat on one
+of the white-and-gold thrones beside him and gently pressed it. "Well,
+then, let's play we have never been engaged. I'm going West to-night
+to settle things up for good, and I won't be back for three or four
+months, and when I come back we'll start new. I'll ask you, and you
+shall say yes or no just as if you had never said either before."
+
+"Peter, when you talk like that!" She saw his brown, round face dimly
+through her wet eyes, and she wanted to hug him for pity of him and
+pride in him, but she could not decide to do it. They went out to
+lunch at the Woman's Exchange, and the only regret Peter had was that
+it was so long past the season of strawberry shortcake, and that
+Charlotte seemed neither to talk nor to listen; she ought to have done
+one or the other.
+
+They had left the Vaneckens busy with their summer trunks at the far
+end of the northward corridor, where their wireless station had been
+re-established for Charlotte's advantage, though she had not thought
+of it the whole short morning long. When she came back from lunch the
+Vaneckens were just brushing away the crumbs of theirs, which the son
+and brother seemed to have brought in for them in a paper box; at any
+rate, he was now there, making believe to help them.
+
+Mrs. Forsyth had promised to come, but she came so late in the
+afternoon that she owned she had been grudgingly admitted at the
+office, and she was rather indignant about it. By this time, without
+having been West for three months, Peter had asked a question which
+had apparently never been asked before, and Charlotte had as newly
+answered it. "And now, mother," she said, while Mrs. Forsyth passed
+from indignant to exultant, "I want to be married right away, before
+Peter changes his mind about taking me West with him. Let us go home
+at once. You always said I should have a home wedding."
+
+"What a ridiculous idea!" Mrs. Forsyth said, more to gain time than
+anything else. She added, "Everything is at sixes and sevens in the
+flat. There wouldn't be standing-room." A sudden thought flashed upon
+her, which, because it was sudden and in keeping with her character,
+she put into tentative words. "You're more at home _here_ than
+anywhere else. You were almost born here. You've played about here
+ever since you were a child. You first met Peter here. He proposed to
+you here, and you rejected him here. He's proposed here again, and
+you've accepted him, you say--"
+
+"Mother!" Charlotte broke in terribly upon her. "Are you suggesting
+that I should be married in a storage warehouse? Well, I haven't
+fallen quite so low as that yet. If I can't have a _home_ wedding, I
+will have a _church_ wedding, and I will wait till doomsday for it if
+necessary."
+
+"I don't know about doomsday," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but as far as
+to-day is concerned, it's too late for a church wedding. Peter, isn't
+there something about canonical hours? And isn't it past them?"
+
+"That's in the Episcopal Church," Peter said, and then he asked, very
+politely, "Will you excuse me for a moment?" and walked away as if he
+had an idea. It was apparently to join the Vaneckens, who stood in a
+group at the end of their corridor, watching the restoration of the
+trunks which they had been working over the whole day. He came back
+with Mr. Vanecken and Mr. Vanecken's mother. He was smiling radiantly,
+and they amusedly.
+
+"It's all right," he explained. "Mr. Vanecken is a Presbyterian
+minister, and he will marry us now."
+
+"But not here!" Charlotte cried, feeling herself weaken.
+
+"No, certainly not," the dominie reassured her. "I know a church in
+the next block that I can borrow for the occasion. But what about the
+license?"
+
+It was in the day before the parties must both make application in
+person, and Peter took a paper from his breast pocket. "I thought it
+might be needed, sometime, and I got it on the way up, this morning."
+
+"Oh, how thoughtful of you, Peter!" Mrs. Forsyth moaned in admiration
+otherwise inexpressible, and the rest laughed, even Charlotte, who
+laughed hysterically. At the end of the corridor they met the Misses
+Vanecken waiting for them, unobtrusively expectant, and they all went
+down in the elevator together. Just as they were leaving the building,
+which had the air of hurrying them out, Mrs. Forsyth had an
+inspiration. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed, and then, in deference to
+Mr. Vanecken, said, "Good gracious, I _mean_. My husband! Peter, go
+right into the office and telephone Mr. Forsyth."
+
+"Perhaps," Mr. Vanecken said, "I had better go and see about having my
+friend's church opened, in the meanwhile, and--"
+
+"By all means!" Mrs. Forsyth said from her mood of universal
+approbation.
+
+But Mr. Vanecken came back looking rather queer and crestfallen. "I
+find my friend has gone into the country for a few days; and I don't
+quite like to get the sexton to open the church without his authority,
+and-- But New York is full of churches, and we can easily find another,
+with a little delay, if--"
+
+He looked at Peter, who looked at Charlotte, who burst out with
+unprecedented determination. "No, we can't wait. I shall never marry
+Peter if we do. Mother, you are right. But _must_ it be in the old
+ancestral five-dollar room?"
+
+They all laughed except Charlotte, who was more like crying.
+
+"Certainly not," Mr. Vanecken said. "I've no doubt the manager--"
+
+He never seemed to end his sentences, and he now left this one broken
+off while he penetrated the railing which fenced in the manager alone
+among a group of vacated desks, frowning impatient. At some murmured
+words from the dominie, he shouted, "_What!_" and then came out
+radiantly smiling, and saying, "Why, certainly." He knew all the group
+as old storers in the Constitutional, and called them each by name as
+he shook them each by the hand. "Everything else has happened here,
+and I don't see why this shouldn't. Come right into the
+reception-room."
+
+With some paintings of biblical subjects, unclaimed from the storage,
+on the walls, the place had a religious effect, and the manager
+significantly looked out of it a lingering stenographer, who was
+standing before a glass with two hatpins crossed in her mouth
+preparatory to thrusting them through the straw. She withdrew, visibly
+curious and reluctant, and then the manager offered to withdraw
+himself.
+
+"No," Charlotte said, surprisingly initiative in these junctures, "I
+don't know how it is in Mr. Vanecken's church, but, if father doesn't
+come, perhaps you'll have to give me away. At any rate, you're an old
+friend of the family, and I should be hurt if you didn't stay."
+
+She laid her hand on the manager's arm, and just as he had
+protestingly and politely consented, her father arrived in a taxicab,
+rather grumbling from having been obliged to cut short a sitting. When
+it was all over, and the Vaneckens were eliminated, when, in fact, the
+Breams had joined the Forsyths at a wedding dinner which the bride's
+father had given them at Delmonico's and had precipitated themselves
+into a train for Niagara ("So banal," Mrs. Forsyth said, "but I
+suppose they had to go somewhere, and _we_ went to Niagara, come to
+think of it, and it's on their way West"), the bride's mother remained
+up late talking it all over. She took credit to herself for the whole
+affair, and gave herself a great deal of just praise. But when she
+said, "I do believe, if it hadn't been for me, at the last, Charlotte
+would never have made up her mind," Forsyth demurred.
+
+"I should say Peter had a good deal to do with making up her mind for
+her."
+
+"Yes, you might say that."
+
+"And for once in her life Charlotte seems to have had her mind ready
+for making up."
+
+"Yes, you might say that, too. I believe she is going to turn out a
+decided character, after all. I _never_ saw anybody so determined not
+to be married in a storage warehouse."
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                            A PRESENTIMENT
+
+
+Over our coffee in the Turkish room Minver was usually a censor of our
+several foibles rather than a sharer in our philosophic speculations
+and metaphysical conjectures. He liked to disable me as one
+professionally vowed to the fabulous, and he had unfailing fun with
+the romantic sentimentality of Rulledge, which was in fact so little
+in keeping with the gross super-abundance of his person, his habitual
+gluttony, and his ridiculous indolence. Minver knew very well that
+Rulledge was a good fellow withal, and would willingly do any kind
+action that did not seriously interfere with his comfort, or make too
+heavy a draft upon his pocket. His self-indulgence, which was quite
+blameless, unless surfeit is a fault, was the basis of an interest in
+occult themes, which was the means of even higher diversion to Minver.
+He liked to have Rulledge approach Wanhope from this side, in the
+invincible persuasion that the psychologist would be interested in
+these themes by the law of his science, though he had been assured
+again and again that in spite of its misleading name psychology did
+not deal with the soul as Rulledge supposed the soul; and Minver's
+eyes lighted up with a prescience of uncommon pleasure when, late one
+night, after we had vainly tried to hit it off in talk, now of this,
+now of that, Rulledge asked Wanhope, abruptly as if it followed from
+something before:
+
+"Wasn't there a great deal more said about presentiments forty or
+fifty years ago than there is now?"
+
+Wanhope had been lapsing deeper and deeper into the hollow of his
+chair; but he now pulled himself up, and turned quickly toward
+Rulledge. "What made you think of that?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know. Why?"
+
+"Because I was thinking of it myself." He glanced at me, and I shook
+my head.
+
+"Well," Minver said, "if it will leave Acton out in the cold, I'll own
+that I was thinking of it, too. I was going back in my mind, for no
+reason that I know of, to my childhood, when I first heard of such a
+thing as a presentiment, and when I was afraid of having one. I had
+the notion that presentiments ran in the family."
+
+"Why had you that notion?" Rulledge demanded.
+
+"I don't know that I proposed telling," the painter said, giving
+himself to his pipe.
+
+"Perhaps you didn't have it," Rulledge retaliated.
+
+"Perhaps," Minver assented.
+
+Wanhope turned from the personal aspect of the matter. "It's rather
+curious that we should all three have had the same thing in mind just
+now; or, rather, it is not very curious. Such coincidences are really
+very common. Something must have been said at dinner which suggested
+it to all of us."
+
+"All but Acton," Minver demurred.
+
+"I mightn't have heard what was said," I explained. "I suppose the
+passing of all that sort of sub-beliefs must date from the general
+lapse of faith in personal immortality."
+
+"Yes, no doubt," Wanhope assented. "It is very striking how sudden the
+lapse was. Everyone who experienced it in himself could date it to a
+year, if not to a day. The agnosticism of scientific men was of course
+all the time undermining the fabric of faith, and then it fell in
+abruptly, reaching one believer after another as fast as the ground
+was taken wholly or partly from under his feet. I can remember how
+people once disputed whether there were such beings as guardian
+spirits or not. That minor question was disposed of when it was
+decided that there were no spirits at all."
+
+"Naturally," Minver said. "And the decay of the presentiment must have
+been hastened by the failure of so many presentiments to make good."
+
+"The great majority of them have failed to make good, from the
+beginning of time," Wanhope replied.
+
+"There are two kinds of presentiments," Rulledge suggested, with a
+philosophic air. "The true and the untrue."
+
+"Like mushrooms," Minver said. "Only, the true presentiment kills, and
+the true mushroom nourishes. Talking of mushrooms, they have a way in
+Switzerland of preserving them in walnut oil, and they fill you with
+the darkest forebodings, after you've filled yourself with the
+mushrooms. There's some occult relation between the two. Think it out,
+Rulledge!"
+
+Rulledge ignored him in turning to Wanhope. "The trouble is how to
+distinguish the true from the untrue presentiment."
+
+"It would be interesting," Wanhope began, but Minver broke in upon him
+maliciously.
+
+"To know how much the dyspepsia of our predecessors had to with the
+prevalence of presentimentalism? I agree with you, that a better diet
+has a good deal to do with the decline of the dark foreboding among
+us. What I can't understand is, how a gross and reckless feeder, like
+Rulledge here, doesn't go about like ancestral voices prophesying all
+sorts of dreadful things."
+
+"That's rather cheap talk, even for you, Minver," Rulledge said. "Why
+did you think presentiments ran in _your_ family?"
+
+"Well, there you have me, Rulledge. That's where my theory fails. I
+can remember," Minver continued soberly, "the talk there used to be
+about them among my people. They were serious people in an unreligious
+way, or rather an unecclesiastical way. They were never spiritualists,
+but I don't think there was one of them who doubted that he should
+live hereafter; he might doubt that he was living here, but there was
+no question of the other thing. I must say it gave a dignity to their
+conversation which, when they met, as they were apt to do at one
+another's houses on Sunday nights, was not of common things. One of my
+uncles was a merchant, another a doctor; my father was a
+portrait-painter by profession, and a sign-painter by practice. I
+suppose that's where I got my knack, such as it is. The merchant was
+an invalid, rather, though he kept about his business, and our people
+merely recognized him as being out of health. He was what we could
+call, for that day and region--the Middle West of the early fifties--a
+man of unusual refinement. I suppose this was temperamental with him
+largely; but he had cultivated tastes, too. I remember him as a
+peculiarly gentle person, with a pensive cast of face, and the
+melancholy accomplishment of playing the flute."
+
+"I wonder why nobody plays the flute nowadays," I mused aloud.
+
+"Yes, it's quite obsolete," Minver said. "They only play the flute in
+the orchestras now. I always look at the man who plays it and think of
+my uncle. He used to be very nice to me as a child; and he was very
+fond of my father, in a sort of filial way; my father was so much
+older. I can remember my young aunt; and how pretty she was as she sat
+at the piano, and sang and played to his fluting. When she looked
+forward at the music, her curls fell into her neck; they wore curls
+then, grown-up women; and though I don't think curls are beautiful, my
+aunt's beauty would have been less without them; in fact, I can't
+think of her without them.
+
+"She was delicate, too; they were really a pair of invalids; but she
+had none of his melancholy. They had had several children, who died,
+one after another, and there was only one left at the time I am
+speaking of. I rather wonder, now, that the thought of those poor
+little ghost-cousins didn't make me uncomfortable. I was a very
+superstitious boy, but I seem not to have thought of them. I played
+with the little girl who was left, and I liked going to my uncle's
+better than anywhere else. I preferred going in the daytime and in the
+summer-time. Then my cousin and I sat in a nook of the garden and
+fought violets, as we called it; hooked the wry necks of the flowers
+together and twitched to see which blossom would come off first. She
+was a sunny little thing, like her mother, and she had curls, like
+her. I can't express the feeling I had for my aunt; she seemed the
+embodiment of a world that was at once very proud and very good. I
+suppose she dressed fashionably, as things went then and there; and
+her style as well as her beauty fascinated me. I would have done
+anything to please her, far more than to please my cousin. With her I
+used to squabble, and sometimes sent her crying to her mother. Then I
+always ran off home, but when I sneaked back, or was sent for to come
+and play with my cousin, I was not scolded for my wickedness.
+
+"My uncle was more prosperous than his brothers; he lived in a much
+better house than ours, and I used to be quite awe-struck by its
+magnificence. He went East, as we said, twice a year to buy goods,
+and he had things sent back for his house such as we never saw
+elsewhere; those cask-shaped seats of blue china for the verandas, and
+bamboo chairs. There were cane-bottom chairs in the sitting-room, such
+as we had in our best room; in the parlor the large pieces were of
+mahogany veneer, upholstered in black hair-cloth; they held me in awe.
+The piano filled half the place; the windows came down to the ground,
+and had Venetian blinds and lace curtains.
+
+"We all went in there after the Sunday night supper, and then the
+fathers and mothers were apt to begin talking of those occult things
+that gave me the creeps. It was after the Rochester Knockings, as they
+were called, had been exposed, and so had spread like an infection
+everywhere. It was as if people were waiting to have the fraud shown
+up in order to believe in it."
+
+"That sort of thing happens," Wanhope agreed. "It's as if the seeds of
+the ventilated imposture were carried atmospherically into the human
+mind broadcast and a universal crop of self-delusion sprang up."
+
+"At any rate," Minver resumed, "instead of the gift being confined to
+a few persons--a small sisterhood with detonating knee-joints--there
+were rappings in every well-regulated household; all the tables
+tipped; people went to sleep to the soft patter of raps on the
+headboards of their beds; and girls who could not spell were occupied
+in delivering messages from Socrates, Ben Franklin and Shakespeare.
+Besides the physical demonstrations, there were all sorts of psychical
+intimations from the world which we've now abolished."
+
+"Not permanently, perhaps," I suggested.
+
+"Well, that remains to be seen," Minver said. "It was this sort of
+thing which my people valued above the other. Perhaps they were
+exclusive in their tastes, and did not care for an occultism which the
+crowd could share with them; though this is a conjecture too long
+after the fact to have much value. As far as I can now remember, they
+used to talk of the double presence of living persons, like their
+being where they greatly wished to be as well as where they really
+were; of clairvoyance; of what we call mind-transference, now; of
+weird coincidences of all kinds; of strange experiences of their own
+and of others; of the participation of animals in these experiences,
+like the testimony of cats and dogs to the presence of invisible
+spirits; of dreams that came true, or came near coming true; and,
+above everything, of forebodings and presentiments.
+
+"I dare say they didn't always talk of such things, and I'm giving
+possibly a general impression from a single instance; everything
+remembered of childhood is as if from large and repeated occurrence.
+But it must have happened more than once, for I recall that when it
+came to presentiments my aunt broke it up, perhaps once only. My
+cousin used to get very sleepy on the rug before the fire, and her
+mother would carry her off to bed, very cross and impatient of being
+kissed good night, while I was left to the brunt of the occult alone.
+I could not go with my aunt and cousin, and I folded myself in my
+mother's skirt, where I sat at her feet, and listened in an anguish of
+drowsy terror. The talk would pass into my dreams, and the dreams
+would return into the talk; and I would suffer a sort of double
+nightmare, waking and sleeping."
+
+"Poor little devil!" Rulledge broke out. "It's astonishing how people
+will go on before children, and never think of the misery they're
+making for them."
+
+"I believe my mother thought of it," Minver returned, "but when that
+sort of talk began, the witchery of it was probably too strong for
+her. 'It held her like a two years' child'; I was eight that winter. I
+don't know how long my suffering had gone on, when my aunt came back
+and seemed to break up the talk. It had got to presentiments, and,
+whether they knew that this was forbidden ground with her, or whether
+she now actually said something about it, they turned to talk of other
+things. I'm not telling you all this from my own memory, which deals
+with only a point or two. My father and mother used to recur to it
+when I was older, and I am piecing out my story from their memories.
+
+"My uncle, with all his temperamental pensiveness, was my aunt's stay
+and cheer in the fits of depression which she paid with for her usual
+gaiety. But these fits always began with some uncommon depression of
+his--some effect of the forebodings he was subject to. Her opposition
+to that kind of thing was purely unselfish, but certainly she dreaded
+it for him as well as herself. I suppose there was a sort of conscious
+silence in the others which betrayed them to her. 'Well,' she said,
+laughing, 'have you been at it again? That poor child looks frightened
+out of his wits.'
+
+"They all laughed then, and my father said, hypocritically, 'I was
+just going to ask Felix whether he expected to start East this week or
+next.'
+
+"My uncle tried to make light of what was always a heavy matter with
+him. 'Well, yesterday,' he answered, 'I should have said next week;
+but it's this week, now. I'm going on Wednesday.'
+
+"'By stage or packet?' my father asked.
+
+"'Oh, I shall take the canal to the lake, and get the boat for Buffalo
+there,' my uncle said.
+
+"They went on to speak of the trip to New York, and how much easier it
+was then than it used to be when you had to go by stage over the
+mountains to Philadelphia and on by stage again. Now, it seemed, you
+got the Erie Canal packet at Buffalo and the Hudson River steamboat at
+Albany, and reached New York in four or five days, in great comfort
+without the least fatigue. They had all risen and my aunt had gone out
+with her sisters-in-law to help them get their wraps. When they
+returned, it seemed that they had been talking of the journey, too,
+for she said to my mother, laughing again, 'Well, Richard may think
+it's easy; but somehow Felix never expects to get home alive.'
+
+"I don't think I ever heard my uncle laugh, but I can remember how he
+smiled at my aunt's laughing, as he put his hand on her shoulder; I
+thought it was somehow a very sad smile. On Wednesday I was allowed to
+go with my aunt and cousin to see him off on the packet, which came up
+from Cincinnati early in the morning; I had lain awake most of the
+night, and then nearly overslept myself, and then was at the canal in
+time. We made a gay parting for him, but when the boat started, and I
+was gloating on the three horses making up the tow-path at a spanking
+trot, under the snaky spirals of the driver's smacking whip-lash, I
+caught sight of my uncle standing on the deck and smiling that sad
+smile of his. My aunt was waving her handkerchief, but when she turned
+away she put it to her eyes.
+
+"The rest of the story, such as it is, I know, almost to the very end,
+from what I heard my father and mother say from my uncle's report
+afterward. He told them that, when the boat started, the stress to
+stay was so strong upon him that if he had not been ashamed he would
+have jumped ashore and followed us home. He said that he could not
+analyze his feelings; it was not yet any definite foreboding, but
+simply a depression that seemed to crush him so that all his movements
+were leaden, when he turned at last, and went down to breakfast in the
+cabin below. The stress did not lighten with the little changes and
+chances of the voyage to the lake. He was never much given to making
+acquaintance with people, but now he found himself so absent-minded
+that he was aware of being sometimes spoken to by friendly strangers
+without replying until it was too late even to apologize. He was not
+only steeped in this gloom, but he had the constant distress of the
+effort he involuntarily made to trace it back to some cause or follow
+it forward to some consequence. He kept trying at this, with a mind so
+tensely bent to the mere horror that he could not for a moment strain
+away from it. He would very willingly have occupied himself with other
+things, but the anguish which the double action of his mind gave him
+was such that he could not bear the effort; all he could do was to
+abandon himself to his obsession. This would ease him only for a
+while, though, and then he would suffer the misery of trying in vain
+to escape from it.
+
+"He thought he must be going mad, but insanity implied some definite
+delusion or hallucination, and, so far as he could make out, he had
+none. He was simply crushed by a nameless foreboding. Something
+dreadful was to happen, but this was all he felt; knowledge had no
+part in his condition. He could not say whether he slept during the
+two nights that passed before he reached Toledo, where he was to take
+the lake steamer for Buffalo. He wished to turn back again, but the
+relentless pressure which had kept him from turning back at the start
+was as strong as ever with him. He tried to give his presentiment
+direction by talking with the other passengers about a recent accident
+to a lake steamer, in which several hundred lives were lost; there
+had been a collision in rough weather, and one of the boats had gone
+down in a few minutes. There was a sort of relief in that, but the
+double action of the mind brought the same intolerable anguish again,
+and he settled back for refuge under the shadow of his impenetrable
+doom. This did not lift till he was well on his way from Albany to New
+York by the Hudson River. The canal-boat voyage from Buffalo to Albany
+had been as eventless as that to Toledo, and his lake steamer had
+reached Buffalo in safety, for which it had seemed as if those lost in
+the recent disaster had paid.
+
+"He tried to pierce his heavy cloud by argument from the security in
+which he had traveled so far, but the very security had its
+hopelessness. If something had happened--some slight accident--to
+interrupt it, his reason, or his unreason, might have taken it for a
+sign that the obscure doom, whatever it was, had been averted.
+
+"Up to this time he had not been able to connect his foreboding with
+anything definite, and he was not afraid for himself. He was simply
+without the formless hope that helps us on at every step, through good
+and bad, and it was a mortal peril, which he came through safely while
+scores of others were lost, that gave his presentiment direction. He
+had taken the day boat from Albany, and about the middle of the
+afternoon the boat, making way under a head-wind, took fire. The pilot
+immediately ran her ashore, and her passengers, those that had the
+courage for it, ran aft, and began jumping from the stern, but a great
+many women and children were burned. My uncle was one of the first of
+those who jumped, and he stood in the water, trying to save those who
+came after from drowning; it was not very deep. Some of the women lost
+courage for the leap, and some turned back into the flames,
+remembering children they had left behind. One poor creature stood
+hesitating wildly, and he called up to her to jump. At last she did
+so, almost into his arms, and then she clung about him as he helped
+her ashore. 'Oh,' she cried out between her sobs, 'if you have a wife
+and children at home, God will take you safe back to them; you have
+saved my life for my husband and little ones.' 'No,' he was conscious
+of saying, 'I shall never see my wife again,' and now his foreboding
+had the direction that it had wanted before.
+
+"From that on he simply knew that he should not get home alive, and he
+waited resignedly for the time and form of his disaster. He had a sort
+of peace in that. He went about his business intelligently, and from
+habit carefully, but it was with a mechanical action of the mind,
+something, he imagined, like the mechanical action of his body in
+those organs which do their part without bidding from the will. He was
+only a few days in New York, but in the course of them he got several
+letters from his wife telling him that all was going well with her and
+their daughter. It was before the times when you can ask and answer
+questions by telegraph, and he started back, necessarily without
+having heard the latest news from home.
+
+"He made the return trip in a sort of daze, talking, reading, eating,
+and sleeping in the calm certainty of doom, and only wondering how it
+would be fulfilled, and what hour of the night or day. But it is no
+use my eking this out; I heard it, as I say, when I was a child, and I
+am afraid that if I should try to give it with the full detail I
+should take to inventing particulars." Minver paused a moment, and
+then he said: "But there was one thing that impressed itself indelibly
+on my memory. My uncle got back perfectly safe and well."
+
+"Oh!" Rulledge snorted in rude dissatisfaction.
+
+"What was it impressed itself on your memory?" Wanhope asked, with
+scientific detachment from the story as a story.
+
+Minver continued to address Wanhope, without regarding Rulledge. "My
+uncle told my father that some sort of psychical change, which he
+could not describe, but which he was as conscious of as if it were
+physical, took place within him as he came in sight of his house--"
+
+"Yes," Wanhope prompted.
+
+"He had driven down from the canal-packet in the old omnibus which
+used to meet passengers and distribute them at their destinations in
+town. All the way to his house he was still under the doom as regarded
+himself, but bewildered that he should be getting home safe and well,
+and he was refusing his escape, as it were, and then suddenly, at the
+sight of the familiar house, the change within him happened. He looked
+out of the omnibus window and saw a group of neighbors at his gate. As
+he got out of the omnibus, my father took him by the hand, as if to
+hold him back a moment. Then he said to my father, very quietly, 'You
+needn't tell me: my wife is dead.'"
+
+There was an appreciable pause, in which we were all silent, and then
+Rulledge demanded, greedily, "And was she?"
+
+"Really, Rulledge!" I could not help protesting.
+
+Minver asked him, almost compassionately and with unwonted gentleness,
+as from the mood in which his reminiscence had left him: "You
+suspected a hoax? She had died suddenly the night before while she and
+my cousin were getting things ready to welcome my uncle home in the
+morning. I'm sorry you're disappointed," he added, getting back to his
+irony.
+
+"Whatever," Rulledge pursued, "became of the little girl?"
+
+"She died rather young; a great many years ago; and my uncle soon
+after her."
+
+Rulledge went away without saying anything, but presently returned
+with the sandwich which he had apparently gone for, while Wanhope was
+remarking: "That want of definition in the presentiment at first, and
+then its determination in the new direction by, as it were,
+propinquity--it is all very curious. Possibly we shall some day
+discover a law in such matters."
+
+Rulledge said: "How was it your boyhood was passed in the Middle West,
+Minver? I always thought you were a Bostonian."
+
+"I was an adoptive Bostonian for a good while, until I decided to
+become a native New-Yorker, so that I could always be near to you,
+Rulledge. You can never know what a delicate satisfaction you are."
+
+Minver laughed, and we were severally restored to the wonted relations
+which his story had interrupted.
+
+
+
+
+                                 III
+
+                     CAPTAIN DUNLEVY'S LAST TRIP
+
+
+  It was against the law, in such case made and provided,
+  Of the United States, but by the good will of the pilots
+  That we would some of us climb to the pilot-house after our breakfast
+  For a morning smoke, and find ourselves seats on the benching
+  Under the windows, or in the worn-smooth arm-chairs. The pilot,
+  Which one it was did not matter, would tilt his head round and say,
+          "All right!"
+  When he had seen who we were, and begin, or go on as from stopping
+  In the midst of talk that was leading up to a story,
+  Just before we came in, and the story, begun or beginning,
+  Always began or ended with some one, or something or other,
+  Having to do with the river. If one left the wheel to the other,
+  Going off watch, he would say to his partner standing behind him
+  With his hands stretched out for the spokes that were not given up yet,
+  "Captain, you can tell them the thing I was going to tell them
+  Better than I could, I reckon," and then the other would answer,
+  "Well, I don't know as I feel so sure of that, captain," and having
+  Recognized each other so by that courtesy title of captain
+  Never officially failed of without offense among pilots,
+  One would subside into Jim and into Jerry the other.
+
+  It was on these terms, at least, Captain Dunn relieved Captain Davis
+  When we had settled ourselves one day to listen in comfort,
+  After some psychological subtleties we had indulged in at breakfast
+  Touching that weird experience every one knows when the senses
+  Juggle the points of the compass out of true orientation,
+  Changing the North to the South, and the East to the West. "Why, Jerry,
+          what was it
+  You was going to tell them?" "Oh, never _you_ mind what it _was_, Jim.
+  _You_ tell them something else," and so Captain Davis submitted,
+  While Captain Dunn, with a laugh, got away beyond reach of his protest.
+  Then Captain Davis, with fitting, deprecatory preamble,
+  Launched himself on a story that promised to be all a story
+  Could be expected to be, when one of those women--you know them--
+  Who interrupt on any occasion or none, interrupted,
+  Pointed her hand, and asked, "Oh, what is that island there, captain?"
+  "That one, ma'am?" He gave her the name, and then the woman persisted,
+  "Don't say you know them all by sight!" "Yes, by sight or by feeling."
+  "What do you mean by feeling?" "Why, just that by daylight we see them,
+  And in the dark it's like as if somehow we felt them, I reckon.
+  Every foot of the channel and change in it, wash-out and cave-in,
+  Every bend and turn of it, every sand-bar and landmark,
+  Every island, of course, we have got to see them, or feel them."
+  "But if you don't?" "But we've got to." "But aren't you ever mistaken?"
+  "Never the second time." "Now, what do you mean, Captain Davis?
+  Never the second time." "Well, let me tell you a story.
+  It's not the one I begun, but that island you asked about yonder
+  Puts me in mind of it, happens to be the place where it happened,
+  Three years ago. I suppose no man ever knew the Ohio
+  Better than Captain Dunlevy, if any one else knew it like him.
+  Man and boy he had been pretty much his whole life on the river:
+  Cabin-boy first on a keelboat before the day of the steamboats,
+  Back in the pioneer times; and watchman then on a steamboat;
+  Then second mate, and then mate, and then pilot and captain and owner--
+  But he was proudest, I reckon, of being about the best pilot
+  On the Ohio. He knew it as well as he knew his own Bible,
+  And I don't hardly believe that ever Captain Dunlevy
+  Let a single day go by without reading a chapter."
+
+  While the pilot went on with his talk, and in regular, rhythmical motion
+  Swayed from one side to the other before his wheel, and we listened,
+  Certain typical facts of the picturesque life of the river
+  Won their way to our consciousness as without help of our senses.
+  It was along about the beginning of March, but already
+  In the sleepy sunshine the budding maples and willows,
+  Where they waded out in the shallow wash of the freshet,
+  Showed the dull red and the yellow green of their blossoms and catkins,
+  And in their tops the foremost flocks of blackbirds debated
+  As to which they should colonize first. The indolent house-boats
+  Loafing along the shore, sent up in silvery spirals
+  Out of their kitchen pipes the smoke of their casual breakfasts.
+  Once a wide tow of coal-barges, loaded clear down to the gunwales,
+  Gave us the slack of the current, with proper formalities shouted
+  By the hoarse-throated stern-wheeler that pushed the black barges
+          before her,
+  And as she passed us poured a foamy cascade from her paddles.
+  Then, as a raft of logs, which the spread of the barges had hidden,
+  River-wide, weltered in sight, with a sudden jump forward the pilot
+  Dropped his whole weight on the spokes of the wheel just in time to
+          escape it.
+
+  "Always give those fellows," he joked, "all the leeway they ask for;
+  Worst kind of thing on the river you want your boat to run into.
+  Where had I got about Captain Dunlevy? Oh yes, I remember.
+  Well, when the railroads began to run away from the steamboats,
+  Taking the carrying trade in the very edge of the water,
+  It was all up with the old flush times, and Captain Dunlevy
+  Had to climb down with the rest of us pilots till he was only
+  Captain the same as any and every pilot is captain,
+  Glad enough, too, to be getting his hundred and twenty-five dollars
+  Through the months of the spring and fall while navigation was open.
+  Never lowered himself, though, a bit from captain and owner,
+  Knew his rights and yours, and never would thought of allowing
+  Any such thing as a liberty _from_ you or taking one _with_ you.
+  I had been his cub, and all that I knew of the river
+  Captain Dunlevy had learnt me; and if you know what the feeling
+  Is of a cub for the pilot that learns him the river, you'll trust me
+  When I tell you I felt it the highest kind of an honor
+  Having him for my partner; and when I came up to relieve him,
+  One day, here at the wheel, and actu'lly thought that I found him
+  Taking that island there on the left, I thought I was crazy.
+  No, I couldn't believe my senses, and yet I couldn't endure it.
+  Seeing him climb the spokes of the wheel to warp the _Kanawha_,
+  With the biggest trip of passengers ever she carried,
+  Round on the bar at the left that fairly stuck out of the water.
+  Well, as I said, he learnt me all that I knew of the river,
+  And was I to learn _him_ now which side to take of an island
+  When I knew he knew it like his right hand from his left hand?
+  My, but I hated to speak! It certainly seemed like my tongue clove,
+  Like the Bible says, to the roof of my mouth! But I had to.
+  'Captain,' I says, and it seemed like another person was talking,
+  'Do you usu'lly take that island there on the eastward?'
+  'Yes,' he says, and he laughed, 'and I thought I had learnt you to do it,
+  When you was going up.' 'But not going _down_, did you, captain?'
+  'Down?' And he whirled at me, and, without ever stopping his laughing,
+  Turned as white as a sheet, and his eyes fairly bulged from their
+          sockets.
+  Then he whirled back again, and looked up and down on the river,
+  Like he was hunting out the shape of the shore and the landmarks.
+  Well, I suppose the thing has happened to every one sometime,
+  When you find the points of the compass have swapped with each other,
+  And at the instant you're looking, the North and the South have changed
+          places.
+  _I_ knew what was in his mind as well as Dunlevy himself did.
+  Neither one of us spoke a word for nearly a minute.
+  Then in a kind of whisper he says, 'Take the wheel, Captain Davis!'
+  Let the spokes fly, and while I made a jump forwards to catch them,
+  Staggered into that chair--well, the very one you are in, ma'am.
+  Set there breathing quick, and, when he could speak, all he said was,
+  'This is the end of it for me on the river, Jim Davis,'
+  Reached up over his head for his coat where it hung by that window,
+  Trembled onto his feet, and stopped in the door there a second,
+  Stared in hard like as if for good-by to the things he was used to,
+  Shut the door behind him, and never come back again through it."
+  While we were silent, not liking to prompt the pilot with questions,
+  "Well," he said, at last, "it was no use to argue. We tried it,
+  In the half-hearted way that people do that don't mean it.
+  Every one was his friend here on the _Kanawha_, and _we_ knew
+  It was the first time he ever had lost his bearings, but _he_ knew,
+  In such a thing as that, that the first and the last are the same time.
+  When we had got through trying our worst to persuade him, he only
+  Shook his head and says, 'I am done for, boys, and you know it,'
+  Left the boat at Wheeling, and left his life on the river--
+  Left his life on the earth, you may say, for I don't call it living,
+  Setting there homesick at home for the wheel he can never go back to.
+  Reads the river-news regular; knows just the stage of the water
+  Up and down the whole way from Cincinnati to Pittsburg;
+  Follows every boat from the time she starts out in the spring-time
+  Till she lays up in the summer, and then again in the winter;
+  Wants to talk all about her and who is her captain and pilot;
+  Then wants to slide away to that everlastingly puzzling
+  Thing that happened to him that morning on the _Kanawha_
+  When he lost his bearings and North and South had changed places--
+  No, I don't call that living, whatever the rest of you call it."
+  We were silent again till that woman spoke up, "And what was it,
+  Captain, that kept him from going back and being a pilot?"
+  "Well, ma'am," after a moment the pilot patiently answered,
+  "_I_ don't hardly believe that I could explain it exactly."
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                          THE RETURN TO FAVOR
+
+
+He never, by any chance, quite kept his word, though there was a
+moment in every case when he seemed to imagine doing what he said, and
+he took with mute patience the rakings which the ladies gave him when
+he disappointed them.
+
+Disappointed is not just the word, for the ladies did not really
+expect him to do what he said. They pretended to believe him when he
+promised, but at the bottom of their hearts they never did or could.
+He was gentle-mannered and soft-spoken, and when he set his head on
+one side, and said that a coat would be ready on Wednesday, or a dress
+on Saturday, and repeated his promise upon the same lady's expressed
+doubt, she would catch her breath and say that now she absolutely must
+have it on the day named, for otherwise she would not have a thing to
+put on. Then he would become very grave, and his soft tenor would
+deepen to a bass of unimpeachable veracity, and he would say, "Sure,
+lady, you have it."
+
+The lady would depart still doubting and slightly sighing, and he
+would turn to the customer who was waiting to have a button sewed on,
+or something like that, and ask him softly what it was he could do for
+him. If the customer offered him his appreciation of the case in hand,
+he would let his head droop lower, and in a yet deeper bass deplore
+the doubt of the ladies as an idiosyncrasy of their sex. He would make
+the customer feel that he was a favorite customer whose rights to a
+perfect fidelity of word and deed must by no means be tampered with,
+and he would have the button sewed on or the rip sewed up at once, and
+refuse to charge anything, while the customer waited in his
+shirt-sleeves in the small, stuffy shop opening directly from the
+street. When he tolerantly discussed the peculiarities of ladies as a
+sex, he would endure to be laughed at, "for sufferance was the badge
+of all his tribe," and possibly he rather liked it.
+
+The favorite customer enjoyed being there when some lady came back on
+the appointed Wednesday or Saturday, and the tailor came soothingly
+forward and showed her into the curtained alcove where she was to try
+on the garments, and then called into the inner shop for them. The
+shirt-sleeved journeyman, with his unbuttoned waistcoat-front all
+pins and threaded needles, would appear in his slippers with the
+things barely basted together, and the tailor would take them, with an
+airy courage, as if they were perfectly finished, and go in behind the
+curtain where the lady was waiting in a dishabille which the favorite
+customer, out of reverence for the sex, forbore to picture to himself.
+Then sounds of volcanic fury would issue from the alcove. "Now, Mr.
+Morrison, you have lied to me again, deliberately _lied_. Didn't I
+tell you I _must_ have the things perfectly ready to-day? You see
+yourself that it will be another week before I can have my things."
+
+"A week? Oh, madam! But I assure you--"
+
+"Don't talk to me any more! It's the last time I shall ever come to
+you, but I suppose I can't take the work away from you as it is.
+_When_ shall I have it?"
+
+"To-morrow. Yes, to-morrow noon. Sure!"
+
+"Now you know you are always out at noon. I should think you would be
+ashamed."
+
+"If it hadn't been for sickness in the family I would have finished
+your dress with my own hands. Sure I would. If you come here to-morrow
+noon you find your dress all ready for you."
+
+"I know I won't, but I will come, and you'd _better_ have it ready."
+
+"Oh, sure."
+
+The lady then added some generalities of opprobrium with some
+particular criticisms of the garments. Her voice sank into
+dispassionate murmurs in these, but it rose again in her renewed sense
+of the wrong done her, and when she came from the alcove she went out
+of the street door purple. She reopened it to say, "Now, remember!"
+before she definitely disappeared.
+
+"Rather a stormy session, Mr. Morrison," the customer said.
+
+"Something fierce," Mr. Morrison sighed. But he did not seem much
+troubled, and he had one way with all his victims, no matter what mood
+they came or went in.
+
+One day the customer was by when a kind creature timidly upbraided
+him. "This is the third time you've disappointed me, Mr. Morrison. I
+really wish you wouldn't promise me unless you mean to do it. I don't
+think it's right for you."
+
+"Oh, but sure, madam! The things will be done, sure. We had a strike
+on us."
+
+"Well, I will trust you once more," the kind creature said.
+
+"You can depend on me, madam, sure."
+
+When she was gone the customer said: "I wonder you do that sort of
+thing, Mr. Morrison. You can't be surprised at their behaving rustily
+with you if you never keep your word."
+
+"Why, I assure you there are times when I don't know where to look,
+the way they go on. It is something awful. You ought to hear them
+once. And now they want the wote." He rearranged some pieces of
+tumbled goods at the table where the customer sat, and put together
+the disheveled leaves of the fashion-papers which looked as if the
+ladies had scattered them in their rage.
+
+One day the customer heard two ladies waiting for their
+disappointments in the outer room while the tailor in the alcove was
+trying to persuade a third lady that positively her things would be
+sent home the next day before dark. The customer had now formed the
+habit of having his own clothes made by the tailor, and his system in
+avoiding disappointment was very simple. In the early fall he ordered
+a spring suit, and in the late spring it was ready. He never had any
+difficulty, but he was curious to learn how the ladies managed, and he
+listened with all his might while these two talked.
+
+"I always wonder we keep coming," one of them said.
+
+"I'll tell you why," the other said. "Because he's cheap, and we get
+things from a fourth to a third less than we can get them anywhere
+else. The quality is first rate, and he's absolutely honest. And,
+besides, he's a genius. The wretch has _touch_. The things have a
+style, a look, a hang! Really it's something wonderful. Sure it iss,"
+she ended in the tailor's accent, and then they both laughed and
+joined in a common sigh.
+
+"Well, I don't believe he means to deceive any one."
+
+"Oh, neither do I. I believe he expects to do everything he says. And
+one can't help liking him even when he doesn't."
+
+"He's a good while getting through with her," the first lady said,
+meaning the unseen lady in the alcove.
+
+"She'll be a good while longer getting through with _him_, if he
+hasn't them ready the next time," the second lady said.
+
+But the lady in the alcove issued from it with an impredicable smile,
+and the tailor came up to the others, and deferred to their wishes
+with a sort of voiceless respect.
+
+He gave the customer a glance of good-fellowship, and said to him,
+radiantly: "Your things all ready for you, this morning. As soon as
+I--"
+
+"Oh, no hurry," the customer responded.
+
+"I won't be a minute," the tailor said, pulling the curtain of the
+alcove aside, and then there began those sounds of objurgation and
+expostulation, although the ladies had seemed so amiable before.
+
+The customer wondered if they did not all enjoy it; the ladies in
+their patience under long trial, and the tailor in the pleasure of
+practising upon it. But perhaps he did believe in the things he
+promised. He might be so much a genius as to have no grasp of facts;
+he might have thought that he could actually do what he said.
+
+The customer's question on these points found answer when one day the
+tailor remarked, as it were out of a clear sky, that he had sold his
+business; sold it to the slippered journeyman who used to come in his
+shirt-sleeves, with his vest-front full of pins and needles, bringing
+the basted garments to be tried on the ladies who had been promised
+them perfectly finished.
+
+"He will do your clothes all right," he explained to the customer. "He
+is a first-rate cutter and fitter; he knows the whole business."
+
+"But why--why--" the customer began.
+
+"I couldn't stand it. The way them ladies would talk to a person, when
+you done your best to please them; it's something fierce."
+
+"Yes, I know. But I thought you liked it, from the way you always
+promised them and never kept your word."
+
+"And if I hadn't promised them?" the tailor returned with some show of
+feeling. "They _wanted_ me to promise them--they made me--they
+wouldn't have gone away without it. Sure. Every one wanted her things
+before every one. You had got to think of that."
+
+"But you had to think of what they would say."
+
+"Say? Sometimes I thought they would _hit_ me. One lady said she had a
+notion to slap me once. It's no way to talk."
+
+"But you didn't seem to mind it."
+
+"I didn't mind it for a good while. Then I couldn't stand it. So I
+sold."
+
+He shook his head sadly; but the customer had no comfort to offer him.
+He asked when his clothes would be done, and the tailor told him when,
+and then they were not. The new proprietor tried them on, but he would
+not say just when they would be finished.
+
+"We have a good deal of work already for some ladies that been
+disappointed. Now we try a new way. We tell people exactly what we
+do."
+
+"Well, that's right," the customer said, but in his heart he was not
+sure he liked the new way.
+
+The day before his clothes were promised he dropped in. From the
+curtained alcove he heard low murmurs, the voice of the new proprietor
+and the voice of some lady trying on, and being severely bidden not to
+expect her things at a time she suggested. "No, madam. We got too much
+work on hand already. These things, they will not be done before next
+week."
+
+"I told you to-morrow," the same voice said to another lady, and the
+new proprietor came out with an unfinished coat in his hand.
+
+"I know you did, but I thought you would be better than your word, and
+so I came to-day. Well, then, to-morrow."
+
+"Yes, to-morrow," the new proprietor said, but he did not seem to have
+liked the lady's joke. He did not look happy.
+
+A few weeks after that the customer came for some little alterations
+in his new suit.
+
+In the curtained alcove he heard the murmurs of trying on, much
+cheerfuller murmurs than before; the voice of a lady lifted in
+gladness, in gaiety, and an incredible voice replying, "Oh, sure,
+madam."
+
+Then the old proprietor came out in his shirt-sleeves and slippers,
+with his waistcoat-front full of pins and needles, just like the new
+proprietor in former days.
+
+"Why!" the customer exclaimed. "Have you bought back?"
+
+"No. I'm just here like a journeyman already. The new man he want me
+to come. He don't get along very well with his way. He's all right;
+he's a good man and a first-class tailor. But," and the former
+proprietor looked down at the basted garment hanging over his arm, and
+picked off an irrelevant thread from it, "he thinks I get along better
+with the ladies."
+
+
+
+
+                                  V
+
+                          SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
+
+
+The figure of a woman sat crouched forward on one of the lowermost
+steps of the brownstone dwelling which was keeping a domestic
+tradition in a street mostly gone to shops and small restaurants and
+local express-offices. The house was black behind its closed shutters,
+and the woman remained sitting there because no one could have come
+out of its door for a year past to hunt her away. The neighborhood
+policeman faltered in going by, and then he kept on. The three people
+who came out of the large, old-fashioned hotel, half a block off, on
+their way for dinner to a French _table d'hote_ which they had heard
+of, stopped and looked at the woman. They were a father and his son
+and daughter, and it was something like a family instinct that
+controlled them, in their pause before the woman crouching on the
+steps.
+
+It was the early dusk of a December day, and the day was very chilly.
+"She seems to be sick or something," the father vaguely surmised. "Or
+asleep."
+
+The three looked at the woman, but they did nothing for a moment. They
+would rather have gone on, but they waited to see if anything would
+happen to release them from the spell that they seemed to have laid
+upon themselves. They were conditional New-Yorkers of long sojourn,
+and it was from no apparent motive that the son wore evening dress,
+which his unbuttoned overcoat discovered, and an opera-hat. He would
+not have dressed so for that problematical French _table d'hote_;
+probably he was going on later to some society affair. He now put in
+effect the father's impulse to go closer and look at the woman.
+
+"She seems to be asleep," he reported.
+
+"Shouldn't you think she would take cold? She will get her death
+there. Oughtn't we to do something?" the daughter asked, but she left
+it to the father, and he said:
+
+"Probably somebody will come by."
+
+"That we could leave her to?" the daughter pursued.
+
+"We could do that without waiting," the son commented.
+
+"Well, yes," the father assented; but they did not go on. They waited,
+helplessly, and then somebody came by. It was a young girl, not very
+definite in the dusk, except that she was unmistakably of the working
+class; she was simply dressed, though with the New York instinct for
+clothes. Their having stopped there seemed to stay her involuntarily,
+and after a glance in the direction of their gaze she asked the
+daughter:
+
+"Is she sick, do you think?"
+
+"We don't know what's the matter. But she oughtn't to stay there."
+
+Something velvety in the girl's voice had made its racial quality
+sensible to the ear; as she went up to the crouching woman and bent
+forward over her and then turned to them, a street lamp threw its
+light on her face, and they saw that she was a light shade of colored
+girl.
+
+"She seems to be sleeping."
+
+"Perhaps," the son began, "she's not quite--" But he did not go on.
+
+The girl looked round at the others and suggested, "She must be
+somebody's mother!"
+
+The others all felt abashed in their several sorts and degrees, but in
+their several sorts and degrees they all decided that there was
+something romantic, sentimental, theatrical in the girl's words, like
+something out of some cheap story-paper story.
+
+The father wondered if that kind of thing was current among that kind
+of people. He had a sort of esthetic pleasure in the character and
+condition expressed by the words.
+
+"Well, yes," he said, "if she has children, or has had." The girl
+looked at him uncertainly, and then he added, "But, of course--"
+
+The son went up to the woman again, and asked: "Aren't you well? Can
+we do anything for you? It won't do to stay here, you know." The woman
+only made a low murmur, and he said to his sister, "Suppose we get her
+up."
+
+His sister did not come forward promptly, and the colored girl said,
+"I'll help you."
+
+She took one arm of the woman and the son took the other, and they
+lifted her, without her connivance, to her feet and kept her on them.
+Then they walked her down the steps. On the level below she showed
+taller than either of them; she was bundled up in different incoherent
+wraps; her head was muffled, and she wore a battered bonnet at an
+involuntary slant.
+
+"I don't know exactly what we shall do with her," the son said.
+
+"We ought to get her home somehow," the daughter said.
+
+The father proposed nothing, but the colored girl said, "If we keep
+walking her along, we'll come to a policeman and we can--"
+
+A hoarse rumble of protest came from the muffled head of the woman,
+and the girl put her ear closer. "Want to go home? Well, the policeman
+will take you. We don't know where you live, and we haven't the time."
+
+The woman seemed to have nothing to say further, and they began
+walking her westward; the colored girl supported her on one hand, and
+the son, in his evening dress and opera-hat, on the other.
+
+The daughter followed in a vague anxiety, but the father went along,
+enjoying the anomaly, and happy in his relish of that phrase, "She
+must be somebody's mother." It now sounded to him like a catch from
+one of those New York songs, popular in the order of life where the
+mother represents what is best and holiest. He recalled a vaudeville
+ballad with the refrain of "A Boy's Best Friend is his Mother," which,
+when he heard it in a vaudeville theater, threatened the gallery floor
+under the applauding feet of the frenzied audience. Probably this
+colored girl belonged to that order of life; he wished he could know
+her social circumstance and what her outlook on the greater world
+might be. She seemed a kind creature, poor thing, and he respected
+her. "Somebody's mother"--he liked that.
+
+They all walked westward, aimlessly, except that the _table d'hote_
+where they had meant to dine was in that direction; they had heard of
+it as an amusingly harmless French place, and they were fond of such
+mild adventures.
+
+The old woman contributed nothing to the definition of their progress.
+She stumbled and mumbled along, but between Seventh Avenue and Eighth
+she stubbornly arrested her guardians. "She says"--the colored girl
+translated some obscure avowal across her back--"she says she wants to
+go home, and she lives up in Harlem."
+
+"Oh, well, that's good," the father said, with an optimistic
+amiability. "We'd better help walk her across to Ninth Avenue and put
+her on a car, and tell the conductor where to let her off."
+
+He was not helping walk her himself, but he enjoyed his son's doing it
+in evening dress and opera-hat, with that kind colored girl on the
+other side of the mother; the composition was agreeably droll. The
+daughter did not like it, and she cherished the ideal of a passing
+policeman to take the old woman in charge.
+
+No policeman passed, though great numbers of other people met them
+without apparently finding anything noticeable in the spectacle which
+their group presented. Among the crowds going and coming on the
+avenues which they crossed scarcely any turned to look at them, or was
+moved by the sense of anything odd in them.
+
+The old woman herself did nothing to attract public notice till they
+were midway between Seventh and Eighth avenues. She mumbled something
+from time to time which the colored girl interpreted to the rest as
+her continued wish to go home. She was now clearer about her street
+and number. The girl, as if after question of her own generous spirit,
+said she did not see how _she_ could go with her; she was expected at
+home herself.
+
+"Oh, you won't have to go with her; we'll just put her aboard the
+Ninth Avenue car," the father encouraged her. He would have encouraged
+any one; he was enjoying the whole affair.
+
+At a certain moment, for no apparent reason, the mother decided to sit
+down on a door-step. It proved to be the door-step of a house where
+from time to time colored people--sometimes of one sex, sometimes of
+another--went in or came out. The door seemed to open directly into a
+large room where dancing and dining were going on concurrently. At a
+long table colored people sat eating, and behind their chairs on both
+sides of the room and at the ends of the table colored couples were
+waltzing.
+
+The effect was the more curious because, except for some almost
+inaudible music, the scene passed in silence. Those who were eating
+were not visibly incommoded by those revolving at their backs; the
+waltzers turned softly around and around, untempted by the table now
+before them, now behind them. When some of the diners or dancers came
+out, they stumbled over the old woman on the door-step without minding
+or stopping to inquire. Those outside, when they went in, fell over
+her with like equanimity and joined the strange company within.
+
+The father murmured to himself the lines,
+
+          "'Vast forms that move fantastically
+             To a discordant melody--'"
+
+with a remote trouble of mind because the words were at once so
+graphic and yet so imperfectly applicable. The son and daughter
+exchanged a silent wonder as long as they could bear it; then the
+daughter asked the colored girl:
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's a boarding-house," the girl answered, simply.
+
+"Oh," the daughter said.
+
+Sounds of more decided character than before now came from the figure
+on the door-step.
+
+"She seems to be saying something," the daughter suggested in general
+terms. "What is she saying?" she asked the colored girl.
+
+The girl stooped over and listened. Then she answered, "She's swearing."
+
+"Swearing? What about? Whom is she swearing at?"
+
+"At me, I reckon. She says, why don't I take her home."
+
+"Well, why doesn't she get up, then?"
+
+"She says she won't."
+
+"We can't carry her to the car," the daughter noted.
+
+"Oh, why not?" the father merrily demanded.
+
+The daughter turned to her brother. They were both very respectful to
+their father, but the son agreed with his sister when she said: "Papa
+would joke about anything. But this has passed a joke. We must get
+this old thing up and start her off."
+
+Upon experiment they could not get the old thing up, even with the
+help of the kind colored girl. They had to let her be, and the colored
+girl reported, after stooping over her again, "She says she can't
+walk."
+
+"She walked here well enough," the daughter said.
+
+"Not _very_ well," the father amended.
+
+His daughter did not notice him. She said to her brother: "Well, now
+you must go and find a policeman. It's strange none has gone by."
+
+It was also strange that still their group remained without attracting
+the notice of the passers. Nobody stopped to speak or even stare;
+perhaps the phenomena of that boarding-house had ceased to have
+surprises for the public of the neighborhood, and they in their
+momentary relation to it would naturally be without interest.
+
+The brother went away, leaving his sister with their father and that
+kind colored creature in charge of the old woman, now more and more
+quiescent on the door-step; she had ceased to swear, or even to speak.
+The brother came back after a time that seemed long, and said that he
+could not find a policeman anywhere, and at the same moment, as if the
+officer had been following at his heels, a policeman crossed the
+street from just behind him.
+
+The daughter ran after him, and asked if he would not come and look at
+the old woman who had so steadfastly remained in their charge, and she
+rapidly explained.
+
+"Sure, lady," the policeman said, and he turned from crossing the
+street and went up to the old woman. He laid his hand on her shoulder,
+and his touch seemed magical. "What's the matter? Can't you stand up?"
+She stood up as if at something familiar in the voice of authority.
+"Where do you live?" She gave an address altogether different from
+that she had given before--a place on the next avenue, within a block
+or two. "You'd better go home. You can walk, can't you?"
+
+"I can walk well enough," she answered in a tone of vexation, and she
+made her word good by walking quite actively away in the direction she
+had given.
+
+The kind colored girl became a part of the prevalent dark after
+refusing the thanks of the others. The daughter then fervently offered
+them to the policeman.
+
+"That's all right, lady," he said, and the incident had closed except
+for her emotion at seeing him enter a police-station precisely across
+the street, where they could have got a dozen policemen in a moment.
+
+"Well," the father said, "we might as well go to our French _table
+d'hote_ now."
+
+"Oh," the son said, as if that reminded him, "the place seems to be
+shut."
+
+"Well, then, we might as well go back to the hotel," the father
+decided. "I dare say we shall do quite as well there."
+
+On the way the young people laughed over the affair and their escape
+from it, especially at the strange appearance and disappearance of the
+kind colored girl, with her tag of sentiment, and at the instant
+compliance of the old woman with the suggestion of the policeman.
+
+The father followed, turning the matter over in his mind. Did mere
+motherhood hallow that old thing to the colored girl and her sort and
+condition? Was there a superstition of motherhood among such people
+which would endear this disreputable old thing to their affection and
+reverence? Did such people hold mothers in tenderer regard than people
+of larger means? Would a mother in distress or merely embarrassment
+instantly appeal to their better nature as a case of want or sickness
+in the neighborhood always appealed to their compassion? Would her
+family now welcome the old thing home from her aberration more fondly
+than the friends of one who had arrived in a carriage among them in a
+good street? But, after all, how little one knew of other people! How
+little one knew of one self, for that matter! How next to nothing one
+knew of Somebody's Mother! It did not necessarily follow from anything
+they knew of her that she was a mother at all. Her motherhood might be
+the mere figment of that kind colored girl's emotional fancy. She
+might be Nobody's Mother.
+
+When it came to this the father laughed, too. Why, anyhow, were
+mothers more sacred than fathers? If they had found an old man in that
+old woman's condition on those steps, would that kind colored girl
+have appealed to them in his behalf as Somebody's Father?
+
+
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                        THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
+
+
+  He had gone down at Christmas, where our host
+  Had opened up his house on the Maine coast,
+  For the week's holidays, and we were all,
+  On Christmas night, sitting in the great hall,
+  About the corner fireplace, while we told
+  Stories like those that people, young and old,
+  Have told at Christmas firesides from the first,
+  Till one who crouched upon the hearth, and nursed
+  His knees in his claspt arms, threw back his head,
+  And fixed our host with laughing eyes, and said,
+  "This is so good, here--with your hickory logs
+  Blazing like natural-gas ones on the dogs,
+  And sending out their flicker on the wall
+  And rafters of your mock-baronial hall,
+  All in fumed-oak, and on your polished floor,
+  And the steel-studded panels of your door--
+  I think you owe the general make-believe
+  Some sort of story that will somehow give
+  A more ideal completeness to our case,
+  And make each several listener in his place--
+  Or hers--sit up, with a real goose-flesh creeping
+  All over him--or her--in proper keeping
+  With the locality and hour and mood.
+  Come!" And amid the cries of "Yes!" and "Good!"
+  Our host laughed back; then, with a serious air,
+  Looked around him on our hemicycle, where
+  He sat midway of it. "Why," he began,
+  But interrupted by the other man,
+  He paused for him to say: "Nothing remote,
+  But something with the actual Yankee note
+  Of here and now in it!" "I'll do my best,"
+  Our host replied, "to satisfy a guest.
+  What do you say to Barberry Cove? And would
+  Five years be too long past?" "No, both are good.
+  Go on!" "You noticed that big house to-day
+  Close to the water, and the sloop that lay,
+  Stripped for the winter, there, beside the pier?
+  Well, there she has lain just so, year after year;
+  And she will never leave her pier again;
+  But once, each spring she sailed in sun or rain,
+  For Bay Chaleur--or Bay Shaloor, as they
+  Like better to pronounce it down this way."
+
+  "I like Shaloor myself rather the best.
+  But go ahead," said the exacting guest.
+  And with a glance around at us that said,
+  "Don't let me bore you!" our host went ahead.
+
+  "Captain Gilroy built the big house, and he
+  Still lives there with his aging family.
+  He built the sloop, and when he used to come
+  Back from the Banks he made her more his home,
+  With his two boys, than the big house. The two
+  Counted with him a good half of her crew,
+  Until it happened, on the Banks, one day
+  The oldest boy got in a steamer's way,
+  And went down in his dory. In the fall
+  The others came without him. That was all
+  That showed in either one of them except
+  That now the father and the brother slept
+  Ashore, and not on board. When the spring came
+  They sailed for the old fishing-ground the same
+  As ever. Yet, not quite the same. The brother,
+  If you believed what folks say, kissed his mother
+  Good-by in going; and by general rumor,
+  The father, so far yielding as to humor
+  His daughters' weakness, rubbed his stubbly cheek
+  Against their lips. Neither of them would speak,
+  But the dumb passion of their love and grief
+  In so much show at parting found relief.
+
+  "The weeks passed and the months. Sometimes they heard
+  At home, by letter, from the sloop, or word
+  Of hearsay from the fleet. But by and by
+  Along about the middle of July,
+  A time in which they had no news began,
+  And holding unbrokenly through August, ran
+  Into September. Then, one afternoon,
+  While the world hung between the sun and moon,
+  And while the mother and her girls were sitting
+  Together with their sewing and their knitting,--
+  Before the early-coming evening's gloom
+  Had gathered round them in the living-room,
+  Helplessly wondering to each other when
+  They should hear something from their absent men,--
+  They saw, all three, against the window-pane,
+  A face that came and went, and came again,
+  Three times, as though for each of them, about
+  As high up from the porch's floor without
+  As a man's head would be that stooped to stare
+  Into the room on their own level there.
+  Its eyes dwelt on them wistfully as if
+  Longing to speak with the dumb lips some grief
+  They could not speak. The women did not start
+  Or scream, though each one of them, in her heart,
+  Knew she was looking on no living face,
+  But stared, as dumb as it did, in her place."
+
+  Here our host paused, and one sigh broke from all
+  Our circle whom his tale had held in thrall.
+  But he who had required it of him spoke
+  In what we others felt an ill-timed joke:
+  "Well, this is something like!" A girl said, "Don't!"
+  As if it hurt, and he said, "Well, I won't.
+  Go on!" And in a sort of muse our host
+  Said: "I suppose we all expect a ghost
+  Will sometimes come to us. But I doubt if we
+  Are moved by its coming as we thought to be.
+  At any rate, the women were not scared,
+  But, as I said, they simply sat and stared
+  Till the face vanished. Then the mother said,
+  'It was your father, girls, and he is dead.'
+  But both had known him; and now all went on
+  Much as before till three weeks more were gone,
+  When, one night sitting as they sat before,
+  Together with their mother, at the door
+  They heard a fumbling hand, and on the walk
+  Up from the pier, the tramp and muffled talk
+  Of different wind-blown voices that they knew
+  For the hoarse voices of their father's crew.
+  Then the door opened, and their father stood
+  Before them, palpably in flesh and blood.
+  The mother spoke for all, her own misgiving:
+  'Father, is this your ghost? Or are you living?'
+  'I am alive!' 'But in this very place
+  We saw your face look, like a spirit's face,
+  There through that window, just three weeks ago,
+  And now you are alive!' 'I did not know
+  That I had come; all I know is that then
+  I wanted to tell you folks here that our Ben
+  Was dying of typhoid fever. He raved of you
+  So that I could not think what else to do.
+  He's there in Bay Shaloor!'
+
+                        "Well, that's the end."
+  And rising up to mend the fire our friend
+  Seemed trying to shun comment; but in vain:
+  The exacting guest came at him once again;
+  "You must be going to fall down, I thought,
+  There at the climax, when your story brought
+  The skipper home alive and well. But no,
+  You saved yourself with honor." The girl said, "Oh,"
+  Who spoke before, "it's wonderful! But you,
+  How could you think of anything so true,
+  So delicate, as the father's wistful face
+  Coming there at the window in the place
+  Of the dead son's! And then, that quaintest touch,
+  Of half-apology--that he felt so much,
+  He _had_ to come! How perfectly New England! Well,
+  I hope nobody will undertake to tell
+  A common or garden ghost-story to-night."
+
+  Our host had turned again, and at her light
+  And playful sympathy he said, "My dear,
+  I hope that no one will imagine here
+  I have been inventing in the tale that's done.
+  My little story's charm if it has one
+  Is from no skill of mine. One does not change
+  The course of fable from its wonted range
+  To such effect as I have seemed to do:
+  Only the fact could make my story true."
+
+
+
+
+                                 VII
+
+                            AN EXPERIENCE
+
+
+For a long time after the event my mind dealt with the poor man in
+helpless conjecture, and it has now begun to do so again for no reason
+that I can assign. All that I ever heard about him was that he was
+some kind of insurance man. Whether life, fire, or marine insurance I
+never found out, and I am not sure that I tried to find out.
+
+There was something in the event which discharged him of all
+obligation to define himself of this or that relation to life. He must
+have had some relation to it such as we all bear, and since the
+question of him has come up with me again I have tried him in several
+of those relations--father, son, brother, husband--without identifying
+him very satisfyingly in either.
+
+As I say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the debt we
+owe in that kind to one another's curiosity, sympathy, or whatever. I
+cannot say what errand it was that brought him to the place, a
+strange, large, indeterminate open room, where several of us sat
+occupied with different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me now,
+by only a provisional right to the place. Certainly the corner
+allotted to my own editorial business was of temporary assignment; I
+was there until we could find a more permanent office. The man had
+nothing to do with me or with the publishers; he had no manuscript, or
+plan for an article which he wished to propose and to talk himself
+into writing, so that he might bring it with a claim to acceptance, as
+though he had been asked to write it. In fact, he did not even look of
+the writing sort; and his affair with some other occupant of that
+anomalous place could have been in no wise literary. Probably it was
+some kind of insurance business, and I have been left with the
+impression of fussiness in his conduct of it; he had to my involuntary
+attention an effect of conscious unwelcome with it.
+
+After subjectively dealing with this impression, I ceased to notice
+him, without being able to give myself to my own work. The day was
+choking hot, of a damp that clung about one, and forbade one so much
+effort as was needed to relieve one of one's discomfort; to pull at
+one's wilted collar and loosen the linen about one's reeking neck
+meant exertion which one willingly forbore; it was less suffering to
+suffer passively than to suffer actively. The day was of the sort
+which begins with a brisk heat, and then, with a falling breeze,
+decays into mere swelter. To come indoors out of the sun was no escape
+from the heat; my window opened upon a shaded alley where the air was
+damper without being cooler than the air within.
+
+At last I lost myself in my work with a kind of humid interest in the
+psychological inquiry of a contributor who was dealing with a matter
+rather beyond his power. I did not think that he was fortunate in
+having cast his inquiry in the form of a story; I did not think that
+his contrast of love and death as the supreme facts of life was what a
+subtler or stronger hand could have made it, or that the situation
+gained in effectiveness from having the hero die in the very moment of
+his acceptance. In his supposition that the reader would care more for
+his hero simply because he had undergone that tremendous catastrophe,
+the writer had omitted to make him interesting otherwise; perhaps he
+could not.
+
+My mind began to wander from the story and not very relevantly to
+employ itself with the question of how far our experiences really
+affect our characters. I remembered having once classed certain
+temperaments as the stuff of tragedy, and others as the stuff of
+comedy, and of having found a greater cruelty in the sorrows which
+light natures undergo, as unfit and disproportionate for them.
+Disaster, I tacitly decided, was the fit lot of serious natures; when
+it befell the frivolous it was more than they ought to have been made
+to bear; it was not of their quality. Then by the mental zigzagging
+which all thinking is I thought of myself and whether I was of this
+make or that. If it was more creditable to be of serious stuff than
+frivolous, though I had no agency in choosing, I asked myself how I
+should be affected by the sight of certain things, like the common
+calamities reported every day in the papers which I had hitherto
+escaped seeing. By another zigzag I thought that I had never known a
+day so close and stifling and humid. I then reflected upon the
+comparative poverty of the French language, which I was told had only
+that one word for the condition we could call by half a dozen
+different names, as humid, moist, damp, sticky, reeking, sweltering,
+and so on. I supposed that a book of synonyms would give even more
+English adjectives; I thought of looking, but my book of synonyms was
+at the back of my table, and I would have to rise for it. Then I
+questioned whether the French language was so destitute of adjectives,
+after all; I preferred to doubt it rather than rise.
+
+With no more logic than those other vagaries had, I realized that the
+person who had started me in them was no longer in the room. He must
+have gone outdoors, and I visualized him in the street pushing about,
+crowded hither and thither, and striking against other people as he
+went and came. I was glad I was not in his place; I believed I should
+have fallen in a faint from the heat, as I had once almost done in New
+York on a day like that. From this my mind jumped to the thought of
+sudden death in general. Was it such a happy thing as people
+pretended? For the person himself, yes, perhaps; but not for those
+whom he had left at home, say, in the morning, and who were expecting
+him at home in the evening. I granted that it was generally accepted
+as the happiest death, but no one that had tried it had said so. To be
+sure, one was spared a long sickness, with suffering from pain and
+from the fear of death. But one had no time for making one's peace
+with God, as it used to be said, and after all there might be
+something in death-bed repentance, although cultivated people no
+longer believed in it. Then I reverted to the family unprepared for
+the sudden death: the mother, the wife, the children. I struggled to
+get away from the question, but the vagaries which had lightly
+dispersed themselves before clung persistently to the theme now. I
+felt that it was like a bad dream. That was a promising diversion. Had
+one any sort of volition in the quick changes of dreams? One was aware
+of finding a certain nightmare insupportable, and of breaking from it
+as by main force, and then falling into a deep, sweet sleep. Was death
+something like waking from a dream such as that, which this life
+largely was, and then sinking into a long, restful slumber, and
+possibly never waking again?
+
+Suddenly I perceived that the man had come back. He might have been
+there some time with his effect of fussing and his pathetic sense of
+unwelcome. I had not noticed; I only knew that he stood at the
+half-open door with the knob of it in his hand looking into the room
+blankly.
+
+As he stood there he lifted his hand and rubbed it across his forehead
+as if in a sort of daze from the heat. I recognized the gesture as one
+very characteristic of myself; I had often rubbed my hand across my
+forehead on a close, hot day like that. Then the man suddenly vanished
+as if he had sunk through the floor.
+
+People who had not noticed that he was there noticed now that he was
+not there. Some made a crooked rush toward the place where he had
+been, and one of those helpful fellow-men who are first in all needs
+lifted his head and mainly carried him into the wide space which the
+street stairs mounted to, and laid him on the floor. It was darker, if
+not cooler there, and we stood back to give him the air which he drew
+in with long, deep sighs. One of us ran down the stairs to the street
+for a doctor, wherever he might be found, and ran against a doctor at
+the last step.
+
+The doctor came and knelt over the prostrate figure and felt its
+pulse, and put his ear down to its heart. It, which has already in my
+telling ceased to be he, drew its breath in those long suspirations
+which seemed to search each more profoundly than the last the lurking
+life, drawing it from the vital recesses and expelling it in those
+vast sighs.
+
+They went on and on, and established in our consciousness the
+expectation of indefinite continuance. We knew that the figure there
+was without such consciousness as ours, unless it was something so
+remotely withdrawn that it could not manifest itself in any signal to
+our senses. There was nothing tragical in the affair, but it had a
+surpassing dignity. It was as if the figure was saying something to
+the life in each of us which none of us would have words to interpret,
+speaking some last message from the hither side of that bourne from
+which there is no returning.
+
+There was a clutch upon my heart which tightened with the slower and
+slower succession of those awful breaths. Then one was drawn and
+expelled and then another was not drawn. I waited for the breathing to
+begin again, and it did not begin. The doctor rose from kneeling over
+the figure that had been a man, and uttered, with a kind of
+soundlessness, "Gone," and mechanically dusted his fingers with the
+thumbs of each hand from their contact with what had now become all
+dust forever.
+
+That helpfulest one among us laid a cloth over the face, and the rest
+of us went away. It was finished. The man was done with the sorrow
+which, in our sad human order, must now begin for those he loved and
+who loved him. I tried vaguely to imagine their grief for not having
+been uselessly with him at the last, and I could not. The incident
+remained with me like an experience, something I had known rather than
+seen. I could not alienate it by my pity and make it another's. They
+whom it must bereave seemed for the time immeasurably removed from the
+fact.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+                             THE BOARDERS
+
+
+The boarder who had eloped was a student at the theological seminary,
+and he had really gone to visit his family, so that he had a fairly
+good conscience in giving this color to the fact that he was leaving
+the place permanently because he could not bear it any longer. It was
+a shade of deceit to connive with his room-mate for the custody of his
+carpet-bag and the few socks and collars and the one shirt and summer
+coat which did not visibly affect its lankness when gathered into it
+from his share of the bureau-drawers; but he did not know what else to
+do, and he trusted to a final forgiveness when all the facts were
+considered by a merciful providence. His board was fully paid, and he
+had suffered long. He argued with his room-mate that he could do no
+good by remaining, and that he would have stayed if he could have
+believed there was any use. Besides, the food was undermining his
+health, and the room with that broken window had given him a cold
+already. He had a right to go, and it was his duty to himself and the
+friends who were helping him through the seminary not to get sick.
+
+He did not feel that he had convinced his room-mate, who took charge
+of his carpet-bag and now sat with it between his feet waiting the
+signal of the fugitive's surreptitious return for it. He was a
+vague-looking young man, presently in charge of the "Local and
+Literary" column of the one daily paper of the place, and he had just
+explained to the two other boarders who were watching with him for the
+event that he was not certain whether it was the supper, or the
+anxiety of the situation, or just what it was that was now affecting
+his digestion.
+
+The fellow-boarders, who sat on the edge of the bed, in default of the
+one unbroken chair which their host kept for himself, as easier than a
+mattress to get up from suddenly, did not take sides for or against
+him in his theories of his discomfort. One of them glanced at the
+broken window.
+
+"How do you glaze that in the daytime? You can't use the bolster
+then?"
+
+"I'm not in, much, in the daytime."
+
+It was a medical student who had spoken, but he was now silent, and
+the other said, after they had listened to the twitter of a piano in
+the parlor under the room, "That girl's playing will be the death of
+me."
+
+"Not if her mother's cooking isn't," the medical student, whose name
+was Wallace, observed with a professional effect.
+
+"Why don't you prescribe something for it?" the law student suggested.
+
+"Which?" Wallace returned.
+
+"I don't believe anything could cure the playing. I must have meant
+the cooking."
+
+"You're a promising young jurist, Blakeley. What makes you think I
+could cure the cooking?"
+
+"Oh, I just wondered. The sick one gets paler every day. I wonder what
+ails her."
+
+"She's not my patient."
+
+"Oh! Hippocratic oath. Rather fine of you, Wallace. But if she's not
+your patient--"
+
+"Listen!" their host interrupted, sharply. After a joint silence he
+added: "No. It must have been the sleet."
+
+"Well, Briggs," the law student said, "if it must have been the sleet,
+what mustn't it have been?"
+
+"Oh!" Briggs explained, "I thought it was Phillips. He was to throw a
+handful of gravel at the window."
+
+"And then you were to run down with his bag and help him to make his
+escape from a friendless widow. Well, I don't know that I blame him.
+If I didn't owe two weeks' board, I'd leave myself--though I hope I
+shouldn't sneak away. And if Mrs. Betterson didn't owe Wallace, here,
+two weeks' board, we'd walk off together arm-in-arm at high noon. I
+can't understand how he ever came to advance her the money."
+
+Wallace rose from the bed, and kicked each leg out to dislodge the
+tight trousers of the middle eighteen-fifties which had caught on the
+tops of his high boots. "You're a tonguey fellow, Blakeley. But you'll
+find, as you live long, that there are several things you can't
+explain."
+
+"I'll tell you what," Blakeley said. "We'll get Mrs. Betterson to take
+your loan for my debt, and we'll go at once."
+
+"You can propose something like that before the justice of the peace
+in your first pettifogging case."
+
+"I believe Wallace likes to stay. And yet he must know from his
+anatomical studies, better than the animals themselves, what cuts of
+meat the old lady gives us. I shouldn't be so fastidious about the
+cuts, if she didn't treat them all with pork gravy. Well, I mustn't be
+too hard on a lone widow that I owe board to. I don't suppose his diet
+had anything to do with the deep damnation of the late Betterson's
+taking off. Does that stove of yours smoke, Briggs?"
+
+"Not when there isn't a fire in it."
+
+"I just asked. Wallace's stove smokes, fire or no fire. It takes
+advantage of the old lady's indebtedness to him. There seem," he
+added, philosophically, "to be just two occupations open to widows who
+have to support themselves: millinery business for young ones,
+boarding-housing for old ones. It _is_ rather restricted. What do you
+suppose she puts into the mince-pies? Mince-pies are rather a mystery
+at the best."
+
+Wallace was walking up and down the room still in some difficulty with
+his trousers-legs, and kicking out from time to time to dislodge them.
+"How long should you say Blakeley had been going on?" he asked Briggs.
+
+"You never can tell," Briggs responded. "I think he doesn't know
+himself."
+
+"Well said, youthful scribe! With such listeners as you two, I could
+go on forever. Consider yourselves clapped jovially on the back, my
+gentle Briggs; I can't get up to do it from the hollow of your bed
+here. As you were saying, the wonder about these elderly widows who
+keep boarding-houses is the domestic dilapidation they fall into. If
+they've ever known how to cook a meal or sweep a room or make a bed,
+these arts desert them in the presence of their boarders. Their only
+aim in life seems to be preventing the escape of their victims, and
+they either let them get into debt for their board or borrow money
+from them. But why do they always have daughters, and just two of
+them: one beautiful, fashionable, and devoted to the piano; the other
+willing to work, but pale, pathetic, and incapable of the smallest
+achievement with the gridiron or the wash-board? It's a thing to make
+a person want to pay up and leave, even if he's reading law. If
+Wallace, here, had the spirit of a man, he would collect the money
+owing him, and--"
+
+"Oh, stop it, Blakeley!" Wallace stormed. "I should think you'd get
+tired of your talk yourself."
+
+"Well, as you insist--"
+
+Blakeley began again, but Briggs jumped to his feet and caught up
+Phillips's carpet-bag, and looked wildly around. "It's gravel, this
+time."
+
+"Well, take your hat, Briggs. It may be a prolonged struggle. But
+remember that Phillips's cause is just. He's paid his board, and he
+has a perfect right to leave. She has no right to prevent him. Think
+of that when the fray is at its worst. But try to get him off quietly,
+if you can. Deal gently with the erring, while you stand firm for
+boarders' rights. Remember that Phillips is sneaking off in order to
+spare her feelings and has come pretty near prevarication in the
+effort. Have you got your shoes off? No; it's your rubbers on. That's
+better."
+
+Briggs faltered with the carpet-bag in his hand. "Boys, I don't like
+this. It feels--clandestine."
+
+"It _looks_ that way, too," Blakeley admitted. "It has an air of
+conspiracy."
+
+"I've got half a mind to let Phillips come in and get his bag
+himself."
+
+"It would serve him right, though I don't know why, exactly. He has a
+right to spare his own feelings if he's sparing hers at the same time.
+Of course he's afraid she'll plead with him to stay, and he'll have to
+be inexorable with her; and if I understand the yielding nature of
+Phillips he doesn't like to be inexorable."
+
+There came another sharp rattle of small pebbles at the window.
+
+"Oh, confound him!" Briggs cried under his breath, and he shuffled out
+of the room and crept noiselessly down the stairs to the front door.
+The door creaked a little in opening, and he left it ajar. The current
+of cold air that swept up to the companions he had left behind at his
+room door brought them the noise of his rush down the gravel walk to
+the gate and a noise there as of fugitive steps on the pavement
+outside.
+
+A weak female tread made itself heard in the hallway, followed by a
+sharp voice from a door in the rear. "Was it the cat, Jenny?"
+
+"No; the door just seems to have blown open. The catch is broken."
+
+Swift, strong steps advanced with an effect of angry suspicion. "I
+don't believe it blew open. More likely the cat clawed it open."
+
+The steps which the voice preceded seemed to halt at the open door, as
+if falling back from it, and Wallace and Blakeley, looking down, saw
+by the dim flare of the hall lamp the face of Briggs confronting the
+face of Mrs. Betterson from the outer darkness. They saw the sick
+girl, whose pallor they could not see, supporting herself by the
+stairs-post with one hand and pressing the other to her side.
+
+"Oh! It's _you_, Mr. Briggs," the landlady said, with a note of
+inculpation. "What made you leave the door open?"
+
+The spectators could not see the swift change in Briggs's face from
+terror to savage desperation, but they noted it in his voice.
+"Yes--yes! It's me. I just--I was just-- No I won't, either! You'd
+better know the truth. I was taking Phillips's bag out to him. He was
+afraid to come in for it, because he didn't want to see you, the
+confounded coward! He's left."
+
+"Left? And he said he would stay till spring! Didn't he, Jenny?"
+
+"I don't remember--" the girl weakly gasped, but her mother did not
+heed her in her mounting wrath.
+
+"A great preacher _he'll_ make. What'd he say he left for?"
+
+"He didn't say. Will you let me up-stairs?"
+
+"No, I won't, till you tell me. You know well enough, between you."
+
+"Yes, I do know," Briggs answered, savagely. "He left because he was
+tired of eating sole-leather for steak, and fire-salt pork, and tar
+for molasses, and butter strong enough to make your nose curl, and
+drinking burnt-rye slops for coffee and tea-grounds for tea. And so am
+I, and so are all of us, and--and-- Will you let me go up-stairs now,
+Mrs. Betterson?"
+
+His voice had risen, not so high but that another voice from the
+parlor could prevail over it: a false, silly, girl voice, with the
+twitter of piano-keys as from hands swept over the whole board to help
+drown the noise of the quarrel in the hall. "Oh yes, I'll sing it
+again, Mr. Saunders, if you sa-a-a-y."
+
+Then this voice lifted itself in a silly song, and a silence followed
+the voices in the hall, except for the landlady's saying, brokenly:
+"Well, all right, Mr. Briggs. You can go up to your room for all me.
+I've tried to be a mother to you boys, but if _this_ is what I get for
+it!"
+
+The two at the threshold of Briggs's room retreated within, as he
+bounded furiously upon them and slammed the door after him. It started
+open again, from the chronic defect of the catch, but he did not care.
+
+"Well, Briggs, I hope you feel better now," Blakeley began. "You
+certainly told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing _but_ the
+truth. But I wonder you had the heart to do it before that sick girl."
+
+"I _didn't_ have the heart," Briggs shouted. "But I had the courage,
+and if you say one word more, Blakeley, I'll throw you out of the
+room. I'm going to leave! _My_ board's paid if yours isn't."
+
+He went wildly about, catching things down here and there from nails
+and out of drawers. The tears stood in his eyes. But suddenly he
+stopped and listened to the sounds from below--the sound of the silly
+singing in the parlor, and the sound of sobbing in the dining-room,
+and the sound of vain entreating between the sobs.
+
+"Oh, I don't suppose I'm fit to keep a boarding-house. I never was a
+good manager; and everybody imposes on me, and everything is so dear,
+and I don't know what's good from what's bad. Your poor father used
+to look after all that."
+
+"Well, don't you cry, now, mother! It'll all come right, you'll see.
+I'm getting so I can go and do the marketing now; and if Minervy would
+only help a little--"
+
+"No, no!" the mother's voice came anxiously up. "We can get along
+without her; we always have. I know he likes her, and I want to give
+her every chance. _We_ can get along. If she was on'y married, once,
+we could all live--" A note of self-comforting gradually stole into
+the mother's voice, and the sound of a nose violently blown seemed to
+note a period in her suffering.
+
+"Oh, mother, I wish I was well!" The girl's voice came with a burst of
+wild lamenting.
+
+"'Sh, 'sh, deary!" her mother entreated. "He'll _hear_ you, and
+then--"
+
+"'Hazel Dell'?" the silly voice came from the parlor, with a sound of
+fright in it. "I can sing it without the music." The piano keys
+twittered the prelude and the voice sang:
+
+          "In the Hazel Dell my Nelly's sleeping,
+            Nelly loved so long!"
+
+Wallace went forward and shut the door. "It's a shame to overhear
+them! What are you going to do, you fellows?"
+
+"I'm going to stay," Briggs said, "if it kills me. At least I will
+till Minervy's married. _I_ don't care what the grub's like. I can
+always get a bite at the restaurant."
+
+"If anybody will pay up my back board, I'll stay, too," Blakeley
+followed. "I should like to make a virtue of it, and, as things stand,
+I can't."
+
+"All right," Wallace said, and he went out and down the stairs. Then
+from the dining-room below his heavy voice offering encouragement came
+up, in terms which the others could not make out.
+
+"I'll bet he's making her another advance," Blakeley whispered, as if
+he might be overheard by Wallace.
+
+"I wish _I_ could have made to do it," Briggs whispered back. "I feel
+as mean as pursley. Would you like to kick me?"
+
+"I don't see how that would do any good. I may want to borrow money of
+you, and you can't ask a loan from a man you've kicked. Besides, I
+think what you said may do her good."
+
+
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+                      BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL
+
+
+                                  I
+
+  Breakfast is my best meal, and I reckon it's always been
+  Ever since I was old enough to know what breakfast could mean.
+  I mind when we lived in the cabin out on the Illinoy,
+  Where father had took up a quarter-section when I was a boy,
+  I used to go for the cows as soon as it was light;
+  And when I started back home, before I come in sight,
+  I come in _smell_ of the cabin, where mother was frying the ham,
+  And boiling the coffee, that reached through the air like a mile o' ba'm,
+  'N' I bet you I didn't wait to see what it was that the dog
+  Thought he'd got under the stump or inside o' the hollow log!
+  But I made the old cows canter till their hoof-joints cracked--you know
+  That dry, funny kind of a noise that the cows make when they go--
+  And I never stopped to wash when I got to the cabin door;
+  I pulled up my chair and e't like I never had e't before.
+  And mother she set there and watched me eat, and eat, and eat,
+  Like as if she couldn't give her old eyes enough of the treat;
+  And she split the shortened biscuit, and spread the butter between,
+  And let it lay there and melt, and soak and soak itself in;
+  And she piled up my plate with potato and ham and eggs,
+  Till I couldn't hold any more, or hardly stand on my legs;
+  And she filled me up with coffee that would float an iron wedge,
+  And never give way a mite, or spill a drop at the edge.
+
+
+                                  II
+
+  What? Well, yes, this is good coffee, too. If they don't know much,
+  They do know how to make coffee, I _will_ say that for these Dutch.
+  But my--oh, my! It ain't the kind of coffee my mother made,
+  And the coffee my wife used to make would throw it clear in the shade;
+  And the brand of sugar-cured, canvased ham that she always used--
+  Well, this Westphalia stuff would simply have made her amused!
+  That so, heigh? I saw that you was United States as soon
+  As ever I heard you talk; I reckon I know the tune!
+  Pick it out anywhere; and _you_ understand how I feel
+  About these here foreign breakfasts: breakfast is my best meal.
+
+
+                                 III
+
+  My! but my wife was a cook; and the breakfasts she used to get
+  The first years we was married, I can smell 'em and taste 'em yet:
+  Corn cake light as a feather, and buckwheat thin as lace
+  And crisp as cracklin'; and steak that you couldn't have the face
+  To compare any steak over here to; and chicken fried
+  Maryland style--I couldn't get through the bill if I tried.
+  And then, her waffles! My! She'd kind of slip in a few
+  Between the ham and the chicken--you know how women'll do--
+  For a sort of little surprise, and, if I was running light,
+  To take my fancy and give an edge to my appetite.
+  Done it all herself as long as we was poor, and I tell _you_
+  _She_ liked to see me eat as well as mother used to do;
+  I reckon she went ahead of mother some, if the truth was known,
+  And everything she touched she give a taste of her own.
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+  _She_ was a cook, I can tell you! And after we got ahead,
+  And she could 'a' had a girl to do the cookin' instead,
+  I had the greatest time to get Momma to leave the work;
+  She said it made her feel like a mis'able sneak and shirk.
+  She didn't want daughter, though, when we did begin to keep girls,
+  To come in the kitchen and cook, and smell up her clo'es and curls;
+  But you couldn't have stopped the child, whatever you tried to do--
+  I reckon the gift of the cookin' was born in Girly, too.
+  Cook she would from the first, and we just had to let her alone;
+  And after she got married, and had a house of her own,
+  She tried to make me feel, when I come to live with her,
+  Like it was my house, too; and I tell you she done it, sir!
+  She remembered that breakfast was my best meal, and she tried
+  To have all I used to have, and a good deal more beside;
+  Grape-fruit to begin with, or melons or peaches, at least--
+  Husband's business took him there, and they had went to live East--
+  Then a Spanish macker'l, or a soft-shell crab on toast,
+  Or a broiled live lobster! Well, sir, I don't want to seem to boast,
+  But I don't believe you could have got in the whole of New York
+  Any such an oyster fry or sausage of country pork.
+
+
+                                  V
+
+  Well, I don't know what-all it means; I always lived just so--
+  Never drinked or smoked, and yet, here about two years ago,
+  I begun to run down; I ain't as young as I used to be;
+  And the doctors all said Carlsbad, and I reckon this is me.
+  But it's more like some one I've dreamt of, with all three of 'em gone!
+  Believe in ghosts? Well, _I_ do. I _know_ there are ghosts. I'm _one_.
+  Maybe I mayn't look it--I was always inclined to fat;
+  The doctors say that's the trouble, and very likely it's that.
+  This is my little grandson, and this is the oldest one
+  Of Girly's girls; and for all that the whole of us said and done,
+  She must come with grandpa when the doctors sent me off here,
+  To see that they didn't starve him. Ain't that about so, my dear?
+  _She_ can cook, I tell you; and when we get home again
+  We're goin' to have something to _eat_; I'm just a-livin' till then.
+  But when I set here of a morning, and think of them that's gone--
+  Mother and Momma and Girly--well, I wouldn't like to let on
+  Before the children, but I can almost seem to see
+  All of 'em lookin' down, like as if they pitied me,
+  After the breakfasts they give me, to have me have to put up
+  With nothing but bread and butter, and a little mis'able cup
+  Of this here weak-kneed coffee! I can't tell how _you_ feel,
+  But it fairly makes me sick! Breakfast is my best meal.
+
+
+
+
+                                  X
+
+                           THE MOTHER-BIRD
+
+
+She wore around the turned-up brim of her bolero-like toque a band of
+violets not so much in keeping with the gray of the austere November
+day as with the blue of her faded autumnal eyes. Her eyes were
+autumnal, but it was not from this, or from the lines of maturity
+graven on the passing prettiness of her little face, that the notion
+and the name of Mother-Bird suggested itself. She became known as the
+Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the earliest, if not the
+latest, of her friends, because she was slight and small, and like a
+bird in her eager movements, and because she spoke so instantly and so
+constantly of her children in Dresden: before you knew anything else
+of her you knew that she was going out to them.
+
+She was quite alone, and she gave the sense of claiming their
+protection, and sheltering herself in the fact of them. When she
+mentioned her daughters she had the effect of feeling herself
+chaperoned by them. You could not go behind them and find her wanting
+in the social guarantees which women on steamers, if not men, exact of
+lonely birds of passage who are not mother-birds. One must respect the
+convention by which she safeguarded herself and tried to make good her
+standing; yet it did not lastingly avail her with other birds of
+passage, so far as they were themselves mother-birds, or sometimes
+only maiden-birds. The day had not ended before they began to hold her
+off by slight liftings of their wings and rufflings of their feathers,
+by quick, evasive flutterings, by subtle ignorances of her approach,
+which convinced no one but themselves that they had not seen her. She
+sailed with the sort of acquaintance-in-common which every one shares
+on a ship leaving port, when people are confused by the kindness of
+friends coming to see them off after sending baskets of fruit and
+sheaves of flowers, and scarcely know what they are doing or saying.
+But when the ship was abreast of Fire Island, and the pilot had gone
+over the side, these provisional intimacies of the parting hour began
+to restrict themselves. Then the Mother-Bird did not know half the
+women she had known at the pier, or quite all the men.
+
+It was not that she did anything obvious to forfeit this knowledge.
+Her behavior was if anything too exemplary; it might be thought to
+form a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the unseasonable band of
+violets around her hat-brim; perhaps it was the vernal gaiety of her
+dress; perhaps it was the uncertainty of her anxious eyes, which
+presumed while they implored. A mother-bird must not hover too
+confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose preoccupations she
+does not share. It might have been her looking and dressing younger
+than nature justified; at forty one must not look thirty; in November
+one must not, even involuntarily, wear the things of May if one would
+have others believe in one's devotion to one's children in Dresden;
+one alleges in vain one's impatience to join them as grounds for
+joining groups or detached persons who have begun to write home to
+their children in New York or Boston.
+
+The very readiness of the Mother-Bird to give security by the mention
+of well-known names, to offer proof of her social solvency by the
+eager correctness of her behavior, created reluctance around her. Some
+would not have her at all from the first; others, who had partially or
+conditionally accepted her, returned her upon her hands and withdrew
+from the negotiation. More and more she found herself outside that
+hard woman-world, and trying less and less to beat her way into it.
+
+The women may have known her better even than she knew herself, and it
+may have been through ignorance greater than her own that the men were
+more acquiescent. But the men too were not so acquiescent, or not at
+all, as time passed.
+
+It would be hard to fix the day, the hour, far harder the moment, when
+the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear
+in the smoking-room, or say whether she passed from the one to the
+other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women's unwritten
+law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship,
+after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and
+sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her
+poor, pretty little face, with its faded blue eyes and wistful mouth.
+There she passed by quick transition from the conversation of the
+graver elderly smokers to the loud laughter of two birds of prey who
+became her comrades, or such friends as birds like them can be to
+birds like her.
+
+From anything she had said or done there was no reason for her lapse
+from the women and the better men to such men; for her transition from
+the better sort of women there was no reason except that it happened.
+Whether she attached herself to the birds of prey, or they to her, by
+that instinct which enables birds of all kinds to know themselves of a
+feather remained a touching question.
+
+There remained to the end the question whether she was of a feather
+with them, or whether it was by some mischance, or by some such stress
+of the elements as drives birds of any feather to flock with birds of
+any other. To the end there remained a distracted and forsaken
+innocence in her looks. It was imaginable that she had made overtures
+to the birds of prey because she had made overtures to every one else;
+she was always seeking rather than sought, and her acceptance with
+them was as deplorable as her refusal by better birds. Often they were
+seen without her, when they had that look of having escaped, which
+others wore; but she was not often seen without them.
+
+There is not much walking-weather on a November passage, and she was
+seen less with them in the early dark outdoors than in the late light
+within, by which she wavered a small form through the haze of their
+cigars in the smoking-room, or in the grill-room, where she showed in
+faint eclipse through the fumes of the broiling and frying, or
+through the vapors of the hot whiskies. The birds of prey were then
+heard laughing, but whether at her or with her it must have been
+equally sorrowful to learn.
+
+Perhaps they were laughing at the maternal fondness which she had used
+for introduction to the general acquaintance lost almost in the moment
+of winning it. She seemed not to resent their laughter, though she
+seemed not to join in it. The worst of her was the company she kept;
+but since no better would allow her to keep it, you could not
+confidently say she would not have liked the best company on board. At
+the same time you could not have said she would; you could not have
+been sure it would not have bored her. Doubtless these results are not
+solely the sport of chance; they must be somewhat the event of choice
+if not of desert.
+
+For anything you could have sworn, the Mother-Bird would have liked to
+be as good as the best. But since it was not possible for her to be
+good in the society of the best, she could only be good in that of the
+worst. It was to be hoped that the birds of prey were not cruel to
+her; that their mockery was never unkind if ever it was mockery. The
+cruelty which must come came when they began to be seen less and less
+with her, even at the late suppers, through the haze of their cigars
+and the smoke of the broiling and frying, and the vapors of the hot
+whiskies. Then it was the sharpest pang of all to meet her wandering
+up and down the ship's promenades, or leaning on the rail and looking
+dimly out over the foam-whitened black sea. It is the necessity of
+birds of prey to get rid of other birds when they are tired of them,
+and it had doubtless come to that.
+
+One night, the night before getting into port, when the curiosity
+which always followed her with grief failed of her in the heightened
+hilarity of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the ship's run
+were making, it found her alone beside a little iron table, of those
+set in certain nooks outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one
+near, where the light from within fell palely upon her. The boon birds
+of prey, with whom she had been supping, had abandoned her, and she
+was supporting her cheek on the small hand of the arm that rested on
+the table. She leaned forward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the
+violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vibrations of the
+machinery. She was asleep, poor Mother-Bird, and it would have been
+impossible not to wish her dreams were kind.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XI
+
+                              THE AMIGO
+
+
+His name was really Perez Armando Aldeano, but in the end everybody
+called him the _amigo_, because that was the endearing term by which
+he saluted all the world. There was a time when the children called
+him "Span-yard" in their games, for he spoke no tongue but Spanish,
+and though he came from Ecuador, and was no more a Spaniard than they
+were English, he answered to the call of "Span-yard!" whenever he
+heard it. He came eagerly in the hope of fun, and all the more eagerly
+if there was a hope of mischief in the fun. Still, to discerning
+spirits, he was always the _amigo_, for, when he hailed you so, you
+could not help hailing him so again, and whatever mock he put upon you
+afterward, you were his secret and inalienable friend.
+
+The moment of my own acceptance in this quality came in the first
+hours of expansion following our getting to sea after long detention
+in the dock by fog. A small figure came flying down the dock with
+outspread arms, and a joyful cry of "Ah, _amigo_!" as if we were now
+meeting unexpectedly after a former intimacy in Bogota; and the
+_amigo_ clasped me round the middle to his bosom, or more strictly
+speaking, his brow, which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was clad in
+a long black overcoat, and a boy's knee-pants, and under the peak of
+his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a
+smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was more and more, with the
+thinness of his small black legs, and his habit of hopping up and
+down, and dancing threateningly about, with mischief latent in every
+motion, like a crow which in being tamed has acquired one of the worst
+traits of civilization. He began babbling and gurgling in Spanish, and
+took my hand for a stroll about the ship, and from that time we were,
+with certain crises of disaffection, firm allies.
+
+There were others whom he hailed and adopted his friends, whose legs
+he clung about and impeded in their walks, or whom he required to toss
+him into the air as they passed, but I flattered myself that he had a
+peculiar, because a primary, esteem for myself. I have thought it
+might be that, Bogota being said to be a very literary capital, as
+those things go in South America, he was mystically aware of a common
+ground between us, wider and deeper than that of his other
+friendships. But it may have been somewhat owing to my inviting him to
+my cabin to choose such portion as he would of a lady-cake sent us on
+shipboard at the last hour. He prattled and chuckled over it in the
+soft gutturals of his parrot-like Spanish, and rushed up on deck to
+eat the frosting off in the presence of his small companions, and to
+exult before them in the exploitation of a novel pleasure. Yet it
+could not have been the lady-cake which lastingly endeared me to him,
+for by the next day he had learned prudence and refused it without
+withdrawing his amity.
+
+This, indeed, was always tempered by what seemed a constitutional
+irony, and he did not impart it to any one without some time making
+his friend feel the edge of his practical humor. It was not long
+before the children whom he gathered to his heart had each and all
+suffered some fall or bump or bruise which, if not of his intention,
+was of his infliction, and which was regretted with such winning
+archness that the very mothers of them could not resist him, and his
+victims dried their tears to follow him with glad cries of "Span-yard,
+Span-yard!" Injury at his hands was a favor; neglect was the only real
+grievance. He went about rolling his small black head, and darting
+roguish lightnings from under his thick-fringed eyes, and making more
+trouble with a more enticing gaiety than all the other people on the
+ship put together.
+
+The truth must be owned that the time came, long before the end of the
+voyage, when it was felt that in the interest of the common welfare,
+something must be done about the _amigo_. At the conversational end of
+the doctor's table, where he was discussed whenever the racks were not
+on, and the talk might have languished without their inspiration, his
+badness was debated at every meal. Some declared him the worst boy in
+the world, and held against his half-hearted defenders that something
+ought to be done about him; and one was left to imagine all the darker
+fate for him because there was nothing specific in these convictions.
+He could not be thrown overboard, and if he had been put in irons
+probably his worst enemies at the conversational end of the table
+would have been the first to intercede for him. It is not certain,
+however, that their prayers would have been effective with the
+captain, if that officer, framed for comfort as well as command, could
+have known how accurately the _amigo_ had dramatized his personal
+presence by throwing himself back, and clasping his hands a foot in
+front of his small stomach, and making a few tilting paces forward.
+
+The _amigo_ had a mimic gift which he liked to exercise when he could
+find no intelligible language for the expression of his ironic spirit.
+Being forbidden visits in and out of season to certain staterooms
+whose inmates feigned a wish to sleep, he represented in what
+grotesque attitudes of sonorous slumber they passed their day, and he
+spared neither age nor sex in these graphic shows. When age refused
+one day to go up on deck with him and pleaded in such Spanish as it
+could pluck up from its past studies that it was too old, he laughed
+it to scorn. "You are not old," he said. "Why?" the flattered dotard
+inquired. "Because you smile," and that seemed reason enough for one's
+continued youth. It was then that the _amigo_ gave his own age,
+carefully telling the Spanish numerals over, and explaining further by
+holding up both hands with one finger shut in. But he had the subtlety
+of centuries in his nine years, and he penetrated the ship everywhere
+with his arch spirit of mischief. It was mischief always in the
+interest of the good-fellowship which he offered impartially to old
+and young; and if it were mere frolic, with no ulterior object, he did
+not care at all how old or young his playmate was. This endeared him
+naturally to every age; and the little blond German-American boy
+dried his tears from the last accident inflicted on him by the _amigo_
+to recall him by tender entreaties of "Span-yard, Span-yard!" while
+the eldest of his friends could not hold out against him more than two
+days in the strained relations following upon the _amigo's_ sweeping
+him down the back with a toy broom employed by the German-American boy
+to scrub the scuppers. This was not so much an injury as an indignity,
+but it was resented as an indignity, in spite of many demure glances
+of propitiation from the _amigo's_ ironical eyes and murmurs of
+inarticulate apology as he passed.
+
+He was, up to a certain point, the kindest and truest of _amigos_;
+then his weird seizure came, and the baby was spilled out of the
+carriage he had been so benevolently pushing up and down; or the
+second officer's legs, as he walked past with the prettiest girl on
+board, were hit with the stick that the _amigo_ had been innocently
+playing shuffle-board with; or some passenger was taken unawares in
+his vanity or infirmity and made to contribute to the _amigo's_
+passion for active amusement.
+
+At this point I ought to explain that the _amigo_ was not traveling
+alone from Ecuador to Paris, where it was said he was to rejoin his
+father. At meal-times, and at other rare intervals, he was seen to be
+in the charge of a very dark and very silent little man, with
+intensely black eyes and mustache, clad in raven hues from his head to
+the delicate feet on which he wore patent-leather shoes. With him the
+_amigo_ walked gravely up and down the deck, and behaved decorously at
+table; and we could not reconcile the apparent affection between the
+two with a theory we had that the _amigo_ had been found impossible in
+his own country, and had been sent out of Ecuador by a decree of the
+government, or perhaps a vote of the whole people. The little, dark,
+silent man, in his patent-leather boots, had not the air of conveying
+a state prisoner into exile, and we wondered in vain what the tie
+between him and the _amigo_ was. He might have been his tutor, or his
+uncle. He exercised a quite mystical control over the _amigo_, who was
+exactly obedient to him in everything, and would not look aside at you
+when in his keeping. We reflected with awe and pathos that, as they
+roomed together, it was his privilege to see the _amigo_ asleep, when
+that little, very kissable black head rested innocently on the pillow,
+and the busy brain within it was at peace with the world which formed
+its pleasure and its prey in waking.
+
+It would be idle to represent that the _amigo_ played his pranks upon
+that shipload of long-suffering people with final impunity. The time
+came when they not only said something must be done, but actually did
+something. It was by the hand of one of the _amigo's_ sweetest and
+kindest friends, namely, that elderly captain, off duty, who was going
+out to be assigned his ship in Hamburg. From the first he had shown
+the affectionate tenderness for the _amigo_ which was felt by all
+except some obdurate hearts at the conversational end of the table;
+and it must have been with a loving interest in the _amigo's_ ultimate
+well-being that, taking him in an ecstasy of mischief, he drew the
+_amigo_ face downward across his knees, and bestowed the chastisement
+which was morally a caress. He dismissed him with a smile in which the
+_amigo_ read the good understanding that existed unimpaired between
+them, and accepted his correction with the same affection as that
+which had given it. He shook himself and ran off with an enjoyment of
+the joke as great as that of any of the spectators and far more
+generous.
+
+In fact there was nothing mean in the _amigo_. Impish he was, or might
+be, but only in the sort of the crow or the parrot; there was no
+malevolence in his fine malice. One fancied him in his adolescence
+taking part in one of the frequent revolutions of his continent, but
+humorously, not homicidally. He would like to alarm the other
+faction, and perhaps drive it from power, or overset it from its
+official place, but if he had the say there would be no bringing the
+vanquished out into the plaza to be shot. He may now have been on his
+way to France ultimately to study medicine, which seems to be
+preliminary to a high political career in South America; but in the
+mean time we feared for him in that republic of severely regulated
+subordinations.
+
+We thought with pathos of our early parting with him, as we approached
+Plymouth and tried to be kodaked with him, considering it an honor and
+pleasure. He so far shared our feeling as to consent, but he insisted
+on wearing a pair of glasses which had large eyes painted on them, and
+on being taken in the act of inflating a toy balloon. Probably,
+therefore, the likeness would not be recognized in Bogota, but it will
+always be endeared to us by the memory of the many mockeries suffered
+from him. There were other friends whom we left on the ship, notably
+those of the conversational end of the table, who thought him simply a
+bad boy; but there were none of such peculiar appeal as he, when he
+stood by the guard, opening and shutting his hand in ironical adieu,
+and looking smaller and smaller as our tender drifted away and the
+vast liner loomed immense before us. He may have contributed to its
+effect of immensity by the smallness of his presence, or it may have
+dwarfed him. No matter; he filled no slight space in our lives while
+he lasted. Now that he is no longer there, was he really a bad little
+boy, merely and simply? Heaven knows, which alone knows good boys from
+bad.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XII
+
+                           BLACK CROSS FARM
+
+                              (To F. S.)
+
+
+  After full many a mutual delay
+  My friend and I at last fixed on a day
+  For seeing Black Cross Farm, which he had long
+  Boasted the fittest theme for tale or song
+  In all that charming region round about:
+  Something that must not really be left out
+  Of the account of things to do for me.
+  It was a teasing bit of mystery,
+  He said, which he and his had tried in vain,
+  Ever since they had found it, to explain.
+  The right way was to happen, as they did,
+  Upon it in the hills where it was hid;
+  But chance could not be always trusted, quite,
+  You might not happen on it, though you might;
+  Encores were usually objected to
+  By chance. The next best thing that we could do
+  Was in his carryall, to start together,
+  And trust that somehow favoring wind and weather,
+  With the eccentric progress of his horse,
+  Would so far drift us from our settled course
+  That we at least could lose ourselves, if not
+  Find the mysterious object that we sought.
+  So one blithe morning of the ripe July
+  We fared, by easy stages, toward the sky
+  That rested one rim of its turquoise cup
+  Low on the distant sea, and, tilted up,
+  The other on the irregular hilltops. Sweet
+  The sun and wind that joined to cool and heat
+  The air to one delicious temperature;
+  And over the smooth-cropt mowing-pieces pure
+  The pine-breath, borrowing their spicy scent
+  In barter for the balsam that it lent!
+  And when my friend handed the reins to me,
+  And drew a fuming match along his knee,
+  And, lighting his cigar, began to talk,
+  I let the old horse lapse into a walk
+  From his perfunctory trot, content to listen,
+  Amid that leafy rustle and that glisten
+  Of field, and wood, and ocean, rapt afar,
+  From every trouble of our anxious star.
+  From time to time, between effect and cause
+  In this or that, making a questioning pause,
+  My friend peered round him while he feigned a gay
+  Hope that we might have taken the wrong way
+  At the last turn, and then let me push on,
+  Or the old horse rather, slanting hither and yon,
+  And never in the middle of the track,
+  Except when slanting off or slanting back.
+  He talked, I listened, while we wandered by
+  The scanty fields of wheat and oats and rye,
+  With patches of potatoes and of corn,
+  And now and then a garden spot forlorn,
+  Run wild where once a house had stood, or where
+  An empty house yet stood, and seemed to stare
+  Upon us blindly from the twisted glass
+  Of windows that once let no wayfarer pass
+  Unseen of children dancing at the pane,
+  And vanishing to reappear again,
+  Pulling their mother with them to the sight.
+  Still we kept on, with turnings left and right,
+  Past farmsteads grouped in cheerful neighborhoods,
+  Or solitary; then through shadowy woods
+  Of pine or birch, until the road, grass-grown,
+  Had given back to Nature all her own
+  Save a faint wheel-trace, that along the slope,
+  Rain-gullied, seemed to stop and doubt and grope,
+  And then quite ceased, as if 't had turned and fled
+  Out of the forest into which it led,
+  And left us at the gate whose every bar
+  Was nailed against us. But, "Oh, here we are!"
+  My friend cried joyously. "At last, at last!"
+  And making our horse superfluously fast,
+  He led the way onward by what had been
+  A lane, now hid by weeds and briers between
+  Meadows scarce worth the mowing, to a space
+  Shaped as by Nature for the dwelling-place
+  Of kindly human life: a small plateau
+  Open to the heaven that seemed bending low
+  In liking for it. There beneath a roof
+  Still against winter and summer weather-proof,
+  With walls and doors and windows perfect yet,
+  Between its garden and its graveyard set,
+  Stood the old homestead, out of which had perished
+  The home whose memory it dumbly cherished,
+  And which, when at our push the door swung wide,
+  We might have well imagined to have died
+  And had its funeral the day before:
+  So clean and cold it was from floor to floor,
+  So lifelike and so deathlike, with the thrill
+  Of hours when life and death encountered still
+  Passionate in it. They that lay below
+  The tangled grasses or the drifted snow,
+  Husband and wife, mother and little one,
+  From that sad house less utterly were gone
+  Than they that living had abandoned it.
+  In moonless nights their Absences might flit,
+  Homesick, from room to room, or dimly sit
+  Around its fireless hearths, or haunt the rose
+  And lily in the neglected garden close;
+  But they whose feet had borne them from the door
+  Would pass the footworn threshold nevermore.
+  We read the moss-grown names upon the tombs,
+  With lighter melancholy than the glooms
+  Of the dead house shadowed us with, and thence
+  Turning, my heart was pierced with more intense
+  Suggestion of a mystical dismay,
+  As in the brilliance of the summer day
+  We faced the vast gray barn. The house was old,
+  Though so well kept, as age by years is told
+  In our young land; but the barn, gray and vast,
+  Stood new and straight and strong--all battened fast
+  At every opening; and where once the mow
+  Had yawned wide-windowed, on the sheathing now
+  A Cross was nailed, the bigness of a man,
+  Aslant from left to right, athwart the span,
+  And painted black as paint could make it. Hushed,
+  I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed
+  To this point and to that point, and then burst
+  In the impotent questionings rejected first.
+  What did it mean? Ah, that no one could tell.
+  Who put it there? That was unknown as well.
+  Was there no legend? My friend knew of none.
+  No neighborhood story? He had sought for one
+  In vain. Did he imagine it accident,
+  With nothing really implied or meant
+  By the boards set in that way? It might be,
+  But I could answer that as well as he.
+  Then (desperately) what did he guess it was:
+  Something of purpose, or without a cause
+  Other than chance? He slowly shook his head,
+  And with his gaze fixed on the symbol said:
+  "We have quite ceased from guessing or surmising,
+  For all our several and joint devising
+  Has left us finally where I must leave you.
+  But now I think it is your part to do
+  Yourself some guessing. I hoped you might bring
+  A fresh mind to the riddle's unraveling.
+  Come!"
+
+        And thus challenged I could not deny
+  The sort of right he had to have me try;
+  And yielding, I began--instinctively
+  Proceeding by exclusion: "We agree
+  It was not put there as a pious charm
+  To keep the abandoned property from harm?
+  The owner could have been no Catholic;
+  And yet it was no sacrilegious trick
+  To make folks wonder; and it was not chance
+  Assuredly that set those boards askance
+  In that shape, or before or after, so
+  Painted them to that coloring of woe.
+  Do you suppose, then, that it could have been
+  Some secret sorrow or some secret sin,
+  That tried to utter or to expiate
+  Itself in that way: some unhappy hate
+  Turned to remorse, or some life-rending grief
+  That could not find in years or tears relief?
+  Who lived here last?"
+
+                        "Ah," my friend made reply,
+  "You know as much concerning that as I.
+  All I could tell is what those gravestones tell,
+  And they have told it all to you as well.
+  The names, the dates, the curious epitaphs
+  At whose quaint phrase one either sighs or laughs,
+  Just as one's heart or head happens to be
+  Hollow or not, are there for each to see.
+  But I believe they have nothing to reveal:
+  No wrong to publish, no shame to conceal."
+
+    "And yet that Cross!" I turned at his reply,
+  Fixing the silent symbol with my eye,
+  Insistently. "And you consent," I said,
+  "To leave the enigma uninterpreted?"
+
+    "Why, no," he faltered, then went on: "Suppose
+  That some one that had known the average woes
+  Of human nature, finding that the load
+  Was overheavy for him on life's road,
+  Had wished to leave some token in this Cross,
+  Of what had been his gain and been his loss,
+  Of what had been his suffering and of what
+  Had also been the solace of his lot?
+  Whoever that unknown brother-man might be,
+  I think he must have been like you and me,
+  Who bear our Cross, and when we fail at length,
+  Bow down and pray to it for greater strength."
+
+    I mused, and as I mused, I seemed to find
+  The fancy more and still more to my mind.
+
+    "Well, let it go at that! I think, for me,
+  I like that better than some tragedy
+  Of clearer physiognomy, which were
+  In being more definite the vulgarer.
+  For us, what, after all, would be the gain
+  Of making the elusive meaning plain?
+  I really think, if I were you and yours,
+  I would not lift the veil that now obscures
+  The appealing fact, lest I should spoil the charm
+  Deeding me for my own the Black Cross Farm."
+
+    "A good suggestion! I am glad," said he,
+  "We have always practised your philosophy."
+
+    He smiled, we laughed; we sighed and turned away,
+  And left the mystery to the summer day
+  That made as if it understood, and could
+  Have read the riddle to us if it would:
+  The wide, wise sky, the clouds that on the grass
+  Let their vague shadows dreamlike trail and pass;
+  The conscious woods, the stony meadows growing
+  Up to birch pastures, where we heard the lowing
+  Of one disconsolate cow. All the warm afternoon,
+  Lulled in a reverie by the myriad tune
+  Of insects, and the chirp of songless birds,
+  Forgetful of the spring-time's lyric words,
+  Drowsed round us while we tried to find the lane
+  That to our coming feet had been so plain,
+  And lost ourselves among the sweetfern's growth,
+  And thickets of young pine-trees, nothing loath,
+  Amidst the wilding loveliness to stray,
+  And spend, if need were, looking for the way,
+  Whole hours; but blundered into the right course
+  Suddenly, and came out upon our horse,
+  Where we had left him--to our great surprise,
+  Stamping and switching at the pestering flies,
+  But not apparently anxious to depart,
+  When nearly overturning at the start,
+  We followed down that evanescent trace
+  Which, followed up, had brought us to the place.
+
+    Then, all the wayside scenes reversing, we
+  Dropped to the glimpses of the distant sea,
+  Content as if we brought, returning thus,
+  The secret of the Black Cross back with us.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIII
+
+                        THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE
+
+
+It had long been the notion of Frederick Erlcort, who held it
+playfully, held it seriously, according to the company he was in, that
+there might be a censorship of taste and conscience in literary
+matters strictly affiliated with the retail commerce in books. When he
+first began to propose it, playfully, seriously, as his listener
+chose, he said that he had noticed how in the great department stores
+where nearly everything to supply human need was sold, the shopmen and
+shopwomen seemed instructed by the ownership or the management to deal
+in absolute good faith with the customers, and not to misrepresent the
+quality, the make, or the material of any article in the slightest
+degree. A thing was not to be called silk or wool when it was partly
+cotton; it was not to be said that it would wash when it would not
+wash, or that the color would not come off when it would come off, or
+that the stuff was English or French when it was American.
+
+When Erlcort once noted his interest in the fact to a floor-walker
+whom he happened to find at leisure, the floor-walker said, Yes, that
+was so; and the house did it because it was business, good business,
+the only good business. He was instantly enthusiastic, and he said
+that just in the same way, as an extension of its good faith with the
+public, the house had established the rule of taking back any article
+which a customer did not like, or did not find what she had supposed
+when she got it home, and refunding the money. This was the best sort
+of business; it held custom; the woman became a customer for life. The
+floor-walker laughed, and after he had told an anxious applicant,
+"Second aisle to the left, lady; three counters back," he concluded to
+Erlcort, "I say she because a man never brings a thing back when he's
+made a mistake; but a woman can always blame it on the house. That
+so?"
+
+Erlcort laughed with him, and in going out he stopped at the
+book-counter. Rather it was a bookstore, and no small one, with ranks
+of new books covering the large tables and mounting to their level
+from the floor, neatly piled, and with shelves of complete editions
+and soberer-looking volumes stretching along the wall as high as the
+ceiling. "Do you happen to have a good book--a book that would read
+good, I mean--in your stock here?" he asked the neat blonde behind
+the literary barricade.
+
+"Well, here's a book that a good many are reading," she answered, with
+prompt interest and a smile that told in the book's favor; it was a
+protectingly filial and guardedly ladylike smile.
+
+"Yes, but is it a book worth reading--worth the money?"
+
+"Well, I don't know as I'm a judge," the kind little blonde replied.
+She added, daringly, "All I can say is, I set up till two last night
+to finish it."
+
+"And you advise me to buy it?"
+
+"Well, we're not allowed to do that, exactly. I can only tell you what
+I know."
+
+"But if I take it, and it isn't what I expected, I can return it and
+get my money back?"
+
+"That's something I never was asked before. Mr. Jeffers! Mr. Jeffers!"
+she called to a floor-walker passing near; and when he stopped and
+came up to the counter, she put the case to him.
+
+He took the book from Erlcort's hand and examined the outside of it
+curiously if not critically. Then he looked from it to Erlcort, and
+said, "Oh, how do you do again! Well, no, sir; I don't know as we
+could do that. You see, you would have to read it to find out that you
+didn't want it, and that would be like using or wearing an article,
+wouldn't it? We couldn't take back a thing that had been used or
+worn--heigh?"
+
+"But you might have some means of knowing whether a book is good or
+not?"
+
+"Well, yes, we might. That's a point we have never had raised before.
+Miss Prittiman, haven't we any means of knowing whether a book's
+something we can guarantee or not?"
+
+"Well, Mr. Jeffers, there's the publisher's advertisement."
+
+"Why, yes, so there is! And a respectable publisher wouldn't indorse a
+book that wasn't the genuine article, would he now, sir?"
+
+"He mightn't," Erlcort said, as if he felt the force of the argument.
+
+"And there are the notices in the newspapers. They ought to tell,"
+Miss Prittiman added, more convincingly. "I don't know," she said, as
+from a sensitive conscience, "whether there have been any about this
+book yet, but I should think there would be."
+
+"And in the mean time, as you won't guarantee the book so that I can
+bring it back and get my money if I find it worthless, I must accept
+the publisher's word?" Erlcort pressed further.
+
+"I should think you could do that," the floor-walker suggested, with
+the appearance of being tired.
+
+"Well, I think I will, for once," Erlcort relented. "But wait! What
+does the publisher say?"
+
+"It's all printed on this slip inside," the blonde said, and she
+showed it as she took the book from him. "Shall I send it? Or will
+you--"
+
+"No, no, thank you, I'll take it with me. Let me--"
+
+He kept the printed slip and began to read it. The blonde wrapped the
+book up and laid it with a half-dollar in change on the counter before
+Erlcort. The floor-walker went away; Erlcort heard him saying, "No,
+madam; toys on the fifth floor, at the extreme rear, left," while he
+lost himself in the glowing promises of the publisher. It appeared
+that the book he had just bought was by a perfectly new author, an old
+lady of seventy who had never written a novel before, and might
+therefore be trusted for an entire freshness of thought and feeling.
+The plot was of a gripping intensity; the characters were painted with
+large, bold strokes, and were of an unexampled virility; the story was
+packed with passion from cover to cover; and the reader would be held
+breathless by the author's skill in working from the tragic conditions
+to an all-round happy conclusion.
+
+From time to time Erlcort heard the gentle blonde saying such things
+as, "Oh yes; it's the best-seller, all right," and, "All I can say is
+I set up till two o'clock in the morning to finish it," and, "Yes,
+ma'am; it's by a new writer; a very old lady of seventy who is just
+beginning to write; well, that's what I _heard_."
+
+On his way up-town in the Subway he clung to the wonted strap,
+unsupported by anything in the romance which he had bought; and yet he
+could not take the book back and get his money, or even exchange it
+for some article of neckwear or footwear. In his extremity he thought
+he would try giving it to the trainman just before he reached his
+stop.
+
+"You want to _give_ it to me? Well, that's something that never
+happened to me on _this_ line before. I guess my wife will like it.
+I--_1009th Street! Change for East Brooklyn and the Bronx!_" the guard
+shouted, and he let Erlcort out of the car, the very first of the tide
+that spilled itself forth at the station. He called after him, "Do as
+much for you some time."
+
+The incident first amused Erlcort, and then it began to trouble him;
+but he appeased his remorse by toying with his old notion of a
+critical bookstore. His mind was still at play with it when he stopped
+at the bell-pull of an elderly girl of his acquaintance who had a
+studio ten stories above, and the habit of giving him afternoon tea in
+it if he called there about five o'clock. She had her ugly
+painting-apron still on, and her thumb through the hole in her
+palette, when she opened her door to him.
+
+"Too soon?" he asked.
+
+She answered as well as she could with the brush held horizontally in
+her mouth while she glared inhospitably at him. "Well, not much," and
+then she let him in, and went and lighted her spirit-lamp.
+
+He began at once to tell her of his strange experience, and went on
+till she said: "Well, there's your tea. _I_ don't know what you've
+been driving at, but I suppose you do. Is it the old thing?"
+
+"It's my critical bookstore, if that's what you call the old thing."
+
+"Oh! _That!_ I thought it had failed 'way back in the dark ages."
+
+"The dark ages are not _back_, please; they're all 'round, and you
+know very well that my critical bookstore has never been tried yet.
+But tell me one thing: should you wish to live with a picture, even
+for a few hours, which had been painted by an old lady of seventy who
+had never tried to paint before?"
+
+"If I intended to go crazy, yes. What has all that got to do with it?"
+
+"That's the joint commendation of the publisher and the kind little
+blonde who united to sell me the book I just gave to that poor Subway
+trainman. Do you ever buy a new book?"
+
+"No; I always borrow an old one."
+
+"But if you _had_ to buy a new one, wouldn't you like to know of a
+place where you could be sure of getting a good one?"
+
+"I shouldn't mind. Or, yes, I should, rather. Where's it to be?"
+
+"Oh, I know. I've had my eye on the place for a good while. It's a
+funny old place in Sixth Avenue--"
+
+"Sixth _Avenue_!"
+
+"Don't interrupt--where the dearest old codger in the world is just
+going out of the house-furnishing business in a small way. It's kept
+getting smaller and smaller--I've watched it shrink--till now it can't
+stand up against the big shops, and the old codger told me the other
+day that it was no use."
+
+"Poor fellow!"
+
+"No. He's not badly off, and he's going back up-state where he came
+from about forty years ago, and he can live--or die--very well on what
+he's put by. I've known him rather a good while, and we've been
+friends ever since we've been acquainted."
+
+"Go on," the elderly girl said.
+
+Erlcort was not stopping, but she spoke so as to close her mouth,
+which she was apt to let hang open in a way that she did not like; she
+had her intimates pledged to tell her when she was doing it, but she
+could not make a man promise, and she had to look after her mouth
+herself with Erlcort. It was not a bad mouth; her eyes were large, and
+it was merely large to match them.
+
+"When shall you begin--open shop?" she asked.
+
+"My old codger's lease expires in the fall," he answered, "but he
+would be glad to have me take it off his hands this spring. I could
+give the summer to changing and decorating, and begin my campaign in
+the fall--the first of October, say. Wouldn't you like to come some
+day and see the old place?"
+
+"I should love it. But you're not supposing I shall be of the least
+use, I hope? I'm not decorational, you know. Easel pictures, and small
+ones at that."
+
+"Of course. But you are a woman, and have ideas of the cozy. I mean
+that the place shall be made attractive."
+
+"Do you think the situation will be--on Sixth Avenue?"
+
+"It will be quaint. It's in a retarded region of low buildings, with a
+carpenter's shop two doors off. The L roars overhead and the surface
+cars squeal before, but that is New York, you know, and it's very
+central. Besides, at the back of the shop, with the front door shut,
+it is very quiet."
+
+The next day the friends lunched together at an Italian restaurant
+very near the place, and rather hurried themselves away to the old
+codger's store.
+
+"He _is_ a dear," Margaret whispered to Erlcort in following him about
+to see the advantages of the place.
+
+"Oh, mine's setting-hen's time," he justified his hospitality in
+finally asking them to take seats on a nail-keg apiece. "You mustn't
+think you're interruptin'. Look 'round all ye want to, or set down and
+rest ye."
+
+"That would be a good motto for your bookstore," she screamed to
+Erlcort, when they got out into the roar of the avenue. "'Look 'round
+all ye want to, or set down and rest ye.' Wasn't he sweet? And I don't
+wonder you're taken with the place: it _has_ such capabilities. You
+might as well begin imagining how you will arrange it."
+
+They were walking involuntarily up the avenue, and when they came to
+the Park they went into it, and in the excitement of their planning
+they went as far as the Ramble, where they sat down on a bench and
+disappointed some squirrels who supposed they had brought peanuts with
+them.
+
+They decided that the front of the shop should be elaborately simple;
+perhaps the door should be painted black, with a small-paned sash and
+a heavy brass latch. On each side should be a small-paned show-window,
+with books laid inside on an inclined shelving; on the door should be
+a modest bronze plate, reading, "The Critical Bookstore." They
+rejected _shop_ as an affectation, and they hooted the notion of "Ye
+Critical Bookstore" as altogether loathsome. The door and window would
+be in a rather belated taste, but the beautiful is never out of date,
+and black paint and small panes might be found rococo in their
+old-fashionedness now. There should be a fireplace, or perhaps a
+Franklin stove, at the rear of the room, with a high-shouldered,
+small-paned sash on each side letting in the light from the yard of
+the carpenter-shop. On the chimneypiece should be lettered, "Look
+'round all ye want to, or set down and rest ye."
+
+The genius of the place should be a refined hospitality, such as the
+gentle old codger had practised with them, and to facilitate this
+there should be a pair of high-backed settles, one under each window.
+The book-counter should stretch the whole length of the store, and at
+intervals beside it, against the book-shelving, should be set
+old-fashioned chairs, but not too old-fashioned. Against the lower
+book-shelves on a deeper shelf might be stood against the books a few
+sketches in water-color, or even oil.
+
+This was Margaret Green's idea.
+
+"And would you guarantee the quality?" Erlcort asked.
+
+"Perhaps they wouldn't be for sale, though if any one insisted--"
+
+"I see. Well, pass the sketches. What else?"
+
+"Well, a few little figures in plaster, or even marble or bronze, very
+Greek, or very American; things in low relief."
+
+"Pass the little figures and low reliefs. But don't forget it's a
+_bookstore_."
+
+"Oh, I won't. The sketches of all kinds would be strictly subordinated
+to the books. If I had a tea-room handy here, with a table and the
+backs of some menus to draw on, I could show you just how it would
+look."
+
+"What's the matter with the Casino?"
+
+"Nothing; only it's rather early for tea yet."
+
+"It isn't for soda-lemonade."
+
+She set him the example of instantly rising, and led the way back
+along the lake to the Casino, resting at that afternoon hour among its
+spring flowers and blossoms innocent of its lurid after-dark
+frequentation. He got some paper from the waiter who came to take
+their order. She began to draw rapidly, and by the time the waiter
+came again she was giving Erlcort the last scrap of paper.
+
+"Well," he said, "I had no idea that I had imagined anything so
+charming! If this critical bookstore doesn't succeed, it'll be because
+there are no critics. But what--what are these little things hung
+against the partitions of the shelves?"
+
+"Oh--mirrors. Little round ones."
+
+"But why mirrors of any shape?"
+
+"Nothing; only people like to see themselves in a glass of any shape.
+And when," Margaret added, in a burst of candor, "a woman looks up and
+sees herself with a book in her hand, she will feel so intellectual
+she will never put it down. She will buy it."
+
+"Margaret Green, this is immoral. Strike out those mirrors, or I will
+smash them every one!"
+
+"Oh, very well!" she said, and she rubbed them out with the top of her
+pencil. "If you want your place a howling wilderness."
+
+He looked at the ruin her rubber had wrought. "They _were_ rather
+nice. Could--could you rub them in again?"
+
+"Not if I tried a hundred years. Besides, they _were_ rather impudent.
+What time is it?"
+
+"No time at all. It's half-past three."
+
+"Dear me! I must be going. And if you're really going to start that
+precious critical bookstore in the fall, you must begin work on it
+right away."
+
+"Work?"
+
+"Reading up for it. If you're going to guarantee the books, you must
+know what's in them, mustn't you?"
+
+He realized that he must do what she said; he must know from his own
+knowledge what was in the books he offered for sale, and he began
+reading, or reading _at_, the new books immediately. He was a good
+deal occupied by day with the arrangement of his store, though he left
+it mainly with the lively young decorator who undertook for a lump sum
+to realize Margaret Green's ideas. It was at night that he did most of
+his reading in the spring books which the publishers were willing to
+send him gratis, when they understood he was going to open a
+bookstore, and only wanted sample copies. As long as she remained in
+town Margaret Green helped him read, and they talked the books over,
+and mostly rejected them. By the time she went to Europe in August
+with another elderly girl they had not chosen more than eight or ten
+books; but they hoped for better things in the fall.
+
+Word of what he was doing had gone out from Margaret, and a great many
+women of their rather esthetic circle began writing to him about the
+books they were reading, and commending them to him or warning him
+against them. The circle of his volunteer associates enlarged itself
+in the nature of an endless chain, and before society quite broke up
+for the summer a Sympathetic Tea was offered to Erlcort by a Leading
+Society Woman at the Intellectual Club, where he was invited to
+address the Intellectuals in explanation of his project. This was
+before Margaret sailed, and he hurried to her in horror.
+
+"Why, of course you must accept. You're not going to hide your
+Critical Bookstore under a bushel; you can't have too much publicity."
+
+The Leading Society Woman flowed in fulsome gratitude at his
+acceptance, and promised no one but the club should be there; he had
+hinted his reluctance. She kept her promise, but among the
+Intellectuals there was a girl who was a just beginning journalist,
+and who pumped Erlcort's whole scheme out of him, unsuspicious of what
+she was doing, till he saw it all, with his picture, in the Sunday
+Supplement. She rightly judged that the intimacy of an interview would
+be more popular with her readers than the cold and distant report of
+his formal address, which she must give, though she received it so
+ardently with all the other Intellectuals. They flocked flatteringly,
+almost suffocatingly, around him at the end. His scheme was just what
+every one had vaguely thought of: something must be done to stem the
+tide of worthless fiction, which was so often shocking as well as
+silly, and they would only be too glad to help read for him. They were
+nearly all just going to sail, but they would each take a spring book
+on the ship, and write him about it from the other side; they would
+each get a fall book coming home, and report as soon as they got back.
+
+His scheme was discussed seriously and satirically by the press; it
+became a joke with many papers, and a byword quickly worn out, so that
+people thought that it had been dropped. But Erlcort gave his days and
+nights to preparation for his autumnal campaign. He studied in careful
+comparison the reviews of the different literary authorities, and was
+a little surprised to find, when he came to read the books they
+reviewed, how honest and adequate they often were. He was obliged to
+own to himself that if people were guided by them, few worthless books
+would be sold, and he decided that the immense majority of the
+book-buyers were not guided by the critics. The publishers themselves
+seemed not so much to blame when he went to see them and explained his
+wish to deal with them on the basis of a critical bookseller. They
+said they wished all the booksellers were like him, for they would ask
+nothing better than to publish only good books. The trouble, they
+said, lay with the authors; they wrote such worthless books. Or if now
+and then one of them did write a good book and they were over-tempted
+to publish it, the public united in refusing to buy it. So he saw? But
+if the booksellers persisted in selling none but good books, perhaps
+something might be done. At any rate they would like to see the
+experiment tried.
+
+Erlcort felt obliged to read the books suggested to him by the endless
+chain of readers who volunteered to read for him, on both sides of the
+ocean, or going and coming on the ocean. Mostly the books they praised
+were abject rubbish, but it took time to find this out, and he formed
+the habit of reading far into the night, and if he was very much vexed
+at discovering that the book recommended to him was trash, he could
+not sleep unless he took veronal, and then he had a ghastly next day.
+
+He did not go out of town except for a few brief sojourns at places
+where he knew cultivated people were staying, and could give him their
+opinions of the books he was reading. When the publishers began, as
+they had agreed, to send him their advance sheets, the stitched but
+unbound volumes roused so much interest by the novelty of their form
+that his readers could not give an undivided attention to their
+contents. He foresaw that in the end he should have to rely upon the
+taste of mercenaries in his warfare against rubbish, and more and more
+he found it necessary to expend himself in it, to read at second hand
+as well as at first. His greatest relief was in returning to town and
+watching the magical changes which the decorator was working in his
+store. This was consolation, this was inspiration, but he longed for
+the return of Margaret Green, that she might help him enjoy the
+realization of her ideas in the equipment of the place; and he held
+the decorator to the most slavish obedience through the carpenters and
+painters who created at his bidding a miraculous interior, all white,
+or just off-white, such as had never been imagined of a bookstore in
+New York before. It was actually ready by the end of August, though
+smelling a little of turpentine still, and Erlcort, letting himself in
+at the small-paned black door, and ranging up and down the long,
+beautiful room, and round and round the central book-table, and in and
+out between the side tables, under the soft, bright shelving of the
+walls, could hardly wait the arrival of the _Minnedingdong_ in which
+the elderly girl had taken her passage back. One day, ten days ahead
+of time, she blew in at the front door in a paroxysm of explanation;
+she had swapped passages home with another girl who wanted to come
+back later, while she herself wanted to come back earlier. She had no
+very convincing reason for this as she gave it, but Erlcort did not
+listen to her reason, whatever it was. He said, between the raptures
+with the place that she fell in and out of, that now she was just in
+time for the furnishing, which he never could have dared to undertake
+alone.
+
+In the gay September weather they visited all the antiquity shops in
+Fourth Avenue, and then threw themselves frankly upon reproductions,
+which they bought in the native wood and ordered painted, the settles
+and the spindle-backed chairs in the cool gray which she decided was
+the thing. In the same spirit they bought new brass fire-irons and new
+shovel and tongs, but all very tall and antique-looking, and then they
+got those little immoral mirrors, which Margaret Green attached with
+her own hands to the partitions of the shelving. She also got soft
+green silk curtains for the chimney windows and for the sash of the
+front door; even the front windows she curtained, but very low, so
+that a salesman or a saleswoman could easily reach over from the
+interior and get a book that any customer had seen from the outside.
+
+One day when all this was done, and Erlcort had begun ordering in a
+stock of such books as he had selected to start with, she said:
+"You're looking rather peaked, aren't you?"
+
+"Well, I've been _feeling_ rather peaked, until lately, keeping awake
+to read and read _after_ the volunteer readers."
+
+"You mean you've lost sleep?"
+
+"Something like that."
+
+"Well, you mustn't. How many books do you start with?"
+
+"About twenty-five."
+
+"Good ones? It's a lot, isn't it? I didn't suppose there were so
+many."
+
+"Well, to fill our shelves I shall have to order about a thousand of
+each."
+
+"You'll never sell them in the world! You'll be ruined."
+
+"Oh no; the publishers will take them back."
+
+"How nice of them! But that's only what painters have to do when the
+dealers can't sell their pictures."
+
+A month off, the prospect was brilliant, and when the shelves and
+tables were filled and the sketches and bas-reliefs were stuck about
+and the little immoral mirrors were hung, the place was charming. The
+chairs and settles were all that could be asked; Margaret Green helped
+put them about; and he let her light the low fire on the hearth of
+the Franklin stove; he said he should not always burn hickory, but he
+had got twenty-four sticks for two dollars from an Italian in a cellar
+near by, and he meant to burn that much. She upbraided him for his
+extravagance while touching the match to the paper under the kindling;
+but October opened cold, and he needed the fire.
+
+The enterprise seemed rather to mystify the neighborhood, and some old
+customers of the old codger's came in upon one fictitious errand and
+another to see about it, and went away without quite making it out. It
+was a bookstore, all right, they owned in conference, but what did he
+mean by "critical"?
+
+The first _bona fide_ buyer appeared in a little girl who could just
+get her chin on the counter, and who asked for an egg-beater. Erlcort
+had begun with only one assistant, the young lady who typed his
+letters and who said she guessed she could help him when she was not
+working. She leaned over and tried to understand the little girl, and
+then she called to Erlcort where he stood with his back to the fire
+and the morning paper open before his face.
+
+"Mr. Erlcort, have we got a book called _The Egg-beater_?"
+
+"_The Egg-beater?_" he echoed, letting his paper drop below his face.
+
+"No, no!" the little girl shouted, angrily. "It _ain't_ a book. It's a
+thing to beat eggs with. Mother said to come here and get it."
+
+"Well, she's sent you to the wrong place, little girl. You want to go
+to a hardware-store," the young lady argued.
+
+"Ain't this No. 1232?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, this is the _right_ place. Mother said to go to 1232. I guess
+she knows. She's an old customer."
+
+"_The Egg-beater! The Egg-beater!_" the blithe young novelist to whom
+Erlcort told the story repeated. He was still happy in his original
+success as a best-seller, and he had come to the Critical Bookstore to
+spy out the stock and see whether his last novel was in it; but though
+it was not, he joyously extended an acquaintance with Erlcort which
+had begun elsewhere. "_The Egg-beater?_ What a splendid title for a
+story of adventure! Keep the secret of its applicability to the last
+word, or perhaps never reveal it at all, and leave the reader
+worrying. That's one way; makes him go and talk about the book to all
+the girls he knows and get them guessing. Best ad. in the world. _The
+Egg-beater!_ Doesn't it suggest desert islands and penguins' nests in
+the rocks? Fellow and girl shipwrecked, and girl wants to make an
+omelette after they've got sick of plain eggs, and can't for want of
+an egg-beater. Heigh? He invents one--makes it out of some wire that
+floats off from the wreck. See? When they are rescued, she brings it
+away, and doesn't let him know it till their Iron Wedding Day. They
+keep it over his study fireplace always."
+
+This author was the first to stretch his legs before Erlcort's fire
+from his seat on one of the reproductions. He could not say enough of
+the beauty of the place, and he asked if he might sit there and watch
+for the old codger's old customers coming to buy hardware. There might
+be copy in it.
+
+But the old customers did not come so often as he hoped and Erlcort
+feared. Instead there came _bona fide_ book-buyers, who asked some for
+a book and some for a particular book. The first were not satisfied
+with the books that Erlcort or his acting saleslady recommended, and
+went away without buying. The last were indignant at not finding what
+they wanted in Erlcort's selection.
+
+"Why don't you stock it?" they demanded.
+
+"Because I don't think it's worth reading."
+
+"Oh, indeed!" The sarcastic customers were commonly ladies. "I
+thought you let the public judge of that!"
+
+"There are bookstores where they do. This is a critical bookstore. I
+sell only the books that _I_ think worth reading. If you had noticed
+my sign--"
+
+"Oh!" the customer would say, and she, too, would go away without
+buying.
+
+There were other ladies who came, links of the endless chain of
+volunteer readers who had tried to help Erlcort in making his
+selection, and he could see them slyly looking his stock over for the
+books they had praised to him. Mostly they went away without comment,
+but with heads held high in the offense which he felt even more than
+saw. One, indeed, did ask him why he had not stocked her chosen book,
+and he had to say, "Well, when I came to go through it carefully, I
+didn't think it quite--"
+
+"But here is _The Green Bay Tree_, and _The Biggest Toad in the
+Puddle_, and--"
+
+"I know. For one reason and another I thought them worth stocking."
+
+Then another head went away high in the air, with its plumes
+quivering. One afternoon late a lady came flying in with all the
+marks, whatever they are, of transatlantic travel upon her.
+
+"I'm just through the customs, and I've motored up here the first
+thing, even before I went home, to stop you from selling that book I
+recommended. It's dreadful; and, horrors! horrors! here it is by the
+hundreds! Oh, Mr. Erlcort! You mustn't sell that dreadful book! You
+see, I had skipped through it in my berth going out, and posted my
+letter the first thing; and just now, coming home, I found it in the
+ship's library and came on that frightful episode. You know!
+Where-- How _could_ you order it without reading it, on a mere say-so?
+It's utterly immoral!"
+
+"I don't agree with you," Erlcort answered, dryly. "I consider that
+passage one of the finest in modern fiction--one of the most ennobling
+and illumining--"
+
+"Ennobling!" The lady made a gesture of horror. "Very well! If _that_
+is your idea of a critical bookstore, all I've got to say is--"
+
+But she had apparently no words to say it in, and she went out banging
+but failing to latch the door which let through the indignant snort of
+her car as it whirled her away. She left Erlcort and his assistant to
+a common silence, but he imagined somehow a resolution in the
+stenographer not to let the book go unsearched till she had grasped
+the full iniquity of that episode and felt all its ennobling force. He
+was not consoled when another lady came in and, after drifting
+unmolestedly about (it was the primary rule of the place not to
+follow people up), stopped before the side shelf where the book was
+ranged in dozens and scores. She took a copy from the neat ranks, and
+opened it; then she lifted her head by chance and caught sight of her
+plume in one of the little mirrors. She stealthily lifted herself on
+tiptoe till she could see her face, and then she turned to the
+assistant and said, gently, "I believe I should like _this_ book,
+please," and paid for it and went out.
+
+It was now almost on the stroke of six, and Erlcort said to his
+assistant: "I'll close the store, Miss Pearsall. You needn't stay any
+longer."
+
+"All right, sir," the girl said, and went into the little closet at
+the rear for her hat and coat. Did she contrive to get a copy of that
+book under her coat as she passed the shelf where it lay?
+
+When she was gone, he turned the key in the door and went back and sat
+down before the fire dying on the hearth of the Franklin stove. It was
+not a very cheerful moment with him, but he could not have said that
+the day had been unprofitable, either spiritually or pecuniarily. In
+its experiences it had been a varied day, and he had really sold a
+good many books. More people than he could have expected had taken him
+seriously and even intelligently. It is true that he had been somewhat
+vexed by the sort of authority the president of the Intellectual Club
+had shown in the way she swelled into the store and patronized him and
+it, as if she had invented them both, and blamed him in a high, sweet
+voice for having so many _old_ books. "My idea was that it would be a
+place where one could come for the best of the _new_ books. But here!
+Why, half of them I saw in June before I sailed!" She chided him
+merrily, and she acted as if it were quite part of the joke when he
+said that he did not think a good book could age much in four months.
+She laughed patronizingly at his conceit of getting in the fall books
+by Thanksgiving; but even for the humor of it she could not let him
+say he should not do anything in holiday books. "I had expected to get
+_all_ my Christmas books of you, Mr. Erlcort," she crowed, but for the
+present she bought nothing. In compensation he recalled the gratitude,
+almost humble gratitude, of a lady (she was a lady!) who had come that
+day, bringing her daughter to get a book, any book in his stock, and
+to thank him for his enterprise, which she had found worked perfectly
+in the case of the book she had got the week before; the book had been
+an unalloyed delight, and had left a sense of heightened self-respect
+with her: that book of the dreadful episode.
+
+He wished Margaret Green had been there; but she had been there only
+once since his opening; he could not think why. He heard a rattling at
+the door-latch, and he said before he turned to look, "What if it
+should be she _now_?" But when he went to peer through the
+door-curtain it was only an old fellow who had spent the better part
+of the afternoon in the best chair, reading a book. Erlcort went back
+to the fire and let him rattle, which he did rather a long time, and
+then went away, Erlcort hoped, in dudgeon. He was one of a number of
+customers who had acted on the half of his motto asking them to sit
+down and rest them, after acting on the other half to look round all
+they wanted. Most of them did not read, even; they seemed to know one
+another, and they talked comfortably together. Erlcort recognized a
+companionship of four whom he had noticed in the Park formerly; they
+were clean-enough-looking elderly men, but occupied nearly all the
+chairs and settles, so that lady customers did not like to bring books
+and look over them in the few places left, and Erlcort foresaw the
+time when he should have to ask the old fellows to look around more
+and rest them less. In resuming his own place before the fire he felt
+the fleeting ache of a desire to ask Margaret Green whether it would
+not be a good plan to remove the motto from the chimneypiece. He would
+not have liked to do it without asking her; it had been her notion to
+put it there, and her other notion of the immoral mirrors had
+certainly worked well. The thoughtful expression they had reflected on
+the faces of lady customers had sold a good many books; not that
+Erlcort wished to sell books that way, though he argued with himself
+that his responsibility ought strictly to end with the provision of
+books which he had critically approved before offering them for sale.
+
+His conscience was not wholly at peace as to his stock, not only the
+books which he had included, but also those he had excluded. Some of
+these tacitly pleaded against his severity; in one case an author came
+and personally protested. This was the case of a book by the
+ex-best-seller, who held that his last book was so much better than
+his first that it ought certainly to be found in any critical
+bookstore. The proceeds of his best-seller had enabled him to buy an
+electric runabout, and he purred up to Erlcort's door in it to argue
+the matter with him. He sat down in a reproduction and proved, gaily,
+that Erlcort was quite wrong about it. He had the book with him, and
+read passages from it; then he read passages from some of the books on
+sale and defied Erlcort to say that his passages were not just as
+good, or, as he put it merrily, the same as. He held that his marked
+improvement entitled him to the favor of a critical bookstore;
+without this, what motive had he in keeping from a reversion to the
+errors which had won him the vicious prosperity of his first venture?
+Hadn't Erlcort a duty to perform in preventing his going back to the
+bad? Refuse this markedly improved fiction, and you drove him to
+writing nothing but best-sellers from now on. He urged Erlcort to
+reflect.
+
+They had a jolly time, and the ex-best-seller went away in high
+spirits, prophesying that Erlcort would come to his fiction yet.
+
+There were authors who did not leave Erlcort so cheerful when they
+failed to see their books on his shelves or tables. Some of them were
+young authors who had written their worthless books with a devout
+faith in their worth, and they went away more in sorrow than in anger,
+and yet more in bewilderment. Some were old authors who had been all
+their lives acceptably writing second-rate books and trying to make
+them unacceptably first-rate. If he knew them he kept out of their
+way, but the dejection of their looks was not less a pang to him if he
+saw them searching his stock for their books in vain.
+
+He had his own moments of dejection. The interest of the press in his
+enterprise had flashed through the Sunday issues of a single week, and
+then flashed out in lasting darkness. He wondered vaguely if he had
+counted without the counting-house in hoping for their continued
+favor; he could not realize that nothing is so stale as old news, and
+that no excess of advertising would have relumed those fitful fires.
+
+He would have liked to talk the case over with Margaret Green. After
+his first revolt from the easy publicity the reporters had first given
+him, he was aware of having enjoyed it--perhaps vulgarly enjoyed it.
+But he hoped not quite that; he hoped that in his fleeting celebrity
+he had cared for his scheme rather than himself. He had really
+believed in it, and he liked having it recognized as a feature of
+modern civilization, an innovation which did his city and his country
+credit. Now and then an essayist of those who wrote thoughtful
+articles in the Sunday or Saturday-evening editions had dropped in,
+and he had opened his heart to them in a way he would not have minded
+their taking advantage of. Secretly he hoped they would see a topic in
+his enterprise and his philosophy of it. But they never did, and he
+was left to the shame of hopes which had held nothing to support
+defeat. He would have liked to confess his shame and own the justice
+of his punishment to Margaret Green, but she seemed the only friend
+who never came near. Other friends came, and many strangers, the
+friends to look and the strangers to buy. He had no reason to
+complain of his sales; the fame of his critical bookstore might have
+ceased in New York, because it had gone abroad to Chicago and St.
+Louis and Pittsburg; people who were clearly from these commercial
+capitals and others came and bought copiously of his criticized stock,
+and they praised the notion of it in telling him that he ought to open
+branches in their several cities.
+
+They were all women, and it was nearly all women who frequented the
+Critical Bookstore, but in their multitude Margaret Green was not. He
+thought it the greater pity because she would have enjoyed many of
+them with him, and would have divined such as hoped the culture
+implicated by a critical bookstore would come off on them without
+great effort of their own; she would have known the sincere spirits,
+too, and could have helped direct their choice of the best where all
+was so good. He smiled to find that he was invoking her help, which he
+had no right to.
+
+His longing had no effect upon her till deep in January, when the
+weather was engaged late one afternoon in keeping the promise of a
+January thaw in the form of the worst snow-storm of the winter. Then
+she came thumping with her umbrella-handle at his door as if, he
+divined, she were too stiff-handed or too package-laden to press the
+latch and let herself in, and she almost fell in, but saved herself
+by spilling on the floor some canvases and other things which she had
+been getting at the artist's-materials store near by. "Don't bother
+about them," she said, "but take me to the fire as fast as you can,"
+and when she had turned from snow to rain and had dripped partially
+dry before the Franklin stove, she asked, "Where have you been all the
+time?"
+
+"Waiting here for you," he answered.
+
+"Well, you needn't. I wasn't going to come--or at least not till you
+sent for me, or said you wanted my advice."
+
+"I don't want your advice now."
+
+"I didn't come to give it. I just dropped in because if I hadn't I
+should have just dropped outside. How have you been getting along with
+your ridiculous critical bookstore?"
+
+"Well, things are rather quiet with us just now, as the publishers say
+to the authors when they don't want to publish their books."
+
+"Yes, I know that saying. Why didn't you go in for the holiday books?"
+
+"How did you know I didn't?"
+
+"Lots of people told me."
+
+"Well, then, I'll tell you why. I would have had to read them first,
+and no human being could do that--not even a volunteer link in an
+endless chain."
+
+"I see. But since Christmas?"
+
+"You know very well that after Christmas the book market drops dead."
+
+"Yes, so I've been told." She had flung her wet veil back over her
+shoulders, and he thought she had never looked so adorably plain
+before; if she could have seen herself in a glass she would have found
+her whole face out of drawing. It seemed as if his thinking had put
+her in mind of them, and she said, "Those immoral mirrors are
+shameful."
+
+"They've sold more of the best books than anything else."
+
+"No matter. As soon as I get a little drier I shall take them down."
+
+"Very well. _I_ didn't put them up." He laid a log of hickory on the
+fire. "I'm not doing it to dry you quicker."
+
+"Oh, I know. I'll tell you one thing. You ought to keep the magazines,
+or at least the Big Four. You could keep them with a good conscience,
+and you could sell them without reading; they're always good."
+
+"There's an idea in that. I believe I'll try it."
+
+Margaret Green was now dry enough, and she rose and removed the
+mirrors. In doing this she noticed that Erlcort had apparently sold a
+good many of his best books, and she said: "Well! I don't see why
+_you_ should be discouraged."
+
+"Who said I was? I'm exultant."
+
+"Then you were exulting with the corners of your mouth down just now.
+Well, I must be going. Will you get a taxi to flounder over to the
+Subway with me?" While Erlcort was telephoning she was talking to him.
+"I believe the magazines will revive public interest in your scheme.
+Put them in your window. Try to get advance copies for it."
+
+"You have a commercial genius, Margaret Green."
+
+"When it comes to selling literature, I have. Selling art is where I
+fall down."
+
+"That's because you always try to sell your own art. I should fall
+down, too, if I tried to sell my own literature."
+
+They got quite back to their old friendliness; the coming of the taxi
+gave them plenty of time. The electric lights were turned brilliantly
+on, but there, at the far end of the store, before the Franklin stove,
+they had a cozy privacy. At the moment of parting she said:
+
+"If I were you I should take out these settles. They simply invite
+loafing."
+
+"I've noticed that they seem to do that."
+
+"And better paint out that motto."
+
+"I've sometimes fancied I'd better. _That_ invites loafing, too;
+though some nice people like it."
+
+"Nice people? Why haven't some of them bought a picture?" He perceived
+that she had taken in the persistent presence of the sketches when
+removing the mirrors, and he shared the indignation she expressed:
+"Shabby things!"
+
+She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and he asked what she was
+going to do with them, as he followed her to the door with her other
+things.
+
+"Put them around the studio. But you needn't come to see the effect."
+
+"No. I shall come to see you."
+
+But when he came in a lull of February, and he could walk part of the
+way up through the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said:
+
+"I suppose you've come to pour out some more of your griefs. Well,
+pour away! Has the magazine project failed?"
+
+"On the contrary, it has been a _succes fou_. But I don't feel
+altogether easy in my mind about it. The fact is, they seem to print
+much more rubbish than I supposed."
+
+"Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their
+nostrils."
+
+She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut and getting very close
+to her picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her
+mouth hang open. He wondered why she was so charming; but when she
+stepped back rhythmically, tilting her pretty head this way and that,
+he saw why: it was her unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her
+mouth and shut it to say, "Well?"
+
+"Well, some people have come back at me. They've said, What a rotten
+number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in
+all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What's
+to be done about it? I can't ask people to buy truck or read truck
+because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the
+first quality."
+
+"No. You can't. Why," she asked, drifting up to her picture again,
+"don't you tear the bad out, and sell the good?"
+
+Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot be spelled in English.
+"Do you know how defiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the
+magazines? They're wired together, and you could no more tear out the
+bad and leave the good than you could part vice from virtue in human
+nature."
+
+"I see," Margaret Green said, but she saw no further, and she had to
+let him go disconsolate. After waiting a decent time she went to find
+him in his critical bookstore. It was late in an afternoon of the days
+that were getting longer, and only one electric was lighted in the
+rear of the room, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Franklin
+stove, so busy at something that he scarcely seemed aware of her.
+
+"What in the world are you doing?" she demanded.
+
+He looked up. "Who? I? Oh, it's you! Why, I'm merely censoring the
+truck in the May number of this magazine." He held up a little roller,
+as long as the magazine was wide, blacked with printer's ink, which he
+had been applying to the open periodical. "I've taken a hint from the
+way the Russian censorship blots out seditious literature before it
+lets it go to the public."
+
+"And _what_ a mess you're making!"
+
+"Of course it will have to dry before it's put on sale."
+
+"I should think so. Listen to me, Frederick Erlcort: you're going
+crazy."
+
+"I've sometimes thought so: crazy with conceit and vanity and
+arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical
+bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast,
+benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or
+a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him?
+Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is
+it universal suffrage?"
+
+"Now," Margaret Green said, "you are talking sense. Why didn't you
+think of this in the beginning?"
+
+"Is it a world, a whole earth," he went on, "where the weeds mostly
+outflourish the flowers, or is it a wretched little florist's
+conservatory where the watering-pot assumes to better the instruction
+of the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust? What is all the
+worthy family of asses to do if there are no thistles to feed them?
+Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the
+finer organisms, are the coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made a
+mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the
+gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the
+gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the
+pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have
+their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the
+rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural
+selection become to certain of them. But let there be no artificial
+selection, no survival of the fittest by main force--the force of the
+spectator, who thinks he knows better than the creator of the ugly and
+the beautiful, the fair and foul, the evil and good."
+
+"Oh, _now_ if the Intellectual Club could hear you!" Margaret Green
+said, with a long, deep, admiring suspiration. "And what are you
+going to do with your critical bookstore?"
+
+"I'm going to sell it. I've had an offer from the author of that
+best-seller--I've told you about him. I was just trying to censor that
+magazine while I was thinking it over. He's got an idea. He's going to
+keep it a critical bookstore, but the criticism is to be made by
+universal suffrage and the will of the majority. The latest books will
+be put to a vote; and the one getting the greatest number of votes
+will be the first offered for sale, and the author will receive a free
+passage to Europe by the southern route."
+
+"The southern route!" Margaret mused. "I've never been that way. It
+must be delightful."
+
+"Then come with _me_! _I'm_ going."
+
+"But how can I?"
+
+"By marrying me!"
+
+"I never thought of that," she said. Then, with the conscientious
+resolution of an elderly girl who puts her fate to the touch of any
+risk the truth compels, she added: "Or, yes! I _have_. But I never
+supposed you would ask me." She stared at him, and she was aware she
+was letting her mouth hang open. While she was trying for some word to
+close it with he closed it for her.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIV
+
+                          A FEAST OF REASON
+
+
+Florindo and Lindora had come to the end of another winter in town,
+and had packed up for another summer in the country. They were sitting
+together over their last breakfast until the taxi should arrive to
+whirl them away to the station, and were brooding in a joint gloom
+from the effect of the dinner they had eaten at the house of a friend
+the night before, and, "Well, thank goodness," she said, "there is an
+end to that sort of thing for _one_ while."
+
+"An end to _that_ thing," he partially assented, "but not that _sort_
+of thing."
+
+"What do you mean?" she demanded excitedly, almost resentfully.
+
+"I mean that the lunch is of the nature of the dinner, and that in the
+country we shall begin lunching where we left off dining."
+
+"Not instantly," she protested shrilly. "There will be nobody there
+for a while--not for a whole month, nearly."
+
+"They will be there before you can turn round, almost; and then you
+women will begin feeding one another there before you have well left
+off here."
+
+"We women!" she protested.
+
+"Yes, you--you women. You give the dinners. Can you deny it?"
+
+"It's because we can't get you to the lunches."
+
+"In the country you can; and so you will give the lunches."
+
+"We would give dinners if it were not for the distance, and the
+darkness on those bad roads."
+
+"I don't see where your reasoning is carrying you."
+
+"No," she despaired, "there is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of
+it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time before it is all
+going on again."
+
+They computed the number of dinners they had given during the winter;
+that was not hard, and the sum was not great: six or seven at the
+most, large and small. When it came to the dinners they had received,
+it was another thing; but still she considered, "Were they really so
+few? It's nothing to what the English do. They never dine alone at
+home, and they never dine alone abroad--of course not! I wonder they
+can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept kind, is always
+loathsome: the everlasting soup, if there aren't oysters first, or
+grape-fruit, or melon, and the fish, and the entree, and the roast and
+salad, and the ice-cream and the fruit nobody touches, and the coffee
+and cigarettes and cigars--how I hate it all!"
+
+Lindora sank back in her chair and toyed desperately with the fragment
+of bacon on her plate.
+
+"And yet," Florindo said, "there is a charm about the first dinner of
+autumn, after you've got back."
+
+"Oh, yes," she assented; "it's like a part of our lost youth. We think
+all the dinners of the winter will be like that, and we come away
+beaming."
+
+"But when it keeps on and there's more and more of our lost youth,
+till it comes to being the whole--"
+
+"Florindo!" she stopped him. He pretended that he was not going to
+have said it, and she resumed, dreamily, "I wonder what it is makes it
+so detestable as the winter goes on."
+
+"All customs are detestable, the best of them," he suggested, "and I
+should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner, that the society
+dinner was an unlovely rite. You try to carry if off with china and
+glass, and silver and linen, and if people could fix their minds on
+these, or even on the dishes of the dinner as they come successively
+on, it would be all very well; but the diners, the diners!"
+
+"Yes," she said, "the old men are hideous, certainly; and the young
+ones--I try not to look at them, poking things into the hollows of
+their faces with spoons and forks--"
+
+"Better than when it was done with knives! Still, it's a horror! A
+veteran diner-out in full action is certainly a hideous spectacle.
+Often he has few teeth of his own, and the dentists don't serve him
+perfectly. He is in danger of dropping things out of his mouth, both
+liquids and solids: better not look! His eyes bulge and roll in his
+head in the stress of mastication and deglutition; his color rises and
+spreads to his gray hair or over his baldness; his person seems to
+swell vividly in his chair, and when he laughs--"
+
+"Don't, Florindo! It _is_ awful."
+
+"Well, perhaps no worse than the sight of a middle-aged matron tending
+to overweight and bulking above her plate--"
+
+"Yes, yes! That's dreadful, too. But when people are young--"
+
+"Oh, when people are young!" He said this in despair. Then he went on
+in an audible muse. "When people are young they are not only in their
+own youth; they are in the youth of the world, the race. They dine,
+but they don't think of the dinner or the unpleasantness of the
+diners, and the grotesqueness of feeding in common. They think--" he
+broke off in defect of other ideas, and concluded with a laugh, "they
+think of themselves. And they don't think of how they are looking."
+
+"They needn't; they are looking very well. Don't keep harping on that!
+I remember when we first began going to dinners, I thought it was the
+most beautiful thing in the world. I don't mean when I was a girl; a
+girl only goes to a dinner because it comes before a dance. I mean
+when we were young married people; and I pinned up my dress and we
+went in the horse-cars, or even walked. I enjoyed every instant of it:
+the finding who was going to take me in and who you were; and the
+going in; and the hovering round the table to find our places from the
+cards; and the seeing how you looked next some one else, and wondering
+how you thought I looked; and the beads sparkling up through the
+champagne and getting into one's nose; and the laughing and joking and
+talking! Oh, the talking! What's become of it? The talking, last
+night, it bored me to death! And what good stories people used to
+tell, women as well as men! You can't deny it was beautiful."
+
+"I don't; and I don't deny that the forms of dining are still
+charming. It's the dining itself that I object to."
+
+"That's because your digestion is bad."
+
+"Isn't yours?"
+
+"Of course it is. What has that got to do with it?"
+
+"It seems to me that we have arrived at what is called an _impasse_ in
+French." He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she gave a little
+jump in her chair. "Oh, there's plenty of time. The taxi won't be here
+for half an hour yet. Is there any heat left in that coffee?"
+
+"There will be," she said, and she lighted the lamp under the pot.
+"But I don't like being scared out of half a year's growth."
+
+"I'm sorry. I won't look at the clock any more; I don't care if we're
+left. Where were we? Oh, I remember--the objection to dining itself.
+If we could have the forms without the facts, dining would be all
+right. Our superstition is that we can't be gay without gorging; that
+society can't be run without meat and drink. But don't you remember
+when we first went to Italy there was no supper at Italian houses
+where we thought it such a favor to be asked?"
+
+"I remember that the young Italian swells wouldn't go to the American
+and English houses where they weren't sure of supper. They didn't
+give supper at the Italian houses because they couldn't afford it."
+
+"I know that. I believe they do, now. But--
+
+          'Sweet are the uses of adversity,'
+
+and the fasting made for beauty then more than the feasting does now.
+It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses
+conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed--the
+sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out to supper."
+
+"I wonder," Lindora said, "whether the same sort of thing goes on at
+evening parties still--it's so long since I've been at one. It was
+awful standing jammed up in a corner or behind a door and eating
+_vis-a-vis_ with a man who brought you a plate; and it wasn't much
+better when you sat down and he stood over you gabbling and gobbling,
+with his plate in one hand and his fork in the other. I was always
+afraid of his dropping things into my lap; and the sight of his jaws
+champing as you looked up at them from below!"
+
+"Yes, ridiculous. But there was an element of the grotesque in a
+bird's-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and
+trying to smile and look _spirituelle_ between the shots."
+
+Lindora as she laughed bowed her forehead on the back of her hand in
+the way Florindo thought so pretty when they were both young. "Yes,"
+she said, "awful, awful! Why _should_ people want to flock together
+when they feed? Do you suppose it's a survival of the primitive
+hospitality when those who had something to eat hurried to share it
+with those who had nothing?"
+
+"Possibly," Florindo said, flattered into consequence by her momentary
+deference, or show of it. "But the people who mostly meet to feed
+together now are not hungry; they are already so stuffed that they
+loathe the sight of the things. Some of them shirk the consequences by
+frankly dining at home first, and then openly or covertly dodging the
+courses."
+
+"Yes, and you hear that praised as a mark of high civilization, or
+social wisdom. I call it wicked, and an insult to the very genius of
+hospitality."
+
+"Well, I don't know. It must give the faster a good chance of seeing
+how funny the feeders all look."
+
+"I wonder, I _do_ wonder, how the feeding in common came to be the
+custom," she said, thoughtfully. "Of course where it's done for
+convenience, like hotels or in boarding-houses--but to do it wantonly,
+as people do in society, it ought to be stopped."
+
+"We might call art to our aid--have a large tableful of people kodaked
+in the moments of ingulfing, chewing, or swallowing, as the act varied
+from guest to guest; might be reproduced as picture postals, or from
+films for the movies. That would give the ten and twenty cent
+audiences a chance to see what life in the exclusive circles was."
+
+She listened in dreamy inattention. "It was a step in the right
+direction when people began to have afternoon teas. To be sure, there
+was the biting and chewing sandwiches, but you needn't take _them_,
+and most women could manage their teacups gracefully."
+
+"Or hide their faces in them when they couldn't."
+
+"Only," she continued, "the men wouldn't come after the first go off.
+It was as bad as lunches. Now that the English way of serving tea to
+callers has come in, it's better. You really get the men, and it keeps
+them from taking cocktails so much."
+
+"They're rather glad of that. But still, still, there's the guttling
+and guzzling."
+
+"It's reduced to a minimum."
+
+"But it's there. And the first thing you know you've loaded yourself
+up with cake or bread-and-butter and spoiled your appetite for dinner.
+No, afternoon tea must go with the rest of it, if we're going to be
+truly civilized. If people could come to one another's tables with
+full minds instead of stomachs, there would be some excuse for
+hospitality. Perhaps if we reversed the practice of the professional
+diner-out, and read up at home as he now eats at home, and-- No, I
+don't see how it could be done. But we might take a leaf from the book
+of people who are not in society. They never ask anybody to meals if
+they can possibly help it; if some one happens in at meal-times they
+tell him to pull up a chair--if they have to, or he shows no signs
+first of going. But even among these people the instinct of
+hospitality--the feeding form of it--lurks somewhere. In our
+farm-boarding days--"
+
+"Don't speak of them!" she implored.
+
+"We once went to an evening party," he pursued, "where raw apples and
+cold water were served."
+
+"I thought I should die of hunger. And when we got home to our own
+farmer's we ravaged the pantry for everything left from supper. It
+wasn't much. There!" Lindora screamed. "There _is_ the taxi!" And the
+shuddering sound of the clock making time at their expense penetrated
+from the street. "Come!"
+
+"How the instinct of economy lingers in us, too, long after the use
+of it is outgrown. It's as bad as the instinct of hospitality. We
+could easily afford to pay extra for the comfort of sitting here over
+these broken victuals--"
+
+"I tell you we shall be left," she retorted; and in the thirty-five
+minutes they had at the station before their train started she
+outlined a scheme of social reform which she meant to put in force as
+soon as people began to gather in summer force at Lobster Cove.
+
+He derided the notion; but she said, "You will see!" and in rather
+more time than it takes to tell it they were settled in their cottage,
+where, after some unavoidable changes of cook and laundress, they were
+soon in perfect running order.
+
+By this time Lobster Cove was in the full tide of lunching and being
+lunched. The lunches were almost exclusively ladies' lunches, and the
+ladies came to them with appetites sharpened by the incomparable air
+of those real Lobster Cove days which were all cloudless skies and
+west winds, and by the vigorous automobile exercise of getting to one
+another's cottages. They seized every pretext for giving these feasts,
+marked each by some vivid touch of invention within the limits of the
+graceful convention which all felt bound not to transcend. It was some
+surprising flavor in the salad, or some touch of color appealing to
+the eye only; or it was some touch in the ice-cream, or some daring
+substitution of a native dish for it, as strawberry or peach
+shortcake; or some bold transposition in the order of the courses; or
+some capricious arrangement of the decoration, or the use of wild
+flowers, or even weeds (as meadow-rue or field-lilies), for the local
+florist's flowers, which set the ladies screaming at the moment and
+talking of it till the next lunch. This would follow perhaps the next
+day, or the next but one, according as a new cottager's claims
+insisted or a lady had a change of guests, or three days at the
+latest, for no reason.
+
+In their rapid succession people scarcely noticed that Lindora had not
+given a lunch, and she had so far abandoned herself to the enjoyment
+of the others' lunches that she had half forgotten her high purposes
+of reform, when she was sharply recalled to them by a lunch which had
+not at all agreed with her; she had, in fact, had to have the doctor,
+and many people had asked one another whether they had heard how she
+was. Then she took her good resolution in both hands and gave an
+afternoon, asking people by note or 'phone simply whether they would
+not come in at four sharp. People were a good deal mystified, but for
+this very reason everybody came. Some of them came from somebody's
+lunch, which had been so nice that they lingered over it till four,
+and then walked, partly to fill in the time and partly to walk off the
+lunch, as there would be sure to be something at Lindora's later on.
+
+It would be invidious to say what the nature of Lindora's
+entertainment was. It was certainly to the last degree original, and
+those who said the worst of it could say no worse than that it was
+queer. It quite filled the time till six o'clock, and may be perhaps
+best described as a negative rather than a positive triumph, though
+what Lindora had aimed at she had undoubtedly achieved. Whatever it
+was, whether original or queer, it was certainly novel.
+
+A good many men had come, one at least to every five ladies, but as
+the time passed and a certain blankness began to gather over the
+spirits of all, they fell into different attitudes of the despair
+which the ladies did their best to pass off for rapture. At each
+unscheduled noise they started in a vain expectation, and when the end
+came, it came so without accent, so without anything but the clock to
+mark it as the close, that they could hardly get themselves together
+for going away. They did what was nice and right, of course, in
+thanking Lindora for her fascinating afternoon, but when they were
+well beyond hearing one said to another: "Well, I shall certainly
+have an appetite for my dinner _to-night_! Why, if there had only been
+a cup of the weakest kind of tea, or even of cold water!"
+
+Then those who had come in autos gathered as many pedestrians into
+them as they would hold in leaving the house, or caught them up
+fainting by the way.
+
+Lindora and Florindo watched them from their veranda.
+
+"Well, my dear," he said, "it's been a wonderful afternoon; an immense
+stride forward in the cause of anti-eating--or--"
+
+"Don't _speak_ to me!" she cried.
+
+"But it leaves one rather hungry, doesn't it?"
+
+"_Hungry!_" she hurled back at him. "I could eat a--I don't know
+what!"
+
+
+
+
+                                  XV
+
+                     CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL
+
+                       A Long-distance Eclogue
+
+                                 1902
+
+
+  _Morrison._ Hello! Hello! Is that you, Wetherbee?
+
+  _Wetherbee._ Yes. Who are you? What do you want with me?
+
+  _Morrison._ Oh, nothing much. It's Morrison, you know;
+  Morrison--down at Clamhurst Shortsands.
+
+  _Wetherbee._                             Oh!
+  Why, Morrison, of course! Of course, I know!
+  How are you, Morrison? And, by the way,
+  _Where_ are you? What! You never mean to say
+  You are down there _yet_? Well, by the Holy Poker!
+  What are you doing there, you ancient joker?
+
+  _Morrison._ Sticking it out over Thanksgiving Day.
+  I said I would. I tell you, it is gay
+  Down here. You ought to see the Hunter's Moon,
+  These silver nights, prinking in our lagoon.
+  You ought to see our sunsets, glassy red,
+  Shading to pink and violet overhead.
+  You ought to see our mornings, still and clear,
+  White silence, far as you can look and hear.
+  You ought to see the leaves--our oaks and ashes
+  Crimson and yellow, with those gorgeous splashes,
+  Purple and orange, against the bluish green
+  Of the pine woods; and scattered in between
+  The scarlet of the maples; and the blaze
+  Of blackberry-vines, along the dusty ways
+  And on the old stone walls; the air just balm,
+  And the crows cawing through the perfect calm
+  Of afternoons all gold and turquoise. Say,
+  You ought to have been with wife and me to-day,
+  A drive we took--it would have made you sick:
+  The pigeons and the partridges so thick;
+  And on the hill just beyond Barkin's lane,
+  Before you reach the barn of Widow Payne,
+  Showing right up against the sky, as clear
+  And motionless as sculpture, stood a deer!
+  Say, does that jar you just a little? Say,
+  How have you found things up there, anyway,
+  Since you got back? Air like a cotton string
+  To breathe? The same old dust on everything,
+  And in your teeth, and in your eyes? The smoke
+  From the soft coal, got long beyond a joke?
+  The trolleys rather more upon your curves,
+  And all the roar and clatter in your nerves?
+  Don't you wish you had stayed here, too?
+
+  _Wetherbee._                          Well, yes,
+  I do at certain times, I must confess.
+  I swear it is enough at times to make you swear
+  You would almost rather be anywhere
+  Than here. The building up and pulling down,
+  The getting to and fro about the town,
+  The turmoil underfoot and overhead,
+  Certainly make you wish that you were dead,
+  At first; and all the mean vulgarity
+  Of city life, the filth and misery
+  You see around you, make you want to put
+  Back to the country anywhere, hot-foot.
+  Yet--there are compensations.
+
+  _Morrison._                    Such as?
+
+  _Wetherbee._                           Why,
+  There is the club.
+
+  _Morrison._         The club I can't deny.
+  Many o' the fellows back there?
+
+  _Wetherbee._                     Nearly all.
+  Over the twilight cocktails there are tall
+  Stories and talk. But you would hardly care;
+  You have the natives to talk with down there,
+  And always find them meaty.
+
+  _Morrison._                  Well, so-so.
+  Their words outlast their ideas at times, you know,
+  And they have _staying_ powers. The theaters
+  All open now?
+
+  _Wetherbee._    Yes, all. And it occurs
+  To me: there's one among the things that you
+  Would have enjoyed; an opera with the new--
+  Or at least the last--music by Sullivan,
+  And words, though not Gilbertian, that ran
+  Trippingly with it. Oh, I tell you what,
+  I'd rather that you had been there than not.
+
+  _Morrison._ Thanks ever so!
+
+  _Wetherbee._                Oh, there is nothing mean
+  About your early friend. That deer and autumn scene
+  Were kind of you! And, say, I think you like
+  Afternoon teas when good. I have chanced to strike
+  Some of the best of late, where people said
+  They had sent you cards, but thought you must be dead.
+  I told them I left you down there by the sea,
+  And then they sort of looked askance at me,
+  As if it were a joke, and bade me get
+  Myself some bouillon or some chocolate,
+  And turned the subject--did not even give
+  Me time to prove it is not life to live
+  In town as long as you can keep from freezing
+  Beside the autumn sea. A little sneezing,
+  At Clamhurst Shortsands, since the frosts set in?
+
+  _Morrison._ Well, not enough to make a true friend grin.
+  Slight colds, mere nothings. With our open fires
+  We've all the warmth and cheer that heart desires.
+  Next year we'll have a furnace in, and stay
+  Not till Thanksgiving, but till Christmas Day.
+  It's glorious in these roomy autumn nights
+  To sit between the firelight and the lights
+  Of our big lamps, and read aloud by turns
+  As long as kerosene or hickory burns.
+  We hate to go to bed.
+
+  _Wetherbee._           Of course you do!
+  And hate to get up in the morning, too--
+  To pull the coverlet from your frost-bit nose,
+  And touch the glary matting with your toes!
+  Are you beginning yet to break the ice
+  In your wash-pitchers? No? Well, that is nice.
+  I always hate to do it--seems as if
+  Summer was going; but when your hand is stiff
+  With cold, it can be done. Still, I prefer
+  To wash and dress beside my register,
+  When summer gets a little on, like this.
+  But some folks find the other thing pure bliss--
+  Lusty young chaps, like you.
+
+  _Morrison._                   And some folks find
+  A sizzling radiator to their mind.
+  What else have you, there, you could recommend
+  To the attention of a country friend?
+
+  _Wetherbee._ Well, you know how it is in Madison Square,
+  Late afternoons, now, if the day's been fair--
+  How all the western sidewalk ebbs and flows
+  With pretty women in their pretty clo'es:
+  I've never seen them prettier than this year.
+  Of course, I know a dear is not a deer,
+  But still, I think that if I had to meet
+  One or the other in the road, or street,
+  All by myself, I am not sure but that
+  I'd choose the dear that wears the fetching hat.
+
+  _Morrison._ Get out! What else?
+
+  _Wetherbee._                Well, it is not so bad,
+  If you are feeling a little down, or sad,
+  To walk along Fifth Avenue to the Park,
+  When the day thinks perhaps of getting dark,
+  And meet that mighty flood of vehicles
+  Laden with all the different kinds of swells,
+  Homing to dinner, in their carriages--
+  Victorias, landaus, chariots, coupes--
+  There's nothing like it to lift up the heart
+  And make you realize yourself a part,
+  Sure, of the greatest show on earth.
+
+  _Morrison._                           Oh, yes,
+  I know. I've felt that rapture more or less.
+  But I would rather put it off as long
+  As possible. I suppose you like the song
+  Of the sweet car-gongs better than the cry
+  Of jays and yellowhammers when the sky
+  Begins to redden these October mornings,
+  And the loons sound their melancholy warnings;
+  Or honk of the wild-geese that write their A
+  Along the horizon in the evening's gray.
+  Or when the squirrels look down on you and bark
+  From the nut trees--
+
+  _Wetherbee._           We have them in the Park
+  Plenty enough. But, say, you aged sinner,
+  Have you been out much recently at dinner?
+
+  _Morrison._ What do you mean? You know there's no one here
+  That dines except ourselves now.
+
+  _Wetherbee._                Well, that's queer!
+  I thought the natives-- But I recollect!
+  It was not reasonable to expect--
+
+  _Morrison._ What are you driving at?
+
+  _Wetherbee._              Oh, nothing much.
+  But I was thinking how you come in touch
+  With life at the first dinner in the fall,
+  When you get back, first, as you can't at all
+  Later along. But you, of course, won't care
+  With your idyllic pleasures.
+
+  _Morrison._                   _Who was there?_
+
+  _Wetherbee._ Oh--ha, ha! What d'you mean by _there_?
+
+  _Morrison._                              Come off!
+
+  _Wetherbee._ What! you remain to pray that came to scoff!
+
+  _Morrison._ You know what I am after.
+
+  _Wetherbee._                         Yes, that dinner.
+  Just a round dozen: Ferguson and Binner
+  For the fine arts; Bowyer the novelist;
+  Dr. Le Martin; the psychologist
+  Fletcher; the English actor Philipson;
+  The two newspaper Witkins, Bob and John;
+  A nice Bostonian, Bane the archaeologer,
+  And a queer Russian amateur astrologer;
+  And Father Gray, the jolly ritualist priest,
+  And last your humble servant, but not least.
+  The food was not so filthy, and the wine
+  Was not so poison. We made out to dine
+  From eight till one A.M. One could endure
+  The dinner. But, oh say! _The talk was poor!_
+  Your natives down at Clamhurst--
+
+  _Morrison._                      Look ye here!
+  What date does Thanksgiving come on this year?
+
+  _Wetherbee._ Why, I suppose--although I don't remember
+  Certainly--the usual 28th November.
+
+  _Morrison._ Novem-- You should have waited to get sober!
+  It comes on the 11th of October!
+  And that's to-morrow; and if you happen down
+  Later, you'd better look for us in town.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XVI
+
+                              TABLE TALK
+
+
+They were talking after dinner in that cozy moment when the
+conversation has ripened, just before the coffee, into mocking guesses
+and laughing suggestions. The thing they were talking of was something
+that would have held them apart if less happily timed and placed, but
+then and there it drew these together in what most of them felt a
+charming and flattering intimacy. Not all of them took part in the
+talk, and of those who did, none perhaps assumed to talk with
+authority or finality. At first they spoke of the subject as _it_,
+forbearing to name it, as if the name of it would convey an unpleasant
+shock, out of temper with the general feeling.
+
+"I don't suppose," the host said, "that it's really so much commoner
+than it used to be. But the publicity is more invasive and explosive.
+That's perhaps because it has got higher up in the world and has
+spread more among the first circles. The time was when you seldom
+heard of it there, and now it is scarcely a scandal. I remember that
+when I went abroad, twenty or thirty years ago, and the English
+brought me to book about it, I could put them down by saying that I
+didn't know a single divorced person."
+
+"And of course," a bachelor guest ventured, "a person of that sort
+_must_ be single."
+
+At first the others did not take the joke; then they laughed, but the
+women not so much as the men.
+
+"And you couldn't say that now?" the lady on the right of the host
+inquired.
+
+"Why, I don't know," he returned, thoughtfully, after a little
+interval. "I don't just call one to mind."
+
+"Then," the bachelor said, "that classes you. If you moved in our best
+society you would certainly know some of the many smart people whose
+disunions alternate with the morning murders in the daily papers."
+
+"Yes, the fact seems to rank me rather low; but I'm rather proud of
+the fact."
+
+The hostess seemed not quite to like this arrogant humility. She said,
+over the length of the table (it was not very long), "I'm sure you
+know some very nice people who have not been."
+
+"Well, yes, I do. But are they really smart people? They're of very
+good family, certainly."
+
+"You mustn't brag," the bachelor said.
+
+A husband on the right of the hostess wondered if there were really
+more of the thing than there used to be.
+
+"Qualitatively, yes, I should say. Quantitatively, I'm not convinced,"
+the host answered. "In a good many of the States it's been made
+difficult."
+
+The husband on the right of the hostess was not convinced, he said, as
+to the qualitative increase. The parties to the suits were rich
+enough, and sometimes they were high enough placed and far enough
+derived. But there was nearly always a leak in them, a social leak
+somewhere, on one side or the other. They could not be said to be
+persons of quality in the highest sense.
+
+"Why, persons of quality seldom can be," the bachelor contended.
+
+The girl opposite, who had been invited to balance him in the scale of
+celibacy by the hostess in her study of her dinner-party, first
+smiled, and then alleged a very distinguished instance of divorce in
+which the parties were both of immaculate origin and unimpeachable
+fashion. "Nobody," she said, "can accuse _them_ of a want of quality."
+She was good-looking, though no longer so young as she could have
+wished; she flung out her answer to the bachelor defiantly, but she
+addressed it to the host, and he said that was true; certainly it was
+a signal case; but wasn't it exceptional? The others mentioned like
+cases, though none quite so perfect, and then there was a lull till
+the husband on the left of the hostess noted a fact which renewed the
+life of the discussion.
+
+"There was a good deal of agitation, six or eight years ago, about it.
+I don't know whether the agitation accomplished anything."
+
+The host believed it had influenced legislation.
+
+"For or against?" the bachelor inquired.
+
+"Oh, against."
+
+"But in other countries it's been coming in more and more. It seems to
+be as easy in England now as it used to be in Indiana. In France it's
+nothing scandalous, and in Norwegian society you meet so many
+disunited couples in a state of quadruplicate reunion that it is very
+embarrassing. It doesn't seem to bother the parties to the new
+relation themselves."
+
+"It's very common in Germany, too," the husband on the right of the
+hostess said.
+
+The husband on her left side said he did not know just how it was in
+Italy and Spain, and no one offered to disperse his ignorance.
+
+In the silence which ensued the lady on the left of the host created a
+diversion in her favor by saying that she had heard they had a very
+good law in Switzerland.
+
+Being asked to tell what it was, she could not remember, but her
+husband, on the right of the hostess, saved the credit of his family
+by supplying her defect. "Oh, yes. It's very curious. We heard of it
+when we were there. When people want to be put asunder, for any reason
+or other, they go before a magistrate and declare their wish. Then
+they go home, and at the end of a certain time--weeks or months--the
+magistrate summons them before him with a view to reconciliation. If
+they come, it is a good sign; if they don't come, or come and persist
+in their desire, then they are summoned after another interval, and
+are either reconciled or put asunder, as the case may be, or as they
+choose. It is not expensive, and I believe it isn't scandalous."
+
+"It seems very sensible," the husband on the left of the hostess said,
+as if to keep the other husband in countenance. But for an interval no
+one else joined him, and the mature girl said to the man next her that
+it seemed rather cold-blooded. He was a man who had been entreated to
+come in, on the frank confession that he was asked as a stop-gap, the
+original guest having fallen by the way. Such men are apt to abuse
+their magnanimity, their condescension. They think that being there
+out of compassion, and in compliance with a hospitality that had not
+at first contemplated their presence, they can say anything; they are
+usually asked without but through their wives, who are asked to "lend"
+them, and who lend them with a grudge veiled in eager acquiescence;
+and the men think it will afterward advantage them with their wives,
+when they find they are enjoying themselves, if they will go home and
+report that they said something vexing or verging on the offensive to
+their hostess. This man now addressed himself to the lady at the head
+of the table.
+
+"Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce was an unquestionable
+evil?"
+
+The hostess looked with a frightened air to the right and left, and
+then down the table to her husband. But no one came to her rescue, and
+she asked feebly, as if foreboding trouble (for she knew she had taken
+a liberty with this man's wife), "Why, don't we?"
+
+"About one in seven of us doesn't," the stop-gap said.
+
+"Oh!" the girl beside him cried out, in a horror-stricken voice which
+seemed not to interpret her emotion truly. "Is it so bad as that?"
+
+"Perhaps not quite, even if it is bad at all," he returned, and the
+hostess smiled gratefully at the girl for drawing his fire. But it
+appeared she had not, for he directed his further speech at the
+hostess again: really the most inoffensive person there, and the least
+able to contend with adverse opinions.
+
+"No, I don't believe we do think it an unquestionable evil, unless we
+think marriage is so." Everybody sat up, as the stop-gap had intended,
+no doubt, and he "held them with his glittering eye," or as many as he
+could sweep with his glance. "I suppose that the greatest hypocrite at
+this table, where we are all so frankly hypocrites together, will not
+deny that marriage is the prime cause of divorce. In fact, divorce
+couldn't exist without it."
+
+The women all looked bewilderedly at one another, and then appealingly
+at the men. None of these answered directly, but the bachelor softly
+intoned out of Gilbert and Sullivan--he was of that date:
+
+          "'A paradox, a paradox;
+            A most ingenious paradox!'"
+
+"Yes," the stop-gap defiantly assented. "A paradox; and all aboriginal
+verities, all giant truths, are paradoxes."
+
+"Giant truths is good," the bachelor noted, but the stop-gap did not
+mind him.
+
+He turned to the host: "I suppose that if divorce is an evil, and we
+wish to extirpate it, we must strike at its root, at marriage?"
+
+The host laughed. "I prefer not to take the floor. I'm sure we all
+want to hear what you have to say in support of your mammoth idea."
+
+"Oh yes, indeed," the women chorused, but rather tremulously, as not
+knowing what might be coming.
+
+"Which do you mean? That all truth is paradoxical, or that marriage is
+the mother of divorce?"
+
+"Whichever you like."
+
+"The last proposition is self-evident," the stop-gap said, supplying
+himself with a small bunch of the grapes which nobody ever takes at
+dinner; the hostess was going to have coffee for the women in the
+drawing-room, and to leave the men to theirs with their tobacco at the
+table. "And you must allow that if divorce is a good thing or a bad
+thing, it equally partakes of the nature of its parent. Or else
+there's nothing in heredity."
+
+"Oh, come!" one of the husbands said.
+
+"Very well!" the stop-gap submitted. "I yield the word to you." But as
+the other went no further, he continued. "The case is so clear that it
+needs no argument. Up to this time, in dealing with the evil of
+divorce, if it is an evil, we have simply been suppressing the
+symptoms; and your Swiss method--"
+
+"Oh, it isn't _mine_," the man said who had stated it.
+
+"--Is only a part of the general practice. It is another attempt to
+make divorce difficult, when it is marriage that ought to be made
+difficult."
+
+"Some," the daring bachelor said, "think it ought to be made
+impossible." The girl across the table began to laugh hysterically,
+but caught herself up and tried to look as if she had not laughed at
+all.
+
+"I don't go as far as that," the stop-gap resumed, "but as an
+inveterate enemy of divorce--"
+
+An "Oh!" varying from surprise to derision chorused up; but he did not
+mind it; he went on as if uninterrupted.
+
+"I should put every possible obstacle, and at every step, in the way
+of marriage. The attitude of society toward marriage is now simply
+preposterous, absolutely grotesque. Society? The whole human framework
+in all its manifestations, social, literary, religious, artistic, and
+civic, is perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the matter.
+Nothing is done to retard or prevent marriage; everything to
+accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue
+which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly vulgar and
+entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The blind and
+witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least with us, is
+flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and revered as
+if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse. But is it? I
+defy any one here to say that it is."
+
+As if they were afraid of worse things if they spoke, the company
+remained silent. But this did not save them.
+
+"You all know it isn't. You all know that it is the caprice of chance
+encounter, the result of propinquity, the invention of poets and
+novelists, the superstition of the victims, the unscrupulous
+make-believe of the witnesses. As an impulse it quickly wears itself
+out in marriage, and makes way for divorce. In this country
+nine-tenths of the marriages are love-matches. The old motives which
+delay and prevent marriage in other countries, aristocratic countries,
+like questions of rank and descent, even of money, do not exist. Yet
+this is the land of unhappy unions beyond all other lands, the very
+home of divorce. The conditions of marriage are ideally favorable
+according to the opinions of its friends, who are all more or less
+active in bottling husbands and wives up in its felicity and
+preventing their escape through divorce."
+
+Still the others were silent, and again the stop-gap triumphed on.
+"Now, I am an enemy of divorce, too; but I would have it begin before
+marriage."
+
+"Rather paradoxical again?" the bachelor alone had the hardihood to
+suggest.
+
+"Not at all. I am quite literal. I would have it begin with the
+engagement. I would have the betrothed--the mistress and the
+lover--come before the magistrate or the minister, and declare their
+motives in wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with
+them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to
+a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would
+quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not,
+he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think
+it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them,
+and dismiss them as before, if they continued obstinate. After three
+months more, he should call them before him and reason with them for
+the last time. If they persisted in spite of everything, he should
+marry them, and let them take the consequences."
+
+The stop-gap leaned back in his chair defiantly, and fixed the host
+with an eye of challenge. Upon the whole the host seemed not so much
+frightened. He said: "I don't see anything so original in all that.
+It's merely a travesty of the Swiss law of divorce."
+
+"And you see nothing novel, nothing that makes for the higher
+civilization in the application of that law to marriage? You all
+approve of that law because you believe it prevents nine-tenths of the
+divorces; but if you had a law that would similarly prevent
+nine-tenths of the marriages, you would need no divorce law at all."
+
+"Oh, I don't know that," the hardy bachelor said. "What about the
+one-tenth of the marriages which it didn't prevent? Would you have the
+parties hopelessly shut up to them? Would you forbid _them_ all hope
+of escape? Would you have no divorce for any cause whatever?"
+
+"Yes," the husband on the right of the hostess asked (but his wife on
+the right of the host looked as if she wished he had not mixed in),
+"wouldn't more unhappiness result from that one marriage than from all
+the marriages as we have them now?"
+
+"Aren't you both rather precipitate?" the stop-gap demanded. "I said,
+let the parties to the final marriage take the consequences. But if
+these consequences were too dire, I would not forbid them the hope of
+relief. I haven't thought the matter out very clearly yet, but there
+are one or two causes for divorce which I would admit."
+
+"Ah?" the host inquired, with a provisional smile.
+
+"Yes, causes going down into the very nature of things--the nature of
+men and of women. Incompatibility of temperament ought always to be
+very seriously considered as a cause."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"And, above all," and here the stop-gap swept the board with his eye,
+"difference of sex."
+
+The sort of laugh which expresses uncertainty of perception and
+conditional approval went up.
+
+The hostess rose with rather a frightened air. "Shall we leave them to
+their tobacco?" she said to the other women.
+
+When he went home the stop-gap celebrated his triumph to his wife. "I
+don't think she'll ask you for the loan of me again to fill a place
+without you."
+
+"Yes," she answered, remotely. "You don't suppose she'll think we live
+unhappily together?"
+
+
+
+
+                                 XVII
+
+                    THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER
+
+
+"Well, what are you doing here?" the younger of the two sages asked,
+with a resolute air of bonhomie, as he dragged himself over the
+asphalt path, and sank, gasping, into the seat beside the other in the
+Park. His senior lifted his head and looked him carefully over to make
+sure of his identity, and then he said:
+
+"I suppose, to answer your fatuous question, I am waiting here to get
+my breath before I move on; and in the next place, I am watching the
+feet of the women who go by in their high-heeled shoes."
+
+"How long do you think it will take you to get your breath in the
+atmosphere of these motors?" the younger sage pursued. "And you don't
+imagine that these women are of the first fashion, do you?"
+
+"No, but I imagine their shoes are. I have been calculating that their
+average heel is from an inch and a half to two inches high, and
+touches the ground in the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece.
+As you seem to be fond of asking questions, perhaps you will like to
+answer one. Why do you think they do it?"
+
+"Wear shoes like that?" the younger returned, cheerily, and laughed as
+he added, "Because the rest do."
+
+"Mmm!" the elder grumbled, not wholly pleased, and yet not refusing
+the answer. He had been having a little touch of grippe, and was
+somewhat broken from his wonted cynicism. He said: "It's very strange,
+very sad. Just now there was such a pretty young girl, so sweet and
+fine, went tottering by as helpless, in any exigency, as the daughter
+of a thousand years of bound-feet Chinese women. While she tilted on,
+the nice young fellow with her swept forward with one stride to her
+three on the wide soles and low heels of nature-last boots, and kept
+himself from out-walking her by a devotion that made him grit his
+teeth. Probably she was wiser and better and brighter than he, but she
+didn't look it; and I, who voted to give her the vote the other day,
+had my misgivings. I think I shall satisfy myself for the next five
+years by catching cold in taking my hat off to her in elevators, and
+getting killed by automobiles in helping her off the cars, where I've
+given her my seat."
+
+"But you must allow that if her shoes are too tight, her skirts are
+not so tight as they were. Or have you begun sighing for the good old
+hobble-skirts, now they're gone?"
+
+"The hobble-skirts were prettier than I thought they were when they
+were with us, but the 'tempestuous petticoat' has its charm, which I
+find I'd been missing."
+
+"Well, at least it's a change," the younger sage allowed, "and I
+haven't found the other changes in our dear old New York which I look
+for when I come back in the fall."
+
+The sages were enjoying together the soft weather which lingered with
+us a whole month from the middle of October onward, and the afternoon
+of their meeting in the Park was now softly reddening to the dim
+sunset over the westward trees.
+
+"Yes," the elder assented. "I miss the new sky-scrapers which used to
+welcome me back up and down the Avenue. But there are more automobiles
+than ever, and the game of saving your life from them when you cross
+the street is madder and merrier than I have known it before."
+
+"The war seems to have stopped building because people can't afford
+it," the other suggested, "but it has only increased automobiling."
+
+"Well, people can't afford that, either. Nine-tenths of them are
+traveling the road to ruin, I'm told, and apparently they can't get
+over the ground too fast. Just look!" and the sages joined in the
+amused and mournful contemplation of the different types of motors
+innumerably whirring up and down the drive before them, while they
+choked in the fumes of the gasolene.
+
+The motors were not the costliest types, except in a few instances,
+and in most instances they were the cheaper types, such as those who
+could not afford them could at least afford best. The sages had found
+a bench beside the walk where the statue of Daniel Webster looks down
+on the confluence of two driveways, and the stream of motors, going
+and coming, is like a seething torrent either way.
+
+"The mystery is," the elder continued, "why they should want to do it
+in the way they do it. Are they merely going somewhere and must get
+there in the shortest time possible, or are they arriving on a wager?
+If they are taking a pleasure drive, what a droll idea of pleasure
+they must have! Maybe they are trying to escape Black Care, but they
+must know he sits beside the chauffeur as he used to sit behind the
+horseman, and they know that he has a mortgage in his pocket, and can
+foreclose it any time on the house they have hypothecated to buy their
+car. Ah!" The old man started forward with the involuntary impulse of
+rescue. But it was not one of the people who singly, or in terrorized
+groups, had been waiting at the roadside to find their way across; it
+was only a hapless squirrel of those which used to make their way
+safely among the hoofs and wheels of the kind old cabs and carriages,
+and it lay instantly crushed under the tire of a motor. "He's done
+for, poor little wretch! They can't get used to the change. Some day a
+policeman will pick _me_ up from under a second-hand motor. I wonder
+what the great Daniel from his pedestal up there would say if he came
+to judgment."
+
+"He wouldn't believe in the change any more than that squirrel. He
+would decide that he was dreaming, and would sleep on, forgetting and
+forgotten."
+
+"Forgotten," the elder sage assented. "I remember when his fame filled
+the United States, which was then the whole world to me. And now I
+don't imagine that our hyphenated citizens have the remotest
+consciousness of him. If Daniel began delivering one of his
+liberty-and-union-now-and-forever-one-and-inseparable speeches, they
+wouldn't know what he was talking about." The sage laughed and champed
+his toothless jaws together, as old men do in the effort to compose
+their countenances after an emotional outbreak.
+
+"Well, for one thing," the younger observed, "they wouldn't understand
+what he said. You will notice, if you listen to them going by, that
+they seldom speak English. That's getting to be a dead language in New
+York, though it's still used in the newspapers." He thought to hearten
+the other with his whimsicality, for it seemed to him that the elder
+sage was getting sensibly older since their last meeting, and that he
+would be the gayer for such cheer as a man on the hither side of
+eighty can offer a man on the thither. "Perhaps the Russian Jews would
+appreciate Daniel if he were put into Yiddish for them. They're the
+brightest intelligences among our hyphenates. And they have the
+old-fashioned ideals of liberty and humanity, perhaps because they've
+known so little of either."
+
+His gaiety did not seem to enliven his senior much. "Ah, the old
+ideals!" he sighed. "The old ideal of an afternoon airing was a gentle
+course in an open carriage on a soft drive. Now it's a vertiginous
+whirl on an asphalted road, round and round and round the Park till
+the victims stagger with their brains spinning after they get out of
+their cars."
+
+The younger sage laughed. "You've been listening to the pessimism of
+the dear old fellows who drive the few lingering victorias. If you'd
+believe them, all these people in the motors are chauffeurs giving
+their lady-friends joy-rides."
+
+"Few?" the elder retorted. "There are lots of them. I've counted
+twenty in a single round of the Park. I was proud to be in one of
+them, though my horse left something to be desired in the way of youth
+and beauty. But I reflected that I was not very young or beautiful
+myself."
+
+As the sages sat looking out over the dizzying whirl of the motors
+they smoothed the tops of their sticks with their soft old hands, and
+were silent oftener than not. The elder seemed to drowse off from the
+time and place, but he was recalled by the younger saying, "It is
+certainly astonishing weather for this season of the year."
+
+The elder woke up and retorted, as if in offense: "Not at all. I've
+seen the cherries in blossom at the end of October."
+
+"They didn't set their fruit, I suppose."
+
+"Well--no."
+
+"Ah! Well, I saw a butterfly up here in the sheep-pasture the other
+day. I could have put out my hand and caught it. It's the soft weather
+that brings your victorias out like the belated butterflies. Wait till
+the first cold snap, and there won't be a single victoria or butterfly
+left."
+
+"Yes," the elder assented, "we butterflies and victorias belong to the
+youth of the year and the world. And the sad thing is that we won't
+have our palingenesis."
+
+"Why not?" the younger sage demanded. "What is to prevent your coming
+back in two or three thousand years?"
+
+"Well, if we came back in a year even, we shouldn't find room, for one
+reason. Haven't you noticed how full to bursting the place seems?
+Every street is as packed as lower Fifth Avenue used to be when the
+operatives came out of the big shops for their nooning. The city's
+shell hasn't been enlarged or added to, but the life in it has
+multiplied past its utmost capacity. All the hotels and houses and
+flats are packed. The theaters, wherever the plays are bad enough,
+swarm with spectators. Along up and down every side-streets the motors
+stand in rows, and at the same time the avenues are so dense with them
+that you are killed at every crossing. There has been no building to
+speak of during the summer, but unless New York is overbuilt next year
+we must appeal to Chicago to come and help hold it. But I've an idea
+that the victorias are remaining to stay; if some sort of mechanical
+horse could be substituted for the poor old animals that remind me of
+my mortality, I should be sure of it. Every now and then I get an
+impression of permanence in the things of the Park. As long as the
+peanut-men and the swan-boats are with us I sha'n't quite despair.
+And the other night I was moved almost to tears by the sight of a
+four-in-hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue drive. There it was,
+like some vehicular phantom, but how, whence, when? It came, as if out
+of the early eighteen-nineties; two middle-aged grooms, with their
+arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it's the rumble), but of all the
+young people who ought to have flowered over the top none was left but
+the lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box. I've tried every
+evening since for that four-in-hand, but I haven't seen it, and I've
+decided it wasn't a vehicular phantom, but a mere dream of the past."
+
+"Four-horse dream," the younger sage commented, as if musing aloud.
+
+The elder did not seem quite pleased. "A joke?" he challenged.
+
+"Not necessarily. I suppose I was the helpless prey of the rhyme."
+
+"I didn't know you were a poet."
+
+"I'm not, always. But didn't it occur to you that danger for danger
+your four-in-hand was more dangerous than an automobile to the passing
+human creature?"
+
+"It might have been if it had been multiplied by ten thousand. But
+there was only one of it, and it wasn't going twenty miles an hour."
+
+"That's true," the younger sage assented. "But there was always a
+fearful hazard in horses when we had them. We supposed they were
+tamed, but, after all, they were only _trained_ animals, like
+Hagenback's."
+
+"And what is a chauffeur?"
+
+"Ah, you have me there!" the younger said, and he laughed generously.
+"Or you would have if I hadn't noticed something like amelioration in
+the chauffeurs. At any rate, the taxis are cheaper than they were, and
+I suppose something will be done about the street traffic some time.
+They're talking now about subway crossings. But I should prefer
+overhead foot-bridges at all the corners, crossing one another
+diagonally. They would look like triumphal arches, and would serve the
+purpose of any future Dewey victory if we should happen to have
+another hero to win one."
+
+"Well, we must hope for the best. I rather like the notion of the
+diagonal foot-bridges. But why not Rows along the second stories as
+they have them in Chester? I should be pretty sure of always getting
+home alive if we had them. Now if I'm not telephoned for at a hospital
+before I'm restored to consciousness, I think myself pretty lucky. And
+yet it seems but yesterday, as the people used to say in the plays,
+since I had a pride in counting the automobiles as I walked up the
+Avenue. Once I got as high as twenty before I reached Fifty-ninth
+Street. Now I couldn't count as many horse vehicles."
+
+The elder sage mocked himself in a feeble laugh, but the younger tried
+to be serious. "We don't realize the absolute change. Our streets are
+not streets any more; they are railroad tracks with locomotives let
+loose on them, and no signs up to warn people at the crossings. It's
+pathetic to see the foot-passengers saving themselves, especially the
+poor, pretty, high-heeled women, looking this way and that in their
+fright, and then tottering over as fast as they can totter."
+
+"Well, I should have said it was outrageous, humiliating, insulting,
+once, but I don't any more; it would be no use."
+
+"No; and so much depends upon the point of view. When I'm on foot I
+feel all my rights invaded, but when I'm in a taxi it amuses me to see
+the women escaping; and I boil with rage in being halted at every
+other corner by the policeman with his new-fangled semaphore, and it's
+"Go" and "Stop" in red and blue, and my taxi-clock going round all the
+time and getting me in for a dollar when I thought I should keep
+within seventy cents. Then I feel that pedestrians of every age and
+sex ought to be killed."
+
+"Yes, there's something always in the point of view; and there's some
+comfort when you're stopped in your taxi to feel that they often _do_
+get killed."
+
+The sages laughed together, and the younger said: "I suppose when we
+get aeroplanes in common use, there'll be annoying traffic
+regulations, and policemen anchored out at intervals in the central
+blue to enforce them. After all--"
+
+What he was going to add in amplification cannot be known, for a
+girlish voice, trying to sharpen itself from its native sweetness to a
+conscientious severity, called to them as its owner swiftly advanced
+upon the elder sage: "Now, see here, grandfather! This won't do at
+all. You promised not to leave that bench by the Indian Hunter, and
+here you are away down by the Falconer, and we've been looking
+everywhere for you. It's too bad! I shall be afraid to trust you at
+all after this. Why, it's horrid of you, grandfather! You might have
+got killed crossing the drive."
+
+The grandfather looked up and verified the situation, which seemed to
+include a young man, tall and beautiful, but neither so handsome nor
+so many heads high as the young men in the advertisements of
+ready-to-wear clothing, who smiled down on the young girl as if he had
+arrived with her, and were finding an amusement in her severity which
+he might not, later. She was, in fact, very pretty, and her skirt
+flared in the fashion of the last moment, as she stooped threateningly
+yet fondly over her grandfather.
+
+The younger sage silently and somewhat guiltily escaped from the
+tumult of emotion which ignored him, and shuffled slowly down the
+path. The other finally gave an "Oh!" of recognition, and then said,
+for all explanation and excuse, "I didn't know what had become of
+you," and then they all laughed.
+
+
+
+
+                                XVIII
+
+                   SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY
+
+
+                                  I
+
+              MISS ISOBEL RAMSEY AND MISS ESTHER GARNETT
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And they were really understood to be engaged?" Miss
+Ramsey is a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of nearly the length of two
+lady's umbrellas and the bulk of one closely folded in its sheath. She
+stands with her elbow supported on the corner of the mantel, her
+temple resting on the knuckle of a thin, nervous hand, in an effect of
+thoughtful absent-mindedness. Miss Garnett, more or less Merovingian
+in a costume that lends itself somewhat reluctantly to a low, thick
+figure, is apparently poising for departure, as she stands before the
+chair from which she has risen beside Miss Ramsey's tea-table and
+looks earnestly up into Miss Ramsey's absent face. Both are very
+young, but aim at being much older than they are, with occasional
+lapses into extreme girlhood.
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, distinctly. I knew you couldn't know, and I
+thought you ought to." She speaks in a deep conviction-bearing and
+conviction-carrying voice. "If he has been coming here so much."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with what seems temperamental abruptness: "Sit down.
+One can always think better sitting down." She catches a chair under
+her with a deft movement of her heel, and Miss Garnett sinks
+provisionally into her seat. "And I think it needs thought, don't
+you?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "That is what I expected of you."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And have some more tea. There is nothing like _fresh_
+tea for clearing the brain, and we certainly need clear brains for
+this." She pushes a button in the wall beside her, and is silent till
+the maid appears. "More tea, Nora." She is silent again while the maid
+reappears with the tea and disappears. "I don't know that he has been
+coming here so _very_ much. But he has no right to be coming at all,
+if he is engaged. That is, in that _way_."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "No. Not unless--he wishes he wasn't."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "That would give him _less_ than no right."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "That is true. I didn't think of it in that light."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I'm trying to decide what I ought to do if he does
+want to get off. She said herself that they were engaged?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "As much as that. Conny understood her to say so. And
+Conny never makes a mistake in what people say. Emily didn't say
+_whom_ she was engaged to, but Conny felt that that was to come later,
+and she did not quite feel like asking, don't you know."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Of course. And how came she to decide that it was Mr.
+Ashley?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Simply by putting two and two together. They two were
+together the whole time last summer."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I see. Then there is only one thing for me to do."
+
+_Miss Garnett_, admiringly: "I knew you would say that."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, dreamily: "The question is what the thing is."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "That is what I wish to think over. Chocolates?" She
+offers a box, catching it with her left hand from the mantel at her
+shoulder, without rising.
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Thank you; do you think they go well with tea?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "They go well with anything. But we mustn't allow our
+minds to be distracted. The case is simply this: If Mr. Ashley is
+engaged to Emily Fray, he has no right to go round calling on other
+girls--well, as if he wasn't--and he has been calling here a great
+deal. That is perfectly evident. He must be made to feel that girls
+are not to be trifled with--that they are not mere toys."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "How splendidly you do reason! And he ought to
+understand that Emily has a right--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, I don't know that I care about _her_--or not
+_pri_marily. Or do you say pri_mar_ily?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I never know. I only use it in writing."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "It's a clumsy word; I don't know that I shall. But
+what I mean is that I must act from a general principle, and that
+principle is that when a man is engaged, it doesn't matter whether the
+girl has thrown herself at him, or not--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "She certainly did, from what Conny says."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "He must be shown that other girls won't tolerate his
+behaving as if he were _not_ engaged. It is wrong."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "We must stand together."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Yes. Though I don't infer that he has been attentive
+to other girls generally."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "No. I meant that if he has been coming here so much,
+you want to prevent his trifling with others."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Something like that. But it ought to be more definite.
+He ought to realize that if another girl cared for him, it would be
+cruel to her, paying her attentions, when he was engaged to some one
+else."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "And cruel to the girl he is engaged to."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Yes." She speaks coldly, vaguely. "But that is the
+personal ground, and I wish to avoid that. I wish to deal with him
+purely in the abstract."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, I understand that. And at the same time you wish
+to punish him. He ought to be made to feel it all the more because he
+is so severe himself."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Severe?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Not tolerating anything that's the least out of the
+way in other people. Taking you up about your ideas and showing where
+you're wrong, or even silly. Spiritually snubbing, Conny calls it."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, I like that in him. It's so invigorating. It
+braces up all your good resolutions. It makes you ashamed; and shame
+is sanative."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "That's just what I told Conny, or the same thing. Do
+you think another one would hurt me? I will risk it, anyway." She
+takes another chocolate from the box. "Go on."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, I was just wishing that I had been out longer, and
+had a little more experience of men. Then I should know how to act.
+How do you suppose people do, generally?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why, you know, if they find a man in love with them,
+after he's engaged to another girl, they make him go back to her, it
+doesn't matter whether they're in love with him themselves or not."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I'm _not_ in love with Mr. Ashley, please."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "No; I'm supposing an extreme case."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, after a moment of silent thought: "Did you ever hear of
+anybody doing it?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Not just in our set. But I know it's done
+continually."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "It seems to me as if I had read something of the
+kind."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh yes, the books are full of it. Are those mallows?
+They might carry off the effects of the chocolates." Miss Ramsey
+passes her the box of marshmallows which she has bent over the table
+to look at.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And of course they couldn't get into the books if they
+hadn't really happened. I wish I could think of a case in point."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why, there was Peg Woffington--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with displeasure: "She was an actress of some sort,
+wasn't she?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_, with meritorious candor: "Yes, she was. But she was a
+very _good_ actress."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "What did _she_ do?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Well, it's a long time since I read it; and it's
+rather old-fashioned now. But there was a countryman of some sort, I
+remember, who came away from his wife, and fell in love with Peg
+Woffington, and then the wife follows him up to London, and begs her
+to give him back to her, and she does it. There's something about a
+portrait of Peg--I don't remember exactly; she puts her face through
+and cries when the wife talks to the picture. The wife thinks it is a
+real picture, and she is kind of soliloquizing, and asking Peg to give
+her husband back to her; and Peg does, in the end. That part is
+beautiful. They become the greatest friends."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Rather silly, I should say."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, it _is_ rather silly, but I suppose the author
+thought she had to do something."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And disgusting. A married man, that way! I don't see
+any comparison with Mr. Ashley."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "No, there really isn't any. Emily has never asked you
+to give him up. And besides, Peg Woffington really liked him a
+little--loved him, in fact."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And I _don't_ like Mr. Ashley at all. Of course I
+respect him--and I admire his intellect; there's no question about his
+being handsome; but I have never thought of him for a moment in any
+other way; and now I can't even respect him."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Nobody could. I'm sure Emily would be welcome to him
+as far as _I_ was concerned. But he has never been about with me so
+much as he has with you, and I don't wonder you feel indignant."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, coldly: "I don't feel indignant. I wish to be just."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, that is what I mean. And poor Emily is so
+uninteresting! In the play that Kentucky Summers does, she is
+perfectly fascinating at first, and you can see why the poor girl's
+fiance should be so taken with her. But I'm sure no one could say you
+had ever given Mr. Ashley the least encouragement. It would be pure
+justice on your part. I think you are grand! I shall always be proud
+of knowing what you were going to do."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, after some moments of snubbing intention: "I don't know
+what I am going to do myself, yet. Or how. What _was_ that play? I
+never heard of it."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I don't remember distinctly, but it was about a young
+man who falls in love with her, when he's engaged to another girl, and
+she determines, as soon as she finds it out, to disgust him, so that
+he will go back to the other girl, don't you know."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "That sounds rather more practical than the Peg
+Woffington plan. What does she do?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Nothing you'd like to do."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I'd like to do something in such a cause. What does
+she do?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh, when he is calling on her, Kentucky Summers
+pretends to fly into a rage with her sister, and she pulls her hair
+down, and slams everything round the room, and scolds, and drinks
+champagne, and wants him to drink with her, and I don't know what all.
+The upshot is that he is only too glad to get away."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "It's rather loathsome, isn't it?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "It _is_ rather loathsome. But it was in a good cause,
+and I suppose it was what an actress would think of."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "An actress?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I forgot. The heroine is a distinguished actress, you
+know, and Kentucky could play that sort of part to perfection. But I
+don't think a lady would like to cut up, much, in the _best_ cause."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Cut up?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "She certainly frisks about the room a good deal. How
+delicious these mallows are! Have you ever tried toasting them?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "At school. There seems an idea in it. And the hero
+isn't married. I don't like the notion of a married man."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh, I'm quite sure he isn't married. He's merely
+engaged. That makes the whole difference from the Peg Woffington
+story. And there's no portrait, I'm confident, so that you wouldn't
+have to do that part."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, haughtily: "I don't propose to do _any_ part, if the
+affair can't be arranged without some such mountebank business!"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "You can manage it, if anybody can. You have so much
+dignity that you could awe him into doing his duty by a single glance.
+I wouldn't be in his place!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I shall not give him a glance. I shall not see him
+when he comes. That will be simpler still." To Nora, at the door:
+"What is it, Nora?"
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                   NORA, MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT
+
+_Nora_: "Mr. Ashley, Miss Ramsey."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with a severity not meant for Nora: "Ask him to sit
+down in the reception-room a moment."
+
+_Nora_: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."
+
+
+                                 III
+
+                      MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT
+
+_Miss Garnett_, rising and seizing Miss Ramsey's hands: "Oh, Isobel!
+But you will be equal to it! Oh! Oh!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with state: "Why are you going, Esther? Sit down."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "If I only _could_ stay! If I could hide under the
+sofa, or behind the screen! Isn't it wonderful--providential--his
+coming at the very instant? Oh, Isobel!" She clasps her friend
+convulsively, and after a moment's resistance Miss Ramsey yields to
+her emotion, and they hide their faces in each other's neck, and
+strangle their hysteric laughter. They try to regain their composure,
+and then abandon the effort with a shuddering delight in the
+perfection of the incident. "What shall you do? Shall you trust to
+inspiration? Shall you make him show his hand first, and then act? Or
+shall you tell him at once that you know all, and-- Or no, of course
+you can't do that. He's not supposed to know that you know. Oh, I can
+imagine the freezing hauteur that you'll receive him with, and the icy
+indifference you'll let him understand that he isn't a _persona grata_
+with! If I were only as tall as you! He isn't as tall himself, and you
+can tower over him. Don't sit down, or bend, or anything; just stand
+with your head up, and glance carelessly at him under your lashes as
+if nobody was there! Then it will gradually dawn upon him that you
+know everything, and he'll simply go through the floor." They take
+some ecstatic turns about the room, Miss Ramsey waltzing as gentleman.
+She abruptly frees herself.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "No. It can't be as tacit as all that. There must be
+something explicit. As you say, I must _do_ something to cure him of
+his fancy--his perfidy--and make him glad to go back to her."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes! Do you think he deserves it?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I've no wish to punish him."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "How noble you are! I don't wonder he adores you. _I_
+should. But you won't find it so easy. You must do something drastic.
+It _is_ drastic, isn't it? or do I mean static? One of those things
+when you simply crush a person. But now I must go. How I should like
+to listen at the door! We must kiss each other very quietly, and I
+must slip out-- Oh, you dear! How I long to know what you'll do! But it
+will be perfect, whatever it is. You always _did_ do perfect things."
+They knit their fingers together in parting. "On second thoughts I
+won't kiss you. It might unman you, and you need all your strength.
+Unman isn't the word, exactly, but you can't say ungirl, can you? It
+would be ridiculous. Though girls are as brave as men when it comes to
+duty. Good-by, dear!" She catches Miss Ramsey about the neck, and
+pressing her lips silently to her cheek, runs out. Miss Ramsey rings
+and the maid appears.
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                          NORA, MISS RAMSEY
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, starting: "Oh! Is that you, Nora? Of course! Nora!"
+
+_Nora_: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Do you know where my brother keeps his cigarettes?"
+
+_Nora_: "Why, in his room, Miss Ramsey; you told him you didn't like
+the smell here."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Yes, yes. I forgot. And has he got any cocktails?"
+
+_Nora_: "He's got the whole bottle full of them yet."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Full yet?"
+
+_Nora_: "You wouldn't let him offer them to the gentlemen he had to
+lunch, last week, because you said--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "What did I say?"
+
+_Nora_: "They were vulgar."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And so they are. And so much the better! Bring the
+cigarettes and the bottle and some glasses here, Nora, and then ask
+Mr. Ashley to come." She walks away to the window, and hurriedly hums
+a musical comedy waltz, not quite in tune, as from not remembering
+exactly, and after Nora has tinkled in with a tray of glasses she
+lights a cigarette and stands puffing it, gasping and coughing a
+little, as Walter Ashley enters. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! Sorry to make you
+wait."
+
+
+                                  V
+
+                       MR. ASHLEY, MISS RAMSEY
+
+_Mr. Ashley_: "The time _has_ seemed long, but I could have waited all
+day. I couldn't have gone without seeing you, and telling you--" He
+pauses, as if bewildered at the spectacle of Miss Ramsey's resolute
+practice with the cigarette, which she now takes from her lips and
+waves before her face with innocent recklessness.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, chokingly: "Do sit down." She drops into an easy-chair
+beside the tea-table, and stretches the tips of her feet out beyond
+the hem of her skirt in extremely lady-like abandon. "Have a
+cigarette." She reaches the box to him.
+
+_Ashley_: "Thank you. I won't smoke, I believe." He stands frowning,
+while she throws her cigarette into a teacup and lights another.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I thought everybody smoked. Then have a cocktail."
+
+_Ashley_: "A what?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "A cocktail. So many people like them with their tea,
+instead of rum, you know."
+
+_Ashley_: "No, I didn't know." He regards her with amaze, rapidly
+hardening into condemnation.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I hope you don't _object_ to smoking. Englishwomen all
+smoke."
+
+_Ashley_: "I think I've heard. I didn't know that American ladies
+did."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "They don't, _all_. But they will when they find how
+nice it is."
+
+_Ashley_: "And do Englishwomen all drink cocktails?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "They will when they find how nice it is. But why do
+you keep standing? Sit down, if it's only for a moment. There is
+something I would like to talk with you about. What were you saying
+when you came in? I didn't catch it quite."
+
+_Ashley_: "Nothing--now--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "And I can't persuade you to have a cocktail? I believe
+I'll have another myself." She takes up the bottle, and tries several
+times to pour from it. "I do believe Nora's forgotten to open it! That
+is a good joke on me. But I mustn't let her know. Do you happen to
+have a pocket-corkscrew with you, Mr. Ashley?"
+
+_Ashley_: "No--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Well, never mind." She tosses her cigarette into the
+grate, and lights another. "I wonder why they always have cynical
+persons smoke, on the stage? I don't see that the two things
+necessarily go together, but it does give you a kind of thrill when
+they strike a match, and it lights up their faces when they put it to
+the cigarette. You know something good and wicked is going to happen."
+She puffs violently at her cigarette, and then suddenly flings it away
+and starts to her feet. "Will you--would you--open the window?" She
+collapses into her chair.
+
+_Ashley_, springing toward her: "Miss Ramsey, are you--you are ill!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "No, no! The window! A little faint--it's so
+close-- There, it's all right now. Or it will be--when--I've
+had--another cigarette." She leans forward to take one; Ashley gravely
+watches her, but says nothing. She lights her cigarette, but, without
+smoking, throws it away. "Go on."
+
+_Ashley_: "I wasn't saying anything!"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, I forgot. And I don't know what we were talking
+about myself." She falls limply back into her chair and closes her
+eyes.
+
+_Ashley_: "Sha'n't I ring for the maid? I'm afraid--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, imperiously: "Not at all. Not on any account." Far less
+imperiously: "You may pour me a cup of tea if you like. That will make
+me well. The full strength, please." She motions away the hot-water
+jug with which he has proposed qualifying the cup of tea which he
+offers her.
+
+_Ashley_: "One lump or two?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Only one, thank you." She takes the cup.
+
+_Ashley_, offering the milk: "Cream?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "A drop." He stands anxiously beside her while she
+takes a long draught and then gives back the cup. "That was perfect."
+
+_Ashley_: "Another?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "No, that is just right. Now go on. Or, I forgot. You
+were not going on. Oh dear! How much better I feel. There must have
+been something poisonous in those cigarettes."
+
+_Ashley_: "Yes, there was tobacco."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, do you think it was the tobacco? Do throw the
+whole box into the fire! I shall tell Bob never to get cigarettes with
+tobacco in them after this. Won't you have one of the chocolates? Or a
+mallow? I feel as if I should never want to eat anything again. Where
+was I?" She rests her cheek against the side of her chair cushion, and
+speaks with closed eyes, in a weak murmur. Mr. Ashley watches her at
+first with anxiety, then with a gradual change of countenance until a
+gleam of intelligence steals into his look of compassion.
+
+_Ashley_: "You asked me to throw the cigarettes into the fire. But I
+want you to let me keep them."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with wide-flung eyes: "You? You said you wouldn't
+smoke."
+
+_Ashley_, laughing: "May I change my mind? One talks better." He
+lights a cigarette. "And, Miss Ramsey, I believe I _will_ have a
+cocktail, after all."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Mr. Ashley!"
+
+_Ashley_, without noting her protest: "I had forgotten that I had a
+corkscrew in my pocket-knife. Don't trouble yourself to ring for one."
+He produces the knife and opens the bottle; then, as Miss Ramsey rises
+and stands aghast, he pours out a glass and offers it to her, with
+mock devotion. As she shakes her head and recoils: "Oh! I thought you
+liked cocktails. They are very good after cigarettes--very reviving.
+But if you won't--" He tosses off the cocktail and sets down the
+glass, smacking his lips. "Tell your brother I commend his taste--in
+cocktails and"--puffing his cigarette--"tobacco. Poison for poison,
+let me offer you one of _my_ cigarettes. They're milder than these."
+He puts his hand to his breast pocket.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with nervous shrinking: "No--"
+
+_Ashley_: "It's just as well. I find that I hadn't brought mine with
+me." After a moment: "You are so unconventional, so fearless, that I
+should like your notion of the problem in a book I've just been
+reading. Why should the mere fact that a man is married to one woman
+prevent his being in love with another, or half a dozen others; or
+_vice versa_?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Mr. Ashley, do you wish to insult me?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Dear me, no! But put the case a little differently. Suppose
+a couple are merely engaged. Does that fact imply that neither has a
+right to a change of mind, or to be fancy free to make another
+choice?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, indignantly: "Yes, it does. They are as sacredly bound
+to each other as if they were married, and if they are false to each
+other the girl is a wretch, and the man is a villain! And if you think
+anything I have said can excuse you for breaking your engagement, or
+that I don't consider you the wickedest person in the world, and the
+most barefaced hypocrite, and--and--I don't know what--you are very
+much mistaken."
+
+_Ashley_: "What in the world are you talking about?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I am talking about you and your shameless perfidy."
+
+_Ashley_: "My shameless perf-- I don't understand! I came here
+to tell you that I love you--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "How dare you! To speak to me of that, when-- Or
+perhaps you _have_ broken with her, and think you are free to hoodwink
+some other poor creature. But you will find that you have chosen the
+wrong person. And it's no excuse for you her being a little--a
+little--not so bright as some girls, and not so good-looking. Oh, it's
+enough to make any girl loathe her own looks! You mustn't suppose you
+can come here red-handed--yes, it's the same as a murder, and any true
+girl would say so--and tell me you care for me. No, Walter Ashley, I
+haven't fallen so low as that, though I _have_ the disgrace of your
+acquaintance. And I hope--I hope--if you don't like my smoking, and
+offering you cocktails, and talking the way I have, it will be a
+lesson to you. And yes!--I _will_ say it! If it will add to your
+misery to know that I did respect you very much, and thought
+everything--very highly--of you, and might have answered you very
+differently before, when you were free to tell me _that_--now
+I have nothing but the utmost abhorrence--and--disapproval of you.
+And--and-- Oh, I don't see how you can be so hateful!" She hides her
+face in her hands and rushes from the room, overturning several chairs
+in her course toward the door. Ashley remains staring after her, while
+a succession of impetuous rings make themselves heard from the street
+door. There is a sound of opening it, and then a flutter of skirts and
+anxieties, and Miss Garnett comes running into the room.
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                       MISS GARNETT, MR. ASHLEY
+
+_Miss Garnett_, to the maid hovering in the doorway: "Yes, I must have
+left it here, for I never missed it till I went to pay my fare in the
+motor-bus, and tried to think whether I had the exact dime, and if I
+hadn't whether the conductor would change a five-dollar bill or not,
+and then it rushed into my mind that I had left my purse somewhere,
+and I knew I hadn't been anywhere else." She runs from the mantel to
+the writing-desk in the corner, and then to the sofa, where, peering
+under the tea-table, she finds her purse on the shelf. "Oh, here it
+is, Nora, just where I put it when we began to talk, and I must have
+gone out and left it. I--" She starts with a little shriek, in
+encountering Ashley. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! What a fright you gave me! I was
+just looking for my purse that I missed when I went to pay my fare in
+the motor-bus, and was wondering whether I had the exact dime, or the
+conductor could change a five-dollar bill, and--" She discovers, or
+affects to discover, something strange in his manner. "What--what is
+the matter, Mr. Ashley?"
+
+_Ashley_: "I shall be glad to have you tell me--or any one."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I don't understand. Has Isobel--"
+
+_Ashley_: "Miss Garnett, did you know I was engaged?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why, yes; I was just going to congrat--"
+
+_Ashley_: "Well, don't, unless you can tell me whom I am engaged to."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why, aren't you engaged to Emily Fray?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Not the least in the world."
+
+_Miss Garnett_, in despair: "Then _what_ have I done? Oh, what a
+fatal, fatal scrape!" With a ray of returning hope: "But she told me
+_herself_ that she was engaged! And you were together so much, last
+summer!" Desperately: "Then if she isn't engaged to you, whom is she
+engaged to?"
+
+_Ashley_: "On general principles, I shouldn't know, but in this
+particular instance I happen to know that she is engaged to Owen
+Brooks. They were a great deal more together last summer."
+
+_Miss Garnett_, with conviction: "So they were!" With returning doubt:
+"But why didn't she say so?"
+
+_Ashley_: "I can't tell you; she may have had her reasons, or she may
+not. Can you possibly tell me, in return for my ignorance, why the
+fact of her engagement should involve me in the strange way it seems
+to have done with Miss Ramsey?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_, with a burst of involuntary candor: "Why, _I_ did
+that. Or, no! What's she been doing?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Really, Miss Garnett--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "How can I tell you anything, if you don't tell me
+everything? You wouldn't wish me to betray confidence?"
+
+_Ashley_: "No, certainly not. What was the confidence?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Well-- But I shall have to know first what she's been
+doing. You must see that yourself, Mr. Ashley." He is silent. "Has
+she--has Isobel--been behaving--well, out of character?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Very much indeed."
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "I expected she would." She fetches a thoughtful sigh,
+and for her greater emotional convenience she sinks into an easy-chair
+and leans forward. "Oh dear! It is a scrape." Suddenly and
+imperatively: "Tell me exactly what she did, if you hope for any help
+whatever."
+
+_Ashley_: "Why, she offered me a cocktail--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh, how good! I didn't suppose she would dare! Well?"
+
+_Ashley_: "And she smoked cigarettes--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "How perfectly divine! And what else?"
+
+_Ashley_, coldly: "May I ask why you admire Miss Ramsey's behaving out
+of character so much? I think the smoking made her rather faint, and--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "She would have let it _kill_ her! Never tell me that
+girls have no moral courage!"
+
+_Ashley_: "But what--what was the meaning of it all?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_, thoughtfully: "I suppose if I got her in for it, I
+ought to get her out, even if I betray confidence."
+
+_Ashley_: "It depends upon the confidence. What is it?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Why-- But you're sure it's my duty?"
+
+_Ashley_: "If you care what I think of her--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Oh, Mr. Ashley, you mustn't think it strange of
+Isobel, on my bended knees you mustn't! Why, don't you see? She was
+just doing it to disgust you!"
+
+_Ashley_: "Disgust me?"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "Yes, and drive you back to Emily Fray."
+
+_Ashley_: "Drive me ba--"
+
+_Miss Garnett_: "If she thought you were engaged to Emily, when you
+were coming here all the time, and she wasn't quite sure that she
+hated to have you, don't you see it would be her duty to sacrifice
+herself, and-- Oh, I suppose she's heard everything up there, and--"
+She catches herself up and runs out of the room, leaving Ashley to
+await the retarded descent of skirts which he hears on the stairs
+after the crash of the street door has announced Miss Garnett's
+escape. He stands with his back to the mantel, and faces Miss Ramsey
+as she enters the room.
+
+
+                                 VII
+
+                         MISS RAMSEY, ASHLEY
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with the effect of cold surprise: "Mr. Ashley? I
+thought I heard-- Wasn't Miss Garnett--"
+
+_Ashley_: "She was. Did you think it was the street door closing on
+_me_?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "How should I know?" Then, courageously: "No, I didn't
+think it was. Why do you ask?" She moves uneasily about the room, with
+an air of studied inattention.
+
+_Ashley_: "Because if you did, I can put you in the right, though I
+can't restore Miss Garnett's presence by my absence."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "You're rather--enigmatical." A ring is heard; the maid
+pauses at the doorway. "I'm not at home, Nora." To Mr. Ashley: "It
+seems to be very close--"
+
+_Ashley_: "It's my having been smoking."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "_Your_ having?" She goes to the window and tries to
+lift it.
+
+_Ashley_: "Let _me_." He follows her to the window, where he stands
+beside her.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Now, she's seen me! And you here with me. Of course--"
+
+_Ashley_: "I shouldn't mind. But I'm so sorry if--and I will go."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "You can't go now--till she's round the corner. She'll
+keep looking back, and she'll think I made you."
+
+_Ashley_: "But haven't you? Aren't you sending me back to Miss Fray to
+tell her that I must keep my engagement, though I care nothing for
+her, and care all the world for you? Isn't that what you want me to
+do?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "But you're not engaged to her! You just--"
+
+_Ashley_: "Just what?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, desperately: "You wish me to disgrace myself forever in
+your eyes. Well, I will; what does it matter now? I heard you telling
+Esther you were not engaged. I _overheard_ you."
+
+_Ashley_: "I fancied you must."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I _tried_ to overhear! I _eavesdropped_! I wish you to
+know that."
+
+_Ashley_: "And what do you wish me to do about it?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I should think any self-respecting person would know.
+I'm _not_ a self-respecting person." Her wandering gaze seems to fall
+for the first time upon the tray with the cocktails and glasses and
+cigarettes; she flies at the bell-button and presses it impetuously.
+As the maid appears: "Take these things away, Nora, please!" To Ashley
+when the maid has left the room: "Don't be afraid to say what you
+think of me!"
+
+_Ashley_: "I think all the world of you. But I should merely like to
+ask--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Oh, you can ask anything of me now!"
+
+_Ashley_, with palpable insincerity: "I should like to ask why you
+don't respect yourself?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Was that what you were going to ask? I know it wasn't.
+But I will tell you. Because I have been a fool."
+
+_Ashley_: "Thank you. Now I will tell you what I was really going to
+ask. Why did you wish to drive me back to Miss Fray when you knew that
+I would be false to her a thousand times if I could only once be true
+to you?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Now you _are_ insulting me! And that is just the
+point. You may be a very clever lawyer, Mr. Ashley, and everybody says
+you are--very able, and talented, and all that, but you can't get
+round that point. You may torture any meaning you please out of my
+words, but I shall always say you brought it on yourself."
+
+_Ashley_: "Brought what on?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Mr. Ashley! I won't be cross-questioned."
+
+_Ashley_: "Was that why you smoked, and poured cocktails out of an
+unopened bottle? Was it because you wished me to hate you, and
+remember my duty, and go back to Miss Fray? Well, it was a dead
+failure. It made me love you more than ever. I am a fool too, as you
+call it."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Say anything you please. I have given you the right. I
+shall not resent it. Go on."
+
+_Ashley_: "I should only repeat myself. You must have known how much I
+care for you, Isobel. Do you mind my calling you Isobel?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Not in the least if you wish to humiliate me by it. I
+should like you to trample on me in every way you can."
+
+_Ashley_: "Trample on you? I would rather be run over by a
+steam-roller than tread on the least of your outlying feelings,
+dearest. Do you mind my saying dearest?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I have told you that you can say anything you like. I
+deserve it. But oh, if you have a spark of pity--"
+
+_Ashley_: "I'm a perfect conflagration of compassion, darling. Do you
+object to darling?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, with starting tears: "It doesn't matter now." She has
+let her lovely length trail into the corner of the sofa, where she
+desperately reclines, supporting her elbow on the arm of it, and
+resting her drooping head on her hand. He draws a hassock up in front
+of her, and sits on it.
+
+_Ashley_: "This represents kneeling at your feet. One doesn't do it
+literally any more, you know."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, in a hollow voice: "I should despise you if you did,
+and"--deeply murmurous--"I don't _wish_ to despise you."
+
+_Ashley_: "No, I understand that. You merely wish _me_ to despise
+_you_. But why?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, nervously: "You know."
+
+_Ashley_: "But I don't know--Isobel, dearest, darling, if you will
+allow me to express myself so fully. _How_ should I know?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "I've told you."
+
+_Ashley_: "May I take your hand? For good-by!" He possesses himself of
+it. "It seems to go along with those expressions."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, self-contemptuously: "Oh yes."
+
+_Ashley_: "Thank you. Where were we?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, sitting up and recovering her hand: "You were saying
+good-by--"
+
+_Ashley_: "Was I? But not before I had told you that I knew you were
+doing all that for my best good, and I wish--I _wish_ you could have
+seen how exemplary you looked when you were trying to pour a cocktail
+out of a corked bottle, between your remarks on passionate fiction and
+puffs of the insidious cigarette! When the venomous tobacco began to
+get in its deadly work, and you turned pale and reeled a little, and
+called for air, it made me mentally vow to go back to Miss Fray
+instantly, whether I was engaged to her or not, and cut out poor old
+Brooks--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Was it Mr. Brooks? I didn't hear the name exactly."
+
+_Ashley_: "When I was telling Miss Garnett? I ought to have spoken
+louder, but I wasn't sure at the time you were listening. Though as
+you were saying, what does it matter now?"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_: "Did I say that?"
+
+_Ashley_: "Words to that effect. And they have made me feel how
+unworthy of you I am. I'm not heroic--by nature. But I could be, if
+you made me--by art--"
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, springing to her feet indignantly: "Now, you are
+ridiculing me--you are making fun of me."
+
+_Ashley_, gathering himself up from his hassock with difficulty, and
+confronting her: "Do I look like a man who would dare to make fun of
+you? I am half a head shorter than you, and in moral grandeur you
+overtop me so that I would always have to wear a high hat when I was
+with you."
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, thoughtfully: "Plenty of girls are that way, now. But
+if you are ashamed of my being tall--" Flashingly, and with starting
+tears.
+
+_Ashley_: "Ashamed! I can always look up to you, you can always stoop
+to me!" He stretches his arms toward her.
+
+_Miss Ramsey_, recoiling bewildered: "Wait! We haven't got to that
+yet."
+
+_Ashley_: "Oh, Isobel--dearest--darling! We've got past it! We're on
+the home stretch, now."
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIX
+
+                      THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
+
+                              A MORALITY
+
+
+                                  I
+
+                    MR. AND MRS. CLARENCE FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Clarence Fountain_, backing into the room, and closing the door
+noiselessly before looking round: "Oh, you poor thing! I can see that
+you are dead, at the first glance. I'm dead myself, for that matter."
+She is speaking to her husband, who clings with one hand to the
+chimney-piece, and supports his back with the other; from this hand a
+little girl's long stocking lumpily dangles; Mrs. Fountain, turning
+round, observes it. "Not finished yet? But I don't wonder! I wonder
+you've even begun. Well, now, _I_ will take hold with you." In token
+of the aid she is going to give, Mrs. Fountain sinks into a chair and
+rolls a distracted eye over the littered and tumbled room. "It's worse
+than I thought it would be. You ought to have smoothed the papers out
+and laid them in a pile as fast as you unwrapped the things; that is
+the way I always do; and wound the strings up and put them one side.
+Then you wouldn't have had to wade round in them. I suppose I oughtn't
+to have left it to you, but if I had let _you_ put the children to bed
+you know you'd have told them stories and kept them all night over
+their prayers. And as it was each of them wanted to put in a special
+Christmas clause; I know what kind of Christmas clause _I_ should have
+put in if I'd been frank! I'm not sure it's right to keep up the
+deception. One comfort, the oldest ones don't believe in it any more
+than we do. Dear! I did think at one time this afternoon I should have
+to be brought home in an ambulance; it would have been a convenience,
+with all the packages. I simply marvel at their delivery wagons
+getting them here."
+
+_Fountain_, coming to the table, where she sits, and taking up one of
+the toys with which it is strewn: "They haven't all of them."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "What do you mean by all of them?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I mean half." He takes up a mechanical locomotive and
+stuffs it into the stocking he holds.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, staying his hand: "What are you doing? Putting
+Jimmy's engine into Susy's stocking! She'll be perfectly insulted when
+she finds it, for she'll know you weren't paying the least attention,
+and you can't blame Santa Claus for it with _her_. If that's what
+you've been doing with the other stockings-- But there _aren't_ any
+others. Don't tell me you've just begun! Well, I could simply cry."
+
+_Fountain_, dropping into the chair on the other side of the table,
+under the shelter of a tall Christmas tree standing on it: "Do you
+call unwrapping a whole car-load of truck and getting it sorted, just
+beginning? I've been slaving here from the dawn of time, and I had to
+have _some_ leisure for the ghosts of my own Christmases when I was
+little. I didn't have to wade round in the wrappings of my presents in
+those days. But it isn't the sad memories that take it out of you;
+it's the happy ones. I've never had a ghastlier half-hour than I've
+just spent in the humiliating multiplicity of these gifts. All the old
+birthdays and wedding-days and Fourth of Julys and home-comings and
+children's christenings I've ever had came trooping back. There
+oughtn't to be any gay anniversaries; they should be forbidden by law.
+If I could only have recalled a few dangerous fevers and funerals!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Clarence! Don't say such a thing; you'll be punished
+for it. I know how you suffer from those gloomy feelings, and I pity
+you. You ought to bear up against them. If _I_ gave way! You must
+think about something cheerful in the future when the happiness of the
+past afflicts you, and set one against the other; life isn't _all_ a
+vale of tears. You must keep your mind fixed on the work before you. I
+don't believe it's the number of the packages here that's broken you
+down. It's the shopping that's worn you out; I'm sure I'm a mere
+thread. And I had been at it from immediately after breakfast; and I
+lunched in one of the stores with ten thousand suburbans who had come
+pouring in with the first of their unnatural trains: I did hope I
+should have some of the places to myself; but they were every one
+jammed. And you came up from your office about four, perfectly fresh."
+
+_Fountain_: "Fresh! Yes, quite dewy from a day's fight with the beasts
+at Ephesus on the eve of Christmas week."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, don't be cynical, Clarence, on this, of all
+nights of the year. You know how sorry I always am for what you have
+to go through down there, and I suppose it's worse, as you say, at
+this season than any other time of year. It's the terrible
+concentration of everything just before Christmas that makes it so
+killing. I really don't know which of the places was the worst; the
+big department stores or the separate places for jewelry and toys and
+books and stationery and antiques; they were all alike, and all
+maddening. And the rain outside, and everybody coming in reeking;
+though I don't believe that sunshine would have been any better;
+there'd have been more of them. I declare, it made my heart ache for
+those poor creatures behind the counters, and I don't know whether I
+suffered most for them when they kept up a ghastly cheerfulness in
+their attention or were simply insulting in their indifference. I know
+they must be all dead by this time. 'Going up?' 'Going down?'
+'Ca-ish!' 'Here, boy!' I believe it will ring in my ears as long as I
+live. And the whiz of those overhead wire things, and having to wait
+ages for your change, and then drag your tatters out of the stores
+into the streets! If I hadn't had you with me at the last I should
+certainly have dropped."
+
+_Fountain_: "Yes, and what had become of your good resolutions about
+doing all your Christmas shopping in July?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "_My_ good resolutions? Really, Clarence, sometimes
+if it were not cruelty to animals I should like to hit you. _My_ good--
+You _know_ that you suggested that plan, and it wasn't even original
+with you. The papers have been talking about it for years; but when
+you brought it up as such a new idea, I fell in with it to please you--"
+
+_Fountain_: "Now, look out, Lucy!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Yes, to please you, and to help you forget the
+Christmas worry, just as I've been doing to-night. You never spare
+_me_."
+
+_Fountain_: "Stick to the record. Why didn't you do your Christmas
+shopping in July?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Why didn't I? Did you expect me to do my Christmas
+shopping down at Sculpin Beach, where I spent the whole time from the
+middle of June till the middle of September? Why didn't _you_ do the
+Christmas shopping in July? You had the stores under your nose here
+from the beginning till the end of summer, with nothing in the world
+to hinder you, and not a chick or a child to look after."
+
+_Fountain_: "Oh, I like that. You think I was leading a life of
+complete leisure here, with the thermometer among the nineties
+nine-tenths of the time?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I only know you were bragging in all your letters
+about your bath and your club, and the folly of any one going away
+from the cool, comfortable town in the summer. I suppose you'll say
+that was to keep me from feeling badly at leaving you. When it was
+only for the children's sake! I will let you take them the next time."
+
+_Fountain_: "While you look after my office? And you think the stores
+are full of Christmas things in July, I suppose."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I never thought so; and now I hope you see the folly
+of that idea. No, Clarence. We must be logical in everything. You
+can't get rid of Christmas shopping at Christmas-time."
+
+_Fountain_, shouting wrathfully: "Then I say get rid of Christmas!"
+
+
+                                  II
+
+              MR. FRANK WATKINS, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Watkins_, opening the door for himself and struggling into the room
+with an armful of parcels: "I'm with you there, Clarence. Christmas is
+at the root of Christmas shopping, and Christmas giving, and all the
+rest of it. Oh, you needn't be afraid, Lucy. I didn't hear any
+epithets; just caught the drift of your argument through the keyhole.
+I've been kicking at the door ever since you began. Where shall I dump
+these things?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Oh, you poor boy! Here--anywhere--on the floor--on
+the sofa--on the table." She clears several spaces and helps Watkins
+unload. "Clarence! I'm surprised at you. What are you thinking of?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I'm thinking that if this goes on, I'll let somebody else
+arrange the presents."
+
+_Watkins_: "If I saw a man coming into my house with a load like this
+to-night, I'd throw him into the street. But living in a ninth-story
+flat like you, it might hurt him."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, reading the inscriptions on the packages: "'For Benny
+from his uncle Frank.' Oh, how sweet of you, Frank! And here's a kiss
+for his uncle Frank." She embraces him with as little interruption as
+possible. "'From Uncle Frank to Jim.' Oh, I know what that is!" She
+feels the package over. "And this is for 'Susy from her aunt Sue.' Oh,
+I knew she would remember her namesake. 'For Maggie. Merry Christmas
+from Mrs. Watkins.' 'Bridget, with Mrs. Watkins's best wishes for a
+Merry Christmas.' Both the girls! But it's like Sue; she never forgets
+anybody. And what's this for Clarence? I _must_ know! Not a
+bath-gown?" Undoing it: "I simply _must_ see it. Blue! His very
+color!" Holding it up: "From you, Frank?" He nods. "Clarence!"
+
+_Watkins_: "If Fountain tries to kiss me, I'll--"
+
+_Fountain_: "I wouldn't kiss you for a dozen bath-gowns." Lifting it
+up from the floor where Mrs. Fountain has dropped it: "It _is_ rather
+nice."
+
+_Watkins_: "Don't overwhelm me."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, dancing about with a long, soft roll in her hand: "Oh,
+oh, oh! She saw me gloating on it at Shumaker's! I do wonder if it
+_is_."
+
+_Fountain_, reaching for it: "Why, open it--"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "You dare! No, it shall be opened the very last thing
+in the morning, now, to punish you! How is poor Sue? I saw her
+literally dropping by the way at Shumaker's."
+
+_Watkins_, making for the door: "Well, she must have got up again. I
+left her registering a vow that if ever she lived to see another
+Christmas she would leave the country months before the shopping
+began. She called down maledictions on all the recipients of her gifts
+and wished them the worst harm that can befall the wicked."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Poor Sue! She simply lives to do people good, and I
+can understand exactly how she feels toward them. I'll be round bright
+and early to-morrow to thank her. Why do you go?"
+
+_Watkins_: "Well, I can't stay here all night, and I'd better let you
+and Clarence finish up." He escapes from her detaining embrace and
+runs out.
+
+
+                                 III
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, intent upon her roll: "How funny he is! I wonder if
+he did hear anything but our scolding voices? Where were we?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I had just called you a serpent."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, with amusement: "No, really?" Feeling the parcel: "If
+it's that Spanish lace scarf I can tell her it was machine lace. I saw
+it at the first glance. But poor Sue has no taste. I suppose I must
+stand it. But I can't bear to think what she's given the girls and
+children. She means well. Did you really say serpent, Clarence? You
+never called me just _that_ before."
+
+_Fountain_: "No, but you called me a laughing hyena, and said I
+scoffed at everything sacred."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I can't remember using the word hyena, exactly,
+though I do think the way you talk about Christmas is dreadful. But I
+take back the laughing hyena."
+
+_Fountain_: "And I take back the serpent. I meant dove, anyway. But
+it's this Christmas-time when a man gets so tired he doesn't know
+what he's saying."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, _you're_ good, anyway, dearest, whatever you
+say; and now I'm going to help you arrange the things. I suppose
+there'll be lots more to-morrow, but we must get rid of these now.
+Don't you wish nobody would do anything for us? Just the
+children--dear little souls! I don't believe but what we can make Jim
+and Susy believe in Santa Claus again; Benny is firm in the faith; he
+put him into his prayer. I declare, his sweetness almost broke my
+heart." At a knock: "Who's that, I wonder? Come in! Oh, it's you,
+Maggie. Well?"
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                  THE FOUNTAINS, FOUNTAIN'S SISTERS
+
+_Maggie_: "It's Mr. Fountain's sisters just telephoned up."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Have them come up at once, Maggie, of course." As
+Maggie goes out: "Another interruption! If it's going to keep on like
+this! Shouldn't you have thought they might have _sent_ their
+presents?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I thought something like it in Frank's case; but I didn't
+say it."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And I don't know why _I_ say it, now. It's because
+I'm so tired I don't know what I _am_ saying. Do forgive me! It's this
+terrible Christmas spirit that gets into me. But now you'll see how
+nice I can be to them." At a tap on the door: "Come in! Come in!
+Don't mind our being in all this mess. So darling of you to come! You
+can help cheer Clarence up; you know his Christmas Eve dumps." She
+runs to them and clasps them in her arms with several half-open
+packages dangling from her hands and contrasting their disarray with
+the neatness of their silk-ribboned and tissue-papered parcels which
+their embrace makes meet at her back. "Minnie! Aggie! To lug here,
+when you ought to be at home in bed dying of fatigue! But it's just
+like you, both of you. Did you ever see anything like the stores
+to-day? Do sit down, or swoon on the floor, or anything. Let me have
+those wretched bundles which are simply killing you." She looks at the
+different packages. "'For Benny from Grandpa.' 'For a good girl, from
+Susy's grandmother.' 'Jim, from Aunt Minnie and Aunt Aggie.' 'Lucy,
+with love from Aggie and Minnie.' And Clarence! What hearts you _have_
+got! Well, I always say there never were such thoughtful girls, and
+you always show such taste and such originality. I long to get at the
+things." She keeps fingering the large bundle marked with her
+husband's name. "Not--not--a--"
+
+_Minnie_: "Yes, a bath-robe. Unless you give him a cigar-case it's
+about the only thing you can give a man."
+
+_Aggie_: "Minnie thought of it and I chose it. Blue, because it's his
+color. Try it on, Clarence, and if it's too long--"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Yes, do, dear! Let's see you with it on." While the
+girls are fussily opening the robe, she manages to push her brother's
+gift behind the door. Then, without looking round at her husband. "It
+isn't a bit too long. Just the very--" Looking: "Well, it can easily
+be taken up at the hem. I can do it to-morrow." She abandons him to
+his awkward isolation while she chatters on with his sisters. "Sit
+down; I insist! Don't think of going. Did you see that frightful pack
+of people when the cab horse fell down in front of Shumaker's?"
+
+_Minnie_: "See it?"
+
+_Aggie_: "We were in the midst of it! I wonder we ever got out alive.
+It's enough to make you wish never to see another Christmas as long as
+you live."
+
+_Minnie_: "A great many _won't_ live. There will be more grippe, and
+more pneumonia, and more appendicitis from those jams of people in the
+stores!"
+
+_Aggie_: "The germs must have been swarming."
+
+_Fountain_: "Lucy was black with them when we got home."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Don't pay the slightest attention to him, girls.
+He'll probably be the first to sneeze himself."
+
+_Minnie_: "I don't know about sneezing. I shall only be too glad if I
+don't have nervous prostration from it."
+
+_Aggie_: "I'm glad we got our motor-car just in time. Any one that
+goes in the trolleys now will take their life in their hand." The
+girls rise and move toward the door. "Well, we must go on now. We're
+making a regular round; you can't trust the delivery wagons at a time
+like this. Good-by. Merry Christmas to the children. They're fast
+asleep by this time, I suppose."
+
+_Minnie_: "I only wish _I_ was!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I believe you, Minnie. Good-by. Good night. Good
+night, Aggie. Clarence, go to the elevator with them! Or no, he can't
+in that ridiculous bath-gown!" Turning to Fountain as the door closes:
+"Now I've done it."
+
+
+                                  V
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Fountain_: "It isn't a thing you could have wished to phrase that
+way, exactly."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And you made me do it. Never thanking them, or
+anything, and standing there like I don't know what, and leaving the
+talk all to me. And now, making me lose my temper again, when I wanted
+to be so nice to you. Well, it is no use trying, and from this on I
+won't. _Clarence!_" She has opened the parcel addressed to herself and
+now stands transfixed with joy and wonder. "_See_ what the girls have
+given me! The very necklace I've been longing for at Planets', and
+denying myself for the last fortnight! Well, never will I say your
+sisters are mean again."
+
+_Fountain_: "You ought to have said that to them."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "It quite reconciles one to Christmas. What? Oh, that
+_was_ rather nasty. You know I didn't mean it. I was so excited I
+didn't know what I was saying. I'm sure nobody ever got on better with
+sisters-in-law, and that shows my tact; if I do make a slip, now and
+then, I can always get out of it. They will understand. Do you think
+it was very nice of them to flaunt their new motor in my face? But of
+course anything _your_ family does is perfect, and always was, though
+I must say this necklace is sweet of them. I wonder they had the
+taste." A tap on the door is heard. "Come in, Maggie!" _Sotto voce._
+"Take it off." She snatches his bath-robe and tosses it behind the
+door.
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                     WILBUR HAZARD, THE FOUNTAINS
+
+_Hazard_: "I suppose I can come in, even if I'm not Maggie. Catch,
+Fountain." He tosses a large bundle to Fountain. "It's huge, but it
+isn't hefty." He turns to go out again.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Oh, oh, oh! Don't go! Come in and help us. What have
+you brought Clarence! May I feel?"
+
+_Hazard_: "You can look, if you like. I'm rather proud of it. There's
+only one other thing you can give a man, and I said, 'No, not a
+cigar-case. Fountain smokes enough already, but if a bath-robe can
+induce him to wash--'" He goes out.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, screaming after him through the open door: "Oh, how
+good! Come back and see it on him." She throws the bath-robe over
+Fountain's shoulders.
+
+_Hazard_, looking in again: "Perfect fit, just as the Jew said, and
+the very color for Fountain." He vanishes, shutting the door behind
+him.
+
+
+                                 VII
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "How coarse! Well, my dear, I don't know where you
+picked up your bachelor friends. I hope this is the last of them."
+
+_Fountain_: "Hazard's the only one who has survived your rigorous
+treatment. But he always had a passion for cold shoulder, poor fellow.
+As bath-robes go, this isn't bad." He gets his arms into it, and walks
+up and down. "Heigh?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Yes, it is pretty good. But the worst of Christmas
+is that it rouses up all your old friends."
+
+_Fountain_: "They feel so abnormally good, confound them. I suppose
+poor old Hazard half killed himself looking this thing up and building
+the joke to go with it."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, take it off, now, and come help me with the
+children's presents. You're quite forgetting about them, and it'll be
+morning and you'll have the little wretches swarming in before you can
+turn round. Dear little souls! I can sympathize with their impatience,
+of course. But what are you going to do with these bath-robes? You
+can't wear _four_ bath-robes."
+
+_Fountain_: "I can change them every day. But there ought to be seven.
+This hood is rather a new wrinkle, though, isn't it? I suppose it's
+for a voyage, and you pull it up over your head when you come through
+the corridor back to your stateroom. We shall have to go to Europe,
+Lucy."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I would go to Asia, Africa, and Oceanica, to escape
+another Christmas. Now if there are any more bath-robes-- Come in,
+Maggie."
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+                        MAGGIE, THE FOUNTAINS
+
+_Maggie_, bringing in a bundle: "Something a District Messenger
+brought. Will you sign for it, ma'am?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "You sign, Clarence. If I know anything about the
+look and the feel of a bundle, this _is_ another bath-robe, but I
+shall soon see." While she is cutting the string and tearing the
+wrappings away, Fountain signs and Maggie goes. Mrs. Fountain shakes
+out the folds of the robe. "Well, upon my word, I should think there
+was conspiracy to insult you, Clarence. I should like to know who has
+had the effrontery-- What's on it?"
+
+_Fountain_, reading from the card which had fallen out of the garment
+to the floor: "'With Christmas greetings from Mrs. Arthur J. Gibby.'"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, dropping the robe and seizing the card: "_Mrs._
+Arthur J. Gibby! Well, upon my word, this _is_ impudence. It's not
+only impudence, it's indelicacy. And I had always thought she was the
+very embodiment of refinement, and I've gone about saying so. Now I
+shall have to take it back. The idea of a lady sending a bath-robe to
+a gentleman! What next, I wonder! What right has Mrs. Gibby to send
+you a bath-robe? Don't prevaricate! Remember that the truth is the
+only thing that can save you. Matters must have gone pretty far, when
+a woman could send you anything so--intimate. What are you staring at
+with that paper? You needn't hope to divert my mind by--"
+
+_Fountain_, giving her the paper in which the robe came: "Seems to be
+for _Mrs._ Clarence Fountain."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, snatching it from him: "What! It is, it is! Oh, poor
+dear Lilly! How can you ever forgive me? She saw me looking at it
+to-day at Shumaker's, and it must have come into her head in despair
+what else to get me. But it was a perfect inspiration--for it was just
+what I was longing for. Why"--laughing hysterically while she holds up
+the robe, and turns it this way and that--"I might have seen at a
+glance that it wasn't a man's, with this lace on and this silk hood,
+and"--she hurries into it, and pulls it forward, looking down at
+either side--"it's just the right length, and if it was made for me it
+couldn't fit me better. What a joke I _shall_ have with Lilly, when I
+tell her about it. I sha'n't spare myself a bit!"
+
+_Fountain_: "Then I hope you'll spare me. I have some little delicacy
+of feeling, and I don't like the notion of a lady's giving me a
+bath-robe. It's--intimate. I don't know where you picked up your girl
+friends."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, capering about joyfully: "Oh, how funny you are,
+darling! But go on. I don't mind it, now. And you may be glad you've
+got off so easily. Only now if there are any more bath-robes--" A
+timid rap is heard at the door. "Come in, Maggie!" The door is slowly
+set ajar, then flung suddenly wide open, and Jim and Susy in their
+night-gowns rush dancing and exulting in.
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+                       JIM, SUSY, THE FOUNTAINS
+
+_Susy_: "We've caught you, we've caught you."
+
+_Jim_: "I just bet it was you, and now I've won, haven't I, mother?"
+
+_Susy_: "And I've won, too, haven't I, father?" Arrested at sight of
+her father in the hooded bath-gown: "He does look like Santa Claus,
+doesn't he, Jimmy? But the real Santa Claus would be all over snow,
+and a long, white beard. You can't fool _us_!"
+
+_Jim_: "You can't fool _us_! We know you, we know you! And mother
+dressed up, too! There isn't any Mrs. Santa Claus, and that proves
+it!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, severely: "Dreadful little things! Who said you might
+come here? Go straight back to bed, this minute, or-- _Will_ you send
+them back, Clarence, and not stand staring so? What are you thinking of?"
+
+_Fountain_, dreamily: "Nothing. Merely wondering what we shall do when
+we've got rid of our superstitions. Shall we be the better for it, or
+even the wiser?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "What put that question into your head? Christmas, I
+suppose; and that's another reason for wishing there was no such
+thing. If I had my way, there wouldn't be."
+
+_Jim_: "Oh, mother!"
+
+_Susy_: "No Christmas?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, not for disobedient children who get out of
+bed and come in, spoiling everything. If you don't go straight back,
+it will be the last time, Santa Claus or no Santa Claus."
+
+_Jim_: "And if we go right back?"
+
+_Susy_: "And promise not to come in any more?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, we'll see how you keep your promise. If you
+don't, that's the end of Christmas in _this_ house."
+
+_Jim_: "It's a bargain, then! Come on, Susy!"
+
+_Susy_: "And we do it for you, mother. And for you, father. We just
+came in for fun, anyway."
+
+_Jim_: "We just came for a surprise."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, kissing them both: "Well, then, if it was only for
+fun, we'll excuse you this time. Run along, now, that's good children.
+_Clarence!_"
+
+
+                                  X
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Fountain_: "Well?" He looks up at her from where he has dropped into
+a chair beside the table strewn with opened and unopened gifts at the
+foot of the Christmas tree.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "What _are_ you mooning about?"
+
+_Fountain_: "What if it was all a fake? Those thousands and hundreds
+of thousands of churches that pierce the clouds with their spires;
+those millions of ministers and missionaries; those billions of
+worshipers, sitting and standing and kneeling, and singing and
+praying; those nuns and monks, and brotherhoods and sisterhoods, with
+their ideals of self-denial, and their duties to the sick and poor;
+those martyrs that died for the one true faith, and those other
+martyrs of the other true faiths whom the one true faith tortured and
+killed; those masses and sermons and ceremonies, what if they were all
+a delusion, a mistake, a misunderstanding? What if it were all as
+unlike the real thing, if there is any real thing, as this pagan
+Christmas of ours is as unlike a Christian Christmas?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, springing up: "I knew it! I knew that it was this
+Christmas giving that was making you morbid again. Can't you shake it
+off and be cheerful--like me? I'm sure I have to bear twice as much of
+it as you have. I've been shopping the whole week, and you've been
+just this one afternoon." She begins to catch her breath, and fails in
+searching for her handkerchief in the folds of her dress under the
+bath-robe.
+
+_Fountain_, offering his handkerchief: "Take mine."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, catching it from him, and hiding her face in it on
+the table: "You ought to help me bear up, and instead of that you
+fling yourself on my sympathies and break me down." Lifting her face:
+"And if it was all a fake, as you say, and an illusion, what would you
+do, what would you give people in place of it?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I don't know."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "What would you have in place of Christmas itself?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I don't know."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, then, I wouldn't set myself up to preach down
+everything--in a blue bath-gown. You've no idea how ridiculous you
+are."
+
+_Fountain_: "Oh, yes, I have. I can see you. You look like one of
+those blue nuns in Rome. But I don't remember any lace on them."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, you don't look like a blue monk, you needn't
+flatter yourself, for there are none. You look like-- What are you
+thinking about?"
+
+_Fountain_: "Oh, nothing. What do you suppose is in all these packages
+here? Useful things, that we need, that we must have? You know without
+looking that it's the superfluity of naughtiness in one form or other.
+And the givers of these gifts, they _had_ to give them, just as we've
+had to give dozens of gifts ourselves. We ought to have put on our
+cards, 'With the season's bitterest grudges,' 'In hopes of a return,'
+'With a hopeless sense of the folly,' 'To pay a hateful debt,' 'With
+impotent rage and despair.'"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "I don't deny it, Clarence. You're perfectly right; I
+almost wish we _had_ put it. How it would have made them hop! But
+they'd have known it was just the way they felt themselves."
+
+_Fountain_, going on thoughtfully: "It's the cap-sheaf of the social
+barbarism we live in, the hideous hypocrisy. It's no use to put it on
+religion. The Jews keep Christmas, too, and we know what they think of
+Christianity as a belief. No, we've got to go further back, to the
+Pagan Saturnalia-- Well, I renounce the whole affair, here and now. I'm
+going to spend the rest of the night bundling these things up, and
+to-morrow I'm going to spend the day in a taxi, going round and giving
+them back to the fools that sent them."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And I'm going with you. I hate it as much as you
+do-- Come in, Maggie!"
+
+
+                                  XI
+
+                   MAGGIE, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Maggie_: "Something the elevator-boy says he forgot. It came along
+with the last one."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, taking a bundle from her: "If this is another
+bath-robe, Clarence! It _is_, as I live. Now if it is a woman sending
+it--" She picks up a card which falls out of the robe as she unfolds
+it. "'Love the Giver,' indeed! Now, Clarence, I insist, I demand--"
+
+_Fountain_: "Hold on, hold on, my dear. The last bath-robe that came
+from a woman was for _you_."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "So it was. I don't know what I was thinking about;
+and I do beg your par-- But this is a man's bath-robe!"
+
+_Fountain_, taking the card which she mechanically stretches out to
+him: "And a man sends it--old Fellows. Can't you read print? Ambrose
+J. Fellows, and a message in writing: 'It was a toss-up between this
+and a cigar-case, and the bath-robe won. Hope you haven't got any
+other thoughtful friends.'"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Oh, very brilliant, giving me a start like this! I
+shall let Mr. Fellows know-- What is it, Maggie? Open the door,
+please."
+
+_Maggie_, opening: "It's just a District Messenger."
+
+_Fountain_, ironically: "Oh, only a District Messenger." He signs the
+messenger's slip, while his wife receives from Maggie a bundle which
+she regards with suspicion.
+
+
+                                 XII
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "'From Uncle Philip for Clarence.' Well, Uncle
+Philip, if you have sent Clarence-- _Clarence!_" breaking into
+a whimper: "It is, it is! It's another."
+
+_Fountain_: "Well, that only makes the seventh, and just enough for
+every day in the week. It's quite my ideal. Now, if there's nothing
+about a cigar-case-- Hello!" He feels in the pocket of the robe and
+brings out a cigar-case, from which a slip of paper falls: "'Couldn't
+make up my mind between them, so send both. Uncle Phil.' Well, this
+is the last stroke of Christmas insanity."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "His brain simply reeled under it, and gave way. It
+shows what Christmas really comes to with a man of strong intellect
+like Uncle Phil."
+
+_Fountain_, opening the case: "Oh, I don't know! He's put some cigars
+in here--in a lucid interval, probably. There's hope yet."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, in despair: "No, Clarence, there's no hope. Don't
+flatter yourself. The only way is to bundle back all their presents
+and never, never, never give or receive another one. Come! Let's begin
+tying them up at once; it will take us the rest of the night." A knock
+at the door. "Come, Maggie."
+
+
+                                 XIII
+
+                JIM AND SUSY, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Jim and Susy_, pushing in: "We can't sleep, mother. May we have a
+pillow fight to keep us amused till we're drowsy?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, desolately: "Yes, go and have your pillow fight. It
+doesn't matter now. We're sending the presents all back, anyway." She
+begins frantically wrapping some of the things up.
+
+_Susy_: "Oh, father, are you sending them back?"
+
+_Jim_: "She's just making believe. Isn't she, father?"
+
+_Fountain_: "Well, I'm not so sure of that. If she doesn't do it, I
+will."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, desisting: "Will you go right back to bed?"
+
+_Jim and Susy_: "Yes, we will."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And to sleep, instantly?"
+
+_Jim and Susy_, in succession: "We won't keep awake a minute longer."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Very well, then, we'll see. Now be off with you." As
+they put their heads together and go out laughing: "And remember, if
+you come here another single time, back go every one of the presents."
+
+_Fountain_: "As soon as ever Santa Claus can find a moment for it."
+
+_Jim_, derisively: "Oh, yes, Santa Claus!"
+
+_Susy_: "I guess if you wait for Santa Claus to take them back!"
+
+
+                                 XIV
+
+                       MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Tiresome little wretches. Of course we can't expect
+them to keep up the self-deception."
+
+_Fountain_: "They'll grow to another. When they're men and women
+they'll pretend that Christmas is delightful, and go round giving
+people the presents that they've worn their lives out in buying and
+getting together. And they'll work themselves up into the notion that
+they are really enjoying it, when they know at the bottom of their
+souls that they loathe the whole job."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "There you are with your pessimism again! And I had
+just begun to feel cheerful about it!"
+
+_Fountain_: "Since when? Since I proposed sending this rubbish back to
+the givers with our curse?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "No, I was thinking what fun it would be if we could
+get up a sort of Christmas game, and do it just among relations and
+intimate friends."
+
+_Fountain_: "Ah, I wish you luck of it. Then the thing would begin to
+have some reality, and just as in proportion as people had the worst
+feelings in giving the presents, their best feeling would be hurt in
+getting them back."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Then why did you ever think of it?"
+
+_Fountain_: "To keep from going mad. Come, let's go on with this job
+of sorting the presents, and putting them in the stockings and hanging
+them up on the tree and laying them round the trunk of it. One thing:
+it's for the last time. As soon as Christmas week is over, I shall
+inaugurate an educational campaign against the whole Christmas
+superstition. It must be extirpated root and branch, and the
+extirpation must begin in the minds of the children; we old fools are
+hopeless; we must die in it; but the children can be saved. We must
+organize and make a house-to-house fight; and I'll begin in our own
+house. To-morrow, as soon as the children have made themselves
+thoroughly sick with candy and cake and midday dinner, I will appeal
+to their reason, and get them to agree to drop it; to sign the
+Anti-Christmas pledge; to--"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Clarence! I have an idea."
+
+_Fountain_: "Not a _bright_ one?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Yes, a bright one, even if you didn't originate it.
+Have Christmas confined entirely to children--to the very youngest--to
+children that believe firmly in Santa Claus."
+
+_Fountain_: "Oh, hello! Wouldn't that leave Jim and Susy out? I
+couldn't have _them_ left out."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "That's true. I didn't think of that. Well, say, to
+children that either believe or _pretend_ to believe in him. What's
+_that_?" She stops at a faint, soft sound on the door. "It's Maggie
+with her hands so full she's pushing with her elbow. Come in, Maggie,
+come in. _Come_ in! Don't you hear me? Come in, I say! Oh, it isn't
+Maggie, of course! It's those worthless, worthless little wretches,
+again." She runs to the door calling out, "Naughty, naughty, naughty!"
+as she runs. Then, flinging the door wide, with a final cry of
+"_Naughty_, I say!" she discovers a small figure on the threshold,
+nightgowned to its feet, and looking up with a frightened, wistful
+face. "Why, Benny!" She stoops down and catches the child in her arms,
+and presses him tight to her neck, and bends over, covering his head
+with kisses. "What in the world are you doing here, you poor little
+lamb? Is mother's darling walking in his sleep? What did you want, my
+pet? Tell mudda, do! Whisper it in mudda's big ear! Can't you tell
+mudda? What? Whisper a little louder, love! We're not angry with you,
+sweetness. Now, try to speak louder. Is that Santa Claus? No, dearest,
+that's just dadda. Santa Claus hasn't come yet, but he will soon.
+What? Say it again. _Is_ there any Santa Claus? Why, who else could
+have brought all these presents? Presents for Benny and Jim and Susy
+and mudda, and seven bath-gowns for dadda. Isn't that funny? Seven!
+And one for mudda. What? I can't quite hear you, pet. Are we going to
+send the presents back? Why, who ever heard of such a thing? Jim said
+so? And Susy? Well, I will settle with them, when I come to them. You
+don't want me to? Well, I won't, then, if Benny doesn't want mudda to.
+I'll just give them a kiss apiece, pop in their big ears. What? You've
+got something for Santa Claus to give them? What? Where? In your crib?
+And shall we go and get it? For mudda too? And dadda? Oh, my little
+angel!" She begins to cry over him, and to kiss him again. "You'll
+break my heart with your loveliness. He wants to kiss you too, dadda."
+She puts the boy into his father's arms; then catches him back and
+runs from the room with him. Fountain resumes the work of filling the
+long stocking he had begun with; then he takes up a very short sock.
+He has that in his hand when Mrs. Fountain comes back, wiping her
+eyes. "He'll go to sleep now, I guess; he was half dreaming when he
+came in here. I should think, when you saw how Benny believed in it,
+you'd be ashamed of saying a word against Christmas."
+
+_Fountain_: "Who's said anything against it? I've just been arguing
+for it, and trying to convince you that for the sake of little
+children like Benny it ought to be perpetuated to the end of the
+world. It began with the childhood of the race, in the rejuvenescence
+of the spirit."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Didn't you say that Christmas began with the
+pagans? How monstrously you prevaricate!"
+
+_Fountain_: "That was merely a figure of speech. And besides, since
+you've been out with Benny, I've been thinking, and I take back
+everything I've said or thought against Christmas; I didn't really
+think it. I've been going back in my mind to that first Christmas we
+had together, and it's cheered me up wonderfully."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_, tenderly: "Have you, dearest? I _always_ think of it.
+If you could have seen Benny, how I left him, just now?"
+
+_Fountain_: "I shouldn't mind seeing him, and I shouldn't care if I
+gave a glance at poor old Jim and Susy. I'd like to reassure them
+about not sending back the presents." He puts his arm round her and
+presses her toward the door.
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "How sweet you are! And how funny! And good!" She
+accentuates each sentiment with a kiss. "And don't you suppose I felt
+sorry for you, making you go round with me the whole afternoon, and
+then leaving you to take the brunt of arranging the presents? Now I'll
+tell you: _next_ year, I _will_ do my Christmas shopping in July. It's
+the only way."
+
+_Fountain_: "No, there's a better way. As you were saying, they don't
+have the Christmas things out. The only way is to do our Christmas
+shopping the day after Christmas; everything will be round still, and
+dog-cheap. Come, we'll begin day after to-morrow."
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "We will, we will!"
+
+_Fountain_: "Do you think we will?"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, we'll _say_ we will." They laugh together, and
+then he kisses her.
+
+_Fountain_: "Even if it goes on in the same old way, as long as we
+have each other--"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "And the children."
+
+_Fountain_: "I forgot the children!"
+
+_Mrs. Fountain_: "Oh, how delightful you are!"
+
+
+                               THE END
+
+
+
+
+                        BOOKS BY W. D. HOWELLS
+
+  Annie Kilburn. 12mo.
+  April Hopes. 12mo.
+  Between the Dark and Daylight. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Boy Life. Illustrated. 12mo.
+  Boy's Town. Illustrated. Post 8vo.
+  Certain Delightful English Towns. Illustrated. 8vo.
+    Traveller's Edition, Leather.
+  Christmas Every Day, and Other Stories. Illustrated. 12mo.
+    Holiday Edition. Illustrated. 4to.
+  Coast of Bohemia. Illustrated. 12mo.
+  Criticism and Fiction. Portrait. 16mo.
+  Day of Their Wedding. Illustrated. 12mo.
+  Familiar Spanish Travels. Illustrated. 8vo.
+  Fennel and Rue. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Flight of Pony Baker. Post 8vo.
+  Hazard of New Fortunes. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Heroines of Fiction. Illustrated. 2 vols. 8vo.
+  Imaginary Interviews. 8vo.
+  Imperative Duty. 12mo.
+    Paper.
+  Impressions and Experiences. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Kentons. 12mo.
+  Landlord at Lion's Head. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Letters Home. 12mo.
+  Library of Universal Adventure. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth.
+    Three-quarter Calf.
+  Literary Friends and Acquaintance. Illustrated. 8vo.
+  Literature and Life. 8vo.
+  Little Swiss Sojourn. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  London Films. Illustrated. 8vo.
+    Traveller's Edition, Leather.
+  Miss Bellard's Inspiration. 12mo.
+  Modern Italian Poets. Illustrated. 12mo.
+  Mother and the Father. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Mouse-Trap, A Likely Story, The Garroters, Five-o'Clock Tea.
+    Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  My Literary Passions. New Edition. 12mo.
+  My Mark Twain. Illustrated. 8vo.
+  My Year in a Log Cabin. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  Open-Eyed Conspiracy. 12mo.
+  Pair of Patient Lovers. 12mo.
+  Parting and a Meeting. Illustrated. Square 32mo.
+  Quality of Mercy. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Questionable Shapes. Ill'd. 12mo.
+  Ragged Lady. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Roman Holidays. Illustrated. 8vo.
+    Traveller's Edition, Leather.
+  Seven English Cities. Illustrated. 8vo.
+    Traveller's Edition, Leather.
+  Shadow of a Dream. 12mo.
+  Son of Royal Langbrith. 8vo.
+  Stops of Various Quills. Illustrated. 4to.
+    Limited Edition.
+  Story of a Play. 12mo.
+  The Daughter of the Storage. 8vo.
+  The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon. Crown 8vo.
+  Their Silver Wedding Journey. Illustrated. 2 vols. Crown 8vo.
+    In 1 vol. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Through the Eye of a Needle. New Edition. 12mo.
+  Traveller from Altruria. New Edition. 12mo.
+  World of Chance. 12mo.
+  Years of My Youth. Crown 8vo.
+
+
+                                FARCES:
+
+  A Letter of Introduction. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  A Likely Story. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  A Previous Engagement. 32mo.
+    Paper.
+  Evening Dress. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  Five-o'Clock Tea. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  Parting Friends. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  The Albany Depot. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  The Garroters. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  The Mouse-Trap. Illustrated. 32mo.
+  The Unexpected Guests. Illustrated. 32mo.
+
+
+               HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Daughter of the Storage, by
+William Dean Howells
+
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